Deadlocked (31 page)

I came out of the bathroom. Alcide was having a beer, and Mustapha was drinking a Coca-Cola. I accepted one, too, and the cold sweetness tasted wonderful going down.

“So what are you going to do with the rogues, for right now?” I asked.

“I’m going to stow them in a reinforced shed my dad built,” Alcide said. Jackson, his dad, had owned a farm outside Shreveport where the pack could run at the full moon.

“So you have a special place to stow people,” I said. “I’m sure Jannalynn has a special place, too. You been thinking about where that might be?”

“Jannalynn’s from Shreveport,” Alcide said. “So, yeah, I’ve been thinking. She lives in the apartment above Hair of the Dog, so that’s out. No place there; besides, we’d have heard Warren if he’d been stashed there, or we’d have smelled him.”

“If he was alive,” I said, very quietly.

“If he wasn’t, definitely we’d have smelled him,” Alcide said, and Mustapha nodded, his face expressionless.

“So where does she have of her own, a place she could be fairly sure no one else would go?”

“Her mom and dad retired to Florida last year,” Alcide said. “But they sold their house. Our computer guy who works at the tax assessor’s office couldn’t find anything else in Jannalynn’s name.”

“You sure that house sold? In this market?”

“That’s what she told me. And the sign was down, last time I went by,” Alcide said.

Mustapha stirred. “It’s on a big lot, and it’s pretty far out of Shreveport,” he said. “I was out that way once, driving with Jannalynn, when the pack was courting me. She said she used to ride dirt bikes out there. They had horses, too.”

“Anyone can take down a sign,” I said.

Alcide got a call just then and talked to the pack members who’d secured my abductors. They were on their way to Alcide’s farm. “You don’t have to be too civil,” Alcide said into the phone, and I could hear the laughter that came from the other end of the line.

I’d been struck by another thought, and as we went out to Alcide’s car, I said, “I guess growing up as a full-blooded Were in Shreveport, Jannalynn would be pretty much bound to know all the others around her age. Even the kids who weren’t full-blood.”

Alcide and Mustapha shrugged, almost in unison. “We did,” they said, and then smiled at each other, though their growing tension made that hard to do.

“Kym Rowe was half-Were and not much older than Jannalynn,” I observed. “Her folks came out to my house. Her dad’s Oscar, a full Were.” Mustapha stopped in his tracks, his head bowed. “Mustapha, was it Jannalynn who made you let Kym into Eric’s house?”

“Yeah,” he said, and Alcide stopped and turned to him. His face was hard and accusing. Mustapha said to both of us, “She told me she had Warren. She told me I had to let this Rowe girl into the house. That was all I had to do.”

“So it was her plan,” I said carefully. “
Her
plan. To get Eric to drink from this girl?”

“No, it was not her plan,” Mustapha said clearly. “She was hired to find a Were girl willing to carry it out, but it was the plan of this dude named Claude. I’ve seen him at your place. Your cousin?”

Chapter 13

I was shocked. I was more than shocked.

And the first coherent thought I had was,
If Dermot was in on this, it’ll break my heart. Or I’ll break his neck.

In our long drive through the night to Jannalynn’s parents’ former place, I had more time than I needed to think, or maybe not enough. I was scrambling for some solid foothold, some sure thing. “Why?” I said out loud. “Why?”

“I sure don’t know,” Mustapha said. “The day I came to your house on the run, it was everything I could do to sit at the table with that Dermot and not try to choke it out of him.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I didn’t know if he was in on it. That Dermot, he’s always nice, and he seems to have a lot of love for you. I just couldn’t see him stabbing you in the back like that. Or taking Warren, either, though I could see he might think that wasn’t so bad—not knowing Warren, hardly knowing me.”

I had to assume it had been Claude’s blood that had made Kym so irresistible to Eric.

“Dammit,” I said, and leaned forward to bury my face in my hands. I was glad to be sitting in the backseat where neither of them could see my face.

“Sookie, we’ll figure all this out,” Alcide said. He sounded very confident and strong. “We’ll get this all taken care of. We’ll clear Eric with the police.”

From which I understood he was scared I’d start crying. I could sort of sympathize with that, and, anyway, first things first. I was kind of beyond crying. I’d already shed enough tears.

Glancing out the window, I saw we were now in a suburban area where the lots were at least four acres; maybe this had been out in the country once upon a time, until Shreveport had grown.

“It’s right around here,” Mustapha said, and when we saw a white fence bordering the road, he said, “This is it. I remember the fence.”

There was a horse gate across the driveway, and I hopped out to move it because I just wanted to get out of the car. They drove through and I followed them. It was completely dark out here, no streetlights. There was a security light in the front yard, but that was it. No lights on in the ranch-style house or in the freestanding garage a few feet behind it, where the driveway terminated. A dilapidated swing set rusted in the front yard. I pictured little Jannalynn playing on it, and found myself picturing a swing hitting her in the head.

I grimly erased that image and joined the two men who’d gotten out of the car to stand uncertainly in the noisy night. The crickets and all the other myriad bugs of Louisiana were having a concert in the woods that bordered the property. I heard a dog bark, far away.

“Now we break in,” Alcide said, and I said, “Wait.”

“But—” Mustapha began.

“Be quiet,” I said, finally feeling that there was something I could do rather than get swept into events as they passed me by. I sent out my other sense, the one that had shaped my life, the one given me at my birth by the demon Mr. Cataliades. I searched and searched, looking for the signature of a mind, and just when I was going to give up, I felt a faint flicker of thought. “There is someone,” I said very quietly. “There is someone.”

“Where?” Mustapha asked eagerly.

“In the attic over the garage,” I said, and it was like I’d fired off the starting gun. Werewolves are creatures of action, after all.

There were outside stairs on the side of the garage, which I hadn’t seen. The sharper eyes of Alcide and Mustapha had, and up they swarmed. Mustapha, catching a scent he recognized, threw back his head and howled. It made my hair stand up. I moved to the foot of the steps, and though I still couldn’t see much, I could make out the two figures on the landing above beginning a furious motion. It accompanied a rhythmic thud. I realized the two men were throwing themselves against a door. There was a
ka-BANG
that had to be the door flying back, and then a light came on.

Mustapha howled again, and I feared that Warren was dead.

I just couldn’t stand it; the death of the little blond sharpshooter with his pale freckled skin and his missing teeth was somehow more than I could bear tonight. I sank to my knees.

“Sookie,” Alcide said urgently.

I looked up. Mustapha was coming down the stairs, a body in his arms. Alcide was right in front of me.

“He’s alive,” Alcide said. “But he’s been up there without air-conditioning or ventilation or food or water for God knows how long. I guess the bitch couldn’t be bothered. We got to get him some help.”

“Vampire blood?” I suggested, but very quietly.

“I think Mustapha might consider that now,” Alcide said, and I knew that Warren must be very bad.

I called Bill. “Sookie, where are you?” he yelled. “I’ve been calling! What happened?”

I glanced at the screen. I did have a lot of missed calls. “I had the phone on vibrate,” I said. “I’ll tell you everything, but I want to ask you a favor first. Are you still in Shreveport?”

“Yes, I’m back outside the Trifecta, trying to pick up the trail of those dogs!”

“Hey, listen, chill. It’s been a real bad night. I need you now, my friend.”

“Anything.”

“Meet me at Alcide’s. You can save a life.”

“I’m on my way.”

On our way back into Shreveport, Mustapha took my place in the backseat with Warren’s head on his lap. When I proposed that Bill give Warren a drink to help him live, Mustapha said, “If it can bring him back, I’ll do it. He may hate me later. Hell, I may hate myself. But we got to save him.”

Our drive back into Alcide’s neighborhood was shorter than our drive out because we knew our way now, but we grudged every stoplight or slow driver ahead of us, and Mustapha’s urgency pounded at me. Warren’s brain signature became weaker, flickered, resumed.

Sure enough, Bill was standing waiting at Alcide’s, and I leaped out of the car and pulled Bill around to the backseat. When the door opened and he saw Warren, recognition flared in his eyes. Of course, Bill knew Mustapha, and he remembered Warren the shooter. I hoped it hadn’t occurred to Bill that it might be a good thing if he died, since he was yet another witness who could testify—at least in a limited way—to what had happened the night we’d killed Victor.

“He wasn’t in the club,” I said, grabbing Bill’s wrist, as Mustapha gently lifted Warren’s head so he could vacate the car to leave room for Bill.

And Bill looked at me, a huge question on his face.

“Feed him,” I said. Without another word, Bill knelt by the car, bit his own wrist, and held the bleeding wrist over Warren’s parched mouth.

I don’t know if Warren would have done it if he hadn’t been so thirsty. At first, Bill’s blood trickling into the slack mouth seemed to raise no reaction. But then something sparked in Warren, and he began to consciously drink. I could see his throat moving.

“Enough,” I said, after a minute. I could sense Warren’s brain firing back up. “Now, take him to the hospital, and they’ll do all the right stuff for him.”

“But they’ll know.” Alcide was scowling at me, and so was Mustapha. “They’ll question him about who took him.” Bill, standing and holding his wrist, looked only mildly interested.

“You don’t want the police to arrest Jannalynn?” That seemed like the best of all possible worlds to me.

“She’d kill them if they tried,” Alcide said, but I knew from the conflict flowing from his head that he wasn’t voicing his real concern.

“You want to punish her,” I said, in as neutral a voice as I could manage.

“Course he does,” Mustapha said. “She’s pack. She’s his to punish.”

“I do want to ask her some questions,” I said. It seemed like the right time to get that out in the open. Otherwise, Jannalynn might end up dead before I’d had a chance to extract information.

“What about Sam?” Bill said, out of the blue.

“What about him?” Alcide asked after a moment.

“He’s not gonna be happy,” I muttered. “They weren’t ever as close as she told you they were, but after all …”

“She’s his woman,” Mustapha said, shrugging. He looked down at Warren. Just then Warren’s eyes fluttered open. He saw Mustapha and smiled. “I knew you’d find me,” he said. “I knew you’d come.”

It was touching, it was awkward, and I was totally confused.

“So it was Claude,” I said out loud. “I just can’t believe it. Why would he want Eric to drink from a borderline whore like Kym? Why would he give her his own blood to drink?” I was beyond mincing words, or being charitable.

“Claude could tell you why,” Bill said grimly. “Where is he now?”

“Niall came to get him. I haven’t seen Claude in days.”

“And he left Dermot here?”

“Yeah, he left Dermot in charge of all the stray supes at Hooligans,” I said.

“I’d heard everyone there was some form of fae,” Bill said, confirming my belief that supes gossiped just like humans did. “Did Claude give you a time for his return?”

“No. Niall took him to Faery to investigate who actually put a curse on Dermot. Claude said it was Murry, but Murry’s dead. I killed him, in my backyard.” I sure had everyone’s attention now. It seemed that all the separate parts of my life were finally colliding. My personal highway was jammed with fairies, werewolves, vampires, and humans.

“So it was pretty convenient for Claude to name Murry as the bad guy,” Bill said, and that kind of hung in the air for a minute before everything came crashing down.

“Claude,” I said. “It was Claude all along.” I felt numb.

After a little while, we were all sorted out. Since no one knew where Jannalynn was, Mustapha and Warren were invited to spend the night at Alcide’s, and Mustapha accepted for them both since Warren was still not talking much. Apparently, he wasn’t going to go to the hospital, which I had to accept. At least he was getting a bottle of Gatorade. Mustapha let him have it in little sips.

Bill and I got in his car, and Mustapha thanked Bill for coming to Warren’s aid. He didn’t like telling Bill he owed him a favor, but he did it.

Alcide was already on the phone as we pulled out of the driveway, and I was sure he was checking on his pack members who’d locked up the rogues. I would put money on his main interest being Kandace. I didn’t know if she’d go into lockup with the rogues or if she’d abandon the pretense of being a rebel. At the moment, I could only be glad that wasn’t my problem.

I was glad Bill was driving. I had too many thoughts crowding my head. I wished there were a way to warn Niall what a snake he was nurturing in his bosom. And as long as I was getting biblical, I’d never in my life been so glad I’d said no to someone when they’d wanted to have sex with me.

“Why would Claude have done such a thing?”

I didn’t realize I’d said it out loud until Bill answered.

“Sookie, I don’t know. I can’t even guess. He doesn’t hate Eric, or at least I can’t think of any reason why he should. He might be envious you have such a handsome lover, but that’s hardly sufficient reason …”

I wasn’t about to tell Bill that Claude had told me he occasionally bedded a real woman. Eric would surely have been more in Claude’s natural ballpark.