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allowed access to the runway between the pens where the ownerless dogs were kept.
    Had been kept.
    They were all dead. I’d stepped through the door with dread in my heart, and that dread was justified. Bundles of bloody fur were in every cage.
    I squatted simply because my knees gave way. My face was wet without my even realizing I’d started crying.
    I’d seen dead human beings plenty of times, and the sight hadn’t made me feel this awful. I guess, in the back of my mind, I believed most people could defend themselves to some extent, if only by running away. And I also believed people sometimes—sometimes—shared responsibility in the situation that brought about their deaths, if only by making unwise choices. But animals . . . not animals.
    I heard another car pull into the parking area. I looked out through the open doors to see the black Ford Focus with the cracked windshield. If I could have felt more frightened, I would have. Its doors opened, and three ill-assorted people got out and approached the animal shelter slowly, their heads swinging from side to side as they sniffed the air. They came through the little room very carefully, the tallest man in the lead.
    “What’s happened here, babe?” he said. He was tall and muscular, with a shaved head and purple eyes. I knew him fairly well. His name was Quinn, and he was a weretiger.
    “Someone shot all the dogs,” I said, stating the obvious because I was trying desperately to pull myself together. I hadn’t seen Quinn in weeks, not since he’d tried to visit me at my home. That hadn’t worked out too well.
    Quinn knew they were dead already. His sense of smell had told him that. He squatted down by me. “I came to Wright to make a chance to talk to you,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be here, with all this death around us.”
    One of Quinn’s companions came to stand by him. The two of them were like a pair of amazing bookends. Quinn’s friend was a huge man, a coal black man, with his hair in short dreads. He looked like some exotic animal, and, of course, he was. He stared down at me with an incurious assessment, and then his eyes moved to the sad corpses in the pens, the streaks of blood running everywhere. The blood was beginning to dry at the edges.
    Quinn extended his hand to me, and together we stood up.
    “I don’t understand why anyone would do this to our brothers,” the black man said, his English clear and crisp but heavily accented.
    “It’s because of the wedding today,” I said. “Bernie Merlotte’s younger son is getting married.”
    “But a younger son will never change into anything. Only the oldest son.” His accent was sort of French, which made the whole conversation more surrealistic.
    “People here don’t seem to know that,” I said. “Or maybe they just don’t care.”
    The third wereanimal was pacing outside the pens, circling the area. She would pick up the scents of the shooter. Or shooters. Tears were streaming down her face, and that wouldn’t help her sense of smell. She was also furious. The set of her shoulders was eloquent.
    “Babe, I don’t know that this wedding is going to go off without more trouble,” Quinn said. His big hand took mine. “I have a lot to say to you, but it’s going to have to wait until later.”
    I nodded. The wedding day of Craig Merlotte and Deidra Lisle had definitely gotten off to a sad start. “Anything that upsets the Merlotte family upsets me. How did you come to be here?” I tried to keep my gaze away from the pitiful, limp forms.
    “I was checking the twoey message board for information about the Shreveport area,” Quinn said. “Sam posts on there from time to time, or sometimes I talk to the members of the Long Tooth pack.” The Long Tooth pack was Alcide Herveaux’s. “Someone posted that you were coming to Wright with Sam, and I already knew Trish and Togo here. Texas is part of my territory, you know.” Quinn worked for Special Events, a branch of