“I’ll get a score of scents after all these folks have touched her. I can only try to match them all. I wish I’d been here first.” He held Tanya as if he needed to lean on someone.
Jason was standing a yard away, waiting for Calvin to notice him. His back was stiff, his face frozen. There was an awful moment of silence when Calvin looked over Tanya’s shoulder and noted Jason’s presence.
I don’t know how Tanya reacted, but every muscle in my body twanged from the tension. Slowly Calvin held out a hand to Jason. Though it was a human hand again, it was obviously battered. The skin was freshly scarred and one of the fingers was slightly bent.
I had done that. I’d stood up for Jason at his wedding, and Calvin had stood up for Crystal. After Jason had made us witness Crystal’s infidelity, we’d had to stand in for them when the penalty had been pronounced: the maiming of a hand or paw. I’d had to bring a brick down on my friend’s hand. I hadn’t felt the same about Jason since then.
Jason bent and licked the back of the hand, emphasizing how subservient he was. He did it awkwardly, because he was still new to the ritual. I held my breath. Jason’s eyes were rolled up to keep Calvin’s face in sight. When Calvin nodded, we all relaxed. Calvin accepted Jason’s obeisance.
“You’ll be in at the kill,” Calvin said, as if Jason had asked him something.
“Thanks,” Jason said, and then backed away. He stopped when he’d gone a couple of feet. “I want to bury her,” he said.
“We’ll all bury her,” Calvin said. “When they let us have her back.” There was not a particle of concession in his voice.
Jason hesitated a moment and then nodded.
Calvin and Tanya got back in Calvin’s truck. They settled in. Clearly they planned to wait there until the body was brought down from the cross. Jason said, “I’m going home. I can’t stay here.” He seemed almost dazed.
“Okay,” I said.
“Are you . . . do you plan on staying here?”
“Yes, I’m in charge of the bar while Sam is gone.”
“That’s a lot of trust he has in you,” Jason said.
I nodded. I should feel honored. I did feel honored.
“Is it true his stepdad shot his mom? That’s what I heard at the Bayou last night.”
“Yes,” I said. “He didn’t know that Sam’s mom was, you know, a shapeshifter.”
Jason shook his head. “This coming-out thing,” he said. “I don’t know that’s it been such a good idea after all. Sam’s mom got shot. Crystal is dead. Someone who knew what she was put her up there, Sookie. Maybe they’ll come after me next. Or Calvin. Or Tray Dawson. Or Alcide. Maybe they’ll try to kill us all.”
I started to say that couldn’t happen, that the people I knew wouldn’t turn on their friends and neighbors because of an accident of birth. But in the end, I didn’t say that, because I wondered if it was the truth.
“Maybe they will,” I said, feeling an icy tingle run down my back. I took a deep breath. “But since they didn’t go after the vampires—for the most part—I’m thinking they’ll be able to accept weres of all sorts. At least, I hope so.”
Mel, wearing the slacks and sports shirt he wore daily at the auto parts place, got out of his car and walked over. I noticed that he was carefully not looking at Calvin, though Jason was still standing right beside the panther’s pickup. “It’s true, then,” Mel said.
Jason said, “She’s dead, Mel.”
Mel patted Jason’s shoulder in the awkward way men have when they have to comfort other men. “Come on, Jason. You don’t need to be around here. Let’s go to your house. We’ll have a drink, buddy.”
Jason nodded, looking dazed. “Okay, let’s go.” After Jason left for home with Mel following right behind, I climbed back in my own vehicle and fished the newspapers for the past few days from the backseat. I often picked them up from the driveway when I came out to go to work, tossed them in the back, and tried to read at least the front page within a reasonable length of time. What with Sam leaving and my business with the bar, I hadn’t caught a glimpse of the news since the weres went public.
I arranged the papers in order and began to read.
The public reaction had ranged from the panicked to the calm. Many people claimed they’d had a suspicion that the world contained more than humans and vampires. The vampires themselves were 100 percent behind their furry brethren, at least in public. In my experience, the two major supernatural groups had had a very bumpy relationship. The shifters and Weres mocked the vampires, and the vampires jeered right back. But it looked like the supernaturals had agreed to present a united front, at least for a while.
The reactions of governments varied wildly. I think the U.S. policy had been formed by werewolves in place within the system, because it was overwhelmingly favorable. There was a huge tendency to accept the weres as if they were completely human, to keep their rights as Americans exactly on a par with their previous status when no one knew they were two-natured. The vampires couldn’t be too pleased about that, because they hadn’t yet obtained full rights and privileges under the law. Legal marriage and inheritance of property were still forbidden in a few states, and vampires were barred from owning certain businesses. The human casino lobby had been successful in banning the vamps from direct ownership of gambling establishments, which I still couldn’t understand, and though vampires could be police officers and firefighters, vampire doctors were not accepted in any field that included treating patients with open wounds. Vampires weren’t allowed in competition sports, either. That I could understand; they were too strong. But there were already lots of athletes whose ancestry included full- and part-weres, because sports were a natural bent for them. The military ranks, too, were filled with men and women whose grandparents had bayed under the full moon. There were even some full-blooded Weres in the armed services, though it was a very tricky occupation for people who had to find somewhere private to be three nights a month.
The sports pages were full of pictures of some part- and whole-weres who’d become famous. A running back for the New England Patriots, a fielder for the Cardinals, a marathon runner . . . they’d all confessed to being wereanimals of one kind or another. An Olympic champion swimmer had just discovered that his dad was a wereseal, and the number-one ranked women’s tennis player in Britain had gone on record as saying that her mother was a wereleopard. The sports world hadn’t been in such a tumult since the last drug scandal. Did these athletes’ heritage give them an unfair advantage over other players? Should their trophies be taken away from them? Should their records be allowed to stand? Another day, I might enjoy debating this with someone, but right now I just didn’t care.
I began to see an overall picture. The outing of the two-natured was a much different revelation than the vampires’ announcement. The vampires had been completely off the human grid, except in legend and lore. They’d lived apart. Since they could subsist on the Japanese synthetic blood, they had presented themselves as absolutely nonthreatening. But wereanimals had been living among us all the time, integrated into our society yet maintaining their secret lives and alliances. Sometimes even their children (those who weren’t firstborn and therefore not weres) didn’t know what their parents were, especially if they were not wolves.
“I feel betrayed,” one woman was quoted as saying. “My granddad turns into a lynx every month. He runs around and kills things. My beautician, I’ve been going to her for fifteen years, and she’s a coyote. I didn’t know! I feel I’ve been deceived in an ugly way.”
Some people thought it was fascinating. “Our principal is a werewolf,” said a kid in Springfield, Missouri. “How cool is that?”
The very fact of the existence of wereanimals frightened some people. “I’m scared I’ll shoot my neighbor by accident if I see him trotting down the road,” said a farmer in Kansas. “What if he gets after my chickens?”