He was right. That was exactly how I’d been treating him.
I took a deep breath. “I apologize, Jason. I still think about you as my human brother. I don’t always remember that you’re a lot more. In all honesty, I’m scared. I’ve seen them kill people before, like I’ve seen your panthers kill and maim people when they thought that was justice. What scares me is not that you do it, which is bad enough, but that I’ve come to accept it as just. the way you do things if you’re two-natured. When those demonstrators were at the bar today, I was so mad at them for hating Weres and shifters without really knowing anything about them. But now I’m wondering how they’d feel if they actually knew more about how packs work; how Gran would feel if she knew I was willing to watch a woman, or anyone, be beaten and maybe killed for an infraction of some rules I don’t live by.”
Jason was silent for what seemed like a long time. “I think the fact that a few days have passed is a good thing. It’s given Alcide time to cool off. I hope the other pack members have had time to think, too,” he said finally. And I knew that was all we could say about this, and maybe more than I should have said. We fell silent for a short time.
“Can’t you listen in to what they’re thinking?” Jason asked.
“Full Weres are pretty hard to read. Some are harder than others. Of course, I’ll see what I can get. I can block a lot when I make myself, but if I let my guard down. ” I shrugged. “This is a case where I want to know everything I can as soon as I can.”
“Who do you think killed that dude in the grave?”
“I’ve given it some thought,” I said gently. “I see three main possibilities. But the key to me suspecting all three is that he was buried on my land, and I have to assume that wasn’t by chance.”
Jason nodded.
“Okay, here goes. Maybe Victor, the new vamp leader of Louisiana, killed Basim. Victor wants to knock Eric out of his position, since Eric’s a sheriff. That’s a pretty important position.”
Jason looked at me like I was an idiot. “I may not know all their fancy titles and all their little secret handshakes,” he said, “but I know someone in charge when I see him. If you say this Victor outranks Eric and wants him gone, I believe you.”
I had to stop underestimating my brother’s shrewdness. “Maybe Victor thought that if I got arrested for murder—since someone tipped off the law that there was a body on my land—Eric would go down with me. Maybe Victor thought that would be enough for their mutual boss to take Eric out of his position.”
“Wouldn’t it have been better to put the body in Eric’s house and call the police?”
“That’s a good point. But finding a body in Eric’s house would mean bad press for all vampires. Another idea I had, maybe the killer was Annabelle, who was screwing both Basim and Alcide. Maybe she got jealous, or maybe Basim said he was going to tell. So she killed him, and since they’d just been on my land, she thought of it as a good place to bury a body.”
“That’s a long way to drive with a body in the trunk,” Jason said. He was clearly going to play devil’s advocate.
“Sure, it’s easy to punch holes in all my ideas,” I said, sounding exactly like his little sister. “Once I go to all the work of coming up with them! But you’re right. That’d be a risk I wouldn’t want to take,” I added, on a more mature level.
“Alcide could’ve done it,” Jason said.
“Yeah. He could’ve. But you were there. Did it seem to you—remotely—like he knew it was going to be Basim?”
“No,” he said. “I thought he got a huge shock. But I wasn’t looking at Annabelle.”
“I wasn’t, either. So I don’t know how she reacted.”
“So you got any other ideas?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And this is my least favorite. You know I told you that Heidi the vampire scented fairies in the woods?”
“I did, too,” Jason said.
“Maybe I should get you to check out the woods on a regular basis,” I said. “Anyway, Claude said it wasn’t him, and Heidi confirmed that. But what if Basim saw Claude meeting with another fairy? In the area around the house, where Claude’s scent would be natural?”
“When would this have happened?”
“The night the pack was on the property. Claude hadn’t moved in then, but he’d come around to see me.”
I could see Jason trying to figure out the sequence. “So Basim warned you about the fairies he tracked, but he didn’t tell you he’d seen some? I don’t think that holds together, Sook.”
“You’re right,” I admitted. “And we still don’t know who the other fairy would be. If there are two, and one of them isn’t Claude, and the other one is Dermot. ”
“That leaves one fairy we don’t know about.”
“Dermot’s seriously messed up, Jason.”
Jason said, “I’m worried about all of ’em.”
“Even Claude?”
“Look, how come he showed up now? When you have other fairies in the woods? And does that sound crazy when you say it out loud, or what?”
I laughed. Just a little. “Yeah, it sounds nuts. And I get your point. I don’t entirely trust Claude, even if he is a little bit family. I wish I hadn’t said yes to him moving in. On the other hand, I don’t believe he means to hurt me or you. And he’s not quite as much of an asshole as I thought he was.”
We tried to put together a few more theories about Basim’s death, but we could punch too many holes in all of our theories. It passed the time until we arrived.
The house Alcide had moved into when his dad died was a large two-story brick home on large grounds, enhanced with impressive landscaping. The—estate? manor house? — was in a very nice area of Shreveport, of course. In fact, it wasn’t too far from Eric’s neighborhood. That gnawed at me, thinking of Eric so close to me but in so much trouble.
The confusion of what I was feeling through our blood bond was making me more jittery with every passing night. There were so many people sharing in that bond now, so much feeling going back and forth. It wore me out emotionally. Alexei was the worst. He was a very dead little boy, that was the only way I could put it: a child locked in a permanent grayness, a child who experienced only occasional flashes of pleasure and color in his new “life.” After days of experiencing what amounted to an echo of him living in my head, I’d decided the boy was like a tick sucking on the life of Appius Livius, Eric, and now me. He siphoned off a little every day.
Apparently, Appius Livius was so used to Alexei’s draining him that he accepted it as part of his existence. Maybe—possibly—the Roman felt responsible for the trouble Alexei caused, since he’d brought him over. If that was Appius Livius’s conviction, I thought he was absolutely correct. I was sure that bringing Alexei to Eric, thinking the presence of another “child” would soothe Alexei’s psychosis, was a last-ditch effort to cure the boy. And Eric, my lover, was caught in the middle of all this along with all the problems he was staving off involving Victor.
I felt less and less like a good person every day. As we walked from the driveway to Alcide’s front door, I admitted to myself that since my visit to Fangtasia, I found myself wishing that all of them would die—Appius Livius, Alexei, Victor.
I had to shove all that into a mental corner, because I had to be on my game to enter a house full of Weres. Jason put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a half hug. “Sometime you’ll have to explain to me how come we’re doing this,” he said. “Because I think I kind of forgot.”
I laughed, which was what he’d wanted. I put up a hand to ring the bell, but the door swung open before my fingertip made contact. Jannalynn was standing there in a sports bra and running shorts. (She always came up with wardrobe choices that startled me.) The running shorts showed concave dips by her hipbones, and I sighed. “Concave” was not a word I’d ever used in relation to my body.