Fic: 50 Sentences of ALVH
Title: 50 Sentences of ALVH
Author: Ivybramble
Fandom: Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter
Summary: What can I say? Sometimes a gal needs to shake things up and try on a new fandom for size. XD Mostly movie based with some novel references. (And one insult blatantly stolen from Stephen Sondheim.) Also...spoilers!
Rating: R for allusions to vampiric violence and period racial slurs.
Disclaimer: I own nothing and make no money.
#01 - Air
The truly exasperating thing about arguing politics with Henry was not, as one might have supposed, that the vampire was quite possibly more damnably mule stubborn than any and all of the opponents Abraham had faced both during his ascent to the Presidency and after winning it, no, the truly exasperating thing was that Henry never hesitated to take advantage of the pauses in Abraham's arguments that breathing necessitated.
#02 - Apples
At first Speed managed, with what he considered commendable effort, to swallow each retort on the tip of his tongue with a generous, vicious bite of apple as Abe listed the reasons a would-be-lawyer-shop boy could never be enough for someone like Miss Mary Todd but when that list began to stretch into the mid-twenties he succumbed to the urge to stop Abe's mouth with the apple instead and bluntly informed him that he was being ridiculous.
#03 - Beginning
The beginning of a malevolent smile bloomed as Adam studied the engraved and undeniably sentimental silver trinket resting in his gloved palm, he wondered if Mr. Lincoln had the slightest inking of how far he had managed to get under Henry's skin or how difficult a feat that was to accomplish these days.
#04 - Bugs
"Your 'pestering horsefly' seems powerfully fond of you," Henry quipped once the Kentuckian had moved out of earshot and was rewarded with the pleasure of watching Abraham blush and choke on his champagne at the reminder of the less than flattering description he'd penned so long ago.
#05 - Coffee
Coffee brown eyes met their grey counterparts for the first time since he'd walked through the door of A. Y. Ellis & Co. and Will held his breath, wondering if he'd been chasing a childish remembrance that held no bearing or impact here in the present, then Abraham hopped over the counter, grinning, to embrace him.
#06 - Dark
Mary knew that reading the journal was both an invasion of privacy and a breach of trust...but she also knew when her husband was lying to her and she refused to be kept in the dark any longer.
#07 - Despair
Were he entirely honest (which he avoided whenever possible) Henry might have confessed that he'd had no intention of ever letting Abraham near Jack Barts again for the simple reason that a hunter's best defense was anonymity...but Barts knew about Mary and Henry was too intimately familiar with the taste of that particular kind of despair to wish it on a friend.
#08 - Doors
The hazard of listening at doors, Abraham discovered on the morning he first woke in Henry Sturges' home, lay in that it was all too easy to...misinterpret what one was hearing.
#09 - Drink
It would be so damnably easy...with the last of the bandages tied off and the foolish boy he's rescued still unconscious, Henry wouldn't even have to open a vein to drink from...he could just lick his fingers...but while he is undeniably a monster he still remembers what it was to be a man...and so he doesn't.
#10 - Duty
Their political views were simply incompatible, always had been, but Joshua Speed believed with all his heart that a man had a duty to his friends, so while he had no intention of ever accepting a political position of any sort there was precious little else he wouldn't undertake for his friend's sake.
#11 - Earth
The one drawback of the salt of the earth modesty she so admires in the man is that it necessitates Mary herself be considerably less subtle regarding her own affections than is generally considered appropriate for a young lady of her standing - poor Mr. Lincoln, always so quick to point out the finer qualities in others, is frustratingly oblivious to his own.
#12 - End
Will Johnson had been threatened with many a creative end over the years but 'Get him in any more trouble Mister Johnson and I will have your balls for a coin purse' damn well beat the Dutch...mostly on account of the utter sincerity with which it had been delivered.
#13 - Fall
Abraham receives a handsome pile of congratulatory letters in the fall of 1860 but the one that manages to stamp a lasting smile on his face
comes from the opposite side of the political divide, offers the possibility of a cure to a friendship that has spent far too many years dying by degrees and concludes 'I am as ever your friend, J.F. Speed.'
#14 - Fire
"There is a fine line Mister Lincoln between determination, which is admirable, and stubbornness, which is decidedly not," his mentor scolded, eyes narrowed behind his tinted spectacles, as he finished wrapping Abraham's bloody and blistered palms in oil soaked bandages that leeched the fire out of the pain.
#15 - Flexible
A vampire does not survive, let along thrive, for 5000 years without learning to be flexible - the hunter accepting his offer and trying to take Henry's head would be every bit as amusing to Adam as turning the man and force feeding him his negro friend...unfortunately he was denied both amusements by a horse and carriage smashing through his front door and running down his sister.
#16 - Flying
As Barts sent the horse flying toward his head, Abraham found that all thought emptied out save one - 'These are the last seconds of my life.'
#17 - Food
The fact of the matter was that, following their brush with death at the Eden Plantation and the realization of exactly what about Henry Sturges made him uneasy, all Will could see when he looked at Abe's 'business associate' was another vampire playing with its food.
#18 - Foot
Even if he lived to be a hundred Joshua Speed was certain he was never going to have the privilege of witnessing anything as consistently hilarious as the swiftness with which his new associate transformed from an eloquent and entertaining storyteller to a lovestruck fool without a prayer of avoiding inserting his foot directly into his mouth every time Miss Mary Todd so much as looked at him.
#19 - Grave
Speed's countenance is unexpectedly grave when Abraham shares the new of his impending nuptials with his friends, "Tell me you ain't going to need another dance lesson Lincoln. I'm mighty pleased for the pair of you but Merciful Christ I still ain't recovered from the last one."
#20 - Green
There's a portrait of a beautiful lady in green that Abraham desperately wants to ask about because it's the only one of Henry's many, many possessions that he ever lingers over, but the absolutely devastated expression that inevitably settles over Henry's features during the course of said lingering convinces him to leave the inquiry unvoiced.
#21 - Head
Mary was a mite disappointed that, after she had employed the man's ridiculous hat in tandem with her own 'ravishing resourcefulness' to eliminate the difference in their heights, Abe's eyes suddenly slid away from hers as he tilted his head so that her kiss would land on his cheek.
#22 - Hollow
Abraham cannot for the life of him pinpoint the exact moment when the polite, hollow smiles Will Johnson and Joshua Speed normally forced themselves to exchange for his sake had filled out and become genuine but he never stops being grateful for the miracle.
#23 - Honour
Henry Sturges might claim that his loathing of his own kind was fueled by there being 'no honour in taking sleeping children from their beds or feasting on the innocent' but Speed was willing to wager that an all too familiar inability to resist one particular pair of melancholy grey eyes played a substantial supporting role.
#24 - Hope
Happiness was something that Abraham had never dared to hope he might one day possess - not until he found himself, against all odds, both a husband and a father.
#25 - Light
Abraham relives the moment over and over again in his nightmares - a breeze extinguishes the light of his candle, the door creaks open, and then he lifts up the board and finds himself staring into the soulless black eyes of the monster who took his mother - he'd thought that killing Barts might finally put an end to the nightmares...it doesn't.
#26 - Lost
As the hours slipped away without Speed saying a single word to him Abraham's relief at not having lost his job (in spite of his stint in jail and broken promise) was replaced by the sinking feeling that he might very well have lost something dearer.
#27 - Metal
There are moments when Mary desperately wants to build up a blazing fire, throw Abe's pocket watch into it and watch it melt - but while the inscription inside the damnable trinket bore partial responsibility for the loss of their little boy, the metal it was crafted from bore partial responsibility for the preservation of her husband's life.
#28 - New
The thing Adam loved most about the New World was the opportunity opened by it, a man could pull himself up by his bootstraps and carve out a kingdom were he only ambitious and industrious enough...though a decided lack of scruples certainly did no harm to his chances.
#29 - Old
The thing Henry missed most about the Old World was the superstition that infused it, a man who believed in the possibility of something preternatural and pointy toothed lurking in the dark tended to be more respectful of it...though caution could not, alas, guarantee survival.
#30 - Peace
Moments of peace and quiet had been few and far between when a man was engaged in helping his President save the country from both vampires and its own divided self - these days Will found himself yearning for the familiar rapid fire rambling of one particularly irrepressible gentleman from Kentucky to fill up the heavy silence.
#31 - Poison
Though Henry had nothing but the highest respect for the works of William Shakespeare he found the notion of poisoning via the ear rather comedic...until that fatal fifteenth of February, 1865 brought him news he was certain would have been sufficient to render him 'at once dispatch'd' had he still been in possession of a beating heart.
#32 - Pretty
Abraham had always appreciated Will's occasionally wicked sense of humour, however, he was also acutely aware of the fact that there were those who would not - which was why he nearly choked on his tongue the first time Will teased Speed about being 'pretty' in the same nonchalant way he always teased Abe about being 'ugly'.
#33 - Rain
Mouth stained a damning crimson and his story told Henry half expected the next sensation he felt to be the sharp bite of the hunter's axe - the quietly voiced apology and farewell Abraham offered before walking away and leaving him alone in the rain cut infinitely deeper.
#34 - Regret
With his axe out of reach, a blade a whisper from Will's throat, and the threat of being forcibly transformed into what he hated most hanging over his head the regret of having chosen not to adhere to Henry's 'no friends, no family' rule threatened to swallow Abraham whole, then Speed came crashing to their rescue.
#35 - Roses
Vadoma lingered just long enough to watch the roses drain from darling Willie Lincoln's precious little tear stained cheeks then slipped away, message delivered, seconds before the child's concerned mother burst into the playroom.
#36 - Secret
After she first read the journal Mary kept herself awake at night agonizing over the possibility that perhaps the difference between Abraham sharing his secret with Joshua Speed and sharing his secret with her was not to be found in the turn of his phrases, the tone of his voice or the look in his eyes...perhaps the only difference to be found was in that she hadn't believed him.
#37 - Snakes
Stephen Douglas knew his days were numbered from the moment he'd concluded his, unnecessary as it turned out and didn't that beat all, revelation of where the real power in the Confederate States lay to President Lincoln - when it came to their personal dealings vampires resembled nothing so much as snakes, they were content to ignore you until you trod on them...then came the swift sting of a bite and a slow, painful death.
#38 - Snow
Will was taken aback when fingers as cold as snow brushed gently across his burning forehead, he'd always reckoned that Henry's bouts of doting and occasional bedside vigil were reserved for Abe and Abe alone...but he was even more taken aback at how deeply touched he was to have been wrong.
#39 - Solid
The President stubbornly elected to ignore the ongoing stream of profanities delivered by a familiar, plummy baritone in the hallway outside his office for a solid hour before he was forced to resign himself to the fact that the sun would sooner cease to rise in the morning than Stephen A. Douglas be moved without speaking his piece.
#40 - Spring
It felt as though he'd strayed into a dream, being out for a spring picnic with the most beautiful woman in Illinois...then again in his dreams Abe usually managed not to make such a blamed fool of himself.
#41 - Stable
'Plant your feet and stand firm,' her father had always told her...but Mary finds she cannot be certain there is any stable ground left in a world where honest men lie to their loved ones and monsters come out of the darkness to snatch and devour little boys.
#42 - Strange
Adam's moment of victory was marred when he registered that the blood filling his mouth tasted strange...then Henry used the arm his fangs were sunk into to rip him away from President Lincoln.
#43 - Summer
As vampires did not perspire every sparring session conducted out in the summer heat required that Henry negotiate the perilous balance between making contact with Abraham frequently enough to 'borrow' the sweat of the younger man's brow and keeping those moments of contact brief enough that the hunter failed to notice the unnatural chill of his skin.
#44 - Taboo
Joshua Speed was certain that each and every one of his ancestors was rolling in their graves over the number of social taboos he was ignoring by having a celebratory drink with a coloured man, never mind the fact that they were sharing the same bottle...but Will was Abe's friend and given that they had all just narrowly escaped being murdered by honest to God vampires social taboos suddenly didn't seem all that important.
#45 - Ugly
Countless people, including the man himself, rated the President's appearance on a scale that began with 'plain' and ended with 'ugly' but Henry had never been able to fathom why - when he looked at Abraham he saw the strength of purpose that radiated from the man's every pore and shone so brightly it put the vampire in mind of what it had been to look at the sun without requiring the protection of tinted glass.
#46 - War
John Wilkes Booth doesn't care a continental that the war is over nor that his kind are abandoning America in droves, he has no intention of allowing that vulgar, high and mighty nigger lover to have things all his own way.
#47 - Water
It seemed such a trivial thing, the way extreme emotion wrung water drops from the human eye, but Henry was nearly certain that being able to weep would have proved a greater comfort to him in his grief than trussing Booth up in silver chains and leaving him to burn with the barn had been.
#48 - Welcome
Though the suggestion was far from welcome Abraham managed, with what he considered commendable effort, to swallow the automatic rebuttal on the tip of his tongue as Speed listed the reasons why he would be infinitely more plausible as a traitor to the cause than Will but when that list began to stretch into the mid-twenties Abe was forced to concede that the other man might be onto something.
#49 - Winter
"Heavens, Mister Sturges, you're as chilly as the winter wind!" Underlying the panic that the vampire had presumed to invite himself to their wedding was a sharp stab of mortification at the immediacy with which Mary noted one of the many peculiarities that had never caught nor held Abraham's attention until after he'd caught Henry feeding and finally recognized him for what he was.
#50 - Wood
Faced with the prospect of weeks of pulling splinters of rotten wood from the back of his head and an eternity of partial blindness Jack Barts resolved to disclose neither the events of the evening nor the identities of his assailants to his superiors, he'd settle Henry Sturges and Abraham-Fucking-Lincoln personally.
Author: Ivybramble
Fandom: Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter
Summary: What can I say? Sometimes a gal needs to shake things up and try on a new fandom for size. XD Mostly movie based with some novel references. (And one insult blatantly stolen from Stephen Sondheim.) Also...spoilers!
Rating: R for allusions to vampiric violence and period racial slurs.
Disclaimer: I own nothing and make no money.
#01 - Air
The truly exasperating thing about arguing politics with Henry was not, as one might have supposed, that the vampire was quite possibly more damnably mule stubborn than any and all of the opponents Abraham had faced both during his ascent to the Presidency and after winning it, no, the truly exasperating thing was that Henry never hesitated to take advantage of the pauses in Abraham's arguments that breathing necessitated.
#02 - Apples
At first Speed managed, with what he considered commendable effort, to swallow each retort on the tip of his tongue with a generous, vicious bite of apple as Abe listed the reasons a would-be-lawyer-shop boy could never be enough for someone like Miss Mary Todd but when that list began to stretch into the mid-twenties he succumbed to the urge to stop Abe's mouth with the apple instead and bluntly informed him that he was being ridiculous.
#03 - Beginning
The beginning of a malevolent smile bloomed as Adam studied the engraved and undeniably sentimental silver trinket resting in his gloved palm, he wondered if Mr. Lincoln had the slightest inking of how far he had managed to get under Henry's skin or how difficult a feat that was to accomplish these days.
#04 - Bugs
"Your 'pestering horsefly' seems powerfully fond of you," Henry quipped once the Kentuckian had moved out of earshot and was rewarded with the pleasure of watching Abraham blush and choke on his champagne at the reminder of the less than flattering description he'd penned so long ago.
#05 - Coffee
Coffee brown eyes met their grey counterparts for the first time since he'd walked through the door of A. Y. Ellis & Co. and Will held his breath, wondering if he'd been chasing a childish remembrance that held no bearing or impact here in the present, then Abraham hopped over the counter, grinning, to embrace him.
#06 - Dark
Mary knew that reading the journal was both an invasion of privacy and a breach of trust...but she also knew when her husband was lying to her and she refused to be kept in the dark any longer.
#07 - Despair
Were he entirely honest (which he avoided whenever possible) Henry might have confessed that he'd had no intention of ever letting Abraham near Jack Barts again for the simple reason that a hunter's best defense was anonymity...but Barts knew about Mary and Henry was too intimately familiar with the taste of that particular kind of despair to wish it on a friend.
#08 - Doors
The hazard of listening at doors, Abraham discovered on the morning he first woke in Henry Sturges' home, lay in that it was all too easy to...misinterpret what one was hearing.
#09 - Drink
It would be so damnably easy...with the last of the bandages tied off and the foolish boy he's rescued still unconscious, Henry wouldn't even have to open a vein to drink from...he could just lick his fingers...but while he is undeniably a monster he still remembers what it was to be a man...and so he doesn't.
#10 - Duty
Their political views were simply incompatible, always had been, but Joshua Speed believed with all his heart that a man had a duty to his friends, so while he had no intention of ever accepting a political position of any sort there was precious little else he wouldn't undertake for his friend's sake.
#11 - Earth
The one drawback of the salt of the earth modesty she so admires in the man is that it necessitates Mary herself be considerably less subtle regarding her own affections than is generally considered appropriate for a young lady of her standing - poor Mr. Lincoln, always so quick to point out the finer qualities in others, is frustratingly oblivious to his own.
#12 - End
Will Johnson had been threatened with many a creative end over the years but 'Get him in any more trouble Mister Johnson and I will have your balls for a coin purse' damn well beat the Dutch...mostly on account of the utter sincerity with which it had been delivered.
#13 - Fall
Abraham receives a handsome pile of congratulatory letters in the fall of 1860 but the one that manages to stamp a lasting smile on his face
comes from the opposite side of the political divide, offers the possibility of a cure to a friendship that has spent far too many years dying by degrees and concludes 'I am as ever your friend, J.F. Speed.'
#14 - Fire
"There is a fine line Mister Lincoln between determination, which is admirable, and stubbornness, which is decidedly not," his mentor scolded, eyes narrowed behind his tinted spectacles, as he finished wrapping Abraham's bloody and blistered palms in oil soaked bandages that leeched the fire out of the pain.
#15 - Flexible
A vampire does not survive, let along thrive, for 5000 years without learning to be flexible - the hunter accepting his offer and trying to take Henry's head would be every bit as amusing to Adam as turning the man and force feeding him his negro friend...unfortunately he was denied both amusements by a horse and carriage smashing through his front door and running down his sister.
#16 - Flying
As Barts sent the horse flying toward his head, Abraham found that all thought emptied out save one - 'These are the last seconds of my life.'
#17 - Food
The fact of the matter was that, following their brush with death at the Eden Plantation and the realization of exactly what about Henry Sturges made him uneasy, all Will could see when he looked at Abe's 'business associate' was another vampire playing with its food.
#18 - Foot
Even if he lived to be a hundred Joshua Speed was certain he was never going to have the privilege of witnessing anything as consistently hilarious as the swiftness with which his new associate transformed from an eloquent and entertaining storyteller to a lovestruck fool without a prayer of avoiding inserting his foot directly into his mouth every time Miss Mary Todd so much as looked at him.
#19 - Grave
Speed's countenance is unexpectedly grave when Abraham shares the new of his impending nuptials with his friends, "Tell me you ain't going to need another dance lesson Lincoln. I'm mighty pleased for the pair of you but Merciful Christ I still ain't recovered from the last one."
#20 - Green
There's a portrait of a beautiful lady in green that Abraham desperately wants to ask about because it's the only one of Henry's many, many possessions that he ever lingers over, but the absolutely devastated expression that inevitably settles over Henry's features during the course of said lingering convinces him to leave the inquiry unvoiced.
#21 - Head
Mary was a mite disappointed that, after she had employed the man's ridiculous hat in tandem with her own 'ravishing resourcefulness' to eliminate the difference in their heights, Abe's eyes suddenly slid away from hers as he tilted his head so that her kiss would land on his cheek.
#22 - Hollow
Abraham cannot for the life of him pinpoint the exact moment when the polite, hollow smiles Will Johnson and Joshua Speed normally forced themselves to exchange for his sake had filled out and become genuine but he never stops being grateful for the miracle.
#23 - Honour
Henry Sturges might claim that his loathing of his own kind was fueled by there being 'no honour in taking sleeping children from their beds or feasting on the innocent' but Speed was willing to wager that an all too familiar inability to resist one particular pair of melancholy grey eyes played a substantial supporting role.
#24 - Hope
Happiness was something that Abraham had never dared to hope he might one day possess - not until he found himself, against all odds, both a husband and a father.
#25 - Light
Abraham relives the moment over and over again in his nightmares - a breeze extinguishes the light of his candle, the door creaks open, and then he lifts up the board and finds himself staring into the soulless black eyes of the monster who took his mother - he'd thought that killing Barts might finally put an end to the nightmares...it doesn't.
#26 - Lost
As the hours slipped away without Speed saying a single word to him Abraham's relief at not having lost his job (in spite of his stint in jail and broken promise) was replaced by the sinking feeling that he might very well have lost something dearer.
#27 - Metal
There are moments when Mary desperately wants to build up a blazing fire, throw Abe's pocket watch into it and watch it melt - but while the inscription inside the damnable trinket bore partial responsibility for the loss of their little boy, the metal it was crafted from bore partial responsibility for the preservation of her husband's life.
#28 - New
The thing Adam loved most about the New World was the opportunity opened by it, a man could pull himself up by his bootstraps and carve out a kingdom were he only ambitious and industrious enough...though a decided lack of scruples certainly did no harm to his chances.
#29 - Old
The thing Henry missed most about the Old World was the superstition that infused it, a man who believed in the possibility of something preternatural and pointy toothed lurking in the dark tended to be more respectful of it...though caution could not, alas, guarantee survival.
#30 - Peace
Moments of peace and quiet had been few and far between when a man was engaged in helping his President save the country from both vampires and its own divided self - these days Will found himself yearning for the familiar rapid fire rambling of one particularly irrepressible gentleman from Kentucky to fill up the heavy silence.
#31 - Poison
Though Henry had nothing but the highest respect for the works of William Shakespeare he found the notion of poisoning via the ear rather comedic...until that fatal fifteenth of February, 1865 brought him news he was certain would have been sufficient to render him 'at once dispatch'd' had he still been in possession of a beating heart.
#32 - Pretty
Abraham had always appreciated Will's occasionally wicked sense of humour, however, he was also acutely aware of the fact that there were those who would not - which was why he nearly choked on his tongue the first time Will teased Speed about being 'pretty' in the same nonchalant way he always teased Abe about being 'ugly'.
#33 - Rain
Mouth stained a damning crimson and his story told Henry half expected the next sensation he felt to be the sharp bite of the hunter's axe - the quietly voiced apology and farewell Abraham offered before walking away and leaving him alone in the rain cut infinitely deeper.
#34 - Regret
With his axe out of reach, a blade a whisper from Will's throat, and the threat of being forcibly transformed into what he hated most hanging over his head the regret of having chosen not to adhere to Henry's 'no friends, no family' rule threatened to swallow Abraham whole, then Speed came crashing to their rescue.
#35 - Roses
Vadoma lingered just long enough to watch the roses drain from darling Willie Lincoln's precious little tear stained cheeks then slipped away, message delivered, seconds before the child's concerned mother burst into the playroom.
#36 - Secret
After she first read the journal Mary kept herself awake at night agonizing over the possibility that perhaps the difference between Abraham sharing his secret with Joshua Speed and sharing his secret with her was not to be found in the turn of his phrases, the tone of his voice or the look in his eyes...perhaps the only difference to be found was in that she hadn't believed him.
#37 - Snakes
Stephen Douglas knew his days were numbered from the moment he'd concluded his, unnecessary as it turned out and didn't that beat all, revelation of where the real power in the Confederate States lay to President Lincoln - when it came to their personal dealings vampires resembled nothing so much as snakes, they were content to ignore you until you trod on them...then came the swift sting of a bite and a slow, painful death.
#38 - Snow
Will was taken aback when fingers as cold as snow brushed gently across his burning forehead, he'd always reckoned that Henry's bouts of doting and occasional bedside vigil were reserved for Abe and Abe alone...but he was even more taken aback at how deeply touched he was to have been wrong.
#39 - Solid
The President stubbornly elected to ignore the ongoing stream of profanities delivered by a familiar, plummy baritone in the hallway outside his office for a solid hour before he was forced to resign himself to the fact that the sun would sooner cease to rise in the morning than Stephen A. Douglas be moved without speaking his piece.
#40 - Spring
It felt as though he'd strayed into a dream, being out for a spring picnic with the most beautiful woman in Illinois...then again in his dreams Abe usually managed not to make such a blamed fool of himself.
#41 - Stable
'Plant your feet and stand firm,' her father had always told her...but Mary finds she cannot be certain there is any stable ground left in a world where honest men lie to their loved ones and monsters come out of the darkness to snatch and devour little boys.
#42 - Strange
Adam's moment of victory was marred when he registered that the blood filling his mouth tasted strange...then Henry used the arm his fangs were sunk into to rip him away from President Lincoln.
#43 - Summer
As vampires did not perspire every sparring session conducted out in the summer heat required that Henry negotiate the perilous balance between making contact with Abraham frequently enough to 'borrow' the sweat of the younger man's brow and keeping those moments of contact brief enough that the hunter failed to notice the unnatural chill of his skin.
#44 - Taboo
Joshua Speed was certain that each and every one of his ancestors was rolling in their graves over the number of social taboos he was ignoring by having a celebratory drink with a coloured man, never mind the fact that they were sharing the same bottle...but Will was Abe's friend and given that they had all just narrowly escaped being murdered by honest to God vampires social taboos suddenly didn't seem all that important.
#45 - Ugly
Countless people, including the man himself, rated the President's appearance on a scale that began with 'plain' and ended with 'ugly' but Henry had never been able to fathom why - when he looked at Abraham he saw the strength of purpose that radiated from the man's every pore and shone so brightly it put the vampire in mind of what it had been to look at the sun without requiring the protection of tinted glass.
#46 - War
John Wilkes Booth doesn't care a continental that the war is over nor that his kind are abandoning America in droves, he has no intention of allowing that vulgar, high and mighty nigger lover to have things all his own way.
#47 - Water
It seemed such a trivial thing, the way extreme emotion wrung water drops from the human eye, but Henry was nearly certain that being able to weep would have proved a greater comfort to him in his grief than trussing Booth up in silver chains and leaving him to burn with the barn had been.
#48 - Welcome
Though the suggestion was far from welcome Abraham managed, with what he considered commendable effort, to swallow the automatic rebuttal on the tip of his tongue as Speed listed the reasons why he would be infinitely more plausible as a traitor to the cause than Will but when that list began to stretch into the mid-twenties Abe was forced to concede that the other man might be onto something.
#49 - Winter
"Heavens, Mister Sturges, you're as chilly as the winter wind!" Underlying the panic that the vampire had presumed to invite himself to their wedding was a sharp stab of mortification at the immediacy with which Mary noted one of the many peculiarities that had never caught nor held Abraham's attention until after he'd caught Henry feeding and finally recognized him for what he was.
#50 - Wood
Faced with the prospect of weeks of pulling splinters of rotten wood from the back of his head and an eternity of partial blindness Jack Barts resolved to disclose neither the events of the evening nor the identities of his assailants to his superiors, he'd settle Henry Sturges and Abraham-Fucking-Lincoln personally.