Dead and Gone

keeping my voice calm and level. “You seem to be the only one upset, Arlene.”
    She glared around the bar, trying to catch the eyes of various patrons. She knew every one of them. Arlene was genuinely shocked to realize more people weren’t sharing her reaction. Sam came to sit in front of her. He looked up at her face with his beautiful doggy eyes.
    I took another step closer to Whit, just in case. Whit was deciding what to do, considering jumping Sam. But who would join him in beating up a collie? Even Whit could see the absurdity, and that made him hate Sam all the more.
    “How could you?” Arlene screamed at Sam. “You been lying to me all these years! I thought you were human, not a damn supe!”
    “He is human,” I said. “He’s just got another face, is all.”
    “And you,” she said, spitting out the words. “You’re the weirdest, the most inhuman, of them all.”
    “Hey, now,” Jason said. He leaped to his feet, and after a moment’s hesitation, Mel joined him. His date looked alarmed, though Jason’s lady friend just smiled. “You leave my sister alone. She babysat your kids and she cleaned your trailer and she put up with your shit for years. What kind of friend are you?”
    Jason didn’t look at me. I was frozen in astonishment. This was a very un-Jason gesture. Could he have grown up a little bit?
    “The kind that don’t want to hang around with unnatural creatures like your sister,” Arlene said. She tore off her apron, said, “I quit this place!” to the collie, and stomped back to Sam’s office to retrieve her purse. Maybe a fourth of the people in the bar looked alarmed and upset. Half of them were fascinated with the drama. That left a quarter on the fence. Sam whined like a sad dog and put his nose between his paws. After that got a big laugh, the discomfort of the moment passed. I watched Whit and his buddy ease out the front door, and I relaxed when they were gone.
    Just on the off chance Whit might be fetching a rifle from his truck, I glanced over at Bill, who glided out the door after him. In a moment he was back, nodding at me to indicate the FotS guys had driven away.
    Once the back door thunked closed behind Arlene, the rest of the evening went pretty well. Sam and Tray retired to Sam’s office to change back and get dressed. Sam returned to his place behind the bar afterward as if nothing had happened, and Tray went to sit at the table with Amelia, who kissed him. For a while, people steered a little clear of them, and there were lots of surreptitious glances; but after an hour, the atmosphere of Merlotte’s seemed just about back to normal. I pitched in to serve Arlene’s tables, and I made sure to be especially nice to the people still undecided about the night’s events.
    People seemed to drink heartily that night. Maybe they had misgivings about Sam’s other persona, but they didn’t have any problem adding to his profits. Bill caught my eye and raised his hand in good-bye. He and Clancy drifted out of the bar.
    Jason tried to get my attention once or twice, and his buddy Mel sent big smiles my way. Mel was taller and thinner than my brother, but they both had that bright, eager look of unthinking men who operate on their instincts. In his favor, Mel didn’t seem to agree with everything Jason said, not the way Hoyt always had. Mel seemed to be an okay guy, at least from our brief acquaintance; that he was one of the few werepanthers who didn’t live in Hotshot was also a fact in his favor, and it may even have been why he and Jason were such big buddies. They were like other werepanthers, but separate, too.
    If I ever began speaking to Jason again, I had a question for him. On this major evening for all Weres and shifters, how come he hadn’t taken the chance to grab a little of the spotlight for himself? Jason was very full of his altered status as a werepanther. He’d been bitten, not born. That is, he’d contracted the virus (or whatever it was) by being bitten by another werepanther, rather than being born with the ability to change as Mel had been. Jason’s changed form was manlike, with hair all over and a pantherish face and claws: really scary, he’d told me. But he wasn’t a beautiful animal, and that griped my brother. Mel was a purebred, and he would be gorgeous and frightening when he transformed.
    Maybe the werepanthers had been asked to lie low because panthers were simply too scary. If something as big and lethal as a panther had