"Hand over the damn phone." Sam almost never curses, so I made a face to show what I thought of his demand and gave the phone to Alcide. I stomped out to the living room and looked through the window. Yep. A Dodge Ram, extended cab. I was willing to bet it had everything on it that could be put on.
I'd rolled my suitcase out by its handle, and I'd slung my carrying bag over a chair by the door, so I just had to pull on my heavy jacket. I was glad Alcide had warned me about the dress-up rule for the bar, since it never would have occurred to me to pack anything fancy. Stupid vampires. Stupid dress code.
I was Sullen, with a capital S.
I wandered back down the hall, mentally reviewing the contents of my suitcase, while the two shape-shifters had (presumably) a "man talk." I glanced through the doorway of my bedroom to see that Alcide, with the phone to his ear, was perched on the side of my bed where I'd been sitting. He looked oddly at home there.
I paced restlessly back into the living room and stared out the window some more. Maybe the two were having shape-shifting talk. Though to Alcide, Sam (who generally shifted into a collie, though he was not limited to that form) would rank as a lightweight, at least they were from the same branch of the tree. Sam, on the other hand, would be a little leery of Alcide; werewolves had a bad rep.
Alcide strode down the hall, safety shoes clomping on the hardwood floor. "I promised him I'd take care of you," he said. "Now, we'll just hope that works out." He wasn't smiling.
I had been tuning up to be aggravated, but his last sentence was so realistic that the hot air went out of me as if I'd been punctured. In the complex relationship between vampire, Were, and human, there was a lot of leeway for something to go wrong somewhere. After all, my plan was thin, and the vampires' hold over Alcide was tenuous. Bill might not have been taken unwillingly; he might be happy being held captive by a king, as long as the vampire Lorena was on site. He might be enraged that I had come to find him.
He might be dead.
I locked the door behind me and followed Alcide as he stowed my things in the extended cab of the Ram.
The outside of the big truck gleamed, but inside, it was the littered vehicle of a man who spent his working life on the road; a hard hat, invoices, estimates, business cards, boots, a first-aid kit. At least there wasn't any food trash. As we bumped down my eroded driveway, I picked up a rubber-banded sheaf of brochures whose cover read, "Herveaux and Son, AAA Accurate Surveys." I eased out the top one and studied it carefully as Alcide drove the short distance to interstate 20 to go east to Monroe, Vicksburg, and then to Jackson.
I discovered that the Herveauxes, father and son, owned a bi-state surveying company, with offices in Jackson, Monroe, Shreveport, and Baton Rouge. The home office, as Alcide had told me, was in Shreveport. There was a photo inside of the two men, and the older Herveaux was just as impressive (in a senior way) as his son.
"Is your dad a werewolf, too?" I asked, after I'd digested the information and realized that the Herveaux family was at least prosperous, and possibly rich. They'd worked hard for it, though; and they'd keep working hard, unless the older Mr. Herveaux could control his gambling.
"Both my parents," Alcide said, after a pause.
"Oh, sorry." I wasn't sure what I was apologizing for, but it was safer than not.
"That's the only way to produce a Were child," he said, after a moment. I couldn't tell if he was explaining to be polite, or because he really thought I should know.
"So how come America's not full of werewolves and shapeshifters?" I asked, after I'd considered his statement.
"Like must marry like to produce another, which is not always doable. And each union only produces one child with the trait. Infant mortality is high."
"So, if you marry another werewolf, one of your kids will be a werebaby?"
"The condition will manifest itself at the onset of, ah, puberty."
"Oh, that's awful. Being a teenager is tough enough."
He smiled, not at me, but at the road. "Yeah, it does complicate things."
"So, your ex-girlfriend … she a shifter?"
"Yeah. I don't normally date shifters, but I guess I thought with her it would be different. Weres and shifters are strongly attracted to each other. Animal magnetism, I guess," Alcide said, as an attempt at humor.
My boss, also a shifter, had been glad to make friends with other shifters in the area. He had been hanging out with a maenad ("dating" would be too sweet a word for their relationship), but she'd moved on. Now, Sam was hoping to find another compatible shifter. He felt more comfortable with a strange human, like me, or another shifter, than he did with regular women. When he'd told me that, he'd meant it as a compliment, or maybe just as a simple statement; but it had hurt me a little, though my abnormality had been borne in on me since I was very young.
Telepathy doesn't wait for puberty.
"How come?" I asked baldly. "How come you thought it would be different?"
"She told me she was sterile. I found out she was on birth control pills. Big difference. I'm not passing this along. Even a shifter and a werewolf may have a child who has to change at the full moon, though only kids of a pure couple-both Weres or both shifters-can change at will,"
Food for thought, there. "So you normally date regular old girls. But doesn't it make it hard to date? Keeping secret such a big, ah, factor, in your life?"
"Yeah," he admitted. "Dating regular girls can be a pain. But I have to date someone." There was an edge of desperation to his rumbly voice.
I gave that a long moment's contemplation, and then I closed my eyes and counted to ten. I was missing Bill in a most elemental and unexpected way. My first clue had been the tug-below-the-waist I'd felt when I'd watched my tape of The Last of the Mohicans the week before and I'd fixated on Daniel Day-Lewis bounding through the forest. If I could appear from behind a tree before he saw Madeleine Stowe …
I was going to have to watch my step.
"So, if you bite someone, they won't turn into a werewolf?" I decided to change the direction of my thoughts. Then I remembered the last time Bill had bitten me, and felt a rush of heat through … oh, hell.
"That's when you get your wolf-man. Like the ones in the movies. They die pretty quick, poor people. And that's not passed along, if they, ah, engender children in their human form. If it's when they're in their altered form, the baby is miscarried."
"How interesting." I could not think of one other thing to say.
"But there's that element of the supernatural, too, just like with vampires," Alcide said, still not looking in my direction. "The tie-in of genetics and the supernatural element, that's what no one seems to understand. We just can't tell the world we exist, like the vampires did. We'd be locked up in zoos, sterilized, ghettoized-because we're sometimes animals. Going public just seems to make the vampires glamorous and rich." He sounded more than a little bitter.
"So how come you're telling me all this, right off the bat? If it's such a big secret?" He had given me more information in ten minutes than I'd had from Bill in months.
"If I'm going to be spending a few days with you, it will make my life a lot easier if you know. I figure you have your own problems, and it seems the vampires have some power over you, too. I don't think you'll tell. And if the worst happens, and I've been utterly wrong about you, I'll ask Eric to pay you a visit and wipe out your memory." He shook his head in baffled irritation. "I don't know why, really. I just feel like I know you."
I couldn't think of a response to that, but I had to speak. Silence would lend too much importance to his last sentence. "I'm sorry the vampires have a hold on your dad. But I have to find Bill. If this is the only way I can do it, this is what I have to do. I at least owe him that much, even if …" My voice trailed off. I didn't want to finish the sentence. All the possible endings were too sad, too final.