Alcide opened his mouth, rage tensing all his muscles. I laid my hand on his arm.
"What do you think of my hair?" I asked softly, moving my head so it slithered over my bare shoulders. I took his hand and held it gently to the curls falling over my chest. Hey, I was pretty good at this! Sookie the sex kitten.
Alcide caught his breath. His fingers trailed through the length of my hair, and his knuckles brushed my collarbone. "I think it's beautiful," he said, and his voice was both sincere and husky.
I smiled at him.
"I guess instead of borrowing you, he rented you," Debbie said, goaded into irreparable error.
It was a terrible insult, to both of us. It took every bit of resolution I had to hang on to a ladylike self-control. I felt the primitive self, the truer me, swim nearly to the surface. We sat staring at the shifter, and she blanched at our silence. "Okay, I shouldn't have said that," she said nervously. "Just forget it."
Because she was a shifter, she'd beat me in a fair fight. Of course, I had no intention of fighting fair, if it came to that.
I leaned over and touched one red fingertip to her leather pants. "Wearing Cousin Elsie?" I asked.
Unexpectedly, Alcide burst into laughter. I smiled at him as he doubled over, and when I looked up, Debbie was stalking back to her party, who had fallen silent during our exchange.
I reminded myself to skip going to the ladies' room alone this evening.
***
By the time we ordered our second drinks, the place was full. Some Were friends of Alcide's came in, a large group - Weres like to travel in packs, I understand. Shifters, it depended on the animal they most often shifted to. Despite their theoretical versatility, Sam had told me that shape-shifters most often changed to the same animal every time, some creature they had a special affinity for. And they might call themselves by that animal: weredog, or werebat, or weretiger. But never just "Weres" - that term was reserved for the wolves. The true werewolves scorned such variance in form, and they didn't think much of shifters in general. They, the werewolves, considered themselves the cream of the shape-shifting world.
Shifters, on the other hand, Alcide explained, thought of werewolves as the thugs of the supernatural scene. "And you do find a lot of us in the building trades," he said, as if he were trying hard to be fair. "Lots of Weres are mechanics, or brick masons, or plumbers, or cooks."
"Useful occupations," I said.
"Yes," he agreed. "But not exactly white-collar. So though we all cooperate with each other, to some extent, there's a lot of class discrimination."
A small group of Weres in motorcycle gear strode in. They wore the same sort of leather vest with wolf's heads on the back that had been worn by the man who'd attacked me at Merlotte's. I wondered if they'd started searching for their comrade yet. I wondered if they had a clearer idea of who they were looking for, what they'd do if they realized who I was. The four men ordered several pitchers of beer and began talking very secretively, heads close together and chairs pulled right up to the table.
A deejay - he appeared to be a vampire - began to play records at the perfect level; you could be sure what the song was, but you could still talk.
"Let's dance," Alcide suggested.
I hadn't expected that; but it would put me closer to the vampires and their humans, so I accepted. Alcide held my chair for me, and took my hand as we went over to the minuscule dance floor. The vampire changed the music from some heavy metal thing to Sarah McLachlan's "Good Enough," which is slow, but with a beat.
I can't sing, but I can dance; as it happened, Alcide could, too.
The good thing about dancing is that you don't have to talk for a while, if you feel chatted out. The bad thing is it makes you hyperconscious of your partner's body. I had already been uncomfortably aware of Alcide's - excuse me - animal magnetism. Now, so close to him, swaying in rhythm with him, following his every move, I found myself in a kind of trance. When the song was over, we stayed on the little dance floor, and I kept my eyes on the floor. When the next song started up, a faster piece of music - though for the life of me I couldn't have told you what - we began dancing again, and I spun and dipped and moved with the werewolf.
Then the muscular squat man sitting at a bar stool behind us said to his vampire companion, "He hasn't talked yet. And Harvey called today. He said they searched the house and didn't find anything."
"Public place," said his companion, in a sharp voice. The vampire was a very small man - perhaps he'd become a vampire when men were shorter.
I knew they were talking about Bill, because the human was thinking of Bill when he said, "He hasn't talked." And the human was an exceptional broadcaster, both sound and visuals coming through clearly.
When Alcide tried to lead me away from their orbit, I resisted his lead. Looking up into his surprised face, I cut my eyes toward the couple. Comprehension filtered into his eyes, but he didn't look happy.
Dancing and trying to read another person's mind at the same time is not something I'd recommend. I was straining mentally, and my heart was pounding with shock at the glimpse of Bill's image. Luckily, Alcide excused himself to go to the men's room just then, parking me on a stool at the bar right by the vampire. I tried to keep looking around at different dancers, at the deejay, at anything but the man to the vampire's left, the man whose mind I was trying to pick through.
He was thinking about what he'd done during the day; he'd been trying to keep someone awake, someone who really needed to sleep - a vampire. Bill.
Keeping a vampire awake during the day was the worst kind of torture. It was difficult to do, too. The compulsion to sleep when the sun came up was imperative, and the sleep itself was like death.
Somehow, it had never crossed my mind - I guess since I'm an American - that the vampires who had snatched Bill might be resorting to evil means to get him to talk. If they wanted the information, naturally they weren't just going to wait around until Bill felt like telling them. Stupid me - dumb, dumb, dumb. Even knowing Bill had betrayed me, even knowing he had thought of leaving me for his vampire lover, I was struck deep with pain for him.
Engrossed in my unhappy thoughts, I didn't recognize trouble when it was standing right beside me. Until it grabbed me by the arm.
One of the Were gang members, a big dark-haired man, very heavy and very smelly, had grabbed hold of my arm. He was getting his greasy fingerprints all over my beautiful red sleeves, and I tried to pull away from him.
"Come to our table and let us get to know you, sweet thing," he said, grinning at me. He had a couple of earrings in one ear. I wondered what happened to them during the full moon. But almost immediately, I realized I had more serious problems to solve. The expression on his face was too frank; men just didn't look at women that way unless those women were standing on a street corner in hot pants and a bra: in other words, he thought I was a sure thing.