A/N: This was a very hard chapter to write, and may well be just as hard to read. So consider that your tissue and trigger alert.


Eric POV

There wasn't much warning, but it was more than enough for me. This was not how I had planned on going through with the blood exchange, but I know how to adapt, and how to do it quickly. It is but one of the many reasons I have lived this long. When Sookie flew at me in her bloodlust, I caught her and fell back onto the bed.

When I felt her mouth on my neck, I couldn't help but grow hard under her. I hissed when her teeth slid into my skin. Her curves were so soft against me. The feel of her pulling at my veins was almost too much to bear, but exquisitely so. Only two others had ever taken my blood: my maker and my child. This was a rare and dangerous intimacy.

My fangs ran out. I tilted my head up to her throat and bit.

Her blood was… different. Like nothing I'd ever tasted before. There was a sweetness to it that defied explanation. If her blood had been like this while she was still human, that would go a long way to explaining how she got turned: a younger vampire would not be able to resist drinking her to the point of death. Even now, changed as it was by her vampiric state, it was almost intoxicating. Something about it tickled the edges of my brain; almost all of my willpower had to be focused on not taking too much, so I pushed all other thoughts aside. For now.

The more I drank of her, the more I began to feel the connection growing between us. Instead of the lust I had been anticipating, there was anger, pain, and fear. While I might have been the trigger, I was not the source of her anguish. My own desire deflated: I found nothing sexually appealing about a woman in that state.

For that reason, I only took what was required to establish the beginnings of a bond between us. A bond between a vampire and a human is different from a bond involving two vampires. In the case of the latter, the effects are stronger, and only grow in intensity with each exchange. Whether or not there is an upper limit to that intensity is unknown: other than the maker/child relationships, bonds between vampires are extremely uncommon.

But I could sense that someone – or perhaps several people - had already taken advantage of this woman, and I would not add myself to that list. I pulled back and watched the wounds close. She was still drinking; I let her. She would need more, being as young as she was.

As vampires age, we grow more powerful in almost every way: physically, intellectually, and even emotionally; whatever vampiric abilities we have, they grow stronger as well. We learn how to manipulate and conserve our energy, how to become more efficient with its expenditure. Some call it magic, and magic it may well be: it was pointless to debate over terminology. Regardless of what we call this amorphous thing, it grows with the rest of our strengths. The stronger it becomes, the less is required to sustain and maintain it.

When my arms went around Sookie, I could feel her panic grow; gently, I stroked her head and tried to soothe her.

"Shh, you're safe."

Sookie made a noise that was either a gasp or a sob as she detached herself from me. Her eyes were dry, but she looked troubled. She scrambled up and off of me; as I sat up, she moved to sit in a chair in a corner of the room. I felt fear from her, but could not guess its cause.

"What are you afraid of?" I asked, keeping my voice low and gentle.

"I… I'm sorry, can you give me a minute?"

I nodded and watched her collect herself. The emotions coming off of her were a confused jumble; I was barely able to decipher one before it was gone and replace with another. Perhaps my experience with Pam would not be of use to me with Sookie; I had never felt my own child in such a state. Pam had been a cold bitch from day one.

I studied her as she closed her eyes and tried to calm herself. She was breathing, and I wondered if it was intentional or out of habit. Gradually, the furrows eased from her brows, and her breathing stopped altogether.

"I still can't hear your thoughts," she said softly, "But I think I can tell what you're feeling."

"Yes. Just as I can now feel yours. That is one of the reasons for the blood exchange."

She rubbed her face with her hands before finally opening her eyes. The fear had been replaced with anger.

"What are the rules about killing people?"

I folded my arms and leaned back. "First tell me why you want to know."

Sookie's jaw clenched; she wanted permission, not discussion. I was glad to see the fighting instinct in her, but I needed to make sure it was tempered with reason. It wasn't a question of whether or not she had a good reason, more that I would not let her devolve into madness. Not that it was hard to figure out: she wanted to kill the person who had hurt her in the past. But I wanted to know what they had done to her. If I was to be any good to her as her maker, I had to know everything about her; I needed to know what made her tick.

"I don't want to talk about it," she muttered.

"Then it is a good thing I didn't ask if you wanted to tell me."

Anger and resentment rose up from her as she stared at me, but her expression was blank. I could tell there was a lifetime of practice in that mask, no doubt a lesson learned from being a telepath.

"My parents died when I was young. My brother and I went to live with Gran. She's always kept herself busy, and when she needed someone to babysit us, she'd call her brother. He…"

Her voice trailed off, and the fear returned.

"Whatever he did, he cannot do anymore." I had a horrible feeling of what it was he had done, and suppressed my own anger so as to not scare her further.

"He molested me. More than once."

The pupils of her eyes dilated until there was nothing but black, and the darkness suddenly flashed golden before the blue of her irises returned. What the fuck had she been before she was turned? And what did that make her now?

We were bound by blood, even if it was only the smallest amount. It disturbed me to feel just how much I wanted to cause lasting physical pain to whoever hurt this woman. I had felt protective of Pam when she was first turned, but it was never like this. Whatever it was I had gotten myself into, there was no getting out of it now.

Even more troubling to me was the fact that I did not want to get out of it.


Sookie POV

For a moment, I hated Eric almost as much as I hated Uncle Bartlett. The vampire in front of me had done something to block me from sensing his emotions, but I could read him well enough to know he was conflicted.

I felt an odd power within myself. No longer was I a scared little girl; quite the opposite. Never before had I wanted to hurt anyone, let alone slaughter them. But if there was anyone on this planet who I could have felt those things for, it would be the person who squashed the last remnants of my childhood innocence.

Not that I'd ever had much of that. Being able to hear the thoughts of everyone around me meant that I was privy to all of their darkest secrets: the lies behind the kind words, the anger behind the smiles, and the pain behind the laughter. And above all, the fear of a little girl who saw through every last bit of it, whether she wanted to or not.

For years I had blamed myself for what he'd done to me, even though Gran had told me over and over that it wasn't my fault.

Bless Gran for believing me when I confided in her. The minute she knew of what her brother had done, she disowned him. Threatened him, even. What she didn't speak of was her own guilt over the fact that she'd thought he'd changed. He'd tried to do to her daughter, my Aunt Linda, what he succeeded in doing to me.

I couldn't bear to tell her that he'd molested my cousin Hadley, as well. Aunt Linda never explained why she had taken her daughter and moved to New Orleans, but I knew it was because of Uncle Bartlett. He didn't touch me until Hadley wasn't around anymore.

I didn't blame Gran for not getting rid of him sooner: she blamed herself for believing his lies. Her anger with him, and the thoughts she had of what she wanted to do to him, shocked me. The brave face I had put on after the death of my parents came back out, and if I was being honest with myself, I guess I'd say it never really went away.

"So? Now you know why."

Eric was silent. He stood up and beckoned to me as he left the room. I got up and followed him to a small kitchenette that I hadn't noticed before. He opened a small fridge and got out two bottles of blood. As they were heating up in the microwave, he stared at me. His emotions were still blocked off, and his face was blank.

When the microwave dinged, he took out the bottles and handed one to me after giving it a good shake.

I wasn't thirsty, but I drank it anyway: better too much than not enough.

"As much as I would like to kill him for you," he finally said, "I will let you do that when the time comes. But not yet."

"Why not?"

"Many reasons. You have never killed before. Your aversion to death has been strong up until now. His death will affect you in ways you cannot comprehend, and I do not know you well enough to predict them. In your current state, you cannot afford that. If you wanted to take out a random stranger who looked at you funny, I would gladly show you how and let you have at it." He took a long drink of his blood before speaking up again.

"In fact, I think before I let you kill your uncle, you will need to kill a stranger first."

I gaped at him. "You want me to murder an innocent person?"

"No one is innocent, Sookie. You, of all people, should know that."

Little Miss Contrary that I was, my mind instantly tried to prove him wrong: I ran through a mental list of everyone I'd ever known. For each person I though of, I remembered something they'd felt guilty about, recalled an event that I'd heard from their minds that they would never speak aloud.

Some of those things seemed silly to me.

Jason once found a wrist watch that belonged to another boy, and when a teacher tried to get him to give it back to the boy, Jason lied about it. It wasn't until they threatened to call Gran about it that he fessed up. He never felt guilty about beating up anyone who bullied me, but he felt bad about lying over a stupid watch.

But some of the things people carried with them, they weren't silly in the slightest.

Tara once beat up another girl, because she didn't know any better. She didn't really have a reason for doing it. Her own parents beat her, and while Gran would take her in every time she ran away from them, Gran couldn't stop the abuse. Tara never saw anyone tell her parents that it was wrong for them to hurt her; even though she had better role models in her life, she thought they were exceptions to the rule. It wasn't until the girl's parents threatened to press charges that Tara learned it wasn't okay to hit people. She carried it with her for years. For all I knew, she still thought about it from time to time.

Hell, Gran felt guilty for all of the time she couldn't protect any of us kids. She felt shame for not being able to help Tara more. Every time Tara ran away from home, she came to our house; and every time, her parents would call and yell at Gran. Gran would sit with her back to us, but I knew she was crying. I could hear her thinking that if it meant they wouldn't take it out on their little girl, her parents could spew their venom at her until the sun went down.

And Gran had her secrets. I would catch whispers of them at times, but she was careful to never think of them when I was around. She knew better.

The truth was that everyone had hurt someone at some point in their lives. Maybe it wasn't intentional, but it still happened. Some people were nicer than others, but we all had our shameful secrets. We all had things that made us cringe when we remembered them.

But wasn't that guilt a sign of them being decent people? If they were bad people, they wouldn't feel any remorse, would they?

I knew all too well that there were things that I couldn't think about when other people were around. Was that true for everyone? Do we all have something that's so private, we have to wait until we're alone before we let it come to the surface?

Damn it.

Yeah, I was glad vampires don't get headaches. This would have been a three-Excedrin migraine rattling through my skull.

When I was done drinking my disgusting synthetic blood, I rinsed the bottle out and threw it into the trash. Since Eric was done with his as well, he handed me his bottle when I held out my hand for it. I took care of that one as well, then leaned back against the sink.

"So… what are we doing tonight?" I asked.

Eric smiled. "Pam can take care of Fangtasia. Tonight, we begin your training."


Disclaimer: All of the characters contained in this story are property of Charlaine Harris. I don't own them; I just like to play with them a bit.