Salt and Iron

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Chapter One

Prologue

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Eric had been born by the sea. As a youth, drunk on life and fermented barely wine, the swirling restlessness of the waves had struck him as a metaphor for infinity. After a millennium, that constant surge of surf and rope-snapping; of wind and shadow-larked echo still served as a reminder that the world never truly slept. Least of all when the sun went down.

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Eric inhaled, tasting the scent of salt and iron in his mouth. Blood. That was what he had come to associate this particularly potent mixture with. But today, in the chilly and oppressive atmosphere of Fangtasia's walk-in freezer, he thought he could almost smell the sea.

"He's been like that for at least a day," observed Pam, gesturing toward the grisly and somewhat tantalizing sight on the freezer's industrial metal floor. "Ginger took one look and bolted. She's locked in her car outside, screaming. Again."

"Take her to my office," murmured Eric dispassionately. "Glamor her."

"If I wipe that sad bitch's mind one more time—"

"Do it," Eric commanded, spinning just enough of his influence as Pam's maker into the order that she would have no choice but to obey him.

"Fine," Pam relented, "but I hope you're prepared to wipe the drool off her chin..."

Eric remained motionless until the freezer door sucked shut with a soft hiss in Pam's wake. Faster than a breather could blink an eye, he moved in to lean over the pale corpse on his floor, eager to assess his damages. Eric's fingers teased the stiff head sideways, searching in vain for a pulse in the curve of a frozen neck.

It was not, by any means, the first time he had found a dead human in his place of establishment. In fact, bodies had an uncanny habit of turning up like dust bunnies every time he found a reason to sweep the place, but this particular cadaver was nothing short of problematic.

Eric allowed the head in his hands to sag back down into the pool of coagulated and frost bitten blood it had been resting in.

"Jason Stackhouse," he murmured resignedly. "Not looking good my friend."

In the far distance, audible even through two walls and a metal door, Ginger started to scream.

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It was eighties theme night in Fangtasia's lounge. The steady pulse of dated pop music matched the gaudy glimmer of his progeny's bedazzled dress. Cheap money. Eric had seen enough of this aesthetic while it was still current to last him until the true death. Still, if he had not been so distracted, he might have admired Pam's efforts. She had never met a theme that could outmatch her.

As it was, however, only a day of bleeds-worthy unrest separated Eric from his journey to Dallas and the wear and tear of his grief still showed. A thousand years of life had been enough to largely inure him against the pains of mortality, helplessness and rejection—but they had not been enough to prepare him for the loss of a father, which, as it turned out, was a stinging mixture of all three.

As he understood it, the infrastructure of the world was an inconstant thing; mutable, strange and frequently foreign. Christ had been dead for nine hundred years when his life as a vampire had first begun. Whole empires had fallen since then, cities rising up only to erode and slip beneath the sea of history. Even the language of his childhood had changed as modern Swedish gradually replaced the Old Norse he had first bawled as an infant.

And in his entire ageless existence, there had only ever been two sources of consistency: the thrumming presence of his maker in his blood and the far off cry of the sea as it beat against unknown shores.

Two days ago at dawn, Godric's voice had winked out forever and here in the sweaty flatlands of Shreveport, the limitless expanse of the ocean seemed equally impossible to reach.

"They're waitin' by the doors," insisted Ginger, her eyes looking especially glassy. "The man and the two kids. Sam. That's what he said his name was. I don't know if he thinks we're a family place or what! My momma would have beat our asses just for for showin' up to a joint like this..."

"Mmn," projected Eric nasally, striking a very unnatural pose against the back of the faux leather booth.

It was bad enough to have the weight of an incomprehensibly lonely sorrow on his back, but now he had also had Jason Stackhouse on ice. A more unfortunate state of affairs would have been hard for him to imagine.

"The shifter's been known to protect Sookie," muttered Pam in low, rapid Swedish, giving voice to Eric's inner turmoil. "He might be here to look for the brother."

"No," murmured Eric, slipping out of English as well, inclining his head toward her. "He brought children with him. He's here to ask the friendly neighbor vampires for a favor."

"Humans," sneered Pam, arching a magnificent eyebrow. "What are the chances he'd trade us the sticky-fingered rugrats in exchange for our services?"

"Slim," Eric smirked.

"They tried to bribe me, you know," chuckled Ginger nervously. Her gaze flickered between Pam and Eric defensively, troubled by the fact that she was unable to understand a word of their conversation. "I told them to wait outside—just like you said I should!"

"Bring them in," Eric decided, switching back to English and adjusting his coat buttons. "Let's hear the whole sob story."

Sam Merlotte was a tall man with a set permanently fixed facial expressions trapped in limbo somewhere between outright earnestness and misplaced resentment. Even if his personality—which was largely witless and characterized by a blatant intolerance for vampires—had not already been known to him, Eric would have disliked Sam on principle. Sookie liked him, of course. Sookie trusted him, and that was just enough at the moment to set his teeth on edge.

His hint of pre-existing loathing steadily grew over the next ten minutes. Eric listened to Sam's detailed account of the visiting Maenad and the chaos that she was unleashing, wondering all the while how it was possible for a person to make a frenzied orgy of blood, sex and cannibalism sound so dull.

"I need your help," Sam finished, desperate enough to allow himself to sound just a little supplicating. "We need it."

When Eric did not respond, Sam grit his teeth and lowered his voice still further. "And hopefully, someday, I might be able to give you something you need in return. Catch my drift?"

Well, wasn't that interesting?

"Can you give me Sookie Stackhouse?" Eric returned promptly, his thoughts dashing back to Jason's lifeless corpse and the Hell that would surely arise because of it.

"No!" snapped Sam, as taken aback by this notion as he was displeased by it.

"Too bad," Eric murmured, sucking on the inside of his cheek almost wistfully. "That would be most helpful."

The worst part about having an obsession with someone who hated his guts was that, when things went wrong, (and invariably, they almost always did) the blame had an unfortunate tendency to be thrown around his neck like a noose.

And things had most certainly gone wrong. Hadn't he just seen Jason Stackhouse two days previously? Yes, he had, and very much alive. Tan from the scorching Texas sun, worshiping at the alter of misguided intolerance. How could any human be so unlucky as to escape three mobs only to turn up dead in his lounge with no notice? It was Stackhouseian, really—the entire family was so luckless that they made the act of bestowing his protection feel like a labor of love.

Not that his protection seemed to be worth its true weight lately. A quick but thorough interview of all his active staff had yielded next to nothing. No one seemed to know anything about the unknown human in the freezer. Mostly vampires, it was beyond Eric's means to forcefully coax information from his henchmen—and as for the humans, that would require Sookie assistance. In this instance, however, it was safe to say that Sookie could not be bartered with.

A brief but shattered plan, composed vaguely of intentional misleads and insinuations, flickered through Eric's stream of consciousness—one that somehow managed to place Jason Stackhouse's last moments in the company of Bill Compton...

"I have no knowledge of this maenad creature," Eric let out impatiently, knowing that any plan calculated to frame Bill was unlikely to ever achieve lift-off. "Although I suspect it's the same bullheaded beast that passed through town recently."

Pam's face puckered at the recollection of her ruined shoes, still caked with mud and forest debris in the back-room. She had intentionally left her battered outfit where Eric would be forced to look at it. He had responded by intentionally not asking Ginger to tidy up.

"So can you help us or not?" asked Sam sharply, growing steadily more ungrateful as the conversation wore thin.

"I do know someone who might be able to offer something useful," Eric allowed, every cog and wheel in his long un-dead brain working to spin hay into gold. "Might be able to," he cautioned.

Maenads, if he remembered correctly, were female followers of Bacchus—all divine possession and frenzied rights. Myth and legend had taught him as much, summoning forth visions of nudist woman cloaked in nothing but deerskins, eager to devour the hearts of their prey with fangless mouths. A promising notion, he had to admit, but also a deadly one, even for the likes of immortals as old as himself. They were also priestesses, he thought dully, magic workers...

The desire to swoop in and play the hero—an urge that Eric had spent the better part of a millennia suppressing into hibernation—stirred wakefully in his chest. A hopeful eye winked open, testing the air; Sookie Stackhouse's impossible scent lingered there like a perfume.

Whip-crack fast—too fast for the comfort of most humans—Eric stood up and re-buttoned his blazer. He was done with this conversation. He had heard everything that could be of use to him. Sam Merlotte was annoying and Queen Sophie Anne was hardly any more promising. He had been selling her blood to humans for months, after all. The last thing he wanted to do was present himself at her feet like a foolish target.

No, he was going to Bon Temps. And why not? He barely had anything left to lose.

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Oh, man. I don't even know what this is. My apologies in advance for all the strange awkwardness that is sure to follow. I just love the show and couldn't help myself. (ALSO, RIP Jason Stackhouse, for I hath VERY unnecessarily murdered thee.) I'll probably switch POVs each chapter so the next post will likely handle Sookie.

Drop me a review and let me know what you think! I've got my hands full with a few other projects, but if anyone is legitimately interested in this, I'm sure I can squeeze it in. :)