The harsh exclamations and disapproving murmurs of the crowd became a thundering silence punctuated by the odd cat-call and intermixed with yips of surprised delight and piercing whistles of approval as the audience realized a new impromptu game was afoot. Their stares ranged from openly curious to vulgar anticipation.

Who better than a true predator to recognize the scent of blood in the water? This was why so many patrons came to the Red Door. One never knew what might happen. It probably wasn't the first time something like this had occurred in recent memory, but the man alone made it a noteworthy occasion.

He didn't come often enough to be a regular or even to be recognized as an infrequent patron, but even in this mixed crowd, there were those who knew him as the authority in this Area. It was rare for a Sheriff to intentionally draw that much personal attention. He was playing a dangerous game, but she had pushed him when he was already feeling reckless.

He wondered what her next move would be. She was still frozen in the chair, alone at a table on the edge of the darkness. Perhaps she was rethinking her rash words? He doubted it. She'd already decided to play the game, whatever stakes he set. She wouldn't back down now. If he knew her, and he did… she was gathering herself for something he suspected he was probably going to enjoy far too much. At least he hoped so. In his fantasies, and there were many, she never disappointed.

She stood regally and called out an order of her own in German that was more mellifluous and less gutturally accented than his own. A driving music suddenly filled his ears. Rammstein. His expression was positively predatory. She walked slowly into the circle of light, pulling the pins from her hair and dropping them like glittering breadcrumbs as she went.

He looked her up and down as she approached. He knew she'd been raised abroad, but it wasn't often he was caught off guard. "You're full of surprises tonight, fraulein. I don't recall that on your CV." She'd only listed French. He also suspected Italian… and now that he knew she had an ear for languages, he wondered how much she understood of his private conversations with Pam in Swedish. Shit.

"Oh, you have no idea what I'm capable of, cowboy."

His eyes widened slightly.

She took a step closer, appearing emboldened for a moment, until he caught the wild flutter of her heart. She was poised on the edge of flight. Most of her wanted to run. A part of her wanted to throw herself on him and beg him to take this somewhere less public… but she'd made up her mind and bold as brass she stood here, shaking like a leaf, but standing her ground all the same. Even if she could dismiss the physical, both the terrified part that wanted to flee and the carnal part that wanted to engage, it was her indomitable will that held her rooted to the spot.

She took another step and he held up his hand, twirling his finger in the universal 'give us a spin' gesture. It made her blood boil even as a new flood trickled from that throbbing place between her legs. The hint of fang he showed her said he knew it, too. Smug bastard. She spun slowly for his pleasure, her mind racing almost as fast as the blood beneath her skin. She was determined. He would get his. Like for like. Even if she knocked him down a peg or two, he would win in the end, of course… unless the world suddenly tilted on its axis, but refusing to play the game was simply out of the question.

Now that the moment was finally upon them, lust rose sharply, threatening to burn them both to ash. She was magnificent, standing before him like a Valkyrie, haughty and proud. Her hair was an inky cloud around her shoulders, the perfect inviting backdrop for her long slender neck. She burned for him. He could smell it, could see it in her fierce gaze and in the way her body moved restlessly under her clothes. It was almost impossible to stay seated, but he was long used to waiting for what he wanted…. And tonight what he most wanted was her.

It was all she could do to keep herself from falling on him in a frenzy. She wanted nothing more than to straddle his hips and ride him hard. Her thighs quivered with it. She forced herself to stand there instead, appraising him as he'd done to her. There was a smattering of appreciative noises and a few more open guffaws from the crowd at her audacity. She ignored them all.

His heavy, black, lug-sole boots were planted firmly on the floor. His legs, encased in black jeans, were casually spread. It was impossible to miss the obscene bulge between them. A tailored black leather jacket covered his wide shoulders and thick arms. A black singlet was beneath. He was wearing jewelry tonight, a few heavy rings on his fingers and something on a chain around his neck. She couldn't see what it was. It hung under his shirt and she suddenly shivered, thinking of how it would bruise them both when they were finally grinding together.

Even if he wasn't the Sheriff with a certain position and appearance to uphold, he wasn't about to get up and twirl for her so she didn't even try to make him. She would only lose face when he refused to comply with her demands. Instead she walked slowly around the chair, eyeing him up from all angles as he'd done to her. Tit for tat. The sharp click of her nude peep-toe pumps marked her slow egress. The movement, and its meaning, wasn't lost on him. There was a tick in his jaw and a low growl in his throat by the time she had stepped back into the charged space between his spread legs. Still, it was hard not to admire her pluck. Even Pam had never brazenly eyed him in public like a side of beef. He almost laughed. If she was like this here, imagine what she'd be like in private? His hips shifted infinitesimally in the chair.

She noticed.

She had forgotten the audience, or rather they had ceased to matter. There was only him and the raging lust that was quickly outstripping their thin veneer of control.

He crooked two autocratic fingers, beckoning her closer. She moved as if on an invisible string. "Boo," he said softly, chuckling when she jumped. She sucked the offending digits into her mouth and he hissed sharply when she bit down hard. He jerked his hand away and tutted, licking his stinging knuckles while he watched her mouth. The world seemed to stop and then to implode violently as he quickly shifted; a blur too quick for her eyes to follow.

His big hands were suddenly at the back of her knees, then skating slowly up under her skirt and over the back of her thighs to the soft swell of her hips. She shivered. His hands were cool, though the look in his eyes was anything but. He didn't delve between her legs to feel the proof of her desire or push a long thick finger inside to claim her property of the Northman. They were both far past such simple games tonight. He removed his hands from beneath her skirt. A scrap of lace came away with them. He paused, amusement spiking through the lust for a brief moment as he stroked the slippery gusset with his thumb. The lacy bit of lingerie was the same shade of atomic orange as her neon pedicure. Tucking them in his pocket, he shamelessly licked his finger and pulled her closer still.

"Delicious." The soft word was barely audible between them. Whatever game he was playing, the Northman never let anyone see all his cards.

"Happy Samhain," she murmured, straddling him.

Wasn't that the truth? The end of the lighter half of the year and the beginning of the darker half. How apt. He had the sudden unwelcome thought that half a year wouldn't be nearly enough time to savor her.

Her dark hair formed a cocoon around them. One zip and he was free. A little frisson of fear went through her. He was as blessed as she remembered. She'd mistakenly interrupted him a time or two in flagarante over the years, and he'd brazenly flirted with her even then, wet and glistening with another woman's pleasure. Cocky son of a bitch. She wasn't smiling now though. This time he was erect for her and it made all the difference.

Without warning, she sat down hard, impaling herself. A sharp gasp left her lips; a soft grunt from his. He was large and she had not been mindful of his girth. There was pain and a stinging stretch but the sensation of finally having what had so long been denied blinded them both to everything else. She was so hot inside; a blast furnace. The tight, fiery embrace nearly undid him; that sublime moment of finally possessing that which you have dreamed about for so long.

The audience was silent, enraptured. This was two beings in the grip of a fierce, vital passion. It wasn't an act or a performance. Her skirt was long and hid everything. There was almost no flesh on display to speak of, and yet it was somehow both more intimate and more erotic than the previously graphic display had been. This was real… and there was no stopping it.

She rose up over him, the long fall of her hair hiding both their faces. He kissed her then, brutally and with a feral primacy. The room spun. She started. His lips and tongue were cool, as was the impossibly thick stand of flesh stretching her. That awareness only made her feel hotter. She was aflame, an inferno of nerve endings and synapses firing wildly. The sensation of sharp points of his fangs on her tongue was indescribably erotic; each little prick of discomfort seemed to drive her higher. The hard knot of his necklace was digging into her breastbone. There was pain. The best kind… but she'd always been aware that there would be a price for knowing him this way.

His hands were in her hair now, fisted at her nape, holding her to him as they ground together wildly. He began drawing back her hair, baring her throat. She felt his lips on her neck and the scrape of his fangs as his mouth opened and he prepared to bite.

She froze.

"Stop!" He went still under her, more from shock than from her urgently whispered command. Even now she wasn't begging.

Glorious.

She buried her face against his throat. "Don't let them see..." Pitched low, her quiet exclamation wasn't without power, though there was deference now. She had reached her limit. He had won. Something in him softened. He has been expecting exultation not this strange tenderness.

A hot stick of surprise burned in his chest, along with a deeper harder to name emotion that might have been satisfaction. It pleased him. For all her bravado, she was more innocent than she'd first appeared. He wouldn't have been interested otherwise. She was not a tart or a fang banger and the only reason she'd taken things so far in a public venue was because he'd goaded her into it.

He continued to gather her hair until he'd capture the long dark fall in one fist, baring her neck to the room before kissing her there for effect, ignoring the calls of encouragement from the audience.

Lifting his mouth, he looked out at the room and raised an arched brow in censure. "She's shy..."

He could feel her tremble with anger. She thought he was making fun... and perhaps for a moment, he had been. And then in a sickening rush of vampiric speed, he scooped her up and they vanished, leaving nothing behind but a few fluttering tablecloths and a handful of glittering hair pins. The audience protested, but only for a moment. There was always something new to titillate their jaded senses, though most were astute enough to realize they'd just caught a glimmer of something real in a world of shadows and mystery.

He didn't take her far. The fire in his blood was burning too hotly to be ignored. When he slowed, they were alone outside, in a darkened alley full of wooden pallets, industrial refuse, hunks of twisted metal, and the odd illegally parked car. The world lurched alarmingly. The air was crisp and cold, but smelled fresh with a metallic undercurrent.

Pulling off his jacket, he pushed her hands into the sleeves impatiently before roughly hauling her up against the coarse bricks and impaling her. "Watch me," he hissed. He was much too far gone to stop, but it was his one concession to his mortal lover's fragility. The full length and breadth of his mercy had been reached. He fully intended for her to bleed for him this night, though not from having her tender back scraped raw. "Watch!" Desire roared through him when she caught his icy gaze instead of looking down to watch his wild thrusts into her lush body. She got him. And it blew his mind. In that moment she was with him in a way that went far beyond cocks and fangs and fragile human bodies.

She was not worried about being disturbed. Monstrous dark things lived in the shadows, but he was the blackest of them all. Anything that wanted her was going to have to go through him first, and the look on his face told her he wasn't about to let a single thing get in his way now that he had her right where he wanted.

"I want to taste you," he growled against her mouth. He felt her hand try to slip down to where they were intimately joined, presumably to let him taste her essence from her fingertips. He smiled inwardly at her naiveté. He wished to taste all of her eventually, of course, but he had been speaking of the life force flowing with such vitality under her skin. He touched his open mouth to her neck and she understood.

He was old enough to not need much blood to sustain him.

He took far more than that. She was intoxicating.

Her orgasm was wild, her hands gripping him tightly as she spasmed on the thick shaft pinning her to the wall. His head swam. She tasted potent and wild and vital and somehow different, though in a way he didn't want to examine too closely. He was tightly wound; all the energy in his body seemed to be gathering at the base of his spine and between his firmly planted legs.

The time for waiting was over.

Using the hard edge of one of the heavy rings on his fingers, he opened a small cut on his chest, offering himself to her.

It was a precarious moment. He was exposed, physically and emotionally. In his experience, humans typically wanted to be bitten rather than do the biting. Thousands of years of cultural conditioning made the thought of ingesting blood, especially from the source, distasteful.

He was pleased but not completely surprised when she embraced the moment without hesitation, her pouty mouth drawing on him, accepting the dark sacrament he'd offered. The intensity of his orgasm took him by surprise. It had been decades, perhaps centuries, since he'd shared his blood with a woman in this way. The ecstasy was shattering. The rhythmic, primal pumping sent fire licking up his spine. It was intensely satisfying. A fierce growl. A scalding gush. His essence filling her. Her thighs quivering against his hips. His knees sagged as she wrung the last agonizing shudders of searing pleasure from his lean body.

Eric lifted his head and her eyes, wide and dark with satiation, met his. He kissed her tenderly, tasting himself on her lips, a curiously novel experience that made something inside his chest lurch alarmingly.

Her cheeks were red, her face a picture of disheveled confusion; his usually unflappable assistant was adorably out of sorts. He was utterly charmed.

"I'm not dreaming, am I? Did we really just do that?"

"What? The eye fucking? The sex? Or the blood exchange?" He didn't remind her they were still technically 'doing it'. She was presently impaled and her feet had yet to touch the ground.

At his smug expression, a little of her bravado came back, no doubt given a healthy shot in the arm from powerful effects of his ancient blood. "Well you did challenge me to know as much of you as I dared..."

"That I did." And she had not disappointed.

She wriggled experimentally in his firm grasp. He groaned softly. She grinned. "In that case, I'm still feeling rather daring..." He let her legs down gently and slowly uncoupled from her, shivering as he withdrew. She winced, smoothing her skirt back down as he zipped up. She kept the jacket. "...but this time I think I'll dare you to find a more appropriate venue with a bed and candles and privacy. I'm in the mood to explore the icy North..." They'd only had the smallest taste of each other. There was so much more...

"Bring it on." His expression was positively wicked. He pressed her hand to the front of his pants with a playful leer. "I can say with certainty that the North Star is an excellent navigational landmark. You can't miss it. I won't let you lose your way..."

"I choose my own way." He pulled her close, tucking her into the protection of his body as they walked into the shadows. "Though I can't help but wonder how you are with the rest of the stars...?"

"Any one in particular?" Cassiopeia came immediately to mind. He told himself it was because it was November, a time when she was most visible, and not because she was the Queen of the Sky and pointed at the North Star.

"Venus seems an appropriate place to start. Though I suspect you're quite familiar navigating that particular landmark."

"Quite." Their eyes met. "Ah, Venus. The dazzling evening star that outshines all else in the sky." He touched her cheek tenderly and for an unguarded moment, his expression was soft. "She lives in the House of Virgo, the Virgin, you know."

Her laugh was husky and warm. "Not for long..."

The night welcomed them into her embrace.

And the stars glittered on.

Author's note: This is my first True Blood story. I'd love to know what y'all thought. The good... the bad... the ugly. ;)