"Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 05 - Dead as a Doornail" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harris Charlaine)

bearded face was raised to the darkening sky. Calvin Norris waited until Jason was climbing out the
passenger’s door of my old Nova before he walked over and bent to my window. I rolled it down.

His golden-green eyes were as startling as I’d remembered, and the rest of him was just as
unremarkable. Stocky, graying, sturdy, he looked like a hundred other men I’d seen in Merlotte’s Bar,
except for those eyes.

“I’ll take good care of him,” Calvin Norris said. Behind him, Jason stood with his back to me. The air
around my brother had a peculiar quality; it seemed to be vibrating.

None of this was Calvin Norris’s fault. He hadn’t been the one who’d bitten my brother and changed him
forever.

Calvin, a werepanther, had been born what he was; it was his nature. I made myself say, “Thank you.”

“I’ll bring him home in the morning.”

“To my house, please. His truck is at my place.”

“All right, then. Have a good night.” He raised his face to the wind again, and I felt the whole community
was waiting, behind their windows and doors, for me to leave.

So I did.

Jason knocked on my door at seven the next morning. He still had his little Wal-Mart bag, but he hadn’t
used anything in it. His face was bruised, and his hands were covered with scratches. He didn’t say a
word. He just stared at me when I asked him how he was, and walked past me through the living room
and down the hall. He closed the door to the hall bathroom with a decisive click. I heard the water
running after a second, and I heaved a weary sigh all to myself. Though I’d gone to work and come
home tired at about two a.m., I hadn’t gotten much sleep.

By the time Jason emerged, I’d fixed him some bacon and eggs. He sat down at the old kitchen table
with an air of pleasure: a man doing a familiar and pleasant thing. But after a second of staring down at
the plate, he leaped to his feet and ran back into the bathroom, kicking the door shut behind him. I
listened to him throw up, over and over.

I stood outside the door helplessly, knowing he wouldn’t want me to come in. After a moment, I went
back to the kitchen to dump the food into the trash can, ashamed of the waste but utterly unable to force
myself to eat.

When Jason returned, he said only, “Coffee?” He looked green around the gills, and he walked like he
was sore.

“Are you okay?” I asked, not sure if he would be able to answer or not. I poured the coffee into a mug.

“Yes,” he said after a moment, as though he’d had to think about it. “That was the most incredible
experience of my life.”
For a second, I thought he meant throwing up in my bathroom, but that was sure no new experience for
Jason. He’d been quite a drinker in his teens, until he’d figured out that there was nothing glamorous or
attractive about hanging over a toilet bowl, heaving your guts out.