After another span of peaceful quiet, Sookie stirred against his chest. "We should go in before the mosquitoes eat us up," she murmured.
"They don't touch me," he said, smiling into her hair, "but I can understand why they would want you."
She sat up and winced as she moved to stand. "Ouch."
"Let me heal you." He raised his fingers to his mouth and pressed them to his fangs.
"Don't," she said as she took his wrist to stop him. Of course; she had just undone their bond. She didn't want his blood. But she surprised him by blushing and adding, "I kind of like it."
Eric stood up beside her, drew her face to his, and kissed her. Since she was achy, he picked up their clothes – what was left of them, anyway – before they went inside. While Sookie went back to her room to dress, he pulled on his jeans and secured them with his belt. His shirt was missing practically every button now, but he put it on anyway. He heated a True Blood in the microwave for himself and used a cold pitcher in the refrigerator to pour a glass of sweet tea for Sookie. He opened her freezer to see if she had an ice pack, but he didn't see one. He made do by filling a Ziploc bag with ice cubes and folding a thin washcloth around it.
By the time Sookie emerged from her room, he had finished his blood and was waiting for her by the sofa. She lowered herself onto it slowly and leaned back against one arm.
"See if this feels better," he said, laying the ice pack on her. He gave her the glass of tea, and she handed him the brush she had brought with her.
Only once before had he tried to brush her hair – the night that Appius and Alexei had arrived – and she had stopped him suddenly. His maker had interrupted and upset their lives before Eric could spare a minute to puzzle over her reaction. He remembered a night when he had watched in jealousy as Bill brushed her hair; perhaps it was a ritual she had shared with him? Whatever it was, a reminder of another lover or nothing at all, the brush was in his hand tonight. He knelt behind the arm of the couch and set to work.
She sipped her tea and occasionally made quiet, happy noises as he cared for her, smoothing out the tangles that he himself had taken great delight in creating. Having long hair himself, he knew how to untangle it gently, and he couldn't stop himself from sliding his fingers through her hair or kissing it now and then. When he had finished brushing it out, he gathered it in one hand, laid it over her shoulder, and kissed her neck. She reached behind her to tug at him.
"C'mere," she said, and he obeyed, shuffling on his knees to the side of the sofa.
He set her empty glass on the coffee table so he could have her hands all to himself. They kissed for several minutes, slowly and softly, taking the time they had not spared earlier on the porch. The tea had made Sookie's mouth cool and sweet.
"Still sore?" he asked her.
"Some," she replied, "but the ice is helping. Can I brush your hair?" He turned around on the floor, and she sat up, putting one leg on either side of him. She ran her fingers through his hair and laughed. "Your hair might be even more tangled than mine was," she said.
Though she couldn't see his face, he grinned. "It felt more like you were pulling it out than tangling it."
He leaned back against the sofa and closed his eyes, as happy as he always was in the cradle of her legs. When she had finished with him, he joined her on the sofa, pulling her legs up into his lap. He rubbed the bottom of her foot, then slid his palm up the smooth, tanned length of her leg before making the return journey on her other leg.
"Has Victor said anything to you?" Sookie asked.
He knew what she meant. "Not about the bond, so he doesn't know yet," he said. "He would have been on the phone instantly." Fortunately, there was no way for Victor to know unless someone told him. Eric rested his head back on the sofa, relaxing as his hand continued to rub Sookie's legs.
"How's Miriam? Did she recover?"
"She recovered from the drugs Victor gave her, but she's sicker in body," he told her grimly. "Pam is as close to despair as I've ever seen her." He could feel it, too. Pam unnerved many people because of her apparent lack of feeling; what unnerved Eric was the revelation of her unexpected depth of feeling.
"Did their relationship come on kind of slowly? Because I didn't have a clue until Immanuel told me about it."
"Pam doesn't often care for anyone as much as she cares about Miriam." In fact, the only person she had cared about as much was himself, and since Pam's declaration the other night, he knew that Miriam was nothing to her when compared to him. This saddened him in a way that he would have scoffed at – no, he would have found it pathetic and weak and repulsive, as would any other vampire – before Sookie. He traced the arch of her foot with his index finger. "I only found out when she asked for some time off from the club to visit Miriam in the hospital," he admitted. "And she gave the girl blood, too, which is the only reason Miriam's lasted this long."
"Vampire blood can't cure her?"
If vampire blood could cure cancer or AIDS or any other disease, the handful of doctors who knew about the blood's healing powers would have already made themselves rich. The pharmaceutical companies would cease to exist.
"Our blood is good for healing open wounds. For illnesses, it can offer relief, but seldom a cure," he explained.
"I wonder why?" she mused.
He answered her with a shrug. "I'm sure one of your scientists would have a theory, but I don't. And since some people go crazy when they take our blood, the risk is considerable. I was happier when the properties of our blood were secret, but I suppose that couldn't be kept quiet for long." He looked at her, and his face hardened at the thought of not being allowed to save her. One day he would have to watch her die, and he would understand Pam's present suffering. "Victor certainly isn't concerned about Miriam's survival – or the fact that Pam has never asked to create a child before," he said bitterly. "After all these years of service, Pam deserves to be granted the right."
"Victor's not letting Pam have Miriam out of sheer cussedness?" she frowned.
Normally, Sookie's expressions amused or puzzled him, but this one he found quite fitting and not a bit funny. "He has a bullshit excuse about there being enough vampires in my sheriffdom, when actually my numbers are low." He growled as if Victor were standing right in front of him. "The truth is that Victor will block us any way he can for as long as he can, in the hope that I'll do something injudicious enough to warrant being removed as sheriff… or killed."
"Surely Felipe wouldn't let that happen," Sookie said in a small voice.
Though he could no longer feel her anxiety or her fear, her face was as open as always, and he could see everything in her eyes. He lifted her onto his lap and folded her against him, pressing his lips into her hair.
"Felipe would judge in Pam's favor if he were on the spot, but I'm sure he wants to stay out of the situation if he can. It's what I'd do." He stroked her hair as he went on, musing aloud, "He's setting up Red Rita in Arkansas, and she's never ruled. He knows Victor is sulking about being appointed regent rather than king in Louisiana. And he is busy himself in Las Vegas, which he's running on a skeleton crew since he's sent people out to both his new states. Consolidating this big an empire hasn't been done in hundreds of years, and the last time it was done, the population was only a fraction of what it is today."
He remembered the years of turmoil when the vampires had fought over the Louisiana Purchase; the French vampires, who had been and still were mostly concentrated in New Orleans, hadn't been at all happy about surrendering their domain just because their human counterparts did.
"So Felipe's still in complete control of Nevada?" she asked. Her breath warmed the skin at his shoulder.
"Yes… for now."
Her arms tightened around him. "That sounds kind of ominous."
"When leaders are spread thin, the sharks gather round to see if they can take a bite."
She lifted her head to look at him. "What sharks? Anyone we know?"
Her eyes were so wide and close to his own; he could not look into them while mentioning Oklahoma. He glanced off to the side, staring at her tea glass on the coffee table.
"Two other monarchs in Zeus," he said. "The Queen of Oklahoma for one, and the King of Arizona."
She lay back against him and sighed. "I wish you were just an average vampire. I wish you weren't a sheriff or anything."
"You mean you wish I were like Bill." Apolitical. Self-loathing. The anti-vampire.
"No, because he's not average, either," she said defensively, almost angrily. She sat up again and frowned at him. Yet again, she had mistaken his meaning. "He's got the whole database thing going, and he's taught himself all about computers. He's sort of reinvented himself. I guess I mean I wish you were more like…" Eric waited for the verdict, almost cringing. "Maxwell."
He gave a snort of derision and rolled his eyes. "Of course, I'm so much like Maxwell. Let me start carrying a pocket calculator with me and putting people to sleep with things like… 'variable annuities,' or whatever the hell it is he talks about."
"I get your point, Mr. Subtle," she said, smiling. She took off the makeshift ice pack, which was now little more than cold water, and set it on the coffee table next to her glass. "See, isn't this fun?" she asked, motioning between them to indicate – he assumed – the tie that was no longer there.
"Yes, so much fun," he said dryly. "Until Victor snatches you up and drains you dry and then says, 'But, Eric, she was no longer bonded to you, so I did not think you still wanted her!' And then he'll turn you against your will, and I'll have to watch you suffer being bound to him for the rest of your life… and mine." The idea alone filled him with anger and misery.
Sookie shivered in his arms. "You really know how to make a girl feel special."
"I love you," he reminded her. If he didn't, he wouldn't care how many power-hungry regents wanted to possess her. His thoughts returned to Pam. "And this situation with Pam has to end," he said, thinking out loud. "If this girl Miriam dies, Pam may decide to leave, and I won't be able to stop her. In fact, I shouldn't. Though she's very useful."
Pam claimed that she didn't want to leave him, but neither he nor she could know how she would feel when Miriam died. Such a death could change a person profoundly – even a person like Pam.
"You're fond of her. Come on, Eric. You love her. She's your kid."
He smiled a little at the thought of how Pam would react to being called his "kid." "Yes, I am very fond of Pam. I made a great choice." He pressed his nose to the top of her hair and inhaled her scent. "You were my other great choice."
There was a short silence, and then Sookie said in a sniffly kind of voice, "That's one of the nicest things anyone's ever said to me."
"Don't cry!" he said quickly, motioning for her to stop.
He hated the sight of her tears, whether happy or sad. He remembered the first time he had ever held her, just the two of them, after she had escaped from the Fellowship church in Dallas. She had been crying then, too, and drying her eyes on his shirt just as she was now.
"So… do you have a plan about Victor?" she asked.
"Every time I make one, I run up against an obstacle so large I have to discard the plan. Victor is very good at self-protection. I may have to openly attack him." His words were pure treason, and he hadn't spoken them aloud to anyone but her, though they often hung unsaid but understood between himself and Pam. "If I kill him… if I win… then I'll have to stand trial." Only Felipe's pardon would be able to save him then, and he couldn't be certain that it would be granted.
"Eric," she said slowly, "if you fought with Victor alone, bare-handed, in an empty room, what do you think the outcome would be?"
"He's very good," he hedged.
Sookie looked up at him. "He might win?"
"Yes," he said frankly, turning his head down to return her gaze. "And what would happen to you and Pam afterward…" Pam would be tortured and killed. Sookie was too valuable to kill, but Victor would certainly make sure that she suffered. She would be his slave in every way.
"I'm not trying to bypass the fact that you would be dead, which would be the most important thing to me in that scenario, but I'm wondering why he would be so sure to hurt Pam and me afterward. What would be the point?"
"The point would be the lesson he'd be making to other vampires who might be thinking of trying to overthrow him." Another point would be Victor's own sadistic pleasure.
Eric looked away from her, trying to decide if he wanted to tell her the story Heidi had told him. It would serve as a warning and a reminder to Sookie that their blood bond was not something she should have thrown away so carelessly. It would remind her that vampires were ruthless and merciless. Including himself. But Sookie already knew what he was. She already knew what he and the others of his kind were capable of. She loved him anyway.
He told her Heidi's story about the vampire, Chico, who had been forced to eat his own mother's tongue. He didn't want to see the undisguised horror and disgust in her eyes, so he kept his eyes trained on one of the family photographs across the room.
"Chico was violently ill, and in fact threw up blood," he said. "He became too weak to move. While he lay on the floor, his mother bled to death. He couldn't crawl to her to give her blood to save her."
Sookie's face, when he finally looked back at her, was exactly how he had pictured it would be.
"Heidi volunteered this story?" she asked.
"Yes. I had asked her why she was so pleased she'd been sent to Area Five."
The story was horrifying not so much for the brutality of cutting out a tongue, which Eric himself had done to enemies and did not regret, but for the injustice of killing Chico's innocent mother. Vampires, however vicious, did have a sense of justice. Most vampires, at least. He suspected – rightly, he knew – that everything about the story was awful to Sookie.
"Victor's either short-sighted or super-cocky," she said.
Eric nodded his agreement. "Maybe both."
Sookie sat up fully in his lap and angled herself more towards him. She trailed her fingertips down the side of his face. "How'd you feel when you heard that story?" she asked him.
He would have thought his feelings were obvious. "I… didn't want that to happen to you." He could see that she was waiting for something else. Did she want an apology on behalf of all vampires? Did she want him to say that he would never rip out someone's tongue? "What are you looking for, Sookie?" he asked directly. "What answer shall I give?"
Should I tell you that if anyone, human or vampire, killed you, I would tear out more than that person's tongue? There are some truths you don't want to hear, even though you already know them.
She smiled a little and shook her head. "That's okay. Never mind." There was disappointment written on her face. If she wanted an answer which he could not give, she would have to remain disappointed. "You know who you should talk to?" she asked suddenly. "Remember the night we went to Vampire's Kiss, that server who tipped me off about the fairy blood by just a look and a thought?" He answered with a nod. "I hate to pull him in any further, but I don't see we have another choice. We have to do this with everything we've got, or we're going down."
For all her unease with moral ambiguity, Sookie had it herself in spades. Fortunately for her, her husband loved her for it. Eric smiled.
"Sometimes you astonish me," he said. "Let's go."
"Wait… what?"
He helped her to her feet and then stood up himself. "To Vampire's Kiss. You said it yourself. We have to do this with everything we've got, or we're going down. So let's go."
Kind of a transition-y chapter, I know, but I hope you enjoyed it. I appreciate all of you so, so much. xoxo -DeeDee