With the release of Dead & Gone I realize that a lot of the facts of the story are no longer true and several of the characters are actually no longer alive. But I'm still planning to leave the story the way it is. I'm only changing a few small details that I had planned for later on. For those of you who haven't read the ninth book yet don't worry there are no spoilers ahead.

Enjoy!

Amelia stayed for only about an hour or so. She and Sookie reconnected and chatted away about normal things like Amelia's marriage to Tray. From what Sookie had gathered they were still as happy together as they had been when they'd been dating. She was glad that Amelia had found someone. It had hurt her when she hadn't been able to attend the wedding. Amelia wanted her to be the maid of honor.

"I'd better get going. Tray will be home soon and I try to have supper on the table by then. If you girls need help moving furniture or anything give us a call. Tray said he'd be happy to help." Amelia had said as she had been walking through the door.

"Thanks Amelia. Give him a hug for me." Sookie said as she gave her friend one last hug.

"I will. It was nice to finally meet you Adele."

"Nice to meet you too Ms. Amelia." Adele said from behind her mother.

They said one last good-bye before Amelia left. Sookie gently closed the door and locked it out of habit. Of course, if anyone really wanted in that lock wouldn't stand a chance.

"Addie, I think we need to talk." Sookie said, stopping her daughter from returning to the sanctuary of her room.

Adele blinked in confusion and hesitantly returned to the living room. "Okay." she said uncertainly as she perched on the edge of the couch.

Sookie took a deep breath and sat down next to her. Adele avoiding talking about this whenever possible but this was one of those times that simply couldn't be avoided.

"Honey, I know you don't want people here to know about what happened back home, but I think it would be for the best if we let a few people know what's going on." Sookie spoke gently.

Adele was practically humming with tension as she stared a hole into the floor. "But you said that we'd be safe here. That's why I agreed to the move because you said we'd be safer."

"I know honey, and we will be, but we won't be as safe if the people here don't know what's going on. And I'm not saying that I want to tell the whole town what happened, but there are a few individuals who could help keep us safe."

"Like who?"

"Well like Bill and Eric."

"But they are vampires too!" Adele cried.

"I know they are but they're different! I know it didn't seem like it last night but both of them are really good guys. And they are older, much older than him. They'll want to help, I promise you. They'll be able to keep you safe a lot better than I can."

Addie sat on the edge of the couch quiet and defeated. "But last night both of them seemed so mad. I heard you and that Eric guy arguing ya know."

Sookie sighed a little, "They're mad at me because I didn't tell them I was leaving. Both of them...both of them had really deep feelings for me and I guess I hurt them more than I realized when I left. I didn't tell them anything about it, I just left because I was scared."

"If you were so scared of them then why do you think we'll be safe with them now?" Addie asked, turning to her mother with accusing eyes. Her eyes were already starting to grow red with tears and Sookie could feel her fear.

Sookie wrapped her arms around her daughter and pulled her into a hug, cradling her against her chest. "I never ever thought that they would hurt me Adele. I never thought they would hurt you either. The only reason I left when I found out I was pregnant with you was because of the politics. I know I've told you that vampires think differently than people, and their politics are the same way. It's all very complicated and I just didn't want you to get caught up in it. I wanted you to have a better life than I had."

"What makes you think they would do that now?"

"Nothing. I think its still possible that I may get caught up in that all over again. But if that's what it takes to keep you safe then I'm willing to do it. I'm not going to let anything happen to you, Adele, I swear it."

"I know Momma." Adele said quietly.

Mother and daughter sat in each other's embrace for several quiet minutes. Sookie was trying to figure out how she was going to explain that her daughter was being stalked by a vampire to her vampires. While she was certain they would help (at least she seriously hoped they would) she wasn't so certain about how willing they would be to do it. Of course Eric would want to make sure that no one would come poaching in his "Area", but she wondered if that would be the only reason he would help. She wondered why it mattered to her in the first place.

"So I'm going to call the police department back home and let them know that we've finally settled in somewhere. Then they are going to send all of their information here so that the local police department can pick up on the investigation." Sookie said finally.

Adele just nodded as she straightened up from her mom's hug. "Alright."

"Don't worry Adele; everything is going to be fine." Sookie promised her little girl.

"I know." She sighed. No matter what her mother said Addie was still going to worry. Until that man was dead, finally dead, she was constantly going to worry.

And Sookie knew that. She frowned as she watched her daughter turn her downcast eyes to the floor. She didn't know what to do for her. There was nothing more she could say, right now she just needed to get Adele's mind onto something else.

"Hey," Sookie said a minute later as a thought hit her. "Why don't we go ahead and pull out all of your canvases? I know you want to paint the room upstairs first but your pictures don't need to sit in storage. Come on; lets find some to hang around the house to brighten up the place a little. The sunflowers would look great in the kitchen."

"You aren't going to use them to brag on me, are you?" Adele asked, trying to sound annoyed, but she couldn't hide the smile curving up the corners of her mouth.

Sookie grinned. "Well of course I'm going to brag about you. You're my daughter, that's what I'm supposed to do."

Addie rolled her eyes but by now she was smiling. "You only get to hang the ones I say you can hang. I don't want any of the shitty ones taking up space."

Sookie's eyes narrowed and she gave her daughter a very pointed look about her choice in language.

"Sorry. Crappy ones." Adele amended quickly before she stood up, looking around as she tried to decide what her next move was going to be. "Can we put the red one above the fireplace?"

The mother couldn't help but smile as she soothed her daughters hair down. "We'll see." She promised.

No vampires appeared on their door step that night or the night after that. It took three more days before the vampires that had so rudely interrupted their happy homecoming would come by again.

This time they didn't knock.

"What is this?!" Eric demanded as he stormed into the Stackhouse residence three nights later.

Mother and daughter jumped at his sudden appearance. There was a loud crack, like a small peal of thunder, and Adele was gone from her place on the couch. Sookie barely seemed to notice

"What the hell Eric?" she shouted back, standing up to face him when she saw the viking. She was reeling from his anger and her own. Besides, the sound of her voice drowned out the loud thumping of her heart against her rib cage.

Said viking did not reply immediately. He stared down at the defiant woman standing before him with fury dancing in his icy blue eyes. He opened his mouth to speak but another thunderous crack interrupted him.

Adele landed on the couch slightly more disheveled than she had left it. She was sitting in it awkwardly, one leg thrown on the back while the other braced against the floor too keep her body from falling off. Her hands were clutching onto the cushions for dear life.

"Sorry," she muttered as she straightened up. "I ended up outside in a tree."

Eric gave the girl a curious glance but before his silent question could be answered Sookie spoke again.

"Eric!" she demanded. "What are you doing here?"

He thrust a sheet of paper into her hand. "Explain this."

Sookie looked down at the page. It was similar to a wanted poster, with a familiar sketch and several lines of information about the man's appearance. There were several contact numbers listed in case he was spotted. She noticed that the Bon Temps Police Department was one of those numbers.

"Where did you get this?" she asked him quietly.

"It was left in Fangtasia's mail box this morning. I didn't notice it until I received a call from a member of the Shreveport Police Vampire Division asking me if I had seen this man before. He said, since I was the Sheriff of Area 5 then I might want to know that there was a young girl in my area who was currently being stalked by a vampire. Imagine my surprise when I heard she had recently moved here from Florida and that her name was Stackhouse." It was clear that the vampire was trying not to snarl.

The anger in his voice didn't phase Sookie. She stood as tall and firm as ever, ready to fight him tooth and nail if she had to. Thankfully it didn't come to that.

"Its my fault." Adele spoke up. "I didn't want Mom to tell anyone when we first got here. I didn't want to get all of the same scared, sympathetic looks that made us leave home in the first place. We finally decided that we were only going to tell a few people and so Mom called the sheriff's office back home yesterday to let them know where we have moved too."

"I was waiting until I'd heard from the local police force before I contacted you." Sookie finished, giving Eric a very accusing look.

Eric was quiet for a few moments as he looked between mother and daughter and their defiant and guilty faces. His anger began seeping away almost as quickly as it came on.

"That was a very foolish thing to do." He chided gently, briefly turning his attention towards Adele. "If I had known sooner that you and your mother were in trouble I would have sent someone out here to make sure that your home was safe. You are most vulnerable now since you have yet to completely settle in."

Adele didn't say anything, she just looked from Eric and up at her mother in quiet apology. She was already blaming herself enough for all of this; the last thing she really wanted was a stranger to confirm all of her worst fears.

Sookie sighed gently and walked over to sit down next to her daughter. "This isn't your fault, Adele. I'm the one who chose to wait to talk to you before I told anyone the truth. Besides, the important thing is that you are safe now. That's all that matters."

"You always say that." Adele grumbled. She wasn't too keen on the idea of her mother babying her so much in front of a stranger, especially a vampire stranger.

Much to her displeasure Adele looked over to see an amused smile playing on their guest face. She could feel herself grimace.

"You seem to be like your mother in more ways than one." Eric observed gently as he watched the pair. "So, how did you come to have a vampire stalker Adele?"

Sookie looked over at her daughter uncertainly. Her daughter didn't like to discuss the details of that day even with her. She doubted she'd want to tell them directly to Eric. When her daughter hesitated she began to prepare a summarized report of the events that lead up to their move, but she was surprised when Adele began to speak.

"It was one day, right after school let out for the summer. We lived right on the beach so a huge group of us went down to celebrate. It was a normal day of partying. We spent all day swimming and surfing and that night we built a big bon fire to roast marshmallows on. It was finally starting to get dark enough out that we couldn't see in the water very well so I started to swim in, but as I got to shore a wave caught me by surprise and knocked me into some rocks. I was trying to get my footing so I could swim out of them when another wave knocked me over. It continued like that for a little while until one of my friends was able to pull me out. My feet were both cut up pretty bad so he carried me over to the back of somebody's truck and they started trying to bandage my feet up.

"That's when he showed up, out of no where. He must have been walking down the beach or something because we hadn't seen him anywhere around before. He came up behind my friend, Lorn, and asked if he could help with bandaging my feet. He had this crazed look in his eye and everyone there was pretty uncomfortable. Lorn told him no and he and a few of the other guys kind formed a barrier between me and him. They told him that he needed to leave and about that time a few of the others started to join us too. I guess he got intimidated by the number of us because he left. Everything was normal after that and I didn't see him again until I started to walk home that night. I had this uneasy feeling all the way home and when I was about a block away I caught a glance of him standing in the shadow of one of the houses. I figured by that time he knew what I was so I just popped home."

"Popped home?" Eric questioned.

"Yea, like what I did a second ago. I can't control it really well and when someone scares me like that I panic and just pop out. I was able to control it enough that night and I managed to get home, although I ended up in a wash room instead of the living room, like I wanted." She shrugged a little.

"Did you see him again after that?"

Adele nodded. "A few nights later me and a few of my girl friends were out and I noticed him walking along behind us. We ducked into a little cafe and sat around for a while, pretending that we were going to be sitting and chatting for even longer, just to see if he would go away. But when he didn't we called Fredrick."

"Who's Fredrick?" Eric asked again, the name rolling off his tongue as though it was some foreign word.

"The only local vampire. He's really nice and helps around the community when he can. Its just him so no one really minds. He's lived there for a while too so everyone is used to him. When I told him what was going on he showed up almost immediately and ran the other vampire off. But even he was worried. He walked all of us home and stayed around outside the house that night to make sure the other vampire didn't come back. He told us later that he called someone else to see what they knew about it. I don't know exactly what happened but Fredrick told me that the other vampire was supposed to leave and wasn't permitted to come back. He stayed gone for about a week and a half but then he came back." Adele's voice was heavy then and although there was more to say she didn't continue.

"Fredrick suggested that we go somewhere else for a while; somewhere that I had a lot of connections, people to look out for us while he and a few others took care of the new vamp that came up." Sookie continued a moment later as she gently stroked her daughter's back.

Eric nodded as he took in all the information. He concentrated on Addie's expression with emotionless eyes. He could tell from the way that they avoided the subject that Adele had been attacked. And although he couldn't see if for sure, he was certain that if he looked he would be able to see the scar on her neck from where she'd been savagely bitten.

"So this Fredrick fellow, he knew of her?" he asked Sookie.

"Yes. He knew she was part fae. I spoke to him on several different occasions and he told me that he would be able to get used to her scent, especially since she was born and raised there. He promised he'd be able to control himself and that his only real concern was if she ever began to bleed around him from a cut or some other reason."

"He said that's what attracted the other one, that he could smell my blood from when I cut my feet in the water." Adele said quietly. "He said that it was probably carried in the water and washed up further down the shore. The vampire would know that the smell was coming from the party going on by the docks."

The three of them were quiet for a minute as they digested all of this information.

"What is his name?" Eric asked in a quiet voice. He was handling the younger Stackhouse with great care, not wanting to incite the wrath of her mother.

"We don't know. If Fredrick knew he never told us." Sookie answered, keeping an close eye on her daughter. "We were more concerned about what his next move would be rather than who he was."

"If you knew who he was then you could contact his maker and have him called off. There are quite adequate punishments for a vampire who stalks and hunts a particular human, especially if it is a child. The synthetic blood and willing donors make hunting in such a way obsolete."

"That's not exactly something you stop and ask someone who is trying to kill you." Sookie said curtly.

Eric seemed to accept that, although he didn't understand why this Fredrick character didn't mention it. But that didn't matter now. They were safe here and he was going to make sure they remained that way.

At that moment the phone rang and Adele jumped up to get it, disappearing into the kitchen to talk to whoever it was that was calling.

"So this is the real reason you've returned. Not because you were feeling homesick."

"No." Sookie said quickly. "No, I was feeling homesick and I had been wanting to come back for years but with Addie in school I just couldn't get away. She had so many friends there and I knew she'd hate to be up and moved. I had already planned to talk to her about at least coming back this summer to visit, just to see what she thought of the place. But then all of this happened and it just seemed right."

"You could have called. I even have an email address now. Contacting me would have been easy." He told her.

"I had other things on my mind Eric. Nothing will ever be more important to me than raising my little girl."

Eric nodded once and slowly stood. He turned his back to her as though getting ready to leave but he stopped and asked her quietly. "Did you ever love me Sookie?"

For a brief moment her heart ached. She thought about that question for a minute, going over all of the different emotions that had flooded her so many times since she left.

"Yes." She finally replied. "I did love you once."

"That's all I needed to know." He said and then he was gone.

I'm sorry for the wait guys but I had the worse case of writers block with this chapter. On top of that I was distracted by the release of Dead and Gone. But now I think I've finally sorted out the next few chapters so there shouldn't be too much of a delay.

Another huge thank you to SEOrwin for proof reading this chapter for me and catching all of my horrid typos.

Thank you so much to everyone who reviewed! I try to reply to everyone but if I miss you I apologize. Sometimes I forget where I leave off. But, really, I love knowing how much everyone likes the story. It makes me (and Eric) very happy. And its always good to keep the author and the Viking happy. So keep sending in your reviews!

Also I just wanted to let everyone know that I've added a few bits of information to my profile concerning the story. So far its only the picture to Addie's necklace and a brief description about Sookie's current appearance. But I will keep it updated as the story progresses.