Deadlocked: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel

one given me at my birth by the demon Mr. Cataliades. I searched and searched, looking for the signature of a mind, and just when I was going to give up, I felt a faint flicker of thought. “There is someone,” I said very quietly. “There is someone.”
    “Where?” Mustapha asked eagerly.
    “In the attic over the garage,” I said, and it was like I’d fired off the starting gun. Werewolves are creatures of action, after all.
    There were outside stairs on the side of the garage, which I hadn’t seen. The sharper eyes of Alcide and Mustapha had, and up they swarmed. Mustapha, catching a scent he recognized, threw back his head and howled. It made my hair stand up. I moved to the foot of the steps, and though I still couldn’t see much, I could make out the two figures on the landing above beginning a furious motion. It accompanied a rhythmic thud. I realized the two men were throwing themselves against a door. There was a ka-BANG that had to be the door flying back, and then a light came on.
    Mustapha howled again, and I feared that Warren was dead.
    I just couldn’t stand it; the death of the little blond sharpshooter with his pale freckled skin and his missing teeth was somehow more than I could bear tonight. I sank to my knees.
    “Sookie,” Alcide said urgently.
    I looked up. Mustapha was coming down the stairs, a body in his arms. Alcide was right in front of me.
    “He’s alive,” Alcide said. “But he’s been up there without air-conditioning or ventilation or food or water for God knows how long. I guess the bitch couldn’t be bothered. We got to get him some help.”
    “Vampire blood?” I suggested, but very quietly.
    “I think Mustapha might consider that now,” Alcide said, and I knew that Warren must be very bad.
    I called Bill. “Sookie, where are you?” he yelled. “I’ve been calling! What happened?”
    I glanced at the screen. I did have a lot of missed calls. “I had the phone on vibrate,” I said. “I’ll tell you everything, but I want to ask you a favor first. Are you still in Shreveport?”
    “Yes, I’m back outside the Trifecta, trying to pick up the trail of those dogs!”
    “Hey, listen, chill. It’s been a real bad night. I need you now, my friend.”
    “Anything.”
    “Meet me at Alcide’s. You can save a life.”
    “I’m on my way.”
    On our way back into Shreveport, Mustapha took my place in the backseat with Warren’s head on his lap. When I proposed that Bill give Warren a drink to help him live, Mustapha said, “If it can bring him back, I’ll do it. He may hate me later. Hell, I may hate myself. But we got to save him.”
    Our drive back into Alcide’s neighborhood was shorter than our drive out because we knew our way now, but we grudged every stoplight or slow driver ahead of us, and Mustapha’s urgency pounded at me. Warren’s brain signature became weaker, flickered, resumed.
    Sure enough, Bill was standing waiting at Alcide’s, and I leaped out of the car and pulled Bill around to the backseat. When the door opened and he saw Warren, recognition flared in his eyes. Of course, Bill knew Mustapha, and he remembered Warren the shooter. I hoped it hadn’t occurred to Bill that it might be a good thing if he died, since he was yet another witness who could testify—at least in a limited way—to what had happened the night we’d killed Victor.
    “He wasn’t in the club,” I said, grabbing Bill’s wrist, as Mustapha gently lifted Warren’s head so he could vacate the car to leave room for Bill.
    And Bill looked at me, a huge question on his face.
    “Feed him,” I said. Without another word, Bill knelt by the car, bit his own wrist, and held the bleeding wrist over Warren’s parched mouth.
    I don’t know if Warren would have done it if he hadn’t been so thirsty. At first, Bill’s blood trickling into the slack mouth seemed to raise no reaction. But then something sparked in Warren, and he began to consciously drink. I could see his throat moving.
    “Enough,” I said, after a minute. I could sense Warren’s brain firing back up. “Now, take him to the hospital, and they’ll do all the right stuff for him.”
    “But they’ll know.” Alcide was scowling at me, and so was Mustapha. “They’ll question him about who took him.” Bill, standing and holding his wrist, looked only mildly interested.
    “You don’t want the police to arrest Jannalynn?” That seemed like the best of all possible worlds to me.
    “She’d kill