A/N – Thanks to everyone who took the time to read and leave a review. You know I appreciate it and its super fun reading what you thought. Here's the next chapter; it's gore light from here on out. Enjoy!

Part VI

Eric snarled, sounding like the rabid, wounded animal he was as a sudden gust of unnatural wind stirred into the room, announcing the abrupt arrival of a vampire.

This unknown vampire halted, stopping so suddenly that despite his current visual disability, Eric managed to make out a fuzzy cloud of dust and dirt manifesting in front of him.

The Viking growled this time, elongated fangs gnashing over lips that were pulled back into an ugly, predatory grimace. Charred, blackened hands tightened over the quarry he held in his lap, cracking and splitting open burned and scorched skin that was desperately trying to heal itself on a dangerously shortened blood supply.

The new vampire in the room made not one sound, standing so preternaturally still and silent that had it not brought with it, the extraordinarily powerful stench of blood and death, Eric would have thought that its presence was a mere figment of his imagination.

The scent of blood not his or his quarry's own wafted towards Eric, reminding him of the imminent danger standing before him. He growled again in warning, murderous rumbles that picked up in intensity and sound as they reverberated from the deep confines of his chest. Fear, adrenaline and the fact that he was currently half-blind rendered the blonde vampire almost feral as other senses were heightened, making Eric all too sensitive and hyper-aware of his surroundings.

"No…"

The succession of growls and snarls immediately died midway up Eric's vibrating throat at the husky utterance of that one word.

"Pam?"

He knew that voice, would know the sound and raspy lilt of his progeny from anywhere. However, what had Eric profoundly disturbed was the fact that Pam's scent was all but nonexistent.

Caution nipped at Eric's heels when silence answered him and he once again cursed the explosion that had basically barbequed his eyeballs within their respective sockets, robbing him temporarily of his vision.

Needing confirmation, the Viking switched to his superior sense of smell even as his slowly healing eyes fixated themselves on a blurry, distorted figure.

The stink of death and the cloyingly sweet bouquet of aching sorrow assaulted Eric's nose like an overpowering perfume. If it was indeed Pam that stood before him, he wasn't surprised that he couldn't initially smell her; death and blood and pain had infused her pores to an almost cellular level.

Eric blinked rapidly, deliberately trying in vain to hasten the return of his eyesight. Frustration built within his gangly frame as his nostrils flared, allowing him to begin picking apart the miasma of scents and smells that lingered around the mute vampire.

Blood and death. That's what hit him first, like a striking blow from a hammer, so strong and fresh it was. This reek was made up of a combination of different vampires, the almost dizzying mix of wildly different smells almost sending Eric's mind reeling. It also made the protective beast in Eric roar with rage, fury and indignation rearing their ugly heads as the blonde vampire cottoned onto how these scents came to be on Pam. The need to spill blood, to exact revenge was strong in Eric, two instinctive reactions that would always be allotted to his child, bond or no bond.

If this vampire was Pam that is.

He tunneled through the thick layer of blood and death, ignored how the scent seemed to come with screaming atoms of recent torture and smacked into a hard wall of pain and sorrow. This new foe was harder to battle, so potent and crushing it was, the intensity and depth of it causing Eric to involuntarily clench his teeth and grip even harder at his quarry's motionless shoulders.

A muscle ticking erratically in his jaw, Eric waded through this debilitating atmosphere of anguish and loss, each step feeling as though serrated razor blades were slowly but deliberately being pushed into the soft muscles of his heart.

There.

Beneath the pain and blood and death and sorrow, Eric finally found the scent he was so desperately seeking.

Lavender. Honeysuckle. A faint strand of vanilla to tie all three scents together to form the bouquet that was uniquely Pam.

"Pamela." Relief flooded through him, so much so that his muscles turned to the consistency of Jell-O and the steely grip he had on his quarry slackened. "Say something," he urged when silence once again mocked him.

"You saved her?"

Pam's stricken tone was akin to nails on a chalkboard and despite himself Eric winced even as he nodded. He looked down at the subject of Pam's inquiry, blew out another breath of relief when he could actually make out the smooth, blank features that currently sat on Tara's face.

"Barely," he admitted, blinking once more, his vision finally returning to him between one blink and the next. He looked up from where his grand progeny lay draped across his lap and sea blue-green eyes widened almost dramatically as he was finally able to take in the sight of his own child.

"Jesus, Pamela…"

Eric couldn't even finish the sentence, the sight of Pam drenched head to toe in blood, guts and god only knew what else, rendering him stunned and speechless. Almost every inch of the blonde's flawless ivory skin was speckled and flecked with scarlet. The famed Elizabeth Bathory herself would have run screaming from the sight of Pam.

Eric himself was fighting hard to school his face into an expression that was anything but horrified as he stared at his child, ocean stained eyes moving from her blood matted hair to crimson streaks that snaked across her face like war paint to bloodied, torn and shot through clothing that was beyond redemption. Wounds decorated Pam's blood-stained skin like weeping tattoos, each one seemingly larger and more fatal than the last. When those blue-green eyes settled on raw, bloodied knuckles hanging limply on either side of Pam's thighs, Eric felt his heart constrict in his chest.

"Pam…"

"Have you seen Jessica?" Pam cut him off abruptly, cerulean blue eyes never leaving Tara's motionless body. To the casual observer, it would have seem as though those blue depths revealed nothing but a chasm of emptiness. However, closer inspection would have have resulted in seeing something akin to grief - but deeper, darker - flicker like a struggling flame in those eerily still azure depths.

Eric struggled against the urge to flinch at the monotony of Pam's cadence. He had never in his over a hundred years with Pam, heard her sound so...empty. Nor had he ever quite seen that expression on her face. It was almost indescribable, what sat on the features of his child's face. Her face was so still, so blank yet every now and then something sinister, something dark, would ripple, originating from the center of her steel-blue eyes until it echoed outwards, making the muscles in her cheeks and jaw twitch.

It was the stillness of chaos. That's what currently held Pam's face prisoner.

Eric shuddered when he caught another glimpse of that stillness. But he nodded anyway, knowing instinctively that answering was the best course of action. "She's safe. She made it out. Pam..."

"And Sookie?'

Genuine surprise flashed across Eric's face at the mention of his half-fairy lover's name escaping voluntarily out of Pam's lips. Growing more perplexed and concerned, especially when his eyes skirted the eerily blank expression on Pam's face, he nodded once again. "Everyone we know is safe," he informed her in a steady and deliberately calm tone. "My sister is..."

This time Eric cut himself off, wincing as he did for this was not the way he wanted to tell his one and only child about hidden blood relatives. Expecting Pam to blow a gasket, he was once again stupefied when Pam bypassed that important nugget of information only to bring back to his attention, the currently dire situation that was his child's child.

"That needs to come out."

Pam was referring to the broken piece of water pipe that had made a new home for itself in Tara's chest.

"It does," Eric agreed quietly. He held up a still blackened hand. "You're going to have to pull it out."

"It's too close to the heart."

Too close was an understatement. Judging from its angle and current position on Tara's chest, Eric estimated that the rod of pipe was directly next to or scant centimeters away from the heart. One nick, one graze was all it would take to render Tara to nothing more than a mass of blood and gristle.

Which was why Eric was in the position he was currently in: hiding. Protecting. Protecting a new member of his family that judging from his own child's face, was of a great importance to her. At least that was what the Viking garnered from Pam's empty, anguished Prussian blue eyes.

Eyes that held wells of pain. Pain that could have only come from one thing.

"You thought she died." A viable theory was formulating in Eric's sharp mind as he observed Pam stare at Tara's prone figure, never blinking, never moving from where she stood.

"They tossed the grenade belt right in front of where she knelt," Pam supplied, her voice robotic, dispassionate.

Eric pushed down that tidal wave of rage, knowing that such blatant emotion was useless. Judging from Pam's bloodied state; she had more than taken care of the vampires that thought to slaughter her progeny. "She's alive, Pamela," he tried to reassure her.

"Her end of the bond winked out after the explosion," Pam continued in that same empty, monotonous voice, talking as though she did not hear her maker speak. "I felt nothing from her. I thought the bond severed."

Eric swallowed, knowing exactly what Pam felt for he had forced himself and her to experience that crushing, scarring sensation that would forever be seared into his psyche when he cut off their maker/progeny tie. "She's here, Pam," Eric tried again, infusing calm, belief into his tone. "She's alive."

"I can barely feel her." An absentminded hand wandered up to press against the swell of her left breast, right over her breastbone. "Minute flutters, fleeting brushes of recognition." For the first time, Pam's monotonous drone bore a distinctive, audible crack as pale fingers lingered over the spot that housed the bond.

"Her body in stasis," Eric explained as he spared another look at Tara. It must be so traumatizing for Pam, to see her child so still, lifeless and unresponsive given what she thought happened. He also knew that Pam had reached her emotional threshold, crossing over that sane and sensible border the second she thought her progeny dead. Now, after having been forced to walk that tightrope between sorrow and pain, she has shut down, unable to deal with what ifs, buts and false hope.

Facts were what Pam needed. And facts were something Eric could provide. "Her body does not have enough blood to regenerate, function," he told Pam in a conversational tone. Ignoring her silence, he pressed on. "She's, for all intents and purposes, in a coma. Without blood, she won't wake but her vampire makeup won't let her die either."

"She needs blood." The emotionless drone was back and Eric was starting to really fear for his child's mental state of mind.

"She needs blood," Eric affirmed. "Anybody alive back in the circle room?"

"No."

"Any bodies intact?" Eric asked.

"A few," came the emotionless reply.

"I'm going to help the wounds on her body to start healing with my blood," Eric told Pam. "I need you to bring back a body or two." He looked up and into those dead, empty eyes, wanted nothing more than to take his child into his arms and hold her until some semblance of Pam returned to that sapphire gaze but until Tara was awake and alert, he knew nothing would snap her out of her emotionless vacuum. "Can you do that, Pam?"

"Yes."

Again with the monosyllabic answers. Pam had never been able to incite in Eric, a sense of discomfort or fear but tonight, in that natural dugout, the Viking had the almost irrepressible urge to widen the physical distance between them. There was a coldness, an iciness that hung around Pam like a phantom ghost. It ate into what little heat Eric's body possessed, sucking away every iota of warmth, dampening any happy memory his subconscious thought to conjure.

"No."

Pam's raspy lilt was almost jarring as it threw Eric back to reality. He head cocked curiously at his progeny. "No?" he queried, confusion coloring his tone.

"Dead man's blood," Pam spoke in that same robotic fashion. Cobalt blue snapped onto Eric's but they didn't seem to lock onto sea blue-green orbs so much as stare right through him. Eric suppressed a shudder, the inhumanity in his child's eyes chilling. "Dead man's blood is useless."

"It's all we have," Eric replied quietly. He looked down at Tara. "It's all she has," he emphasized. "Find the freshest bodies and bring them back."

Pam responded by blurring away, once again kicking up dust and disturbing the stale air that curled around the room like a moth-eaten scarf.

The second Pam's presence disappeared, Eric's shoulders drooped, the Viking not having known them to have tensed. It was only when he was alone with Tara that he realized just how suffocating, how choking Pam's emotional projection or lack thereof was. He pulled Tara a little closer to him, his newly healed hands flexing and stretching the regenerated skin and flesh.

"You are not allowed to die," he spoke quietly to his grand progeny as he settled his back against the craggy wall. "Do you hear me?" He protracted his fangs then lifted his wrist to his mouth. Tearing open twin ragged lines through skin, flesh and veins, he began milking out his thousand year old blood into Tara's numerous and varied wounds all over her body.

"You are not allowed to die," he repeated solemnly as he watched a brutal head wound began stitching itself back together. "She won't survive it." He then moved his weeping wrist to Tara's mouth, squeezing and aggravating the self-inflicted wounds to drop as much blood as he could offer into the comatose vampire's mouth. "So you just hold the fuck on."

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Bodies.

Human bodies.

Crumpled, broken and lying in distorted fashions throughout the room like bleeding, brutalized puzzle pieces. Jagged bones jutted through ripped clothing and bent limbs, spearing through mangled flesh, fat, muscle and skin only to protrude obscenely into the air, its crude and serrated tips tainted red.

Pam paid the carnage no attention, didn't care that every step she took dropped her ruined shoes into puddle after puddle of leftover vampire biohazard. Her face was a terrifying blank canvas, her eyes devoid of any iota of emotion as she scouted her terrain, trying to find the freshest quarries to fill her quota.

The blonde froze as she stopped in the middle of the room, cocking her head as she used her superior sense of smell to discern one body's scent from the next.

A twinge coming from between her shoulder blades distracted her. Reaching behind with one hand, she felt about, hissing instinctively when the pads of her fingers came into contact with cool silver.

They were embedded deep into her flesh; the weapons' curved edges digging past skin and muscle only scorch the tissue it settled in. Around it, pale alabaster skin had tried to heal around the embedded metal, which meant that when Pam pulled out the throwing stars, she would once again rent tears through her own flesh.

Skin sizzled, a daunting sound in this silent, echoing tomb as the blonde tightened her grip on the first shuriken. The metallic scent of blood immediately stained the air when Pam yanked none too gently on the throwing star, forcing it out of her shoulder and shredding snow-white skin in the process.

There was a dull clink as Pam dropped the weapon needlessly to the ground. Burning flesh soon raided the air, fighting with the heavy coppery notes of blood as Pam tugged on the second throwing star, muscles, flesh and skin splitting open to vomit rivulets of blood as she too yanked the offending item out before letting it fall to the ground at her feet.

Pam didn't bother to check on the self-inflicted wounds, didn't care that the back of her left shoulder was currently running wet with crimson. She refocused, her head cocked once again and nostrils flaring as cool, aloof blue eyes scanned the terrain of bodies and blood.

There.

The blonde lunged, putting her vampiric speed to good use as she blurred across the room and picked up a surprisingly intact if bullet riddled body. She sniffed, nose wrinkling in slight distaste as the tepid and coagulating stench of blood wafted up to her nose. But out of all the bodies in this room of torn and mangled limbs, this one was the freshest.

Pam threw the body over her shoulder in a fireman's carry.

Then she blurred back down the tunnel.

Back to Eric.

Back to Tara.

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Pam dropped the body next to Eric with an unceremonious thump.

"Body," she announced needlessly, impassively. Blue eyes, more a dull-iron gray due to her stonewalling her emotions, skittered sideways until they fell on Tara's still impressively bruised, torn up, bullet-ridden, knife slashed body. "You didn't heal her."

"I gave her as much of my blood as I could," Eric defended uselessly. He shifted Tara until she was lying between his newly open thighs. Propping her back against his chest carefully, he gripped at her shoulders. "You need to pull the pipe out before we feed her."

Pam eyed the line of pipe sticking out of Tara's chest, the way a fighter eyed their opponent. "Too close to the heart," she told her maker listlessly.

"Goddamn it, Pam, it needs to come out." Eric's patience, of which he naturally possessed little, was reaching its end. "Pull. It. Out."

A juddering breath escaped Pam then, a flicker of emotion sparking in the steely blue of her irises. She dropped carelessly to her knees in front of Tara, between Eric's legs, her entire body one raw nerve, her muscles too tired to shake the lithe frame that was entirely too tense. An alabaster hand reached up, hovered, hesitated before pale fingers finally wrapped themselves around the protruding end of the pipe.

The air around the vampire trio seemed to still and even Eric held his nonexistent breath as Pam began slowly sliding the pipe out, making sure not to change its trajectory by even a sliver.

"Good girl," Eric whispered, his voice hushed, muted as Pam pulled the pipe out, slow by slow inch. Sea blue-green eyes never left the slowly emerging pipe, Eric's hands on Tara's shoulders immoveable, unflinching.

When the jagged end of the pipe, the part of the object that had tunneled a trench through Tara's chest deep enough to lose several fingers in, came out, Pam sat back on her haunches, holding the bloodstained pipe in her hand as though she had never seen such an item.

Eric felt an incremental amount of tension drain from his muscles as he stared at the now gaping hole in Tara's chest. It wasn't healing but it wasn't retching out fountains of blood either.

"Pam, the body," Eric instructed.

Pam's blank, empty gaze shifted, petrifyingly dead eyes so blue in the dark as they landed on the body she had procured from the unintentional tomb that was the heart of the labyrinth.

Eric flinched when Pam suddenly drove the serrated end of the pipe through the body's left wrist, the act so swift and forceful that the pipe made an awful "thunk" as it hit the stony ground, bones crunching along the way. With a calmness and detachment that was painfully frightening, Pam yanked the pipe out, dropped it carelessly next to her then dragged the abused wrist to Tara's mouth.

Blue eyes were devoid of any sort of warmth as pale fingers squeezed at the appendage, milking out as much blood as she could procure from the body.

"Give me your wrist," Eric requested in a quiet tone when he noted that the dead body's blood was working far too slow. Time was running out; not only were they still in enemy territory but time was also working against them. Already, Eric could feel the creep of dawn approach, like an uncomfortable sensation that danced a mocking path up his spine.

"Pam," he called out a little more sharply than he intended when his child failed to acknowledge his request. When Pam obediently held it up, Eric tore into soft pale skin, sharp incisors breaking through skin, flesh and muscle until there was a subtle pop and warm liquid settled against his tongue. Swallowing the residual blood that starburst into his mouth, he turned Pam's upturned wrist downwards, directly over the gaping wound in Tara's chest.

The next few minutes proved almost unbearably tense as both Pam and Eric's patience were put to the test. Pam, having exsanguinated the dead body of every last quart of its blood, coldly kicked it aside; it spun through the air, smacking a faraway wall with a sickening thud before sliding down in a crumpled heap onto the dusty floor.

Remote blue eyes then joined a pair of worried sea blue-green ones in observing the still unconscious, unresponsive Tara.

A minute passed. Eric's long fingers flexed against their post on either side of Tara's shoulders.

Three minutes passed. Pam shivered despite herself. She was so cold; not a physical kind of cold but the kind that ate into her bones, withering her soul and shriveling her heart. The air around Pam thickened, chilled, trying to match the arctic temperatures bleeding out from the blonde's tense, lithe body, Tara's maker teetering on the edge of a complete mental and psychological breakdown as time ticked mercilessly by.

Five minutes passed. Tara did not move, did not wake.

Eric's face fell, pale, limber fingers absentmindedly kneading at the dark flesh it found beneath its fingertips.

Pam's icy resolve proved to be disintegrating as Tara's unresponsiveness slowly began edging her out from her emotional void. A lone tremor raked through the blonde's lithe frame, cerulean blue eyes disturbingly bright and electric with grief even as they remain welded onto the smooth, blank features of her progeny's face.

"Pam…"

Pam did not acknowledge Eric's calling of her name, her maker's voice sounding as though it were coming from the end of a very long tunnel.

She stared.

"Pam…"

Air roared through her ears, loud, ceaseless and relentless as sapphire orbs remained locked onto Tara's face. Her vision blurred, the world around her seemed to tilt on its axis as more seconds trickled by, each one robbing her of every last thread of hope.

"Pam…"

Eric's voice was garbled, distorted. It sounded as though she were trying to hear him speak from under water. She tried to look up, tried to find those pools of calming sea blue-green eyes but her body neither had the will nor the strength to move from its current position, her eyes adamant and refusing to budge from its sentinel gaze on Tara's face.

"Pamela, LOOK!"

She was so cold, icy drifts renting her veins, atrophying her muscles, a glacial blizzard tearing her from the inside out.

But she forced herself to raise her head.

Blue eyes were dull with sorrow, flaying Eric with the depth of its pain.

But Pam obeyed.

Pam looked.

TBC

A/N 2 – Alright, I know I said this story was going to be angst light and this chapter aside, it has been. Right? I wasn't doling out the angst at every possible avenue in each chapter. *laughs* This one was suitably angst-y because it needed to be. Hopefully, it didn't derail y'all too much. Let me know what you thought if you've got half a second. Thanks for reading!