Note: I've never written a sequel. It feels a little strange. I thought about tacking this on to the first part, but decided against it because I'm fairly certain this one will end up with some more mature content. With that in mind, I included quite a bit of backstory for any newcomers to my re-imagining. I didn't expect to post so soon, although I didn't not expect it either. I can't guarantee I'll update daily again. But I'm so much faster and the writing flows better if I don't let up, and I found myself dabbling in this world again instead of writing in other worlds (as in the real one, which who wants to write about that at the moment?) And after all the melodrama, I thought it was time for Sookie to let loose a bit. Hope you like, and like to review. I do appreciate them!

Also naming chapters, because it's fun but I forgot in the first few of the last story and am too anal to have only half of the chapters named.

Chapter One: The Re-Education of Mrs. Merlotte

It took me eighty plus years, but I finally did it. And by did it. I mean did it. I finally had sex with a human man. Not a vampire. Not a were. Not a shifter. A human. Surprisingly, or maybe not, as most other humans seem to enjoy having sex with other humans, it was spectacular. As in spectacular, spectacular—no word in the vernacular, and all that. And it didn't stop with one. I started having sex with tons of them. Strong, square-jawed men of every shade of color. Slender, tall ones of every hue of hair. Long ones. Short ones. Fat ones. Skinny ones. Stick them in my mouth and watch them squirm ones.

To any who had known me for the better part of my life, they wouldn't have recognized the new me. And I was a new me. Literally.

Six months ago, I had been a happily-married grandmother who enjoyed gardening and quiet nights reading on the couch beside my husband of half a century, an elegant woman for my years, if I do say so, who had long ago buried the thrills and kills that had defined my late twenties, a survivor who had risen above the violence of that tragic turbulence, to curate a beautiful life from the wreckage and wildness, to break to bear four children and to appreciate that the finer things in life are not the fanciest or fastest or fiercest.

And then some high priestess of the new, exponentially expanding Mother Nature religion got it into her head that she could turn me into her damn deity. Yep. This zealot priestess, a powerful were-witch, convinced herself and her off-shoot cult followers that I, Sookie Stackhouse Merlotte, could become the goddess of the whole earth. Mother freaking Nature.

That life, that lovely, lovely life, that corner of my world that I had carved out and called my own, was ripped from me in a Louisiana minute. In the span of three weeks, my husband was killed, my ex-lover vampires charged back into my life, kings and queens and fanging cartels, trampling over my god-given freedom and sniffing and drooling all over me, and that priestess were-witch who would eventually be reborn as a vamp bitch, turned my daughter into one of those suckers, by her fangs killed my son, later revived by me, captured, tortured, and made his twin brother a wereman, and, on multiple occasions, spelled my eldest granddaughter, who during one of her spelled episodes was almost raped by some thuggish leech. Think all that's bad? I haven't even mentioned what the hell happened to me.

And I won't. Not the real bad stuff. Hakuna Matata, baby. Part of the new me. Again literally.

New me was me, because the same six months ago, right as this pretty, little, eighty-year old life of mine was already being packed in the hand basket to go straight to hell, right as all the crap to my family was about to go down, I unwittingly accepted my fairy prince Great-grandfather's itty-bitty gift of a retro-fitted (25 year-old model), super-charged (just ask sun-dried fangers), shiny new body (yep, literally), a body fully-loaded with blood that was ten-times the vampire heroine, a brain that still read minds, an immune system that rejuvenated faster than a RHONO reality star could say Botox, and a libido of a mood-swinging, teenaged nymphomaniac!

This gift of regeneration that came with the price of living long enough to see my children die, to watch my grandchildren pass away, to live for however many human lifespans surrounded by the constant hum of humanity's secrets and their worst desires. This gift that if not for another mystical blessing would have cracked me long ago, truly transforming me into the Crazy Sookie that all my fellow humans called me anyway. Or used to. Or didn't as often anymore. After the priestess had failed, I learned for myself that her faith hadn't been entirely delusional.

On Christmas Day, I met the Mother—as in Nature, as in Earth. And she gave me the greatest Yuletide gift of my life. This marvelous, maternally-bestowed other present, that also restored to me a resting place where my shifter spirit husband and I could one day dwell, had a bonus feature attached—the ability to turn the volume to my telepathy off and the vamp-inducing pheromone in my blood to odorless. That was right. Snap. I could keep them out. Snap I could keep them from wanting to eat me, as much.

After grieving for three months for all my loss and hurt, scraping together some semblance of wholeness, some facade of joy, reaching the end of my line and finding nothing to hold onto when the rope ran out, all the while being inexplicably shut out of my fellow telepathic son's life, rebuffed by him at every turn, and blocked from speaking to or seeing my vampire daughter by my ex-lover and her sort-of, surrogate Maker—when everyone else in the family had seen her—hell, her husband/widower had even bedded her! (Dave was a profligate social media oversharer.) After all that I had given—my life, my body, my damn ticket to fairy heaven, my blood—oh, had I given more than my weight in blood, and they had taken and taken and taken. Yeah. I was the Grannie. The matriarch. The damn mother. Nothing else should be expected of me.

What could I say? After all that, I quit. That's right. I quit. First flew my will to do anything but mope about my house. Then to shower for the day. Then to get out of bed in the morning. No one had told me about this part of grief. How it wasn't the five stages and then wham-bam-thank you, ma-am, and poof it was done. The stages happen and then re-happen and then switch to random shuffle, like some cursed playlist for the broken-hearted.

Looking back, I should have known. The pages of my life's history had been perforated by tragedy. Maybe the recent losses had been one hole too many. Simply put, I grew tired of hearing the same old, sad song; that slow, drawling spiritual crooned in a throaty voice about the traveler who comes knocking on the door. I needed a shake-me-up. A make-me-over of personality to match my make-over of body.

For most of my life, even during that era of chaotic vampire dating, I had played the role of the good girl, the church-going, never-a-parking ticket, sexually monogamous, responsible ingenue. Hell, I'd been so afraid of my own shadow and other people's opinions, I'd been a twenty-five year old virgin! And later in my life, I'd embraced to the max the self-sacrificing, always-puts-own interests last, steadfast, retiring mom. No more. I had quit.

What was the point of always playing the heroine? Yeah, yeah, I'd kicked some tail in my day. Yeah, I'd buried my share of corpses felled by my skills. And yeah, I'd walked on the wild side of supernatural sex and misadventures. But even then, at the heyday of my mayday, I had been the voice of reason, the voice of conscience, the voice of the person most likely to be screaming as a sociopath tried to attack me or someone who I loved.

Cool that cat on the hot tin roof—part of my adaption to my new look had also been to fully embrace this younger generation's obsession with the 1960s. Dig it? In the last three months, I hadn't crossed over to the dark side, only the flip fun side. The eradication of bias against supernatural communities was still near and dear to my heart; the use of please and thanks and have a blessed day and turn signals still behaviors in my daily routine, and no, I hadn't devolved into a violent maniac, bar-hopping to pick up on strange men only to fry them (which I could). But that otherwise good girl was otherwise gone.

And she was having the grooviest time of her life. Literally.

Tonight I'd chosen a dive of a nightclub, so low-down and low-rent that my chances for some dirty dancing were higher than the addicts shooting V in the grime-painted bathrooms. Telepathy turned blissfully off, I slanted at the bar, twirling my straw between my teeth, ogling the backside of a bear of a man—with the ass of an angel, lounging at a standing table. Downing the last of my gin and tonic, I sauntered up to the man—broad-shouldered, tapered-waist, thigh muscles bursting to break out of his slacks—a regular (hopefully for my sake straight) Rock Hudson. Tapping him on the shoulder, he turned around, and my saucy smirk faltered. This man wasn't a bear. He wasn't even a man. He was a werewolf.

"Sookie," shouted Dr. Guillaume Herveaux, AKA Gile, AKA Alcide Herveaux's grandson, who was a damn carbon copy of his pops, who was stunned and sidelined by the same humiliation which had sucker-punched me. "Wow. Long time."

I was about to backtrack my way out of the bar when something equally shocking and unpleasant happened. "Damn. She looks good—but I can't go there. She broke my heart and we didn't even kiss. Hell, her daughter broke my heart and I didn't even kiss her!"

"Why can I hear you?" I asked loudly—the club music vibrating my rib cage.

"Yeah," Gile yelled back. "They play their music way too loud."

"I am not going back down that road—the road I didn't even go down but got stuck in neutral on the damn on-ramp before." There it was again. I actually snapped my fingers in my ears. And darted my eyes around the club. Ear-splitting base. Low-murmured talking. No thoughts. Except for his. And mine—which at the moment were bewildered. Without so much as a how-dee-doo, I grabbed his hot were hand and dragged him past the seedy crowd and drunk bouncer to the tropical June night.

No one was hanging around outside—almost midnight and it must be ninety plus humidity. The soupy damp clung to both our bodies the instant we exited the blasting AC. My skin-tight white tube dress must be practically transparent at this point. One eye rove and grunt by the doctor confirmed it. I dropped his hand, surreptitiously wiping the added sweat on my dress, and frowned.

"I'm sorry I haven't called, or seen how you were doing. I've been a fair-weather friend," he apologized, his green eyes warm with sincerity. Clearly. I was the mind-reader. Not him.

"Gile, I didn't yank you across a club because I'm mad—I should have called too."

"If this isn't mad, I wonder what happy looks like."

My fire, that sunlight braided in my blood, combusted suddenly—something that had not happened without my permission in months. Gile instantly perked up, his nostrils flaring. I hadn't been killing my scent—what was the point in a room full of humans? But whenever my yellow flame unexpectedly ignited, it lit the wick on the scented candle of my blood, and the wick on any person within seeing or smelling distance.

"Hot damn, Sookie," the were muttered. "I forgot what it was to see you shine."

Eyes briefly shut, a breath deeply taken, and I cooled my fire. "Gile, I can turn my disability," a heavy, forehead furrow from the doctor, who did not condone my labeling my ability as a disadvantage, "my telepathy on and off now. But not for you. I can still hear your thoughts."

The furrow somehow folded into itself. "Maybe it has something to do with my being a genetic anomaly. You've always said I possess the clearest-thinking were-mind you've ever heard."

I nodded. He was right. That had to be it. Gile wasn't a typical werewolf—and not simply because he was unbearably hot and a private practice doctor with a clientele of the supernatural. According to were laws of heredity, he shouldn't be a were. The Herveaux line should have ended with Alcide, at least in his family. The grandad hadn't married a pure blood. None of his gaggle of kids had inherited the were-gene. And then had out popped Gile. Back in the old days, his kind had been exterminated at first transition and called changelings. These anomalies tended to follow their own genetic rules—very few of them transitioned in the same fashion and appearance as typical weres. As rare as Gile was, the fact that he shifted into a beautiful, totally "normal" wolf, might be the rarest thing of all about him. Or had been until tonight.

"You know, I never cared about you reading my mind, Sookie." Gile's smile weakened knees like a baseball bat in the hands of a loan shark, and something more than the wolfish thoughts tipped me off that the doctor was fully aware of the effect. Watching me shine had nudged him to reconsider his hesitation in chasing after me.

My body reacted to Gile's lusty gaze, desire spooling in my limbs, piling in a heap right at the base of my pelvis. He hadn't been wrong. Nothing had happened between us six months ago when we had met, so much nothing, that I had given the thumb's up to my youngest daughter, Julianne, to pursue him. She'd needed a good partner for once, instead of the string of failed romances. They'd gone on one platonic date—and that was all that had happened. No one could fathom why—no one except me, after I'd accidentally read her mind and discovered that she'd gone for a different were. That was a messy conversation.

"Hear from your pops lately?"

That silky, seductive eye ogle ended and Gile rubbed the back of his neck. "No. It's still a bit of a sore subject for me. My dad doesn't push it."

"Yeah, I can understand that. It was a sore spot for me, too." I didn't add that I'd had to get over it, swallow that jagged little pill down a dry throat, or be fine with only having one of my children in my life. Julianne may be a disaster in the relationship department—going for an eighty-year-old almost lover of her mom, for instance. (Although apparently things were going well? He'd up and moved to Tennessee to be with her.) But she'd never judged me or tried to change me. Hell, she was cheering me on during my sex spree. The sex spree that was on an awkward commercial break.

Gile and I stood there in the swelter, outside a grubby nightclub that guaranteed only one thing to all who debased themselves to enter its unhallowed doors. The one thing we had been prowling for up until my tap on his shoulder. The thing we were both inching towards as we stared silently at each other, seeping sweat onto our skin and clothes.

"I figured after Julianne—and everything with the witch, that you might want some space."

"I did, and then, after a couple months, I realized that space is just another word for empty."

"And you didn't want to fill that emptiness with—and you chose to fill that emptiness with places like this?"

An image of Eric had blinked in the were's mind, before he'd cut himself off with a different query. I hadn't seen hide nor hair of the Viking since he'd whisked away with my undead daughter, leaving a rose encased in crystal as a farewell, but as always when I envisioned the vampire, the music of our reformed bond, that bond the crazy witch had magically remastered, played like icicle tines in my blood, swiftly rising in pitch and clarity. Currently, wherever in Oklahoma he was, the vampire vibrated with a sinister excitement, as if on a hunt, as if seconds from pouncing on his prey. My gut clenched with his faraway anticipation, and turning my attention back on the werewolf, my own heart thrummed with expectation.

Why the hell not? That's what I'd been asking myself for months, unable to come up with a single answer that satisfied me, only thinking of another question—what do I have to lose? The answer to that was simple—not anything I haven't lost before.

Gile had come to the same conclusion. He reached his hand out for me, drawing me to him by cupping my neck. The temperature of his palm matched the summer air; it radiated from his tall, massive body. A body I wanted naked and wet against my own.

"Try and keep your mind shut," I said breathily. I knew he could close his thoughts, if he tried. He'd done so before.

"Would you like me to escort you to your car," he brushed at my the swirls of my hair glued to my forehead, "or to my car."

Neither of us moved, stuck to each other, stuck to this spot. My breathing was shallow; my glow curled in my capillaries. The werewolf leaned down for a kiss, inhaling my scent. I saw it then, in his mind, as he smelled it in the air, but it was too late for a reaction.

The vampire dropped down from the roof, slicking right in-between us, forcing Gile aside and, if his hand hadn't shot out to clasp my wrist, knocking me onto the heated pavement. Those blue eyes danced, a certain swagger enlivening the smirk. Gile growled, hackles raised.

"No need to mark your territory, Dr. Herveaux," Eric said, his gaze fixed on me. "Mrs. Merlotte has made it clear that this is open season."

With the exaggerated courtesy of a bygone era, Eric kissed my trapped wrist with his cool lips. He might as well have slapped me across the face.