Disclaimer: This vampire world and everything in it belongs to Charlaine Harris, I'm just leasing.

Note: I think this qualifies as a teaser or a preview of sorts. "I Have Gone Out" is starting to wind down and this will be the next thing I put time into but it won't get going until "Out" is finished. The plan is for a story in a patchwork of styles that takes a rather atypical look at Sookie being turned (I know, I thought I'd never go there either). Feedback of all varieties always welcome. The following preview has been approved for all audiences for all audiences.

The Ballad of Charybdis and Scylla

And then on a day like any other, in the bed where her father had been born, Sookie Stackhouse breathes her last breath. Hers has been a slow fade. Life leaking from her in the tiniest of trickles. It has left like the color from her hair, fading so slowly from blond to gray that no one was quite sure what was happening until the onset of shocking white. That hair surrounds her now, a nimbus of white against a white pillow, a halo that faded and brightened with her.

She is iconic, the wonder and the warning of modern medicine. This is what it is to live to a ripe old age: paper thin skin and paper photograph memories, hearing gone out of ears that listened to her legacy in a grandchild's voice, vitality coaxed out into capillaries when it was time long ago for it to retreat to the sacred space of a tired heart.

She clings stubbornly (many things have left her or changed into something else but stubbornness is not one of them) to life until her children and grandchildren finally find enough sense to leave the room. With them gone beyond the shrinking limits of her perception, her last ties to the world fade. Her breath shudders, her heart swishes to a stop. As death often is, hers is quiet and painful. Her cells starve for oxygen one-by-one. Death comes over her like a brown-out.

Fading. Fading. Gone.

Or at least that's how it should have happened. I should have died mundanely. My body should have progressed toward the dirt I sprang from even while it was still alive. (Cracked mud crowsfeet, dusty dry skin, silted varicose veins.)

I scratch a fingernail idly over the skin of my left thigh. I press too hard, tearing through cotton and then skin and fat that glows with unlife. From the wound springs the fountain of youth.

I let my finger rest in the closing wound and watch my body trying to heal around itself. I wonder if perversity is part and parcel of the vampiric condition or if it just grows out of boredom. I wiggle my finger and silky-thick blood squeezes out around its edges.

This blood could save hundreds. Thousands.

I wipe my finger on my jeans.

I've had a hundred years now to practice holding a grudge. He promised he would never turn me. But he couldn't promise I wouldn't be turned.