A/N: Eric is going to relive his past and some readers might find it offensive. I wanted to add that disclaimer so no one flames for not being warned.

Eric

Twenty Eight

I looked over at my wife. I couldn't guess what she was thinking. I knew it couldn't be good because she wasn't even looking at me. There was a tense set to her shoulders and her eyes were facing the window as if captivated by the thick sheets of rain washing over the pane. She was afraid of me again. She had to be. For the second time, she bore witness to the truth that I was a monster.

It was like the old days. Ocella would use his ties as my maker to rile and incite me then unleash me, and like a rabid dog I would attack. No matter how badly I wanted to stop, no matter how hard I fought, I always lost myself to the madness within. I couldn't see. I just felt rage. It engulfed me. It shackled my mind and roared through me with so much force it often left me screaming and on my knees. The pain would trigger more fury and the current just continued to increase until I was wrapped in a warped whirling cyclone of the two.

Today there had been no edict to compel me or a maker to manipulate my emotions. The thought of someone harming my wife was the only switch needed. I was already gone, and having her call her guards would have made it worse. So, I'd told her not to let me go and she didn't. I'd trusted myself not to hurt her and I hadn't. The fury had been there. I'd been ripped into darkness and pain but I wasn't completely lost. Somewhere in the haze I saw Sookie's face. I could feel her arms around my waist, her hand stroking my back, and her heart thumping against my silent chest.

Batanya kept glancing at me. I knew she was still in shock. The day we had both feared had come, and we'd both walked away. She wanted an explanation but I couldn't give her one. Heeding my wife's call while in that state hadn't been a compulsion. It was an invitation to return to her, and I did. Her voice lulled me as it always did; it called back my broken psych; not to my control, but to hers.

Sitting in the car was hell on the injuries I'd sustained. I hadn't healed as I should have and the pain was only getting worse. It was silver. The sting of it on my flesh was familiar. While it burned me, it couldn't kill me. It was one of the things my maker had done to make me stronger. Once upon a time it had been my constant companion.

"Damascus can clean you up," Batanya said, helping me out of the car once we arrived at the house.

I looked to the side. My wife was still there and she was still quiet. She followed silently as Batanya helped me into the house and into the bedroom closest to the door. It was as far as I could get. It wasn't the pain that kept me off my leg, I had a very high tolerance; it was the bone or lack thereof. The bullets in my leg shattered my shin and knee and others ruined my shirt. That in itself was infuriating—Sookie had bought me this shirt.

Once I got settled in the room Sookie came and sat beside me. It was then that she was able to get a proper look at my face and she did a double take. I felt her confusion. She turned my face to hers and I knew what she was seeing, eyes that were a stormy grey and not blue. She took hold of my chin and stared a few moments longer as if she didn't trust what she was seeing. Her mouth opened and closed but she seemed unable to form words. I wanted to pull away from her touch but it wasn't something I was physically capable of it seemed.

"Your eyes?" she asked.

"I know," I replied blinking. They stung and my vision was a bit clouded. I'd fried my eye balls. That was always the only part of me that was affected. "They'll return to normal in a bit."

Surely, now she would leave. She must want to, so I gave her an out. "I don't want you to catch cold," I told her. "Go get dry."

She left and I watched disappointed but she only went as far as the bathroom and came right back before I had a chance to miss her. She wrapped a towel around her head. Ever so gently she patted my hair dry and ran a comb through it. I smiled at the gesture. I could tell her that having damp hair wouldn't affect me, I could sleep in the arctic and not freeze. But there were times when she truly forgot that I was a vampire and this was one of them.

Damascus entered the room with his tools in hand. "You don't have to watch this," I added looking at Sookie. It was a confusing thing; I wanted her with me but I wanted to spare her the gore.

"I can help," she replied while pulling my hair up as to avoid blood from my wounds from staining it.

My clothes were cut away. Damascus dug into my body and fished out bullets some of them had fragmented and spread through my body on impact. With the amount of time that had passed I'd partially healed around them. Now they would have to cut out and the flesh that was burned internally would have to be scrubbed away.

It would have been less painful if my would-be assassins had used pure silver and not simply coated lead with the substance. You would think that they had enough sense not to cut corners when attempting to take on someone my age. That was apparently too much to ask. My wife kept her fingers in mine. She was caressing my face at intervals and mopped at the blood from my wounds.

Finally, Damascus washed away the last bit of silver from my body. He set the bone in my leg and left. Unlike the flesh wounds, it would take a while to knit back together.

"I'll go get you a blood," my wife said.

It was at that exact moment that Batanya walked in with a heated blood. Unceremoniously she tossed me the bottle and I caught it. I held Sookie's hand, happy that she didn't have to go anywhere at the moment. Someone else might have not noticed but I was always so in tune with my wife that I registered the flickering in her emotion from concentrated and slightly anxious to…something else. I couldn't pin down exactly what. She was slightly agitated and something else, I couldn't say what.

"You guys need to talk," my wife said, rising.

"You don't have to go love," I said squeezing her hand.

She smiled. "I need to get dry. I'll be right back." She kissed me briefly and then left.

Sookie's gait told of her mood. I truly didn't enjoy making my wife angry, what husband did? But seeing her walk away when she was so full of fire was a sight. When she was angry, there was confidence to her swagger, not to mention sexuality. It said she was right and she knew it and no one could take that from her.

When I made her 'You are impossible and overprotective' kind of angry, I'd fuck her to get back in her good graces. It was usually a hair pulling, hard thrusting, ass pounding kind of sex, after which she was so spent and sated that she couldn't maintain her ire. At the moment, though, she was moving with a kind of uncertainty. The only thing I could come up with was that she was afraid, as she should be I acknowledged internally.

"I repeat," Batanya said. "What the fuck?" she asked.

Her irritation was due to the fact that she had to know the ins and out of the locations I was in before I got there. She could always account for every single person I was exposed to and assess their risk of pissing me off. Tonight, she wasn't able to do her job, not something that made the daemon happy.

I told her what happened and gave her the routes we took when Sookie and I went out alone. I had no intention of letting this incident ruin our date night and I wasn't about to expand it to include my guards. Batanya would just have to find means to secure the way.

"I already called her Majesty." My personal guard said after asking a million questions about the attack. "It insulted her."

That meant I would have to call Sophie-Anne myself and it was a real shame. I was in no mood for upholding the pretenses of her authority over me this evening. Seeing my wife was gone I took the opportunity to clear things up with the Queen.

"Sending your guard to me is an insult," she said in hello. Clearly she wasn't over her irritation. "I am your Queen. Do not forget that fact."

I think it was because Illeta was gone that individuals with an ax to grind thought to try their hand. My sister might have been powerful but she had always been less of threat than me. Unlike her, I had no control. Now that she had passed her ability to Pam, I wouldn't want to be my enemy.

"I don't think you understand the gravity of the situation," I told her calmly. "These piss ants shot at me and my wife."

"Your human—" she inserted.

I growled to cut off from whatever insult that was going to follow. Once I heard it nothing could save her. She wasn't only my queen, she was my sheriff. She was obligated by law to ensure that any who attacked was found and punished. I paid her ridiculous tariffs, I'd made my appearances at her numerous events. She was going to find out how this happened in the heart of her territory or I was going to assume she was responsible, and then I would make her pay.

"Allow me to clarify your position," I said in an eerily controlled voice. "If you do not do your job, I will insert someone in your place who will." And just because I was in a bad mood, I added, "You have two weeks. If you do not bring me my enemy I will come to claim your head." Then I hung up.

"Have Hellion pay her a visit every afternoon until her time runs out," I told Batanya.

She grinned. "I don't think she'll be able to concentrate with him following her from safe house to safe house."

I shrugged. "Then she should have taken your phone call for the gift it was."

I wasn't worried about Sophie-Anne. I had no doubt that she would resolve the issue. Someone attacking a resident—more importantly, a taxpaying resident—was an insult to her authority. If that wasn't enough to make this a priority I'd provided additional motivation. With my threat hanging over her head and Hellion stalking her for a few days, she would close the case in no time. She had been queen for centuries. If there was nothing else she knew, she knew how to keep her head.

Sookie returned to the room. She was dressed in her favorite old shirt and very short shorts. She crawled in beside me, very careful not to jostle me. I knew she had questions but I didn't know what to say. This wasn't something that we could pretend didn't happen. She saw me annihilate over a dozen vampires.

How could I tell her? I was a monster but she already knew that, at least she thought she did. The true extent of my crimes against this world was hidden, and that was how I wanted it. I opened my arms to her knowing I would have to relive a past I never really broke free of. I struggled with it as she lay with her head on my chest and wrapped her arm around my neck.

"Are you still angry?" I asked.

She looked up at me confused. "What makes you think that?" she asked. "I wasn't mad."

"You said you were going to bring me a blood but then you didn't," I continued.

"I didn't think you needed another." She kissed me and looked shame-faced. "She already brought you one."

By the slight inflection on the first pronoun and the returning tension to her shoulders, I realized what was bothering her. She was jealous. It was incredibly ridiculous but yet so adorable.

"I'm sorry sweetheart, I'll go get it." Then she began pulling away from the bed.

I tightened the hold I had on her. I didn't want her to go anywhere. "I don't need it. I wanted it." I told her. "I want you to feed me."

She nodded. The silence continued. I could almost see the questions churning through her mind but she voiced none of them.

"Aren't you going to ask?" I finally wondered out loud.

She made a noise of refusal. "If want me to know you'd tell me and if you don't I don't want to force you to have to lie."

"I wouldn't," I told her. "I don't lie to you but there are some things I don't say because I don't want you to be afraid."

She snorted derisively. "I'm not scared of you," she said confidently. "You won't hurt me."

"No love, I would never." I affirmed kissing her head. That's what made me decide. "Do you know of the bonds between a vampire and their maker?" I asked her.

"It's eternal and the maker can feel emotions of their vampire child and where they are," she said sitting up. "Like you and Pam."

I shook my head. I wish. "Your maker owns you, mind, body, and soul. If they chose to abuse you, you would have no choice."

"Not like you and Pam," she whispered.

"Pam is my baby," I said with a smile. "Everything I never had, I found in her. England was an unforgiving place for decades after this country's independence. It was where I met her. She was ten. She broke into the house where I lived. Being a vampire I had no food for her to steal. Being an orphan, she assumed it was because I couldn't afford any. She broke in the next day to leave me bread. She's been with me ever since."

"That's really sweet," she said with a serene smile but then her face clouded. "Yours wasn't like that," she deduced.

"Not in the least." I pulled her back against me for comfort as I revisited hell.

I told her about the life I had when I was human, and how Ocella had been a collector of rarities and had the talent to seek them out. I'd always had a draw towards lightning. I found it pleasant while so many others of time had shunned it. It had been my damnation. I speared her the details of how my talent was honed into a weapon but she'd guessed.

"Two weeks after he turned me he brought me back to my village," I said. "It was what he had done to us all. It was his way to break our ties to this world so we would only have him. He ordered me kill them all."

Ocella had forced me to drown all the children, rape their mothers, and set their fathers on fire. They had all begged me by name, they all knew my face, and they had all died by hands. My own children he forced me drink dry.

"Don't cry," I said wiping Sookie's tears. "It is done and your tears will do nothing but make me sad."

There had been no pain as I told her about the worse of what eternity had showed me. If I felt anything it was apprehension that she would be repulsed. She wasn't. She was crying for me. Making her cry for any reason other than joy was not something I ever wanted to do again.

She nodded and swallowed her tears as best as she could. "That's why Illeta…" her voice trailed off.

"Ni siquiera el diablo haría esto," I said, recalling my sister's words. "It means, 'Not even the devil would do this. Her husband had died before she gave birth to their son. He had been a toddler when Ocella had turned her. She said he smiled at her and called her by name as she drowned him. She told me that he never looked afraid. The look in his eyes had one of confusion. It wasn't her fault but she always believed there was a special in hell for her, for not even the devil would murder his own son. It wasn't until recently that she began to forgive herself. She found peace and I think she didn't want to risk ever parting with it."

"How did you get away?" she asked. "What happened to the others?"

"My maker's last acquisition was to be his crowning jewel," I told her. "She was psychic and with her he would have been unstoppable but she saw him coming. She killed him to save her family but she died in the process." I thought I would never forget her face but I had. She was forever the breaker of shackles.

"When he was gone, the bond that had been wound so tightly snapped. There were twelve of us. Illeta, Ezra, Asha, and I were the youngest so his hold over us wasn't as deep and the madness in his mind hadn't fully infected us. The others were not as fortunate. The instant the bond broke, so did their minds. They'd been tied to him for too long there was nothing left of who'd they'd been. They were killing machines with no 'off' switch, so the four of us had to put them down because no one else in this world could. Asha and Ezra died in the fight and then it was just Leta and me."

"But it's only you now," she murmured, wrapping her arm around my neck.

I nodded. "It's just me."