Oceans of Possibility
"Ruben...?"

Francess crept across the blankets on the floor. The area of the old Paragon pharmacy that once contained pharmaceuticals was now a sleeping pallet for the fugitives. It was a safe corner, tucked away from the windows. It gave them a place to hide from sunlight and mount a defensive, if anyone broke into the entrance. She felt a lump that might be someone's leg. "Sorry," she whispered and kept going, towards the wall where the vampire slept through the day. On her knees, Francess stopped by his side. She tucked her hands between her thighs. Her hair curtained her face as she leaned over him and tried to make out his features in the dark.

"Psst... Ruben, are you awake?" She bit her lip.

"I'm awake, girl. What're you creepin' around for? Ought to be asleep." He himself hardly slept anymore, his slumber disturbed by bad memories of the last few years of running and hiding. He'd brought the gun with him when he'd finally laid down, and he could feel it on his other side where Francess couldn't see it. The vampire turned his head, felt long hair tickling his cheeks and chin. "You okay? My turn for watch?"

Francess shook her head. Then she remembered he couldn't see her. "No, it's Daniel's turn," she said. She felt foolish for disturbing him. "I can't sleep. I dreamed our house fell down and the sun--" She bit off the rest of the sentence, because a vampire didn't care about a twenty-one-year-old girl's nightmares. Even if he did, he wouldn't want to hear about vampires burning to a crisp in the daylight. "Are you going to sleep all night? Because of your stomach?" When she had an injury, it took rest for it to heal. Once, an Inquisitor stuck a rod through her leg. It took ages to get better.

If he wanted to sleep, Fran decided, she wouldn't mention the favor she wanted.

"The stomach's fine. Still a little tender, but it's mostly healed. I should be up and about tomorrow night." Pause. Ruben shifted under his blanket. He'd stripped down to his underwear to try and sleep, but not even that had worked. "I don't think I can sleep anyway."

The vampire sat up, letting the blanket fall around his waist, exposing his narrow chest. He looked down at his bare belly, noticing the pinkish flesh where the wound had been. "What time is it?"

Because of his state of undress, Fran's cheeks flamed and she was relieved for the darkness. It wasn't the first time she saw a man's bare chest, of course. Living in such close quarters meant the fugitives sometimes dressed or bathed in close proximity, or treated one another's wounds, but usually in the company of others. She blinked. "I'm not sure," she said, "I lost my watch at home. The band broke. I think near nine."

She shifted on her knees. Fran's hands stayed pressed between them. "Cass and I took a walk this morning," she whispered, mindful of anyone sleeping. "It's nice here."

"Depends on what you mean by 'nice', I reckon," Ruben answered with the ghost of a smile. He hadn't been himself for months, the long nightmare of being hunted wearing on even his blase outlook on the world. But for the girl, for Francess, he could at least try. She'd been exposed to enough badness as it was, he didn't have to compound it. "Where'd you walk? What'd you see? I didn't pay attention to much except findin' a place to lay down.

She slid onto her hip and picked at the blanket, which had tiny balls of lint. "We walked to a park and picked some flowers for Cassandra's spells. Then we went to a market and took some fruit. We're going to look for a soup kitchen." All of that was lame, she realized, not of much importance to a vampire. "Most of the houses around ours are empty," she said. "Cass thinks something terrible happened to the neighborhood, but it looks fine to me. There's a lake on the east side of it, and people and demons walk around free. Can you imagine?"

There was a flicker of interest in Ruben's expression, and the vampire sat forward, drawing his legs up so that the blanket concealed his skinny calves. "Yeah? Did you see any of them? Any vampires?" His own kind had been driven almost out of existence by the Inquisitors, and it was rare to see any back where they had come from. Was it different here? A frown creased the pale forehead.

"How many worlds you think there are?" Half the time he didn't care where he went anymore, but the possibility of other worlds was something he'd never really considered. How many other places might there be, places where the Inquisition hadn't scourged the landscape clean of what they were afraid of? "Was it dark enough for somebody like me to be out wanderin' around?"

Francess listened to the questions, unable to answer one before the next was offered. She understood it, though, that insatiable curiosity, the need to know, when knowing was the only power one had. Often, she behaved the same way with the elder fugitives. "I saw a vampire when I projected," she said. Her hair tickled her cheeks so she tucked it back. "But not on my real walk, because it was morning and too bright. As for the worlds..." She helplessly lifted her shoulders. "I don't know."

A moment later, a memory bubbled up. "I read a book once... before they found out about me. It was written by a scientist who worked on the portal generators. He said there could be two, or three, or five million or even infinity, and even the past could be traveled to, because... because time exists everywhere at once." She freed her hands and inspected her thumbnail in the dark. "I didn't understand that part."

Infinity. Ruben didn't even know what such a number would look like, and the hugeness of it forced him to stop contemplating the subject. He hadn't had the benefit of much education when he was alive, and he supposed that as a vampire he hadn't broadened his horizons much. He looked down at the gray blanket covering his legs, then stared over at the blank wall on his right.

"Tell me more about outside." He reflected on the ridiculousness of it for a minute, himself and this girl sitting here whispering to one another as if they were children, and he wondered if she ever resented it, being treated the same as any common vampire. If she ever thought that humans treated one another just the same way his sort acted towards their supposed brethren. For a 'superior' breed, daywalkers weren't that much different. "Were there lots of people?"

Francess nodded. "After we took the fruit, we wandered a bit more, and there were automobiles going past on a road, everyone in a hurry and honking their horns." Sensing his interest, she inched a bit closer and excitedly whispered, "And when I floated the other night, I saw more, in an arena. There were men running on the grass and dirt. They played a sort of game with wooden bats while people cheered on. There must've been..."

She searched the dark ceiling for an estimate, having no real perspective on it. "Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe!" She picked up a piece of hair and twisted it. Then she brushed the pieces across her mouth.

"Baseball. It's called baseball." The game had just begun to become popular at the time of his human death. Ruben was still looking over at the wall, and his left hand drew aimless circles in the dust on the floor. No one had been in here for a long time. He could hear Francess' heartbeat, strangely loud against the silence inside his own chest. "Do you think...?"

He stopped talking, because to go on implied that he was hoping. Hope was a dangerous thing to have in these perilous times, and you never knew when something would come along and crush that hope down into the dirt. But the girl had made him think, and he cast his mind in the direction of his query as recklessly as a little boy throwing rocks. "Do you think, if there's a million worlds out there, there's one where she's all right?"

The vampire shut his mouth, and his back molars set together. He never mentioned Grace to anyone anymore, and to even bring it up to this girl, this human child, was almost too much. The part of him that was still capable of hurting hurt quite a lot over what the Inquisitors had ripped away from him. To have even the ghost of it back would be a balm.

Francess raised her shoulders. "I don't know." She wasn't certain of who he meant, be it a vampire or a lover or a mother or sister, but in the end it didn't matter. The question remained the same. "Perhaps," she said. "Maybe there's a world where my sister still loves me. But if it's so, then I might be jealous and want to go there and want her to love, me, too, to make it right. But it wouldn't be the same. Like... like having a person's twin and playing pretend."

It puzzled her, the entire thought process. The world looked so much the same as theirs, and yet it wasn't. "Do you... do think there might be people who look like us here?" she asked. Oh, how she hoped not. What if one of those Inquisitors saw someone who looked the same as her and shot her, or worse?

"Anything's possible, reckon." Ruben's voice had gone toneless, and he crammed his earlier thoughts into a tiny corner of his mind. He would put it away and not consider it. Hope was dangerous. Hope could get a man killed. The vampire stopped drawing circles, erased them with the palm of his hand. He looked at the dust on his palm, wiped it off on the blanket.

"So what do you want? I know I ain't much company no more, you can't have wandered over here for a chat." He offered Francess that ghostly smile again, but there wasn't much behind it. "What's goin' on, girl?"

Francess wasn't sure whether she should or not -- after all, she was just a 'girl' -- but she politely cleared her throat. "It's Fran," she corrected, wishing to keep her identity. Aside from the clothes on her back, it was all she had. "I wanted to know if you'd go somewhere with me. As..." She chewed her lip and thought up the right word. "As a sort of guard. I wanted to go swimming in the lake, only I know it isn't proper to do so, so I should like to go at night. But it's far too dangerous to go alone."

"Proper." Did she even realize who she was talking to? He hadn't been a living man in nearly a century, and even with a pulse he and basic deency had been acquaintances merely in passing. Ruben looked down to hide the smile, because the girl - Fran - was a companion if not a friend, and he didn't want to laugh in her face. His shoulders were very white in the dimness.

"You plannin' to swim nekkid?" Because it was okay to make her blush, and he flicked the corner of the blanket at her. "I'd not mind if that was the case."

"I..." Francess's jaw flapped. She patched together her dignity as best she could. "I will wear underthings," she said, straightening her posture into a rigid position, which she imagined was aristocratic, but made her look more like an indignant goose. Underwater, wearing a chemise would be almost as bad as wearing nothing, but she couldn't swim in a dress. All the soggy layers would drown her. "You could pretend to be a gentleman and turn your head."

To make a point, she picked up the blanket and tossed it as Ruben's torso. It slung over one shoulder like a toga.

Surprising himself, the vampire chuckled, almost sounding like his old self again. He got to his feet, throwing aside the blanket so that it covered up the stolen machine gun. "Hell, why not?" he asked, stretching. He could stand a walk, if nothing else. "Lemme find my pants and shoes. If'n I'm pretendin' to be a gentleman, I better not wander outside in just my drawers." He dropped the mortal a wink, picked up his clothes where he'd piled them.

He dropped the shirt back where he'd found it, wanting to feel the night air on his skin. Now that he could see out the windows, there were silvery streaks of moonlight coming in through the old venetian blinds. He offered a hand to Francess, trying to keep a straight face. "Milady?"

"Now?" she squeaked. Francess looked around. Now might be a smart time. Only one of their fellow fugitives slept on the pallet. She still wasn't sure whose leg she trampled earlier, and now they gave the barest of grumbles at her high-pitched sound. The others were out wandering, or in other parts of the building. No one need know they went for a walk, if she feared getting a lecture.

She used Ruben's hand to pull herself up. If she stood straight, she was only an inch shorter than him. "I don't suppose you're going to wear a shirt," she said, taking pains to keep her eyes on his face, and the blank walls, and the ceiling, and eventually the floor as she picked across it. "I don't suppose I can fault you for it, either, considering what I'm up to," she hissed.

The hallway leading to the back door was dark and narrow. Having struck her elbow on it once, Francess was careful to walk down its center, arms out to the sides, until she got to the rear exit of the old pharmacy. The door squeaked. She crept into the alleyway and held the door for the vampire.

"Perhaps Daniel went to the loo," she suggested.

Outside, the night was warm and soft, and Ruben closed his eyes as he turned his face up towards the sky. The moon's rays were almost a physical sensation on his skin, kinder than the sun could ever be. "I think that boy's a little absent-minded," he responded, picking out Francess' features in the near-darkness. "Easy to forget yerself when the world slips out from under your feet like this."

He stretched again, the bright light of the moon silvering his face and torso. "Guess you're gonna have to lead the way," he said, gesturing away from the building. "The others'll be fine without us for a little while."

"Oh, of course." Francess, who had been standing center-alley with her arms around her ribcage, remembered that she knew the way. "Um." She looked at the sky and the rooftops. For a moment, she pivoted and she concentrated on how their shapes looked, trying to recall what it was like to float above them. Which way had she gone to find the lake?

Her ankle boots clacked on the asphalt. Tiny flecks of mica shone under the streetlamps and moon. She went to the corner and rubbed her arms as she got her bearings. "We go this way," she said, pointing to the east. "All the way to the end. There's a beach."

Despite there being no traffic, she kept to the sidewalk and walked along the empty storefronts. Most had signs, for sale or rent. A place with bare bookshelves said 'under contract'. Wanting to make conversation, she said, "What will you do if the Inquisitors give up? Will you... will you stay in this city or go exploring?"

"I dunno. Ain't thought much farther than tomorrow. Can't think where I'd go. Ain't like I got people no more. This is better than back there, though. Tired of runnin'."

Ruben was also looking at the buildings, noticing that some of the windows had been broken out. Shards of glass still in the frames caught the streetlamps. "That's provided they know how to give up, though. Not sure 'retreat' is in their vocabulary." He paused, and after a second he snickered. "If they did follow us here? They might've already flopped over dead from culture shock. Serve 'em right, too."

Francess squeezed her sides and smiled. "What, a naked person went by and gave them a heart attack?" She was an innocent girl in some respects, what the modern world would've labeled old-fashioned, but the Inquisitors were Puritanical. "Noooo... a naked demon!" she said, relishing the idea. "The high and mighty Inquisition brought down by someone's dangling demon manhood! It could happen... I saw girls in dresses that stopped here." Francess touched her upper thighs. "Perhaps there's a clan of Scottish demons in kilts."

"Oh, you'd be surprised what's out there, girl. Sorry. Fran. There's a whole great big world of things you ain't ever seen. It was different in my day, back when those of us who weren't exactly accepted could roam free. Pious folks ruin everything." Ruben shook his head, pulled himself away from the melancholy thought. "If they leave us be, what will you do?"

The question sobered her. Francess lifted her shoulders. "I don't know. I wouldn't want to roam, but I haven't many skills." It was her fault for opening the door to the question. The idea of going it alone terrified her. She worried about escaping to another world, leaving behind oppression and punishment, only to land in a perfectly good one and remain destitute. To be destitute and alone was so much worse than running in a pack, as she had for years.

"They say the women here are full of modern ways," she said. "I don't know if I could be modern. Perhaps someone would hire me for household work." As they drew nearer the lake, the scent of the air changed and wind came off it cool and strong. Fran's legs strained against the weight of her layered skirt.

"Modern ain't so bad. When you see things change and remain the same yourself, you learn to try and fit in. It's...it might be different for humans, but for the ones like me, it's a way to stay in one piece. You could probably learn."

The vampire could hear the water now, small waves lapping against the shore, and he watched the prints his shoes left in the sand as the two of them drew closer to the lake's edge. "I haven't seen open water in...." Ruben actually had to stop and think about it, then just shrugged his bare shoulders. "A long time. The last time it was the Pacific Ocean. Ever seen the Pacific, Fran?"

She shook her head no. "Only the Atlantic." She knelt in the sand and untied her laces. "I liked thinking of how it's one ocean," she said, working her fingers in the rough cords. "About how the water molecules on my feet could've been as far away as India." She nudged the shoes off her feet and let them sink into the grains.

"I bet it's cold," she said, looking out at the lake. Anticipatory chillbumps dotted her arms. "Are you going to swim, too, or just stand here?" Francess didn't know if Ruben knew how to swim. True, he was a vampire and couldn't drown, but he could sink like a rock. For the time being, she held onto her clothes and looked around the shore, hoping they were alone and no one would catch her in her unmentionables.

"I might wade in after you." He was already taking off his shoes, his sockless feet making contact with the sand before his toes dug into the loose grains. "When I was a little boy, we had a swimmin' hole a mile or so away from the home place. At least until the drought dried it up, turned it into clay." He stepped into the shallows, looked out across the expanse of water.

"Ain't nobody here but us." He wasn't looking at her, just listening to the steady thump-thump of her heart. "I promise not to tell if'n I see your drawers."

Francess pulled a face at Ruben's back. She had the distinct impression he was mocking her. "Good!" she said, reaching for her hem and tugging the dress overhead. The elastic band of her petticoats allowed them to come easily down her legs. "Because if you did, I'd tell right back! I'd say you tried to bite me without permission, and then Sonya'd have you for supper."

She rolled down her old stockings. Francess balanced on a long leg and looked at the choppy water. She wondered if a person could forget how to swim. If such a thing happened, Ruben would have to wade past the shallows and rescue her, so she left on her slip and walked past him as quickly as possible. Fran's white legs made big splashes as she went up to her knees. "It's freezing!" she said, but kept going until the water lapped her stomach. She dove under and came up rubbing her eyes.

It was cold, even he could tell the difference, and he rolled his pants legs up to mid-calf as he moved farther into the water. Somewhere, a night bird let out a long, lonely-sounding call. He felt...he didn't know what he felt, if anything. Unhindered, maybe. With the Inquisitors no longer directly at his heels, there was the tiniest sliver of the future threatening to peek over the horizon. He had lived for a long time, most of it spent on the other side of the grave. If there was a future to be had here, he could start looking for it.

Ruben started unfastening his belt, his hands acting almost of their own accord, and he drew first one leg free of the garment, then the other. Droplets of water splashed up onto his calves as he re-submerged his feet. He rolled the pants into a careless ball, tossed them onto the shore where they'd stay dry. He waded out farther, felt the water rising up his legs until it was around his waist, soaking his briefs and plastering them to his hips. He dove forward, heard the ker-splunk! before he was underwater, then swam out to join Fran. Re-emerging, he slicked his hair back, water flying from the unruly brown curls. "Whoo, Jesus, it is cold!"

"I know!" Fran's teeth chattered. "I'm looking for ice cubes." She held onto her upper arms. It was too dark to require such modesty; she simply hoped for warmth. When the wind blew, it cooled the drops of water of her arms. She gasped and her lungs had trouble expanding. "If we go in farther, maybe we'll get used to it," she said optimistically. It was naive to think so, but she wouldn't allow her swim to be spoiled by a tiny detail like hypothermia.

She backed into the gentle waves of the lake, until her hair floated around her shoulders like kelp. It made her feel like a mermaid. Once the wind only touched her face, she did feel better. "It must be lovely to be cold-blooded."

"Can't lie, it has advantages." Ruben was chin-deep in the water now, his feet kicking as he pushed farther away from shore. He'd been a good swimmer as a child, unafraid of the depths of the pool of water near his boyhood home. His hearing was muffled by the liquid in his ears. Underneath it, Francess was almost as pale as he was.

"What's your favorite thing about this place so far?"

"Mmm..." Francess paddled into deeper water and tread in place. "Invisibility!" Her legs stopped kicking and she slipped under the surface. The water burned her eyes when she opened them. If she stayed just underneath, she could see the moon warbling, pale yellow and nearly round. She came back up shivering. "When I went into the market, nobody noticed me, even in my clothes, and they aren't fashionable here. No one saw me at all. I could walk for hours, I think, and never have to worry about attracting attention."

She lifted herself into a float on her back.

"I could stand to be invisible." No point in telling her he'd once been invisible and that it made it much easier to hunt that way. Francess, for all her brightness, was in many ways a child, and he would not sour this moment for her. He knew what he was. Reminding her of it wasn't necessary.

The vampire disappeared underwater, darted around the mortal's slender legs within the cold of the lake. He'd seen an aquarium once, a huge one down in Florida. He wondered what the two of them would look like behind glass. After several minutes, he exploded into the open air again, close enough that he could see the color of the girl's eyes despite the lack of light.

"Jesus Lord." The strangest thing in the world for a supposedly damned creature to say. His feet peddled, keeping him above the surface. "Hi, there."

"Whoa... Hi." Francess reigned her arms and legs in closer, so she wouldn't hit his sore stomach. She watched a drop of water bead on his nose and roll off the tip. "Has anyone ever told you that, for a vampire, you're very religious?" The Christian words punctuated his speech all the time. It might have been habit or dialect, she wasn't sure which.

"I don't believe in god," she said. There was nothing maudlin about the confession, only a matter of fact telling of it. "Or souls, not the way we think of them. You're nicer than most people I know who are supposed to have them." She sniffed and kept her legs and arms in motion.

"My daddy was a circuit preacher as a young man," Ruben answered. "When the drought came and turned everything to dust, the family scattered like seeds in a harsh wind. I can't...I can't even remember what he looked like now."

He wiped water away from his cheeks, scooped some of it up in his palm to trickle it over Francess' closest shoulder. "I'm nice to them what's close to me," he continued. "Without you, I reckon I'd've starved in those first months. Nobody trusts a hungry vampire. They're right not to. But at least you ain't a damn fool like a lot of folks. Just 'cause I ain't a 'man' don't mean I got to be a bastard to them what's decent to me."

He kissed her on the cheek, a brush of cool skin on cool skin. The temperature was getting to her. She smelled like lake water. He kissed her other cheek. If he had still possessed the emotional vocabulary for it, he'd have called it solace. He'd become a melancholy creature since the Inquisition had set their sights on him. But he was not 'good', and they both knew it. "Tell me to quit."

The press of Ruben's mouth was sweet and at odds with itself, like a pretty melody out of key. Francess watched him lean in the first time. The second, she closed her eyes. It felt nice to be kissed, an affection she hadn't experienced since she was younger and still a well-dressed, clean, fed girl that could be called pretty.

It was a painful way to live. She had lost things. Two parents, two siblings, a happy childhood removed because of a silly talent. It was awful to have and then have not. To remember the coziness of a four-poster bed from her blanket on a concrete floor. To daydream about mugs full of sweet, hot tea and slippers while her feet froze during the winters outside and her stomach growled. To long for a family pet while uniformed zealots set barking dogs on her heels, saliva splashing her bare calves.

"I will. Tell you to quit, I mean," she said. A wave rolled past, lifting their feet farther from the sandy bottom. The old lace on her chemise floated with her hair. "Just not yet."

There had been another girl once, and she and Ruben had fought and fucked to the last. She was lost to him now, as lost as everything else. Ashes to ashes, literally. He leaned in, found Francess' mouth with his own, feeling the water give way around his feet. His thumb made contact with her warm cheek, brushed all the way down the side of her neck to where the raised flesh on her throat resided. The mark of his bite.

He kept it soft, paying his own form of respect to her youth and innocence. There were a hundred ways he could have taken advantage of her by now if he'd set his mind to it, and without attracting Sonya's wrath, but in the quiet moment of now he could continue to pretend he was a gentleman. They'd both lost so much, been treated as cruelly as if they were cut from the same cloth. But he was better than they were by a damn country mile. For her, he would be something he was not.

"Fran?" The smell of water and skin combined, and he was toying with the ends of her wet hair. The sound of her pulse was louder than the waves now. He bumped his nose against the spot just beneath her ear. "Are you all right?"

She swallowed and nodded. "Uh huh." Underwater, her legs forgot to kick, and she bobbed up and down.

Francess had been kissed before. There was a boy in her neighborhood, Brandon, who went to the same school. He seemed to relish opportunities to make her miserable: he tripped her during lunch, put a lizard down her dress, stuck sticks in her hair, and once pulled up her skirts in front of everyone. Then one day he kissed her full on the mouth, which was as confusing as it was exhilarating. Francess forgave him on the spot. Two days later, the Inquisition came. She wondered what he thought afterwards, knowing he kissed a filthy fugitive.

Ever since, the closest she came to romance was vampire bites. Those were like kisses, sometimes. A few vampires had finesse. Others got gropey and she wound up with knees pressed between her legs, hands fumbling to pull her neckline down. It was a convincing reason to carry a wooden cross under her skirts. When she let someone feed, she kept her hand on the little weapon.

Ruben tasted like lake water. "Don't worry, I won't drown or anything."

"Won't let you."

He found her mouth again, his hand cupping her jaw as part of her chemise wound around his calf under the water. Being patient with her, just relishing the fact that they were both whole and alive despite everything. She felt fragile against him, but he'd already seen her strength. His bottom lip parted from the top one, and the tip of his tongue pressed carefully against the mortal's lower lip. Wanting to give as well as get, coaxing her along, his other hand resting on the small of her back.

"You're okay with me." Muttering the words into the tiny space between them. "Promise you."

Fran's breath hitched. She knew the little intake of air told on her, just like her pulse, and was embarrassed. She didn't want him to know how innocent she was. She hated to always be the youngest, to never be seen as more than a girl. To make up for it, she parted her lips and touched her tongue to the cooler tip of his. The texture of it surprised her, how electric it felt to taste a vampire's mouth. She put her hands on his shoulders.

"Why are you kind?" Francess stretched out her legs and felt the silt underfoot. She balanced on her tiptoes. "You could hurt me and they'd never find out."

"Because..." He had to stop and think about it, because kindness, like solace, was in some ways just a word to him now. He could grab on to the tail end of it, remember what it felt like, but on a day-to-day basis he lost track of the truth behind it. Mostly it was practicality, that when a man needed friends to keep him alive it was best to practice what manners he had around them. But if Francess saw it as kindness, who was he to argue with her?

"Because what they've done to us is wrong. Whatever I am, I can't no more be blamed for it than you'd blame a dog for barkin'. And because I like you, I reckon." That, at least, was the truth, he did like her. She represented the world as it had been, a girl who'd been caught up in things she couldn't control. His feet were resting on the lake bottom now, his hands under the water on Fran's slender hips. He ducked his head, kissed her on the mouth lingeringly. He'd heard the earlier gasp of surprise and knew what it meant, but to him she was as much of an adult as anyone. "Are you still all right with this?" His fingers flexed against sodden fabric where they'd alighted. "I feel like I could kiss you a whole lot if'n you'd let me."

Francess understood. She chewed on her lip and gave a shivery nod to say so. Their noses bumped and the next swell pushed her flush against his torso. She noticed how motionless he was, how he never had to breathe. The cruelty of others brought oddly-matched people together. There was a famous saying about it, 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend'. Had the vampire met her under normal circumstances, she felt certain, when she was a semi-privileged girl with wide eyes and the softness that came with no suffering, Francess would've been a drained corpse in a street.

The Inquisitors' unilateral approach was a flawed strategy. It galvanized those that should've meant nothing to one another.

"I like it," she hedged. "I mean... It feels good to be held." Francess wrapped her arms around his neck. "Don't you think?"

"I do. And it does." He felt her sway, put one arm around her waist to keep her steady. He should probably get her back soon, back and in some dry clothes. If damned Sonya woke up and found them gone, she'd be screeching like a wild-woman when they got back. He didn't want to fight with the Russian, not when they'd just been...swimming. Yeah, swimming, that was all.

Ruben kissed Francess on the forehead, then on the left cheek, then paused for half a second before kissing her mouth again. He was aware of every cell in his body, even the heart that no longer beat. She was warm and sweet in his arms. It helped fill the hole, if not close it up.

"Pretty girl..."

A smile broke on her face, shy and vulnerable and indescribably pleased. "Thank you." Behind his neck, her fingers twined together and messed with his hair. "I think you're very handsome. I like your accent." It was distinctly Colonial, the way people spoke who'd grown up in the former United States, in the rural places. Pockets of the culture remained deep in the south and in the west.

The wind blew harder. Fran's teeth clacked together from cold. "I'd kiss you back, but I might bite your lip on accident." Her ears seemed to draw her shoulders upward. They should get out of the water before she caught a chill, or before others returned and found them gone.

"You're freezin', ain't you?" He rubbed his hands up and down her thin arms, then took her hand to lead her back to shore. "C'mon, I oughta take you on back, get you a blanket so you don't catch pneumonia." It might have been summer, but the lake was icy. As they emerged from the water, the wind blew harder. He linked his fingers with hers.

"You ever say your prayers at night? Before you go to sleep?"

"No." She shook her head; a few times, she tried praying to god just in case it existed, but found herself feeling empty, like talking to thin air. Maybe, if this world was better than the last, she'd find a reason to believe in it. "Why?"

As they walked up the beach, the fabric of her underclothes plastered to her skin. Fran picked up her dress and flipped the material inside-out. It would be best to take off the wet layer before putting on the dry. She waited for Ruben to turn around before quickly shimmying out of the soaking clothes.

"If there is a God, I doubt he'd listen to me." The vampire was looking off down the strip of beach, hitching his pants up around his waist and fastening his belt. The buckle jangled quietly. "I was figurin' if someone else asked to make it possible, he'd see fit to pull those Inquisitors away from us for good. They ain't takin' me back, though. I'll put an end to myself first."

He picked up his shoes, put them over his shoulder to hold them by the laces. He could still taste those innocent kisses on his mouth. They weren't having him, not ever. Ruben turned back to face Francess when he felt sure she'd be dressed, offered that same ghostly smile from earlier. "C'mon. I can smell the day creepin' up. Let's try to find some sleep, huh?"

"Okay." She laced her boots and gathered her wet clothes into a ball. Before they set out, she looked back at the lake with its city light reflections and the moon shining on the whitecaps. Once Francess had it caught in her memory, she trudged through the sand. They were all the way to the sidewalk before she looked at Ruben. She smiled and shrugged. "Just in case there is a god, I'll ask for both of us."