I tried to look at the shoulder wound in the improved light of the kitchen, but he was so grimy it was hard to examine in detail. “Do you think you could stand to take a shower?” I asked, hoping I didn’t sound like I thought he smelled or anything. Actually, he did smell a little unusual, but his scent wasn’t unpleasant.
“I think I can stay upright that long,” he said briefly.
“Okay, stay put for a second,” I said. I brought the old afghan from the back of the living room couch and arranged it around him carefully. Now it was easier to concentrate.
I hurried to the hall bathroom to turn on the shower controls, added long after the claw-footed bathtub had been installed. I leaned over to turn on the water, waited until it was hot, and got out two fresh towels. Amelia had left shampoo and crème rinse in the rack hanging from the showerhead, and there was plenty of soap. I put my hand under the water. Nice and hot.
“Okay!” I called. “I’m coming to get you!”
My unexpected visitor was looking startled when I got back to the kitchen. “For what?” he asked, and I wondered if he’d hit his head in the woods.
“For the shower. Hear the water running?” I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. “I can’t see the extent of your wounds until I get you clean.”
We were up and moving again, and I thought he was walking better, as if the warmth of the house and the smoothness of the floor helped his muscles relax. He’d just left the afghan on the chair. No problem with nudity, like most Weres, I noticed. Okay, that was good, right? His thoughts were opaque to me, as Were thoughts sometimes were, but I caught flashes of anxiety.
Suddenly he leaned against me much more heavily, and I staggered into the wall. “Sorry,” he said, gasping. “Just had a twinge in my leg.”
“No problem,” I said. “It’s probably your muscles stretching.” We made it into the small bathroom, which was very old-fashioned. My own bathroom off my bedroom was more modern, but this was less personal.
But Preston didn’t seem to note the black-and-white-checkered tile. With unmistakable eagerness, he was eyeing the hot water spraying down into the tub.
“Ah, do you need me to leave you alone for a second before I help you into the shower?” I asked, indicating the toilet with a tip of my head.
He looked at me blankly. “Oh,” he said, finally understanding. “No, that’s all right.” So we made it to the side of the tub, which was a high one. With a lot of awkward maneuvering, Preston swung a leg over the side, and I shoved, and he was able to raise the second leg enough to climb completely in. After making sure he could stand by himself, I began to pull the shower curtain closed.
“Lady,” he said, and I stopped. He was under the stream of hot water, his hair plastered to his head, water beating on his chest and running down to drip off his . . . Okay, he’d gotten warmer everywhere.
“Yes?” I was trying not to sound like I was choking.
“What’s your name?”
“Oh! Excuse me.” I swallowed hard. “My name is Sookie. Sookie Stackhouse.” I swallowed again. “There’s the soap; there’s the shampoo. I’m going to leave the bathroom door open, okay? You just call me when you’re through, and I’ll help you out of the tub.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll yell if I need you.”
I pulled the shower curtain, not without regret. After checking that the clean towels were where Preston could easily reach them, I returned to the kitchen. I wondered if he would like coffee or hot chocolate or tea? Or maybe alcohol? I had some bourbon, and there were a couple of beers in the refrigerator. I’d ask him. Soup, he’d need some soup. I didn’t have any homemade, but I had Campbell’s Chicken Tortilla. I put the soup into a pan on the stove, got coffee ready to go, and boiled some water in case he opted for the chocolate or tea. I was practically vibrating with purpose.
When Preston emerged from the bathroom, his bottom half was wrapped in a large blue bath towel of Amelia’s. Believe me, it had never looked so good. Preston had draped a towel around his neck to catch the drips from his hair, and it covered his shoulder wound. He winced a little as he walked, and I knew his feet must be sore. I’d gotten some men’s socks by mistake on my last trip to Wal-Mart, so I got them from my drawer and handed them to Preston, who’d resumed his seat at the table. He looked at them very carefully, to my puzzlement.
“You need to put on some socks,” I said, wondering if he paused because he thought he was wearing some other man’s garments. “They’re mine,” I said reassuringly. “Your feet must be tender.”
“Yes,” said Preston, and rather slowly, he bent to put them on.
“You need help?” I was pouring the soup in a bowl.
“No, thank you,” he said, his face hidden by his thick dark hair as he bent to the task. “What smells so good?”
“I heated some soup for you,” I said. “You want coffee or tea or . . .”
“Tea, please,” he said.
I never drank tea myself, but Amelia had some. I looked through her selection, hoping none of these blends would turn him into a frog or anything. Amelia’s magic had had unexpected results in the past. Surely anything marked LIPTON was okay? I dunked the tea bag into the scalding water and hoped for the best.
Preston ate the soup carefully. Maybe I’d gotten it too hot. He spooned it into his mouth like he’d never had soup before. Maybe his mama had always served homemade. I felt a little embarrassed. I was staring at him, because I sure didn’t have anything better to look at. He looked up and met my eyes.
Whoa. Things were moving too fast here. “So, how’d you get hurt?” I asked. “Was there a skirmish? How come your pack left you?”
“There was a fight,” he said. “Negotiations didn’t work.” He looked a little doubtful and distressed. “Somehow, in the dark, they left me.”
“Do you think they’re coming back to get you?”
He finished his soup, and I put his tea down by his hand. “Either my own pack or the Monroe one,” he said grimly.
That didn’t sound good. “Okay, you better let me see your wounds now,” I said. The sooner I knew his fitness level, the sooner I could decide what to do. Preston removed the towel from around his neck, and I bent to look at the wound. It was almost healed.
“When were you hurt?” I asked.
“Toward dawn.” His huge tawny eyes met mine. “I lay there for hours.”
“But . . .” Suddenly I wondered if I’d been entirely intelligent, bringing a stranger into my home. I knew it wasn’t wise to let Preston know I had doubts about his story. The wound had looked jagged and ugly when I’d found him in the woods. Yet now that he came into the house, it healed in a matter of minutes? What was up? Weres healed fast, but not instantly.
“What’s wrong, Sookie?” he asked. It was pretty hard to think about anything else when his long wet hair was trailing across his chest and the blue towel was riding pretty low.
“Are you really a Were?” I blurted, and backed up a couple of steps. His brain waves dipped into the classic Were rhythm, the jagged, dark cadence I found familiar.
Preston Pardloe looked absolutely horrified. “What else would I be?” he said, extending an arm. Obligingly, fur rippled down from his shoulder and his fingers clawed. It was the most effortless change I’d ever seen, and there was very little of the noise I associated with the transformation, which I’d witnessed several times.
“You must be some kind of super werewolf,” I said.
“My family is gifted,” he said proudly.
He stood, and his towel slipped off.
“No kidding,” I said in a strangled voice. I could feel my cheeks turning red.
There was a howl outside. There’s no eerier sound, especially on a dark, cold night; and when that eerie sound comes from the line where your yard meets the woods, well, that’ll make the hairs on your arm stand up. I
glanced at Preston’s wolfy arm to see if the howl had had the same effect on him, and saw that his arm had reverted to human shape.
“They’ve returned to find me,” he said.
“Your pack?” I said, hoping that his kin had returned to retrieve him.
“No.” His face was bleak. “The Sharp Claws.”
“Call your people. Get them here.”
“They left me for a reason.” He looked humiliated. “I didn’t want to talk about it. But you’ve been so kind.”
I was not liking this more and more. “And that reason would be?”
“I was payment for an offense.”
“Explain in twenty words or less.”
He stared down at the floor, and I realized he was counting in his head. This guy was one of a kind. “Packleader’s sister wanted me, I didn’t want her, she said I’d insulted her, my torture was the price.”
“Why would your packleader agree to any such thing?”
“Am I still supposed to number my words?”
I shook my head. He’d sounded dead serious. Maybe he just had a really deep sense of humor.
“I’m not my packleader’s favorite person, and he was willing to believe I was guilty. He himself wants the sister of the Sharp Claw packmaster, and it would be a good match from the point of view of our packs. So, I was hung out to dry.”
I could sure believe that the packmaster’s sister had lusted after him. The rest of the story was not outrageous, if you’ve had many dealings with the Weres. Sure, they’re all human and reasonable on the outside, but when they’re in their Were mode, they’re different.
“So, they’re here to get you and keep on beating you up?”
He nodded somberly. I didn’t have the heart to tell him to rewind the towel. I took a deep breath, looked away, and decided I’d better go get the shotgun.
Howls were echoing, one after another, through the night by the time I fetched the shotgun from the closet in the living room. The Sharp Claws had tracked Preston to my house, clearly. There was no way I could hide him and say that he’d gone. Or was there? If they didn’t come in . . .
“You need to get in the vampire hole,” I said. Preston turned from staring at the back door, his eyes widening as he took in the shotgun. “It’s in the guest bedroom.” The vampire hole dated from when Bill Compton had been my boyfriend, and we’d thought it was prudent to have a light-tight place at my house in case he got caught by day.
When the big Were didn’t move, I grabbed his arm and hustled him down the hall, showed him the trick bottom of the bedroom closet. Preston started to protest—all Weres would rather fight than flee—but I shoved him in, lowered the “floor,” and threw the shoes and junk back in there to make the closet look realistic.
There was a loud knock at the front door. I checked the shotgun to make sure it was loaded and ready to fire, and then I went into the living room. My heart was pounding about a hundred miles a minute.
Werewolves tend to take blue-collar jobs in their human lives, though some of them parlay those jobs into business empires. I looked through my peephole to see that the werewolf at my front door must be a semipro wrestler. He was huge. His hair hung in tight gelled waves to his shoulders, and he had a trimmed beard and mustache, too. He was wearing a leather vest and leather pants and motorcycle boots. He actually had leather strips tied around his upper arms, and leather braces on his wrists. He looked like someone from a fetish magazine.
“What do you want?” I called through the door.
“Let me come in,” he said, in a surprisingly high voice.
Little pig, little pig, let me come in!
“Why would I do that?” Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.
“Because we can break in if we have to. We got no quarrel with you. We know this is your land, and your brother told us you know all about us. But we’re tracking a guy, and we gotta know if he’s in there.”
“There was a guy here; he came up to my back door,” I called. “But he made a phone call and someone came and picked him up.”
“Not out here,” the mountainous Were said.
“No, the back door.” That was where Preston’s scent would lead.
“Hmmmm.” By pressing my ear to the door, I could hear the Were mutter, “Check it out,” to a large dark form, which loped away. “I still gotta come in and check,” my unwanted visitor said. “If he’s in there, you might be in danger.”
He should have said that first, to convince me he was trying to save me.
“Okay, but only you,” I said. “And you know I’m a friend of the Shreveport pack, and if anything happens to me, you’ll have to answer to them. Call Alcide Herveaux if you don’t believe me.”
“Oooo, I’m scared,” said Man Mountain in an assumed falsetto. But as I swung open the front door and he got a look at the shotgun, I could see that he truly did look as if he was having second thoughts. Good.
I stood aside, keeping the Benelli pointed in his direction to show I meant business. He strode through the house, his nose working all the time. His sense of smell wouldn’t be nearly as accurate in his human form, and if he started to change, I intended to tell him I’d shoot if he did.
Man Mountain went upstairs, and I could hear him opening closets and looking under beds. He even stepped into the attic. I heard the creak its old door makes when it swings open.
Then he clomped downstairs in his big old boots. He was dissatisfied with his search, I could tell, because he was practically snorting. I kept the shotgun level.
Suddenly he threw back his head and roared. I flinched, and it was all I could do to hold my ground. My arms were exhausted.
He was glaring at me from his great height. “You’re pulling something on us, woman. If I find out what it is, I’ll be back.”
“You’ve checked, and he’s not here. Time to go. It’s Christmas Eve, for goodness’ sake. Go home and wrap some presents.”
With a final look around the living room, out he went. I couldn’t believe it. The bluff had worked. I lowered the gun and set it carefully back in the closet. My arms were trembling from holding it at the ready. I shut and locked the door behind him.
Preston was padding down the hall in the socks and nothing else, his face anxious.
“Stop!” I said, before he could step into the living room. The curtains were open. I walked around shutting all the curtains in the house, just to be on the safe side. I took the time to send out my special sort of search, and there were no live brains in the area around the house. I’d never been sure how far this ability could reach, but at least I knew the Sharp Claws were gone.
When I turned around after drawing the last drape, Preston was behind me, and then he had his arms around me, and then he was kissing me. I swam to the surface to say, “I don’t really . . .”
“Pretend you found me gift-wrapped under the tree,” he whispered. “Pretend you have mistletoe.”
It was pretty easy to pretend both those things. Several times. Over hours.
When I woke up Christmas morning, I was as relaxed as a girl can be. It took me a while to figure out that Preston was gone; and while I felt a pang, I also felt just a bit of relief. I didn’t know the guy, after all, and even after we’d been up close and personal, I had to wonder how a day alone with him would have gone. He’d left me a note in the kitchen.
“Sookie, you’re incredible. You saved my life and gave me the best Christmas Eve I’ve ever had. I don’t want to get you in any more trouble. I’ll never forget how great you were in every way.” He’d signed it.
I felt let down, but oddly enough I also felt happy. It was Christmas Day. I went in and plugged in the lights on the tree and sat on the old couch with my grandmother’s afghan wrapped around me, which still smelled faintly of my visitor. I had a big mug of coffee and some homemade banana nut bread to have fo
r breakfast. I had presents to unwrap. And about noon, the phone began to ring. Sam called, and Amelia; and even Jason called just to say “Merry Christmas, Sis.” He hung up before I could charge him with loaning my land out to two packs of Weres. Considering the satisfying outcome, I decided to forgive and forget—at least that one transgression. I put my turkey breast in the oven, and fixed a sweet potato casserole, and opened a can of cranberry sauce, and made some cornbread dressing and some broccoli and cheese.
About thirty minutes before the somewhat simplified feast was ready, the doorbell rang. I was wearing a new pale blue pants and top outfit in velour, a gift from Amelia. I was feeling self-sufficient as hell.
I was astonished how happy I was to see my great-grandfather at the door. His name’s Niall Brigant, and he’s a fairy prince. Okay, long story, but that’s what he is. I’d only met him a few weeks before, and I couldn’t say we really knew each other well, but he was family. He’s about six feet tall, he almost always wears a black suit with a white shirt and a black tie, and he has pale golden hair as fine as cornsilk; it’s longer than my hair, and it seems to float around his head if there’s the slightest breeze.
Oh, yeah, my great-grandfather is over a thousand years old. Or thereabouts. I guess it’s hard to keep track after all those years.
Niall smiled at me. All the tiny wrinkles that fissured his fine skin moved when he smiled, and somehow that just added to his charm. He had a load of wrapped boxes, to add to my general level of amazement.
“Please come in, Great-grandfather,” I said. “I’m so happy to see you! Can you have Christmas dinner with me?”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s why I’ve come. Though,” he added, “I was not invited.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling ridiculously ill-mannered. “I just never thought you’d be interested in coming. I mean, after all, you’re not . . .” I hesitated, not wanting to be tacky.