From Dead to Worse

designated shelves, and while the water was getting hot, I got down two cups and saucers and put them on a tray. I added the sugar bowl and a tiny pitcher with milk and two spoons. Napkins! I thought, and wished I had some cloth ones instead of regular paper. (This was how Octavia Fant made me feel, without her using a bit of magic on me.) I heard the water running in the hall bathroom just as I put a handful of cookies on a plate and added that to the assemblage. I didn’t have any flowers or a little vase, which was the only other thing I thought of that I could’ve added. I picked up the tray and made my way slowly down the hall to the living room.
    I set the tray down on the coffee table in front of Ms. Fant. She looked up at me with her piercing eyes and gave me a curt nod of thanks. I realized that I could not read her mind. I’d been holding off, waiting for a moment when I could really give her her proper due, but she knew how to block me out. I’d never met a human who could do that. For a second I felt almost irritated. Then I remembered who and what she was, and I scooted off to my room to make my bed and visit my own little bathroom. I passed Amelia in the hall, and she gave me a scared look.
    Sorry, Amelia, I thought, as I closed my bedroom door firmly. You’re on your own.
    I didn’t have to be at work until the evening, so I put on some old jeans and a Fangtasia T-shirt (“The Bar with a Bite”). Pam had given it to me when the bar first started selling them. I slid my feet into some Crocs and went into the kitchen to fix my own beverage, coffee. I made some toast and got the local paper I’d grabbed when I’d answered the door. Rolling the rubber band off, I glanced at the front page. The school board had met, the local Wal-Mart had donated generously to the Boys and Girls Club’s after-school program, and the state legislature had voted to recognize vampire-human marriages. Well, well. No one had thought that bill would ever pass.
    I flipped open the paper to read the obituaries. First the local deaths—no one I knew, good. Then the area deaths—oh, no.
    MARIA-STAR COOPER , read the heading. The item said only, “Maria-Star Cooper, 25, a resident of Shreveport, died unexpectedly at her home yesterday. Cooper, a photographer, is survived by her mother and father, Matthew and Stella Cooper of Minden, and three brothers. Arrangements are pending.”
    I felt suddenly out of breath and sank into the straight-back chair with a feeling of total disbelief. Maria-Star and I hadn’t exactly been friends, but I’d liked her well enough, and she and Alcide Herveaux, a major figure in the Shreveport Were pack, had been going together for months. Poor Alcide! His first girlfriend had died violently, and now this.
    The phone rang and I jumped. I grabbed it up with a terrible feeling of disaster. “Hello?” I said cautiously, as if the phone could spit at me.
    “Sookie,” said Alcide. He had a deep voice, and now it was husky with tears.
    “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I just read the paper.” There was nothing else to say. Now I knew why he’d called the night before.
    “She was murdered,” Alcide said.
    “Oh, my God.”
    “Sookie, it was only the beginning. On the off chance that Furnan is after you, too, I want you to stay alert.”
    “Too late,” I said after a moment given to absorbing this awful news. “Someone tried to kill me last night.”
    Alcide held the phone away from him and howled. Hearing this, in the middle of the day, over the telephone ... Even then, it was frightening.
    Trouble within the Shreveport pack had been brewing for a while. Even I, separated from Were politics, had known that. Patrick Furnan, the leader of the Long Tooth pack, had gotten his office by killing Alcide’s father in combat. The victory had been legal—well, Were legal—but there had been a few not-so-legal plays along the way. Alcide—strong, young, prosperous, and packing a grudge—had always been a threat to Furnan, at least in Furnan’s mind.
    This was a tense topic, since Weres were secret from the human population, not out in the open like vampires. The day was coming, and coming soon, when the shifter population would step forward. I’d heard them speak of it over and over. But that hadn’t happened yet, and it wouldn’t be good if the first knowledge the humans had of the Weres was of bodies turning up all over the place.
    “Someone will be over there right away,” Alcide