Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (118 page)

“I smell someone,” Mark Stonebrook said.

“What? Here and now?” Hallow stopped her chant, sounding a little breathless.

I began to tremble.

“Yeah.” His voice came out deeper, almost a growl.

“Change,” she ordered, just like that. I heard a sound I knew I’d heard before, though I couldn’t trace the memory. It was a sort of gloppy sound. Sticky. Like stirring a stiff spoon through some thick liquid that had hard things in it, maybe peanuts or toffee bits. Or bone chips.

Then I heard a real howl. It wasn’t human at all. Mark had changed, and it wasn’t the full moon. This was real power. The night suddenly seemed full of life. Snuffling. Yipping. Tiny movements all around us.

I was some great guardian for Eric, huh? I’d let him sweep me over here. We were about to be discovered by a vampire-blood drinking Were witch, and who knows what all else, and I didn’t even have Jason’s shotgun. I put my arms around Eric and hugged him in apology.

“Sorry,” I whispered, as tiny as a bee would whisper. But then I felt something brush against us, something large and furry, while I was hearing Mark’s wolfy sounds from a few feet away on the other side of the tree. I bit my lip hard to keep from giving a yip myself.

Listening intently, I became sure there were more than two animals. I would have given almost anything for a floodlight. From maybe ten yards away came a short, sharp bark. Another wolf? A plain old dog, in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Suddenly, Eric left me. One minute, he was pressing me against the tree in the pitch-black dark, and the next minute, cold air hit me from top to bottom (so much for my holding on to his wrists). I flung my arms out, trying to discover where he was, and touched only air. Had he just stepped away so he could investigate what was happening? Had he decided to join in?

Though my hands didn’t encounter any vampires, something big and warm pressed against my legs. I used my fingers to better purpose by reaching down to explore the animal. I touched lots of fur: a pair of upright ears, a long muzzle, a warm tongue. I tried to move, to step away from the oak, but the dog (wolf?) wouldn’t let me. Though it was smaller than I and weighed less, it leaned against me with such pressure that there was no way I could move. When I listened to what was going on in the darkness—a lot of growling and snarling—I decided I was actually pretty glad about that. I sank to my knees and put one arm across the canine’s back. It licked my face.

I heard a chorus of howls, which rose eerily into the cold night. The hair on my neck stood up, and I buried my face in the neck fur of my companion and prayed. Suddenly, over all the lesser noises, there was a howl of pain and a series of yips.

I heard a car start up, and headlights cut cones into the night. My side of the tree was away from the light, but I could see that I was huddled by a dog, not a wolf. Then the lights moved and gravel sprayed from Bill’s driveway as the car reversed. There was a moment’s pause, I presumed while the driver shifted into drive, and then the car screeched and I heard it going at high speed down the hill to the turnoff onto Hummingbird Road. There was a terrible thud and a high shrieking sound that made my heart hammer even harder. It was the sound of a pain a dog makes when it’s been hit by a car.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said miserably, and clutched my furry friend. I thought of something I could do to help, now that it seemed the witches had left.

I got up and ran for the front door of Bill’s house before the dog could stop me. I pulled my keys out of my pocket as I ran. They’d been in my hand when Eric had seized me at my back door, and I’d stuffed them into my coat, where a handkerchief had kept them from jingling. I felt around for the lock, counted my keys until I arrived at Bill’s—the third on the ring—and opened his front door. I reached in and flipped the outside light switch, and abruptly the yard was illuminated.

It was full of wolves.

I didn’t know how scared I should be. Pretty scared, I guessed. I was just assuming both of the Were witches had been in the car. What if one of them was among the wolves present? And where was my vampire?

That question got answered almost immediately. There was a sort of
whump
as Eric landed in the yard.

“I followed them to the road, but they went too fast for me there,” he said, grinning at me as if we’d been playing a game.

A dog—a collie—went up to Eric, looked up at his face, and growled.

“Shoo,” Eric said, making an imperious gesture with his hand.

My boss trotted over to me and sat against my legs again. Even in the darkness, I had suspected that my guardian was Sam. The first time I’d encountered him in this transformation, I’d thought he was a stray, and I’d named him Dean, after a man I knew with the same eye color. Now it was a habit to call him Dean when he went on four legs. I sat on Bill’s front steps and the collie cuddled against me. I said, “You are one great dog.” He wagged his tail. The wolves were sniffing Eric, who was standing stock-still.

A big wolf trotted over to me, the biggest wolf I’d ever seen. Weres turn into large wolves, I guess; I haven’t seen that many. Living in Louisiana, I’ve never seen a standard wolf at all. This Were was almost pure black, which I thought was unusual. The rest of the wolves were more silvery, except for one that was smaller and reddish.

The wolf gripped my coat sleeve with its long white teeth and tugged. I rose immediately and went over to the spot where most of the other wolves were milling. We were at the outer edge of the light, so I hadn’t noticed the cluster right away. There was blood on the ground, and in the middle of the spreading pool lay a young dark-haired woman. She was naked.

She was obviously and terribly injured.

Her legs were broken, and maybe one arm.

“Go get my car,” I told Eric, in the kind of voice that has to be obeyed.

I tossed him my keys, and he took to the air again. In one available corner of my brain, I hoped that he remembered how to drive. I’d noted that though he’d forgotten his personal history, his modern skills were apparently intact.

I was trying not to think about the poor injured girl right in front of me. The wolves circled and paced, whining. Then the big black one raised his head to the dark sky and howled again. This was a signal to all the others, who did the same thing. I glanced back to be sure that Dean was keeping away, since he was the outsider. I wasn’t sure how much human personality was left after these two-natured people transformed, and I didn’t want anything to happen to him. He was sitting on the small porch, out of the way, his eyes fixed on me.

I was the only creature with opposable thumbs on the scene, and I was suddenly aware that that gave me a lot of responsibility.

First thing to check? Breathing. Yes, she was! She had a pulse. I was no paramedic, but it didn’t seem like a normal pulse to me—which would be no wonder. Her skin felt hot, maybe from the changeover back to human. I didn’t see a terrifying amount of fresh blood, so I hoped that no major arteries had been ruptured.

I slid a hand beneath the girl’s head, very carefully, and touched the dusty dark hair, trying to see if her scalp was lacerated. No.

Sometime during the process of this examination, I began shaking all over. Her injuries were really frightening. Everything I could see of her looked beaten, battered, broken. Her eyes opened. She shuddered. Blankets—she’d need to be kept warm. I glanced around. All the wolves were still wolves.

“It would be great if one or two of you could change back,” I told them. “I have to get her to a hospital in my car, and she needs blankets from inside this house.”

One of the wolves, a silvery gray, rolled onto its side—okay, male wolf—and I heard the same gloppy noise again. A haze wrapped around the writhing figure, and when it dispersed, Colonel Flood was curled up in place of the wolf. Of course, he was naked, too, but I chose to rise above my natural embarrassment. He had to lie still for at least a minute or two, and it was obviously a great effort for him to sit up.

He crawled over to the injured girl. “Maria-Star,” he said hoarsely. He bent to smell her, which looked very weird when he was in human form. He whined in distress.

He turned his head to look at me. He said, “Where?” and I understood he meant the blankets.

“Go in the house, go up the stairs. There’s a bedroom at the head of the stairs. There’s a blanket chest at the foot of the bed. Get two blankets out of there.”

He staggered to his feet, apparently having to deal with some disorientation from his rapid change, before he began striding toward the house.

The girl—Maria-Star—followed him with her eyes.

“Can you talk?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, barely audibly.

“Where does it hurt worst?”

“I think my hips and legs are broken,” she said. “The car hit me.”

“Did it throw you up in the air?”

“Yes.”

“The wheels didn’t pass over you?”

She shuddered. “No, it was the impact that hurt me.”

“What’s your full name? Maria-Star what?” I’d need to know for the hospital. She might not be conscious by then.

“Cooper,” she whispered.

By then, I could hear a car coming up Bill’s drive.

The colonel, moving more smoothly now, sped out of the house with the blankets, and all the wolves and the one human instantly arrayed themselves around me and their wounded pack member. The car was obviously a threat until they learned likewise. I admired the colonel. It took quite a man to face an approaching enemy stark naked.

The new arrival was Eric, in my old car. He pulled up to Maria-Star and me with considerable panache and squealing brakes. The wolves circled restlessly, their glowing yellow eyes fixed on the driver’s door. Calvin Norris’s eyes had looked quite different; fleetingly, I wondered why.

“It’s my car; it’s okay,” I said, when one of the Weres began growling. Several pairs of eyes turned to fix on me consideringly. Did I look suspicious, or tasty?

As I finished wrapping Maria-Star in the blankets, I wondered which one of the wolves was Alcide. I suspected he was the largest, darkest one, the one that just that moment turned to look me in the eyes. Yes, Alcide. This was the wolf I’d seen at Club Dead a few weeks ago, when Alcide had been my date on a night that had ended catastrophically—for me and a few other people.

I tried to smile at him, but my face was stiff with cold and shock.

Eric leaped out of the driver’s seat, leaving the car running. He opened the back door. “I’ll put her in,” he called, and the wolves began barking. They didn’t want their pack sister handled by a vampire, and they didn’t want Eric to be anywhere close to Maria-Star.

Colonel Flood said, “I’ll lift her.” Eric looked at the older man’s slight physique and lifted a doubtful eyebrow, but had the sense to stand aside. I’d wrapped the girl as well as I could without jarring her, but the colonel knew this was going to hurt her even worse. At the last minute, he hesitated.

“Maybe we should call the ambulance,” he muttered.

“And explain this how?” I asked. “A bunch of wolves and a naked guy, and her being up here next to a private home where the owner’s absent? I don’t think so!”

“Of course.” He nodded, accepting the inevitable. Without even a hitch in his breathing, he stood with the bundle that was the girl and went to the car. Eric did run to the other side, open that door, and reach in to help pull her farther onto the backseat. The colonel permitted that. The girl shrieked once, and I scrambled behind the wheel as fast as I could. Eric got in the passenger side, and I said, “You can’t go.”

“Why not?” He sounded amazed and affronted.

“I’ll have twice the explaining to do if I have a vampire with me!” It took most people a few minutes to decide Eric was dead, but of course they would figure it out eventually. Eric stubbornly stayed put. “And everyone’s seeing your face on the damn posters,” I said, working to keep my voice reasonable but urgent. “I live among pretty good people, but there’s no one in this parish who couldn’t use that much money.”

He got out, not happily, and I yelled, “Turn off the lights and relock the house, okay?”

“Meet us at the bar when you have word about Maria-Star!” Colonel Flood yelled back. “We’ve got to get our cars and clothes out of the cemetery.” Okay, that explained the glimpse I’d caught on the way over.

As I steered slowly down the driveway, the wolves watched me go, Alcide standing apart from the rest, his black furry face turning to follow my progress. I wondered what wolfy thoughts he was thinking.

The closest hospital was not in Bon Temps, which is way too small to have its own (we’re lucky to have a Wal-Mart), but in nearby Clarice, the parish seat. Luckily, it’s on the outskirts of the town, on the side nearest Bon Temps. The ride to the Renard Parish Hospital only seemed to take years; actually, I got there in about twenty minutes. My passenger moaned for the first ten minutes, and then fell ominously silent. I talked to her, begged her to talk to me, asked her to tell me how old she was, and turned on the radio in attempt to spark some response from Maria-Star.

I didn’t want to take the time to pull over and check on her, and I wouldn’t have known what to do if I had, so I drove like a bat out of hell. By the time I pulled up to the emergency entrance and called to the two nurses standing outside smoking, I was sure the poor Were was dead.

She wasn’t, judging from the activity that surrounded her in the next couple of minutes. Our parish hospital is a little one, of course, and it doesn’t have the facilities that a city hospital can boast. We counted ourselves lucky to have a hospital at all. That night, they saved the Were’s life.

The doctor, a thin woman with graying spiked hair and huge black-rimmed glasses, asked me a few pointed questions that I couldn’t answer, though I’d been working on my basic story all the way to the hospital. After finding me clueless, the doctor made it clear I was to get the hell out of the way and let her team work. So I sat in a chair in the hall, and waited, and worked on my story some more.