"Tell me," Alcide said, bending down to look me in the eyes. He nodded, satisfied with what he saw. I opened my mouth. "In as few words as possible," he added.

Apparently, time was of the essence.

"Palomino found where Felipe was keeping a guy hostage, a guy we needed to rescue. Discreetly. I kind of resemble her, so to leave her cover intact, I pretended to be her wearing this waitress outfit." I glared at Mustapha. "That the casinos picked out," I added, to make myself clear. Alcide gave me a little shake to speed me up.

"Okay! So Bill and I came out with the hostage and we were gonna drive off, when this group of four Weres comes up, and the leader, Van-whom I'd seen here, by the way, so I thought he was okay-Van tells us you sent them to get me and I need to come with them, because they've found Warren's body and they want me to verify that it's really Warren."

Alcide turned his back and shook his head from side to side. Mustapha looked down at the floor, his face a map of complex emotions.

"So Bill headed to the-away, with the hostage, and I got in the car with Van and them, and I realized pretty quick that they were rogues because you wouldn't have 'em. That Van ..." And then I just didn't want to talk about him anymore.

"He hit you, huh?" Alcide said, turning back to eye my face. There was a moment of fraught silence. "He rape you?"

"Didn't have time," I said, glad to get that out of the way. "I don't know where they were taking me, but Mustapha shot the driver and got me out of the car, and here I am. So. Thank you, Mustapha."

He bobbed his head, still involved in his own thoughts, his own worry for his friend.

"Was there a woman with them, kind of quiet, about thirty?"

"Pixie haircut?"

Both the men looked blank. "Real short hair, light brown, tall woman?"

Alcide nodded vigorously. "Yes, that's her! She okay?"

"Yeah. She was sitting in the passenger front. Who is she?"

"She's my undercover," Alcide said.

"You have undercover agents?"

"Yeah, of course. Her name's Kandace. Kandace Moffett."

"Can you please explain all this?" I hated to sound stupid. Telepaths get used to knowing stuff, I guess.

"I'll give you the Reader's Digest version," he said, to my surprise. "But come in the bathroom and wash yourself off while I fill you in. Mustapha, man, I owe you."

"I know," Mustapha said. "Just help me find Warren. That's all I need."

Alcide hustled me into a bathroom right off the entrance hall. It was all granite countertops and pure white towels, and I felt like the nastiest thing the cat had ever drug in. Alcide didn't necessarily mind the blood, because that's not a Were hang-up, but I sure did. I turned on the shower and stepped under it after shucking my shoes, which were the cleanest things I was wearing. When Alcide's back was turned, I stepped out of the waitress outfit and let it fall to the floor of the shower. I grabbed a washcloth, soaped it up, and began scrubbing. Alcide resolutely kept his eyes turned away.

"Start talking," I reminded him, and he did.

"After I talked to you about Jannalynn, I began to think about her pretty seriously," he said. "The more I took her recent actions apart, the more I thought I should look deeper. I figured out that Jannalynn was not telling me the truth about a few things. I wondered if maybe she was skimming off the top at Hair of the Dog." He shrugged. "Sometimes when she was supposed to be around, she was out of touch. I thought maybe her romance with Sam was going over the top, but when she'd tell me one thing about them, you didn't seem to know anything about it. And Sam's your partner, so you'd know, I figured."

So he'd called me to talk about Sam and Jannalynn's "wedding plans," at least in part to hear my reaction; of course, I'd been completely shocked.

"I saw her one time when she didn't see me. She was at a bar way across town, instead of at the Hair. And she was with the rogues I had turned down. I knew she was planning something. I'd had them all over at social evenings at the house, talked to 'em. The only one worth anything was Kandace, and she wasn't sure she wanted to be in a pack. Didn't like the power struggles. I got to respect that, but I thought she'd be an asset."

I thought maybe he'd also liked Kandace's assets, but that was his business.

"So I called up Kandace, and I asked her to meet me alone. Without me even bringing it up, she volunteered to tell me what was going on, because it troubled her."

Alcide clearly wanted me to give Kandace a virtual pat on the back, so I said, "She must be a good person."

He smiled, gratified. "Kandace said Jannalynn wanted to challenge me, defeat me, but first she wanted to get a good toehold in the pack by socking away some money, enlisting pack members to her side, getting some of her own muscle. Her proposal to these rogues was that they could come into the pack if they'd do her bidding; then when she beat me, she'd let them have full benefits."

I wondered if that included health and dental, but I wasn't going to go down a side path while he was still in a sharing mood. I hung up the washcloth and poured a dollop of shampoo into my hands. I began to scrub my scalp and hair. "Go on," I said, by way of encouragement.

"So," he said. "I got a guy she didn't know to follow Jannalynn. He saw her meeting with your buddy Claude. There's just no good reason for that."

I stopped rinsing the shampoo from my hair. "What ... why? Why was she meeting with Claude, of all people?"

"I have no idea," Alcide said.

"So all we have to do is find Jannalynn and ask her a lot of questions," I said. "And find Warren. And hope that Claude comes back from Faery, so I can question him. And get Felipe and his vamps to leave us alone, here in Shreveport. And get that Freyda out of here."

Alcide looked at me, wondered whether to speak, and decided on full disclosure. "Is it true, Sookie? Palomino told Roy that Eric's engaged to a vampire from Oklahoma?"

"I can't talk about it," I said. "Or I'll get real upset, Alcide, and you just don't want that tonight. I owe Palomino a solid favor for getting us in to rescue ... a guy, but she shouldn't be telling vampire business around town."

"You owe her more of a solid than you know," he said. "She saw you being grabbed, and she called me. Right before Bill did. That was smart, Sook, getting him to call. It was all I could do to get him to continue on his way and check back in later. I promised him I'd keep you safe."

"So you called Mustapha? You've known where he was all along?"

"No, but after I got your phone messages, I called him. As you'd advised, when Jannalynn wasn't around. He'd run down his last lead on Warren, and he had to talk to someone. I still don't know where he's been hiding."

"But it's thanks to you that he found me in time."

"Both our efforts and some guessing, too. He knows those rogues. He figured they'd head back to their house outside Fillmore. Van does bad stuff to women, and he'd want to have some time with you before he handed you over to Jannalynn. The follow-up car was his idea, too."

"Oh my God." I felt sick, wondered if I was going to throw up. No. I got hold of myself.

After a little rinsing, I was as clean as I was going to get. Alcide left the bathroom so I could change into my more modest shorts and T-shirt. It was really interesting how much difference a few covered inches could make in your self-respect. Now that I felt more like myself, I could begin to think some more.

I came out of the bathroom. Alcide was having a beer, and Mustapha was drinking a Coca-Cola. I accepted one, too, and the cold sweetness tasted wonderful going down.

"So what are you going to do with the rogues, for right now?" I asked.

"I'm going to stow them in a reinforced shed my dad built," Alcide said. Jackson, his dad, had owned a farm outside Shreveport where the pack could run at the full moon.

"So you have a special place to stow people," I said. "I'm sure Jannalynn has a special place, too. You been thinking about where that might be?"

"Jannalynn's from Shreveport," Alcide said. "So, yeah, I've been thinking. She lives in the apartment above Hair of the Dog, so that's out. No place there; besides, we'd have heard Warren if he'd been stashed there, or we'd have smelled him."

"If he was alive," I said, very quietly.

"If he wasn't, definitely we'd have smelled him," Alcide said, and Mustapha nodded, his face expressionless.

"So where does she have of her own, a place she could be fairly sure no one else would go?"

"Her mom and dad retired to Florida last year," Alcide said. "But they sold their house. Our computer guy who works at the tax assessor's office couldn't find anything else in Jannalynn's name."

"You sure that house sold? In this market?"

"That's what she told me. And the sign was down, last time I went by," Alcide said.

Mustapha stirred. "It's on a big lot, and it's pretty far out of Shreveport," he said. "I was out that way once, driving with Jannalynn, when the pack was courting me. She said she used to ride dirt bikes out there. They had horses, too."

"Anyone can take down a sign," I said.

Alcide got a call just then and talked to the pack members who'd secured my abductors. They were on their way to Alcide's farm. "You don't have to be too civil," Alcide said into the phone, and I could hear the laughter that came from the other end of the line.

I'd been struck by another thought, and as we went out to Alcide's car, I said, "I guess growing up as a full-blooded Were in Shreveport, Jannalynn would be pretty much bound to know all the others around her age. Even the kids who weren't full-blood."

Alcide and Mustapha shrugged, almost in unison. "We did," they said, and then smiled at each other, though their growing tension made that hard to do.

"Kym Rowe was half-Were and not much older than Jannalynn," I observed. "Her folks came out to my house. Her dad's Oscar, a full Were." Mustapha stopped in his tracks, his head bowed. "Mustapha, was it Jannalynn who made you let Kym into Eric's house?"

"Yeah," he said, and Alcide stopped and turned to him. His face was hard and accusing. Mustapha said to both of us, "She told me she had Warren. She told me I had to let this Rowe girl into the house. That was all I had to do."

"So it was her plan," I said carefully. "Her plan. To get Eric to drink from this girl?"

"No, it was not her plan," Mustapha said clearly. "She was hired to find a Were girl willing to carry it out, but it was the plan of this dude named Claude. I've seen him at your place. Your cousin?"

Chapter 13

I was shocked. I was more than shocked.

And the first coherent thought I had was, If Dermot was in on this, it'll break my heart. Or I'll break his neck.

In our long drive through the night to Jannalynn's parents' former place, I had more time than I needed to think, or maybe not enough. I was scrambling for some solid foothold, some sure thing. "Why?" I said out loud. "Why?"

"I sure don't know," Mustapha said. "The day I came to your house on the run, it was everything I could do to sit at the table with that Dermot and not try to choke it out of him."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because I didn't know if he was in on it. That Dermot, he's always nice, and he seems to have a lot of love for you. I just couldn't see him stabbing you in the back like that. Or taking Warren, either, though I could see he might think that wasn't so bad-not knowing Warren, hardly knowing me."

I had to assume it had been Claude's blood that had made Kym so irresistible to Eric.

"Dammit," I said, and leaned forward to bury my face in my hands. I was glad to be sitting in the backseat where neither of them could see my face.

"Sookie, we'll figure all this out," Alcide said. He sounded very confident and strong. "We'll get this all taken care of. We'll clear Eric with the police."

From which I understood he was scared I'd start crying. I could sort of sympathize with that, and, anyway, first things first. I was kind of beyond crying. I'd already shed enough tears.

Glancing out the window, I saw we were now in a suburban area where the lots were at least four acres; maybe this had been out in the country once upon a time, until Shreveport had grown.

"It's right around here," Mustapha said, and when we saw a white fence bordering the road, he said, "This is it. I remember the fence."

There was a horse gate across the driveway, and I hopped out to move it because I just wanted to get out of the car. They drove through and I followed them. It was completely dark out here, no streetlights. There was a security light in the front yard, but that was it. No lights on in the ranch-style house or in the freestanding garage a few feet behind it, where the driveway terminated. A dilapidated swing set rusted in the front yard. I pictured little Jannalynn playing on it, and found myself picturing a swing hitting her in the head.

I grimly erased that image and joined the two men who'd gotten out of the car to stand uncertainly in the noisy night. The crickets and all the other myriad bugs of Louisiana were having a concert in the woods that bordered the property. I heard a dog bark, far away.

"Now we break in," Alcide said, and I said, "Wait."

"But-" Mustapha began.