“Are you well?” he asked. I could hear some noise in the background. It didn’t sound like the familiar bar noises.
“I’m fine,” I said. “There seems to be a lot of hostility here in this town against Sam and his mom, and I’m a little bit worried about that. Maybe the hater is just their cranky old neighbor, but I got a feeling there’s more to worry about.” This was what I hadn’t discussed with Sam, so I was glad to pour it out to Eric.
“That’s worrisome,” he said, but he didn’t sound too worried. “Can you handle it, or do you need help? What’s the name of the town?”
“I’m in Wright, Texas,” I said, and I may have said it a little sharply. After all, you expect your boyfriend to listen when you tell him stuff, and I knew I’d told him about the wedding. “It’s west and a little south of Dallas.”
“How far?”
I described the route we’d taken to Wright, and Eric said, “That would still be in Joseph Velasquez’s territory. When Stan became king, he gave Joseph the sheriffdom.”
“Your point?”
“I’d have to ask Joseph for permission to send someone to help you.”
“Well, I appreciate the thought.” Though I noticed that Eric hadn’t actually said he’d do it. “But the wedding will be tomorrow afternoon in the daytime, so I don’t think a vampire would be a big help.”
“If you’re really worried, you could call Alcide,” Eric said reluctantly. “Maybe he knows the leader of the nearest pack down there, and it’s possible the packleader would be willing to come to make sure things go well. Though surely Sam and his mother know the other two-natured in the area.”
I didn’t know how seriously to take one man’s malice, but I did know from the shadow of his thoughts that there were more people in the town who believed the way he did. Maybe sending out a request for help would be a good idea. On the other hand, that was hardly my call to make.
“What’s going on with you?” I asked, trying to sound completely focused. Eric had his own political problems, and the representative of the Bureau of Vampire Affairs was breathing down his neck about a violation of one of the rules for operating a vampire-owned business. A barmaid had promised a female customer that she (the barmaid, Cyndee) could bribe one of Eric’s vamps to bite the woman. Cyndee’d been blowing smoke, but the BVA had to investigate the allegation. Plus, there was a tense situation with Eric’s boss, Victor Madden.
“I think the BVA investigation is going to exonerate us,” he said, “but Victor was here today with his own accountant, going through my books. This is well-nigh intolerable. I can fire Cyndee, and I have. I understand that’s all I can do to her.”
“Don’t worry about things down here, then,” I said. “You’ve got your hands full.”
We talked a little longer, but Eric was preoccupied, and so was I. It wasn’t a very satisfactory conversation.
I’d unfolded the couch to find it was already made up, and I discovered a folded bedspread and a pillow lying on the sewing machine. The evening was warm and the windows open, so I didn’t exactly need the bedspread, but the pillow was nice and fluffy. I turned off the overhead light and stretched out on the lumpy mattress. As I adjusted my spine, I wondered if there was any foldout couch in the world that was as comfortable as a bed. I reminded myself to be glad I wasn’t sleeping on the floor.
I could hear a muffled conversation coming from the room Sam was sharing with Craig. The brothers laughed. Their voices died away gradually. Through the open window, I heard a small animal outside, and the hoot of an owl. The breeze coming in didn’t even smell like the wind at home.
I considered the possibility of calling Alcide Herveaux, the Were pack-leader in Shreveport. He was the werewolf I knew the best, and he might have some insight for me about the situation in neighboring Texas. But not only was I harboring a great resentment toward Alcide since he’d pressured me into taking hallucinogenic drugs so I could solve a pack dispute; I knew he was feeling resultant guilt himself. People who felt guilty lashed out, in my experience. It would be just my luck if he sent Jannalynn to provide backup.
Awkward.
Geez Louise, I’d be on the chopping block in no time flat. I wondered what kind of conversation Sam had had with her before we’d left. (“Yes, I’m going to my brother’s wedding, but I’m taking Sookie because she’s more presentable.” I thought not.) And truly, it was another thing that was none of my business.
Then I fell to wondering if there were any other two-natured in Wright or its environs. If there were, maybe Sam could ask them to help when—if—trouble arose. The two-natured didn’t always stick together. Of course, neither did any other minority group I’d ever heard of.... The owl hooted again.
I woke the next morning to the welcome smell of coffee and pancakes with a side of bacon. Oh, yeah. I could hear a couple of voices in the kitchen, and the water was running in the bathroom. The household was up early. This was the day of the rehearsal and the wedding. I smiled up at the ceiling in anticipation. My room looked over the front yard, and I got up and padded over to the window to see what kind of day it was.
It was a bad day.
CHAPTER TWO
I pulled on shorts and a T–shirt, and hurried out into the kitchen. Sam and his mother looked up as I appeared in the doorway. They’d been smiling, and Sam was raising his coffee cup to his lips while Bernie was flipping the bacon in the frying pan. Sam put down his cup hastily and jumped to his feet.
“What?” he said.
“Go look in the front yard,” I said, and stood aside while they hurried from the kitchen.
Someone had stuck a big sign in the yard, facing the house. The message was definitely for Bernie. DOGS BELONG IN THE POUND, it said. I’d already jumped to a conclusion about its meaning.
“Where is it?” I asked Sam. “The pound? I hope I’m wrong, but I have to check.”
“If you go back to the highway, head south,” he said. There was a ring of white around his mouth. “It’s on Hall Road, to the right. I’m coming.”
“No. Give me your keys. This is your brother’s wedding day. You have to take care of your mother.”
“It’s not safe.”
“Whatever’s happened there, if anything has . . . it’s already done.”
He handed me his keys without another word. I hurried out to the truck, noticing along the way that not a soul was outside in any of the yards, though Saturday mornings are good for washing cars, yard work, garage sales, shooting hoops. Maybe Bernie’s neighbors had already seen that trouble was brewing and wanted no part of it.
In fact, not that many people were out and about in the entire town of Wright. I saw a stout man about Sam’s age putting gas in his car at the filling station. I caught his eye as I drove by, and he turned away pointedly. Perhaps he’d recognized the truck. I saw an elderly woman walking her dog, an equally elderly dachshund. She nodded civilly. I nodded back.
I found Hall Road without any trouble and took a right. It was a dusty stretch of asphalt with a few straggling businesses, places in little faux-adobe structures spaced far apart. I began looking at signs, and it didn’t take long to spot the one that read LOS COLMILLOS COUNTY ANIMAL SHELTER. It stood in front of a very small cement block building. Roofed pens extended in a long line on either side of a concrete run behind the building.
I turned off the motor and jumped out of the truck. I was struck by how quiet it was. Outside any animal shelter, I would expect to hear yapping and barking.
The pens out back were silent.
The front door was unlocked. I took a deep breath, let it out. I steeled myself and pushed it open, left it that way.
I stepped into a little room containing a desk topped with a battered and grimy old computer. There was a phone with an answering machine, half-buried under a pile of folders. A dilapidated file cabinet stood in a corner. In the opposite corner were two huge bags of dog food and some plastic containers of chemicals that I supposed were used to clean t
he pens. And that was all.
A door in the center of the rear wall stood open. I could see that it allowed access to the runway between the pens where the ownerless dogs were kept.
Had been kept.
They were all dead. I’d stepped through the door with dread in my heart, and that dread was justified. Bundles of bloody fur were in every cage.
I squatted simply because my knees gave way. My face was wet without my even realizing I’d started crying.
I’d seen dead human beings plenty of times, and the sight hadn’t made me feel this awful. I guess, in the back of my mind, I believed most people could defend themselves to some extent, if only by running away. And I also believed people sometimes—sometimes—shared responsibility in the situation that brought about their deaths, if only by making unwise choices. But animals . . . not animals.
I heard another car pull into the parking area. I looked out through the open doors to see the black Ford Focus with the cracked windshield. If I could have felt more frightened, I would have. Its doors opened, and three ill-assorted people got out and approached the animal shelter slowly, their heads swinging from side to side as they sniffed the air. They came through the little room very carefully, the tallest man in the lead.
“What’s happened here, babe?” he said. He was tall and muscular, with a shaved head and purple eyes. I knew him fairly well. His name was Quinn, and he was a weretiger.
“Someone shot all the dogs,” I said, stating the obvious because I was trying desperately to pull myself together. I hadn’t seen Quinn in weeks, not since he’d tried to visit me at my home. That hadn’t worked out too well.
Quinn knew they were dead already. His sense of smell had told him that. He squatted down by me. “I came to Wright to make a chance to talk to you,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be here, with all this death around us.”
One of Quinn’s companions came to stand by him. The two of them were like a pair of amazing bookends. Quinn’s friend was a huge man, a coal black man, with his hair in short dreads. He looked like some exotic animal, and, of course, he was. He stared down at me with an incurious assessment, and then his eyes moved to the sad corpses in the pens, the streaks of blood running everywhere. The blood was beginning to dry at the edges.
Quinn extended his hand to me, and together we stood up.
“I don’t understand why anyone would do this to our brothers,” the black man said, his English clear and crisp but heavily accented.
“It’s because of the wedding today,” I said. “Bernie Merlotte’s younger son is getting married.”
“But a younger son will never change into anything. Only the oldest son.” His accent was sort of French, which made the whole conversation more surrealistic.
“People here don’t seem to know that,” I said. “Or maybe they just don’t care.”
The third wereanimal was pacing outside the pens, circling the area. She would pick up the scents of the shooter. Or shooters. Tears were streaming down her face, and that wouldn’t help her sense of smell. She was also furious. The set of her shoulders was eloquent.
“Babe, I don’t know that this wedding is going to go off without more trouble,” Quinn said. His big hand took mine. “I have a lot to say to you, but it’s going to have to wait until later.”
I nodded. The wedding day of Craig Merlotte and Deidra Lisle had definitely gotten off to a sad start. “Anything that upsets the Merlotte family upsets me. How did you come to be here?” I tried to keep my gaze away from the pitiful, limp forms.
“I was checking the twoey message board for information about the Shreveport area,” Quinn said. “Sam posts on there from time to time, or sometimes I talk to the members of the Long Tooth pack.” The Long Tooth pack was Alcide Herveaux’s. “Someone posted that you were coming to Wright with Sam, and I already knew Trish and Togo here. Texas is part of my territory, you know.” Quinn worked for Special Events, a branch of the national event-planning company E(E)E. Special Events staged important rites of passage for the supernatural community, like vampire weddings and first changes for the two-natured. “I knew Trish has a ranch outside Wright. I decided to take the chance to see you without the deader around.” That would be Eric. “I flew into Dallas, and they picked me up. We were able to track you. I didn’t want anything to happen to you on the way. I should have worried about what would happen when you got to Wright.”
“This town is full of hate,” the man called Togo said.
“I’m afraid so.” I looked up at the broad nose, the high cheekbones, the gleaming skin. He was quite extraordinary. He stood out in these surroundings like a bird of paradise in a wren flock . . . not that there was anything avian about him.
The third wereanimal had finished her prowling, and now she appeared beside us. “I’m Trish Pulaski,” she said. “You must be Sookie. Oh my God and his angels! Who would ever conceive of hurting poor dumb dogs to make a point?” She was lovely, and she was also clearly in her fifties. Her hair was solid gray, thick and curly. She didn’t wear glasses, and her eyes were bright chips of blue in a tan face. Her jeans left no doubt she was in excellent shape. She wasn’t thinking about herself or her companions. She was beside herself with rage and pain. I understood at that moment that the pound was her special project, that she’d raised the money to build it, she came every day to feed the animals, and she’d loved them all.
I said, “They left a sign in Bernie’s yard.”
“Bernie? They’re targeting Bernie? Those fools!” she said, and her anger blazed like a flame within her. She turned to Quinn. “When we agreed to come out like the vampires did, this is the last thing I imagined would happen.” She looked around at the dead dogs and the pools of blood, her gray curls dancing gaily and incongruously in the morning wind. She sighed, and her shoulders straightened. She said to me, “I’m sorry we had to meet here. This big guy is Togo Olympio. Quinn tells me you two are old friends. What was on the sign?”
I wanted to ask a lot of questions, but now was clearly not the time. I explained the little I knew. I also told them about Jim Collins.
“On Craig’s wedding day,” Trish said. She was angry and tearful and hurt. “Assholes!” Togo put a huge hand on Trish’s thin shoulder. She laid her cheek on it for just a moment. “I’m not surprised to hear Jim Collins is involved,” she continued. “Ever since we came out, he’s been posting hate messages on his website.”
“He has a website?” I said stupidly.
“Yeah, he’s Mr. Right Wing. One of my jobs is monitoring websites like his. They’ve sprung up everywhere since the vamps came out, and they sprouted like mushrooms when we did. I watch Jim’s especially closely since we’re in the same area. He’s even had postings from the Newlins.” Steve and Sarah Newlin were the leaders of the radical religious underground in America. “Jim’s website backs every extreme conservative position you can think of. Some of his principles I actually agree with, though it chokes me to say so. But most of his beliefs are so radical they scare me, and he doesn’t seem to care how people will be hurt as a consequence of acting on those beliefs. Obviously, he doesn’t care about animals,” she added quietly.
Togo Olympio had entered one of the pens and bent over to touch the side of one of the fallen dogs. Flies were swarming now, and though I hadn’t noticed their buzzing before, it droned in my ears. His dark eyes met mine, and I shivered. I was glad we were on the same side.
“I have to go back to the house and tell them,” I said. “What will happen at the wedding if people are this determined to do them harm?”
“That’s the big question, isn’t it?” Trish said. She was pulling herself together. “Quinn says you’re a friend of the shifters and the vampires though you’re human.”
I saw Quinn twitch out of the corner of my eye.
“But you’re not completely human, right?” Trish persisted.
“No, ma’am.” My bloodline wasn’t exactly her concern, I figured, so I stopped at that.
/> “If you’re Sam’s friend, you’re special already,” she said, nodding to indicate she’d made a quick decision. I felt absurdly pleased. “Well, Sookie, Togo roams through every few weeks, and he and I are the scandal of the county. I’ve known Quinn, here, for years. Together, maybe we can hold back this hatred long enough for the young people to get married. After the wedding’s over, I’m hoping like hell that feeling dies down and things go back to normal.”
“Did you come out?” I asked. “With the other wereanimals?”
“This town’s always thought I was a wild card, and no one was that surprised.” Trish smiled broadly. “Bernie—she shocked everyone because she always seemed like Hannah Housewife; she and her first husband had such a great marriage, such good kids. Then, after she married Don . . . That was the trouble, Don’s going nuts like that. His reaction was so violent and public, though I don’t think he was in his right mind. Look, let’s get out of here. All of this is making me sick.”
I glanced at Quinn, and he nodded. “Togo and I’ll come back later and dig a pit,” he said, answering a question I hadn’t wanted to ask.
To my surprise, Togo brought out a digital camera and began taking pictures. “My brothers and sisters need to know,” he told me when he saw me watching. “This is to post on our own websites.”
This just got more and more interesting.
“I’ve got to get back. I’m sorry I can’t help you clean up,” I said, which was a total lie. I was hugely relieved to have good reason to avoid burying the poor dogs. “Where are the cats?” I asked, struck by the fact that all the corpses were canine.
“I keep the cats at my place, thank God,” Trish said, and I could only say Amen to that.
I walked back through the little building. When I got to the parking lot, I leaned against Sam’s truck. The awfulness of the morning rolled over me again like a heavy wave. It was abominable that someone had slaughtered innocent dogs in a vicious attempt to ruin a day that should be happy. I felt the swell of a huge anger. I’d always had a slow temper. I didn’t get really angry very often. But when I did, I did it right and proper. Since my time in the hands of the fae, my control over that anger seemed to have slipped. The second wave, the weight of my rage, threatened to pull me under. I’m not myself, I thought distantly.