Eyes turned to look at us as we descended the stairs. Jason looked alarmed, but I gave him a reassuring smile. Something must have been off about it, because his face didn’t smooth out.
Alcide’s second went to stand by the kneeling Annabelle. Jannalynn threw back her head and gave a series of yips. Now I was standing by my brother, and he was holding on to me. Somehow, Alcide had passed me over to Jason’s keeping.
“Geez,” Jason muttered. “What’s wrong with waving your hand in the air or ringing a triangle?” I could assume yipping was not a summons in the panther pride. That was okay. I smiled at Jason. I felt a lot like Alice in Wonderland after she took a bite of the mushroom.
I was on one side of the empty space around Annabelle, Alcide on the other. He looked around to collect the pack’s attention. “We’re here tonight with two visitors to decide what to do about Annabelle,” he said without a preamble. “We’re here to judge whether she had anything to do with the death of Basim, or if that death can be laid at the door of anyone else.”
“Why are there visitors?” asked a woman’s voice. I tried to find her face, but she was standing so far in the back I couldn’t see her. I estimated there were perhaps as many as forty people in the room, ranging in age from sixteen (the change began after puberty) to seventy. Ham and Patricia were to my left, about a quarter of the circle away. Jannalynn had stayed by Annabelle. The few other pack members I knew by name were scattered through the crowd.
“Listen hard,” Alcide said, looking directly at me. Okay, Alcide, message received. I closed my eyes, and I listened. Well, this was absofucking-lutely amazing. I found I knew when his gaze swept the assembled pack members by the ripple of fear that followed. I could see the fear. It was dark yellow. “Basim’s body was found on Sookie’s land,” Alcide said. “It was planted there in an attempt to blame her for his death. The police came to search for it right after we removed it.”
There was a general surge of surprise. from almost everyone.
“You moved the body?” Patricia said. My eyes flew open. Why had Alcide elected to keep that a secret? Because it had been a total shock to Patricia, and to a few others, that Basim’s body was not still in the clearing. Jason moved up behind me and put his beer down. He knew he needed his hands free. My brother might not be a mental giant, but he had good instincts.
I was amazed at Alcide’s cleverness in setting up the scene. I might not get Were thoughts that clearly, but Were emotions. That was what he was after. Now that I was concentrating, focusing on the creatures in the room, almost out of my body with the intensity of it, I saw Alcide as a ball of red energy, pulsing and attractive, and all the other Weres were circling around him. I understood for the first time that the packleader was the planet around which all others orbited in the Were universe. The pack members were various shades of red and violet and pink, the colors of their devotion to him. Jannalynn was a blazing streak of intense crimson, her adoration making her almost as bright as Alcide himself. Even Annabelle was a watery cerise, despite her infidelity.
But there were a few spots of green. I held my hand out in front of me as if I were telling the rest of the world to stop while I considered this new interpretation of perception.
“Tonight Sookie is our shaman,” Alcide’s voice boomed from a distance. I could safely ignore that. I could follow the colors, because they betrayed the person.
Green, look for the green. Though my head remained still and my eyes closed, I turned them somehow to look at the green people. Ham was green. Patricia was green. I looked the other way. There was one more green one, but he fluctuated between pale yellow and faint green. Ha! Ambivalent, I told myself wisely. Not a traitor yet, but doubtful about Alcide’s leadership. The wavering image belonged to a young male, and I dismissed him as insignificant. I looked at Annabelle again. Cerise still, but flickering with amber as her intense fear broke through her loyalty.
I opened my eyes. What was I supposed to say—“They’re green, get them!”? I found myself moving, drifting through the pack like a balloon through the trees. Finally, I was right in front of Ham and Patricia. This was where the hands would come in handy. Ha! That was funny! I laughed a little.
“Sookie?” Ham said. Patricia shrank back, letting go of him.
“Don’t go anywhere, Patricia,” I said, smiling at her. She flinched, ready to run, but a dozen hands grabbed her and held her firmly. I looked up at Ham and put my fingers on his cheeks. If I’d had some finger paint, he’d have looked like a movie Indian on the warpath. “So jealous,” I said. “Ham, you told Alcide there were people camping on the stream and that was why the pack needed to run in my woods. You invited those men, didn’t you?”
“They—no.”
“Oh, I see,” I said, touching the tip of his nose. “I see.” I could hear his thoughts as clearly as if I were inside his head now. “So they were from the government. They were trying to gather information on the Were packs in Louisiana and anything bad the packs might have done. They asked you to bribe an enforcer, a second. To describe all the bad stuff he’d done. So they could push through that bill, the one that’ll require you-all to register like aliens. Hamilton Bond—shame on you! You told them to force Basim to tell them stuff, the stuff that had gotten him kicked out of the Houston pack.”
“None of this is true, Alcide,” Ham said. He was trying to sound all Big Serious Man, but to me he sounded like a squeaky little mouse. “Alcide, I’ve known you my whole life.”
“And you thought that Alcide would make you his second,” I said. “Instead, he picked Basim, who already had a track record as an enforcer.”
“He got thrown out of Houston,” Ham said. “That’s how bad he was.” The anger broke through, pulsing in gold and black.
“I’d ask him, and I’d know the truth, but I can’t now, right? Because you killed him and put him in the cold, cold ground.” Actually, it hadn’t been all that cold, but I felt I was due a little artistic license. My mind soared and swooped, way above everything. I could see so much! I felt like God. This was fun.
“I didn’t kill Basim! Well, maybe I did, but it was because he was screwing our packleader’s girlfriend! I couldn’t stomach such disloyalty!”
“Beep! Try again!” I fanned my fingers over his cheeks. We needed to know something else, didn’t we? Some other question had to be answered.
“He met with a creature in your woods on our moon night,” Ham blurted. “He, I don’t know what he talked about.”
“What kind of creature?”
“I don’t know. Some guy. Some. I’ve never seen anything like him. He was really handsome. Like a movie star or something. He had long hair, really pale long hair, and he was there one minute and gone the next. He talked to Basim while Basim was in his wolf form. Basim was by himself. After we ate the deer, I’d fallen asleep on the other side of some laurel bushes. When I woke up, I heard them talking. The other guy was trying to frame you for something because you’d done something to him. I don’t know what. Basim was going to kill someone and bury him on your land, and then call the cops. That would take care of you, and then the fair. ” Ham’s voice died away.
“You knew it was a fairy,” I said, smiling at Ham. “You knew. So you decided to do the job first.”
“It wasn’t something Alcide would have wanted Basim to do, right, Alcide?”
Alcide didn’t answer, but he was pulsating like a skyrocket on the periphery of my vision.
“And you told Patricia. And she helped,” I said, stroking his face. He wanted to make me stop, but he didn’t dare.