"Go, go, go," bellowed the shorter man, who'd hopped into the front seat. The driver obliged with a completely unnecessary squealing of tires, and we lurched out of the courtyard as if the president had just been shot and we had to get him to Walter Reed.
Quinn came to completely as we turned off Chloe Street to head for our final destination, wherever it might be. His hands were bound behind him, which is painful, and he hadn't quit bleeding from the head. I'd expected him to remain groggy and shocked. But when his eyes focused on my face, he said, "Babe, they beat you bad." I must not look too good.
"Yeah, well, you seem to be in the same boat," I said. I knew the driver and his companion could hear us, and I didn't give a damn.
With a grim attempt at a smile, he said, "Some defender I turned out to be."
In the Weres' estimation, I wasn't very dangerous, so my hands had been bound in front. I squirmed until I was able to put pressure on the cut on Quinn's forehead. That had to have hurt even more, but he didn't say a word in protest. The motion of the van, the effects of the beating, and the constant shifting and smell of the trash all around us combined to make the next ten minutes very unpleasant. If I'd been very clever, I could have told which way we were going—but I wasn't feeling very clever. I marveled that in a city with as many famed restaurants as New Orleans had, this van was awash with Burger King wrappers and Taco Bell cups. If I got a chance to rummage through the debris, I might find something useful.
"When we're together, we get attacked by Weres," Quinn said.
"It's my fault," I said. "I'm so sorry I dragged you into this."
"Oh, yeah," he said. "I'm known for hanging with a desperate crowd."
We were lying face to face, and Quinn sort of nudged me with his leg. He was trying to tell me something, and I wasn't getting it.
The two men in the front seat were talking to each other about a cute girl crossing the street at a traffic light. Just listening to the conversation was almost enough to make you swear off men, but at least they weren't listening to us.
"Remember when we talked about my mental condition?" I said carefully. "Remember what I told you about that?"
It took him a minute because he was hurting, but he got the hint. His face squinched up as if he were about to chop some boards in half, or something else requiring all his concentration, and then his thought shoved into my head. Phone in my pocket, he told me. The problem was, the phone was in his right pocket, and he was lying on that side. There was hardly room for him to turn over.
This called for a lot of maneuvering, and I didn't want our captors to see it. But I managed, finally, to work my fingers into Quinn's pocket, and made a mental note to advise him that, under this set of circumstances, his jeans were too tight. (Under other circumstances, no problem with the way they fit.) But extricating that phone, with the van rocking, while our Were assailants checked on us every minute or so, that was difficult.
Queen's headquarters on speed dial, he told me when he felt the phone leave his pocket. But that was lost on me. I didn't know how to access speed dial. It took me a few moments to make Quinn understand that, and I'm still not sure I how I did it, but finally he thought the phone number at me, and I awkwardly punched it in and pressed send. Maybe we hadn't thought that through all the way, because when a tiny voice said, "Hello?" the Weres heard it.
"You didn't search him?" the driver asked the passenger incredulously.
"Hell no, I was trying to get him in the back and get myself out of the rain," the man who had pinched me snarled right back. "Pull over, dammit!"
Has someone had your blood? Quinn asked me silently, though this time he could have spoken, and after a precious second, my brain kicked in. "Eric," I said, because the Weres were out their doors and running to open the rear doors of the van.
"Quinn and Sookie have been taken by some Weres," Quinn said into the phone I was holding to his mouth. "Eric the Northman can track her."
I hoped Eric was still in New Orleans, and I further hoped whoever answered the phone at the queen's headquarters was on the ball. But then the two Weres were yanking open the van doors and dragging us out, and one of them socked me while the other hit Quinn in the gut. They yanked the phone from my swollen fingers and tossed it into the thick undergrowth at the side of the road. The driver had pulled over by an empty lot, but up and down the road were widely spaced houses on stilts in a sea of grasses. The sky was too overcast for me to get a fix on our direction, but I was sure now we'd driven south into the marshes. I did manage to read our driver's watch, and was surprised to find out it was already past three in the afternoon.
"You dumb shit, Clete! Who was he calling?" yelled a voice from the second van, which had pulled over to the side of the road when we did. Our two captors looked at each other with identical expressions of consternation, and I would have been laughing if I hadn't been hurting so badly. It was as if they'd practiced looking stupid.
This time Quinn was searched very thoroughly, and I was, too, though I had no pockets or anywhere else to conceal anything, unless they wanted to do a body cavity check. I thought Clete—Mr. Pinch-Ass—was going to, just for a second, as his fingers jabbed the spandex into me. Quinn thought so, too. I made an awful noise, a choked gasp of fear, but the sound that came from Quinn's throat was beyond a snarl. It was a deep, throaty, coughing noise, and it was absolutely menacing.
"Leave the girl alone, Clete, and let's get back on the road," the tall driver said, and his voice had that "I'm done with you" edge to it. "I don't know who this guy is, but I don't think he changes into a nutria."
I wondered if Quinn would threaten them with his identity—most Weres seemed to know him, or know of him—but since he didn't volunteer his name, I didn't speak.
Clete shoved me back into the van with a lot of muttering along the lines of "Who died and made you God? You ain't the boss of me," and so on. The taller man clearly was the boss of Clete, which was a good thing. I wanted someone with brains and a shred of decency between me and Clete's probing fingers.
They had a very hard time getting Quinn into the van again. He didn't want to go, and finally two men from the other van came over, very reluctantly, to help Clete and the driver. They bound Quinn's legs with one of those plastic things, the kind where you run the pointed tip through a hole and then twist it. We'd used something similar to close the bag when we'd baked a turkey last Thanksgiving. The tie they used on Quinn was black and plastic and it actually locked with what looked like a handcuff key.
They didn't bind my legs.
I appreciated Quinn's getting angry at their treatment of me, angry enough to struggle to be free, but the end result was that my legs were free and his weren't—because I still didn't present a threat to them, at least in their minds.
They were probably right. I couldn't think of anything to do to prevent them from taking us wherever we were going. I didn't have a weapon, and though I worried at the duct tape binding my hands, my teeth didn't seem to be strong enough to make a weak spot. I rested for a minute, shutting my eyes wearily. The last blow had opened a cut on my cheek. A big tongue rasped over my bleeding face. Then again.
"Don't cry," said a strange, guttural voice, and I opened my eyes to check that it was, indeed, coming from Quinn.
Quinn had so much power that he could stop the change once it had begun. I suspected he could trigger it, too, though I'd noticed that fighting could bring it on in any shape-shifter. He'd had the claws during the fight in Hadley's apartment, and they'd almost tipped the balance in our favor. Since he'd gotten so enraged at Clete during the episode by the side of the road, Quinn's nose had flattened and broadened. I had a close-up view of the teeth in his mouth, teeth that had altered into tiny daggers.