The Bon Temps cemetery had cleared of the crowds and the lights and the noise and the blood.

"No, they were never here."

I whipped my head around, rubbing it from pain, and looked at him. The sky blue eyes, the ruddy, wrinkled cheeks, the white, curly hair—thick and coarse after all these years. My lips parted as tenderness softened my features. I lifted my hand to tuck a curl around my finger and stopped at the sight. It was my hand. My eighty-year old hand, with dimples and sunspots, rolling, blue veins and beaded knuckles. Tears swirled in my vision.

"I didn't know how much I missed these."

My voice was thick as I caressed my left hand with my right.

"Allow me. I've missed them too." Sam took my hand in his and began circling his thumb over the tough skin. "I know you've missed me, also."

"I've missed you more."

"Yes. I've seen it."

I wiped a tear from my cheek. "You have?"

"From time to time."

"Was tonight one of those times?"

Sam kissed my knuckle and pressed my hand to his cheek, nodding.

"The owl. That was you."

He kissed the other knuckle and squeezed my hand as he wove his fingers through my fingers and rested our intertwined hands between us. We were sitting on a bench, under the sweet scented leaves of a willow tree.

"It was me as much as I am ever me anymore."

"You're not you anymore?"

"My spirit belongs to nature, and nature belongs to all and to none."

"You didn't used to be so confusing to talk to you."

His bushy white brows waggled up. "Am I confusing you?"

"My great-grandfather came to see me, did you know?"

He glanced out at the cemetery. "I know you were lost to me once, as you stood near my grave."

"I think that was tonight."

"No, you went to the Summerlands—briefly. I chose not to follow."

I wasn't aware I had ever gone to the resting place of my Fae kin but I wasn't about to argue now. "Will you go with me when we are able? Will you go with me forever?"

"I would like that. It is why I still seek out this form."

A breeze rustled the willow's weeping leaves, dropping tears onto our skin.

"Where are we?"

"In the realm of all nature's spirits. My home."

"How can I be here? I'm not dead, am I?"

"No, but you would have died and been lost to me forever. So I took your spirit here. Since you are mine, and I am yours. Although, you cannot stay long."

"Do you have a Mother here? Niall told me you would only come with me to the Summerlands if you and the Mother decided it together. Is it true? Is she here?"

"She is the keeper of all nature's spirits. The face of the many and the one. She is here and she is there, always."

"The witch thinks I can become her."

"The thing she seeks cannot be done."

"Yeah. I kinda figured."

"The thing you seek, however, can be done."

"What do I seek?"

"To be with the Ancient One."

I stared at Sam—at my Sam, the one I had last seen and would always remember first. This more than all the other cryptic remarks told me that no matter what he appeared as, this Sam was something of himself and something else. "I want to be with you," I said.

"Yes. That is why you are in this form, but you are not always in this form."

"I'm not in my other form to be with anyone. I'm in it to protect our family."

"No, you are in it to carry your home with you always. That is what you wanted, a place of rest, a place of beauty, of safety, of love, and most of all, a place of life. And it is that last, most significant value that draws you to the Ancient One, and which has always drawn you to him." Sam looked at our withered hands. "We have been blessed, Sookie. We have many homes. You are my home. Nature is my home. This is my home. But a vampire can never really call any place home. We could just as easily call them the homeless as the undead. Home is the center of all life. It is the purpose of creation. It is what we want above all. Even for a vampire. Especially for a vampire."

Sam kissed my hand once more and stood. "The witch will do much damage in her attempt. She already has."

"Alex said all supernaturals are in trouble. He was wrong about the big blood bond. Was he wrong about the danger?"

"We are all connected. For one of us to be in danger, is for all of us to be in danger."

"Wait. Why did you tell me to choose myself? If we are all connected—if it was never an option to choose to be Mother Nature—why tell me to choose myself?"

"Because who else should you choose?"

And like that he was gone. Or maybe I was. Because I heard voices. Loud voices. Or a loud voice. A raspy, broken voice, and a soft, rich voice. Both male voices. My hearing wasn't the only sense returned to me. All feeling flooded through me; each sensation amplified in a music whose distant strains floated as a memory out of sight, but not out of mind. And something more than myself, more than even my renewed self stirred in my blood. Renewed I truly was. No pain in my neck. No dislocated shoulder. No exhaustion. The broken male voice beside me heightened in emotion.

"She will never forgive you! How could you do that to her?"

"I would have preferred not to do it myself."

"I don't give a damn what you'd prefer!"

"I think she may, but Alex is too young, and Pam was not here."

"I agree with the boy." A new voice, gruff yet warm. "Northman, you've got one hell of a nerve."

"You've been quiet—what do you think?"

"I think I need to take you to my clinic to run tests. All those different bite marks. It's unique."

"I mean about my mother!"

Silence. A silence I could hear—the heavy breathing, the shuffle of limbs, the whisper of hair against fabric.

"Well, doctor?"

"I don't know. Part of me wants to stake him. Part of me wants to thank him."

"No one wants to know what I think?" A female voice. "Typical."

"What do you think Miss Merlotte?"

"I think she isn't going to be a vampire."

And that's what made me open my eyes. Only I couldn't tell I had done anything. Blackness surrounded me. Not darkness. Blackness. I was positioned vertically on my back in blackness. Soft, smooth blackness. Tentatively I put my hand out in front of me. Satiny above. Satiny below. I'd been here not long ago, resting while eavesdropping. I didn't want it to be a habit.

I was about to start banging on the satin when the next words stopped me.

"The witch arrives."

Snapping of branches and the rustle of brush, the crush of leaves beneath naked feet. The sounds of a person approaching in the woods. My heart was as relieved as it was angered to hear her voice, the milky, bayou accent coating her tongue. If she were alive, than so was my family. But if she was alive, than so was her miserable, impossible plan.

"Has she stirred? Am I right?"

"Where is my progeny, witch? Let me heal him."

"In good time, Ancient One." Her voice drew nearer. "You killed all but one of my lieutenants."

"I apologize for overlooking the one."

"I can't believe I'm saying this but I agree with the vampire. Only sorry I missed him too."

"Careful, elder wolf. You do not share in His Excellency's protections."

"Priestess. Please. We are neither a threat, a benefit, nor a liability. Let my family go. Let us go."

"Grace, how can you suggest such a thing? Were you not moved by what you witnessed? What you felt?"

"You mean when I witnessed you kill my grandmother? What I felt when you stabbed her in the neck? I can't wait to witness about that—in a court of law."

"And you profess not to be a liability. Enough blood has been unnecessarily spilled. More will be, though if you do not come peacefully with me. The circle blossom is restored. All but the Ancient One. Come!"

Grunts and moans and sighs burbled through the air. My family and were friends crashed loudly away through whatever forest sheltered us. From what the witch had said—it must be the thicket which enclosed the Bon Temps cemetery. I knew what black silkiness I was lying in then, and wasn't surprised when the coffin lid immediately opened once the noise of the others had faded away.

Eric looked down at me, his skin shimmering palely, his eyes shimmering darkly. The cool of the night blew across my face and I inhaled the freshness, the pines and ferns and willows parfuming the air. Eric inhaled in time with me as I took my second breath. With his blood newly in me, I could almost hear it—that muted not severed bond between us, could almost sense the excitement pulse in him as he enticed his senses by inviting in my aroma.

"Your heart beats more beautifully than usual right now," the vampire said, offering me his hand. I chose not to take it as I sat up, nor the help he then tried to give as I climbed out of the coffin. My eyes scanned the wooded dimness, the fairy lights of the cemetery blinking several yards away through the silhouetted trees. I shook the stiffness from my limbs and glanced down at my outfit. A new chiffon shift—no longer the fancily embroidered one of before, but a clean, unwrinkled one. Let's see if I could keep it unbloodied. At least less bloodied than the filthy one Eric still wore.

"What happened?" I asked.

"I might ask the same. You died."

"No I didn't. I just took a vacation."

"From breathing?"

"I guess so."

"It's been an hour but your heart started beating a minute ago."

"An hour?"

I darted my eyes around in the dusky night lights. I couldn't sense any eyes watching or voices thinking or voids waiting to materialize into tangible threats. "We need to go get the others," I said. "We need to leave."

"I cannot leave. They magically locked me in this corner of the forest—but withstanding that, I will not abandon Alex again."

"Well then I'll go. I'll go get help. Where's Pam? Or Karin?"

"Drained and silvered, at Joe's," the vampire said quietly. "As is Heidi. I cannot help them right now."

I didn't care but the information may be useful. "And Freyda?"

"I have not seen my wife since you have. I do not believe they drained her. They would not do that to a Queen."

"They did it to you."

"They had other reasons for that, reasons that are tangential at best, and I am only a Royal Consort."

A gust of wind danced through the treetops then, starlight filtering in through the rocking branches. The weather had grown more wintry during my "vacation." And I shivered in the inadequate chiffon. Eric watched me, apparently content to accept his captivity.

"I can't sit here." I started to walk toward the opposite direction of the lights, quickly plotting a way around to the other side of the cemetery.

"The witch believed you would return as yourself. She fairy-proofed this area of the forest with iron bear-traps and homemade pressure cooker bombs of lemon and shrapnel. I watched them carry them into the forest, but I cannot tell you where they placed them. I heard the cloaking incantation—and even hunting them free of a spell, we may miss one or two bombs."

I spun back around, my chiffon wavering in the breeze. "Damn Harriet. Do you know she stalked me? Studied up on me like you would for a test or something? Even made me my Gran's famous turnip soup." I looked at my hands. My young, soft hands. Did the witch suspect where I had been? Eric was thinking along the same lines.

"Where were you?" he asked. "Not with other Fae. I wouldn't be able to resist you if you had been with your fairy kin, not with your added allure and so much of my blood in your veins. It's hard enough right now to resist."

My gaze involuntarily flickered down. Dark or not, I could see how hard it was for him at the moment. A familiar tug swirled between my legs.

"What happened?" I repeated with a breathier voice than I'd like. "Why are we here in the forest? How did you kill a bunch of her lackeys? When did you fight them off?"

"You're asking too many questions at once."

"You're not answering any."

"I don't want to be talking with you right now."

Oh boy. Eric had taken two steps toward me. My heart hammered in a betraying thrill of anticipation. My tongue thickened with thirst, a thirst of a desert of desire. Sam's bizarre but true words nudged me to give in. To simply accept the inevitability. But how could I? After what he had tried to make me become?

I was more furious with the vampire than ever before; I had never wanted him more. In the end, he didn't give me a choice. Or I didn't take it. He'd flung his dirty shift to the forest floor before he crashed into me, his tall, naked body walling me off from the distracting world. His cool smooth flesh pinned me against the rough bark of a tree. His mouth covered mine, consuming me. Willingly I responded. My fire—it was there, it was still there, that spark of life, that flame of creation—flickered, an ember being coaxed to burn. He lifted me at my thighs as he lifted my shift above my waste. I waited for that long-forgotten pressure. It didn't come. Eric stopped kissing me, and my lungs heavy with lust, deflated of oxygen. I opened my eyes and he stared at me, his fangs fully extended.

"Can't you break the spell, Sookie?"

"What?" I panted.

The animal growl of frustration tore up from his abdomen—I felt the packs of his muscles ripple against my shift. His hand clawed at the bark of the tree behind us, the elimination of it crunching in my ear. Unceremoniously, I was dropped. My shift slipped back down my legs. My almost lover growled again, this time the destruction of bark was not enough. Slack-jawed I watched Eric uproot a tree with the circumference of a tire swing and the height of a two-story house and hurl it through the forest like it was a football on game day. A pressure cooker bomb twenty yards away went off. Voices and feet crashed toward the acidic plume, their figures hidden in the wood. Breathless I waited for someone to veer our way, but after a minute, no one did. Somehow my own sexual frustration seemed irrelevant.

Perhaps stupidly, I raced to bar him from a pretty ash tree he started eyeballing.

"Explanation, Eric."

After a moment, the Viking regained some control, and the tenseness of his shoulders relaxed. "When the witch drained me, she cursed me that I could not put my dead seed in you until by her command I had first put my blood."

"But you gave me your blood."

"Of my own will. Not by her command. Still, as you broke through all the other enchantments, I assumed you had broken through that one as well."

"I broke through the other enchantments? Which ones?"

"As far as I can tell, all of them. You really have no idea what you did when you shined during your struggle with the witch." He smirked ruefully. "To have so much power and so little awareness. It is criminal."

I glowered. I'd show him how much awareness I had—for starters that I was aware that he was still one-hundred percent clothes-free and facing me with this legs shoulder-width apart, his junk swinging out there like a damn Tarzan with two boulders strapped to his back. I was also aware that we didn't have time for his favorite game of "Keep Sookie in the Dark."

"Which enchantments Eric?"

"Your light touched everything under the tent, Sookie. It broke her spell chaining us to her command and to our place in the circle—ending the feasting frenzy on the dead girl. Luckily, too, as your shine incinerated the girl's corpse to ash. It freed the weres to transform into wolves—which they both immediately did upon your death—"

"Vacation."

Eric's eyes rolled up into his skull. "Absence, then. It uncloaked the King of Mississippi. It healed your son of—"

"Neal's healed?"

"The bite marks resemble crescent scars now. The witch had cursed the wounds to fester. It is still unclear what your son will become on the full moon. He told us he was bitten by many creatures."

"Yes, Harriet showed me as much." My expression darkened. "What happened to her?"

"You almost killed her. She was very weakened."

"Why didn't you finish her off?"

His eye brows now were the things to fold up into his skull. "She told us of her kill orders. I did not think you would wish your family murdered over the relish of ending her life, and I had other distractions. Every vampire in the cemetery, and nearly every human, were racing to experience your light for themselves. I had to fend them away from you, despite their injuries." He answered the question in my face. "Any vampire within ten feet of you was charred with third-degree burns before you—before your absence—apart from Alex and myself. We had a minor sunburn, which helped as we fought against far greater numbers."

"Why'd you and Alex get burned less? You were closer."

"I'm assuming it has something to do with your blood in our systems. I lied to the other vampires who still remained, once we had been subdued by the coven—even I am no match for thirty angry witches—that you had spared us on purpose from the worst of your heat."

"Maybe I did do it on purpose."

"Sookie, you lack the ability to tell me what you did, let alone how."

"Fine. So if it's only been an hour, why is Harriet as bossy and bitchy as ever?"

"Why do you call the witch by her given name?"

"Because she calls me by mine. Why isn't she laid up or something? She drink one of her witchy vamp's blood?"

"She drank my blood."

Another jaw drop. "Yours? You let her?"

"She drank it from a champagne flute after pouring it from your grandmother's crystal decanter."

And the jaw was still stuck in gape-mode. "I didn't tell her Eric. I swear."

"It never crossed my mind that you had. Her access to my blood may be why the spell remains unbroken. I'm certain it eroded away my ability to stave off her attack on my progeny and me. She drained us very quickly."

"I don't see why she's hanging onto my Gran's decanter now, when she's got whatever she drained from you." Eric didn't respond. The Viking was either ignoring that comment or lost in thought. I became lost for a second too. The decanter was some of my Gran's best crystal. The witch better give it back

"I wonder how she found it—it wasn't Gile," I tacked on aggressively.

"True, since according to the wolf doctor she didn't capture him or Alcide until after she had left your house this afternoon, while they were on their way to their pack meeting. No, I am convinced she discovered it on her own. There is something almost were about her scent. She may be some type of shifter. It is undeniable she is the most powerful witch I have met in centuries. Magic does not thrive as it once did, but neither does nature. The correlation is not coincidental."

I looked at my wrists, expecting to see fang wounds, but they had finally healed. Contemplative, I touched the blemish-less skin. "I think you might be right. She could sense who had drank from me just from my bite marks—and in my dreams, the woman is first a wolf."

"What dreams?"

"Just dreams," I said and lifted my gaze. He was still Full-Monty. "Eric, don't you want to get dressed? We're banking in borrowed time here, considering the bomb and all."

"I don't want to get dressed. What I want is to fuck you against that tree and every other tree in the forest as we feast on each other—to hell with witches and their damn spells and bombs."

I pulled into myself, even as my body screamed to open up every possible part of me to him and my flame tickled my core with ten flavors of heat. At least two flavors of that heat had nothing to do with pleasure, though. "Yeah," I told him. "That's not going to happen."

"You can try Sookie. Try to break it."

"Well, maybe I don't want to try. Maybe I'm glad I had a cold shower of witchcraft to stop me from making a big mistake. I'm so mad at you, Eric. You tried to turn me into a vampire!" A spark flew alongside my fury, but the Viking didn't flinch.

"I never intended on denying your wishes, Sookie." That kind sincerity in his voice made me angrier. "I simply reacted. I found I could not let you go again." And I found I could not meet his vibrant gaze, a new interest in the needled forest floor. He spoke on in that same hushed gentleness: "For what it is worth, I am glad you are not vampire. It has been many years since I wanted to be your Maker."

"Why?" I asked, almost involuntarily, peeking up at him.

"Even to you, I would not wish to be enthralled. I would not wish to be as Bill and Lorena were."

I frowned, weirded out, which made things less weird with Eric. "We would never be like they were."

Eric laughed lightly. "Sweet Sookie. Maybe you are as crazy as all the humans think."

"What?" I asked, smiling in spite of everything, in spite of the anger at him for trying to turn me, at the trepidation for whatever was coming, at the constant, painful ache for the welfare of my children and grandchildren, in spite of it all, I could find something to smile about with Eric. When we had been good, it had always been this way. Flirty and friendly and—but I would not finish it.

I focused on Eric. He no longer smiled. There was a hardness to his expression. "They are coming." I no longer smiled either.

Note: I had every intention of finishing this part of the story in a single chapter, and then I ate some bad cantelope. And as I had debated splitting the chapter in two here when I saw how long it was growing, it seemed like a fit. I think I'll feel well enough to write and post tomorrow. Oof. Yes the last chapter was dark. This one is a bit lighter. And talkier. Cards on the table. I don't believe in soulmates but I do believe in kindred spirits, and that in one way or another, we are all shapeshifters looking for the shape that makes us feel most at home. Some may find that shape in more than one home, others find it in the first shape they take and happily stay there for all their lives. Thanks for the reviews. I'm done with melons...