Eternal: More Love Stories With Bite by Anthology Page B

such assumptions in the home of a vampire.

    He looked down at Claire's picture again. Was she counting down the hours, the way he was? Seven hundred years of waiting. Seven hundred.

    ILY. R, he texted. He smirked. Look at the son of the House of Montague, texting. He wasn't big on it. There was no grace in it.

    The era Romeo and Juliet had been born in had been violent, yes, yet graceful in its way. Duty and honor were as real as love at first sight. The twenty-first century was more complicated, with murky rules, coarse language, and coarser behavior. There was sex everywhere. If their story had begun now, instead of back then, they would never have had to kill themselves for the sake of their innocent passion. Very few people these days believed in the kind of love they had—a love that conquered the grave.

    He waited. She didn't text back.

    J? he added, with a flash of irritation. Or was it fear?

    There's nothing to fear, he reminded himself. She is Juliet. My search is over. But the fear wouldn't go away. It washed over him like the horror of finding himself buried in unhallowed ground, behind the sanctuary of his family's vault. He was a suicide, after all, destined for hell, and a suicide did not deserve to lie with the faithful sons and daughters of the church.

    He balled his fists. Sometimes he wanted to lock Juliet in her room, as men had done back in his time to protect their women. The world outside was dangerous. Look what had happened to Juliet herself, sneaking out to meet him. Her father had been too permissive. And his daughter had come to grief.

    Nothing could have stopped us, he thought. Not locks, nor fathers. We were fortune's fools.

    He'd thought long and hard about recapturing those days for her. About making sure nothing happened to her. He could move them to a more old-fashioned, isolated villa—a place in the Italian countryside, where people lived slower, simpler lives. Maybe in Mantua; he hadn't minded his brief exile there. The sunsets there had brought tears to his eyes.

    Mantua was where things had gone wrong. Where he had not received the letter informing him that she was lying in a stupor in the Capulet tomb, waiting for him to wake her with a kiss. The architect of that fiasco, Friar Lawrence, had promised she would one day return to her beloved. Insisted that he'd arranged for it to happen. But the old magician had died a failure in that as well, refusing at the end to be saved from death in the way he had saved Romeo.

    "Better to die," the old man had said, gasping, "than to become like you."

    "Tormented," Romeo had whispered through his fangs. "As you made me."

    For centuries Romeo had roamed the world, seeking her. Juliet, Juliet, where art thou, Juliet? Paying magicians, then torturing them, to force them to do what Friar Lawrence had promised. Studying in monasteries, fasting, scourging himself. Praying, threatening. Friar Lawrence had sworn that she'd return. But she had not.

    His despair was the cause of his temper. Take love from him, and light was absent. He was a vampire, a creature of darkness, whose black deeds were born in a heart that was dying of loneliness, and regret.

    Then, by love's light wings, he'd found her—on Face- book. His search engine had pointed to her after she had quoted the Shakespeare play about them. Then he had seen the confirming crescent moon on her shoulder. Not a tattoo, but a real birthmark, like Juliet's. The chances of finding her in such a seemingly random manner made him wonder if there was a God after all, one that could perform miracles. He had long ago ceased to believe in magic, though Friar Lawrence had sworn on his immortal soul that magic would bring her back. After the first fifty years of waiting, and then the first century, Romeo probably would have killed the old monk-cum-sorcerer for the sin of false hope, if Lawrence hadn't died first.

    Juliet. G iulietta. Her contemporary name was Claire Johnson, and she lived in