I looked at the dashboard clock when I parked in front of the house. I’d been gone only forty-five minutes. I sure felt a lot more than forty-five minutes older. I got out and crossed the yard to the front door.

As I came close to the damn sign, I ripped it out of the ground. Moving with a lot more velocity, I strode over to the neighbor’s house. Jim Collins was looking out of his open front window when I jabbed the stake into his dirt. Well, yee-haw. “You damn murderer,” I said, and then I made myself walk away before I climbed through the window to choke Collins.

His creased face had been shocked and almost frightened, and for a blinding second I’d felt sorry that he didn’t have a weak heart. After seeing the pathetic heaps of blood and fur, I would have enjoyed the sensation of scaring him to death.

I didn’t knock on Bernie’s door since I was staying there, and once I was inside, I went right to the kitchen at the back of the house. Sam, Bernie, and Craig were all there. They looked eerily alike as I appeared in the kitchen: apprehensive, upset, unhappy.

“All the dogs at the shelter are dead,” I said. “They were shot.”

Sam rose to take a tentative step toward me, and I could tell he wanted to offer me comfort. But I was too angry to accept it, and I held the palm of my hand toward him to let him know that.

“I moved the sign into Jim Collins’s yard,” I said. “That man’s a murderer.” My rage deflated just a little.

“Oh, Sookie,” Bernie began, sounding both alarmed and a little reproachful, and I held up the same palm to her.

“It was him,” I said. “He was not the only one, but it was him.”

She sat back and looked at me with more objective attention than she’d given me since I’d met her. “And you know this how?” she said.

“He’s condemned by his own words, from his own brain.”

“Sookie can read minds, Mom,” Sam said, and after a second’s thought, Bernie flushed a dull red. She had thought a few unflattering things about me. I’m a big girl; I can live with that. It wasn’t like I hadn’t heard plenty of similar things before.

“Shapeshifters are hard to read, if that makes you feel any better,” I offered, and I sat down at the table with a thud. As the rage oozed out of me, it left an empty space, an aching hole. I looked down at my leg as if I could see it through my clothes, see the thickened, whiter flesh of the scarring. I made myself sit straighter. This family had enough on their plate without having to bolster me up.