I didn't know what to do first. "Thanks, Claudine," I said, and kissed her cheek.
"I can't always make it," Claudine cautioned me. "Don't count on an automatic rescue."
"Am I wearing some kind of fairy Life Alert button? How'd you know to come?" I could tell she wasn't going to answer. "Anyway, I sure appreciate this rescue. Hey, I guess you know I met my great-grandfather." I was babbling. I was so glad to be alive.
She bowed her head. "The prince is my grandfather," she said.
"Oh," I said. "So, we're like cousins?"
She looked down at me, her eyes clear and dark and calm. She didn't look like a woman who'd just killed two wolves as quick as you could snap your fingers. "Yes," she said. "I guess we are."
"So what do you call him? Granddaddy? Popsy?"
"I call him ‘my lord.' "
"Oh."
She stepped away to check out the wolves she'd disposed of (I was pretty sure they were still dead), so I went over to the lion. I crouched beside him and put my arm around his neck. He rumbled. Automatically, I scratched the top of his head and behind his ears, just like I did with Bob. The rumble intensified.
"Sam," I said. "Thanks so much. I owe you my life. How bad are your wounds? What can I do about them?"
Sam sighed. He laid his head on the ground.
"You're tired?"
Then the air around him got hyper, and I pulled away from him. I knew what was coming. After a few moments, the body that lay beside me was human, not animal. I ran my eyes over Sam anxiously and I saw that he still had the wounds, but they were much smaller than they'd been on his lion form. All shapeshifters are great at healing. It says a lot about the way my life had changed that it didn't seem significant to me that Sam was buck naked. I had kind of gone beyond that now—which was good, since there were bare bodies all around me. The corpses were changing back, as well as the injured wolves.
It had been easier to look at the bodies in wolf form.
Cal Myers and his sister, Priscilla, were dead, of course, as were the two Weres Claudine had dispatched. Amanda was dead. The skinny girl I'd met in the Hair of the Dog was alive, though severely wounded in the upper thigh. I recognized Amanda's bartender, too; he seemed unscathed. Tray Dawson was cradling an arm that looked broken.
Patrick Furnan lay in the middle of a ring of the dead and wounded, all of them Priscilla's wolves. With some difficulty, I picked my way through broken, bloody bodies. I could feel all the eyes, wolf and human, focus on me as I squatted by him. I put my fingers on his neck and got nothing. I checked his wrist. I even put my hand against his chest. No movement.
"Gone," I said, and those remaining in wolf form began to howl. Far more disturbing were the howls coming from the throats of the Weres in human form.
Alcide staggered over to me. He appeared to be more or less intact, though streaks of blood matted his chest hair. He passed the slain Priscilla, kicking her corpse as he went by. He knelt for a moment by Patrick Furnan, dipping his head as though he was bowing to the corpse. Then he rose to his feet. He looked dark, savage, and resolute.
"I am the leader of this pack!" he said in a voice of absolute certainty. The scene became eerily quiet as the surviving wolves absorbed that.
"You need to leave now," Claudine said very quietly right behind me. I jumped like a rabbit. I'd been mesmerized by the beauty of Alcide, by the primitive wildness rolling off him.
"What? Why?"
"They're going to celebrate their victory and the ascension of a new packmaster," she said.
The skinny girl clenched her hands together and brought them down on the skull of a fallen—but still twitching— enemy. The bones broke with a nasty crunch. All around me the defeated Weres were being executed, at least those who were severely wounded. A small cluster of three scrambled to kneel in front of Alcide, their heads tilted back. Two of them were women. One was an adolescent male. They were offering Alcide their throats in surrender. Alcide was very excited. All over. I remembered the way Patrick Furnan had celebrated when he got the packmaster job. I didn't know if Alcide was going to fuck the hostages or kill them. I took in my breath to exclaim. I don't know what I would've said, but Sam's grimy hand clapped over my mouth. I rolled my eyes to glare at him, both angry and agitated, and he shook his head vehemently. He held my gaze for a long moment to make sure I would stay silent, and then he removed his hand. He put his arm around my waist and turned me abruptly away from the scene. Claudine took the rear guard as Sam marched me rapidly away. I kept my eyes forward.
I tried not to listen to the noises.
Chapter 10
Sam had some extra clothes in his truck, and he pulled them on matter-of-factly. Claudine said, "I have to get back to bed," as if she'd been awoken to let the cat out or go to the bathroom, and thenpop! she was gone.
"I'll drive," I offered, because Sam was wounded.
He handed me his keys.
We started out in silence. It was an effort to remember the route to get back to the interstate to return to Bon Temps because I was still shocked on several different levels.
"That's a normal reaction to battle," Sam said. "The surge of lust."
I carefully didn't look at Sam's lap to see if he was having his own surge. "Yeah, I know that. I've been in a few fights now. A few too many."
"Plus, Alcide did ascend to the packmaster position." Another reason to feel "happy."
"But he did this whole battle thing because Maria-Star died." So he should have been too depressed to think about celebrating the death of his enemy, was my point.
"He did thiswhole battle thing because he was threatened," Sam said. "It's really stupid of Alcide and Furnan that they didn't sit down and talk before it came to this point. They could have figured out what was happening much earlier. If you hadn't persuaded them, they'd still be getting picked off and they'd have started an all-out war. They'd have done most of Priscilla Hebert's work for her."
I was sick of the Weres, their aggression and stubbornness. "Sam, you went through all of this because of me. I feel terrible about that. I would have died if it wasn't for you. I owe you big-time. And I'm so sorry."
"Keeping you alive," Sam said, "is important to me." He closed his eyes and slept the rest of the way back to his trailer. He limped up the steps unaided, and his door shut firmly. Feeling a little forlorn and not a little depressed, I got in my own car and drove home, wondering how to fit what had happened that night into the rest of my life.
Amelia and Pam were sitting in the kitchen. Amelia had made some tea, and Pam was working on a piece of embroidery. Her hands flew as the needle pierced the fabric, and I didn't know what was most astonishing: her skill or her choice of pastimes.
"What have you and Sam been up to?" Amelia asked with a big smile. "You look like you've been rode hard and put away wet."
Then she looked more closely and said, "What happened, Sookie?"
Even Pam put down her embroidery and gave me her most serious face. "You smell," she said. "You smell of blood and war."
I looked down at myself and registered what a mess I was. My clothes were bloody, torn, and dirty, and my leg ached. It was first aid time, and I couldn't have had better care from Nurse Amelia and Nurse Pam. Pam was a little excited by the wound, but she restrained herself like a good vampire. I knew she'd tell Eric everything, but I just couldn't find it in me to care. Amelia said a healing spell over my leg. Healing wasn't her strongest suit, she told me modestly, but the spell helped a bit. My leg did stop throbbing.