Whether the owl was some reincarnate form of Sam, or a fellow spirit animal he had sent from his current resting place, or nothing more than an ordinary owl drawn to me by the curious power which coursed in my blood, I didn't know. I only knew it was a friend, not a foe.
Lune's strange grey eyes studied the bird, and then the witch twirled around, explaining in a loud voice that the apparition of the owl, the ancient bird of the occult, had come as a sign that their planned offering was accepted. What a load of bull. She should be the spin-master on the news for the pro-witch movement.
The owl agreed with me and hooted sharply at the witch. I appreciated its solidarity, but not its added weight. My legs would no longer support me with it on my shoulder and the torment clawing at me from the bands. I had never experienced a sensation quite like this, like my very will to live was being culled from me. I sank down to the ground, knocking Neal's face off my foot, but able to maneuver his head onto my shins with some care. His eyes quivered open, once, twice, and his awareness was no more. The owl had fluttered to my side at my collapse, and remained there beside my hip.
The pallbearers had broken ranks with the surrounding worshipers again and waited beside the coffins. Their mad priestess returned to stand beside Sam's grave, her back to me and her shadow fluttering over me as the stars and fairy lights twinkled above us. The owl hopped onto my lap. I tried to focus on the pain, to unspool it from me so that I could locate my fire again, but my attention became lost in the allure of the moment.
Harriet Lune raised her arms high above her head and began chanting in a language I had never heard before, a guttural, staccato language. From nothing, a huge blaze erupted at the end of Sam's plot. The flames swirled with seductive waves of blues and whites and purples. The owl flapped its wings on my lap and Neal stirred, the amber of his lashes fluttering as he opened his eyes. "Sons of the immortal night," the witch called in her deep, accented voice. Instantly two of the coffin lids banged open. "Generations of the changing moon!" Another call and two more broken open coffins. "Daughters of the constant day!" Same deal. All the coffins were now unsealed. And it wasn't just the lids. I could hear the minds of four of them, and sense the void of the other two. Three of the minds I knew right away, and it crushed me. But the witch hadn't finished. "Rise Firstborn of Mother Nature's true heirs!"
Panting, painfully, but as if he could not stop himself, Neal climbed to his feet. He swayed unsteadily, and gritting my teeth, I stood beside him so that he could lean against me, which he immediately did. The owl hooted and rested on the headstone.
Lune faced me and lowered her arms until they stretched out to me, as an invitation for an embrace. "Blessed of the Fae. Commander of the Sun. Vessel of the Earth. Come take your place in my bosom."
Something cold and nasty yanked around my navel, and almost dragged me forward, but Neal was slumping against me, his sweat and blood leaking over my chiffon shift and I ignored the impulse. That was not supposed to happen. Drilling me with those silvery eyes the witch repeated her command. It was harder this time, but I ignored her.
"How? You are wearing iron bands dipped in essence of lemon. You should be too weak to deny my magic."
Well that explained the pain. The iron sensitivity was new. The thing was—"I'm not full fairy," I thought of how Bill had described it, how my bouquet had not changed, only the quantity of that same bouquet had increased. "I'm more fairy now, but I'm somehow that much more human too. So I guess the iron's more an intolerance than a true allergy. In other words, you can't spell me to do a damn thing."
"Then I'll just do things the old-fashioned way," Lune said, grabbing me by the scalp and twisting me around. Neal fell back to the ground and the owl screeched. The pastel fire roared. The witch hooked her arm across my throat and jammed the tip of a knife—where had she been hiding that? I didn't want to know—into that thin layer of skin over my carotid artery. The mental hum of the audience, their attention and intrigue, played as a drumbeat beneath the intimate struggle between the witch and me.
With my hands bound, I hadn't been prepared for her attack or able to fend her off. But it was what I had been waiting for. The minds of those in the coffin, their hurt and confusion and fear, were also helping to unlock my light. I could feel that inner fire burn into the pain from the bands, lessening it just enough. My flame had reignited within me.
"Go ahead Sookie," she whispered in my ear, "I'd love for you to turn that sweet little light of yours on."
But I didn't need to shine. My son's abused, masticated face lie feet away from me, the alabaster fire reflected in his eyes, and I bit into the witch's arm with all my hate, tearing a chunk of her muscle away. Screaming she let go of me, and I ran towards Neal. He was only a yard away but I didn't make it. Two of the witchy pallbearer vampires heaved me into the air, grabbing me by my tied-up arms and whipping my head back. I heard Russel Edgington chortling nearby, exclaiming, "Finally! Something interesting is happening." He wasn't the only one laughing—a cruel, husky cackle vibrated through the warm night air.
"I was planning on giving you my blood. So thank you! Do you intend on biting all of us? On burning all of us?" Lune cackled again as her henchmen carried me to her. "You have nowhere to go!"
I flailed and kicked and spat, trying to rid myself of her blood, and might as well have done nothing. Since my fire had eaten at the pain, I could sense it in my blood, with a newfound control. Still I hesitated, unsure if that control extended to an ability to manipulate the effect as well. I wanted to turn it on them; I didn't want to turn them on.
Just then the owl swooped down, its talons raking across the eyes of one of the henchmen, silently swiping at the other set of vampire eyes in seconds. The vampires snarled in rage and threw me down, swatting at the bird that had already vanished into the night. Blinded, the second vampire lunged at Sam's tombstone, perhaps believing the quaking reflection on it was the movement of the wing and not the shadow of the fire. From my knees, I hit him with my shoulder, running-back style. Off-balance, he wobbled into the bluish blaze. The fire consumed him and his screams in a crackle of light. Neal had passed out again and couldn't be helped. I rolled over and bolted up, racing to one of the coffins.
Grace stared up at me—her green eyes sparkling in the glow of the tent of lights. As expected, she wore the ceremonial shift. Her mouth, hands and feet were bound with duct tape, because, sure why not?
"Gran? What's going on? They took me and my paralegal—she's also a Mother Naturist. I swear I didn't mean for any of this to happen."
"Sweetie, I know. It'll—"
Sharp nails sunk into my scalp, pinpricks of blood cooling over my flushed skin. I was flung to the ground, my shoulder popping out of its socket on the swift landing. The incandescent fire hissed in my ear. I had almost slid right into its radiant heat.
"Enough!" Lune bellowed, yanking me by the hair roots again, forcing me to stare up at her. "One more mark of disobedience and Riley dies." The warmth of my simmering fire, ready to break free, and the swelter of the magical bonfire melted my skin into a sticky texture. I stared at the witch, hands behind my back, shoulder lopsided, and began to laugh, a breathy, unhappy laugh.
"No harm you claimed! You were of the light! Do you know I actually thought you wanted me to give life to the undead? To make Eric human again?" I laughed and hiccuped, and laughed and hiccuped while I spoke my delirious ideas and she had me by the hair. "That somehow you wanted harmony and peace and good things—and Alex, oh you're going to break his dead heart. He thought you wanted us—humans, vampires, witches, weres—you name it," laughed and hiccuped, "he thought you wanted us to be one big, happy family—sure you'd kill us all, but we'd die for your trying!" I hiccuped, a hard, sucking one that tore at my lungs, and the smile fell from my lips. "Crazy Sookie, that's what all the kids called me. Even last night. The vampires. Crazy Sookie. I saw it in their faces. I'd started to believe it, almost. Tell me, Harriet. What'd the kids call you?"
The violet and blue flames spun in her grey eyes. "Miss Loony Lune," she said softly.
"Bastards,"'I replied.
Her fingers released my hair and I fell fully onto the ground. The witch sighed and knelt in front of me. Tenderly she wiped away a speckle of blood that leaked from my scalp. Her glittery gaze ran over my body. Stains and wrinkles dirtied my shift, patches of the chiffon clung to my wet skin, erasing any illusion of modesty. My fire mellowed; the pain from the bands festered with fresh bitterness.
"Don't you see, Sookie? I do want peace and harmony between all of the Mother's creatures and creations. That is why I spoke so long and so often with Alex about how to unite all species. A massive blood bond would bring destruction. I want to bring creation. A mother creates. Alex did not understand, because he only saw his science. With the Mother incarnate, all those gaps will be sealed, all those divisions will be healed. Why are you fighting me on this? I am offering you a gift—"
"All gifts come with a price, Harriet. The price of your gift is my life."
"But the gift itself is life—eternal, expanding, endless life."
"I never wanted immortality."
"Of course you did. Of course you do. You never wanted a dead immortality—the counterfeit eternity the vampires promise." She lifted me up by my good arm, and brushed my hair away from my neck. "But if you accept this gift, maybe you can offer the vampires more than they ever offered you. Not their human lives back, though as the Mother, that will be possible, but you can offer them true immortality. A living, endless existence."
"Alex believes you're endangering all supernatural creatures."
"As brilliant as his mind is with numbers, it is ignorant of creation—of art or music or love, the things that truly bind us to one another. The things born in a womb and delivered in the light."
Her deep, rich voice was like a lullaby, rocking me back and forth, and back and forth, and shushing me to sleep. And I could have gone there. If not for my son who lie in a heap beside the fire; if not for the terrified thoughts of my granddaughter; if not for the grave underneath my feet.
"I'm not going to stop fighting. I'm not going to give in." Choose yourself. Those words echoed once again in my mind, and finally I think I understood them. I was tempted by her gift. Who wouldn't be? But the gift was a lie. "What you're offering is a counterfeit me. And I guess after eighty years, I'm okay with the real deal."
"Then I hope you enjoy your life, for the next few minutes. I chose the guests in your honor." Her eyes still on mine, she punched me to the floor by hitting my injured shoulder and said, "Rise." The command was not meant for me. I could do nothing but crouch in my unbearable agony and watch. Damn these iron bracelets!
With the same awkward, robotic movements that Neal had demonstrated earlier, each of the occupants of the coffins somehow contorted themselves out of their boxes and into a standing position on the grass. Neal crept forward from beside Sam's grave, Grace and her paralegal wriggled themselves upright, duct tape and all, the two "changing moon" coffin residents managed to bare the weight of their heavy metal shackles, despite the eighty-plus years of one of them. "Sookie," the two Herveaux were-men thought in unison, the weathered and youthful green eyes, softer and more olive than Grace's color, seeking my gaze, their wolffish minds alert but lost.
"She's the witch who cursed Alex," the doctor thought, as he flicked his eyes to the white-haired woman at my side, and I nodded at him. "I will kill her—but she did something to us. We can't shift since she made us bite—my pops told me after it was your son." Gile glanced at Neal, then could no longer meet my gaze and shut me out of his warm were mind. Alcide had remained quiet, his pain greater from his greater age, his thoughts a tortured hue.
The vampires were the last to rise. And it was little wonder why. Chained in silver beneath the damn transparent garb, Alex crawled from his coffin, hunched and silent. Eric followed. How he could move, let alone stand so proud and tall, mystified me. He had not only been chained, but drained. Some blood remained—much more than when I had discovered Alex—yet his skin caved in at odd angles and hung on his bones more translucently than the chiffon draped over his body. But the Viking did not know surrender. Finally I understood—this was not logic. This was magic, including Eric's defiance.
I tried to catch his eye—he was only four feet from me, but his gaze remained fixed on something far above my head. Curious, I looked up and saw it was the crescent moon. It had finally risen. And so had he.
The witch raised her arms then and slammed them down onto the grass, crying out: "Now bound to the earth. Now bound to voice. Mine to move. My own choice. Lift the silver and the steel. Chains are words to sic or heel." That little rime must have taken her awhile, much longer than the time it took for the removal of the shackles, the metal unwinding from its victims and whipping through the air toward the open coffins. Not my cuffs, however, I noted. And I grimaced from the stinging ache.
"Remember, Sookie dear, one false move—"
"I remember!"
Any pretense of the kindly caretaker had vanished. The witch clutched me by my bad arm again, hurled me to my feet, and pushed me at Eric. I stumbled into his strangely bony chest, and his rail-thin arms caught my fall. I looked up at him and he did not turn away, his expression wary, uncertain, and hollow. I wondered if I looked the same. It frightened me, with a force I had not expected, to see my Viking nearly destroyed. It was an impossibility to me that he should cease to exist, even when I would no longer walk this earth—it was impossible for me to envision an earth without him on it. I couldn't describe what that moment did to me. Nothing mattered then, but the truth that I could make him whole.
"Ancient One," the witch called too soon and a film slipped over the blue of Eric's eyes. "Heal thyself. First from the blood of the fae, then from the blood of the were, next from the blood of the women, in whose womb thou did stir."
I knew it was unavoidable. It was what I wanted, and so I opened my neck to him, and closed my eyes. This was nothing like before—no sex, no heat, no Eric. This was pure mechanics. He fed from me, and then zipped to the two Herveaux men, and then zipped to Grace and the paralegal.
As Eric fed, I found it easier to survey the murmuring crowd, noticing an obvious hole in the swaying, chiffon formation. The King of Mississippi had disappeared. I squinted into the indentation and started to doubt my own eyes. Something told me the royal vampire lurked in the void. Cloaked. And it didn't require three guesses to figure out why. I was about 99.999% certain King Russel and his crew were on the Viking's hit list. Eric must know about Joe's betrayal and progenitor. Not that I could ask him while he was seemingly spelled and all. I had enough troubles, like a bleeding neck.
By the time Eric rounded back to where I stood, my spine bent and my blood clotting, he was completely healed. I moved to walk away from the small orbit of his control, but he reached out for me, and held me up, wrapping his strong arm around my waist.
"Steady, Sookie," he whispered, and somehow I did.
Lune was on a roll, rushing as if taking a timed exam: "Son of the Ancient," she cried, "heal the harm thy maker hath done—save the Fae, who thou will shun."
Wonderful. She had more rimes up her sleeves. I had one for her: "Psycho One, you're no fun, so I'll kill you when you're done!" Alex now circled the group, healing the others with his blood. The movements of the "son" were more jerky and pained than his Maker's had been—but Eric had drank my blood. I wondered if he even felt the lingering effects of the silver. He wasn't flying—figuratively or literally. I would have thought, actually, he might have even been cured of the spell. Guess my blood wasn't as splendid as I believed it to be.
Curious, I watched as Alex fed Grace, tearing off the duct tape from her mouth as he had done with the weres. ( Sure, because duct tape can't even be spelled off? I smelled a new ad campaign.)
This was the first time the two had interacted since that fateful night of Sam's death—the night she would never remember. Perhaps I was imagining things, searching for beauty in the ugliness, but I thought I perceived some tenderness in their exchange absent from the other feedings. I guess I might have to redefine my definition of incest...
When Alex returned to his place beside his Maker, he cast a hungry, sad eye at my scabbing neck wound. Fortunately he would get to feed next.
"Immortal death, Father and Son, feed on each other and be one." Alex and Eric simultaneously drank from one another—healing their bond. They held each other by the shoulders at arms' length, staring into the other's blue gaze, and then turned toward the center. Eric's arm snaked back around my waste. I heard a less-than pleasant thought about the vampire's "freshness" from the were corner.
There was a brief lull in the action, as the stage was reset, and the pallbearers carried the coffins away. The blazing fire crackled in the false tranquility. Lune stalked about the graveyard, issuing commands. Everyone under her bare foot, apart from me. I might as well have been. Despite the comfort, Eric's arm was hardly enough to keep me upright. I had a million things to ask him—none of which I trusted he could tell me. He certainly wasn't offering anything. He'd said two words total to me since his rising. None of the risen seemed chatty, though.
Tired and hurting, I looked to my son. His suffering dampened my own. Neal, who out of all the participants, had been excluded. I was thankful he had not been eaten, but he could have used some feeding. The bite marks, hundreds of serrated crescents, ran from his crown to his heel. Gile had said Alcide and he had inflicted the wounds—but that could not be. Teeth marks of all sizes lacerated his skin. He stood next to Grace, his daughter acting as a human crutch, her thoughts torn between worry for her dad and worry for me—with the occasional self-conscious musing on Alex peppering the anxious mix.
The lull ended. Guess the witch was back to the grind, and I was poised to fight, but so far, it had been weirdly okay. "Ancient One." Here we go with a rime. "Drink from the child who stands for the father. Then drink from the mother who stands for us all." I frowned. For several reasons. The poem was a cop-out. She could have made a couplet out of that. But more importantly—
"No!" And for the second time, my words tracked heat. I'd wanted to heal Eric. I'd been fine with Alex healing everyone else, and re-bonding with Eric, but not this. The witch blinked back at me, tears at the edges of her eyes, as if I had slapped her with all of my force. "You will not touch my son."
"Dillon!" the witch barked at one of the pallbearer vampires. "Call that rat Vincent and put the phone on speaker while he eats his meal—Alcott or Riley, Sookie's Choice."
Vincent? That slimy leech was the vampire threatening my family? Neal's family? I looked to see if Eric showed any reaction. He'd been living with Vincent for days. Nada. At least this was a kind of litmus test to show me that my instincts to postpone asking him about the whereabouts of Pam or Psycho Queen were correct. Or it was just the Viking being as maddeningly secretive as usual. My son whispered, "No need. I will feed the vampire." And not that anyone needed my permission, but I actually stomped my foot as I growled, "No!"
Too late, I became aware of the vacancy at my side. Eric had obeyed the command, rime or no rime, my permission or not, and was feeding off of Neal. I raced across the graves, my sore, restrained arms wagging behind me as a weird dog tail and my shoulder flapping grotesquely from its socket. The vampire had finished his feeding, and, breathing an apology to me, hooked his fangs in me again. Oh right that had been the non-riming stanza.
This time was shorter than the last, but more personal too. A slight shiver of desire rippled in me, as a single drop on a sea of horrors. I must have caused a ripple in Eric, too, a shiver moved against my belly, a shiver warm and hard.
Eric whisked back to his designated plinth of dirt, and I found it difficult to meet anybody's eye—especially as their thoughts confirmed my worst fears. Gile put it most succinctly: "Damn. He's huge. No wonder." Yeah, well, you're right up there with him, I added, to my shame. I hadn't tried to measure anything—it had just sort of happened. I'm old. I've earned the right—or something.
Another pause as the pallbearers carried in a golden coffin. How nice. She'd spent top-dollar for me. Because this had to be mine. The back and forth was getting to me. Tedious had not been my vision for this night. Beaten of spirit and sprite, I craved peace. "Can we wrap this up?" I asked, annoyed, a tinkling of my fire in my question. "Neal needs a rest." My child and grandchild actually groaned beside me—and I heard Neal—I heard my son! "Does she realize the longer this takes, the longer she stays alive?"
I turned to the witch, who prowled around the circle again, to try with her—and realized that the forced downtime was so she could keep the cloaking spell in place to protect the king—a delay she found irritating and incendiary. The witch had too many plates spinning. She needed the vampires, her unavoidable but lucrative evil. I wondered why they needed her. Something whispered I might play a part. She became aware of the intrusion and shut me out, but the damage had been done. I knew I could break through her defense spell. I could break through it for all.
And I did. Boom. My mind sent out an invisible shockwave. All the spelled witches' minds rose in volume and variety and voice. I understood why it had suddenly become so easy. I wasn't the only one breaking into them; the spell was breaking apart. The coven witch alone held onto her privacy, but only just. Her mind had switched from a fuzzy black and white screen to a pixelated show in color. That's how I realized—or read in about a dozen minds—the time limit attached to this spell. The champagne flutes that had contained the tracest amount of the witch's special anti-telepathy brew—so the spell really had been a potion.
The shock wave had tipped me over the cliff. I was incredibly woozy. Eric's last taste was the second time in minutes I had been fed on—the fourth time in less than forty-eight hours. And if that wasn't enough, I'd been in a car accident early this morning, iron bands currently leeched my strength, and my shoulder was a new damn doll limb. If it wasn't for my increased health and healing, this would have already happened. Try as I might, I staggered and willed myself not to faint.
Neal sat down on his father's grave, his feet warming by the opaline blaze. Somehow I found myself leaning against Sam's headstone. The coo of a bird trilled in my ear. The owl had come back and perched on the stone.
I closed my eyes to drown out the unnecessary voices. The abrupt cacophony blared against my heavy brain. I focused on the only one I needed to tune in. I saw into the hazy brightness of the choppy, technicolor clips. My channel surfing was not covert—Lune sensed me as an audience to her thoughts. If she could no longer keep me at bay, she intended to make me pay. Really as smart as she was, she wasn't complex.
There was no rush now for her. She was shoring up her spell work on my risen friends and family, as she and a dozen of her henchmen sprinkled what smelled like sage and daffodil along the circumference of the circle, chanting something. As she chanted, the risen captive in their places, Neal and I captive from our pain, she showed me the past, to mock and punish, and justify. I saw what she had done to Neal—for two days he had been imprisoned and bitten by every were the witch's minions could track down, spelling the shifters to transform. This was the work-around. Sam had been meant to stand in the circle with me—as a pure shapeshifter, he really was Mother Nature's truest expression and child. I had led the witch to my son's door that day she had "bumped" into me in town—and although she had watched Neal before in the six months leading up to here—it was on that day that she had noticed his resemblance to his father and the possibilities as the first born. The past closed. The next steps of her plan unfolded to me, my very future in the pictures. At last, she showed me the present. And that's when I really stomped my foot.
My eyes snapped open and she shortened the gap between us. "I warned you Sookie."
My reply was to barrel into her. She tripped into that golden coffin, and I smacked into it with her. Yelling and cursing her name, my fire burst from me as a molten cloud, slapping her as it had before. She actually clutched at her cheek. Neal's weak grip tried to rein me back, tugging on the hem of my shift. "Mom, please she has my family!"
"She has our entire family!" I screamed, rage infusing me with a new energy. But the witch had recovered. She scooped up a handful of the dried herbs she had sprinkled as a boundary and flung them into my face.
Not sage. Lemon grass.
The powdered herb scalded my face and neck. I could do nothing to ward off another attack, my hands trapped behind me. The owl dived in front of me just as the witch flung a second clod of acidic mulch at me. Screeching, my bird savior swerved right at Lune, gouging her chestnut cheek with its talon. To my surprise, the witch immediately surrendered and genuflected before the owl.
"Pax mater noster!" she said. "Pax!"
The owl screeched once more, setting down on my unharmed shoulder. Lune waved off the aid offered by her henchmen, who I hadn't noticed had been ready to pounce on me, if not for their leader's command. Creakily the witch rose to her feet, her chrome eyes wary of my feathery bodyguard. Her mind, still a maze of knots and dead ends, allowed for me to perceive the witch's puerile fear of the creature. I knew nothing of the history of owls, and could not read the witch's mind as a textbook, but gathered enough of an impression to understand that she had not been lying earlier in the evening—she truly believed this owl was a representative for the Mother. I could see into her mind suddenly, see past the darkness, as offense and outrage weakened her fortitude. Harriet Lune believed absolutely in the righteousness of her calling. This was a war of extinction, and she had been called to the front lines. Her faith may be the thing I could use to defeat her.
"It is time for the final stage of the dedication!" she announced. A thrilled awe moved through the masses, those ever-swinging masses. I had become blind to their presence, even as the layering of their numbers kept me from liberating myself from their bodied prison. And their voices were distinct yet indeterminate. Lune started going off in that engrossing, nonsensical way of hers, the witch once more a priestess, singing at her billowing, blue fire.
My leaden feet shuffled back to Sam's headstone. A metallic sick was on my tongue from the degree of pain and fatigue I was experiencing. The owl fluttered down to the arched top of the headstone as I sat against it. I felt a click, an unknowable weight slipped off my wrists, and sudden relief. The owl had unlocked the noxious cuffs. I rubbed my wrists and flexed my fingers, ginger with my shoulder. Scraped of feeling, but for a numbness that would soon give way to anger and sorrow, I pet the bird, my good hand rustling silently in its feathers.
The witch was in full-swing of her sermon to the flame, and now all the preparations and feedings and fighting seemed a distant memory. Choose you. Choose yourself. I didn't even know what that meant anymore. If I had been right about its meaning or not. Silently I asked the bird, but this wasn't a dream, and the bird, its wide, amber eyes staring blankly back at me—made no reply. I waited, knowing what was coming. Not knowing what to do.
I couldn't look at the weres, their green eyes on the witch, drawn in by her prowess to persuade. Grace and her assistant were even more enthralled—she was after all, their religious guru. I had been avoiding the vampires, although, strangely, I felt Eric's influence touch lightly on my mind, a little wavelet of the tide of his power tempting to flow into where he'd never been before. Why would he be trying to glamour me? I glanced at him, but he was either feigning indifference or lost in those frozen states vampires sometimes escaped into. I wished he could glamour the witch. I wished the hold the witch had over the risen had a time limit. I wished I knew what to do. Maybe if given the training and tools, I could work around it, use that back fairy door. Only problem, I didn't even know where the front door was. All I had were my three wishes, and I was no fairy goddess—not when my children's lives hung in the balance, because that's what she had revealed—the faces of the vampires who lurked outside my children's and grandchildren's homes. All of them. And if she died, they were ordered to kill my entire family.
I hadn't been paying attention. Rookie mistake. Lune had finished her preaching and had returned to stand beside Sam's grave where all the "participating humans" were clumped, Neal and me on the grave, Grace and the paralegal a foot or two away. I gasped when I saw it in her craggy mind. How had I missed it? Once more, the witch had noticed my trespassing into her thoughts.
"I will never make that choice!" I said.
"I don't need to read your mind, cher. I'll even decide for you. Why do you think I was kind enough to pick one not of your blood?" With that, the witch's knife appeared in her hand and as I leaped to knock it from her, she grabbed Grace's paralegal by the shoulders and sliced open her throat.
"Feed all risen on the blood of the slain—but not for the Fae, lest all be in vain!" Blood gulped out of the paralegal's throat, out of that young, dead girl's throat, bathing the witch in slick crimson. She licked at her soaked arm and dropped the corpse. In one mass attack, my child and grandchild, Alcide and Gile, Alex and Eric converged on the girl.
And I converged on the witch. My hands wrapped around her bloodied upper arms, despite the wracking pain in my shoulder. She smiled, a wild, exhilarated smile, and grasped my arms with her hard fingers. Her knife vanished again. "Yes, sweet Sookie. Oh yes! Show me your light!" I didn't care if I got her all hot and bothered—maybe if I kept at it, she'd burn like the undead. I would save my family. I could! My fire had been waiting, doused in the accelerant of adrenaline. The flame exploded onto my body, beyond my skin, it wrapped around the witch. Her head rolled back and her body twitched, and when she had gasped a shuddering note and her hands went slack, I did not release her. My fingers dug into her; her body began to writhe again and her voice to wail, but as I kept my hold on her, the sounds and shivers started to change. Her eyes flew wide open. Frantic, she tried to unclamp my fingers, to twist and untwist from me, to beat the backs of my hands with blistering slaps. I knew she was yelling something but in the roar of my own inferno I could no longer hear even her thoughts.
And then that damn knife appeared in her hand again. The one she must keep locked in a magic cubby. I reached for it across my body, giving her an instant of calm, and she stabbed it into my neck. My fire blew out, wisps of smoke curling into the night. My hands squeezed at my throat, the blood pouring over my skin, slipping between my breasts. None of that mattered. I couldn't breathe. No matter what I did, I couldn't pull the air through the blood strangling my throat. My lungs screamed at me with the volume of a thousand minds and tongues. My heart thundered with the feet of a mighty stampede. Stumbling, I noticed the nameless faces of the crowd running at me. I crumpled to the floor, beside the ashy remains of the paralegal. Not even her bones had survived the frenzy—shattered and ground to dust by my friends and family and a former lover and his son. Those faces who hovered above me now, screaming in the same breathless howl as my lungs.
I searched for and found his eyes, found the color of the ocean under the moon. I wanted to go there with him, to live in the place where the moon touches the same ocean as the sun. A place we could call home. His eyes filled up my vision, the blue fading into black. And a caress as soft as a feather touched my brow.
Note: And here I thought I could have the last chapter, this one and the next as one! Thanks for the reviews. I try and keep in mind this Sookie is an old woman. And honestly all will be revealed next chapter. At least that is the plan. And I may have made sure there were 6 coffins to fit Eric's family as a major misdirect. But I'll say this...the best laid plans...the coven leader might use that phrase. Cheers and Happy Friday?! How is that possible. And I am annoying. I like rime...