Dead But Not Forgotten by Charlaine Harris

me to come put up our Christmas tree. I’m not interested in any quick rides.”
    â€œOh. Okaythen. MerryChristmas.” I grabbed my stuff off the floor and headed for the door. “Wait, I haven’t paid my check.”
    â€œThat’s okay,” he said. “It’s on me.”
    â€œNo, no, you’ve got that wife and kids.” I reached into my pocket to pull out a couple of twenties and put them on the bar. It was Uncle Desmond’s money anyway.
    â€œMa’am?” Sam said as I was unlocking the door.
    â€œYou change your mind?”
    â€œNo, I just thought you might want to get dressed before you go outside.”
    â€œYeah, good idea.”
    As soon as I was out the door, I zoomed off and ducked behind a tree before Sam could notice that I didn’t have a car in the parking lot. He locked the door pretty emphatically, and a few minutes later, I saw him come around the back, look around nervously, then get into his truck and drive away. I didn’t bother to follow him to make sure he was going home.
    Before I put the rest of my clothes back on, I’d caught a glimpse of my reflection in the window—or rather that other woman’s reflection—and I looked pretty damned good. If Sam didn’t want a piece of that, then Sookie didn’t have anything to worry about.
    But something was still hinky at Merlotte’s. I broke my spell so I would look like myself again and started sniffing around the parking lot. Uncle Desmond says my sense of smell is better than most weres, which can be good or bad depending on what’s around to smell.
    The edges of the parking lot were okay other than a couple of spots where drunks had decided to pee before they got into their cars, but the closer I got to the building, the worse it smelled. There were whole layers of stinky, but it wasn’t just the garbage in the Dumpster.
    Somebody had cast a curse on Merlotte’s. Worse! They’d cast a crapload of curses.
    I moved away before I barfed up that burger and started counting out the number of curses I thought had to be in effect. First up was something to make food go bad quick. Another must have made clean surfaces sticky even after cleaning. There was also either a clumsiness spell, or a spell to make waitresses tired enough to be clumsy. Maybe something to make people cranky, too, but that could have been a side effect of the other spells. Plus I spotted a colony of rats living around the foundations of Merlotte’s that hadn’t been there when I’d visited before, and I didn’t think it was just because of the bad food. Finally, something was keeping Sam sick enough that he couldn’t smell the curses or the rats.
    That was somewhere between five and seven curses, and there might be more I hadn’t caught. It would have taken days for a witch to cast all those spells, which was bad luck for her. It meant she would have left her scent around. I cast around for a while but with weather and normal outdoor smells, it was too diffuse outside. I was hoping I’d have better luck inside, and fortunately for Sam’s windows, one of the other presents in my Christmas bag was a set of lock picks that were better than my old ones and maybe a little enchanted. It didn’t take me any time at all to get inside the back door, and I was glad to see I’d flustered Sam so much he’d forgotten to set the alarm.
    It took over half an hour of sniffing to finally isolate the scent of a person who’d been around a lot but that didn’t match any of the stuff in the employee lockers. On the good side, it gave me the chance to catch a couple of overconfident rats. It had been a long time since lunch.
    Once I had the scent clear in my head, it was time to go hunting. If the witch hadn’t been local, I’d have been out of luck, but I was betting that any witch who came to Merlotte’s over and over again had to be in Bon Temps.