Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set

by Charlaine Harris

  “Sam,” I said, feeling unaccountably wounded, “I’m on my own, and sometimes that’s no fun, but I don’t have to take up with a werewolf just because he offers.”

  Sam looked mildly puzzled. “You wouldn’t have to. The people in Hotshot aren’t Weres.”

  “He said they were.”

  “No, not Weres with a capital W. They’re too proud to call themselves shifters, but that’s what they are. They’re were-panthers.”

  “What?” I swear I saw dots floating in the air around my eyes.

  “Sookie? What’s wrong?”

  “Panthers? Didn’t you know that the print on Jason’s dock was the print of a panther?”

  “No, no one told me about any print! Are you sure?”

  I gave him an exasperated look. “Of course, I’m sure. And he vanished the night Crystal Norris was waiting for him in his house. You’re the only bartender in the world who doesn’t know all the town gossip.”

  “Crystal—she’s the Hotshot girl he was with New Year’s Eve? The skinny black-headed girl at the search?”

  I nodded.

  “The one Felton loves so much?”

  “He what?”

  “Felton, you know, the one who came along on the search. She’s been his big love his whole life.”

  “And you know this how?” Since I, the mind reader, didn’t, I was distinctly piqued.

  “He told me one night when he’d had too much to drink. These guys from Hotshot, they don’t come in much, but when they do, they drink serious.”

  “So why would he join in the search?”

  “I think maybe we’d better go ask a few questions.”

  “This late?”

  “You got something better to do?”

  He had a point, and I sure wanted to know if they had my brother or could tell me what had happened to him. But in a way, I was scared of finding out.

  “That jacket’s too light for this weather, Sookie,” Sam said, as we bundled up.

  “My coat is at the cleaner’s,” I said. Actually, I hadn’t had a chance to put it in the dryer, or even to check to make sure all the blood had come out. And it had holes in it.

  “Hmmm” was all Sam said, before he loaned me a green pullover sweater to wear under my jacket. We got in Sam’s pickup because the snow was really coming down, and like all men, Sam was convinced he could drive in the snow, though he’d almost never done so.

  The drive out to Hotshot seemed even longer in the dark night, with the snow swirling down in the headlights.

  “I thank you for taking me out here, but I’m beginning to think we’re crazy,” I said, when we were halfway there.

  “Is your seat belt on?” Sam asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Good,” he said, and we kept on our way.

  Finally we reached the little community. There weren’t any streetlights out here, of course, but a couple of the residents had paid to have security lights put up on the electric poles. Windows were glowing in some of the houses.

  “Where do you think we should go?”

  “Calvin’s. He’s the one with the power,” Sam said, sounding certain.

  I remembered how proud Calvin had been of his house, and I was a little curious to see the inside. His lights were on, and his pickup was parked in front of the house. Stepping out of the warm truck into the snowy night was like walking through a chilly wet curtain to reach the front door. I knocked, and after a long pause, the door came open. Calvin looked pleased until he saw Sam behind me.

  “Come in,” he said, not too warmly, and stood aside. We stamped our feet politely before we entered.

  The house was plain and clean, decorated with inexpensive but carefully arranged furniture and pictures. None of the pictures had people in them, which I thought interesting. Landscapes. Wildlife.

  “This is a bad night to be out driving around,” Calvin observed.

  I knew I’d have to tread carefully, as much as I wanted to grab the front of his flannel shirt and scream in his face. This man was a ruler. The size of the kingdom didn’t really matter.

  “Calvin,” I said, as calmly as I could, “did you know that the police found a panther print on the dock, by Jason’s bootprint?”

  “No,” he said, after a long moment. I could see the anger building behind his eyes. “We don’t hear a lot of town gossip out here. I wondered why the search party had men with guns, but we make other people kind of nervous, and no one was talking to us much. Panther print. Huh.”

  “I didn’t know that was your, um, other identity, until tonight.”

  He looked at me steadily. “You think that one of us made off with your brother.”

  I stood silent, not shifting my eyes from his. Sam was equally still beside me.

  “You think Crystal got mad at your brother and did him harm?”

  “No,” I said. His golden eyes were getting wider and rounder as I spoke to him.

  “Are you afraid of me?” he asked suddenly.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not.”

  “Felton,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Let’s go see,” he said.

  Back out into the snow and darkness. I could feel the sting of the flakes on my cheeks, and I was glad my jacket had a hood. Sam’s gloved hand took mine as I stumbled over some discarded tool or toy in the yard of the house next to Felton’s. As we trailed up to the concrete slab that formed Felton’s front porch, Calvin was already knocking at the door.

  “Who is it?” Felton demanded.

  “Open,” said Calvin.

  Recognizing his voice, Felton opened the door immediately. He didn’t have the same cleanliness bug as Calvin, and his furniture was not so much arranged as shoved up against whatever wall was handiest. The way he moved was not human, and tonight that seemed even more pronounced than it had at the search. Felton, I thought, was closer to reverting to his animal nature. Inbreeding had definitely left its mark on him.

  “Where is the man?” Calvin asked without preamble.

  Felton’s eyes flared wide, and he twitched, as if he was thinking about running. He didn’t speak.

  “Where?” Calvin demanded again, and then his hand changed into a paw and he swiped it across Felton’s face. “Does he live?”

  I clapped my hands across my mouth so I wouldn’t scream. Felton sank to his knees, his face crossed with parallel slashes filling with blood.

  “In the shed in back,” he said indistinctly.

  I went back out the front door so quickly that Sam barely caught up with me. Around the corner of the house I flew, and I fell full-length over a woodpile. Though I knew it would hurt later, I jumped up and found myself supported by Calvin Norris, who, as he had in the woods, lifted me over the pile before I knew what he intended. He vaulted it himself with easy grace, and then we were at the door of the shed, which was one of those you order from Sears or Penney’s. You have your neighbors come help put it up, when the concrete truck comes to pour your slab.

  The door was padlocked, but these sheds aren’t meant to repel determined intruders, and Calvin was very strong. He broke the lock, and pushed back the door, and turned on the light. It was amazing to me that there was electricity out here, because that’s certainly not the norm.

  At first I wasn’t sure I was looking at my brother, because this creature looked nothing like Jason. He was blond, sure, but he was so filthy and smelly that I flinched, even in the freezing air. And he was blue with the cold, since he had only pants on. He was lying on a single blanket on the concrete floor.

  I was on my knees beside him, gathering him up as best I could in my arms, and his eyelids fluttered open. “Sookie?” he said, and I could hear the disbelief in his voice. “Sookie? Am I saved?”

  “Yes,” I said, though I was by no means so sure. I remember what had happened to the sheriff who’d come out here and found something amiss. “We’re going to take you home.”

  He’d been bitten.

  He’d been bi
tten a lot.

  “Oh, no,” I said softly, the significance of the bites sinking in.

  “I didn’t kill him,” Felton said defensively, from outside.

  “You bit him,” I said, and my voice sounded like another person’s. “You wanted him to be like you.”

  “So Crystal wouldn’t like him better. She knows we need to breed outside, but she really likes me best,” Felton said.

  “So you grabbed him, and you kept him, and you bit him.”

  Jason was too weak to stand.

  “Please carry him to the truck,” I said stiffly, unable to meet the eyes of anyone around me. I could feel the fury rising in me like black wave, and I knew I had to restrain it until we were out of here. I had just enough control to do this. I knew I did.

  Jason cried out when Calvin and Sam lifted him. They got the blanket, too, and sort of tucked it around him. I stumbled after them as they made their way back to Calvin’s and the truck.

  I had my brother back. There was a chance he was going to turn into a panther from time to time, but I had him back. I didn’t know if the rules for all shifters were the same, but Alcide had told me that Weres who were bitten, not born—created Weres, rather than genetic Weres—changed into the half-man, half-beast creatures who populated horror movies. I forced myself to get off that track, to think of the joy of having my brother back, alive.

  Calvin got Jason into the truck and slid him over, and Sam climbed into the driver’s seat. Jason would be between us after I climbed into the truck. But Calvin had to tell me something first.

  “Felton will be punished,” he said. “Right now.”

  Punishing Felton hadn’t been at the top of my list of things to think about, but I nodded, because I wanted to get the hell out of there.

  “If we’re taking care of Felton, are you going to go to the police?” he asked. He was standing stiffly, as if he was trying to be casual about the question. But this was a dangerous moment. I knew what happened to people who drew attention to the Hotshot community.

  “No,” I said. “It was just Felton.” Though, of course, Crystal had to have known, at least on some level. She’d told me she’d smelled an animal that night at Jason’s. How could she have mistaken the smell of panther, when she was one? And she had probably known all along that that panther had been Felton. His smell would be familiar to her. But it just wasn’t the time to go into that; Calvin would know that as well as I, when he’d had a moment to think. “And my brother may be one of you now. He’ll need you,” I added, in the most even voice I could manage. It wasn’t very even, at that.

  “I’ll come get Jason, next full moon.”

  I nodded again. “Thank you,” I told him, because I knew we would never have found Jason if he’d stonewalled us. “I have to get my brother home now.” I knew Calvin wanted me to touch him, wanted me to connect with him somehow, but I just couldn’t do it.

  “Sure,” he said, after a long moment. The shape-shifter stepped back while I scrambled up into the cab. He seemed to know I wouldn’t want any help from him right now.

  I’d thought I’d gotten unusual brain patterns from the Hotshot people because they were inbred. It had never occurred to me they were something other than wolves. I’d assumed. I know what my high school volleyball coach always said about “assume.” Of course, he’d also told us that we had to leave everything out on the court so it would be there when we came back, which I had yet to figure out.

  But he’d been right about assumptions.

  Sam had already gotten the heater in the truck going, but not at full blast. Too much heat too soon would be bad for Jason, I was sure. As it was, the second Jason began to warm up, his smell was pretty evident, and I nearly apologized to Sam, but sparing Jason any further humiliation was more important.

  “Aside from the bites, and being so cold, are you okay?” I asked, when I thought Jason had stopped shivering and could speak.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Every night, every damn night, he’d come in the shed, and he’d change in front of me, and I’d think, Tonight he’s going to kill me and eat me. And every night, he’d bite me. And then he’d just change back and leave. I could tell it was hard for him, after he’d smelled the blood . . . but he never did more than bite.”

  “They’ll kill him tonight,” I said. “In return for us not going to the police.”

  “Good deal,” said Jason, and he meant it.

  15

  JASON WAS ABLE TO STAND ON HIS OWN LONG ENOUGH to take a shower, which he said was the best one he’d taken in his life. When he was clean and smelled like every scented thing in my bathroom, and he was modestly draped with a big towel, I went all over him with Neosporin. I used up a whole tube on the bites. They seemed to be healing clean already, but I could not stop myself from trying to think of things to do for him. He’d had hot chocolate, and he’d eaten some hot oatmeal (which I thought was an odd choice, but he said all Felton had brought him to eat had been barely cooked meat), and he’d put on the sleeping pants I’d bought for Eric (too big, but the drawstring waist helped), and he’d put on a baggy old T-shirt I’d gotten when I’d done the Walk for Life two years before. He kept touching the material as if he was delighted to be dressed.

  He seemed to want to be warm and to sleep, more than anything. I put him in my old room. With a sad glance at the closet, which Eric had left all askew, I told my brother good night. He asked me to turn the hall light on and leave the door cracked a little. It cost Jason to ask that, so I didn’t say a word. I just did as he’d requested.

  Sam was sitting in the kitchen, drinking a cup of hot tea. He looked up from watching the steam of it and smiled at me. “How is he?”

  I sank down into my usual spot. “He’s better than I thought he would be,” I said. “Considering he spent the whole time in the shed with no heat and being bitten every day.”

  “I wonder how long Felton would have kept him?”

  “Until the full moon, I guess. Then Felton would’ve found out if he’d succeeded or not.” I felt a little sick.

  “I checked your calendar. He’s got a couple of weeks.”

  “Good. Give Jason time to get his strength back before he has something else to face.” I rested my head in my hands for a minute. “I have to call the police.”

  “To let them know to stop searching?”

  “Yep.”

  “Have you made up your mind what to say? Did Jason mention any ideas?”

  “Maybe that the male relatives of some girl had kidnapped him?” Actually, that was sort of true.

  “The cops would want to know where he’d been held. If he’d gotten away on his own, they’d want to know how, and they’d be sure he’d have more information for them.”

  I wondered if I had enough brainpower left to think. I stared blankly at the table: the familiar napkin holder that my grandmother had bought at a craft fair, and the sugar bowl, and the salt- and peppershakers shaped like a rooster and a hen. I noticed something had been tucked under the saltshaker.

  It was a check for $50,000, signed by Eric Northman. Eric had not only paid me, he had given me the biggest tip of my career.

  “Oh,” I said, very gently. “Oh, boy.” I looked at it for a minute more, to make sure I was reading it correctly. I passed it across the table to Sam.

  “Wow. Payment for keeping Eric?” Sam looked up at me, and I nodded. “What will you do with it?”

  “Put it through the bank, first thing tomorrow morning.”

  He smiled. “I guess I was thinking longer term than that.”

  “Just relax. It’ll just relax me to have it. To know that . . .” To my embarrassment, here came tears. Again. Damn. “So I won’t have to worry all the time.”

  “Things have been tight recently, I take it.” I nodded, and Sam’s mouth compressed. “You . . .” he began, and then couldn’t finish his sentence.

  “Thanks, but I can’t do that to people,” I said firmly. “Gran always said that was the sur
est way to end a friendship.”

  “You could sell this land, buy a house in town, have neighbors,” Sam suggested, as if he’d been dying to say that for months.

  “Move out of this house?” Some member of my family had lived in this house continuously for over a hundred and fifty years. Of course, that didn’t make it sacred or anything, and the house had been added to and modernized many times. I thought of living in a small modern house with level floors and up-to-date bathrooms and a convenient kitchen with lots of plugs. No exposed water heater. Lots of blown-in insulation in the attic. A carport!

  Dazzled at the vision, I swallowed. “I’ll consider it,” I said, feeling greatly daring to even entertain the idea. “But I can’t think of anything much right now. Just getting through tomorrow will be hard enough.”

  I thought of the police man-hours that had been put into searching for Jason. Suddenly I was so tired, I just couldn’t make an attempt to fashion a story for the law.

  “You need to go to bed,” Sam said astutely.

  I could only nod. “Thank you, Sam. Thank you so much.” We stood and I gave him a hug. It turned into a longer hug than I’d planned, because hugging him was unexpectedly restful and comfortable. “Good night,” I said. “Please drive careful going back.” I thought briefly of offering him one of the beds upstairs, but I kept that floor shut off and it would be awfully cold up there; and I’d have to go up and make the bed. He’d be more comfortable making the short drive home, even in the snow.

  “I will,” he said, and released me. “Call me in the morning.”

  “Thanks again.”

  “Enough thank-yous,” he said. Eric had put a couple of nails in the front door to hold it shut, until I could get a dead bolt put on. I locked the back door behind Sam, and I barely managed to brush my teeth and change into a nightgown before I crawled in my bed.

  The first thing I did the next morning was check on my brother. Jason was still deeply asleep, and in the light of day, I could clearly see the effects of his imprisonment. His face had a coating of stubble. Even in his sleep, he looked older. There were bruises here and there, and that was just on his face and arms. His eyes opened as I sat by the bed, looking at him. Without moving, he rolled his eyes around, taking in the room. They stopped when they came to my face.