My face got hot. “I couldn’t sleep. I haven’t been able to sleep well in a while. I didn’t want to disturb anyone, so I figured I’d use the time productively.”
“Now Jason, I’m sure between us we could have figured out a way to help you get to sleep.” I choked on my own tongue, and Kamila laughed. “I told you, Ferin don’t worry about all the little social conventions. You’ll get there.” She patted my back. “So, you were trying to work on your abilities?”
“Yeah.” I kicked the wall absently. “I want to be ready. I want to be able to fight the next time the bad guys came around. I didn’t want to be caught with my pants down, you know?” I paused, looking into the night. “Do you think they’re following us? Would we even know?”
“If there is a way to tell, I haven’t found it yet. But I’m not too worried. If they come, they come. If they don’t, they don’t. We can’t do anything about it either way, and I happen to agree with you. Our ability is inherently loud and showy. We can’t forgo practicing with it because it’s loud and showy. Tess’s ability is subtler. She can practice with it by going out and getting into a bar fight. That’s not going to attract a lot of attention, you know?
“So, yes, we need to practice. We can’t let our abilities be weak simply because there might be vampires around. If we were relocating permanently, if we were staying here in Nebraska for the long term, things might be different. We’re in a whole new world now, Jason. And Tess has a lot to get used to, just like the rest of us.”
I relaxed a little. “She’s really pissed. Do you think I should bring her something tomorrow, something she’d like?”
She ruffled my hair. “You’re a good man, Jason. Tomorrow, why don’t you stop at that yarn shop we passed and bring her some supplies when you go out to get the breakfast? I think that should make her pretty happy, and it would be a nice gesture.”
Kamila hopped down from the wall. “Now since we’re both awake and out here, why don’t you show me what you’ve been working on?”
28
I got down onto the ground and gave Kamila a demonstration of exactly what I’d been doing for the past few days. I wasn’t showing off. She’d asked me to demonstrate, so I did. I showed her how I built a little shelter of flame, one the vampires probably couldn’t pass through. It might be a long shot, but I was willing to bet they’d have trouble. And if they did get through it, they’d have already taken some damage before I had to do anything else to them.
I could expand the shelter at will. It worked like a dome, a super-hot forcefield that would protect myself and the people with me. I could set it up with a thought and forget about it, too, leaving me free to focus on things like fighting the ones who did make it through the burning barrier.
I showed her some of my other tricks too, both my improved focus and the increased heat of my flame. I could melt metal now and reduce bone to the finest ash if I so chose. I could cook food in seconds, which would make travel easier.
She nodded approvingly when I finished going through my paces, and then she stepped forward. “You’re improving by leaps and bounds. It’s astonishing. I’ve never seen someone learn so quickly. I understand why Tess felt the way she did, but you really are exceptional. Let me show you a few things. This might feel uncomfortable for a minute, but remember, it won’t hurt you.”
My internal temperature skyrocketed as Kamila stared me down. She was right. It was uncomfortable. It was downright painful. I gritted my teeth and breathed through it, shocked to see steam coming from my nostrils. And it was truly, actual steam.
My blood was boiling.
My blood was boiling, and it hurt, but it wasn’t doing damage to me. I knew that as much as I knew my own name. After all, fire couldn’t hurt me. I exhaled a little more forcefully, and the sensation stopped.
Kamila’s eyes widened, and then she laughed. “Oh, that’s cute. We hadn’t talked about that yet.”
I grinned. I’d been worried she’d be mad about it, but she wasn’t. “What, you didn’t want me to push your attack away?”
She tossed her long, red hair over her shoulder. “I figured we’d get there eventually. You understand why you might want to boil someone’s blood, right?”
I ran my tongue along the inside of my teeth. “They’re vampires. They’re already dead, so they don’t have their own blood pumping in their veins. But they drink blood. If I can boil that…”
“Right. Burning them alive from the inside out. It’s acutely painful and deeply unpleasant. Think about it. Now you try.” She met my eyes.
I recoiled. “Kamila, I don’t know if I can do that to you.”
She crossed her arms over her ample chest. “I just did it to you.”
“You did. But it’s you. I don’t know if I could hate you enough to boil your blood. Even though I know you wouldn’t be hurt by it, but I was human once, and I still carry all of those tendencies with me.”
She stroked my face. “It’s okay, Jason. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. When the time comes, I think you’ll be able to do it. So far, there hasn’t been a lot you haven’t been able to figure out.” She stood on her tiptoes and touched her lips to mine.
It was a gentle kiss, a loving kiss. I ran my fingers through her hair as I yielded to her touch. She could make me feel incredible, with just a look or a touch. Having her mouth on me felt like a perfect, soft, soaking rain, the kind that turned the grass green again after a long drought.
We were in the middle of a ruined silo. There wasn’t anything for us but concrete and rubble, no place soft for me to lay Kamila down. I picked her up, and she wrapped her legs around my waist, her warm body snug against mine in the November chill. She was still kissing me, but I heard her breath catch.
Kamila could still be surprised.
I set her down on top of the half wall, its height perfectly matched to my intentions. I traced her breasts through her dress, my fingers lazy around the nipples, sweeping down the full sides to inscribe a line across her ribs. She’d gone without a bra tonight, probably because she’d dressed quickly to come outside when she realized she was alone in the van.
As I worked, I stroked her thigh as well. She’d opted to go without underwear too, and I could feel that she was already slick with need and desire. I unzipped my jeans and freed my cock. She met me in the middle, her eyes locked on me with a smile that was sultry and devious.
I thrust into her and settled into an immediate rhythm, slow, deliberate, and gentle despite her grasping hands, rough on my back. We would go together or not at all, and after a long moment of my casual denial, she gave in, her hips matching me like the beat of a drum. The world narrowed, and everything else fell away. There was no more war, no more vampires, no more threat, and no more fear. All that mattered was right here—me and Kamila, our bodies moving in perfect unison.
She came with a cry, clenching around me so hard I couldn’t move. I buried my face in her shoulder and finished with a loud groan, surrendering to a world of sensation and pleasure, every nerve in my body breaking apart in the exquisite moment that verged on pain. I saw stars and ribbons of light under my fluttering eyes, then opened them to see her gazing at me. It was a soft look, her lids dropping with lazy joy as she finished her own pleasure with a series of fading seismic events, each a mere echo of the one before. Finally, her body went still except for her hands, which reached down to encircle me and tuck me away in my pants. She laughed softly, languidly kissing me, and then I noticed the light
A shelter of flame had sprung up around us, bright and warm and beautiful. I brought it back into myself with a thought, and we wandered back to the van holding hands like young lovers at a state fair.
The next morning, I left before the sun was up to get our breakfast. I stopped by the little yarn shop we’d passed, just as Kamila had suggested. It didn’t take much to work the lock open, and I grabbed some yarn and supplies for Tess. I had no idea what she would want, or how to tell the difference between
the different items, so I grabbed a few things and left, smiling at the dual nature of my crime—as I stole, I was giving. It was a lot like being Ferin.
Tess still wasn’t speaking to me when I got back, but she softened when I gave her my sack of ill-gotten gains.
“That’s actually kind.” She glared at me with suspicion. “Did you do anything to tip people off to where we were?”
I shook my head. “No, I was careful. I just know you’re mad, probably with some justification. You think I’m not listening to you, and you’re nervous about everything that’s happening. I am too. We can all stand to blow off a little steam now and then, and you deserve something that will calm you and give you focus. This might help.”
She threw her arms around me and thanked me.
Then we headed west, at peace, if not peaceful.
We still had more of Nebraska to get through. Most of the state was covered in corn. In November, the corn had already been harvested and what we looked at was stubble and scrub, in which anything could be hiding. It was a distinctly spooky feeling, and I couldn’t pretend to like it. We stayed close together as we traveled. I didn’t even try to zoom up ahead, even though the temptation was always there.
After Nebraska came Wyoming. Wyoming gave me some pause, because a good part of the state is mountain and we couldn’t get around them. So far, our bikes had served us well, as had the van. I had no idea how they would handle on mountain roads where snowfall was already a thing. We would put our road skills to the test.
It was slow going. I had my own source of heat, and of course, so did Kamila. Tess, on the other hand, was bound to suffer. After the first couple of hours, we met up and re-evaluated our position. We would limit our driving to four hours per day, with Tess in the van. Kamila would drive Tess’s Harley. I didn’t like doubling our journey like that, but I couldn’t think of any other solution
We crashed in an empty mountain cabin on our first night in Wyoming. The owner probably used it as a hunting lodge, and Daisy seemed to like the place. She found a million things to sniff, her nose busy as she coursed around doing dog things with the occasional yip of excitement. Fortunately, the place had electricity and a laundry room. We all jumped at the chance to wash our clothes, which were road-grimed and ripe.
I’d never thought of clean clothes as a luxury until I had no way to wash them. I didn’t mind roughing it in most ways, but clean clothes were not optional. That night, Kamila and I both practiced drying clothes with our flames without singeing them, a skill that I considered to be nothing short of miraculous after living in dirty pants for days on end. My standards are civilized, even if my behavior is questionable.
Part of me wanted to stay in the cabin an extra day. Staying put a little longer might have allowed me to get some extra sleep, but the delay would do nothing to help us find Mort. He was still out there somewhere, and we needed to know what happened to him, whether he’d been taken by vampires, wandered off on his own, or had come to a more sinister end.
Our next shelter was an abandoned mine, and it put my senses on high alert form the moment we entered. The place reminded me of the Owl’s Head safe house, and I could almost see Margaret’s face in the walls. Tess seemed to find the same resemblance comforting, though, and I certainly wasn’t in a position to object to anything she found soothing at this point. We needed unity, not my own petty fears causing issues.
Daisy didn’t like the mine either. She curled up on my lap, shaking, and refused to leave it until we left the next morning. I didn’t know what she thought she smelled or heard in that mine, but her uneasiness put me on edge too. Dog senses were better than ours, so I trusted her. Maybe she was just used to living with a fire Ferin and didn’t want to get blown up. Either way, nothing happened, and we proceeded the next day, but I watched over my shoulder as we left, cautious until the mine was a vanishing dot on the horizon.
Squatting made for a more interesting journey than ducking into hotels or motels would have. Those places gave you security in the form of a bed and a locked door, but you didn’t feel like you were part of the community when you stayed in a motel. Motels were reliable. Mines and barns were not.
Squatting was different. We chose abandoned properties far from the beaten track, for obvious reasons. These places weren’t consistent, and they weren’t part of the community. Often, they weren’t part of anything anymore. We could stay in places no longer deemed fit for human habitation, too, like contaminated explosives factory we sheltered in or the old place where they built chemical weapons during World War Two.
I was kind of worried about poor Daisy, but as it turned out, Daisy was Ferin too—just a dog. I was learning all kinds of things on this trip I’d never thought I needed to know, and one of them was that Daisy had the same immunities we had. I chose not to think about how that had come about. Some things were beyond my curiosity for the simple fact that they violated what little sense of normalcy I had left.
Eventually, we made it through Wyoming, unfroze ourselves, and continued west. Idaho awaited us, along with answers. I hoped.
29
It took us four days to make it into Twin Falls, but we did make it. Twin Falls wasn’t a big city by any stretch of the imagination but considering that I’d spent the past few days sleeping in abandoned mines and Superfund sites, it seemed positively cosmopolitan.
“I feel like I’ve got eyes on me every time I turn around,” I told Tess. “It’s like they’re right on the back of my neck. They itch.”
“It’s the DTs,” she joked. “We all knew it would come to this eventually.”
“Cute.” None of us had dipped into the whiskey we carried. We couldn’t get more than a little buzz, but we didn’t feel up to celebrating lately. “Am I the only one?”
Kamila sighed. “No, but if you want to find Mort and you’re sure he’s here, we have to stay until we can figure out where he might be.”
She was right, and we knew it. The only problem was that by the time we rolled into town, it was already after the stores closed. We couldn’t get a burner phone to use to call the Twin Falls Ferin, even if we could find a number for them, and we had to kill time until we could get a phone the next day.
We decided to go to a bar. People in dive bars liked to talk, and Tess hoped we’d overhear something that would give us the information we needed. We parked the bikes and the van in a garage and headed over to the bar. Before we could get to the bar in question, though, we found ourselves surrounded by vampires, their collective hiss killing any hope I had of a whiskey buzz. Fucking fangers. They could screw up even a casual drink.
I honestly hadn’t believed they’d attack in a city, right out in the open. Vampires had almost as much to fear from exposure as Ferin. They were harder to kill, but people were also more afraid of them than they were of us. These vampires had no shame about dropping to the sidewalk in front of dozens of civilians and charging like mad bulls.
The vamps might not have had any qualms about exposing what they were, but our little trio did. I made a shield of flame hot enough to melt metal, and we ran for an alley. The vampires who tried to stand in our way were incinerated on contact. I had no idea how many of them there were, but I wasn’t about to count. Score one for me.
We made it to the grimy back alley, surrounded by the rear portions of early twentieth-century brick buildings. It wasn’t ideal. I had no idea who or what lived in those buildings, but it would have to do. It was better than catching civilians in our crossfire or getting the police stuck in the middle. When in doubt, I would try to preserve human life.
“Oh look, it’s a baby Ferin and his bitches.” The first vampire, who stood in the middle, grinned and bared his foul teeth at us.
“Not many dentists in your town, bloodsucker?” I snapped. I called my power to me and let loose with a stream of concentrated flame, directly into his sneering face. He screamed, clawing at his eyes, and fell to the ground. I didn’t let up, and he disintegrated into ash in on
ly a few seconds. I’d expected more of a fight, but I wasn’t about to complain.
I didn’t have time to admire my handiwork, because there were ten vampires and three of us. Kamila couldn’t use her shotgun since a shotgun draws attention in a city, and firing one draws more. She could, however, shoot off fireballs. Tess dove in with her silver spike, the metal a glittering blur as she howled and began stabbing like the vamps owed her money. I decided to try my new skill and drew down on the blood of the fanger closest to me. It was time to boil a vamp from his inside out.
I concentrated. The great thing about fighting a big group of your enemies is you have a target rich environment. I let loose all of my rage and visualized the blood in the monsters’ bellies heating up to a boil. Instead of one, I spread my angry power wide, reaching out in a cone of fury.
Three of them stopped what they were doing and dropped to the ground, their skin splitting like I was watching the world’s most disgusting pig roast. Glass in nearby windows shattered as they clutched at their middles, screaming. Pink steam poured from their mouths, just before they exploded. Once they popped, their innards flew in ragged wet streamers before the entire mess of remains seared into ashes. I liked my new skill, and the vamps hated it.
Tess stabbed the one nearest her in the heart with her silver spike as he gaped in horror. “No rest for the wicked,” she snapped, and he collapsed into ash as well.
Kamila set another vampire on fire and turned to me. “Don’t stand there admiring your work. There’s more.”
I shot another beam at yet another vampire, and then another. Kamila took one down, and that left just one more. Tess was about to stake him, but he held up his hands and dropped to his knees. “I surrender.” He looked over at me, and I met his eyes. “I surrender to you. Alone.”
Kamila and Tess exchanged glances. “This is nuts,” Tess said. “Just kill him.”
Forever Young Page 17
