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

“Shifting,” I said tentatively.

He nodded, cradling his coffee mug in his hands. He held his face over the steam rising from the hot,
strong blackness. He met my eyes. His own were once again their ordinary blue. “It’s the most incredible
rush,” he said. “Since I was bitten, not born, I don’t get to be a true panther like the others.”

I could hear envy in his voice.

“But even what I become is amazing. You feel the magic inside you, and you feel your bones moving
around and adapting, and your vision changes. Then you’re lower to the ground and you walk in a whole
different way, and as for running, damn, you can run. You can chase. . . .” And his voice died away.

I would just as soon not know that part, anyway.

“So it’s not so bad?” I asked, my hands clasped together. Jason was all the family I had, except for a
cousin who’d drifted away into the underworld of drugs years before.

“It’s not so bad,” Jason agreed, scraping up a smile to give me. “It’s great while you’re actually the
animal. Everything’s so simple. It’s when you’re back to being human that you start to worry about stuff.”

He wasn’t suicidal. He wasn’t even despondent. I wasn’t aware I’d been holding my breath until I let it
out. Jason was going to be able to live with the hand he’d been dealt. He was going to be okay.

The relief was incredible, like I’d removed something jammed painfully between my teeth or shaken a
sharp rock out of my shoe. For days, weeks even, I’d been worried, and now that anxiety was gone.
That didn’t mean Jason’s life as a shape-shifter would be worry-free, at least from my point of view. If he
married a regular human woman, their kids would be normal. But if he married into the shifter community
at Hotshot, I’d have nieces or nephews who turned into animals once a month. At least, they would after
puberty; that would give them, and their auntie Sook, some preparation time.

Luckily for Jason, he had plenty of vacation days, so he wasn’t due at the parish road department. But I
had to work tonight. As soon as Jason left in his flashy pickup truck, I crawled back into bed, jeans and
all, and in about five minutes I was fast asleep. The relief acted as a kind of sedative.

When I woke up, it was nearly three o’clock and time for me to get ready for my shift at Merlotte’s. The
sun outside was bright and clear, and the temperature was fifty-two, said my indoor-outdoor
thermometer. This isn’t too unusual in north Louisiana in January. The temperature would drop after the
sun went down, and Jason would shift. But he’d have some fur—not a full coat, since he turned into
half-man, half-cat—and he’d be with other panthers. They’d go hunting. The woods around Hotshot,
which lay in a remote corner of Renard Parish, would be dangerous again tonight.

As I went about eating, showering, folding laundry, I thought of a dozen things I’d like to know. I
wondered if the shifters would kill a human being if they came upon one in the woods. I wondered how
much of their human consciousness they retained in their animal form. If they mated in panther form,
would they have a kitten or a baby? What happened when a pregnant werepanther saw the full moon? I
wondered if Jason knew the answer to all these questions yet, if Calvin had given him some kind of
briefing.

But I was glad I hadn’t questioned Jason this morning while everything was still so new to him. I’d have