I just nodded. There was really nothing to say.
“Mr. Herveaux doing okay after the loss of his father?” Jackson Herveaux’s body had been found half-in, half-out of a feed tank filled with water on an old farm belonging to the family. Though the newspaper had tap-danced around some of the injuries, it was clear wild animals had chewed at some of the bones. The theory was that the older Herveaux had fallen into the tank and broken his leg when he hit the bottom. He had managed to get to the edge and haul himself halfway out, but at that point he had passed out. Since no one knew he’d visited the farm, no one came to his rescue, the theory went, and he’d died all by himself.
Actually, a large crowd had witnessed Jackson’s demise, among them the man beside me.
“I haven’t talked to Alcide since his dad was found,” I said truthfully.
“My goodness, I’m sure sorry that didn’t work out,” Detective Coughlin said, pretending he didn’t see that I was standing with my date for the evening. “You two sure made a nice-looking couple.”
“Sookie is pretty no matter who she’s with,” Quinn said.
I smiled up at him, and he smiled back. He was sure making all the right moves.
“So if you’ll come with me for a minute, Miss Stackhouse, we’ll get your story down on paper and you can leave.”
Quinn’s hand tightened on mine. He was warning me. Wait a minute, who was the mind reader around here? I squeezed right back. I was perfectly aware that Detective Coughlin thought I must be guilty of
something
, and he’d do his best to discover what. But in fact, I was not guilty.
We had been the targets, I’d picked that from the attackers’ brains. But why?
Detective Coughlin led me to a desk in a roomful of desks, and he fished a form out of a drawer. The business of the room continued; some of the desks were unoccupied and had that “closed for the night” look, but others showed signs of work in progress. There were a few people coming in and out of the room, and two desks away, a younger detective with short white-blond hair was busily typing on his computer. I was being very careful, and I’d opened my mind, so I knew he was looking at me when I was looking in another direction, and I knew he’d been positioned there by Detective Coughlin, or at least prodded to get a good hard look at me while I was in the room.
I met his eyes squarely. The shock of recognition was mutual. I’d seen him at the packmaster contest. He was a Were. He’d acted as Patrick Furnan’s second in the duel. I’d caught him cheating. Maria-Star had told me his punishment had been having his head shaved. Though his candidate won, this punishment had been exacted, and his hair was just now growing in. He hated me with the passion of the guilty. He half rose from his chair, his first instinct being to come over to me and beat the crap out of me, but when he absorbed the fact that someone had already tried to do that, he smirked.
“Is that your partner?” I asked Detective Coughlin.
“What?” He’d been peering at the computer through reading glasses, and he glanced over at the younger man, then back at me. “Yeah, that’s my new partner. The guy I was with at the last crime scene I saw you at, he retired last month.”
“What’s his name? Your new partner?”
“Why, you going after him next? You can’t seem to settle on one man, can you, Miss Stackhouse?”
If I’d been a vampire, I could have made him answer me, and if I were really skilled, he wouldn’t even know he’d done it.
“It’s more like they can’t settle on me, Detective Coughlin,” I said, and he gave me a curious look. He waved a finger toward the blond detective.
“That’s Cal. Cal Myers.” He seemed to have called up the right form, because he began to take me through the incident once again, and I answered his questions with genuine indifference. For once, I had very little to hide.
“I did wonder,” I said, when we’d concluded, “if they’d taken drugs.”
“You know much about drugs, Miss Stackhouse?” His little eyes went over me again.
“Not firsthand, but of course, from time to time someone comes into the bar who’s taken something they shouldn’t. These young men definitely seemed . . . influenced by something.”
“Well, the hospital will take their blood, and we’ll know.”
“Will I have to come back?”
“To testify against them? Sure.”
No way out of it. “Okay,” I said, as firmly and neutrally as I could. “We through here?”
“I guess we are.” He met my eyes, his own little brown eyes full of suspicion. There was no point in my resenting it; he was absolutely right, there was something fishy about me, something he didn’t know. Coughlin was doing his best to be a good cop. I felt suddenly sorry for him, floundering through a world he only knew the half of.
“Don’t trust your partner,” I whispered, and I expected him to blow up and call Cal Myers over and ridicule me to him. But something in my eyes or my voice arrested that impulse. My words spoke to a warning that had been sounding surreptitiously in his brain, maybe from the moment he’d met the Were.
He didn’t say anything, not one word. His mind was full of fear, fear and loathing . . . but he believed I was telling him the truth. After a second, I got up and left the squad room. To my utter relief, Quinn was waiting for me in the lobby.
A patrolman—not Boling—took us back to Quinn’s car, and we were silent during the drive. Quinn’s car was sitting in solitary splendor in the parking lot across from the Strand, which was closed and dark. He pulled out his keys and hit the keypad to open the doors, and we got in slowly and wearily.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“The Hair of the Dog,” he said.
9
T
HE HAIR OF THE DOG WAS OFF KINGS HIGHWAY, not too far from Centenary College. It was an old brick storefront. The large windows facing the street were covered with opaque cream curtains, I noticed, as we turned in to the left side of the building to lurch through an alley that led to a parking area at the back. We parked in the small, weedy lot. Though it was poorly lit, I could see that the ground was littered with empty cans, broken glass, used condoms, and worse. There were several motorcycles, a few of the less expensive compact cars, and a Suburban or two. The back door had a sign on it that read NO ENTRANCE—STAFF ONLY.
Though my feet were definitely beginning to protest the unaccustomed high heels, we had to pick our way through the alley to the front entrance. The cold creeping down my spine intensified as we grew close to the door. Then it was like I’d hit a wall, the spell gripped me that suddenly. I stopped dead. I struggled to go forward, but I couldn’t move. I could smell the magic. The Hair of the Dog had been warded. Someone had paid a very good witch a handsome amount of money to surround the door with a go-away spell.
I fought not to give in to a compulsion to turn and walk in another direction, any other direction.
Quinn took a few steps forward, and turned to regard me with some surprise, until he realized what was happening. “I forgot,” he said, that same surprise sounding in his voice. “I actually forgot you’re human.”
“That sounds like a compliment,” I said, with some effort. Even in the cool night, my forehead beaded with sweat. My right foot edged forward an inch.
“Here,” he said, and scooped me up, until he was holding me just like Rhett carried Scarlett O’Hara. As his aura wrapped around me, the unpleasant go-away compulsion eased. I drew a deep breath of relief. The magic could no longer recognize me as human, at least not decisively. Though the bar still seemed unattractive and mildly repellent, I could enter without wanting to be sick.
Maybe it was the lingering effects of the spell, but after we’d entered it, the bar
still
seemed unattractive and mildly repellent. I wouldn’t say all conversation ceased when we walked in, but there was a definite lull in the noise that filled the bar. A jukebox was playing “Bad Moon Rising,” which was like the Were national anthem, and the motley collection of Weres and shifters seemed to reorient themselves.
“Humans are not allowed in this place!” A very young woman leaped across the bar in one muscular surge and strode forward. She was wearing fishnet stockings and high-heeled boots, a red leather bustier—well, a bustier that wished it was made of red leather, it was probably more like Naugahyde—and a black band of cloth that I supposed she called a skirt. It was like she’d pulled a tube top on, and then worked it down. It was so tight I thought it might roll up all at once, like a window shade.
She didn’t like my smile, correctly reading it as a comment on her ensemble.
“Get your human ass out of here,” she said, and growled. Unfortunately, it didn’t sound too threatening, since she hadn’t had any practice at putting the menace into it, and I could feel my smile widen. The dress-challenged teen had the poor impulse control of the very new Were, and she pulled her hand back to punch me.
Then Quinn snarled.
The sound came from deep in his belly, and it was thunderous, the deep sound of it penetrating every corner of the bar. The bartender, a biker type with beard and hair of considerable length and tattoos that covered his bare arms, reached down below the bar. I knew he was pulling out a shotgun.
Not for the first time, I wondered if I shouldn’t start going armed everywhere I went. In my law-abiding life, I had never seen the need until the past few months. The jukebox cut off just then, and the silence of the bar was just as deafening as the noise had been.
“Please don’t get the gun out,” I said, smiling brightly at the bartender. I could feel it stretching my lips, that too-bright grin that made me look a little nuts. “We come in peace,” I added, on a crazy impulse, showing them my empty palms.
A shifter who’d been standing at the bar laughed, a sharp bark of startled amusement. The tension began to ratchet down a notch. The young woman’s hand dropped to her side, and she took a step back. Her gaze flickered from Quinn to me and back again. Both the bartender’s hands were in sight now.
“Hello, Sookie,” said a familiar voice. Amanda, the red-haired Were who’d been chauffeuring Dr. Ludwig the day before, was sitting at a table in a dark corner. (Actually, the room seemed to be full of dark corners.)
With Amanda was a husky man in his late thirties. Both were supplied with drinks and a bowl of snack mix. They had company at the table, a couple sitting with their backs to me. When they turned, I recognized Alcide and Maria-Star. They turned cautiously, as if any sudden movement might trigger violence. Maria-Star’s brain was a motley jumble of anxiety, pride, and tension. Alcide’s was just conflicted. He didn’t know how to feel.
That made two of us.
“Hey, Amanda,” I said, my voice as cheerful as my smile. It wouldn’t do to let the silence pile up.
“I’m honored to have the legendary Quinn in my bar,” Amanda said, and I realized that, whatever other jobs she might have, she owned the Hair of the Dog. “Are you two out for an evening on the town, or is there some special reason for your visit?”
Since I had no idea why we were there, I had to defer to Quinn for an answer, which didn’t make me look too good, in my opinion.
“There’s a very good reason, though I’ve long wanted to visit your bar,” Quinn said in a courtly, formal style that had come out of nowhere.
Amanda inclined her head, which seemed to be a signal for Quinn to continue.
“This evening, my date and I were attacked in a public place, with civilians all around us.”
No one seemed awfully upset or astonished by this. In fact, Miss Fashion-Challenged shrugged her bare skinny shoulders.
“We were attacked by Weres,” Quinn said.
Now
we got the big reaction. Heads and hands jerked and then became still. Alcide half rose to his feet and then sat down again.
“Weres of the Long Tooth pack?” Amanda asked. Her voice was incredulous.
Quinn shrugged. “The attack was a killing one, so I didn’t stop to ask questions. Both were very young bitten Weres, and from their behavior, they were on drugs.”
More shocked reaction. We were creating quite the sensation.
“Are you hurt?” Alcide asked me, as if Quinn weren’t standing right there.
I tilted my head back so my neck would be visible. I wasn’t smiling anymore. By now the bruises left by the boy’s hands would be darkening nicely. And I’d been thinking hard. “As a friend of the pack, I didn’t expect anything to happen to me here in Shreveport,” I said.
I figured my status as friend of the pack hadn’t changed with the new regime, or at least I hoped it hadn’t. Anyway, it was my trump card, and I played it.
“Colonel Flood did say Sookie was a friend of the pack,” Amanda said unexpectedly. The Weres all looked at each other, and the moment seemed to hang in the balance.
“What happened to the cubs?” asked the biker behind the bar.
“They lived,” Quinn said, giving them the important news first. There was a general feeling that the whole bar gave a sigh; whether of relief or regret, I couldn’t tell you.
“The police have them,” Quinn continued. “Since the cubs attacked us in front of humans, there was no way around police involvement.” We’d talked about Cal Myers on our way to the bar. Quinn had caught only a glimpse of the Were cop, but of course he’d known him for what he was. I wondered if my companion would now raise the issue of Cal Myers’s presence at the station, but Quinn said nothing. And truthfully, why comment on something the Weres were sure to already know? The Were pack would stand together against outsiders, no matter how divided they were among themselves.
Police involvement in Were affairs was undesirable, obviously. Though Cal Myers’s presence on the force would help, every scrutiny raised the possibility that humans would learn of the existence of creatures that preferred anonymity. I didn’t know how they’d flown (or crawled, or loped) under the radar this long. I had a conviction that the cost in human lives had been considerable.