Chapter 22

Adrift between dimensions, Sookie floated gently, holding her son by the hand who in turn gripped Eric’s hand. Sookie realised hysterically that they were in the same poses as Peter Pan, Wendy and the boys painted on Marcus’ nursery as Peter flew them to Neverland. At least with Eric, Karin and Pam no pixie dust was necessary. Ludwig was nowhere to be seen, and neither was Cataliades.

“Where are we?” Sookie asked, her voice strangely muffled in this still place, as though she was talking underwater.

“Between,” was all Eric said. He and his vampire children had no need to breathe – but Sookie and Marcus did. He was quietly panicking – this place was vast and had no sense of up or down. The gray-purple of dawn spread out as far as he could see. How would they return to their own realm? He used his superior vision to look for something – anything – but there were no landmarks to distinguish.

Just as he was beginning to despair, Sookie sighed and said, “Look, I can see stars. Aren’t they beautiful?” He knew from his bond with her that the air around them was not what it should be to support her. The child was already strangely quiet. He looked at the stars, silently cursing them for making Sookie waste her precious breath, and hope rose within him as something ancient clawed its way to the surface of his undead brain.

Sookie gasped. She was no longer in the strange purple-gray space but instead there was solid wood beneath her feet and dark night sky all around, filled with the brightest stars she had ever seen. They were so close she could almost touch them.  The prow of the ship curved up into a carved dragon’s head, scaled and fierce with antlers atop it. Square sails, massive and heavy, pressed down upon her, and down either side of the ship were wooden shields painted with runes. Shadows of men filled the ship, some slept and others rowed. Eric was beside her, garbed in strange clothes of coarse cloth and leather trimmed with fur. His hair was longer in places, other parts shaved close to his skull, and intricately braided.

“Hey Eric, doesn’t this look like one of your ships when you were human?” Sookie giggled. Eric thought she must be suffering from oxygen deprivation.

“It is in my memory, lover. I was thinking of my human time sailing across oceans and you have brought us both here.”

“So you’re human?”

“Only in my memory.”

“Ah. That makes sense – sort of.”

“Look at the stars, lover.” Eric pointed upwards, holding Sookie close, kissing her gently and tenderly, not knowing if they would survive this.

“Yeah, pretty cool, huh?”

“This is what the night sky was like before light pollution dulled the stars.”

“Light what?”

“Look, Sookie. They are the same. I can use them to fly us home.”

“Like Peter Pan. Second star to the right and straight on to morning.” Sookie laughed at her own joke, thinking it was far more hilarious than it actually was. Eric shook her gently.

“Sookie, your brain is starved of oxygen. We have to get out of here.”

“Just wake up,” she giggled. “It’s your dream. Click your heels together. There’s no place like home, Toto.” Groaning with exasperation, Eric grabbed Sookie, surprised that his strength was only that of a normal human and here he had no ability to fly. He considered throwing them both into the ocean but instead willed himself to be vampire in this memory, focusing intently on his unbeating heart, his cold skin, his super-strength and speed and the feel of his fangs in his mouth, how good it felt to bite with them and the delight of drinking blood.

The memory resisted, trying to keep him human, but at last it gave in and he was vampire standing on his father’s longship, setting out for war in the kingdom of Northumbria. He chuckled to himself, thinking of what his people would have thought of his vampire state.

He pulled Sookie to him and took to the air, the memory turning to smoke around him as he latched onto the stars he knew and had known of old to find his way home. He flew as fast as he could, noting Sookie was also unconscious now, along with the child. Karin was helping Pam keep up as they instinctively let him take the lead and he followed the stars as he had once done in his human life.

Then the purple-gray haze burned away and they were back at the shores of the lake.

“What the fuck happened to my house?” Pam demanded. 

Eric noted that although her face was somewhat ashen from the mild silver poisoning Ludwig had given her, she seemed otherwise to be herself, although a little weakened. There was still no sign of Ludwig or Cataliades, and he saw with relief that Marcus and Sookie were breathing, though apparently asleep.

“Worry about what happened later. Now we need to get to a safe house,” Eric replied.

“Where could we possibly be safe from fairies?” Pam demanded. “Those fucktastic fuck-holes can pop in everywhere.”

“Not through iron,” he smirked. “And I have just the place.”

“The dungeon!” Pam exclaimed. “Oooh – do I get to torture someone too?”

“What dungeon?” Karin asked.

“Oh you’ll love it. It’s in an industrial estate, kind of like a warehouse. It’s not really a dungeon but I told Eric it reminded me of one, and the name stuck.”

“We have a spy to interrogate.”

 

 

With Sookie and Marcus safely stowed away in an iron-reinforced safe room, ensconced in a warm soft bed to recuperate from their near-suffocation, Eric had time to play with his prime suspect – with a little help from Pam, of course.

Not for the first time that evening, Eric wished he had some brain-bleach. Buckets and buckets of it. But of course nothing would ever remove the image of Compton seared in his mind.

“My maker has chastised me for not adequately wrapping his present for his pledging. I am attempting to remedy this,” Pam explained as she picked up her staple gun – pink, of course. Somehow, somewhere she had managed to find – or more likely glamoured someone to make – silver staples. She was industriously stapling pink bows of varying shades and sizes all over Compton’s pathetic naked body.

 That Pam, thought Eric. Always so literal.

“Hmmm,” Pam mused, holding the staple gun above Compton’s tiny limp cock.  “I don’t think I have a bow small enough for this. No wonder Sookie still smelled like a virgin until my master fucked her. I doubt that sad little flap of skin could have actually penetrated anyone. What really happened, Bill? Did you just rub it up and down on the outside of her sparkly fairy vagina until you spurted your sad little load on the outside, hoping she wouldn’t notice the difference?”

“Pam,” Eric warned. Without adequate supplies of brain-bleach there was no way he wanted to entertain any visuals of Bill with his Sookie. Not even hilarious ones.

“Forgive me, Master,” Pam intoned in her bored monotone voice that told Eric she was not sorry at all.  “Perhaps if I cut it off, it might grow back bigger next time. Or the next time, or the one after that. I have scissors round here somewhere.” Pam rummaged through her torture kit. “Oh darn it – all I can find is this hot glue gun.” Pam waved it round, the object the same offensive shade of pink as her staple-gun.

Eric stepped closer as Pam continued to pull out various crafting and home decor implements that had been modified for torture as she continued to hunt for those scissors. Compton tried to squirm away from  each object she removed – attempts that were of course futile as Pam made sure Bill was exposed to the full range of torture devices on offer.

“As I’m sure you already know, we all come to vampirism with an existing skill set. My maker was fortunate in his human time he was a skilled swordsman and cleaver of skulls. Me, however, well being from more ‘civilised’ times and of course with the limitations of being female, well most of my education consisted of functional and recreational arts and crafts. Did you make your wife stitch your clothes, Bill? Did you force your daughters to learn needlework and painting?  It took me quite some time to find the proper application for such feminine arts, but luckily I am quite creative and my maker has encouraged my pursuits. Now, what was I looking for again? Oh yes – scissors. Hmm, but all I can find are crewel needles, pinking shears – I brought them just for the name – macrame hooks – what was I thinking? Stitch wheel – looks like a spiky pizza cutter for cutting stitch holes in leather – “

Pam was enjoying herself too much, and as much as he too enjoyed watching Compton squirm, he needed to get some answers.

“Why didn’t you inform me, your sherrif, of the stench at Sookie’s farm house caused by the shifter?”

“I forgot?”

“Pam.”

Pam took out the silver-tipped stitch wheel and criss-crossed it with some vehemence down Compton’s white and pudgy chest.

“You scream like a girl,” she smirked.

“I didn’t know what it was – not at first. I thought maybe the shifter had killed her and hidden the body in the house. I didn’t want to have my head removed for bringing you that news.”

“But you didn’t care if she’d been killed, her body stuffed under the floorboards?”

“Why would I?”

“I should kill you anyway.” Eric grabbed a Viking war hammer, far less dainty than Pam’s instruments, and buried it with a satisfying thunk into Compton’s shoulder. When the screaming subsided, he leaned over into his face.

“When did you start getting the bleeds? When did you figure out the shifter could be used by an older vampire as a weapon against our own kind?”

“I – I didn’t,” he sputtered, trying to cower further into the table he was currently strapped to and raised to a 45 degree angle on – just so he didn’t miss anything, Pam had smirked. “I never figured it out.”

“So you told Russell and he figured it out.”

“No – I mean, yes, I did tell Russell but only after they made me.”

“The fairies?”

“You know?”

“We’ve met,” Pam interjected. “In the car park at Fangtasia. I was bleeding all over the place and in they walked smelling like candy.”

“Which clan were they from?” Eric demanded.

“I don’t know – water, maybe?”

“What did they promise you in exchange for my wife and child?”

“Did they promise to turn you into a real boy instead of a fucking wooden vampire puppet?” Pam leered. Compton didn’t reply. “Holy fuck, they did, didn’t they?”

“They said they could make me human again, that I could be with Sookie if I wanted, have a family with her. They only wanted her kid, and I have no use for him.”

“What the fuck? Do you really think she would touch you after you took her child?” Pam demanded.

“She wouldn’t have known. It would just seem like the boy had sickened again and died, but really they would have taken him. Something about using him as a weapon against Niall Brigant.”

Eric rested his head in his hands for just a moment. Fucking fairies. Not for the first time, he wished Sookie had been a plain old regular human.

“Pam.”

Pam had done this enough times that she knew how to read her maker’s cues. He was tired of Compton and was giving her permission to incapacitate him. She knew she was unlikely to be allowed to kill him until the fairy threat had been removed. Pam took out some palette knives and threw them deftly at Compton, and as he cried out in pain she broke his jaw with a swift punch.

“Oh thank fuck. I am so sick of hearing your whinging,” Pam taunted. “Besides, you’ve already squealed like the pig you are. Piggy Compton. Palette knives are fun because they’re blunt. Did you force your daughters to learn painting? Did you want them to be dripping with accomplishments so they could have a better class of cum dripping from their twats when you sold them into holy matrimony to some ass-clown?”

Eric smirked, leaving Pam to her fun. He decided to check on Sookie in the iron-clad safe room, but before he could reach her, he found himself surrounded by hostile fairies.

A/N – slight warning – this story is winding up and only has a few more chapters left.

Chapter 23