Dead as a Doornail (Sookie Stackhouse #5)(59)
Author: Charlaine Harris

I didn’t know whether I felt that much better when he drew his pistol.

"Drop it, Bellefleur," said a no-nonsense voice, one that sounded familiar.

"Bullshit," Andy sneered. "Why should I?"

"Because I got a bigger gun," said the voice, cool and sarcastic. Sweetie Des Arts stepped from the shadows, carrying a rifle. It was pointed at Andy, and I had no doubt she was ready to fire. I felt like my insides had turned to Jell-O.

"Why don’t you just leave, Andy Bellefleur?" Sweetie asked. She was wearing a mechanic’s coverall and a jacket, and her hands were gloved. She didn’t look anything like a short-order cook. "I’ve got no quarrel with you. You’re just a person."

Andy was shaking his head, trying to clear it. I noticed he hadn’t dropped his gun yet. "You’re the cook at the bar, right? Why are you doing this?"

"You should know, Bellefleur. I heard your little conversation with the shifter here. Maybe this dog is a human, someone you know." She didn’t wait for Andy to answer. "And Heather Kinman was just as bad. She turned into a fox. And the guy that works at Norcross, Calvin Norris? He’s a damn panther."

"And you shot them all? You shot me, too?" I wanted to be sure Andy was registering this. "There’s just one thing wrong with your little vendetta, Sweetie. I’m not a shifter."

"You smell like one," Sweetie said, clearly sure she was right.

"Some of my friends are shifters, and that day I’d hugged a few of ’em. But me myself – not a shifter of any kind."

"Guilty by association," Sweetie said. "I’ll bet you got a dab of shifter from somewhere."

"What about you?" I asked. I didn’t want to get shot again. The evidence suggested that Sweetie was not a sharpshooter: Sam, Calvin, and I had lived. I knew aiming at night had to be difficult, but still, you would’ve thought she could have done better. "Why are you on this vendetta?"

"I’m just a fraction of a shifter," she said, snarling just as much as Dean. "I got bit when I had a car wreck. This half-man half-wolf… thing… ran out of the woods near where I lay bleeding, and the damn thing bit me… and then another car came around the curve and it ran away. But the first full moon after that, my hands changed! My parents threw up."

"What about your boyfriend? You had one?" I kept speaking, trying to distract her. Andy was moving as far away from me as he could get, so she couldn’t shoot both of us quickly. She planned on shooting me first, I knew. I wanted the bloodhound to move away from me, but he stayed loyally pressed against my legs. She wasn’t sure the dog was a shifter. And, oddly, she hadn’t mentioned shooting Sam.

"I was a stripper then, living with a great guy," she said, rage bubbling through her voice. "He saw my hands and the extra hair and he loathed me. He left when the moon was full. He’d take business trips. He’d go golfing with his buddies. He’d be stuck at a late meeting."

"So how long have you been shooting shifters?"

"Three years," she said proudly. "I’ve killed twenty-two and wounded forty-one."

"That’s awful," I said.

"I’m proud of it," she said. "Cleaning the vermin off the face of the earth."

"You always find work in bars?"

"Gives me a chance to see who’s one of the brethren," she said, smiling. "I check out the churches and restaurants, too. The day care centers."

"Oh, no." I thought I was going to throw up.

My senses were hyperalert, as you can imagine, so I knew there was someone coming up the alley behind Sweetie. I could feel the anger roiling in a two-natured head. I didn’t look, trying to keep Sweetie’s attention for as long as I could. But there was a little noise, maybe the sound of a piece of paper trash rustling against the ground, and that was enough for Sweetie. She whirled around with the rifle up to her shoulder, and she fired. There was a shriek from the darkness at the south end of the alley, and then a high whining.

Andy took his moment and shot Sweetie Des Arts while her back was turned. I pressed myself against the uneven bricks of the old Feed and Seed, and as the rifle dropped from her hand, I saw the blood come out of her mouth, black in the starlight. Then she folded to the earth.

While Andy was standing over her, his gun dangling from his hand, I made my way past them to find out who had come to our aid. I switched on my flashlight to discover a werewolf, terribly wounded. Sweetie’s bullet had hit him in the middle of the chest, as best I could tell through the thick fur, and I yelled at Andy, "Use your cell phone! Call for help!" I was pressing down on the bubbling wound as hard as I could, hoping I was doing the right thing. The wound kept moving in a very disconcerting way, since the Were was in the process of changing back into a human. I glanced back to see that Andy was still lost in his own little vale of horror at what he’d done. "Bite him," I told Dean, and Dean padded over to the policeman and nipped his hand.

Andy cried out, of course, and raised his gun as if he were going to shoot the bloodhound. "No!" I yelled, jumping up from the dying Were. "Use your phone, you idiot. Call an ambulance."

Then the gun swung around to point at me.

For a long, tense moment I thought for sure the end of my life had come. We’d all like to kill what we don’t understand, what scares us, and I powerfully scared Andy Bellefleur.

But then the gun faltered and dropped back to Andy’s side. His broad face stared at me with dawning comprehension. He fumbled in his pocket, withdrew a cell phone. To my profound relief, he holstered the gun after he punched in a number.

I turned back to the Were, now wholly human and naked, while Andy said, "There’s been a multiple shooting in the alley behind the old Feed and Seed and Patsy’s Cleaners, across Magnolia Street from Sonic. Right. Two ambulances, two gunshot wounds. No, I’m fine."

The wounded Were was Dawson. His eyes flickered open, and he tried to gasp. I couldn’t even imagine the pain he must be suffering. "Calvin," he tried to say.

"Don’t worry now. Help’s on the way," I told the big man. My flashlight was lying on the ground beside me, and by its oddly skewed light I could see his huge muscles and bare hairy chest. He looked cold, of course, and I wondered where his clothes were. I would have been glad to have his shirt to wad up over the wound, which was steadily leaking blood. My hands were covered in it.

"Told me to finish out my last day by watching over you," Dawson said. He was shuddering all over. He tried to smile. "I said, ‘Piece of cake.’ " And then he didn’t say anything else, but lost consciousness.