The Sookie Stackhouse Companion

about Sam’s age putting gas in his car at the filling station. I caught his eye as I drove by, and he turned away pointedly. Perhaps he’d recognized the truck. I saw an elderly woman walking her dog, an equally elderly dachshund. She nodded civilly. I nodded back.
    I found Hall Road without any trouble and took a right. It was a dusty stretch of asphalt with a few straggling businesses, places in little faux-adobe structures spaced far apart. I began looking at signs, and it didn’t take long to spot the one that read LOS COLMILLOS COUNTY ANIMAL SHELTER. It stood in front of a very small cement block building. Roofed pens extended in a long line on either side of a concrete run behind the building.
    I turned off the motor and jumped out of the truck. I was struck by how quiet it was. Outside any animal shelter, I would expect to hear yapping and barking.
    The pens out back were silent.
    The front door was unlocked. I took a deep breath, let it out. I steeled myself and pushed it open, left it that way.
    I stepped into a little room containing a desk topped with a battered and grimy old computer. There was a phone with an answering machine, half-buried under a pile of folders. A dilapidated file cabinet stood in a corner. In the opposite corner were two huge bags of dog food and some plastic containers of chemicals that I supposed were used to clean the pens. And that was all.
    A door in the center of the rear wall stood open. I could see that it allowed access to the runway between the pens where the ownerless dogs were kept.
    Had been kept.
    They were all dead. I’d stepped through the door with dread in my heart, and that dread was justified. Bundles of bloody fur were in every cage.
    I squatted simply because my knees gave way. My face was wet without my even realizing I’d started crying.
    I’d seen dead human beings plenty of times, and the sight hadn’t made me feel this awful. I guess, in the back of my mind, I believed most people could defend themselves to some extent, if only by running away. And I also believed people sometimes—sometimes—shared responsibility in the situation that brought about their deaths, if only by making unwise choices. But animals . . . not animals.
    I heard another car pull into the parking area. I looked out through the open doors to see the black Ford Focus with the cracked windshield. If I could have felt more frightened, I would have. Its doors opened, and three ill-assorted people got out and approached the animal shelter slowly, their heads swinging from side to side as they sniffed the air. They came through the little room very carefully, the tallest man in the lead.
    “What’s happened here, babe?” he said. He was tall and muscular, with a shaved head and purple eyes. I knew him fairly well. His name was Quinn, and he was a weretiger.
    “Someone shot all the dogs,” I said, stating the obvious because I was trying desperately to pull myself together. I hadn’t seen Quinn in weeks, not since he’d tried to visit me at my home. That hadn’t worked out too well.
    Quinn knew they were dead already. His sense of smell had told him that. He squatted down by me. “I came to Wright to make a chance to talk to you,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be here, with all this death around us.”
    One of Quinn’s companions came to stand by him. The two of them were like a pair of amazing bookends. Quinn’s friend was a huge man, a coal black man, with his hair in short dreads. He looked like some exotic animal, and, of course, he was. He stared down at me with an incurious assessment, and then his eyes moved to the sad corpses in the pens, the streaks of blood running everywhere. The blood was beginning to dry at the edges.
    Quinn extended his hand to me, and together we stood up.
    “I don’t understand why anyone would do this to our brothers,” the black man said, his English clear and crisp but heavily accented.
    “It’s because of the wedding today,” I said. “Bernie Merlotte’s younger son is getting married.”
    “But a younger son will never change into anything. Only the oldest son.” His accent was sort of French, which made the whole conversation more surrealistic.
    “People here don’t seem to know that,” I said. “Or maybe they just don’t care.”
    The third wereanimal was pacing outside the pens, circling the area. She would pick up the scents of the shooter. Or shooters. Tears were streaming down her face, and that wouldn’t