Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (56 page)

THE NEXT THING I knew, I was hanging upside down in my seat belt. A hand was reaching in to pull me out. I recognized the fingernails; it was Sarah. I bit her.

With a shriek, the hand withdrew. “She’s obviously out of it,” I heard Sarah’s sweet voice gabbling to someone else, someone unconnected with the church, I realized, and knew I had to act.

“Don’t you listen to her. It was her car that hit us,” I called. “Don’t you let her touch me.”

I looked over at Luna, whose hair now touched the ceiling. She was awake but not talking. She was wriggling around, and I figured she was trying to undo her seat belt.

There was lots of conversation outside the window, most of it contentious.

“I tell you, I am her sister, and she is just drunk,” Polly was telling someone.

“I am not. I demand to have a sobriety test right now,” I said, in as dignified a voice as I could manage, considering that I was shocked silly and hanging upside down. “Call the police immediately, please, and an ambulance.”

Though Sarah began spluttering, a heavy male voice said, “Lady, doesn’t sound like she wants you around. Sounds like she’s got some good points.”

A man’s face appeared in the window. He was kneeling and bent sideways to see in. “I’ve called nine-one-one,” the heavy voice said. He was disheveled and stubbly and I thought he was beautiful.

“Please stay here till they come,” I begged.

“I will,” he promised, and his face vanished.

There were more voices now. Sarah and Polly were getting shrill. They’d hit our car. Several people had witnessed it. Them claiming to be sisters or whatever didn’t go over well with this crowd. Also, I gathered, they had two Fellowship males with them who were being less than endearing.

“Then we’ll just go,” Polly said, fury in her voice.

“No, you won’t,” said my wonderful belligerent male. “You gotta trade insurance with them, anyway.”

“That’s right,” said a much younger male voice. “You just don’t want to pay for getting their car fixed. And what if they’re hurt? Don’t you have to pay their hospital?”

Luna had managed to unbuckle herself, and she twisted when she fell to the roof that was now the floor of the car. With a suppleness I could only envy, she worked her head out of the open window, and then began to brace her feet against whatever purchase she could find. Gradually, she began to wriggle her way out of the window. One of the purchases happened to be my shoulder, but I didn’t even peep. One of us needed to be free.

There were exclamations outside as Luna made her appearance, and then I heard her say, “Okay, which one of you was driving?”

Various voices chimed in, some saying one, some saying another, but they all knew Sarah and Polly and their henchmen were the perpetrators and Luna was a victim. There were so many people around that when yet another car of men from the Fellowship pulled up, there wasn’t any way they could just haul us off. God bless the American spectator, I thought. I was in a sentimental mood.

The paramedic that ended up extricating me from the car was the cutest guy I’d ever seen. His name was Salazar, according to his bar pin, and I said, “Salazar,” just to be sure I could say it. I had to sound it out carefully.

“Yep, that’s me,” he said while lifting my eyelid to look at my eye. “You’re kinda banged up, lady.”

I started to tell him that I’d had some of these injuries before the car accident, but then I heard Luna say, “My calendar flew off the dashboard and hit her in the face.”

“Be a lot safer if you’d keep your dash clear, ma’am,” said a new voice with a flat twang to it.

“I hear you, Officer.”

Officer? I tried to turn my head and got admonished by Salazar. “You just keep still till I finish looking you over,” he said sternly.

“Okay.” After a second I said, “The police are here?”

“Yes, ma’am. Now, what hurts?”

We went through a whole list of questions, most of which I was able to answer.

“I think you’re going to be fine, ma’am, but we need to take you and your friend to the hospital just to check you out.” Salazar and his partner, a heavy Anglo woman, were matter-of-fact about this necessity.

“Oh,” I said anxiously, “we don’t need to go to the hospital, do we, Luna?”

“Sure,” she said, as surprised as she could be. “We have to get you X-rayed, honey bunch. I mean, that cheek of yours looks bad.”

“Oh.” I was a little stunned by this turn of events. “Well, if you think so.”

“Oh, yeah.”

So Luna walked to the ambulance, and I was loaded in on a gurney, and with siren blaring, we started off. My last view before Salazar shut the doors was of Polly and Sarah talking to a very tall policeman. Both of them looked very upset. That was good.

The hospital was like all hospitals. Luna stuck to me like white to rice, and when we were in the same cubicle and a nurse entered to take down still more details, Luna said, “Tell Dr. Josephus that Luna Garza and her sister are here.”

The nurse, a young African American woman, gave Luna a doubtful look, but said, “Okay,” and left immediately.

“How’d you do that?” I asked.

“Get a nurse to stop filling out charts? I asked for this hospital on purpose. We’ve got someone at every hospital in the city, but I know our man here best.”

“Our?”

“Us. The Two-Natured.”

“Oh.” The shapeshifters. I could hardly wait to tell Sam about this.

“I’m Dr. Josephus,” said a calm voice. I raised my head to see that a spare, silver-haired man had stepped into our curtained area. His hair was receding and he had a sharp nose on which a pair of wire-rimmed glasses perched. He had intent blue eyes, magnified by his glasses.

“I’m Luna Garza, and this is my friend, ah, Marigold.” Luna said this as if she were a different person. In fact, I glanced over to see if it was the same Luna. “We met with misfortune tonight in the line of duty.”

The doctor looked at me with some mistrust.

“She is worthy,” Luna said with great solemnity. I didn’t want to ruin the moment by giggling, but I had to bite the inside of my mouth.

“You need X rays,” the doctor said after looking at my face and examining my grotesquely swollen knee. I had various abrasions and bruises, but those were my only really significant injuries.

“Then we need them very quickly, and then we need out of here in a secure way,” Luna said in a voice that would brook no denial.

No hospital had ever moved so quickly. I could only suppose that Dr. Josephus was on the board of directors. Or maybe he was the chief of staff. The portable X-ray machine was wheeled in, the X rays were taken, and in a few minutes Dr. Josephus told me that I had a hairline fracture of the cheekbone which would mend on its own. Or I could see a plastic surgeon when the swelling had gone down. He gave me a prescription for pain pills, a lot of advice, and an ice pack for my face and another for my knee, which he called “wrenched.”

Within ten minutes after that, we were on our way out of the hospital. Luna was pushing me in a wheelchair, and Dr. Josephus was leading us through a kind of service tunnel. We passed a couple of employees on their way in. They appeared to be poor people, the kind who take low-paying jobs like hospital janitor and cook. I couldn’t believe the massively self-assured Dr. Josephus had ever come down this tunnel before, but he seemed to know his way, and the staff didn’t act startled at the sight of him. At the end of the tunnel, he pushed open a heavy metal door.

Luna Garza nodded to him regally, said, “Many thanks,” and wheeled me out into the night. There was a big old car parked out there. It was dark red or dark brown. As I looked around a little more, I realized that we were in an alley. There were big trash bins lining the wall, and I saw a cat pouncing on something—I didn’t want to know what—between two of the bins. After the door whooshed pneumatically shut behind us, the alley was quiet. I began to feel afraid again.

I was incredibly tired of being afraid.

Luna went over to the car, opened the rear door, and said something to whoever was inside. Whatever answer she got, it made her angry. She expostulated in another language.

There was further argument.

Luna stomped back to me. “You have to be blindfolded,” she said, obviously certain I would take great offense.

“No problem,” I said, with a sweep of one hand to indicate how trifling a matter this was.

“You don’t mind?”

“No. I understand, Luna. Everyone likes his privacy.”

“Okay, then.” She hurried back to the car and returned with a scarf in her hands, of green and peacock blue silk. She folded it as if we were going to play pin-the-tail, and tied it securely behind my head. “Listen to me,” she said in my ear, “these two are tough. You watch it.” Good. I wanted to be more frightened.

She rolled me over to the car and helped me in. I guess she wheeled the chair back to the door to await pickup; anyway, after a minute she got in the other side of the car.

There were two presences in the front seat. I felt them mentally, very delicately, and discovered both were shapeshifters; at least, they had the shapeshifter feel to their brains, the semiopaque snarly tangle I got from Sam and Luna. My boss, Sam, usually changes into a collie. I wondered what Luna preferred. There was a difference about these two, a pulsing sort of heaviness. The outline of their heads seemed subtly different, not exactly human.

There was only silence for a few minutes, while the car bumped out of the alley and drove through the night.

“Silent Shore Hotel, right?” said the driver. She sounded kind of growly. Then I realized it was almost the full moon. Oh, hell. They had to change at the full moon. Maybe that was why Luna had kicked over the traces so readily at the Fellowship tonight, once it got dark. She had been made giddy by the emergence of the moon.

“Yes, please,” I said politely.

“Food that talks,” said the passenger. His voice was even closer to a growl.

I sure didn’t like that, but had no idea how to respond. There was just as much for me to learn about shapeshifters as there was about vampires, apparently.

“You two can it,” Luna said. “This is my guest.”

“Luna hangs with puppy chow,” said the passenger. I was beginning to really not like this guy.

“Smells more like hamburger to me,” said the driver. “She’s got a scrape or two, doesn’t she, Luna?”

“Y’all are giving her a great impression of how civilized we are,” Luna snapped. “Show some control. She’s already had a bad night. She’s got a broken bone, too.”

And the night wasn’t even halfway over yet. I shifted the ice pack I was holding to my face. You can only stand so much freezing cold on your sinus cavity.

“Why’d Josephus have to send for freakin’ werewolves?” Luna muttered into my ear. But I knew they’d heard; Sam heard everything, and he was by no means as powerful as a true werewolf. Or at least, that was my evaluation. To tell you the truth, until this moment, I hadn’t been sure werewolves actually existed.

“I guess,” I said tactfully and audibly, “he thought they could defend us best if we’re attacked again.”

I could feel the creatures in the front seat prick up their ears. Maybe literally.

“We were doing okay,” Luna said indignantly. She twitched and fidgeted on the seat beside me like she’d drunk sixteen cups of coffee.

“Luna, we got rammed and your car got totaled. We were in the emergency room. ‘Okay’ in what sense?”

Then I had to answer my own question. “Hey, I’m sorry, Luna. You got me out of there when they would’ve killed me. It’s not your fault they rammed us.”

“You two have a little roughhouse tonight?” asked the passenger, more civilly. He was spoiling for a fight. I didn’t know if all werewolves were as feisty as this guy, or if it was just his nature.

“Yeah, with the fucking Fellowship,” Luna said, more than a trace of pride in her voice. “They had this chick stuck in a cell. In a dungeon.”

“No shit?” asked the driver. She had the same hyper pulsing to her—well, I just had to call it her aura, for lack of a better word.

“No shit,” I said firmly. “I work for a shifter, at home,” I added, to make conversation.

“No kidding? What’s the business?”

“A bar. He owns a bar.”

“So, are you far from home?”

“Too far,” I said.

“This little bat saved your life tonight, for real?”

“Yes.” I was absolutely sincere about that. “Luna saved my life.” Could they mean that literally? Did Luna shapeshift into a . . . oh golly.

“Way to go, Luna.” There was a fraction more respect in the deeper growly voice.

Luna found the praise pleasant, as she ought to, and she patted my hand. In a more agreeable silence, we drove maybe five more minutes, and then the driver said, “The Silent Shore, coming up.”

I breathed out a long sigh of relief.

“There’s a vampire out front, waiting.”

I almost ripped off the blindfold, before I realized that would be a really tacky thing to do. “What does he look like?”

“Very tall, blond. Big head of hair. Friend or foe?”

I had to think about that. “Friend,” I said, trying not to sound doubtful.

“Yum, yum,” said the driver. “Does he cross-date?”

“I don’t know. Want me to ask?”

Luna and the passenger both made gagging sounds. “You can’t date a deader!” Luna protested. “Come on, Deb—uh, girl!”

“Oh, okay,” said the driver. “Some of them aren’t so bad. I’m pulling into the curb, little Milkbone.”

“That would be you,” Luna said in my ear.

We came to a stop, and Luna leaned over me to open my door. As I stepped out, guided and shoved by her hands, I heard an exclamation from the sidewalk. Quick as a wink Luna slammed the door shut behind me. The car full of shapeshifters pulled away from the curb with a screech of tires. A howl trailed behind it in the thick night air.