Sookie Stackhouse Boxed Set (Books 1-8) - Charlaine Harris [886]
She bowed her head. “The prince is my grandfather,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “So, we’re like cousins?”
She looked down at me, her eyes clear and dark and calm. She didn’t look like a woman who’d just killed two wolves as quick as you could snap your fingers. “Yes,” she said. “I guess we are.”
“So what do you call him? Granddaddy? Popsy?”
“I call him ‘my lord.’ ”
“Oh.”
She stepped away to check out the wolves she’d disposed of (I was pretty sure they were still dead), so I went over to the lion. I crouched beside him and put my arm around his neck. He rumbled. Automatically, I scratched the top of his head and behind his ears, just like I did with Bob. The rumble intensified.
“Sam,” I said. “Thanks so much. I owe you my life. How bad are your wounds? What can I do about them?”
Sam sighed. He laid his head on the ground.
“You’re tired?”
Then the air around him got hyper, and I pulled away from him. I knew what was coming. After a few moments, the body that lay beside me was human, not animal. I ran my eyes over Sam anxiously and I saw that he still had the wounds, but they were much smaller than they’d been on his lion form. All shape-shifters are great at healing. It says a lot about the way my life had changed that it didn’t seem significant to me that Sam was buck naked. I had kind of gone beyond that now—which was good, since there were bare bodies all around me. The corpses were changing back, as well as the injured wolves.
It had been easier to look at the bodies in wolf form.
Cal Myers and his sister, Priscilla, were dead, of course, as were the two Weres Claudine had dispatched. Amanda was dead. The skinny girl I’d met in the Hair of the Dog was alive, though severely wounded in the upper thigh. I recognized Amanda’s bartender, too; he seemed unscathed. Tray Dawson was cradling an arm that looked broken.
Patrick Furnan lay in the middle of a ring of the dead and wounded, all of them Priscilla’s wolves. With some difficulty, I picked my way through broken, bloody bodies. I could feel all the eyes, wolf and human, focus on me as I squatted by him. I put my fingers on his neck and got nothing. I checked his wrist. I even put my hand against his chest. No movement.
“Gone,” I said, and those remaining in wolf form began to howl. Far more disturbing were the howls coming from the throats of the Weres in human form.
Alcide staggered over to me. He appeared to be more or less intact, though streaks of blood matted his chest hair. He passed the slain Priscilla, kicking her corpse as he went by. He knelt for a moment by Patrick Furnan, dipping his head as though he was bowing to the corpse. Then he rose to his feet. He looked dark, savage, and resolute.
“I am the leader of this pack!” he said in a voice of absolute certainty. The scene became eerily quiet as the surviving wolves absorbed that.
“You need to leave now,” Claudine said very quietly right behind me. I jumped like a rabbit. I’d been mesmerized by the beauty of Alcide, by the primitive wildness rolling off him.
“What? Why?”
“They’re going to celebrate their victory and the ascension of a new packmaster,” she said.
The skinny girl clenched her hands together and brought them down on the skull of a fallen—but still twitching—enemy. The bones broke with a nasty crunch. All around me the defeated Weres were being executed, at least those who were severely wounded. A small cluster of three scrambled to kneel in front of Alcide, their heads tilted back. Two of them were women. One was an adolescent male. They were offering Alcide their throats in surrender. Alcide was very excited. All over. I remembered the way Patrick Furnan had celebrated when he got the packmaster job. I didn’t know if Alcide was going to fuck the hostages or kill them. I took in my breath to exclaim. I don’t know what I would’ve said, but Sam’s grimy hand clapped over my mouth.