place in the hierarchy of magical creatures. I haven’t figured out exactly what it is yet, but sooner or later I’ll piece it together.
Every man in the bar was drooling over Claudine, and she was eating it up. She gave Andy Bellefleur a long, bigeyed look, and Halleigh Robinson glared, mad enough to spit, until she remembered she was a sweet southern girl. But Claudine abandoned all interest in Andy when she saw he was drinking ice tea with lemon. Fairies are even more violently allergic to lemon than vampires are to garlic.
Claudine worked her way over to me, and she gave me a big hug, to the envy of every male in the bar. She took my hand to pull me into Sam’s office. I went with her out of sheer curiosity.
“Dear friend,” Claudine said, “I have bad news for you.”
“What?” I’d gone from bemused to scared in a heartbeat.
“There was a shooting early this morning. One of the werepanthers was hit.”
“Oh, no! Jason!” But surely one of his friends would’ve called if he hadn’t gone into work today?
“No, your brother is fine, Sookie. But Calvin Norris was shot.”
I was stunned. Jason hadn’t called to tell me this? I had to find out from someone else?
“Shot dead?” I asked, hearing my voice shake. Not that Calvin and I were close—far from it—but I was shocked. Heather Kinman, a teenager, had been fatally shot the week before. What was happening in Bon Temps?
“Shot in the chest. He’s alive, but he’s bad hurt.”
“Is he in the hospital?”
“Yes, his nieces took him to Grainger Memorial.”
Grainger was a town farther southeast than Hotshot, and a shorter drive from there than the parish hospital in Clarice.
“Who did it?”
“No one knows. Someone shot him early this morning, when Calvin was on his way to work. He’d come home from his, um, time of the month, changed, and started into town for his shift.” Calvin worked at Norcross.
“How’d you come to know all this?”
“One of his cousins came into the store to buy some pajamas, since Calvin didn’t have any. Guess he sleeps in the buff,” Claudette said. “I don’t know how they think they’re going to get a pajama top on over the bandages. Maybe they just needed the pants? Calvin wouldn’t like to be shuffling around the hospital with only one of those nasty gowns between him and the world.”
Claudine often took long side trails in her conversation.
“Thanks for telling me,” I said. I wondered how the cousin had known Claudine, but I wasn’t going to ask.
“That’s okay. I knew you’d want to know. Heather Kinman was a shape-shifter, too. Bet you didn’t know that. Think about it.”
Claudine gave me a kiss on the forehead—fairies are very touchy-feely—and we went back into the bar area. She’d stunned me into silence. Claudine herself was back to business as usual. The fairy ordered a 7-and-7 and was surrounded by suitors in about two minutes flat. She never left with anyone, but the men seemed to enjoy trying. I’d decided that Claudine fed off this admiration and attention.
Even Sam was beaming at her, and she didn’t tip.
By the time we were closing the bar, Claudine had left to go back to Monroe, and I’d passed along her news to Sam. He was as appalled by the story as I was. Though Calvin Norris was the leader of the small shifter community of Hotshot, the rest of the world knew him as a steady, quiet bachelor who owned his own home and had a good job as crew foreman at the local lumber mill. It was hard to imagine either of his personas leading to an assassination attempt. Sam decided to send some flowers from the bar’s staff.
I pulled on my coat and went out the bar’s back door just ahead of Sam. I heard him locking the door behind me. Suddenly I remembered that we were getting low on bottled blood, and I turned to tell Sam this. He caught my movement and stopped, waiting for me to speak, his face expectant. In the length of time it takes to blink, his expression changed from expectant to shocked, dark red began to spread on his left leg, and I heard the sound of a shot.
Then blood was everywhere, Sam crumpled to the ground, and I began to scream.
3
I’D NEVER HAD to pay the cover charge at Fangtasia before. The few times I’d come through the public entrance, I’d been with a vampire. But now I was bymy