Club Dead - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,23

Alcide as he stowed my things in the extended cab of the Ram.

The outside of the big truck gleamed, but inside, it was the littered vehicle of a man who spent his working life on the road; a hard hat, invoices, estimates, business cards, boots, a first-aid kit. At least there wasn’t any food trash. As we bumped down my eroded driveway, I picked up a rubber-banded sheaf of brochures whose cover read, “Herveaux and Son, AAA Accurate Surveys.” I eased out the top one and studied it carefully as Alcide drove the short distance to interstate 20 to go east to Monroe, Vicksburg, and then to Jackson.

I discovered that the Herveauxes, father and son, owned a bi-state surveying company, with offices in Jackson, Monroe, Shreveport, and Baton Rouge. The home office, as Alcide had told me, was in Shreveport. There was a photo inside of the two men, and the older Herveaux was just as impressive (in a senior way) as his son.

“Is your dad a werewolf, too?” I asked, after I’d digested the information and realized that the Herveaux family was at least prosperous, and possibly rich. They’d worked hard for it, though; and they’d keep working hard, unless the older Mr. Herveaux could control his gambling.

“Both my parents,” Alcide said, after a pause.

“Oh, sorry.” I wasn’t sure what I was apologizing for, but it was safer than not.

“That’s the only way to produce a Were child,” he said, after a moment. I couldn’t tell if he was explaining to be polite, or because he really thought I should know.

“So how come America’s not full of werewolves and shapeshifters?” I asked, after I’d considered his statement.

“Like must marry like to produce another, which is not always doable. And each union only produces one child with the trait. Infant mortality is high.”

“So, if you marry another werewolf, one of your kids will be a werebaby?”

“The condition will manifest itself at the onset of, ah, puberty.”

“Oh, that’s awful. Being a teenager is tough enough.”

He smiled, not at me, but at the road. “Yeah, it does complicate things.”

“So, your ex-girlfriend . . . she a shifter?”

“Yeah. I don’t normally date shifters, but I guess I thought with her it would be different. Weres and shifters are strongly attracted to each other. Animal magnetism, I guess,” Alcide said, as an attempt at humor.

My boss, also a shifter, had been glad to make friends with other shifters in the area. He had been hanging out with a maenad (“dating” would be too sweet a word for their relationship), but she’d moved on. Now, Sam was hoping to find another compatible shifter. He felt more comfortable with a strange human, like me, or another shifter, than he did with regular women. When he’d told me that, he’d meant it as a compliment, or maybe just as a simple statement; but it had hurt me a little, though my abnormality had been borne in on me since I was very young.

Telepathy doesn’t wait for puberty.

“How come?” I asked baldly. “How come you thought it would be different?”

“She told me she was sterile. I found out she was on birth control pills. Big difference. I’m not passing this along. Even a shifter and a werewolf may have a child who has to change at the full moon, though only kids of a pure couple—both Weres or both shifters—can change at will.”

Food for thought, there. “So you normally date regular old girls. But doesn’t it make it hard to date? Keeping secret such a big, ah, factor, in your life?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “Dating regular girls can be a pain. But I have to date someone.” There was an edge of desperation to his rumbly voice.

I gave that a long moment’s contemplation, and then I closed my eyes and counted to ten. I was missing Bill in a most elemental and unexpected way. My first clue had been the tug-below-the-waist I’d felt when I’d watched my tape ofThe Last of the Mohicans the week before and I’d fixated on Daniel Day-Lewis bounding through the forest. If I could appear from behind a tree before he saw Madeleine Stowe . . .

I was going to have to watch my step.

“So, if you bite someone, they won’t turn into a werewolf?” I decided to change the direction of my thoughts. Then I remembered the last time Bill had bitten me, and felt a rush of heat through . . . oh,hell .

“That’s when you get your wolf-man. Like the ones