————— ——————
Many months later . . .
————— ——————
Veronica and Eliza were standing on top of a mountain only a few miles from Eliza’s compound. A lot can happen in a short amount of time. The doctors and Kelik had been right about improved healing times. Wounds and broken bones that should have as long as six months to a year to heal had healed in just under three months. Just a few days earlier, Veronica had gotten the last of her casts removed.
Eliza and Veronica had spent a lot of time together. Doctors and scientists around the country had wanted to come poke and prod the couple, but they had retreated to Eliza’s team-compound, and nobody got in to see them without going through Eliza’s personal assistant . . . Thug. As a result, the two spent a lot of time alone. They were having difficulty enough dealing with the fact that they were unlike any other living things without having to deal with being gawked at like animals at the zoo. Both of them, Veronica especially, were trying to build their strength back up. It almost seemed as if Veronica had something to prove, but Eliza wasn’t sure who she was trying to prove it to. She had been temporarily relieved of duty as official U. S. envoy while the government tried to wrap their pencil-necked heads around the concept of her being unable to keep information secret from a civilian, as well as her no longer being human.
Physically, they were both in phenomenal shape, especially considering what they had gone through. Eliza had clocked a top land-speed of forty miles-per-hour and was able to lift twice as much as she had been able to before. Her more efficient biology gave her more endurance and required less rest to replenish her energy stores. And as Veronica’s health returned, she seemed to be becoming Eliza’s equal in every way. They had just jogged up the side of a mountain just to get away.
“Can you believe this?” Veronica asked, staring off into space. They were looking out over the mountainside, and they could see the ocean off in the distance.
“Nice view,” Eliza said. Of course, she was staring at Veronica’s backside when she said that. The two of them hadn’t been intimate except in their dreams since before Veronica had been abducted. While Veronica hadn’t been raped, she had been tortured in just about every other way imaginable, and she was still a little gun-shy regarding physical contact. And Eliza was still blaming herself. They tried to respect each other’s thoughts, but sometimes their respective insecurities leaked out and made the other uncomfortable.
Veronica dipped her head. “It’s okay you know. You can still be attracted to me.”
Eliza blushed. Their psychic link had grown even stronger since their transformation, and as already mentioned, some things just couldn’t be hidden.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. Just . . .” Veronica was nervous. The two women had been tiptoeing around each other for a while, and she wanted it to end. “I’m sorry I’ve been a bit distant . . . physically.”
“You don’t need to apologize for that. I can’t imagine what it was like . . .”
“But you can!” Veronica almost shouted, exasperated with the guilt and self-doubt that she was sensing from her partner. “You were there in my head the whole time. Allyson told me what happened to you every time they did something to me. Knowing you were there . . . that you were out there trying to find me is the only reason I was able to hold on as long as I did.” Veronica wiped some moisture from her eyes. “If it weren’t for you, I’d be dead. And I want to touch you . . . to feel you the way I used to. I feel the same way ABOUT you that I did, but . . . I’m not even comfortable in this skin anymore.”
“I know what you mean. I’m staring at daylight, which used to hurt. I move through the world, but can’t tell if I’ve sped up or it’s slowed down. And . . . and I don’t know if I even want to go home anymore. I don’t know if I can.”
Veronica turned around, confused. As she did so, she finally saw something that she had completely missed. Even if the dimensional portal reopened, Eliza was going to finally have to tell her parents about her sexuality, which was no small matter in vampire society. Now, she wasn’t even a vampire anymore. How could a reserved culture and tradition-oriented family accept someone whose sexual appetites were socially offensive to them and who wasn’t even from the same species anymore.
“I’m sorry. I hadn’t even thought about that.”
“I think you being tortured takes emotional precedence over my homesickness.”
“Don’t do that,” Veronica said heatedly, facing Eliza. “Don’t act like you did something wrong. Without you, Captain Corbin never would have found me.”
“Without me, the Purity never would have taken you.”
“Bullshit! They would have come after me for something else. I was stupid for letting my guard down and I paid for it. We’ve suffered. We’re scared. We’re the only two of our kind in the world. Guess what?!? We’ll always have suffered. We’ll always have been scared, and we may very well be the only two things like us that will ever exist. So how long do we keep this up?” Veronica sat down on a rock. “How long do we keep running up the mountain to get away from the rest of the world?”
“So you want to go back down the mountain?”
“It was a METAPHOR!” Veronica screamed, scaring several nearby birds. Then she saw Eliza snickering behind her hand. “Okay,” she muttered, smiling a little at the former vampire, “point to you.”
Eliza sat down next to her friend. “What a pair we are.” She felt Veronica’s hand creep into her own and grip it tightly. She sniffed the air. “Great. We have an intruder,” she said. “No one I recognize.”
Veronica tested the air also. “It’s going to take a while to get used to this whole ‘recognizing by smell’ thing. Paparazzi maybe? We had a bunch of them hanging out in front of the compound earlier. One of them could have seen us come up here.”
“Vultures with cameras,” Eliza muttered. “Whoever it was would have had to be up on the slope already. There’s no way someone could have kept up with us. Probably hoping to get a shot of the bedroom,” she said, then blanched a bit. There hadn’t been anything going on in that room recently worth taking a picture of.
“I’ll be ready soon,” Veronica said. “I promise.” That coaxed a smile from Eliza. “Now, wanna go scare the hell out of this guy?”
———– —————
A while later . . .
———– —————
Allyson walked into the living room to find that Eliza and Veronica had returned and were rolling around on the floor laughing. The rest of the crew, including Kelik, were just staring at them.
“What the . . .”
“You should have seen it!” Veronica said between gasps. “We smelled this sleazy photographer guy following us around the mountain . . .”
It was Eliza’s turn. “And so we started following him instead! We kept breaking twigs and making noise on purpose just to fuck with him!”
“Then we’d disappear. Finally we pounced on him and teased him endlessly. We had him thinking he was going to get lucky, then . . .”
” . . . we had him thinking he was going to get eaten. It was funny. He went from having a hard on . . .”
” . . . to wetting himself within a couple of minutes! It was precious!”
“We stole his camera and left him outside the main gate. The other paparazzi were actually laughing at him when they saw him!” Eliza finally got herself under control. “God I needed that!” Veronica was still laughing, but lay her head in her lover’s lap, and Eliza started braiding that blonde hair.
“I hate to interrupt,” Allyson said with a smile, “but we got a call from Captain Corbin. He politely requests both of your company tomorrow at Fort Crass. He sounded happy about something.”
“You up for doing some business?” Eliza asked of her girlfriend.
“I guess so,” Veronica said with a sigh. “I just . . . I was just beginning to feel better. It’d be nice to have some real time off before everything started up again.”
“Then let’s go out tonight,” Eliza replied, her eyes lighting up. “God, we all could use a night on the town!” she added, looking around at her crew. They all looked like they had been ridden hard and put away wet. In the last few months, they had endured more than any of them should have had to, and it was showing. “What do you guys think?”
————— ————
Many hours later . . .
————— ————
“See you gals later,” Allyson slurred. She had consumed quite a bit of alcohol at the restaurant, then again at the bar and later at the club, and Dennis was getting ready to take her home. Kelik, Thug and Wyrm had bowed out after dinner, and the remaining four had been painting the town red. But Eliza and Veronica weren’t even vaguely tired. There was a full moon, and the two of them still felt like howling. Both had drunk quite a bit, but their paranormal metabolisms had already begun sobering them up. After splitting with their friends, the two found themselves wandering the dark streets and alleys of Springfield.
Eliza was teaching her lover what being a creature of the night really meant. They practiced stalking and sneaking. They found themselves leaping from rooftop to rooftop as quietly as alley cats. Veronica was growing accustomed to being able to see in the dark. She could smell every scent wafting up from all-night cafes and she could smell the cheap perfume from the hookers on the street corners. Just as Eliza had become accustomed to being awake during the day, Veronica found herself feeling alive in the shadows.
They found themselves overlooking a series of apartments near the college. There was a block party going on, and there were people everywhere. The sound of music, the sight of pulsating lights and the smell of alcohol and sex were everywhere. The jumped down from the building they were on and made there way through the crowds. Everyone stared at them, but Eliza doubted any of the onlookers knew who the two were. They weren’t getting stared at because they were some hybrid life forms. They were being stared at because they were too stunningly beautiful “women” in skin-tight black bodysuits that had a look of hunger in their eyes.