Sookie Stackhouse Boxed Set (Books 1-8) - Charlaine Harris [679]
I laid my head on Quinn’s shoulder and I closed my eyes. But the voices didn’t get any closer, and we didn’t hear the baying of wolves, and nothing bit my leg to drag me down. “That’s what gators do, you know,” I told Quinn. “They pull you under and drown you, and stick you somewhere so they can snack on you.”
“Babe, the wolves aren’t going to eat us today, and neither will the gators.” He laughed, a low rumble deep in his chest. I was so glad to hear that sound. After a moment, we began moving through the water again. The trees and the bits of land became close together, the channels narrow, and finally we came up on a piece of land large enough to hold a cabin.
Quinn was half supporting me when we staggered out of the water.
As shelter, the cabin was poor stuff. Maybe the structure had once been a glorified hunting camp, three walls and a roof, no more than that. Now it was a wreck, halfway fallen. The wood had rotted and the metal roof had bent and buckled, rusting through in spots. I went over to the heap of man-tailored material and searched very carefully, but there didn’t seem to be anything we could use as a weapon.
Quinn was occupied by ripping the remnants of the duct tape off his wrists, not even wincing when some skin went with it. I worked on my own more gently. Then I just gave out.
I slumped dismally to the ground, my back against a scrubby oak tree. Its bark immediately began making deep impressions in my back. I thought of all the germs in the water, germs that were doubtless speeding through my system the moment they’d gained entry through the cuts on my wrists. The unhealed bite, still covered by a now-filthy bandage, had doubtless received its share of nasty particles. My face was swelling up from the beating I’d taken. I remembered looking in the mirror the day before and seeing that the marks left by the bitten Weres in Shreveport had finally almost faded away. Fat lot of good that had done me.
“Amelia should have done something by now,” I said, trying to feel optimistic. “She probably called vampire HQ. Even if our own phone call didn’t reach anyone who’d do something about it, maybe someone’s looking for us now.”
“They’d have to send out human employees. It’s still technically daylight, even though the sky’s so dark.”
“Well, at least the rain’s over with,” I said. At that moment, it began to rain again.
I thought about throwing a fit, but frankly, it didn’t seem worth using up the energy. And there was nothing to do about it. The sky was going to rain, no matter how many fits I threw. “I’m sorry you got caught up in this,” I said, thinking that I had a lot for which to apologize.
“Sookie, I don’t know if you should be telling me you’re sorry.” Quinn emphasized the pronouns. “Everything has happened when we were together.”
That was true, and I tried to believe all this wasn’t my fault. But I was convinced that somehow, it really was.
Out of the blue, Quinn said, “What’s your relationship with Alcide Herveaux? We saw him in the bar last week with some other girl. But the cop, the one in Shreveport, said you’d been engaged to him.”
“That was bullshit,” I said, sitting slumped in the mud. Here I was, deep inside a southern Louisiana swamp, the rain pelting down on me . . .
Hey, wait a minute. I stared at Quinn’s mouth moving, realized he was saying something, but waited for the trailing end of a thought to snag on something. If there’d been a lightbulb above my head, it would have been flashing. “Jesus Christ, Shepherd of Judea,” I said reverently. “That’s who’s doing this.”
Quinn squatted in front of me. “You’ve picked who’s been doing what? How many enemies do you have?”
“At least I know who sent the bitten Weres, and who had us kidnapped,” I said, refusing to be sidetracked. Crouched together in the downpour