Thanks for the reviews, favorites, and follows everyone! The last chapter was pretty devoid of Eric/Georgina interaction, so to make up for that... I gave you this! Enjoy!
I spent the pressing hours of the night with my eyes wide and my legs curled up to my chest. It had been two nights since the hundreds of draining creatures had appeared in my head and flung themselves into Pam's, and I couldn't wash any of it from my brain. It was like the artist that lived in the dark crevices of my skull kept painting the same picture over and over again.
They cried, they wailed, they sang for the sea and the sea sang for them.
Bundles of tied flowers sat before me on the coffee table, some pressed and some fresh. The living room smelled like a flower shop delivery truck heading for a wedding—gardenias, begonias, carnations, rhododendrons, hydrangeas, lantana, black-eyed susans, camellias, crested irises, roses, aster, catchfly…
The tips of my fingers were detailed with pink scratches and scarlet scrapes from the rusty garden scissors which badly needed replacement. Long tails of silk ribbons hopped and cavorted across the floor and wrapped themselves around the stems of flowers. The past two mornings Sookie had cautiously descended down the stairs and looked at the terrible mess I'd made with a frown and nothing to say.
The previous night, after I had spent hours listening to Jessi Colter and dusting every inch of the house, Sookie sat me down and explained to me where she'd been the few hours prior to her silly stomping through the front door at ten o'clock, as she expected I may have been worried for her whereabouts—though truthfully, in those hours, I hadn't even realized she was gone. More so, she'd sat me down and vociferated to me the irritation Eric had planted in her head that night.
"'Werewolves. Stay away. They're territorial, vicious, pathologically secretive—nothing like me. And you know what you are? Werewolf bait. So stay away. You'll wreck everything, does your little human mind understand this? Even though I say all this, you're so valuable to me and I want you'," Sookie mimicked dramatically, keeping her voice low, flat, and domineering. I rolled my eyes and giggled, forcing the laughter to my lips so she thought not one small part of me was wounded by what Eric had said to her. I supposed he loved Sookie for all her many redeeming qualities and the sugar that ran in her baby pink blood.
"He's so condescending it makes me madder than a hatter, Gee," Sookie squealed. She retrieved a pitcher of iced tea and refilled my glass, filling a cup of her own as well.
"Maybe he's just lookin' out for you?" I suggested, but she responded to the question with an elaborated roll of her dark eyes.
"Well, I never asked. I don't care if I get myself in trouble and neither should he. I am Bill's and I'll do just 'bout anything to keep it that way."
I always hated it when she referred to herself as Bill's—even though in the vernacular of vampires it sounded much less authoritative than it did in that of humans. Initially she rejected the possessive terminology, but now she used it on the go. She was Bill's; but, I didn't think I ever heard anyone saying Bill was Sookie's. Funny how that worked out.
It was two in the morning when the front door cried with a few gentle knocks. With a half-glass full of Grandpa Earl's aged brandy in hand, I stood up without much grace and schlepped towards the front door, as if Gran's ancient crystal was as heavy as steel.
Through the lace curtain was a tall figure with broad shoulders and dark garments dressing his hard chest. I peaked through the flimsy curtain like a little piglet hesitant to allow the Big Bad Wolf inside. I saw Eric through the pane of glass; normally I would have blushed and opened the door without making eye contact, but the old liquor had done some odd miracle to my poise.
I reached for the rickety, brass doorknob and turned it, opening the front door with a steadiness so atypical of me.
"Pretty darn late for a visit from you, Eric," I said boldly, pushing my glass onto the table beside the front door.
"Where's Sookie?" He asked. I looked at the ground, oddly feeling my heart gain a few pounds in my ribcage. What other reason would he come besides one concerning Sookie?
"Sleepin'."
"Well… that's good."
"Why's that?"
"It's not really—"
"Oh, you're worried about the werewolf this mornin'? Sookie told me 'bout it. She's all safe 'n sound, he didn't do nothin' to her—just ran away like a little girl," I sighed. He looked at me warily, wondering how I was handling the knowledge that supernatural creatures besides vampires existed. "I'm more informed than you'd guess."
"If you're so informed, do you think you could pass on information to her for me?"
"'Course," I nodded. He looked at me expectantly, not saying anything but stabbing his blue eyes deep into me my abdomen and making the hot contents within my veins and arteries bubble with an even more intense heat than that which my brain monitored.
"May I come in?" He asked.
"Don't you already have an invitation?" I asked, my brow knotting together further.
"Something about you tells me I should observe some degree of courtesy. May I come in?"
I blinked, my mouth opening slightly like that of a whale taking in armies of plankton. I nodded. "Sure."
He stepped inside, observing the peeling walls of the foyer in the fresh and dark light of these first and unadulterated hours of the day during which I so liked to study the color of the moonbeams on Gran's garden. I walked into the family room, nervously pushing my hair behind my ears. I focused on the burning the liquor did to my heart and stabilized my confidence. It was no time for sheepishness.
"Interesting," he commented on the piles of flowers, petals, leaves, and ribbons across the floor, sofa, and coffee table. "Project you're working on?"
"What is it you want me to tell Sookie?" I asked, ignoring his jest.
"That I lied to her. I said I had little knowledge of werewolves, but I actually have a substantial amount… My late maker, Godric, and I spent many decades hunting them down, particularly in the second world war. Him and I joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party and posed as members of the Nazi Schutzstaffel in order to infiltrate an operation organized by the Nazi Party which was organized to operate behind the enemy lines of the Allies, called Operation Werwolf.
Members of the organization were branded by the Wolfsangel symbol, which is a Nordic rune that was intended to ward off or capture wolves. Him and I captured a werewolf in Ausburg in 1945, whom I let drink my blood in return for the knowledge of her master. She revealed little, except for the fact that her master was a vampire."
Eric paused before meeting my eyes through clouded corneas, saddened by something that I was unsure of—I figured it was the mention of his late maker.
"I'm sorry 'bout your maker. I wish I could've met him; Sookie told me you lost him in Dallas."
I thought about touching my hand to his—perhaps to catch a glimpse of Godric at some point in his life, as it most likely was caught on his mind at that moment. But I had no way of controlling or predicting what I was going to sense or whether it would be done by means of sight, scent, sound, or whatever else. Not only that, but it was best Eric know the least about me and my idiosyncrasies as possible.
"Thank you, Georgina," he said calmly with a teaspoon of surprise. Perhaps he wasn't used to people putting sentimentality before mission. If that were true, I pitied him and I hoped that that was what inspired him to mind courtesy with me.
"You and Godric were in the SS?" I returned to the topic he had handed me and put me in charge of as the messenger.
"We posed as whatever would help us most," he answered.
"And you were hunting the Nazi werewolves?"
"Yes. But, this pack dates back far further than the Nazi Party."
"So they're not Nazis."
"No, and it's important that you mention that to Sookie. These werewolves are not ordinary; they're organized, highly trained, well-funded, and fueled by vampire blood. Not to mention, they've been working under these conditions for much longer than you'd think."
"Why didn't you just mention this last night when you saw her? It's bad enough she'll probably go off on her own and try an' hunt this wolves down with just a shotgun."
Eric sighed, looking out the window carefully, as though he saw a pair of watching eyes between the branches of the trees or could hear the crack of a twig caught underfoot. He looked back to me hesitantly and I could see the gears turning behind the blue fountains of his eyes. "Well… I don't—I'm not supposed to reveal any of this, and why I am risking this is partly unknown to me but… I owe Sookie."
"Right," I nodded. "Sookie."
I stood up and walked to the kitchen, picking up the glass of brandy I had left beside the door on the way. I didn't feel or hear Eric behind me, but the shadow of a presence leaked into my farthest plane of sensorial knowledge and I suddenly felt my body slide onto the edge of unsettlement. While in the kitchen, I quietly grabbed a glittering kitchen knife and held it behind the base of my spine. The brandy that still boiled in my stomach made me worry for my marksmanship with the hazardous blade, but the firmness of the fear in my heart ended the trembling in my hands.
The rug I stood on buzzed with silent electricity beneath the soles of my feet and I could feel its grain pushing me in one direction, as though the small pieces of fabric were bent in the exact route I was intended to follow.
With my footsteps quieter than the slither of a garden snake through Gran's tangled flower beds, I began to see the shape of a thick-coated creature taking tentative steps from the window sill in the dining room onto the floor. Its long rows of sharp teeth glittered like ivory and were painted with long strokes of red, from tip to gum. Its canary yellow eyes trained on me and its snout released the long and bitter hum of an enemy's growl.
In such a moment of peril, I could feel the entire ground in my body. From Sookie's slippered feet meeting the floorboards in her bedroom a level up to Eric's rushed and blurring footsteps heading towards the dining room. I suddenly had tunnel vision—my target being the life of this house. I could feel its fear and consternation; I wanted it to feel safe. I would do anything to keep it safe. Every small string of muscle in my body twisted and hardened into twine and twinkled electric blue with a static and acidic drone.
As Eric appeared at the opposite entrance of the dining room, the wolf launched at me. And yet all the energy the house could give me—from that in the old ash scattered across the chimney crown to that in the buried skeletons of the Stackhouse elders and pets who were buried deep beneath the ground the house rested on. I was strong, powerful, and I moved with the life force of many instead of one.
The wolf was beneath me on the old ornate rug and I pressed the edge of my kitchen knife into its scraggly, furry neck. The whimper of a puppy sounded before the body below me transformed into that of a human man.
"Georgina!" Eric exclaimed, pushing me away slightly and taking the reigns to which I gripped with a dying mystical power. He clamped his hands around the man's throat and pushed him harder into the ground. "He knows."
"Knows what?" I asked. The light died from my body and slipped back into the old and weathered threads of the rug like the dye that slowly faded from them and into time.
"Who do you work for?" Eric insisted. The dark veins of his arms were like thick, scarlet lines sewn onto his long and pale forearms. I can't remember ever seeing him so livid than he was at that very moment.
"Give me a taste, fucker!" The man snarled through his dirty and crooked teeth.
"Who sent you!?" Eric roared lowly, his hand clenching tighter with an impossible grip.
"I—I can't talk," the man grunted as air struggled to escape his closed throat. His nostrils gasped for air with an unsteady snorting similar to that of a fat, old pig and his mouth raggedly gulped.
Eric hesitated before pulling back his hand, letting loose the man's reddened neck that was scarred with fleshy lesions and ingrown hairs and shaving nicks.
Unsurprisingly, the man scurried away with a bark before lunging on top of Eric. He dug his teeth deep into Eric's chest and ripped out flesh with a dripping mouthful. Eric cried as the grisly man slobbered maniacally and pulled away, smiling something terrible with a mouth dribbling blood. With his satisfactory gulp and the sense of his loss of temporary power, he tried to scamper away once more, but I sent my knife from my hand as fast and straight as a bullet leaves a gun and the sharp blade planted itself deep in the bare flesh of the man's leg. He hollered in agony and fell to the floor on his side. He attempted to curl himself into a infantile ball but Eric's tackle of his stocky body did not permit this.
"For the last time," Eric growled. "Who is your master?"
"Think you can mad-dog me, you dead fucking fanger?"
I crouched and urged Eric to push away his grip. He was as hesitant as he could be in the moment but did as I suggested when I pressed the underside of my hands to the man's neck and scraggly cheek.
I saw the flickering fluorescent lights like heaven peaking through overcast clouds. Cyan and lime green—the name of a bar. It was all blurred, but I could make up the refection of the crescent moon in the window of the dining room and the cloud that crossed it like a crucifix. Cursive letters twirled beneath the crescent moon and cloud, but all I could make out through the smudges of electric colors was a capital "L". People in dark attire lined outside beneath the hanging sign and pushed one another around rambunctiously. It was a club; a bar.
"What you doin', damn fangbanger!?" The man before me exclaimed.
The brand burned on my own neck and I yelped squeamishly, rubbing my neck with my palm before pulling back the hair that hung over the man's shoulder, that of which was disgustingly slick with grease. There was a hideous scar composed of lines forming the same rune I felt on my neck.
"Who is your master!?" Eric shouted.
"If I tell, I'm as dead as you are," the man chuckled. His chortles rolled far away and his soul felt no longer present. When I brushed my hand against his cheek once more, there was nothing there to sense. "You might as well kill me now."
Eric looked at me as if to ask permission, but I made no expression to signal a semblance of approval or not. Eric growled territorially and peeled his lips back farther from his pronounced fangs. "As you wish."
Blood spilled across the old Stackhouse family rug once Eric dug his fangs into the internal carotid artery, ripping out flesh with his bite and swallowing the thick blood with predatory gulps. He drained the man dry faster than I would expect possible, but I had never seen a vampire truly feed on a person before. And when the blood ran in crimson rivulets down his throat and neck and his growling and snarling was as savage as that of the lion, king of all predators, while feeding on the fresh blood of a zebra of antelope, I was oddly enthralled. There was something transfixing about Eric feeding so savagely and being so deeply embedded in his true nature; something almost…kindling.
I didn't feel like possible prey at the moment—not in the way the werewolf was to Eric. I felt more than human and far above the man who lay dead across the dining room carpet with leftover blood sliding across the floor. I wasn't scared or angered by the mess he'd made, I was stirred and excited. I wanted to touch his skin and ignite the fuse that my mind made so mysteriously; I wanted to see him, but I was worried I'd be afraid for what I saw and I was worried I'd be afraid of him once he really knew about me.
"What did you do just then?" Eric asked me quietly, the blood still catching on his teeth and every word.
"Nothin'," I shrugged, speaking in a mumble. "Jus' wanted to see if he had that tattoo them Weres have, an' I was right. Speaking of, I was talkin' to somebody who knew somebody 'bout some Were bar relatively near."
"You have a computer?" He asked as his fangs snapped back into his gums absentmindedly.
"Sure."
Eric stood and looked as though he were ready to follow my every step like a puppy before he stopped himself and looked at the mess he'd made. "I'll clean that…and get you a new rug. Where's the computer?"
I walked out of the dining room and to the foyer, where we could ascend up the stairs. Sookie's bedroom door was closed in spite of my sensing that she was up and about earlier. But at that moment, I wasn't focused on Sookie so much; I was busy with the peculiarities I had faced myself in the past several minutes.
In my bedroom was my old laptop. It was odd having Eric in there with me, and suddenly more tense than I'd expected. My room was rather plain, with light lavender walls, a queen-size bed decorated with Gran's old pillows, and some other dressers and knickknacks I kept spread around the open space and flat surfaces. Wrapped around my bed like a necklace were stacks of books and maps and magazines—making my bedroom look like some unusual sort of cult gathering with me in my bed in the middle.
"Bookworm?" Eric asked casually and my cheeks went pink suddenly—the brandy had worn off since the jaunt with the werewolf.
"Sookie and Jason don't like readin' much, so all of Gran's books pretty much went to me," I shrugged. I made way for my desk where my laptop hid in one of its drawers, but Eric sunk onto my bed—disappearing in the plush comforter as I did every night.
"Cozy," Eric commented. "Much more so than my coffin."
I paused as I placed my laptop on my desk, taking a moment to look back at him through a few straight tufts of gilded strawberry hair. "What're those like?" I asked curiously
"Well, they're… They're not as comfortable as this bed," he tried to elaborate. He placed his head on the pillows and even yawned, despite it being the middle of the night. "I mean really, this is quite extraordinary. This is perhaps the most comfortable bed I've ever been on in my life, and I've been alive a thousand years."
I pursed my lips, not knowing how to respond. I looked back to my computer screen, it glowed Persian blue as it started up and illuminated my face, drawing out my features in forlorn, cold colors and distorting my face to that of one found at a funeral. I looked at myself in the glass and suddenly saw Eric standing behind me, looking down at the top of my head.
"Christ!" I exclaimed, looking up at him suddenly and shifting a few inches in my seat. He smiled as I muttered beneath my breath: "Forgive me, Lord."
"Religious?" He asked. I looked up to him critically, my eyes scrutinizing. "Don't you find the whole thing hypocritical?"
"How's that?"
"If God is good, how come he punishes so often?"
I smiled at him minutely, seeing the atheism of a weathered, old man. He had seen too many horrors to see the truth in God's work. "God does not punish. God forgives."
"Then how are people sent to Hell for their sins? Is that not an act of punishment?"
"To be forgiven by God, we must repent. He gives us the choice to when we have sinned—to repent or not to. Hell is locked from the inside, we ain't locked in there 'cause we don't have no choice. We repent, are forgiven by the Lord, and then ascend to heaven. God is merciful, but it is the choice of man to accept or deny his mercy."
Eric waited, looking out the window. "Do you love Him?"
"He is my hope and my light."
"If He is light and His creation, man—of whom He created in His image—is of light too, are vampires, the natural predators of humans, of darkness?"
"Of course not," I laughed. Eric's concern with the doom and gloom of his own kind was so saddening and relentless I wish I could shed God's own light onto him so he could truly know his goodness and light. "Nothing is of darkness, not even the Devil. Vampires are of God's creation and He loves them. He has given you His eternal life… He loves you. He has made you suffer with time, I can see it in your eyes, but He loves you and He is so happy you have faced these many years 'spite the toil that is carried with 'em."
Eric looked at me momentarily, waiting in the quiet darkness and stillness of the night. I could smell a cold sea on him. I did not know the last time he visited his rimy homeland but I could see it in his blue gaze and smell it in his nearness. "Christianity has never sounded so reassuring."
I looked back to my computer as it flashed, asking for my login code. I typed in my username and password to which Eric chuckled at the sight of my password, which referred to my late German Shepard named Bean.
His chin hovered above my shoulder and I could feel the coldness emanating from his pale skin. I did not dare look his way as he could see my eyes flicker in the refection on the window pane. My mind buzzed like a hive of bees as I tried to focus myself; I could hardly remember where on my computer I could find the internet. When I did, it loaded slowly—painfully so. The raggedness of my breath became bluntly noticeable as it croaked like sandpaper on wood. It was like the magic that kept his body working was expelling large clouds of smoke and they were suffocating me. I couldn't escape and, despite the lack of breath I was experiencing, I didn't want to escape.
"It was something short… with a crescent moon. That don't help us much, though," I muttered, trying to avert my attention and possibly his too.
"It's in Mississippi."
"How do you know?"
"Can't you humans differentiate between dialect? His accent was a Mississippian accent."
I rolled my eyes at his reversion to his typical stereotyping person, critiquing humans for their lack of knowledge—of which they only had a handful of years to gather as opposed to Eric's one thousand years. In my peripheral vision, I saw a small grin light his face at the sight of my irritated gesture.
"Let me type," he said, reaching for the keyboard and swiping off my small hands to replace them with his own enormous ones.
"You ain't even on a search engine, Eric," I sighed, trying to push back his hands.
"What? Yes I am."
"You don't even know what you're doin'," I argued.
"Yes I do. Let me do this," he insisted in a soft voice, almost like that of a child trying to get his mother to remove the cookie jar from the top shelf.
"Will you get away? You're typing onto a blank page!"
"What?"
"Oh my gosh," I exclaimed, pulling the laptop out from under him.
"I know what I'm doing, Georgina."
"No, you don't!" I walked over to the bed, but in the blink of an eye he was beside me, watching me type into an actual search box. I searched 'bars in Mississippi crescent moon' and Eric watched the page load. "Looks like there's somethin' you haven't mastered Eric: the internet. Pretty lame," I laughed.
"Lame?" He laughed with happy and loud lungs. I noticed in the time I'd spent with him he rarely gave a hearty laugh to anything, just a low and breathy chuckle.
I scrolled through the results, finding little.
"Try Jackson, Mississippi."
"Why?"
"It's the capital."
"What're we goin' to do, go through every city?"
"Why are you so truculent?"
I huffed, typing in what he wanted. Instantly, in my head, the curving and fluorescent 'L' appeared and I typed in the letter at the end. "I think it started with that."
He hummed and swiped my hands away once again, scrolling through the results. He found a list of the up and coming bars in Mississippi in an online magazine article and slowly scrolled through them. He went especially slowly past those starting with an 'L' and looked at me expectantly every time. I bit my lip and shook my head, turning each down. None of them were right.
"Wait," I said and he stopped. I pushed him off of the keyboard again and pulled up my online dictionary. Breaking off the word 'wolf', I went from synonym to synonym until I found the word: lupine. "That's it!"
"Lupine?"
"No! Lou Pine's," I smiled, typing it into the search box and the bar's website came up, adorned with that lovely crescent moon with a cloud crossing through it.
"Ah, here we are," Eric said. "Lou Pine's in Jackson, Mississippi. Twenty-two McCain Avenue. I'm impressed Georgina."
I turned my head and looked at him, grinning. "Well, thanks," I sighed.
He froze like ice beside me; the cold burn between us reigniting and making me self-conscious over the intimacy of our position and previous conversation. In half of a second he slammed shut the laptop and overpowered me, locking both his hands onto my shoulders and baring his ivory white fangs at me.
"How do you do that?" He spoke lowly, holding me down with a painful strain. However, I didn't grimace or struggle, I only looked up at him with worried eyes. He couldn't know what I could do.
"Do what?" I asked beneath my breath. His touch on my shoulders engendered the sight of his homeland in my head. I saw the jarring, salty waves comb the pebbly sand on the cold, northern beaches of the bygone Norwegian shores. The room darkened above his outlined figure above me and the thatched roof of a wide longhouse sheltered me from the cacophonous winds only a man as well-built and sturdy as Eric could face with bared teeth and a free and wild heart.
My eyes scurried around the room and Eric's eyebrows furrowed in a farrago of conflicting emotions, wondering what I was looking at in fury, wonder, perplexity… "What are you doing?"
"Nothing," I responded immediately. "Stop it."
The heaviness in his hands lifted but he still looked at me with the harshness with which he had pushed me down. "What are you?"
"I'm not lettin' you treat me like everyone treats Sookie. Don't think I'll put up with lettin' everyone constantly buggin' me 'bout what I and where I'm from. I'm a livin', breathin', dyin' human being—that's all that concerns you. I can rescind my invitation if I'd like and I can go on never seein' you again, and I'll do it if need be. Now don't bother me no more about anything that's my business and I'll do the same for you."
I loved the feeling of his lips on mine—and I knew this fondness before I was aware that he had kissed me. He was not my first kiss, but I had never experienced such a flush of memory through the touching of lips. In spite of their innate sensitivity, a man's lips on mine typically didn't cause waters of emotion and sense inside of me to turn tempestuous—but with Eric it was different. His home wrapped around me and every sense was as clear as the water I could suddenly sense I came from. It was like we two were preserved in amber from the northwestern coasts from which he hailed. And it was not my home—I was not from Sweden nor did I have any lineage I was aware of from the area, but I felt like I was home with him. Embedded in the snow and between icy gust of air kissed in with the tide and warmed beside the undying, crackling fire… I was home.
I wondered if Eric felt the same, as his hands were covering me and his mouth begged against my lips and face and chin and neck. My fingers caught in his hair and I pulled every strand in a different direction, breaking it from its formal place and organization. His face met the dark crevices of my neck that had never before been touched so intimately and I pulled his torso as close to me as I could with the heels of my feet and palms of my hands.
Time sped forward and I could see a young man with cropped brown hair and beautiful, swirling tattoos of ink drawn across his chest and arms and neck. I didn't need to know any more; it was Godric. I could see Eric from so long ago above me even with my eyes closed and I could hear Godric teaching him the ways of the vampire. And time sped forward again, and Eric was alone and laughing at medieval courts and smiling in ladies' slender pale arms. I began to struggle—I could feel every woman and their skin and their names; I no longer felt like Eric was kissing me. I was every girl he'd bed before me.
"Eric," I breathed raggedly, tilting my face away and only making him kiss my nose and forehead. One of my hands raised and extended in the air, picking up some current subconsciously. "Sookie. She's gone."
"What?" Eric pushed away, sitting and standing with one fast breath leaving my mouth.
He was all of the sudden no longer in my room and breaking open Sookie's locked door. I stood up on wobbly legs made of jello muscle and cream bone and I walked out of my room and to Sookie's. I looked over his arm into the room, only to see emptiness and feel a cold draft from the open window blow back the tangled pieces of hair that stuck to my sticky cheeks. "Well, shit."
I slipped around Eric and walked onto the rug that took up half of the floor of Sookie's large bedroom. I hoped to feel something, but I received nothing. I folded up her messy bed; while doing so, I saw her slip out of bed and creep out of the bedroom—leaving through the door even though Eric stood between the doorframe and there would be no possible way she could actually get out of the room, and yet I saw what she had done just moments ago. When I placed the decorative and embroidered pillows over the more practical ones, I saw her scurry back into her bedroom and change into a pair of jeans and a purple sweatshirt. She slipped sneakers onto her feet and opened the window beside her bed as quietly as she could. She slipped out of it, sneaking down the roof and jumping onto the grassy ground with a satisfying thud.
I looked at the bed and turned back around to Eric. "She heard about Lou Pine's. She's off to Jackson."
"God damn it," he cursed.
"Don't use the Lord's name—"
"I don't give a shit about the Lord. He's just the fabrication of a bunch of primitive, delusional cretins' weakness and fear."
I shut my mouth at Eric's affront and my heart sped up in my chest.
I watched Eric as he flew over to the window and looked out, seeing Sookie was already well on her way. He pulled out his cell phone and began calling someone, who picked up after a few metallic rings.
"Meet me at my house as soon as possible. It's time to repay your father's debts, wolf," Eric said as he searched for something of Sookie's—he went through her hairbrush, one of her scarves, until he seemed satiated with the pajama shirt she'd slept in that night.
"Where do you think you're taking that?" I asked and he didn't answer, just rushed back into my bedroom to check the address of Lou Pine's on my laptop once again. I scoffed and walked down to my room, where placed myself between the doorframe. Eric sighed when he looked at me as though I was a little girl who was trying to keep her father from leaving for work.
"This is urgent," he said. "Move."
"Why's it urgent?"
"Because—"
"'Cause it's Sookie?" I finished his sentence as he probably would've liked to and his gaze grew more infuriated—not with the fact that I was being difficult and preventing him from doing as he wished, but because I was a human who couldn't understand. If only he knew Sookie was just as much a human as I was, then maybe she wouldn't be placed on such a high pedestal.
He held my shoulders with his hands as he had done not so long ago, but this time I only felt the coldness of his skin and it was far from endearing. Trying to fight against his push was comically useless; I had never seen someone who was so effortlessly strong.
"Fine then, if you're in such a rush—I'll help you out. I rescind your invitation, Eric Northman."
Eric began moving at a faster pace that not even he could fight. Before I knew it he was gone and I heard the front door slam shut.
I gloomily gazed out the window that overlooked the front yard where Eric's black Cadillac pulled away into the night. I wrapped my arms around myself as if to imitate his touch—which was desperate to a degree of amusement. I dropped my arms and crept downstairs, each plane of wood sending a harrowing shiver through my body. In reaching the foyer, all I wanted was warmth, but that normally could not be gifted to me without the horrible senses of the past of others being planted in my mind.
So I padded down the hallways until the tiles of the kitchen touched my toes and I poured myself another glass of Grandpa Earl's ancient brandy and I sipped until I was silly; the old man's liquor could only warm me and keep my mind and senses numb to everyone else's. I sat in the dining room until morning, watching the blood that oozed from the dead man's body stain the rug to the floorboards. And yet, the scent of those beautiful drying flowers still tickled my nose between the whiffs of blood.
