As I examined my legs, I realized it could have been much worse. The sparks had caught my apron, not my pants, and Sam had been very quick with the extinguisher. Now I appreciated his checking the extinguishers every year; I appreciated his going down to the fire station to get them refilled; I appreciated the smoke alarms. I had a flash of what might have been.

Deep breath, I told myself as I patted my legs dry. Deep breath. Think of how good it feels to be clean. It had felt wonderful to wash away the smell, to lather up my hair, to rinse out all the smell along with the shampoo.

I couldn’t stop worrying about what I’d seen when I’d looked out Merlotte’s window: a short figure running toward the building, holding something in one hand. I hadn’t been able to tell if the runner was a man or a woman, but one thing I was sure of: The runner was a supe, and I suspected he—or she—was a twoey. This suspicion gained more weight when I added in the speed and agility of the runner and the strength and accuracy of the throw—the bottle had come at the window harder than a human could have hurled it, with enough velocity to shatter the window.

I couldn’t be 100 percent sure. But vampires don’t like to handle fire. Something about the vampire condition causes them to be extra flammable. It would take a very confident, or very reckless, fanger to use a Molotov cocktail as a weapon.

For that reason alone, I was inclined to put my money on the bomber being a twoey—a shapeshifter or were of some variety. Of course, there were other sorts of supernatural creatures like elves and fairies and goblins, and they were all quicker than humans. To my regret, the whole incident had happened too swiftly for me to scope out the bomber’s mind. That would have been decisive, because vampires are a big blank to me, a hole in the aether, and I also can’t read fairies, though they register differently. Some twoeys I can read with fair accuracy, some I can’t, but I see their brains as warm and busy.