5,399A/N: Hi Everyone. Well, this is it. This is the final chapter of Pretty Kitty. I can't believe it. Even now, as I write this final A/N, I don't want to post it, because that means I'll never post on it again. I'd like to thank everyone who's read, commented, lurked and rehashed with me along the way. I sometimes reread my reviews and see the names of nice people that I haven't spoken to in years. And new ones who Favorite and Follow this story, even now. I'd love to hear from you, old and new, just one last time before I sign off. You've all been amazing. You have no idea. And now, the finale.
EPOV
Of Bonde unique cometh the Scion. Prophesied of Fae, Augury of the invisible world.
The Omen of Amalgamation, the twist, the deed of Equalibrium
Of beating hearts twain, come one. From the once, come thrice.
In the days that followed Adam's birth, I had some time to consider the prophesy that foretold of his Coming.
It took much convincing, but I finally got Sookie to sleep. She fought me tooth and nail after the battle, whisper-screaming over our son's sleeping head that we weren't out of the woods by any means. That just because some dusty old book said that Adam was bullet proof sure as hell didn't mean that we were going to test that theory by falling asleep and letting some residual psychos try to kill him again.
It took Pam and Alcide standing guard at our house before she finally succumbed to exhaustion. As she slept like the dead on our new bed, in the beautiful house I'd built for my beautiful family, I folded into my favorite chair at her side, holding my firstborn in my arms and reciting the tome's words in my head.
Adam could not hear it. His ability to speak with Sookie with his infant thoughts did not extend to me.
No matter. We were happy enough to stare.
Shortly after the battle, Massawa released Ludwig. As I'd assumed, she'd been captured and questioned before his attack on my house. He glamored her, though there was nothing to find. I'd been very careful to hide everything she knew. Her werewolf guards had been killed in front of her, in hopes of loosening her tongue. Rumor as it that she glanced at their ripped, naked bodies bleeding in the dirt before replying, "I'm a cat person anyhow."
Massawa let her go unharmed. There was no point in keeping her.
When she returned to us in a black, tinted sedan with AUTHORITY license plates, Sookie hugged her hard enough to break bones. The doctor brushed her aside, nearly running to the bassinet behind her. In awe, she gently laid the boy on the bed and examined him. Ten fingers. Ten toes. Good lungs. Responsive eyes. Alert ears. Normal heart rate. Over sixty percentile in birth weight and height. No reaction to sunlight, lemon or iron. She turned to us, her expression hollowed from shock.
"He's a baby," she informed us unnecessarily. "A healthy, normal baby."
Sookie had turned into me and shuddered, her biggest, secret fear leaving violently through her skin. I draped a loose arm around her while gazing at Ludwig. "And you are his doctor."
She didn't seem to see me, but she dug into her bag and handed me a pamphlet as she shuffled towards the door. It was a schedule for childhood vaccinations.
And that was that.
And so the Scion, prophesied of the Fae, began his new life with us. The augury of the invisible world, he had destroyed the Fae realm with a tiny jerk on Sookie's finger. Their land magicked out of existence. As much as this horrified the fairies initially, what they didn't know at the time was that the deed of equalibrium also came into effect. Their Radia, exploding from their bodies as they wailed in terror, saw to that.
Orla and Dan had merely been the first beneficiaries.
And it wasn't just the fairies in the field that night.
All over the world, every fairy that suddenly found themselves yanked from their plane and dumped into the graceless human world lost their Radia immediately. The shiny little suns tore across towns. Across countries. Oceans and ice and sand. Until they located their vampire target. Of the thirty million vampires currently living in the world today, ten thousand were going about their business when a giant ball of terrifying sunshine ran them down like dogs and plowed straight into their chests. Men. Women. Of all ages and backgrounds. They were Chosen without a single clue as to what had just happened. All they knew was that it was agony, an agony only eased by retracing the orb's trajectory to its fairy master.
The world never saw such a supernatural migration as these vampires and fairies moving across the world to find each other. They blew the caribou of Canada and the tuna in the south Atlantic out of the water. Once united, the couple simply stared at each other, taking in the features of a total stranger, before they followed my, Sookie's, Orla's and Dan's lead.
Namely, a free-for-all of blood sharing, fucking and total immersion in another soul.
That tricky fucking tome: It had predicted the salvation of the fairy race.
Granted, it was slightly unorthodox, and thank fuck it didn't specify how it would happen, because I guarantee that zero fairies would have agreed to a vampire lover, no matter how many skins it saved. (It turned out that only forty Fae were already bonded, twenty pairs total. To Choose a mate in their land was a ritual seldom entered into. Eternity was a long time to spend with someone.)
But fate, as always, knew better than to take a poll.
Instead, it simply Chose for each fairy the most perfect mate it could find among the living vampire population.
The fairies became inedible to any other vampire in the world, just as Sookie had proven with Sophie Anne. Their bond, and their mate, protected them from these attacks. Their vampires, in turn, were cursed/blessed with a single blood source, the purest and most delicious they'd ever known. The first bite made them forget all about humans, or hunting, or sliding greasy twenties to donors in an alley. They fell in love. They couldn't and wouldn't taste another. Their new Radias allowed them to day walk and protect their fairy with their lives, threatening any other vampire with a sunny death at night, should they try to interfere.
The declining Fae race was safe at last.
I never questioned whether these new mates were compatible, or simply compelled by Fae magic towards their intended, much as I never questioned it with Sookie and I. It didn't really matter. We were one. I seriously doubted that any of the new fairy-vampire couples were as perfect for each other as we were.
I looked down again at Adam.
He'd grown tired of staring at me and had gone to sleep. He slept a lot. Saving his mother's kin had sapped him, clearly. I looked out of the enormous bay window of our new plantation's master bedroom. The blue of the sky still awed me. Television, my only exposure to it for a thousand years, had done it no justice.
We'd retired here shortly after the whole mess ended.
Needless to say, the mass Choosing startled the shit out of the entire earthly community. Now that the fairies were an established fact -unable to hide in another world and away from prying eyes- every other group dealt with this mythological marvel in their own way.
Humans panicked, as usual. But settled quickly into suspicion, hatred, adulation and religious fervor at the appearance of so many angelic creatures that either Jesus or Satan had sent with a correlating mission of good or evil. The only ones that reacted with a modicum of grace were the witches, but even they ruined it slightly by spouting their usual crystal-consulting, age of Aquarius, Goddess loves everyone claptrap.
Weres and other two-natureds gave a fraction of a fuck that humans did. They were already aware of other races, and the two species had little in common with fairies, with no historical beefs to address. They mostly ignored each other. (Save Herveaux practically licking Hadley daily until they were well into their eighties.)
In fact, after the initial amazement, very little changed.
But of course, the prophesy wasn't done fucking with everyone.
The world had only just come to grips with its new, interdimensional arrivals before it was rocked yet again.
Orla.
Sweet, fragile, raven-haired Orla with her handsome vampire who'd been turned the same evening that John F. Kennedy took office, had another little surprise thrown at them.
She became pregnant.
She gave birth to a lovely, equally raven-haired daughter after just two weeks gestation. They named her Io, after a nymph who was seduced by Zeus. Orla, who loved Dan very much, still had a teensy bone to pick with the universal forces that propelled them together. Like we and Io's namesake learned, you just can't fight God when he wants something.
We did not have long to astonish over that before another fairy woman was with vampire child. And another. And another. Until the shock of Adam's birth was buried under a cute, squawking pile of hybrid babies.
Interestingly, the Fae men who'd Chosen vampire women, as well as homosexual mates, did not produce children. Research was done, and it was assumed that the nonfunctioning wombs of undead women were unable to carry babies, however briefly, to term. But the Fae men were protected for life, and that was more security than they'd ever had before.
By this time, I had abdicated the twin throne of Louisissippi, as Hunter had dubbed it. Now that the need for an army to protect Sookie was no longer necessary, I developed a severe case of the fuck-its. I kept my businesses and my portfolio. I kept us very comfortable. My letter of resignation came in the form of an upper cut to Massawa's chin. the man was still broken by the whole affair, convinced The End was as far away as Adam's adulthood. I spat on his suit as I walked out.
"Put that in your books, scribe," I suggested as I slammed the door to his office.
From the crook of my elbow, Adam snuffled in his sleep. Gently, I dragged a finger down his chubby cheek, amazed that human skin could be so soft. He turned into my finger, thinking that I was dinner. But still asleep, he detected no mother's milk in my rough callouses, and relaxed.
I looked up and found Sookie's sleepy eyes on me. I smiled gently at her. "Welcome back, lover."
"How long I been sleepin'?"
"About six hours."
"You haven't moved. Not one inch."
I shrugged. "Perfect moments are ruined by movement."
She smiled at that. She reached up, testing the state of her messy hair. "I need a shower."
I stood and carefully arranged myself on the bed next to her, threading my arm under her head. I tsked her. "No. I just told you no moving allowed."
She chuckled, sitting up slightly to join Adam on my chest. She cupped his head. "He's just so pretty."
"Naturally."
We watched her thumb trace his ear. Adam stirred at her attention. Slowly, his blue eyes opened, regarding us earnestly.
"Good morning, sleepyhead," Sookie whispered.
He blinked languidly.
Sookie was quiet for a moment, then drew a breath sharply through her nose.
I was growing used to this sound. It meant that Adam was speaking to her. He didn't always, but when he did, it always caught her off guard.
"And?" I asked. "What was it this time?"
She nibbled her lip, looking at me with an almost guilty expression.
"Remember when you came to me that first night on my porch? You asked about my blood dreams, what I'd dreamt of you."
"Yes," I answered. "You said I was good to you."
"But it was more than that. In the dream, you said..." she tapered off, looking away.
"I said?"
"You... you said... Well, you kissed me. Kissed the life outta me, and then you told me that this," she gestured between she and I, "this was the beginning."
I paused. "The beginning," I echoed.
She nodded, "But like, The Beginning. You made it sound so important. Like some huge thing was gonna come out of our being together."
She looked back at our son. "He just said the same thing. He looked at you and I and thought the word 'beginning'."
I was silent. She continued in a whisper.
"We started it all, even way back then when you were just a ghost in my head. My brain just knew. We...us. We were destined for something amazing."
We fell into our thoughts. Adam watched us, letting us process what he'd known his whole, brief life.
Three sets of eyes blinked at each other.
No one moved.
E~S~E~S~E~S~E~S~E~S~E~S~E~S~E~S
Years passed.
Adam grew. Nothing about him, save his mother's good looks and telepathy, was unusual. He laughed. Then he sat up. The he crawled.
By the time he started walking, Amanda was born to us. His first sibling.
Throughout his entire life, Adam would always smell like hoar frost and water Forget-Me-Nots.
Mandy, as she came to be called, smelled of the Amanda's Blue butterfly after having gorged itself on nectar. Sookie had laughed out loud as I sipped blood from her thigh and scented my daughter through the womb, not believing my description. I insisted, it was exactly right. I even showed her a photo of the insect on the internet.
"Amanda's Blue," Sookie smiled as she gazed at the lovely, cerulean creature of my homeland. "Well, that saves us naming her." Amanda Blue Northman it was.
And so it went on.
Each of our children -and there were many children- smelled of one or two very distinct things from my northern home.
Caleb, our third child, smelled like rock salt and water lilies.
Adele Marie? Of an ash grove and autumn campfires.
Silas, one of our strongest children, shocked me when he'd toddle into my arms, for he smelled exactly like my wolf pelt bedding from ten centuries before.
Each child's essence astonished me. Sookie rolled her eyes every time. She smelled nothing on them but baby powder and applesauce.
So it stayed a secret that only I detected. It was only fair, as half of the conversations in our house were conducted entirely in the heads of my mind-reading woman and children.
More years passed.
The world went on about its business and in time, Sookie and I were largely forgotten, just as we'd always hoped.
The Choosings still occurred on occasion, once a fairy hybrid child came of age.
One such Choosing happened exactly as I'd predicted. Sixteen years after the fateful night Sookie had taken me as her mate, Hunter walked into my bar after hours. He was there for business with Sookie. He'd been spending a lot of time with his stepfather, Alcide, and the Shreveport pack. He'd gotten his degree in engineering and planned to join his construction crew as an architect. I had been in my office, so I did not witness it. Sookie had been behind the bar going over the books with Pam. Jessica's nose had been hovering over the receipts. She was in her last few weeks of working for me, before she began her new job as Chief Human Liaison at the AVL.
Hunter had barely stepped into the room when he froze in his tracks.
Jessica looked up from her calculator.
Their eyes locked.
Hunter gasped loudly. "Jessica," he whispered.
They were shocked, not having seen each other in many years, despite our rather tight circle of family. He'd been a child, then a teenager in school. He'd left for New Orleans to study. Now he was back, a young man of twenty-two.
But their separation didn't matter. From the moment his dark eyes drilled into Jessica's pale blues, it was all over.
Light erupted from his palms. Two searing orbs exploded out, flying across the room, straight into my adopted progeny.
They torpedoed into Jessica's chest, knocking her off the chair and onto the hard tiles. But it didn't keep her down for long. According to Sookie, Jessica was already on her feet and running full speed at Hunter, who was striding across the room. He didn't see anyone else. As of that moment, neither did she. They leapt on each other, Jessica clamping her thighs around the tall man's waist. I'm told their kiss was downright obscene, all teeth and tongue and a mere prelude to days of nonstop fucking. I have no idea if they got a word in edgewise, if only to reintroduce themselves. They simply took off, probably into the nearby forest, where Hunter could introduce her sunlight and fairy blood while she could teach him just what it meant to take inexhaustible vampire lover.
He was now a safe as safe could be, thanks to his fiery protectress.
Not that attacks against the Chosen pairs happened much anymore.
At first, of course. The vast majority of vampires left in the world without such a tasty mate at their side thought they could simply cut in. Those ten thousand vampires and their luck, their indescribable luck, created much desent from those who would never know the joy of being paired with such feisty specimens of love and sass. There were a few, early attempts to separate some pairs in the hopes of claiming the Fae as their own, with very messy results. The unChosen vampire population soon realized that such attempts spelled certain death with zero drops of fairy blood to show for it.
I pitied none of them, save one.
Pam.
She loved me. She even came to love Sookie. She was patient and fair to our children, never openly favoring one above another, and could even be called kind... at a stretch.
But she remained unattached.
She seemed unfazed by it. She had never been a monogamist, and while she mourned the loss of the sun like all vampires, she did not begrudge those who regained it. She never spoke of it. She simply worked at my side, unstintingly loyal, for all those years.
Until my sixth daughter, Lana, turned nineteen.
One of the rare brunettes of my brood, Lana was an especially beautiful, thoughtful child. Where my other children laughed, she simply smiled. Where they scampered and skipped, she calmly walked. Her large blue eyes saw much, but her Cupid's bow mouth spoke little.
Needless to say, that fateful day when she and Pam saw each other, Lana didn't say much. She simply put her hands out, blew Pam away with her gift of love and Light, then they promptly mauled each other. Mercifully, I was not there to witness that Choosing, either. I was still a father, and did not react well when my children inevitably Chose their mate, even if that mate was Pam. But I had a unique pleasure knowing that my only Child and one of my many daughters had forged together. They made a striking couple. And though her sarcasm never wavered, I sensed Pam's happiness.
In fact, each of my children Chose well. Vampires I never met were impaled on their Light, so my say in the matter was already pointless. Still. I was an incredibly lucky father-in-law. None of my vampire in-laws irritated me too much.
My problems were much more personal.
To my slight horror, my desire for Sookie never simmered. It blazed, as bright and hot as the night she agreed to be mine. I had hoped that although we did not age, our time together would yield a comfort and routine that would lead to a kinder, gentler attraction to each other that could be easily overridden by rationality. I couldn't keep groping her like a horny teen for the rest of eternity.
Alas, that is exactly how we spent the rest of our lives.
I fucked her on every square inch of our new house, and continued doing so, even when it was as old as the Stackhouse homestead. I fucked her in seventy-two countries. She conceived in eleven of them outside of the states, and even gave birth in three. Her Light never dimmed. Worse, it grew brighter, and she more beautiful. She would be cooking, or playing with our children, or humming as she brushed her hair, or squinting as she read her books, and I would attack. I would shred thousands of her clothes in the end. Her breasts were a marvel every time I saw them. Her thighs stayed flawless, firm and sweet. Her lips tasted like honey. And her eyes would sparkle as she wrapped them around my cock nearly every day. Her pussy was always my downfall, as I would enter and get so lost in her that I couldn't untangle myself. It was just plain unfair. My woman only grew prettier, funnier, sexier, and gave me an endless parade of applesauce-loving miracles.
Wrapped in my arms, she'd arch into our lovemaking, and I was compelled to make more.
Regrettably, we lost many of those we cared about to mortality.
Herveaux and Hadley died within months of each other. Hadley went first, passing away in her sleep. They'd spent every last one of their days together, and even without the benefit of a bond, they were madly in love. Even in their old age. Herveaux lost much of his impressive physique. His tall frame bent over the decades, and rippling pectorals are a young man's possession. And yet, Hadley never lost that expression of lost longing when she looked at him. She would forever remember standing on a burning hillside, watching in amazement as a werewolf loped into view and swept her away from danger. He saved her. And she made him whole in return. After she died, Alcide simply refused to go on.
Jason was next. He lived to ninety-seven, his fairy genes giving him a long, healthy life. At the end, he thought his visits with Sookie were dreams, his baby sister still young and beautiful. He talked to her like she was a memory. She brought him things from his past, things she thought he'd like. A quilt from Gran's house. Old photos. A football. He'd run his fingers over the glossy paper and the pebbly pigskin, losing himself deeper in nostalgia. It hurt Sookie, but she kept coming to see him, right up until the last day.
Ludwig. Lafayette. Sam Merlotte. Tara, after many years when she finally returned to Bon Temps. Good people who's death hurt Sookie deeply. I hurt for her, though I was exceptionally lucky. The only people I loved most had no such date with death.
We never learned for sure if Adam, or any of our children, were unkillable. He was a wonderful child, and a strong, good man, but he exhibited no unusual abilities in the vampire-fairy children born to all of the Chosen. They all Chose vampires when they reached adulthood, and the women all had children of their own. Adam Chose as well, a sweet vampire with a biting wit. Sookie liked her. I teased her that he'd married his mother. He lived a happy life, but it seemed that his extraordinary gift to the world was given when he was three minutes old. After that, he was mercifully normal.
Sookie and I did not live to see any of our children die, thank Almighty fuck.
I won't bore you with our fates. Yes, we did eventually die, as all things invariably must. The number of years it took and the means of which it happened are not important. Suffice it to say, Sookie met hers first. I felt her leave me the moment it happened. And unlike Claudine's abduction many centuries before, I knew for certain that she was gone. I took only enough time to see her body one last time, then gather our many, many children and kiss them goodbye. Many cried, others railed, but in the end, they accepted my choice. As immortals themselves, they all had similar choices ahead of them someday.
On a warm spring morning, two days after Sookie's departure, I met my own true death. I'll give you one last detail, and admit that I met the sun one last time, with a small, plain wooden box filled with Sookie's ashes under my arm.
I burned alongside her.
And will always burn for her.
My angel. My Fae. My Sookie.
The End