“Thomas, look at me,” Julia said quietly, wiggling closer to him on the bed where they were seated. “Look . . .”
He turned his head and was locked in her gaze. For an honest moment, the world and all of its problems—war, enemies, angry friends—faded away as he stared into her eyes.
“Moments, Thomas. Moments. Remember? Those are the things that compose life,” she whispered quietly, moving her hands to either side of his face to hold it gently. “And in this moment, it’s just you and me. No one else, understand?”
Struggling as a torrent of emotion swelled inside of him, Thomas managed to choke out a few words. “It’s hard. No matter what I do, I’m always causing problems.”
“Problems that are outside of this moment,” Julia whispered firmly, conviction making her soft voice sound as strong as iron. “It’s just you and me now, okay?”
Thomas didn’t have time to reply as Julia leaned forward and kissed him.
As their lips met, he believed he could forget the world.
Gentle kisses turned into a long embrace, and his tension finally released. Knots he wasn’t aware of drained from between his shoulders, freeing him to become consumed with her. She slipped into his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck. He thought of nothing else.
Julia’s eyes sparkled.
“That’s better,” she purred, brushing his hair out of his face.
“I feel better. I’ve missed you,” Thomas murmured as he ran his hands down Julia’s waist, settling them on her hips.
“I’ve missed you, too,” Julia teased, craning her neck slightly.
He took the hint and leaned forward to kiss along her neck in a way that made Julia melt into him.
Their one moment of forgetting the world began to stretch into several as the two began to enjoy one another’s company more intimately. Julia’s fingers nimbly began to undo the first few buttons of Thomas’ shirt as they broke another kiss, each staring at each other breathlessly.
“Hey, is Thomas in here?”
The apartment door swung open, making them both jump. They whirled around and saw Artemis standing in the doorway.
“Er,” It was the most intelligent thing Thomas could manage to say as both he and Julia blushed like kids being caught with their hand in the cookie jar.
“I—I’m sorry,” Artemis stammered, backing out of the room. “I wanted to tell you Penny said she’d donate. I’m still not sure. Um, I’ll leave now.”
“Artemis, hold on a—”
“Sorry,” Artemis said again, her face growing red.
Before Julia or Thomas could think of another reply, Artemis slipped her hand behind the door, twisting the knob to lock it after it shut, and slammed the door behind her.
“How much do you think she heard?” He swallowed nervously.
Julia shook her head. “I don’t know . . . not much, I think.”
“So much for forgetting,” he grumbled to himself.
Julia reached over and clicked off the lamp on the stand next to the bed, nibbling at his ear as she did. In an instant the entire apartment was veiled in darkness.
“Shall we get back to the moment?” she asked as she released his ear.
Thomas smiled, and moved forward to kiss Julia again, slowly falling back into their one perfect moment.
14 Almost Like Normal
Thomas opened his eyes to soft sunlight streaming through the blinds. The rays were weak early in the day, but he felt the burning heat all the same. Grunting in surprise, Thomas rolled out of the bed. He stumbled over to a dresser in the corner of the room and began pulling out drawers. There had to be sunscreen in here somewhere. There!
Thomas popped the cap off of the tube of extra strength sunscreen and applied it everywhere and anywhere the sun might reach him. Only after he was finished did he realize Julia was awake, too.
She stood near the window, looking out into the street wearing nothing but last night’s t-shirt and a pair of briefs. Her hair glinted in the light slipping in from the open slats in the blinds. Thomas couldn’t help but smile at the sight of her. The moment they’d shared last night had been beautiful—as beautiful as Julia.
Approaching her as quietly as he could, Thomas slipped his arms around Julia’s waist and pressed his lips against her hair. She sighed into his embrace, her head falling back to rest on his shoulder as she kept her eyes focused on the window.
“Good morning,” Thomas said, his voice rusty from sleep.
Julia did not reply. Words were lost on her. Instead, she ran her hand along Thomas’ forearm. Her touch tickled, and he almost laughed.
“Thomas,” Julia said. Her voice was as soft as the early rays of sunlight dancing across their bodies.
“Hmm?”
“Have you ever been in love?”
Thomas’ eyes sprang open. It was a loaded question, and he wasn’t sure how to respond. He and Julia had something special, something he’d never felt before, not with anyone. His affection for Artemis had always been different. But was this, right now, love?
“I’m not sure,” he said finally. Julia’s grip tightened on his forearm. “Have you?”
Julia broke from Thomas’ embrace to face him. Her eyes were wide and searching. Had she told him she could see into the depths of his soul, Thomas would have believed her.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Lawrence says when you live as long as we do, the people we love have a habit of leaving us. I guess after hearing that for so many years it got hard to let people in. But I feel something when I’m with you. I feel . . . I don’t know what I feel.”
“Is that what we have, then? Are we in love?”
He reddened as the words left his mouth. What a clumsy thing to ask. Wasn’t love something you could just feel? If he was in love, shouldn’t he know?
A smile spread across Julia’s lips. “I was hoping you could tell me.”
She lifted a finger and traced it down the side of Thomas’ face, letting it rest at the corner of his mouth.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “I was only a little curious. You were funny and interesting. But I didn’t want to fall in love.”
“Ah, well you know what they say about curiosity. It has a habit of turning on you.”
“Hmm.”
Julia stood on her tiptoes and pressed her lips between Thomas’. She kissed his bottom lip gently, lingering for who knows how long. Thomas couldn’t be sure. Time had become no more than a blur.
After what could have been either an eternity or a millisecond, Julia broke away from him. Thomas had to consciously hold back from leaning forward after her to pull her back in, and settled for locking on to her searching stare once more. Her eyes could have melted him into nothing.
Julia was the first to look away. She glanced down to find Thomas’ hand, taking it in her own. After swinging it a few times, she sighed and used her free hand to brush her hair out of her face.
“I’m afraid our moment’s up,” she said.
“Yeah,” Thomas replied gruffly.
Although he had every intention of moving on with the day, he couldn’t take his eyes off of her. He was getting greedy; he knew it. Suddenly the small moments they shared weren’t enough. He needed her presence. He thirsted for it with the same ferocity he thirsted for blood. He wanted to be consumed by her in a way he never could be by his more monstrous desires.
Thomas’ phone buzzed and broke the spell. Julia squeezed his hand.
“Come on,” she said with a warm smile, jerking her head toward the door. “The war won’t wait forever.”
She couldn’t have been more right. His phone’s buzzing was a message about more injuries downstairs. Julia and Thomas dressed quickly and headed off to the makeshift hospital together.
The worst injury was Jericho’s. He’d been blindsided; one of the thugs they had faced off against during the night had been armed with a revolver loaded with the customized communion wine round
s that nearly ended Charles. Jericho would have been dead if the revolver-wielding thug had done more than hit his target with a lucky shot.
The shot had grazed Jericho’s ribs, which was enough to cause a wicked reaction but nothing lethal. Had the man’s aim been better and the bullet lodged into the giant vampire’s ribs, the holy water would have spread inside him much quicker.
“It looks like some unholy crossbreed of gangrene, frostbite, and hemotoxin,” Nelson said, his voice muffled through his medical mask, as Jericho peeled off his bloody shirt to show his injured ribs.
Thomas had told Nelson he didn’t need to wear a medical mask: the risk of airborne infection was next to none. He assumed his friend wore the mask to help deal with the smell.
As it was a cramped space, their makeshift hospital reeked of cordite, sweat, blood, and the bitter almond reek of necrotic flesh from wine-soaked wounds. Thomas had to tell himself not to focus on the smell—if he thought of it too much, his heightened senses made the small med-zone unbearable.
Taking hold of a scalpel, Thomas carefully carved away the worst of the blackened skin.
Jericho didn’t even grunt.
“There’s a ranging degree of allergic reactions, but I’m not quite sure if there’s a pattern or not. Sunlight will blister us, holy water burns like boiling water, but communion wine and hawthorn are the worst. The wine causes what seems to be weeks of decay in a matter of moments, and the hawthorn stops about any kind of regeneration,” Thomas explained in his textbook voice. He handed the scalpel off to Nelson and grabbed some rubbing alcohol to flush the wound.
That brought a hiss of pain from Jericho.
“Hawthorn? That’s what the creep Ernest got you with, right?” Nelson asked. “Have you fully recovered?”
Thomas shook his head. “I don’t feel it unless I’m pushing my limits as a vampire. It hurts like hell if I use any of my supernatural abilities.”
“And these sutures?” Nelson asked, handing Thomas the special medical supplies he’d been rationing.
“Some synthesized polymer I’ve never seen before. I don’t know how they do it, or where they came from except for the logo BSE written on the packaging. They help draw out whatever pollutants are inside a vampire, preventing them from recovering at their full pace,” Thomas replied, stitching Jericho’s injury with an expert hand. Nelson clicked his tongue behind his mask as he examined the sutures.
After the gunshot wound was closed and bandaged, Jericho thanked Thomas for patching him up and lumbered through the door to get his next assignment. There was no rest for the soldiers of the Red Lightning Pub anymore. They had to continuously assault Ernest’s turf to avert high human fatalities elsewhere. Already they were sitting pretty at thirty-four human deaths, and by the end of the day there would be more.
The fighting had gone on too long though, and both sides were growing desperate. Ernest was shifting away from his routine attacks on humans, the ones designed to draw attention to his movements and force Lawrence from the city, and was focusing more on trying to kill any of the Red Lightning vampires he happened to see on the streets.
It wasn’t much better at the pub. Boston Bob was pushing for an all-out attack on Ernest’s home base, something they’d avoided to prevent the inevitable casualties it would incur. The Sanguine King was overrun with blood junkies, but there were also loads of humans trying their luck at the tables. If the Red Lightning Pub vampires tried to attack the casino, numerous humans would die. The slaughter would expose the war. The Red Lightning Pub vampires knew this, and Bob’s idea had been widely rejected when he proposed it two days ago, but now it was gaining traction. The fighting was getting out of hand.
The constant guerilla attacks had upped Thomas’ workload despite assistance from Nelson and occasionally Julia.
Nelson was still examining the special sutures. “Hmm, if you really want to find out what these things are, I can send a sample to Mitch. He was over my residency program when I first got on at the hospital. He’s working for a pharmaceutical lab now, and I’m sure he could figure this out.”
Thomas frowned thoughtfully as he carefully began to put away the suture kit. Knowing what this material was would be useful, but he doubted he would be able to figure out how to manufacture it. Besides, according to Julia there were some vampires who didn’t want to get mixed up in their spat, and their contribution of the specialized suture was top secret.
Thomas didn’t want to accidentally isolate such a valuable potential ally because he’d let his curiosity get the better of him.
“I’ll have to think about it.”
“There’s something else you should give some thought to,” Nelson said as he removed his gloves and mask. “We’re cooking dinner together tonight. Penny wanted me to offer you and your girlfriend an official invitation.”
It was unexpected, but Thomas wasn’t sure why he felt surprised. A dinner invitation was such a mundane thing for him and his friends, something they did all the time before he’d turned into a vampire. But now? Now he was crossing new territory, a new awkward. Was this where he had come to with his friends? Needing formal invitations to hang out like old times?
“Come on, Nelson, I don’t even have to think about that. Yes, we’d love to join you. Uh, I’ll ask Julia to double check, but I’m sure she would love it, too. I’ll be there no matter what, though.” Thomas tripped over his tongue, as if the quicker he accepted the invitation the sooner the awkwardness would end.
“That’s good. Get ready to be stuffed to the gills because Artemis has been baking her brains out between her pub redecorating projects. She burned some muffins.” Nelson said the last part in a hushed whisper, as if criticizing Artemis’ culinary skills was the greatest sin he could commit.
Thomas shifted uncomfortably. In the years he’d known her, Thomas had never seen Artemis ruin a dish, and she only baked when she was upset.
His cheeks burned at the memory of Artemis walking in on him and Julia last night—like they’d been a couple of teenagers. And after such an intense meeting and request issued from Lawrence. It couldn’t have been at a more inopportune time.
He must have looked extremely selfish after asking them for blood donations one second then making out with his girlfriend the next. Not to mention how little he’d seen his friends ever since they’d been living here. He could spend a night with a girl he’d just met but not drop by to say hello to lifelong friends. Guilt swirled uncomfortably in his stomach.
“You okay, man? You look flushed,” Nelson said with a frown. “If you aren’t feeling well, don’t force yourself to go to dinner. We can always try to get together later.”
Thomas made a show of splashing cool water on his face, trying to cover up his reddening. The fact Nelson hadn’t razzed him about making out with Julia all day long meant Artemis had, thankfully, kept it to herself.
Even when she was mad at him for being such a bad friend, Artemis still managed to do what was right. Her loyalty was a thing of beauty.
“No, it’s fine. Sometimes the blood still gets to me,” Thomas lied, and to further cover his embarrassment he added, “Is there anything Julia and I should bring?”
Giving him an odd look, Nelson reached into his pocket and handed a folded sheet of paper to Thomas.
“Um, yeah. You and your girl are taking care of the shopping. All of the shopping. Y’know, since you are the only two who can move freely outside of this place anymore,” Nelson said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
Thomas shoved his hands in his pocket and avoided looking at the paper and Nelson. “Um, I actually can’t.”
“What?”
“I’m not allowed out either,” Thomas said, his blush returning. He felt like a teenager. “Lawrence says I’m too vital to the team to go around outside where Ernest could get me.”
They glanced at each other, both looking away when their eyes met. After an awkward moment, Nelson sighed.
“Oh, that make
s this a little awkward. We thought . . .”
Thomas snatched the paper. “We’ll find a way out.”
“Cool,” Nelson said, relieved.
“What about Sean?”
Nelson scratched under his ear. “He’s still not back. We’re trying to get a hold of him, but—”
“Yeah, no worries,” Thomas said, relieving Nelson of the burden of finishing his sentence.
“This’ll be good.” Nelson smiled. “It’s about time we got a break, you know?”
“Yeah.”
Thomas hoped Nelson was right.
◆◆◆
“You sure you’re still up for this, big guy?” Charles asked a massive shadow behind him as they opened the Red Lightning Pub’s door.
“I’m sure. How’s the leg?” Jericho walked outside.
Thomas set several full grocery bags down near the apartment complex’s main entrance, about thirty feet from the pub’s door, waving Julia to stop, too.
He shouted, “Wait, you’re already going out? I said the leg needed more time.”
Charles grinned. “Eh, I still have the other one.”
Thomas didn’t believe it. Neither of the fighters had fully healed. Charles limped, but Jericho had mostly recovered from the blood junkie’s venomous bite. They needed more time to rest, but war didn’t have much patience for the wounded. They weren’t the first still-recovering vampires to reinjure themselves in a skirmish with Ernest’s men.
“Goof just told us ‘bout a refurbished mechanic’s garage. Gotta human gang in it. They’re supplying Ernest with custom weaponry,” Jericho said.
“I’m going for revenge.” Charles’ smirk fell into a grimace. “We think they made those damn communion wine bullets.”
Julia frowned and set down her own bags. “If you can cut off Ernest’s weapon supply, we might end the war by next week.”
“Exactly,” Jericho said. “There’s a deal goin’ down there tonight. Ernest’ll be there. Gonna kill ‘im there.” He swung a wooden baseball bat that was filed to a spear point.
Charles carried a hatchet. Neither had guns as they couldn’t risk drawing attention until Vivian regained her hold on the local police. Thomas had heard Lawrence complaining about it yesterday.
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