"I hope you enjoyed the gift basket," says Eric, when he arrives at the jail the next evening.

Sookie doesn't jump when she hears his voice this time. She looks up from her book, and after a moment, sets it aside.

"It was real nice," she says. "You were very thoughtful to send it."

"It was my pleasure." Eric draws up a seat and crosses his legs. He doesn't smile at her. This isn't going to be a pleasant conversation. "I'm sorry I didn't visit yesterday. I've been quite busy."

"That's alright," she says. "It's not like we made a date or anything."

"Didn't we?" He arches an eyebrow. "Let's fix that. Where shall we go when you're released? I know a charming French restaurant in Shreveport. Not that I eat, of course. But I would enjoy watching you eat."

The smile she gives him is patient, and tired. "No offense," she says, "but when I get out of here the only place I want to go is home."

"A night in." He can't help grinning at that. "Sounds wonderful."

Sookie rolls her eyes.

"Did Bill take you on many dates?" Eric asks her.

"I'm not sure how that's any of your business."

"I'm merely trying to determine what league I'm competing in," he says. "I don't want to find myself outclassed by a dead man."

"You'll have to excuse me, Mr Northman." Sookie's voice is flat. "But I'm having trouble thinking about anything other than the fact that I'm about to go to prison for a crime I didn't commit."

"Is that what your lawyer thinks?"

Sookie shrugs. "He tries not to show it. He doesn't want me to worry."

"But you can tell."

"Yeah."

"Because you can read his thoughts."

Sookie tenses. She looks up at him slowly. Eric can hear her heartrate elevating. "Excuse me?"

"You're a telepath," Eric says.

She blinks. A wide, tense smile spreads over her face. "That's crazy," she says, with a nervous laugh. "Telepath, what even is that? You think I'm psychic or something?"

Eric arches an eyebrow and shakes his head reproachfully. "Sookie."

She looks him in the eye for a moment. Then her shoulders slump.

"Alright, fine." Her tone is surly. "I'm a telepath. Call the National Inquirer."

Eric smiles. He never doubted that what the Queen had told him was true, but it is gratifying to hear it from Sookie's own lips.

"What am I thinking now?" he says, and forms a detailed mental image of what he imagines she would look like if she were naked and underneath him.

"No idea," she says flatly, to his disappointment. "I can't read vampires, just humans."

For her sake, Eric thinks, that is just as well. "All humans?"

"Some clearer than others."

"All your life?"

"Yes."

He shakes his head. "What a childhood you must have had."

He's surprised when this idle comment fetches a spark of sincere feeling from her. Something almost like gratitude shows in her face. "You have no idea."

Eric leans forward, elbows on his knees. "Did Bill know?"

"Yes, I told him."

"When?"

"The night he saved me from the Rattrays."

Fuck him, Eric thinks. "The night he gave you his blood."

"Yes."

"Did he try to glamor you?"

"Yes."

"How did he react when you proved immune?"

"He was surprised."

I'll bet he was surprised, thinks Eric. What a wrench for Bill, finding his pretty human prey so well defended from him that he had to step back and let human thugs create the opening he needed to bring her under his sway. Eric may well kill him for that, if he isn't dead already. If he only he knew whether this would endear him to Sookie, or whether he will need to conceal his revenge from her.

One way to find out. "Did you love him?"

"You asked me that before." Sookie folds her arms over her stomach, looking hunched and defensive.

"I'm asking again."

"Yes, I loved him." Her voice grows defiant. "Part of me probably always will."

The strange thing is that Eric believes her, despite the way he knows she must react to what he has to tell her about Bill. In anyone else he would consider such deathless loyalty a sign of weakness, but in Sookie it pleases him. Or would, if it were directed at anyone but Bill.

"Are you sorry he's dead?"

"What kind of question is that?" she bristles.

"Answer it."

"Go to hell."

Eric smiles. "Why do you think he was keeping a file on you?" he inquires, in a mild voice.

Sookie shrugs. "He never said."

"But you must have formed a theory."

"Not really."

"I don't believe that."

"Believe what you want."

No, he won't be doing that. What he wants to believe is that if he took the iron bars dividing them between his hands and wrenched them apart, she would open her arms to him. But they aren't there yet. Allowing himself to believe otherwise will not serve him.

"Do you think he loved you?"

A flash of something like pain in her eyes. He's getting near the heart of the matter now. "What do you care?" she demands.

"I would like to know how he persuaded you to care for him."

Sookie laughs, and there is more than a hint of derision in the sound. "Why, so you can make me want you by doing what he did? That's not how people work."

If I did as Bill Compton did and gave you my blood, you would soon find out very differently, he thinks. But he doesn't say it aloud. Instead he smiles, and pitches his voice low.

"Did he compliment you? Tell you that your hair was the color of a sunrise reflected in virgin snow? Did he take you on moonlit strolls through the cemetery between your houses?" She flinches, and Eric restrains the urge to snort. Of course he did. He was like a walking cliche of a vampire.

"Did you find yourself thinking of him, even when you didn't mean to?" Eric's voice grows harder. He is leaving the realm of conjecture for what he knows to be fact. "Didn't you feel drawn to him, almost against your will? Wasn't your desire for him stronger than anything you'd ever felt, like a fire in your skin?"

Sookie's eyes widen, and her face grows pale. She knows what he's driving at; she's very intelligent, if hampered by her narrow upbringing.

"He gave me his blood," she says.

"Yes." Eric lets that stand, lets the implications burrow into her brain.

"You think everything I felt for him was just the blood talking." She blinks, leans back on the bed. "That's crap! You think I don't know the difference between what I feel and something from outside of me, forcing me to feel things?"

"Do you?" says Eric mildly. "Would you like to put it to the test? You could drink my blood and observe for yourself if your feelings for me change."

"Nice try," Sookie snaps.

"Yes, I thought so too." Eric's smile vanishes as quickly as it appears. "Sookie. You don't need my blood to tell you that Bill Compton fucked with your head."

She looks away. He hears her breathing change. He feels a twinge of...something. He hadn't meant to make her cry.

When she speaks again, her voice is ragged. She turns her face away and keeps it averted. "You think if I decide my feelings for Bill weren't real, it's going to make me like you any better?"

It's a start. "I think you're so blinded by your loyalty to him that you're afraid to face the truth."

"Maybe you're just jealous."

"Of course I'm jealous." Eric speaks without heat, pronouncing a plain fact. Sookie turns back to look at him, clearly startled by the admission.

"He touched you, tasted you, made love to you. And he used you and abandoned you and left you to rot in this jail. For that alone, I could kill him. I may do it yet."

He hadn't meant to say the last part aloud. He tenses, studying her for a reaction.

She stares at him for a long moment. "Bill's alive?" she whispers. "You know for sure?"

Eric shuts his eyes briefly, a human gesture that rarely comes to him anymore. Is he prepared to tell her the truth? He came here tonight with that intention, but until now he did not have a clear idea of what it would cost him. Still, his habit is to speak the truth unless there are compelling reasons to do otherwise.

"Last night I learned that the Queen of Louisiana ordered Bill's maker, Lorena, to kill him, because he defied her orders. I suspect that he is alive and with Lorena still. I sent Pam to find out for sure. I expect her to report soon with news."

Sookie stands up, so quickly that it startles him, though he doesn't let it show.

"The vampires know I didn't kill him," she says, tonelessly.

Eric shrugs. "The Queen and I know, and Lorena. I told Pam. I don't know about Baker. The AVL, as I said before, doesn't care."

A parade of conflicting emotions passes over her face. "You have to tell the judge."

"I can't do that," says Eric immediately. "The Queen is too powerful to oppose openly. It might make her angry enough to kill us both. But I can use what I know to keep you from going to prison."

"How?"

"I'm still figuring that part out."

Sookie sits down again. They gaze at each other silently for a moment.

"You said the Queen wanted him dead because he defied her," she says.

"He failed to complete a mission she gave him, and he prevented her other agents from finishing it for him."

"What was the mission?"

It is Eric's turn to grow silent and thoughtful for a moment. "You never answered my question. Do you think he loved you?"

"That doesn't matter now."

Not to Eric, certainly. No amount of love can redeem such treachery. "It matters very much, both to his failed mission for the Queen, and to what I will do when I find him."

Sookie stares at him, and there's a haggard, haunted look about her eyes. "Yes," she says finally. "He loved me. As much as he knew how to."

In that final qualifier, there is a world of deeper perception than he'd given her credit for. Perhaps she is not as blind as he thought.

"Did Bill ever tell you why he came to Bon Temps?"

"He lived here when he was human. He inherited, or re-inherited, the old family house when Jesse Compton died."

"Is that what he said?"

The relative calm with which Sookie has participated in the conversation up to now cracks apart, like lightning splits the sky.

"Yes!" she yells, throwing her hands up in the air. "Yes, you smug, irritating man! That's what he said to me! Do you know different, or are you just trying to make me crazy?"

"Yes." At Sookie's outraged look, he raises a hand defensively. "I know differently."

Sookie deflates. She looks apprehensive; she knows it's going to be bad. But she lifts her chin and looks him in the eye. "Tell me."

Eric hesitates, before deciding there is no way to soften what he must tell her. He will make a clean strike, and hope there is enough left of her to piece back together afterwards.

"The Queen knows that you are a telepath," he says. "She dispatched Bill to Bon Temps on orders to find you, seduce you, and embroil you so deeply in our world that when Bill presented you to her, you would feel you had no choice but to use your powers in her service."

He watches each word fall upon her like a succession of blows. By the time he is finished, she is still and pale and looks, somehow, smaller than she had before. He resists the urge to look away.

"That's why he had that file on me," she says, in a toneless voice.

"Yes."

Her hands fall dead at her sides. She looks at Eric blankly. "My grandmother died because I was seeing him."

He has read the police reports, and knows what she's referring to. "Yes."

"He let the Rattrays beat me half to death."

It is not that Eric cares about doing Bill Compton justice, but- "I don't know that for certain."

Her eyes widen incredulously. "He must have! He wanted me to drink his blood, and I wouldn't do it."

"He would have been dismayed when he discovered you couldn't be glamored. Forming a blood bond with you was the only way to tie you to him reliably."

"So this is my fault?" her voices rises to a high pitch, and cracks.

"Don't be stupid," he says, his voice harsher than he intends.

She stares at him mutely. Tears well up in her eyes, but she hardly seems to notice them.

"For whatever it's worth," he says, more gently, "when you broke up with him, the Queen sent other vampires to Bon Temps to kidnap you, and Bill killed them. He kept vigil outside your house every night to prevent them taking you."

Sookie takes a deep breath, and sniffs, like she's surprised to find her nose running. She looks down at the floor.

"Why did you tell me all of this?" Her voice is without reproach, too lifeless to be curious.

She is sitting at the very end of the bed, less than a foot from the cell door. Eric rises and reaches his long arm between the bars. He grips her hand before she has a chance to pull away. She tilts her face up to look at him with wide eyes. Eric is just as surprised as she is. In all the time he's spent imagining what it would feel like to touch her for the first time, he never saw it happening this way.

"I told you because you deserve to know the truth," he says. "I may not always be as-forthcoming as you wish, but I will never lie to you."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" she says shakily.

His grip on her hand tightens. "It should," he says. "You will always know precisely where you stand with me."

He stands there for a long moment, rubbing his thumb along the inside of her wrist. She looks down at the place where their hands join, and some of the tension seems to leave her body.

Just then, the text message notification on Eric's cell phone chimes. He reaches in his pocket with his free hand and takes the phone out to look at the message. His hand tightens on Sookie's, and she gasps in pain.

"I'm sorry." He drops her hand, and takes a step back from the door.

Sookie looks as though she might yell at him, but her expression changes when her eyes light on his face. "What's wrong?" she says.

"Pam is in trouble." He wants to explain to her why this is important, why Pam's safety must take priority even over comforting her, but he doesn't have the time. And in case, he thinks she will understand.

"I have to find her," he says. "I'll return as soon as I can."

It's probably a mistake, hesitating that last second to reassure her. But then she says, "Good luck," and smiles, and he decides that it was worth it after all.