CHAPTER 53
One thing I could say about my Viking. When he wanted something, he wasn't shy about letting me know. And at least one part of him was definitely letting me know. I watched as he stepped out of his itty-bitty undies, knowing exactly what he wanted.
"Eric, Thalia and Thomas are right outside."
"Yes, Lover, of course they are."
"And Pam or Jordun might be back any time, or Jan for that matter."
"Yes, Lover, they might."
He was right in front of where I was sitting on the couch, and his second best asset was pretty close to eye level. It was an eyeful, that's for sure.
"Have you no shame at all, Eric?"
"None, Lover, since you have enough for both of us," he said with a grin.
He bent down and rested his hands on the back of the couch, his mouth approaching mine. I arched my neck to kiss him, and found that I might not have as much shame as he thought. My arms reached up and clasped him around the waist. His lips felt cool against mine, but heat ran through both of us as we made contact.
Before I could realize that he had moved, he was kneeling in front of me and his fingers were busy at the buttons on my blouse and then sliding around to my back to unfasten my bra. My shirt joined Eric's on the floor, followed soon after by my jeans and panties.
A hungry vampire is a dangerous looking thing, and I was not immune to that attraction. As Eric's mouth found my breast, I thought about how just how sweet I must taste, since I could feel the adrenaline in my veins as his fangs pricked the delicate skin. I ached for the feel of his flesh, and I wanted him right now!
Wrapping my legs around him, I invited him in and he took advantage of my welcome as our bodies joined. Feeling the fervor of my response to him, he moved quickly, almost harshly, and if he breathed, he would have been matching my panting breath as he slammed against me.
"Bite me," he said, almost growling. "Bite me."
I pulled him closer, and bit at random, my bite taking him high in the chest above his nipple. He gasped and stilled for a moment as my teeth worked to break his perfect smooth skin. As his blood began to flow into my mouth, he began to whisper in his native tongue and my mind reeled with the emotion flowing into me through our bond and with his blood.
His movements became purposeful then, each push forward calculated to bring us closer and closer, the tension in our bodies a quivering mass of energy. His blood was thick and salty sweet, and it pulsed through me, like fuel to a fire, until my muscles tightened around him. My mouth pulled away as I gasped for breath and he lowered his head to my breast and bit.
Pushed over the edge we both fell in wave after wave of sensation, the pleasure almost painful in its intensity as his mouth pulled on the small wound and his seed spilled into me. A flush of heat washed over me and then cooled as my body shook and then stilled under him.
"Perfect," he gasped and then collapsed on top of me, his weight a comforting pressure.
We lay that way for a long moment until he pushed his weight up onto one arm and looked down at me. Blood was smeared on his chest and over his perfect nipple, and his lips were red and glistening. He leaned down and licked the small wound on my breast, then licked around my mouth, cleaning his own blood from my smeared lips. Our bond hummed with love and contentment.
A voice rang out from the doorway. Pam.
"Can't we leave you two alone for a minute? I bet you made a helluva mess on the couch."
Eric growled, and if I hadn't already been under him, I would have crawled under him in embarrassment.
"Pam!" Eric snapped, and I heard Pam's heels clicking as she walked back towards the kitchen. Since you could never hear Pam move, I knew she was just doing it to annoy. She was humming again. I thought it might be 'Lay Lady Lay'. Pam was really stuck in the seventies. A moment later, Gran's ugly old afghan came flying across the room, landing on top of Eric.
"Eric, get up," I said, pushing at his chest, as if my pushing could have made him move if he didn't want to.
"Yes, dear," he said with a grin and popped up all at once, leaving me totally exposed for a moment, and then he had me covered with the blanket.
"Jesus Christ, Shepherd of Judea!"
"I don't think he will help you at this juncture, Sookie. Let me carry you upstairs."
I might have protested, but since there was no graceful exit at this point, I let him wrap me in the blanket and fly me up to our room.
"What about Claudine?" I asked as I stumbled, still slightly dazed, to the bathroom to clean up.
"I'll bring our little angel to her cradle," Eric said and went to get the baby. I rolled my eyes at the image of my naked vampire flying around the house, baby in arms. Indecent exposure indeed!
Claudine remained asleep through her relocation, and when she was tucked securely into her little bed, Eric tucked me into ours. He climbed under the covers, nestling in behind me. Within moments, I was dead to the world.
One of the things I still missed after moving in with Eric was the sun streaming through the window when I woke up. I didn't have the instinctual ability that the vamps had to sense sunrise and sunset. When I woke up, I could never tell what time of the day or night it was. I had put a clock on the table on my side of the bed, and the blue glow of its face gave an eerie light to the room and to the skin of the vampire sleeping next to me.
Eric had piled all of the covers on top of me, no doubt worried that I would be warm enough. He never seemed to think of the simple solution of turning up the thermostat, but then as he had said, central heating was something he had lived without when he was human. Since the cold didn't bother him particularly, and certainly wouldn't keep him awake, I was just pleased that he thought of my comfort as the nights became cooler at this time of year. I would have to remember to reset the thermostat myself.
Eric had taken my earlier concern to heart and was lying on the bed in royal blue silk boxer shorts. They would have looked great with his eyes, if his eyes had been open. Of course Eric looked great in just about anything, and even better in nothing at all.
Claudine was whimpering and I realized that I could feel her actual hunger and distress. More and more I was becoming concerned that she would inherit my telepathy. I hated to think of her suffering through the mundane worries and sometimes vicious thoughts of all around her, as I had. A gift it might be, under the right circumstances, but it was more often a curse.
I tried to project my thoughts to her, that mommy was coming to feed her, and she quieted. Well, that was something new. Perhaps she and I would be able to communicate, as Barry and I did, the same way I did with Hunter. Since she was still too young to use language as a communication tool, it would be hard to determine the full extent of what would happen.
I hauled myself out of bed, threw on a robe and quickly took care of my most pressing needs in the bathroom. A shower would have to wait, because the baby was not going to be patient forever. When she got too hungry, she let the whole world know. Looking at the clock as I headed to the cradle, I realized that she had actually slept for close to six hours without waking. No wonder I felt so rested.
Amelia was waiting for me downstairs and managed to spit her coffee half way across the table when she saw Claudine. I wondered if choking on beverages was going to be the usual reaction to my daughter.
"Oh my God, Sook! When did this happen? Why didn't you call me?"
She must have been pretty shocked because she didn't jump up instantly to clean up the mess on the table. It was pretty rare that anything trumped a clean surface in Amelia's book.
"Night before last," I answered. "I guess we were all so taken aback that it never occurred to me to call anybody except Dr. Ludwig. But Thomas got pictures!"
"Wow! I have to say that I never expected anything like this."
"No one else did either, but I'm getting used to the idea. Claudine seems perfectly happy about it."
"Well, hand her over. It looks like she's grown in just the few days since I've seen her too."
"Maybe. It's hard for me to tell, since I see her all the time. She better not grow too fast. I'm having to have all her clothes altered to fit over the wings, and I want to get a little use out of them. I can't even pass them down for charity when she outgrows them now."
I handed the baby over to Amelia and then went to get some paper towels to wipe up the table. Amelia, like everyone else, started petting the baby's wings first thing. Claudine smiled at her and it was like the sun coming out in the morning. We all felt good.
Amelia, in her pastel blue soccer mom outfit, looked comfortable and natural with a baby in her lap. She had never mentioned wanting to have a family of her own, but I thought she probably would make a great mom. Maybe the right man would come along, although maybe the right one had been the one we had so recently laid to rest.
"She's a magical little thing, isn't she?" Amelia said.
"I'm beginning to think so. She just charms everyone. But, what baby that age isn't charming when they're not crying?"
"I don't know, Sook. I have seen some butt ugly babies."
"Amelia! How could you say that about any baby? Gracious!"
"You're just the cutest thing ever, aren't you little angel, aren't you?" Amelia crooned at the baby. Claudine cooed back happily.
Amelia was going to revert to baby talk before long, the way she used to do with Bob the cat. I was guilty of it myself. I poured myself a cup of coffee and looked around to see what Grace had left for breakfast. There was a tray with sliced bagels, cream cheese, fruit and some thin slices of what looked like ham. I popped a bagel into the toaster.
"Grace went to the store. She was muttering about laundry soap or something, and Elvis's underwear. Is Bubba here too now?"
"Oh God, we better make sure Bob doesn't get out. I thought Bubba was in Mississippi, but maybe he came home. He mostly stays with Bill."
"I think maybe Bill is out of town. I went over to see how he was doing last night and his car was there, but the house was dark. There were a couple of newspapers on the porch like he went on vacation and forgot to have the paper stopped."
Or maybe Bill had pissed Eric off one too many times and wasn't coming back. I hoped he was just doing research for the vampire database or something and not locked away somewhere being punished. I didn't think he would leave the area without letting someone know to get his mail and stuff, and that someone would probably have been Amelia. I didn't think Eric would do anything irrevocable either, or at least I hoped not. I owed my life to Bill.
"You okay, Sookie? You look kind of pale all of a sudden."
"I'm fine. Just hungry I think. This nursing really takes it out of you," I said and turned away to put the cream cheese on my bagel. My appetite was actually not so good now, but I knew that I had to eat something or I probably would be ill.
I sipped at my coffee for a few moments, watching Amelia play with Claudine. The erratic uncontrolled movements of a newborn were being replaced by slightly more controlled ones, and Claudine seemed to focus on every word that Amelia said. Not that most of it made much sense, but I could almost feel the baby trying to make sense of Amelia's baby talk.
Bob seemed drawn in by Amelia's voice too, and came padding into the kitchen for a visit. He approached Amelia hesitantly at first, wary, his eyes fixed on her hands as she tickled Claudine. It was hard to tell sometimes how much of Bob the human was left in Bob the cat, but he had the good sense to be wary of Amelia.
"Well, Bob," Amelia said haughtily. "There's a big, bad vampire who just loves to eat cats hanging around these days. Maybe you should take a nice walk outside in the woods tonight."
"Amelia! Don't you even think about it! Bob's under my personal protection."
The moment I said that I realized I was even starting to sound like a vampire. It wasn't enough that I glowed like them these days from all of Eric's blood. Amelia just laughed.
"Oh, I won't let him out, Sook. But it would serve him right if I did."
Bob, perhaps thinking that it wouldn't hurt to get back into Amelia's good graces, tentatively rubbed his head against Amelia's leg, only to be rebuffed by her foot.
"You can try to make nice all you want, Bob, but you're still on my shit list, and don't you forget it."
Stalking away as if unimpressed by Amelia's rejection, Bob went over to his food dish and began to noisily crunch his cat chow. Cats!
"A waste of good cat food, Sook, that's my opinion."
Amelia gave Bob one last hateful look and returned her attention to the baby. I turned my attention back to my breakfast and managed to polish off most of it in a very short amount of time.
"Amelia, Eric and I have been talking about how to handle this new development with the press and the public."
"Oh, they're going to love the wings, Sookie! I bet there will be a thousand new web sites about angels the minute her picture hits the papers."
"I suppose. But it is going to make her more of a target for the hate mongers too, Amelia. You know it will. It's just one more thing for them to focus on, and since the wings are black, they're sure to come up with some story about her being devil's spawn or some kind of fallen angel of Satan or something. We won't have a moment's peace, and we won't be able to go out without drawing a crowd."
"Maybe I can come up with some spell to change them or something, Sookie."
"Amelia!! There is no way on earth you are going to work a spell to change anything on my daughter. Look what happened with Bob when your spell didn't go right the first time."
"Don't rub that in, Sookie. It sure worked right this time, and anyway, Octavia taught me how to reverse it."
Amelia still bristled whenever anyone mentioned "the mistake". But that one mistake was enough for me to not let her experiment on Claudine. Not that I wanted Claudine changed anyway. I just wanted her safe.
"Not going to happen, Amelia. I can't take the risk. Anyway, she is what she is. I don't want to change her, I just want to disguise it, so she can go out and we can have more of a real life."
"Maybe an aversion spell might work, Sook, something to get people to look away. Then the humans would just not notice her."
"My great grandfather could do that," I said. "Something like that might work if we can't come up with something else, but I had another idea actually. Do you remember when I told you about the conference in Rhodes? How King Isaiah had those Britlingens to guard him?"
"Oh yeah, you told me about that. They had an invisibility cloak or something. Very Harry Potter!"
"I don't think it was a cloak, but that's the general idea. Apparently a witch had to bring them over from their dimension or whatever it is. It's expensive, but we have money. I thought, if we could maybe get Batanya here, we could consult with her. Maybe it is something she could teach to you and we could use it with Claudine. If Claudine could just hide the wings, then I could take her out like she was a regular human child."
"That's actually a good idea, Sook," Amelia said and I was a little surprised that her tone sounded surprised that I might have a good idea. Some times Amelia was a little too full of herself.
"I could ask Octavia, I guess, but I don't know if she has dealt with anything like alternate dimensions. She might know a witch that knows how to do it. But why haven't you asked Mr. Cataliades, or King Isaiah? He would be the one to know since he hired the Britlingens for the conference."
"I wouldn't ask the King unless I was out of options. I don't think Eric or I want to owe him any favors."
"Didn't you save his life? He's the one that owes you."
"Yeah, you would think that. But I saw how Felipe de Castro paid me back for saving his life. I don't trust vampires."
"You're only living with about ten of them, Sook. If you don't trust them, what the hell do you think you're doing?"
"I don't know sometimes, Amelia. I really don't. But I trust the ones in our little family, and I guess I trust Bill too and even Bubba, as far as you can trust someone with such limited capacity. So, I guess it's just that I don't trust the ones I don't know very well. But I hadn't thought about Mr. Cataliades. He didn't really know anything about angels, but he will know about the Britlingens and might know how to contact them."
"So you talk to the demon, and I'll talk to Octavia, and we'll see what we can find out."
"I'll talk to Eric tonight about making an appointment with Mr. Cataliades. You know that you have to keep this confidential, Amelia. I think Octavia is okay, but not anyone else. It's important."
"I learned my lesson, Sookie. I really did. No one is going to hear about this from me. I would just die if something happened to this little baby because of something I said, so I'll be real careful," she said and went back to playing with Claudine.
Actually, that might just happen if something Amelia did caused harm to Claudine. Eric wouldn't forgive her twice for breaching security. But I was pretty sure that she wouldn't. I was betting our safety on it.
The tailor showed up later in the afternoon, after Amelia had gone home to call Octavia and discuss the situation with her. Mr. Johnson brought a portable sewing machine with him and carried a small suitcase full of trims and threads and fasteners. . He was again impeccably dressed in a well fitting suit. He took off his jacket and carefully draped it over the back of one of the kitchen chairs.
"If you don't mind, Ma'am, I can just set up on the table and I can have most of these taken care of in a few hours. I thought this might be easier than sending the things back and forth. I know how babies go through clothes. I have a couple of them at home."
Grace didn't mind giving up the kitchen table for a bit. She was still working on the weekend's laundry. Since Claudine went through clothes like they were going out of style, I was anxious to get everything altered as expeditiously as possible.
The tailor pulled out the pieces that he had finished, several t-shirts and onesies, and we tried them on Claudine. With the soft border he had stitched around the cutout, and the Velcro fasteners at the neck, the clothes fit well and looked like they would be comfortable for the baby. They could be washed with out the problem of unraveling, which had happened with the few items I had hacked up with scissors.
"Wow, this is great, Mr. Johnson. You're a genius with needle and thread."
"Thank you, Mrs. Northman. I take pride in my work. My father trained me. He's retired now and I have taken over the business. Our family has been in this profession for several generations now."
"And you usually have enough work?"
"Oh yes, especially since the vamps have come out. They love parties and ceremonies, and they really like to dress up. They have become some of our best clients now. There is always a lot of work around Mardi Gras too, even here in Shreveport. I've had to hire several assistants. But of course, I will take care of the King's business personally."
Mr. Johnson had everything set up quickly and began working on the stack of small shirts and pajamas that Grace had brought in from the nursery. He snipped and stitched while we chatted. I made lunch since Grace had enough to do and sat down with my sandwich at the other end of the table. Mr. Johnson declined my offer of lunch but gratefully accepted a cup of tea.
"I have everything lined up for your costume. There is a Mardi Gras costumer who will work on some of it of course, since I only work on the fabric components. There should be no problem having everything ready though. I think you will be very pleased."
"I'm sure I will. Are you doing Eric's costume too?" I asked.
Eric had been very secretive about what he was wearing for the Halloween party, although he knew about the costumes for me and Claudine. I had originally thought he would just come as something predictable like Count Dracula, but he looked offended when I suggested that.
"As if I would pretend to be someone of Dracula's eminence!" he had said.
Since I still couldn't believe that the Count was a real person, even though all of the vampires believed he existed, I thought that was a little ridiculous. I wasn't going to say that to Eric though.
"Yes, we'll be constructing the King's costume too. He will be most impressive I think."
"Oh?" I commented innocently. "What is he wearing? With all of the commotion over the new baby and all, I just never thought to ask him what his costume was going to be."
Mr. Johnson raised his eyebrows slightly, hard pressed to believe that I thought him so easy to fool with my ruse of innocence.
"Mr. Northman's costume is always a surprise. I'm afraid that I couldn't possibly say what it will be, even to you, Mrs. Northman."
Well, it had been worth a try, but like everyone else, I would just have to wait for Halloween.
