Sookie Stackhouse Boxed Set (Books 1-8) - Charlaine Harris [674]
“When we’re together, we get attacked by Weres,” Quinn said.
“It’s my fault,” I said. “I’m so sorry I dragged you into this.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I’m known for hanging with a desperate crowd.”
We were lying face to face, and Quinn sort of nudged me with his leg. He was trying to tell me something, and I wasn’t getting it.
The two men in the front seat were talking to each other about a cute girl crossing the street at a traffic light. Just listening to the conversation was almost enough to make you swear off men, but at least they weren’t listening to us.
“Remember when we talked about my mental condition?” I said carefully. “Remember what I told you about that?”
It took him a minute because he was hurting, but he got the hint. His face squinched up as if he were about to chop some boards in half, or something else requiring all his concentration, and then his thought shoved into my head. Phone in my pocket, he told me. The problem was, the phone was in his right pocket, and he was lying on that side. There was hardly room for him to turn over.
This called for a lot of maneuvering, and I didn’t want our captors to see it. But I managed, finally, to work my fingers into Quinn’s pocket, and made a mental note to advise him that, under this set of circumstances, his jeans were too tight. (Under other circumstances, no problem with the way they fit.) But extricating that phone, with the van rocking, while our Were assailants checked on us every minute or so, that was difficult.
Queen’s headquarters on speed dial, he told me when he felt the phone leave his pocket. But that was lost on me. I didn’t know how to access speed dial. It took me a few moments to make Quinn understand that, and I’m still not sure I how I did it, but finally he thought the phone number at me, and I awkwardly punched it in and pressed SEND. Maybe we hadn’t thought that through all the way, because when a tiny voice said, “Hello?” the Weres heard it.
“You didn’t search him?” the driver asked the passenger incredulously.
“Hell no, I was trying to get him in the back and get myself out of the rain,” the man who had pinched me snarled right back. “Pull over, dammit!”
Has someone had your blood? Quinn asked me silently, though this time he could have spoken, and after a precious second, my brain kicked in. “Eric,” I said, because the Weres were out their doors and running to open the rear doors of the van.
“Quinn and Sookie have been taken by some Weres,” Quinn said into the phone I was holding to his mouth. “Eric the Northman can track her.”
I hoped Eric was still in New Orleans, and I further hoped whoever answered the phone at the queen’s headquarters was on the ball. But then the two Weres were yanking open the van doors and dragging us out, and one of them socked me while the other hit Quinn in the gut. They yanked the phone from my swollen fingers and tossed it into the thick undergrowth at the side of the road. The driver had pulled over by an empty lot, but up and down the road were widely spaced houses on stilts in a sea of grasses. The sky was too overcast for me to get a fix on our direction, but I was sure now we’d driven south into the marshes. I did manage to read our driver’s watch, and was surprised to find out it was already past three in the afternoon.
“You dumb shit, Clete! Who was he calling?” yelled a voice from the second van, which had pulled over to the side of the road when we did. Our two captors looked at each other with identical expressions of consternation, and