APRIL

I love spring for all the obvious reasons. I love the flowers blooming (which happens early here in Louisiana); I love the birds twittering; I love the squirrels scampering across my yard.

I love the sound of werewolves howling in the distance.

No, just kidding. But the late, lamented Tray Dawson had once told me that spring is the favorite season of werewolves. There’s more prey, so the hunt is over quickly, leaving more time to eat and play. Since I’d been thinking about Weres, it wasn’t such a surprise to hear from one.

On that sunny morning in the middle of April, I was sitting on my front porch with my second cup of coffee and a magazine, still wearing my sleep pants and my Superwoman T-shirt, when the Shreveport packleader called me on my cell phone.

“Huh,” I said, when I recognized the number. I flipped the phone open. “Hello,” I said cautiously.

“Sookie,” said Alcide Herveaux. I hadn’t seen Alcide in months. Alcide had ascended to the position of packleader the year before in a single evening of mayhem. “How are you?”

“Right as rain,” I said, nearly meaning it. “Happy as a clam. Fit as a fiddle.” I watched a rabbit hop across the clover and grass twenty feet away. Spring.

“You’re still dating Eric? He the reason for the good mood?”

Everyone wanted to know. “I’m still dating Eric. That sure helps keep me happy.” Actually, as Eric kept telling me, “dating” was a misleading term. Though I didn’t think of myself as married since I’d simply handed him a ceremonial knife (Eric had used my ignorance as part of his master strategy), the vampires did. A vampire-human marriage isn’t exactly like a “love, honor, and obey” human pairing, but Eric had expected the marriage would earn me some perks in the vampire world. Since then, things had gone pretty well, vampire-wise. Aside from the huge glitch of Victor not letting Eric come to my aid when I was dying, that is—Victor, who really needed to die.