I met his eyes squarely. The shock of recognition was mutual. I'd seen him at the packmaster contest. He was a Were. He'd acted as Patrick Furnan's second in the duel. I'd caught him cheating. Maria-Star had told me his punishment had been having his head shaved. Though his candidate won, this punishment had been exacted, and his hair was just now growing in. He hated me with the passion of the guilty. He half rose from his chair, his first instinct being to come over to me and beat the crap out of me, but when he absorbed the fact that someone had already tried to do that, he smirked.

"Is that your partner?" I asked Detective Coughlin.

"What?" He'd been peering at the computer through reading glasses, and he glanced over at the younger man, then back at me. "Yeah, that's my new partner. The guy I was with at the last crime scene I saw you at, he retired last month."

"What's his name? Your new partner?"

"Why, you going after him next? You can't seem to settle on one man, can you, Miss Stackhouse?"

If I'd been a vampire, I could have made him answer me, and if I were really skilled, he wouldn't even know he'd done it.

"It's more like they cant settle on me, Detective Coughlin," I said, and he gave me a curious look. He waved a finger toward the blond detective.

"That's Cal. Cal Myers." He seemed to have called up the right form, because he began to take me through the incident once again, and I answered his questions with genuine indifference. For once, I had very little to hide.

"I did wonder," I said, when we'd concluded, "if they'd taken drugs."

"You know much about drugs, Miss Stackhouse?" His little eyes went over me again.

"Not firsthand, but of course, from time to time someone comes into the bar who's taken something they shouldn't. These young men definitely seemed… influenced by something."

"Well, the hospital will take their blood, and we'll know."

"Will I have to come back?"

"To testify against them? Sure."

No way out of it. "Okay," I said, as firmly and neutrally as I could. "We through here?"

"I guess we are." He met my eyes, his own little brown eyes full of suspicion. There was no point in my resenting it; he was absolutely right, there was something fishy about me, something he didn't know. Coughlin was doing his best to be a good cop. I felt suddenly sorry for him, floundering through a world he only knew the half of.

"Don't trust your partner," I whispered, and I expected him to blow up and call Cal Myers over and ridicule me to him. But something in my eyes or my voice arrested that impulse. My words spoke to a warning that had been sounding surreptitiously in his brain, maybe from the moment he'd met the Were.

He didn't say anything, not one word. His mind was full of fear, fear and loathing… but he believed I was telling him the truth. After a second, I got up and left the squad room. To my utter relief, Quinn was waiting for me in the lobby.

A patrolman—not Boling—took us back to Quinn's car, and we were silent during the drive. Quinn's car was sitting in solitary splendor in the parking lot across from the Strand, which was closed and dark. He pulled out his keys and hit the keypad to open the doors, and we got in slowly and wearily.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"The Hair of the Dog," he said.

Chapter 9

The Hair of the Dog was off Kings Highway, not too far from Centenary College. It was an old brick storefront. The large windows facing the street were covered with opaque cream curtains, I noticed, as we turned in to the left side of the building to lurch through an alley that led to a parking area at the back. We parked in the small, weedy lot. Though it was poorly lit, I could see that the ground was littered with empty cans, broken glass, used condoms, and worse. There were several motorcycles, a few of the less expensive compact cars, and a Suburban or two. The back door had a sign on it that read NO ENTRANCE—STAFF ONLY.

Though my feet were definitely beginning to protest the unaccustomed high heels, we had to pick our way through the alley to the front entrance. The cold creeping down my spine intensified as we grew close to the door. Then it was like I'd hit a wall, the spell gripped me that suddenly. I stopped dead. I struggled to go forward, but I couldn't move. I could smell the magic. The Hair of the Dog had been warded. Someone had paid a very good witch a handsome amount of money to surround the door with a go-away spell.

I fought not to give in to a compulsion to turn and walk in another direction, any other direction.

Quinn took a few steps forward, and turned to regard me with some surprise, until he realized what was happening. "I forgot," he said, that same surprise sounding in his voice. "I actually forgot you're human."

"That sounds like a compliment," I said, with some effort. Even in the cool night, my forehead beaded with sweat. My right foot edged forward an inch.

"Here," he said, and scooped me up, until he was holding me just like Rhett carried Scarlett O'Hara. As his aura wrapped around me, the unpleasant go-away compulsion eased. I drew a deep breath of relief. The magic could no longer recognize me as human, at least not decisively. Though the bar still seemed unattractive and mildly repellent, I could enter without wanting to be sick.

Maybe it was the lingering effects of the spell, but after we'd entered it, the bar still seemed unattractive and mildly repellent. I wouldn't say all conversation ceased when we walked in, but there was a definite lull in the noise that filled the bar. A jukebox was playing "Bad Moon Rising," which was like the Were national anthem, and the motley collection of Weres and shifters seemed to reorient themselves.

"Humans are not allowed in this place!" A very young woman leaped across the bar in one muscular surge and strode forward. She was wearing fishnet stockings and high-heeled boots, a red leather bustier—well, a bustier that wished it was made of red leather, it was probably more like Naugahyde—and a black band of cloth that I supposed she called a skirt. It was like she'd pulled a tube top on, and then worked it down. It was so tight I thought it might roll up all at once, like a window shade.

She didn't like my smile, correctly reading it as a comment on her ensemble.

"Get your human ass out of here," she said, and growled. Unfortunately, it didn't sound too threatening, since she hadn't had any practice at putting the menace into it, and I could feel my smile widen. The dress-challenged teen had the poor impulse control of the very new Were, and she pulled her hand back to punch me.

Then Quinn snarled.

The sound came from deep in his belly, and it was thunderous, the deep sound of it penetrating every corner of the bar. The bartender, a biker type with beard and hair of considerable length and tattoos that covered his bare arms, reached down below the bar. I knew he was pulling out a shotgun.

Not for the first time, I wondered if I shouldn't start going armed everywhere I went. In my law-abiding life, I had never seen the need until the past few months. The jukebox cut off just then, and the silence of the bar was just as deafening as the noise had been.

"Please don't get the gun out," I said, smiling brightly at the bartender. I could feel it stretching my lips, that too-bright grin that made me look a little nuts. "We come in peace," I added, on a crazy impulse, showing them my empty palms.

A shifter who'd been standing at the bar laughed, a sharp bark of startled amusement. The tension began to ratchet down a notch. The young woman's hand dropped to her side, and she took a step back. Her gaze flickered from Quinn to me and back again. Both the bartender's hands were in sight now.