Chapter 20 – Empty

 

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She threw her hair carelessly over her shoulder gazing at the hot stare of his eyes. He was expecting to hear words of defeat. Her white flag, coming from between her clenched teeth begging him to let her come. However, she had saved her weapon of choice for last, uttering the treacherous words he would never refuse from her swollen lips.

 

 

“Bite me,” she said with pleading eyes and an offering of her neck. His fangs clicked down standing proud in their pearly white glory. Godric obliged by licking the ethereal artery, the scent so familiar yet foreign at the same time. He broke his fast willingly for the first time in months as he waited in anticipation for the intoxicating blood of the fiery Fae-vampire to treacle out and into his starved mouth. There was heat but the veins were devoid and dry. He was met with an experience he knew far too well for far too long. Emptiness.

 

 

Eric never felt so full, his cock surrounded by the warmth of a goddess who seemed to be wringing him out like a wet towel as his mouth filled with the ambrosia from her veins. His thousand year old control slipped as he came deep inside her as her delectable blood hit his palette. He pulled out but only a mere smidgen of cum decorated her back as was intended when her release massaged his intended exit to dizzying heights.

 

“We’re filthy,” she giggled as he held her in his encompassing embrace. She rested her head against his chest positioning her forehead on his bicep as they steadied themselves to a state of calm once more.

 

“Took you long enough to notice,” he smirked. “Time for my fairy to give me a bath.”

 

His victory, however, was short lived as she found her upper hand. “Told you I have yet to grow in my wings,” Sookie teased as she turned her head to look towards her shoulder blades. “Unless they arrived with priority express you’re going to have to settle for a human bath.”

 

“You wound me,” he mocked.

 

“Only with my tongue.”

 

Eric had to admit there was yet to be a truer statement to come from that much adored mouth.

 

---

 

It didn’t matter what Godric did he always ended up here in emptiness. Cecily had disappeared when the hollowness of her veins had hit the back of his throat or rather had not. His whole body had been worked up and his parched fangs searched out desperately for what had been promised to them.

 

He was spiralling out of the tightly wound discipline that had cemented his resolve and control. She wanted him to feel and now he felt. Everything. All at once.

 

Godric’s eyes raked repeatedly over the holy book that had changed his outlook but he could no longer find the answers he was looking for anymore. He had lost the light and could only find darkness in the bible that had once brought him solace. They were just words now, just as the journals he used to keep had become words without meaning to him.

 

He picked up the journal Cecily had read from and traced the familiar sight of his penmanship. Remembering exactly how he had spent centuries in true darkness, when only the flicker of a candle gave way to illumination as he scribbling away his observations of the ordinary. The storm had reverted him back to that darkness as the generators on the property were now solely relegated to the safe rooms where the humans were kept safe. Godric had seen no priority to re-establish the electrical current to his quarters when he had been gifted with far superior sight.

 

The leather-bound journal of the early 1800’s followed his travel back to Paris. In his younger years it was still called Lutetia but he had avoided the grounds of his birth until the draw had become too great to ignore. When Godric arrived, the city was becoming known as La Ville-Lumière, the city of light. Mainly for being one of the first to install gas lighting in its streets but soon came to allude to the enlightened thought that heralded Europe into a new era.

 

Godric had come for the physical light, eternal darkness and the stars had been his companions for too long, but in the end he stayed for the thoughts. Slowly the soft lumen of candles had given way to an intensified glare of a gas lamp but none had prepared him for his first sight of an entire city in full illumination. His eyes could see more than most but artificial light had given him a reminiscence of the sun. A chance to experience the day as the citizens of Paris dared venture out in the evenings where the rest of the world stayed safely huddled inside. With great excitement he had happily chased Cecily’s silent form all over the city that was opening up wide with boulevards and splendours he had never seen, while he indulged copiously on the blood that lay waiting on the streets.

 

Invitations to salons were granted continually as he picked at the minds of the enlightened thinkers where his journal tracked the seemingly ordinary man and woman that for the first time had the ability to move beyond their confines and truly become extraordinary. That had been the point he had stopped recording these lives of others because he no longer stood as a lone witness in the dark.

 

Godric had reverted to that frame of mind again, he had found the light and it had escaped him once more. Something was offered and taken away. His maker may be dead but the cruel methods of his teachings remained to haunt him. He had stayed in Paris for a long time before this realisation had fallen upon him again and it had him seeking out that deadly light for the first time in centuries again. Instead of the rays of the sun lighting up his face it had been the radiance that surrounded Cecily’s ethereal form that had beckoned him back into the safety of darkness moments before dawn. She had held him as tears of blood fell from his eyes for his continued damnation to the dark.

 

Without thought he had left the city the next night after the realisation had settled that the lights that allowed him to live more than most were merely a taunting artifice of what he could never hope to regain. Light artificial.

 

Godric should have known that when he arrived by boat to his next destination that the large gift bestowed by France on his newfound home would taunt him like all the others with their promises. Cecily had stood in the light, a gleaming beam in the night illuminating the recognisable emblem with a cheeky smile. La Liberté éclairant le monde, Liberty Enlightening the World, or rather The Statue of Liberty as she came to be called, held a torch that resembled the enlightened thought he had just left behind. This was the country where it was supposed to flourish. These people had broken their chains and thrown it at their feet. It had been that burden that had brought him here but over century on he continued to be fooled by promises that never came.

 

Emptiness reigned once more with only darkness as its companion.

 

Resigning to his fate Godric blew out the candle by his bed to succumb to the darkness that signified the day, only for the room to illuminate with the green light from his cell phone. Through the bond he now shared with Tara he knew it was from her as he sensed her apprehension. With curiosity he stared at the blinking envelope that contained her message. It was succinct, like the woman herself.

 

Call me, we need to talk.  

 

---

 

A heavy thud indenting the mattress startled Sookie awake and knowing Eric was snuggled up beside her, dead to the world, she scrambled in panic clutching at the sheets.

 

“You’re welcome by the way,” Cecily announced amused at Sookie’s frazzled state. She sighed a sigh of relief that the unwelcome trespasser was not a hostile one.

 

“Morning to you too Cecily,” she murmured while squinting at the sight of her purse, the unidentified weighty object that had woken Sookie from her slumber. “We really need to get you an Emily Post for Apparitions. Where did you get this?”

 

“You ok?” Eric mumbled in his half sleep. Sookie merely urged him back to his rest now that danger seemed averted.

 

“Some were bitch brought it in. Feisty,” she said with glee. The images she projected to Sookie’s mind explained her relish of the bloodshed that had accompanied it. Her stomach curdled as she recognised the were as Alcide Herveaux’s girlfriend. His love for the supernatural world was just going to increase exponentially with that news.

 

“I thought you couldn’t kill anyone in your state?” Sookie groaned as she realised Eric and her had just buried the now identified body.

 

“I can’t, but I can get close,” she said with a minute shrug. The feather light state of her hair rippled in response. “I have life in me now.”

 

“Jason’s?” Sookie demanded worry lacing her voice. She had abated her concern for their little tryst till now. Cecily was a unique being and while she seemed to follow the same objective as Eric and her, the depth of the faeling’s true nature was unpredictable.

 

She shook her head to refute the presumption. “It happened from the moment you walked into his bar,” she returned pointing at the sleeping vampire beside her. Sookie followed the direction of her pointed finger and smiled longingly at his unguarded face. She was momentarily distracted as her fingers trailed through his soft short hairs.

 

It made little sense to her how their meeting was responsible for Cecily’s resuscitation to some form of life but something inexplicable had happened between them indeed. She had resisted then in the fear of the unknown but being in close quarters with Eric had rendered that useless.

 

“We bonded, once,” Sookie said as she finally took in Cecily’s altered state. The ethereal white glow that seemed to cloud her was somehow less bright but clearer at the same time. Her defying of gravity and her ethereal nature seemed dampened, replaced with what could only be described as life behind her fiery eyes.

 

“Keep doing it.”

 

“I’ll take it under advisement,” Sookie returned still unsure of her own stance on it while wondering if she and Eric were truly responsible for birthing Cecily back into the world. “Why did you have to kill the poor woman?”

 

“Poor woman?” Cecily scoffed. “She found your things with her mate. She came to kill you on assumptions you were birthing him puppies.”

 

“Even so,” Sookie admonished. “We have a justice system for that.”

 

Cecily laughed at Sookie’s naiveté, it wasn’t maniacal in sound but it wasn’t far off either. A small tear trickled from her eye at the hilarity of it all. “My brother really needs to teach you the basics of the supernatural world,” she said in between her fits. “No one touches what is ours.” Her last statement was spoken with a sharper and serious tone to underline the gravity of it.

 

“Your true family would have acted with far greater repercussion,” Cecily added. “Why do you think I offered her to them?”

 

“Well they rejected the offer,” Sookie scoffed with disgust at the memory of the mutilated body that had been tossed out through the portal. “Eric and I were the clean-up crew that night.”

 

“Interesting,” she pondered tapping her slim fingers rapidly to her jutted chin. “The portal opened for you?”

 

“Yeah, my fingers got all tingly.”

 

“Expect your long lost relatives to appear sooner than you think,” Cecily returned. “Call me when they do.”

 

“You have a cell phone too now?” Sookie said with a roll of her eyes wandering which service provider was hosting her ghost of a contract. She didn’t even own one of those shiny gadgets herself.

 

“We are kin,” she informed with a sneer at Sookie’s apparent lack of knowledge. “Think of me and I will appear. How else do you think I can come here?”

 

Sookie gave a small shrug, “I thought you could just appear anywhere.”

 

“Not in private homes without an invitation.” Her reply was accompanied by a demonstration of her dainty fangs.

 

“You come with a whole set of your own rules don’t you,” Sookie mumbled as she finally got out of the bed knowing sleep would be lost on her now. She shrouded herself with the white sheet beckoning Cecily to follow her to the kitchen.

 

“How’s Jason?” she asked during her unsuccessful expedition in discovering something besides blood in the cupboards and fridge.

 

“We don’t talk much,” Cecily returned with a lascivious wink that made Sookie cringe.

 

“Figures,” she mumbled before exclaiming an excited ‘Yes!’ when she successfully found a drawer full of astronaut meals. She selected a questionable looking beef stew and a selection of strawberries and set to rehydrate it into something edible. Her stomach grumbled as it had been too damn long since she had a proper meal. She was going to have a conversation with Eric about it or she’d soon turn into a bag of bones if she were to keep up with his voracious appetites.

 

“Listen,” Sookie said as she started popping a rehydrated strawberry in her mouth. It tasted good but the texture was discernibly odd. “I don’t mean to be the overbearing sister but you and Jason?”

 

Cecily merely blinked at her impatiently waiting for her to finish her sentence.

 

“Are you like together together?”

 

“I don’t understand,” Cecily replied to a question that clearly belonged to a high school conversation between infatuated tweens.

 

Sookie took a deep breath hating having to entertain this conversation while Eric was happily dead to the world.

 

“Are you exclusive, like me and Eric,” she blurted out only to receive Cecily’s mocking laugh in return.

 

“I hope not,” she chortled. “I hope there will be many others to join us. Vampires like Eric and I are not monogamous beings, Princess.”

 

The blood drained from her face. She had never physically sat down and talked to Eric about it but life had just gotten in the way of anything beyond the intense moments of physical exertion to process the ridiculous amount of threat and danger they survived. Realising the conversation should be had with Eric and not with Cecily she cleared her mind to the matter at hand.

 

“Eric wants to send in spies with the Fellowship,” she explained. “They already know who I am so I can’t go in. You and Jason seem a good fit, he and Sarah Newlin have history.”

 

“They fucked,” Cecily said bluntly making a mockery of Sookie’s careful delivery of words. “I have no issue if they continue to do so. I’ll keep him out of trouble.”

 

Sookie nodded in compliance as they went over the extensive intelligence Eric had gathered preparing Cecily and Jason for their mission in Dallas. Her mind, however, was elsewhere. That initial fear that had steered her away from Eric initially resurfaced. He would ruin her for all others and leave her behind.

 

Alone, once more.

 

With determination she slipped into the darkened bedroom to hover her face over the seemingly innocent one of a Viking vampire that she had never seen appear so innocent.  Her hand collided with the hard muscle of his face as the noise of a well aimed slap resonated through the room. “Wake up, Asshole!”

 

---

 

“Are you feeling all right?” It was a strange question to pose from one nocturnal creature to the next. There were incapacitating diseases that could threaten one’s health but Russell seemed to be suffering from something Pam had yet to see in a vampire.

 

“I’m fine poppet,” Russell assured her. Whatever was ailing him wasn’t physical, it was the mind. “What’s on the menu today?”

 

“Do you want me to select you a donor?”

 

“No, no,” he replied with a gesture of his hands. “I meant what’s on the agenda.”

 

“I forget all your references are from the nineties,” Pam quipped which merely earned her a piqued look she knew well from her own Maker. “You need to select a gift to give the new King of Texas.”

 

“Why bother?” Russell shrugged. “Mexico will be annexing that state soon enough. Select something of Lorena’s that we haven’t burnt yet. Better yet send him one of those hideous True Blood bouquets we received so many of. Are all the states in need of financial aid or are they just not happy to see me?”

 

Pam returned with a small shrug, unsure of the true reason. From being Eric’s deputy she knew Sophie Anne had been running the state into financial ruin for a long time but there had been little talk of it being a nationwide occurrence. “Maybe they wanted to show you what delightful cardboard crap you’ve been missing out on all these years,” the female vampire offered jovially.

 

“No it isn’t a coincidence,” Russell spoke sagely, ignoring her serve to banter. “There’s a pattern here.”

 

“They’re declaring their loyalty to the authority,” Pam observed as she placed the neat and identical scripture from the different heads of state next to each other. “The strongest proponents of the mainstreaming movement. It’s time you start making your alliances known.”

 

“I have only ever allied with myself,” the ancient shrugged. “There was never need, no one dared encroach on my territory for the simple fact of my age.”

 

“The authority has inflated with power since the Great Reveal,” she informed even though Russell’s intelligence reports would have told him this much. “It was clear to Eric and me that they dictated much of Sophie Anne’s rule when her finances were falling apart. Her desperate attempt to monetise our blood was a clear move to usurp their hold on her.”

 

“Instead it heralded in the Gaul,” Russell noted. “They will have no such hold over me. We can be Switzerland.”

 

“That would be dreadfully boring would it not?” a cloaked figure spoke with an accent of the old world while it approached the two lethargic vampires on their matching set of thrones. “All those trains running on time, it’s the most unexciting place on earth. Don’t worry, the Authority will reveal its hold over you soon enough.”

 

“I have more gold than the vaults of Switzerland,” Russell dismissed to the newcomer. Pam eyed the dark figure suspiciously but the newly reinstated king chuckled with delight at the vampire that dared enter their chambers where everyone else had fearfully kept their distance.

 

The dark glean of the brown haired vampire’s eyes revealed when the hood was lowered. “It is not gold they will entice you with Mississippi, rather your child.”

 

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A/N: As I mentioned in last chapter’s a/n this will be the last chapter for this year and we’ll pick up with this story and my other WIPs in January. I haven’t decided on scheduling yet in the new year, I’m hoping to get back to three updates a week rather than the current two leaving a week and a half between but I’m still trying to figure out what works best.

 

Oh and keep guessing on the identity of the cloaked figure, I might have to bake another batch of Eric shaped cookies for whoever gets that right.

 

Special thanks to msbuffy for her ever skilful beta work.

 

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