Disclaimer: See part 1
CHAPTER 7
I was lost and confused and quite thoroughly convinced I was dreaming. I blinked and shook my head, thinking the apparition that stood before me in full sunlight would vanish back into the billowing sheets like the blood in the mirror had disappeared from my face.
But this vision of Eric was much more persistent than my bloody neck had been. It would be.
I really couldn't determine what I was supposed to do next. It was like I'd been following a route marked "Directions for Sookie Stackhouse's Life" and suddenly come to the edge of the map. If I'd had more time to think about it, I might have actually asked him to pinch me. But, unfortunately, my mouth caught up with the world before the rest of me did. "You had to kiss her? Like that?"
My little yard was filled with the booming roar of his laugh.
Eric might be pink in the cheeks and walking around in daylight. He might be, God help me, breathing. But his laugh was like it had always been, big, loud and contagious. "You couldn't have just shared a spoon?" I added ineffectually since a fit of giggles had me doubled over on the chaise.
"I should have known that was the first thing you'd say to me," Eric said when we'd both caught our breaths. There was more complexity to his voice, like I'd gotten used to hearing the steamrolled version and now the bass notes had kicked in.
I gave him a look to let him know that I was still waiting for an answer but I got distracted by the rise and fall of his chest and it was probably not so withering a stare as I'd intended. "A mutual exchange makes the effect last longer and relieves the necessity of physical proximity to the source." he explained. "Your friend insisted that I would change too quickly for blood to be a viable option." I grinned, picturing Emma trying, with logic, to convince Eric that he shouldn't bite her. In my mind she used diagrams of Pam spewing blood. "I offered to lick her from head to toe and let her return the favor. But she rejected the suggestion out of hand." Eric's mouth turned down in the smallest of frowns. "I think she likes women."
He was serious in his confusion, which made it all the funnier. He responded to my fresh burst of laughter with a look that clearly said I was to blame for this pattern of women turning him down.
Briefly, I considered chucking my iced tea glass at him just to have something to do with all the strange, excited energy that was buzzing around my body. But then I was seized by the sudden fear that he was much more fragile in his present state and it would be very rude to injure him out of … good humor? Joy?
That thought killed a little of the giddiness that had welled up inside me. "Eric, why did you do this?" I asked, my voice firmly locked into serious mode.
"You'd rescinded my invitation to your home and I needed to speak with you," He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. I got the vague sense that he wasn't sure if he should say what he was going to say next. "And I'd hoped that the surprise," he indicated his very large, very alive body, "would make you more inclined to hear me out.
"Plus," his tone dropped its rakish edge and took on something else. "I've never gotten to look at you properly in daylight."
"It might be dangerous. You have enemies." More than the ones I know about too, I'm sure.
Eric shrugged, unconcerned. A bed sheet obscured half his body and revealed him alive and well or hid him from me by turns like the flourish of a magician's cape. "I don't have so many enemies as you think, Sookie," he replied. "And many of the ones I do have are in their daytime sleeps now. As for the rest, they can hardly have expected that I would choose to become human. Or that I would have the means to do so. What they don't know won't hurt me." He raised a big hand, curling it lightly into a fist as if he were testing to see if it was in working order. "And I am not completely defenseless even if I am not vampire."
Yeah buddy, try that out for a while before you decide to take on any Weres, I thought. I knew from experience how far human strength and skill didn't get you in a fight with a supe.
"This is from Emma Asli," Eric said and handed me a scrap a paper like he wanted to complete the task before he forgot about it.
The slip of paper looked like it might have been torn from a business envelope. On it, in the handwriting she used to fill out order tickets at the bar, Emma had written, "Blood does not create."
"Do you know what this means?" I sure as all heck didn't.
Eric's expression did not try to hide the fact that he had (as I expected) read the note. "I didn't come here as her messenger."
I nodded. Back to business. "So why did you?"
"You told me to stay away. And I said I would." It wasn't really an apology. But it was sort of an acknowledgment that he had broken his word. Well, my word that he had agreed to.
"I would have let you in." At least, I would have considered it.
Neither of us knew what to say next. I learned, over the course of my twenty-seven years, to take cues from people's thoughts when an awkward silence needed to be broken. I met Eric's eyes, feeling compelled to try to convey to him what I was about to do. He stared back, doing a good imitation of his own typical lack of expression.
With the brief thought that I must be acting reckless out of shock and perhaps more anxiety than I've ever had approaching a mind, I sought his thoughts.
Nothing.
What? My thoughts were the only ones in my head. "I can't hear you," I said with astonishment, taking myself back to the night I met Bill. But, then, Bill had been a vampire.
"You could hear Pam?"
"Yes."
Eric's face was puzzled. It was surprising that his features could take on that set since it was an expression so unfamiliar to him. He approached me slowly, almost warily, and held out his hand, reaching toward me with his fingertips just like that famous painting of God creating Adam.
I touched as little of him as possible, knowing deep in my gut that I was not ready yet to know how a warm-blooded Eric felt. If I expected an electric jolt to pass between us, I didn't get it. No more than usual anyway.
To help me concentrate, I closed my eyes. But the sun was still blazing behind my eyelids, brighter even than it had been in my yard. It took me a very, very long moment to realize that this was Eric's mind.
"You're full of light!" I said in surprise, knowing how ridiculous it sounded. Maybe I really was dreaming. Or maybe Eric was just so taken by the sun that he hadn't seen properly in over a thousand years that he couldn't think of anything else.
That wasn't quite right though. Impressions drifted through the light. Impressions of something dark, and something brighter still, and of a space that was walled off from me. There was pride, so much pride that I thought for while that it and the light were one and the same. There was sadness too, great, deep sadness that rode (unlikely as it seemed) on the back of fear. And finally, rising in a way that seemed, somehow, deliberate, words. You are very beautiful in the sunlight.
He had definitely thought that at me.
"Something's wrong," he guessed.
I let go of his fingers and opened my eyes, blinking to adjust. The sunlight seemed dimmer than it had been. "No," I said. "It's just … Eric I've never encountered anything like your mind."
"But I am human now," he said as if he could solve the issue with sheer pragmatism.
I nodded, thinking that over. "Maybe," I said slowly, "Maybe it's a little like Emma's mind."
"Oh?"
"Not really like it," I emphasized. "It's just, you both … it's like your thoughts don't stray far enough from you for me to hear them. They're too … concise. It's like you have to want me to hear them."
Eric nodded, seeming to accept this. "Emma Asli and I are very old," he said. "Perhaps our thoughts simply know to whom they belong."
It was as good an explanation as any I could come up with.
I think we realized at the same time that Eric's temporary humanity was distracting us from his purpose. And that at least one of us was supposed to be very angry with the other. "I'm not entirely sure how long I have," Eric said without managing to sound like a person who had ever been unsure about anything. Ever.
It was intensely interesting to see how much of the Eric I'd known for almost three years was vampire and how much was just Eric. I was absolutely certain that I'd rather follow him around all day and write lengthy notes on the differences than hear any of what he'd come here to tell me.
"Would you like something to drink?" I blurted, letting my hospitable courtesies protect me like armor.
"Yes," Eric said like he hadn't considered the possibility of thirst. "But then we must talk, Sookie."
"Sure," I said, bolting into the house and popping a TrueBlood in the microwave before I had a chance to think about it. Oh, sweet Lord, have mercy on my addled brain. I pulled the lukewarm blood out of the microwave and stared at it, not knowing what to do.
I'd uncapped it since metal and microwaves don't mix, so now it had to be drunk or it would soon go bad. Maybe Eric would turn back soon and be hungry. I berated myself a second time for that thought. If Eric reverted to his vampire state he'd zonk out until the robust summer sun got around to setting.
In the fridge I found a pitcher of sweet tea and one of water that had been run through the Brita filter Amelia had installed on the kitchen sink. I stepped out onto the screened in back porch. "Tea or water?"
Eric shrugged indifference. He, at least, realized that he wouldn't be downing any blood. "Whatever you're having."
I went back to the kitchen and sliced a lemon for tea. I was very careful to cut the slices to a nice, uniform thickness. Stalling all the way. When I had two glasses of tea poured and garnished, there was nothing to do but go back outside.
"Should we talk in the house?" I thought of Bill's burnt face and of the bolt-hole in my closet.
"No, I'd rather talk under the sky." Some of the fear I'd seen (heard?) in his mind crossed his face for just a split second.
"Okay." I managed to stall just a little more by retrieving a chair for him from the porch. For once he let me play the hostess and didn't try to carry it for me.
We sat side by side. The arrangement of chairs was purposeful. I didn't know if I wanted to look at him. As the minutes wore on with no one speaking I felt anxiety mounting in me.
"Spit it out," I said when I couldn't take anymore. "You're making me nervous." Sookie the Sensitive strikes again.
Eric smirked but the expression didn't last long. His long fingers gripped the arms of the chair a little too hard. He was ready to start. "I've known Niall a long time," he said, voice low and deep like he was telling a creation myth.
To say that I hadn't expected this particular opening would be an understatement. "He told me," I said, recalling my first meeting with my great grandfather.
"But he didn't tell you how we met."
"No," I answered, though it hadn't been a question. "He didn't tell me that."
"He saved me from Lochlan and Neave."
I'd been sipping on my tea to have something to do that didn't involve looking at Eric while he spoke. Now I was doing a pretty good imitation of Pam's infamous blood spewing—but with iced tea. And I managed to catch most of it back in the glass. "What! What?"
My stomach lurched with dread at the sound of their names and a memory of pain washed over my body. I shuddered, glad my body's memory was far from perfect.
Eric's face was calm. It was beyond calm. It was impassive. Like a shock victim or a vampire. I had reacted like he'd expected. A large part of me didn't want to hear anymore but another part of me wondered desperately why, if Niall had rescued him, Eric hadn't returned the favor.
"You remember what I told you about my maker?"
I nodded. I remembered Eric's tale of the Roman legionnaire who'd turned him and taken him from his home and family. "Appius Livius Ocella."
Eric nodded. "When I was still a young vampire, maybe fifty years old, Ocella sent me away from him. He said it was time I went out and lived on my own for a while, fended for myself.
"When I returned to him a month later, he had a gift for me. It was a leech he'd preserved in amber before it could digest the blood inside it." I smiled absurdly, thinking of mosquitoes and Jurassic Park but Eric went on, deadly serious. "I didn't understand the gift. I had little desire for blood that had been contained in an insect. Ocella laughed and smashed the amber. He told me to eat the leech. So I did." I risked a glance at Eric. His expression was a very human, very confused, jumble of emotions. "Ocella had caught a fairy."
Uh-oh.
"He'd bound the fairy in iron," Eric continued. "He leeched it. When he began to feed he could not stop himself, as so often happens with fairies, and he drained her."
I held my breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
"The fairy was Lochlan and Neave's mother."
"Oh, Eric!" I practically wailed.
He took a large swallow of the tea I'd given him. I wondered if he even tasted it. "I had never tasted fairy blood and the gift delighted me. Ocella stayed with me a few days and then he moved on, saying again that I should spend time on my own. The fairies came two days later, just as I was preparing to move on."
I closed my eyes and wondered, selfishly, how much detail he was about to subject me to.
"They could sense their mother's blood in me. And, of course, Appius's scent was on me and had been all over their mother's body. If they'd cared to try, they could have figured out quite easily that it hadn't been I who killed her. But they didn't care to try. Appius had counted on that.
"Three days, they held me," he went on. "They practiced their art on me in payment for their mother. Three days. Then Niall showed up."
"He stopped them," I said feeling a rush of affection and gratitude for my great grandfather.
The corner of Eric's mouth tugged up in a smile, but it wasn't a happy one. "He was old and wise even then. He knew immediately that I hadn't killed the female fairy. He told them that torturing me was vengeance and not justice and that she deserved better."
I understood the implication in his words. Niall hadn't stopped the twins out of concern for Eric but out of moral obligation to the dead fairy. I remembered, then, the casual way that Niall had offered to kill Eric for me at our first meeting and I shivered. It chilled me to know that someone I was related to, who cared for me so much, could be so cold.
I couldn't take it all in. My memories of the fairy twins and the shack—of their teeth and their knives and their fire—were too fresh. I realized I was crying. "How does Emma fit in to all this?" He'd said he needed to speak with her at Merlotte's. Then he'd come to speak with me. I might as well have it all out now.
Eric pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his jeans like he'd expected my tears as well. "Healing has always been one of my gifts," he said. "It made me confident … cocky, knowing that I could recover quickly from wounds that immobilized other, older, vampires." His sad smile had returned. "Lochlan and Neave knew. Somehow. They knew how I thought myself to be very near immortal. They knew how much pain I could endure because of it. So they brought Emma."
"She was there?" I felt sick.
"She was there."
