They look on hungrily; Debbie nearly cries when he tells her she can't have any V tonight, because of the branding. He talks about the tradition here, how he's been doing this for their people for "ages," which catches Sookie's attention, and then he gets the fuck out of there. They all start growling and yipping and things get sort of sweaty and Red Bully everywhere.

It's sort of like if you took everything Lafayette and Amy ever said about V, and added it to the nakedness and the abandon of Dionysus, and stuck it in a Mississippi biker bar, incorporated their lycanthropy and put some neo-Nazi clothes on it and said: There is meaning here. You get all the religious significance of the blood, and separately the communion; add to that the drugs qua drugs thing, which is its own worship; the fellowship of being a pack and losing control together in a sanctioned or sanctified way; and then on top of all of it you have all that lovely White Power/Teabagger stuff about being somehow both the powerful majority and the overlooked minority at the same time. "You are special, this has been handed down to you from generations."

Russell Edgington is a genius, because this is a perfect recipe, and he's the only one that can give it to them, in his round sunglasses and leather jacket and car waiting outside. The only reason neo-Nazis look archaic to us is because their stuff, their iconography, seems out of date. And they are silly ignorant idiots, so there's no real reason to consider it at all, obviously. But to them, it's always been in season. There is an unbroken line of hate going back sixty years. And to these Weres this is, and has been for hundreds of years, living ritual. Not just some sad drug orgy in a bar that smells like piss, but a connection to the divine -- and one that not only accepts them just as they are, in their hate and violence and rage, but makes them feel themselves like gods. It's altogether too realistic. If Sophie-Anne weren't so disdainful of belief she might have thought of this herself.

Not the only ritual in town. The stripper plays with her nipples and does a little private show for Bill. Maybe he's into it, maybe not. I can never tell. She says her name is Destiny, which is how you end up a stripper, but Bill asks again. "Camilla," she says, which only sounds like a lie because he's a vampire and has known probably fifty of those; he glamours her a little bit, and asks for a third time. Ann is her name (Coincidence? Bill having just sold out Sophie-Anne?): No husband, no kids -- "world's too fucked up" -- and no family. "Told me I wasn't worth nothing. I figured they ain't worth knowing." She points out, bookending Tara's speech to Franklin earlier: "No point anyway... Loving anyone. Anything. Feels good at first, but it always turns to crap. I know the truth about life. It's a hell I'll never get out of alive." There's that word again. And Bill agrees; maybe "Destiny" was the right name after all. He goes cold.