“A date? Now? You do know we’ve just declared war?”
“I think it’s the perfect time,” Julia said confidently as she crossed the room to help Thomas move medical supplies to a more accessible counter. “True, a renegade group of blood fiends is hell-bent on murdering us all, and they’re a fatal threat to our secrecy, but it isn’t like there’ll be bombs raining from the sky or tanks rolling through our front door.”
Presented with this new perspective, Thomas tried to gather his thoughts. His brow furrowed, and he frowned. What she said was true, but he still couldn’t shake the feeling that pursuing personal enjoyment during a raging turf war would be frivolous.
“I, I don’t know. That seems, I mean . . .” Disoriented, Thomas gave up. “It doesn’t feel right.”
The light scent of perfume tickled his nose through the usual miasma of disinfectant that clung to the air in the blood bank, and Thomas was painfully aware of Julia’s sudden closeness.
“I disagree,” Julia said, placing a bottle of disinfectant on the counter. “Moments are all we have, Thomas. Just moments. The world changes fast—in the blink of an eye—and we tend to forget or ignore it. It’s a poisonous way of thinking. If you forget and don’t seize the moments when you have the chance. . . . Well, there’s more than one way to lose a war.”
Having nothing to add to or argue against her point, he kept quiet as he organized the supplies on the counter.
“My world has changed so rapidly, so many times. One moment I’m living happily with my mother, getting to know the first man who actually cared for her. Suddenly, she’s dead and I don’t have a home. Now I’m wandering the country with that man as my new father, living from scrounged paycheck to paycheck. I find out he’s a vampire and I decide I’d rather live with my father forever than watch myself grow old alone. My entire life changes in a flash again, and before I can blink, I have a another mother, someone who loves my father as much as my blood mother once did, and this new mother is just the first of the rest of my family,” Julia said, her voice falling to a whisper. This wasn’t something she talked about often.
Julia handed Thomas a few more supplies. As he put the last few items away on the counter, Julia grabbed his hand.
“And before I know it I’m coming back home to my family’s pub, and I’m meeting a week-old vampire who had a rough couple of nights.” Julia’s eyes met Thomas’. “And after that, a war breaks out.”
Thomas swore he could see her life story dancing in her irises. How’d they come to this? Julia was usually guarded about her feelings. Why was she revealing so much about her life now?
“Life moves at such a quick pace you have to reach out and make your own moments that will live forever. People hide themselves away from life trying to prolong it, but what’s the point if you’re miserable?” Julia asked. She waved a hand about the room. “We could both hide here and wait for this war to end. We can put life on pause and play it safe. But what about the next disaster? What about the next scare? There’ll always be a reason to not enjoy ourselves. There’ll always be a reason to hide inside, while all these moments are passing on by.”
Stepping closer, Julia released Thomas’ hand, reached up, and caressed his face.
“Thomas, I was done being afraid the moment I decided to become a vampire. The fear of the transformation was more than anything I’ve ever felt. I thought if I was going to live forever I couldn’t continue to feel regret over all the moments I didn’t take.” Julia paused for a moment, her breath tickling Thomas’ lips. “I will not let anything else make me afraid again, and I want you to share in these moments. I want you to experience life with me, even if it’s sometimes dangerous.”
Standing on her toes, Julia kissed him.
Electricity surged through Thomas, as potent as the pain he’d felt less than twenty-four hours ago, but this time the burn he felt was invigorating. Her lips were soft against his, possessing his full concentration. She kissed him again. And again. And again. Each time, her passion was more intense. Then finally, she pulled away.
“So, I want a date with the most interesting person I’ve met this decade, and nothing else matters. Not even a vampire war.”
In his mind, Julia’s words hung heavy with the truth of someone who’d lived a long, long time. Her rejection of fear stirred memories in him. Moments of loss and regret he’d put himself through because he’d been scared, because he’d played it safe. He remembered all those nights at Artemis’ bedside, confessing his fears and stresses. He remembered all the people he’d been too scared to approach, all the colleges he hadn’t applied to for fear he wouldn’t be able to compete. He couldn’t remember the last time he was genuinely happy—there was always some worry nagging at the back of his mind.
Now, with Julia in front of him, he felt for the first time that he had power over his fear, that he could throw it away and never let it control him again. After everything he’d been through over the last few days, it was only now he felt free. With Julia, he could just be. He didn’t have to worry about tomorrow—he had today.
“I don’t think I can ever be as sure as you,” Thomas confessed, putting on his best smile. “But I can try. Let’s pause and carve moments out of time together. Where do you want to go for our date?”
Wrapping her arms around his waist, Julia rested her head against Thomas’ chest as he embraced her.
“We can decide later,” she murmured, closing her eyes and melting into the embrace.
Thomas didn’t reply. He enjoyed the moment.
10 First Attack
Fatigue enhanced the pain in Thomas’ chest as he bent over Jericho’s bleeding arm. The old vampire’s wound wasn’t healing due to the metal shavings Thomas was extracting from the torn muscles, and he needed to concentrate so he didn’t miss any pieces.
Jericho winced, his free arm holding a small jug of red lightning. “All dead. I brought back their gear. No way am I letting some junkies loot it.”
Thomas glanced at a stash of knives sitting on top of thick leather gloves. Some of them looked like old metal crosses reshaped into sloppy blades, the edges shaven to a point. A half-inch long metal shaving jutted through Jericho’s dense muscle, and Thomas extracted it with his blood-soaked forceps. He wanted to be finished. His date with Julia was in less than an hour, and instead of getting ready he was staining his clothes with blood and his hands were deep in the gaping wounds of vampire after vampire as they returned from their first day fighting Ernest’s gang.
“Last piece,” he said, pulling out a miniscule shard.
The muscle it’d been lodged in started to mend as Jericho chugged the red lightning. Thomas washed his hands and watched the blood mix with rushing water and soap, red-tinged bubbles swirling around the small basin before draining into old pipes.
He’d run out of gloves that morning. A runner was fetching him more, as well as some additional supplies he was running low on, but he couldn’t let Jericho wait, either.
Jericho muttered to himself, and Thomas sighed. He grabbed an unused suture kit and pivoted, the turning motion enhancing the sharp pains in his chest. The kit clicked as he popped it open, revealing shiny needles and sutures. Jericho’s elbow smashed into Thomas’ face, and he flew three feet backward, his head crashing against a cabinet of IV equipment.
His eyes fluttered open—no, one eye fluttered open—to Julia smirking as she leaned over him. Jericho hovered at her side, apologizing on repeat.
“Half an hour, huh?” Julia snickered.
Thomas’ face was on fire. He touched his right cheek, and his flesh burned beneath his fingers. Sharp tingles spread under his eye, and he cradled his face. His right eye wouldn’t open, and his cheekbone was shattered.
“What the hell?”
Jericho shoved the half-empty jug of red lighting into Thomas’ arm. “Sorry. I hate needles. . . . I should have warned you. I’m glad you woke up quick, though, not every vampire does.”
Thomas took the ju
g and drank, his burning cheek itching as the blood boosted his healing. The first tiny chinks of bone pieces joining together inside his head echoed in his ears. Julia kept laughing and offered a hand up.
“You caught me off guard. I ain’t gonna swing at you this time,” Jericho said.
Thomas grumbled and picked the open suture kit off the floor. He could still only see from one eye.
Jericho’s arm was tight as he held still, and Thomas took a few extra minutes stitching up the vampire. The vampire didn’t need stitches, but they helped the wound heal faster. He flexed his arm when Thomas finished, frowning but looking impressed at the same time.
“Could’ve used stitches like these back in the day.”
Footsteps echoed on the stairs, and everyone turned to the door. Thomas washed his hands again, expecting another half-destroyed vampire, but it was only Lawrence beneath a pile of bulk boxes and plastic shopping bags. The man flashed his fangs as he looked around the room and dumped the pile of medical supplies near the door.
“We’ve saved a lot of lives today,” Lawrence said. “Nice work down here, Thomas.”
Julia grunted, looking up from her phone as she moved toward her father. “Not quite, Dad. Look at this.” She handed him her phone, and he shoved it back as he grumbled. Julia tapped her screen, reading news headlines and summarizing articles aloud. There were five mysterious deaths in one day throughout Colesbrooke’s downtown.
All of them brutally beaten. Strange bite marks. A stake driven through the heart. Broad daylight. All human.
Ernest wasn’t trying to be subtle, and no matter how hard Lawrence’s crew was trying to cover it up, they hadn’t found all the bodies—nor prevented all the deaths. Within a day, Colesbrooke was nervous, and the media was feeding the fear.
The room was a mixture of emotions: anger, frustration, disappointment. They barely breathed as they listened to Julia read. When she was done, she slipped her phone into her pocket and frowned at Lawrence.
“Anyone else arrive today?”
Thomas busied himself with putting away the supplies and started cleaning up the room, not caring to hear the rest of the conversation. It was the first moment he’d had to clean up since Lawrence had dragged in the first injured vampire from the war. Dried blood was coated across most surfaces. He would have been fired at the hospital for allowing a room to become so unsterile, but the vampires weren’t worried about any standard health regulations from the last hundred years or so, nor were they at risk from blood borne pathogens.
Over the course of the day, the vampires who were willing to confront Ernest and his blood junkies had begun moving into the Red Lightning Pub. Lawrence owned the apartment building the pub was in, and he had the foresight to keep several of the rooms empty in case of an emergency.
Thomas had a sneaking suspicion the usual human tenants of the pub’s apartments were the ones resupplying the Red Lightning Pub’s stores of blood, since they could be escorted by Lawrence without too much trouble. It was a question he’d brought up once or twice to his boss but hadn’t received a satisfactory response. Then again, Lawrence had been pretty busy.
Lawrence and Charles were leading the strike teams against Ernest’s army. Both of them had called in some muscle from out of town. Charles had called in Jericho, and Lawrence had called on some former bootleggers who were flying in from Boston the next morning. Lawrence was trying to keep the whole affair small, while also dealing with it with as much haste as possible.
The fewer vampires that knew about this war with Ernest, the less likely any real powerhouses in the vampiric community would get involved. That could spell disaster. As Lawrence put it, “The palookas who are older than electricity don’t mind turnin’ any younger blood-suckers into kebabs.”
On the other hand, the fewer soldiers Lawrence recruited, the longer the war would drag on. The more familiar faces Thomas would repeatedly patch up. Each day the war lasted, the likelihood increased that the older vampires would learn of it anyway.
This was all new and confusing to Thomas. He didn’t understand war tactics—just how to heal. Each injured vampire brought to him that day had solidified his decision to only focus on the things that were important to him and that he understood. He understood how to mend fatal injuries. He knew he wanted to protect his friends. Gary had been killed right next to him, and Thomas was sure he couldn’t take it if that happened again to anyone else he knew. Ernest knew Thomas, which meant he might know about his friends. In Thomas’ eyes, that made his friends as much of a target as any of the vampires in Lawrence’s good graces.
“Hey Lawrence,” Thomas said, pausing as he scrubbed a flat table he’d used as a makeshift bed and counter. “Are there any rooms left available?”
Lawrence turned from his daughter, glaring. “Why’s that?”
“I want some rooms for my friends. What if they get targeted like Gary?”
Lawrence swore. “They’re humans. I can’t protect each human and my family.” He stormed out of the room, leaving Thomas open-mouthed and Julia scowling.
“Well, they are protected by threshold magic,” Julia tried to comfort Thomas as he resumed scrubbing. He rubbed his bloody cloth over the same spot, dirtying it with each wide circle. “Look, Thomas. The Red Lightning Pub will be targeted by Ernest sooner or later. He knows this is the base of operations. Bringing your human friends here could put them in more danger.”
Thomas stopped scrubbing and met Julia’s eyes. “I can’t not protect them.”
“Bringing them here isn’t guaranteed protection.”
The table wasn’t any cleaner. Thomas left the bloodied cloth on it and began sanitizing the special needles from the suture kit. Julia joined him by the sink, placing her hand on his wrist.
“They’ll be fine, Thomas. Gary was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That won’t happen to your friends. Besides, don’t we have a date starting right about now?”
Thomas grimaced. All he wanted to do was go on that date, at least that had been his desire earlier. Now he wasn’t sure what he wanted.
“Relaxing won’t hurt anyway. My dad can hold the fort for a few hours.”
Thomas finished sanitizing the last needle and put it away. He needed the break to clear his head, to forget the gore he’d seen that afternoon and evening. Ernest’s blood junkies had played dirty. Cudgels made from crosses, hawthorn shanks, silver bullets, and pipe bombs filled with gasoline and holy water. Thomas had seen the damage they dealt. They created wounds unlike any Thomas had ever treated at Stoker Memorial, a disgusting blend of burnt and rotting flesh. The surgeon within him was morbidly fascinated by these kinds of injuries, but he also feared how they would escalate if the war continued too long.
Maybe Julia was right—his friends wouldn’t be safe at the Red Lightning Pub. Thomas washed his hands and dried them on a small, clean corner of a rag he’d found.
“I better get changed then.”
◆◆◆
“I hope I’m not embarrassing you,” Thomas murmured into his wine glass.
She made a heroic effort not to giggle as she replied, “Oh no, you certainly aren’t. It’s barely noticeable.”
Smiling, Thomas winced as his face flared with a dull pain.
“Would it be worse if I took them off? I look like an idiot for wearing sunglasses at night anyway.”
Julia speared another bite of her salad and chewed thoughtfully. The effect of wearing his best clothes was distorted by the oversized sunglasses dominating a generous portion of his face.
Underneath the right lens, Thomas’ eye was still swollen shut and was finally beginning to heal, and the exposed half of his cheek was still discolored. He’d wanted to wait until the injury was completely healed before going out, but Julia had insisted it was fine. It could take a while to fully heal because of the hawthorn in his chest.
“If you took them off, people may think you got punched in the face defending my honor,” Julia teased. “Or maybe they�
�ll think you ticked me off, and I clocked you.”
Thomas stopped removing his sunglasses.
Maybe looking like a pompous jackass by wearing sunglasses at midnight in a candlelit restaurant was the lesser of two evils.
“Well, if you can hit as hard as Jericho does, I’d be impressed,” he grumbled, reminding himself not to touch the injured side of his face.
“Oh, believe me, he can hit a lot harder when he means to. Charles once lost a fight to Jericho when Jericho was still human. Can you imagine? A vampire losing to a human! If I remember correctly, he was some sort of frontiersman. Or maybe he was a trapper. . . .” Julia frowned slightly then waved a hand dismissively. “Anyway, he saw enough danger as a human that not much can phase him now. I actually saw him lift a semi-trailer once. He didn’t get it completely off the ground or anything, but it was still impressive.”
Thomas was impressed, although not entirely surprised. He remembered the surge of strength he felt when he’d lifted the boulder overhead in the park and threw it like a cannonball. If someone as scrawny and gangly as him could lift a boulder when tapping into his supernatural strength, then a massive brute like Jericho or a big lug like Charles could easily chuck a full-grown hockey player or two thirty feet into the air.
“You think any more vampires like Jericho will come?” Thomas asked, genuinely interested in the response.
“More vampires like Jericho? Oh no, I think we’ll only get one vampire farm boy who can bench press a full-grown bull.” Julia laughed then continued in a more somber tone. “And I don’t think so. I’m not even sure who Lawrence called in from Boston. I think they might be former moonshiners like him from back in the day. Lawrence gets a little irrational whenever Ernest is involved.”
She frowned. “Mom’s been different, too. Thankfully she has Vivian to lean on, and we should be grateful Vivian decided to help us. She may be our friend, but the older the vampire gets, the more complicated they become.”
“I’m just happy she knew the precinct captain,” Thomas remarked, truly amazed at the coincidence. “If she can keep the police from trying to hunt the people responsible for this mess, we might be able to keep them safe.”
Shadows of Colesbrooke Page 18