A/N – This is my first fanfic, so please bear with me! I'm still working on the story line, but I wanted to get this first chapter out and "test the waters" so to speak. All criticism is greatly appreciated!
I don't own the characters, except maybe a few original ones added later to enhance the story. They are Ms. Harris' property and I hope she doesn't mind me taking them for a spin around the block!
----------------------------------------
CHAPTER 1
"Bye, Sam" I called as I walked through the employee parking lot toward my car. Even though Merlotte's hadn't been particularly busy tonight, I was still glad my shift was done and I was heading home. I was bone tired and wanted nothing more than my bed.
"Later, Sook" Sam answered back as he headed to his double wide behind the bar. Even though Sam was my boss, he was also one of my best friends. He had helped me through some pretty rough stuff and I knew I could always count on him to be there if I needed someone.
I opened the door of my not-so-gently-used car and flopped down into the driver's seat, the engine sputtering to life as I turned the key in the ignition. I drove around the building through the empty parking lot and pulled onto the highway toward home. The car windows were down and the warm night air whirled around me as I drove, whipping my ponytail back and forth against my neck. The radio was tuned to a soft rock station and I hummed along to the music as I drove.
It was just a short drive from Sam Merlotte's bar to Gran's house (well, it was really my house now, but part of me will always think of it as Gran's house) and before I knew it I was turning off of Hummingbird Drive into my driveway. I pulled around to the back and shut the car off. I was secretly glad I had installed the safety lights at the back of the house – it always made me feel a little better to know that at least I would be able to see who was trying to kill me instead of meeting my death shrouded in ignorance.
I unlocked the back door and went straight to my room. Amelia had gone to New Orleans for a few days at her father's request (I wondered how that was going) and Octavia was spending the night at her friend's house in Monroe, so I had the house all to myself tonight. Peeling off the white T-shirt and black shorts that was our regular summer uniform, I decided I would probably smell and sleep better if I had a shower. I felt like I had a thousand pounds of bar ick caked all over me.
I turned on the shower and waited for the steam to start rolling out across the top of the curtain. I stepped under the spray and let the water cascade over me, little rivers of warmth running all down my body. Grabbing the soap and lathering myself up, my mind wandered back to what seemed like a thousand nights ago. I had begun my shower that night in the same fashion, but that's where the similarities ended. That night, the curtain had been pulled back and the most breathtaking, most delectable, most annoying, most undead Viking in all of Louisiana had stepped in with me. Until that night, I hadn't known soap could be so...so...sexy. My insides were like churning lava as I remembered Eric washing my body, drying my body, tasting my body, claiming my body...
I quickly finished my shower and toweled myself briskly, rubbing my skin with way more force than was really needed to dry off. As if that would somehow erase Louisiana's answer to heaven on earth (or heaven in bed, at the very least) from my mind. I rummaged through my chest of drawers and pulled out a pair of comfortable old jersey shorts and a big, baggy T-shirt. I grabbed a comb from the bathroom and proceeded through the house and out the front door to sit on the porch and comb the tangles out of my hair.
As I began to carefully work the comb through my snarled locks, my first thought was of Bill Compton and how he used to take great pleasure in combing my hair out for me after I had washed it. Bill was my first vampire, my first love (and lover), and my first heartbreak. And my neighbor, I said to myself glumly as I looked toward the cemetery that separated my house from his. I remembered the night he walked into Sam Merlotte's bar and my life. Until that night I had just been your average, run-of-the-mill telepathic barmaid. I was blissfully unaware that I had been leading a ho-hum existence until Bill introduced me to the world of vampires, Weres, and various and sundry supernatural beings. Now here I was, my mind doing a flip-flop dance with Bill and Eric, and I knew that wasn't good. Man, I've got to get myself a hobby.
On a more serious note, I was puzzled and had more than hurt feelings that I had heard virtually nothing from Eric since Felipe de Castro's hostile takeover of Louisiana and Arkansas. I felt almost nothing of him through our blood bond, although I could tell the bond was still there. It was almost like a radio that you could see sitting on a shelf, but it wasn't turned on. I hadn't wanted it, had fought it actually, and now that it was in neutral gear I found myself...missing it?
I was just getting geared up to play an exhausting game of Eric Tug of War with myself when a rustling in the woods at the edge of the yard caught my ear. For a moment my skin turned to goose flesh and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I was prepared to bolt for the front door when a figure stepped out of the wooded darkness and said "Hi, Miss Sookie! Beautiful night, huh?"
"Bubba!" I called back weakly, releasing a breath I didn't realize I had been holding. "You gave me quite a start."
"I'm sorry, Miss Sookie," Bubba replied, looking chagrined. "It's just me. I was sent here by Mr. Eric to give you a message." He gave me a lopsided grin and his face had the self-satisfactory look of a seven year old that had just completed a top-secret spy mission. I giggled to myself at the thought of The Man From Memphis as a CIA operative.
"Well, why don't you come on up here to the porch and tell me about it?" Dealing with Bubba was like dealing with a small child, which was really quite a paradox when you considered, in his human life, this man's fan club included the entire planet.
Bubba lumbered through the yard and up the front steps. "Please sit down," I said, patting the empty space beside me on the porch swing. He looked hesitant at first then sat down beside me. "So, what is Eric's message and why did he ask you to deliver it to me instead of telling me himself?" I hoped I wasn't throwing too much too fast at Bubba – it certainly didn't pay to upset him.
"He told me to tell you he wants you to come to Fangtasia on Friday night.," Bubba recited. "He said to dress real nice, 'cause there's something special going on."
"Did he say what the 'something special' was, Bubba?" I quizzed. I was mildly irritated that I had heard nothing from Eric for weeks then here comes a command appearance out of the blue. And he couldn't even do his own commanding!
"No ma'am, just that you needed to be there, and he would send a car to pick you up at eight o'clock." I sat back in the swing and knitted my brows, still wondering what was up with all the cloak and dagger, but knowing I would get no more from Bubba on the subject. He was only good for a couple of items of information at one time, three tops.
His message having been delivered, I figured Bubba would jump up and take off back into the woods (he never was one to hang around for more than a few minutes) but he settled deeper into the swing and a look came over his face that gave me goose flesh all over again.
"You know, things aren't always what they seem, Sookie," he said quietly. My head snapped to attention on two counts: one, Bubba's voice had just taken on a most ominous tenor, and two, he never addressed me as just Sookie, without the "Miss" in front of it. I looked at his face and his eyes met mine with a clarity that made Baccarat crystal seem opaque. "Most folks only see what they want to see. I don't tell them any different because that's exactly how I want it."
Jesus Christ, Shepherd of Judea! It's a good thing I had been sitting down, otherwise I would have been a crumpled heap on the porch. Shock, bewilderment, and a hundred other emotions hit my body like a runaway freight train, but I did my best to shove them down deep inside me. Knowing Bubba's history of instability, I didn't want an emotional outburst from me to trigger a tirade in him. I put on the best neutral face I could muster (I was pretty good, too, a talent I had perfected from years of trying to cover up my ability to read people's minds) and urged him to continue.
"I don't know how much you might know about my 'other life,' but it was pretty out of control before I...uh, until...that night. I didn't even feel like I was my own person any more. If I'da had to admit it beforehand, I honestly don't think I woulda minded just throwing in the towel and giving it all up."
I had to listen close, because at this point Bubba's voice was barely above a whisper. There was a kinda far-off look in his eyes, and I was so torqued I could barely move or breathe. I could tell all this had been bottled up inside him for over three decades, and it was like once the cork popped he couldn't stop the flow.
"Anyway," he continued, his slight drawl becoming more pronounced, "first thing I remember was waking up in one of those slide-out refrigerated drawers in an unused storage room in the morgue. The idiot who turned me – I don't know if I should be referring to him that way or not – went half crazy saying he didn't know if he shoulda done it, didn't know how he coulda been so stupid, hoping he wasn't gonna get staked for being so irresponsible, that he was just a fan and had panicked, hoping my transformation wouldn't be altered by...you know...uh, all the drugs..." Bubba actually looked a little embarrassed at this revelation, and I gently put a hand over his to let him know I wasn't going to judge how he had lived his human life. This seemed to give him the strength he needed to continue.
"The local vamps took me in, but I could tell they really didn't know what to do with me. I didn't say much at first because they were worried, like my maker, that all the drugs could have affected my 'coming over.' It was all new to me and I didn't know how I was supposed to feel or act. The more I thought about it those first few days, the more I knew that was exactly how it needed to happen. I decided I would act like all the drugs had messed up my mind, and it worked like a charm. Since I'd had no choice in what had happened, I thought maybe this could be a way to escape the traps of my other life.
"Before I knew it, I was being passed around from area to area, the entire southern vamp population taking care of me and looking after me. Because I was a new vampire and didn't have glamour yet, and because my face was so recognizable, other vamps would help me out with humans so I could, you know, feed." Bubba squirmed a little in the swing, and I gave his hand a little squeeze. I knew this revelation, while cathartic, must be terribly painful for him. "When enough time had passed that they assumed I could use glamour, they stopped helping. But, the glamour never happened for me, even to this day. I guess maybe all the drugs did have an effect, after all. Anyway, since I can't glamour humans for blood, I had to either drink the bottled stuff, which, by the way, is worse than elephant piss, (I stifled a giggle at this analogy) or do animals." He made a mildly disgusted look with his face. "For whatever reason, cats tasted less horrible than the others, so I kinda stuck with them. Which, I guess in the end has helped me in my charade."
"So all of this is just an act?" I wasn't sure whether I had voiced a question or a statement. My mind was still trying to get a handle on what I'd just heard. I hesitated for a moment before asking the obvious question, but I decided that since Bubba had opened the floodgates of honesty, I might as well dive in myself. "Why?"
The warm night breeze blew a lock of Bubba's black hair down over his forehead and for a moment, other than being about twenty shades paler, I was looking at The King as he once was in all his human glory. He leaned back in the swing, and if he were still human I imagine he would have taken a deep breath.
"It didn't take me long to learn that folks, both vamps and humans, seemed more relaxed around me knowing I was 'less' than what I was when I was human. My mama always told me you learned more by listening than you did by talking, so that's what I did. And people have given up lots of secrets around me because they didn't think it mattered one way or the other if I heard 'em." He paused there before going on, and in his silence I could hear the crickets chirping, the breeze rustling the leaves on the trees at the edge of the yard and, somewhere in the distance, an owl softly hooting.
"That's why I told you my story, Sookie. Since that first night Bill asked me to guard your house, I knew there was something special 'bout you. Something a lot of folks couldn't see. But I knew." He turned around in the swing so he could face me directly. His face now had a look of urgency and somehow I just knew what was coming next couldn't be good.
"You've been through a lot since I first met you, and you have managed to survive so far. Lord only knows how, but you have. But really bad things are gonna happen, Sookie, I hear the rumblings. Victor Madden's up to something...something evil and destructive, but I'm just not sure what. I wanted to come here and warn you, but I didn't know if you were being watched." Bubba's voice had an almost conspiratorial tone now. "When I heard Eric say he needed to get a message to you, I volunteered." His eyes narrowed and he leaned closer to me as he continued his warning.
"I'll keep my ears open, but you gotta be careful. Until I know what's going on for sure, anyone's a potential target, especially you. You're not a supe, so you can't defend yourself the way the others can. I'll keep you posted as best I can. I can't stand by any more and not say anything. I don't wanna see you hurt any more than you already have been." Bubba stood up to leave and I stood up, too, and walked with him to the steps.
He turned around at the edge of the porch and threw his arms around me in a big, unvampirelike hug. My eyebrows almost met my hairline in surprise. Then it dawned on me: in case someone is watching the house. "You can't let anyone know my secret," he whispered in my ear. "I'd be dead for real if someone found out." With that, he gave me a little squeeze and sprinted down the steps.
He turned and waved when he reached the woods at the edge of the yard, a big Bubba grin all over his face. "Bye, Miss Sookie. I'll tell Mr. Eric you'll see him on Friday!"
"You do that, Bubba," I called back from the porch. And just like that, he disappeared into the darkness.
I turned around and went back into the house, taking care to lock the deadbolt after I closed the front door. Whoo boy, I thought as I leaned against the door. Eric is gonna effing freak if he finds out about Bubba. I was glad our bond was in "downtime" mode, because I didn't even want to think about what would happen if he could feel tonight's events. I was, however, going to have to call him about his demands for Friday night. I didn't want him to get the impression that I was always at his beck and call. A beck-and-call girl...I giggled at the mental image. Somehow, I didn't think Eric would think it was too funny.
After shutting off the lamp that was burning in the living room, I made my way down the hall to my bedroom. I climbed into bed, thinking about Bubba and his own personal Great Revelation, all the times he had stood watch over my house, and silently thanked God I didn't have a cat.