Sookie Stackhouse Boxed Set (Books 1-8) - Charlaine Harris [607]
The creature on top of me was a brand-new fresh half Were, so young he could only have been bitten in the past three weeks. He was in such a frenzy that he had attacked before he had finished with the partial change that a bitten Were can achieve. His face was still elongating into a muzzle, even as he tried to choke me. He would never attain the beautiful wolf form of the full-blooded Were. He was “bitten, not blood,” as the Weres put it. He still had arms, he still had legs, he had a body covered with hair, and he had a wolf ’s head. But he was just as savage as a full-blood.
I clawed at his hands, the hands that were gripping my neck with such ferocity. I wasn’t wearing my silver chain tonight. I’d decided it would be tacky, since my date was himself a shifter. Being tacky might have saved my life, I thought in a flash, though it was the last coherent thought I had for a few moments.
The Were was straddling my body, and I brought my knees up sharply, trying to give him a big enough jolt that he’d loosen his hold. There were shrieks of alarm from the few remaining pedestrians, and a higher, more piercing shriek from Quinn’s attacker, whom I saw flying through the air as if he’d been launched from a cannon. Then a big hand grasped my attacker by his own neck and lifted him. Unfortunately, the half beast who had his hands wrapped around my throat didn’t let me go. I began to rise from the pavement, too, my throat becoming more and more pinched by the grip he had on me.
Quinn must have seen my desperate situation, because he struck the Were on top of me with his free hand, a slap that rocked the Were’s head back and simply knocked him for a loop so thoroughly that he let go of my neck.
Then Quinn grabbed the young Were by the shoulders and tossed him aside. The boy landed on the pavement and didn’t move.
“Sookie,” Quinn said, hardly sounding out of breath. Out of breath is what I was, struggling to get my throat to open back up so I could gulp in some oxygen. I could hear a police siren, and I was profoundly thankful. Quinn slipped his arm under my shoulders and held me up. Finally I breathed in, and the air was wonderful, blissful. “You’re breathing okay?” he asked. I gathered myself enough to nod. “Any bones broken in your throat?” I tried to raise my hand to my neck, but my hand wasn’t cooperating just at the moment.
His face filled my scope of vision, and in the dim light of the corner lamp I could see he was pumped. “I’ll kill them if they hurt you,” he growled, and just then, that was delightful news.
“Bitten,” I wheezed, and he looked horrified, checking me over with hands and eyes for the bite mark. “Not me,” I elaborated. “Them. Not born Weres.” I sucked in a lot of air. “And maybe on drugs,” I said. Awareness dawned in his eyes.
That was the only explanation for such insane behavior.
A heavyset black patrolman hurried up to me. “We need an ambulance at the Strand,” he was saying to someone on his shoulder. No, it was a little radio set. I shook my head.
“You need an ambulance, ma’am,” he insisted. “Girl over there says the man took you down and tried to choke you.”
“I’m okay,” I said, my voice raspy and my throat undeniably painful.
“Sir, you with this lady?” the patrolman asked Quinn. When he turned, the light flashed off his name pin; it said Boling.
“Yes, I am.”
“You . . . ah, you got these punks offa her?”
“Yes.”
Boling’s partner, a Caucasian version of Boling, came up to us then. He looked at Quinn with some reservation. He’d been examining our assailants, who had fully changed to human form before the police had arrived. Of course, they were naked.
“The one has a broken leg,” he told us. “The other is claiming his shoulder’s dislocated.”
Boling shrugged. “Got what was coming to ’em.” It might have been my imagination, but he, too, seemed a bit more cautious when he looked at my date.
“They got more than they expected,” his partner said neutrally.