“But it’s a public business. Anyone can come inside,” she said, as if she were the authority.
Not any more than I was. “No, not if Sam doesn’t want them in here, and as his representative, I’m telling you to leave.”
“You’re not Sam Merlotte, or his wife. You’re that girl who dates a vampire,” she said venomously.
“I am Sam’s right-hand person at this bar,” I lied, “and I’m telling you to get out, or I’ll put you out.”
“You lay one finger on me, and I’ll call the law on you,” she said, jerking her head.
Rage flared up in me. I really, really don’t like threats.
“Kennedy,” I said, and in a second she was standing by me. “I’d say between us we’re strong enough to pick up this lady and take her out of the bar. What do you say?”
“I’m all for it.” Kennedy stared down at the woman as if she were only waiting for the starting gun to go off. “And you’re that girl who shot her boyfriend,” the woman said, beginning to look properly frightened.
“I am. I was really mad at him, and at the moment I’m pretty pissed off at you,” Kennedy said. “You get your butt out of here and take your little sign with you, and you do it right now.”
The older woman’s courage broke, and she scuttled out, remembering at the last moment to keep her head up and her back straight since she was one of God’s soldiers. I got that direct from her head.
Catfish clapped for Kennedy, and a few others joined in, but mostly the bar patrons sat in stunned silence. Then we heard the chanting from the parking lot, and we all surged to the windows.
“Jesus Christ, Shepherd of Judea,” I breathed. There were at least thirty protesters in the parking lot. Most of them were middle-aged, but I spotted a few teenagers who should have been in school, and I recognized a couple of guys who I knew to be in their early twenties. I sort of recognized most of the crowd. They attended a “charismatic” church in Clarice, a church that was growing by leaps and bounds (if construction was any indicator). The last time I’d driven by when I was going to have physical therapy with JB, a new activities building had been going up.
I wished they were being active
there
, where they belonged, rather than here. Just as I was about to do something idiotic (like going out in the parking lot), two Bon Temps police cars pulled up, lights flashing. Kevin and Kenya got out. Kevin was skinny and white, and Kenya was round and black. They were both good police officers, and they loved each other dearly. but unofficially.
Kevin approached the chanting group with apparent confidence. I couldn’t hear what he said, but they all turned to face him and began talking all at once. He held up his hands to pat the air in a “back off and get quiet” gesture, and Kenya circled around to come up behind the group.
“Maybe we should go out there?” Kennedy said.
Kennedy, I noted, was not in the habit of sitting back and letting things take their course. Nothing wrong with being proactive, but this was not the time to escalate the confrontation in the parking lot, and that was what our presence would do. “No, I think we need to stay right here,” I said. “There’s no point in throwing fuel on the fire.” I looked around. None of the patrons were eating or drinking. They were all looking out the windows. I thought of requesting that they sit down at their tables, but there was no point in asking them to do something they clearly weren’t going to do, with so much drama going on outside.
Antoine came out of the kitchen and stood by me. He looked at the scene for a long moment. “I didn’t have nothing to do with it,” he said.
“I never thought you did,” I said, surprised. Antoine relaxed, even inside his head. “This is some crazy church action,” I said. “They’re picketing Merlotte’s because Sam is two-natured. But the woman who came in here, she was pretty aware of me and she knew Kennedy’s history, too. I hope this is a one-shot. I’d hate to have to deal with protesters all the time.”
“Sam’ll go broke if this keeps up,” Kennedy said in a low voice. “Maybe I should just quit. It’s not going to help Sam that I work here.”
“Kennedy, don’t set yourself up to be a martyr,” I said. “They don’t like me, either. Everyone who doesn’t think I’m crazy thinks there’s something supernatural about me. We’d all have to quit, from Sam on down.”
She looked at me sharply to make sure I was sincere. She gave me a quick nod. Then she looked out the window again and said, “Uh-oh.” Danny Prideaux had pulled up in his 1991 Chrysler LeBaron, a machine he found only slightly less fascinating than he found Kennedy Keyes.
Danny had parked right at the edge of the crowd, and he hopped out and began to hurry toward the bar. I just knew he was coming to check on Kennedy. Either they’d had a police band radio on at the home builders’ supply place or Danny had heard the news from a customer. The jungle drums beat fast and furious in Bon Temps. Danny was wearing a gray tank top and jeans and boots, and his broad olive shoulders were gleaming with sweat.
As he strode toward the door, I said, “I think my mouth is watering.” Kennedy put her hand over her mouth to stifle a yip of laughter.
“Yeah, he looks pretty good,” she said, trying to sound offhand. We both laughed.
But then disaster struck. One of the protesters, angry at being shooed away from Merlotte’s, brought his sign down on the hood of the LeBaron. At the sound Danny turned around. He froze for a second, and then he was heading at top speed toward the sinner who’d marred the paint job on his car.
“Oh, no,” Kennedy said and hurtled out of the bar as if she’d been fired from a slingshot. “Danny!” she yelled. “Danny! You stop!”
Danny hesitated, turning his head just a fraction to see who was calling him. With a leap that would have done a kangaroo proud, Kennedy was beside him and wrapping her arms around him. He made an impatient movement, as if to shake her off, and then it seemed to dawn on him that Kennedy, whom he’d spent hours admiring, was embracing him. He stood stiffly, his arms at his side, apparently afraid to move.
I couldn’t tell what Kennedy was saying to him, but Danny looked down at her face, completely focused on her. One of the demonstrators had forgotten herself enough to get an “Awww” expression on her face, but she snapped out of her lapse into humanity and brandished her sign again.
“Animals go! People stay! We want Congress to show the way!” one of the older demonstrators, a man with a lot of white hair, shouted as I opened the door and stepped out.
“Kevin, get them out of here!” I called. Kevin, whose thin, pale face was creased into unhappy lines, was trying to shepherd the little crowd out of the parking lot.
“Mr. Barlowe,” Kevin said to the white-haired man, “what you’re doing is illegal, and I could put you in jail. I really don’t want to have to do that.”
“We’re willing to be arrested for our beliefs,” the man said. “Isn’t that so, you-all?”
Some of the church members didn’t look entirely certain of that.
“Maybe you are,” Kenya said, “but we got Jane Bodehouse in one of the cells now. She’s coming off a bender, and she’s throwing up about every five minutes. Believe me, people, you do
not
want to be in there with Jane.”
The woman who’d originally come into Merlotte’s turned a little green.
“This is private property,” Kevin said. “You cannot demonstrate here. If you don’t clear this parking lot in three minutes, all of you are under arrest.”
It was more like five minutes, but the parking lot was clear of demonstrators when Sam joined us in the parking lot to thank Kevin and Kenya. Since I hadn’t seen his truck drive up, his appearance was quite a surprise.
“When did you get back?” I asked.
“Less than ten minutes ago,” he said. “I knew if I showed myself, they’d just get pumped up again, so I parked on School Street and walked through the back way.”
“Smart,” I said. The lunch crowd was leaving Merlotte’s, and the incident was already on the track to becoming a local legend. Only one or two of the patrons seemed upset; the rest regarded the demonstration as good entertainment. Catfish Hennessy clapped Sam on the shoulder as he went by, and he wasn’t the only one who made an extra effort to show support. I wondered how long the tolerant attitude would last. If the picketers kept it up, a lot of people might decide that coming here simply wasn’t worth the trouble.
I didn’t need to say any of this out loud. It was written on Sam’s face. “Hey,” I said, slinging an arm around his shoulders. “They’ll go away. You know what you should do? You should call the pastor of that church. They’re all from Holy Word Tabernacle in Clarice. You should tell him that you want to come talk to the church. Show them you’re a person just like everyone else. I bet that would work.”
Then I realized how stiff his shoulders were. Sam was rigid with anger. “I should not have to tell anyone anything,” he said. “I’m a citizen of this country. My father was in the army. I was in the army. I pay my share of taxes. And I’m
not
a person like everyone else. I’m a shifter. And they need to just put that on their plates and eat it.” He whirled to go back into his bar.
I flinched, though I knew his anger wasn’t directed at me. As I watched Sam stalk away, I reminded myself that none of this was about me. But I couldn’t help but feel I had a stake in the outcome of this new development. Not only did I work at Merlotte’s, but the woman who’d come in initially had named me as part of the problem.
Furthermore, I still thought approaching the church in person was a good idea. It was reasonable and civil.
Sam wasn’t in a reasonable and civil mood, and I could understand that. I just didn’t know where he was going to put his anger.
A newspaper reporter came in an hour later and interviewed all of us about “the incident,” as he called it. Errol Clayton was a guy in his forties who wrote about half the stories in the little Bon Temps paper. He didn’t own it, but he managed it on a shoestring budget. I had no issue with the paper, but of course lots of folks made fun of it. The
Bon Temps Bugle
was frequently called the
Bon Temps Bungle
.
While Errol was waiting for Sam to finish a phone call, I said, “You want a drink, Mr. Clayton?”
“I’d sure appreciate some iced tea, Sookie,” he said. “How’s that brother of yours?”
“He’s doing well.”
“Getting over the death of his wife?”
“I think he’s come to terms with it,” I said, which covered all sorts of ground. “That was a terrible thing.”
“Yes, very bad. And it was right here in this parking lot,” Errol Clayton said, as if I might have forgotten. “And right here, in this parking lot, was where the body of Lafayette Reynold was found.”
“That’s true, too. But of course, none of that was Sam’s fault, or had anything to do with him.”
“Never arrested anyone for Crystal’s death that I recall.”
I reared back to give Errol Clayton a hard stare. “Mr. Clayton, if you’ve come here to make trouble, you can just leave now. We need things to be better, not worse. Sam is a good man. He goes to the Rotary, he puts an ad in the high school yearbook, he sponsors a baseball team at the Boys and Girls Club every spring, and he helps with the Fourth of July fireworks. Plus, he’s a great boss, a veteran, and a tax-paying citizen.”
“Merlotte, you got you a fan club,” Errol Clayton said to Sam, who’d come to stand right behind me.
“I’ve got a friend,” Sam said quietly. “I’m lucky enough to have a lot of friends and a good business. I sure would hate to see that ruined.” I heard an apology in his voice, and I felt his hand pat my shoulder. Feeling much better, I slipped away to do my job, leaving Sam to talk to the newspaperman.
I didn’t get a chance to talk to my boss again before I left to go home. I had to stop at the store because I needed a couple of things—Claude had made inroads into my potato chip stash and my cereal, too—and I wasn’t just imagining that the store was full of people who were busy talking about what had happened at lunchtime at Merlotte’s. There was silence every time I came around a corner, but of course that didn’t make any difference to me. I could tell what people were thinking.
Most of them didn’t share the beliefs of the demonstrators. But the mere fact of the incident had set some of the previously indifferent townspeople to thinking about the issue of the two-natured, and about the legislation that proposed to take away some of their rights.
And some of them were all for it.
Jason was on time, and I climbed up into his truck. I’d changed into blue jeans and a pale blue thin T-shirt I’d bought at Old Navy. It said PEACE in golden Gothic letters. I hoped I didn’t look like I was hinting. Jason, in an ever-appropriate New Orleans Saints T-shirt, looked ready for anything.
“Hey, Sook!” He was buzzing with happy anticipation. He’d never been to a Were meeting, of course, and he wasn’t aware of how dangerous they could be. Or maybe he was, and that was why he was so excited.
“Jason, I got to tell you a few things about Were gatherings,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, a bit more soberly.
Aware that I sounded more like his know-it-all older sister instead of his younger sister, I gave him a little lecture. I told Jason that the Weres were touchy, proud, and protocol minded; explained how the Weres could abjure a pack member; emphasized the fact that Basim was a newer pack member who’d been trusted with a position of great responsibility. That he’d betrayed that trust would make the pack even touchier, and they might question Alcide’s judgment in picking Basim as enforcer. He might even be challenged. The pack judgment on Annabelle was impossible to predict. “Something pretty awful may happen to her,” I warned Jason. “We got to suck it up and accept it.”
“You’re saying they might physically punish a woman because she cheated on the packleader with another pack officer?” Jason said. “Sookie, you’re talking to me like I’m not two-natured, too. You think I don’t know all that?”
He was right. That was exactly how I’d been treating him.
I took a deep breath. “I apologize, Jason. I still think about you as my human brother. I don’t always remember that you’re a lot more. In all honesty, I’m scared. I’ve seen them kill people before, like I’ve seen your panthers kill and maim people when they thought that was justice. What scares me is not that you do it, which is bad enough, but that I’ve come to accept it as just. the way you do things if you’re two-natured. When those demonstrators were at the bar today, I was so mad at them for hating Weres and shifters without really knowing anything about them. But now I’m wondering how they’d feel if they actually knew more about how packs work; how Gran would feel if she knew I was willing to watch a woman, or anyone, be beaten and maybe killed for an infraction of some rules I don’t live by.”
Jason was silent for what seemed like a long time. “I think the fact that a few days have passed is a good thing. It’s given Alcide time to cool off. I hope the other pack members have had time to think, too,” he said finally. And I knew that was all we could say about this, and maybe more than I should have said. We fell silent for a short time.
“Can’t you listen in to what they’re thinking?” Jason asked.
“Full Weres are pretty hard to read. Some are harder than others. Of course, I’ll see what I can get. I can block a lot when I make myself, but if I let my guard down. ” I shrugged. “This is a case where I want to know everything I can as soon as I can.”
“Who do you think killed that dude in the grave?”
“I’ve given it some thought,” I said gently. “I see three main possibilities. But the key to me suspecting all three is that he was buried on my land, and I have to assume that wasn’t by chance.”
Jason nodded.
“Okay, here goes. Maybe Victor, the new vamp leader of Louisiana, killed Basim. Victor wants to knock Eric out of his position, since Eric’s a sheriff. That’s a pretty important position.”
Jason looked at me like I was an idiot. “I may not know all their fancy titles and all their little secret handshakes,” he said, “but I know someone in charge when I see him. If you say this Victor outranks Eric and wants him gone, I believe you.”
I had to stop underestimating my brother’s shrewdness. “Maybe Victor thought that if I got arrested for murder—since someone tipped off the law that there was a body on my land—Eric would go down with me. Maybe Victor thought that would be enough for their mutual boss to take Eric out of his position.”
“Wouldn’t it have been better to put the body in Eric’s house and call the police?”
“That’s a good point. But finding a body in Eric’s house would mean bad press for all vampires. Another idea I had, maybe the killer was Annabelle, who was screwing both Basim and Alcide. Maybe she got jealous, or maybe Basim said he was going to tell. So she killed him, and since they’d just been on my land, she thought of it as a good place to bury a body.”
“That’s a long way to drive with a body in the trunk,” Jason said. He was clearly going to play devil’s advocate.
“Sure, it’s easy to punch holes in all my ideas,” I said, sounding exactly like his little sister. “Once I go to all the work of coming up with them! But you’re right. That’d be a risk I wouldn’t want to take,” I added, on a more mature level.
“Alcide could’ve done it,” Jason said.
“Yeah. He could’ve. But you were there. Did it seem to you—remotely—like he knew it was going to be Basim?”
“No,” he said. “I thought he got a huge shock. But I wasn’t looking at Annabelle.”
“I wasn’t, either. So I don’t know how she reacted.”
“So you got any other ideas?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And this is my least favorite. You know I told you that Heidi the vampire scented fairies in the woods?”
“I did, too,” Jason said.
“Maybe I should get you to check out the woods on a regular basis,” I said. “Anyway, Claude said it wasn’t him, and Heidi confirmed that. But what if Basim saw Claude meeting with another fairy? In the area around the house, where Claude’s scent would be natural?”
“When would this have happened?”
“The night the pack was on the property. Claude hadn’t moved in then, but he’d come around to see me.”
I could see Jason trying to figure out the sequence. “So Basim warned you about the fairies he tracked, but he didn’t tell you he’d seen some? I don’t think that holds together, Sook.”
“You’re right,” I admitted. “And we still don’t know who the other fairy would be. If there are two, and one of them isn’t Claude, and the other one is Dermot. ”
“That leaves one fairy we don’t know about.”
“Dermot’s seriously messed up, Jason.”
Jason said, “I’m worried about
all
of ’em.”
“Even Claude?”
“Look, how come he showed up now? When you have other fairies in the woods? And does that sound crazy when you say it out loud, or what?”
I laughed. Just a little. “Yeah, it sounds nuts. And I get your point. I don’t entirely trust Claude, even if he is a little bit family. I wish I hadn’t said yes to him moving in. On the other hand, I don’t believe he means to hurt me or you. And he’s not
quite
as much of an asshole as I thought he was.”
We tried to put together a few more theories about Basim’s death, but we could punch too many holes in all of our theories. It passed the time until we arrived.
The house Alcide had moved into when his dad died was a large two-story brick home on large grounds, enhanced with impressive landscaping. The—estate? manor house? — was in a very nice area of Shreveport, of course. In fact, it wasn’t too far from Eric’s neighborhood. That gnawed at me, thinking of Eric so close to me but in so much trouble.
The confusion of what I was feeling through our blood bond was making me more jittery with every passing night. There were so many people sharing in that bond now, so much feeling going back and forth. It wore me out emotionally. Alexei was the worst. He was a very dead little boy, that was the only way I could put it: a child locked in a permanent grayness, a child who experienced only occasional flashes of pleasure and color in his new “life.” After days of experiencing what amounted to an echo of him living in my head, I’d decided the boy was like a tick sucking on the life of Appius Livius, Eric, and now me. He siphoned off a little every day.
Apparently, Appius Livius was so used to Alexei’s draining him that he accepted it as part of his existence. Maybe—possibly—the Roman felt responsible for the trouble Alexei caused, since he’d brought him over. If that was Appius Livius’s conviction, I thought he was absolutely correct. I was sure that bringing Alexei to Eric, thinking the presence of another “child” would soothe Alexei’s psychosis, was a last-ditch effort to cure the boy. And Eric, my lover, was caught in the middle of all this along with all the problems he was staving off involving Victor.
I felt less and less like a good person every day. As we walked from the driveway to Alcide’s front door, I admitted to myself that since my visit to Fangtasia, I found myself wishing that all of them would die—Appius Livius, Alexei, Victor.
I had to shove all that into a mental corner, because I had to be on my game to enter a house full of Weres. Jason put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a half hug. “Sometime you’ll have to explain to me how come we’re doing this,” he said. “Because I think I kind of forgot.”
I laughed, which was what he’d wanted. I put up a hand to ring the bell, but the door swung open before my fingertip made contact. Jannalynn was standing there in a sports bra and running shorts. (She always came up with wardrobe choices that startled me.) The running shorts showed concave dips by her hipbones, and I sighed. “Concave” was not a word I’d ever used in relation to my body.
“Getting into the new job?” Jason asked her, stepping forward. Jannalynn had to either back up or block his way, and she chose to back up.
“I was born for this job,” the young Were said.
I had to agree. Jannalynn seemed to love doling out violence. At the same time, I wondered what job she could hold in the real world. She’d been bartending at a Were-owned bar in Shreveport when I’d first seen her, and I knew the owner of that bar had died in the struggle between the packs. “Where are you working now, Jannalynn?” I asked, since there shouldn’t be any need to keep that secret that I could see.
“I manage the Hair of the Dog. The ownership passed to Alcide, and he felt I could handle the job. I have some help,” she said, which was a confession that surprised me.
Ham, his arm around a pretty brunette in a sundress, was waiting across the foyer by the opened doors to the living room. He patted my shoulder and introduced his companion as Patricia Crimmins. I recognized her as one of the women who’d joined the Long Tooth pack in surrender after the Were war, and I tried to focus on her. But my attention kept straying. Patricia laughed and said, “It’s quite a place, isn’t it?”
I nodded in silent agreement. I’d never been in the house before, and my eyes were drawn to the French doors on the other side of the big room. There were lights out in the large backyard, which not only was enclosed by a fence that had to be seven feet tall, but was also lined outside with those quick-growing cypresses that shoot up like spears. In the middle of the patio was a fountain, which would make getting a drink easy if you’d turned into a wolf. There was a lot of wrought iron furniture set around on the flagstones, too. Wow. I’d known the Herveauxes were well-to-do, but this was impressive.
The living room itself was very “men’s club,” all glossy dark leather and paneling, and the fireplace was as big as fireplaces got in this day and age. There were animal heads mounted on the walls, which I thought was kind of amusing. Everyone seemed to have a drink in hand, and I located the bar at the center of the thickest cluster of Weres. I didn’t spot Alcide, who because of his height and his presence was usually a standout in any crowd.
I spotted Annabelle. She was in the center of the room on her knees, though she was not constrained in any way. There was an empty space all around her.
“Don’t approach,” Ham said quietly as I took a step forward. I stopped in my tracks.
“You can talk to her later, probably,” Patricia whispered. It was the “probably” that bothered me. But this was pack business, and I was on pack land.
“I’m getting me a beer,” Jason said after he’d had a good look at Annabelle’s situation. “What do you want, Sook?”
“You need to go upstairs,” Jannalynn said very quietly. “Don’t drink anything else. Alcide’s got a drink for you.” She jerked her head toward the stairs to my left. I puckered my brows together, and Jason looked as though he were going to protest, but she jerked her head again.
I found Alcide in a study at the head of the stairs. He was looking out the window. There was a glass of cloudy yellow liquid sitting on the desk blotter.
“What?” I said. I was getting an even worse feeling about this evening than I’d already had.
He turned to face me. His black hair was still in a tumble, and he could have used a shave, but grooming had nothing to do with the charisma that surrounded him like a cocoon. I didn’t know if the role had enhanced the man, or if the man had grown into the role, but Alcide had come far from the charming, friendly guy I’d met two winters ago.
“We don’t have a shaman anymore,” he said with no preamble. “We haven’t had one for four years. It’s hard to find a Were who’s willing to take the position, and you have to have the talent for it to even consider it anyway.”
“Okay,” I said, waiting to see where he was going.
“You’re the closest we’ve got.”
If there’d been drums in the background, they would’ve started an ominous roll. “I’m not a shaman,” I said. “In fact, I don’t know what a shaman is. And you don’t have me.”
“That’s a term we use for a medicine man or woman,” Alcide said. “One with a gift for interpreting and applying magic. It sounded better to us than ‘witch.’ And this way, we know who we’re talking about. If we had a pack shaman, that shaman would drink the stuff in this glass and be able to help us determine the truth of what happened to Basim, and the degree of guilt of everyone involved. Then the pack would decide on proportionate justice.”
“What is it?” I asked, pointing at the liquid.
“It’s what was left over in the last shaman’s stash.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a drug,” he said. “But before you walk out, let me tell you that the last shaman took it several times without any lasting ill effect.”
“Lasting.”
“Well, he had stomach cramps the next day. But he was able to go back to work the day after that.”