“You need to put on some socks,” I said, wondering if he paused because he thought he was wearing some other man’s garments. “They’re mine,” I said reassuringly. “Your feet must be tender.”

“Yes,” said Preston, and rather slowly, he bent to put them on.

“You need help?” I was pouring the soup in a bowl.

“No, thank you,” he said, his face hidden by his thick dark hair as he bent to the task. “What smells so good?”

“I heated some soup for you,” I said. “You want coffee or tea or…”

“Tea, please,” he said.

I never drank tea myself, but Amelia had some. I looked through her selection, hoping none of these blends would turn him into a frog or anything. Amelia’s magic had had unexpected results in the past.

Surely anything marked LIPTON was okay? I dunked the tea bag into the scalding water and hoped for the best.

Preston ate the soup carefully. Maybe I’d gotten it too hot. He spooned it into his mouth like he’d never had soup before. Maybe his mama had always served homemade. I felt a little embarrassed. I was staring at him, because I sure didn’t have anything better to look at. He looked up and met my eyes.

Whoa. Things were moving too fast here. “So, how’d you get hurt?” I asked. “Was there a skirmish? How come your pack left you?”

“There was a fight,” he said. “Negotiations didn’t work.” He looked a little doubtful and distressed. “Somehow, in the dark, they left me.”

“Do you think they’re coming back to get you?”

He finished his soup, and I put his tea down by his hand. “Either my own pack or the Monroe one,” he said grimly.

That didn’t sound good. “Okay, you better let me see your wounds now,” I said. The sooner I knew his fitness level, the sooner I could decide what to do. Preston removed the towel from around his neck, and I bent to look at the wound. It was almost healed.

“When were you hurt?” I asked.

“Toward dawn.” His huge tawny eyes met mine. “I lay there for hours.”

“But…” Suddenly I wondered if I’d been entirely intelligent, bringing a stranger into my home. I knew it wasn’t wise to let Preston know I had doubts about his story. The wound had looked jagged and ugly when I’d found him in the woods. Yet now that he came into the house, it healed in a matter of minutes? What was up? Weres healed fast, but not instantly.

“What’s wrong, Sookie?” he asked. It was pretty hard to think about anything else when his long wet hair was trailing across his chest and the blue towel was riding pretty low.

“Are you really a Were?” I blurted, and backed up a couple of steps. His brain waves dipped into the classic Were rhythm, the jagged, dark cadence I found familiar.

Preston Pardloe looked absolutely horrified. “What else would I be?” he said, extending an arm. Obligingly, fur rippled down from his shoulder and his fingers clawed. It was the most effortless change I’d ever seen, and there was very little of the noise I associated with the transformation, which I’d witnessed several times.

“You must be some kind of super werewolf,” I said.

“My family is gifted,” he said proudly.

He stood, and his towel slipped off.

“No kidding,” I said in a strangled voice. I could feel my cheeks turning red.

There was a howl outside. There’s no eerier sound, especially on a dark, cold night; and when that eerie sound comes from the line where your yard meets the woods, well, that’ll make the hairs on your arm stand up. I glanced at Preston ’s wolfy arm to see if the howl had had the same effect on him, and saw that his arm had reverted to human shape.

“They’ve returned to find me,” he said.

“Your pack?” I said, hoping that his kin had returned to retrieve him.

“No.” His face was bleak. “The Sharp Claws.”

“Call your people. Get them here.”

“They left me for a reason.” He looked humiliated. “I didn’t want to talk about it. But you’ve been so kind.”

I was not liking this more and more. “And that reason would be?”

“I was payment for an offense.”

“Explain in twenty words or less.”

He stared down at the floor, and I realized he was counting in his head. This guy was one of a kind. “Packleader’s sister wanted me, I didn’t want her, she said I’d insulted her, my torture was the price.”

“Why would your packleader agree to any such thing?”

“Am I still supposed to number my words?”

I shook my head. He’d sounded dead serious. Maybe he just had a really deep sense of humor.

“I’m not my packleader’s favorite person, and he was willing to believe I was guilty. He himself wants the sister of the Sharp Claw packmaster, and it would be a good match from the point of view of our packs. So, I was hung out to dry.”

I could sure believe that the packmaster’s sister had lusted after him. The rest of the story was not outrageous, if you’ve had many dealings with the Weres. Sure, they’re all human and reasonable on the outside, but when they’re in their Were mode, they’re different.

“So, they’re here to get you and keep on beating you up?”

He nodded somberly. I didn’t have the heart to tell him to rewind the towel. I took a deep breath, looked away, and decided I’d better go get the shotgun.

Howls were echoing, one after another, through the night by the time I fetched the shotgun from the closet in the living room. The Sharp Claws had tracked Preston to my house, clearly. There was no way I could hide him and say that he’d gone. Or was there? If they didn’t come in…

“You need to get in the vampire hole,” I said. Preston turned from staring at the back door, his eyes widening as he took in the shotgun. “It’s in the guest bedroom.” The vampire hole dated from when Bill Compton had been my boyfriend, and we’d thought it was prudent to have a light-tight place at my house in case he got caught by day.

When the big Were didn’t move, I grabbed his arm and hustled him down the hall, showed him the trick bottom of the bedroom closet. Preston started to protest-all Weres would rather fight than flee-but I shoved him in, lowered the “floor,” and threw the shoes and junk back in there to make the closet look realistic.

There was a loud knock at the front door. I checked the shotgun to make sure it was loaded and ready to fire, and then I went into the living room. My heart was pounding about a hundred miles a minute.

Werewolves tend to take blue-collar jobs in their human lives, though some of them parlay those jobs into business empires. I looked through my peephole to see that the werewolf at my front door must be a semipro wrestler. He was huge. His hair hung in tight gelled waves to his shoulders, and he had a trimmed beard and mustache, too. He was wearing a leather vest and leather pants and motorcycle boots. He actually had leather strips tied around his upper arms, and leather braces on his wrists. He looked like someone from a fetish magazine.

“What do you want?” I called through the door.

“Let me come in,” he said, in a surprisingly high voice.

Little pig, little pig, let me come in!

“Why would I do that?” Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.

“Because we can break in if we have to. We got no quarrel with you. We know this is your land, and your brother told us you know all about us. But we’re tracking a guy, and we gotta know if he’s in there.”

“There was a guy here, he came up to my back door,” I called. “But he made a phone call and someone came and picked him up.”

“Not out here,” the mountainous Were said.

“No, the back door.” That was where Preston ’s scent would lead.

“Hmmmm.” By pressing my ear to the door, I could hear the Were mutter, “Check it out,” to a large dark form, which loped away. “I still gotta come in and check,” my unwanted visitor said. “If he’s in there, you might be in danger.”

He should have said that first, to convince me he was trying to save me.