[selected small favor quotes on thomas. spoilers ahoy!]
The driver-side window rolled down and revealed a young man whom fathers of teenage daughters would shoot on sight. He had pale skin and deep grey eyes. His dark, slightly curly hair was long enough to declare casual rebellion, and tousled to careless perfection. He wore a black leather jacket and a white shirt, both of them more expensive than any two pieces of furniture at my apartment. In marked contrast, there was a scarf inexpertly crocheted from thick white yarn around his neck, under the collar of the jacket. He faced straight ahead so that I saw only his profile, but I felt confident that he was smirking on the other side of his face, too.
"Thomas," I said. "A lesser man than me would hate you."
He grinned. "There's someone lesser than you?" He rolled his eyes to me on the last word, to deadpan the delivery, and his face froze in an expression of absolute neutrality. He stayed that way for a few seconds. "Empty night, Harry. You look like..."
"Ten miles of bad road?"
He forced a smile onto his mouth, but that was as far as it went. "I was going to go with 'a raccoon.'"
-page 63, chapter eight
"...I'm not going to add to their workload by dragging them into this mess."
"You don't seem to mind adding to mine," Thomas noted.
I snorted. "That's because I respect them."
"So long as we have that clear," he said.
-page 66, chapter eight
"I like the scarf," I said. I leaned over and inhaled through my nose as best I could. It stung, but I detected a faint whiff of vanilla and strawberries. "She make it for you?"
Thomas nodded without saying anything. The leather-gloved fingers of one hand traced over the soft, simple yarn. He looked quietly sad. I felt bad for mentioning Justine, my brother's lost lover. Then I understood why he wore the gloves: If she'd made it for him, a token of her love, he didn't dare touch it with his skin. It would sear him like a hot skillet. So he kept it close enough for him to smell her touch upon it, but he didn't dare let it brush against him.
Every time I think my romantic life is a wasteland, I look at my brother and see how much worse it could be.
-page 67, chapter eight
Thomas produced from nowhere a semiautomatic pistol scaled to fit his truck, and had it trained on Fix's head before the other man had finished speaking the second syllable of the word.
Fix's eyes widened. "Holy crap."
-page 69, chapter nine
Thomas blinked at me, then at the dog. "Can he understand you?"
"When it suits him," I grumped. "He's smarter than a lot of people I know."
Thomas took a moment to absorb that, and then faced Mouse a little uncertainly. "Uh, okay, look. What I said about Harry earlier? I wasn't serious, okay? It was totally a joke."
Mouse flicked his ears and turned his nose away from Thomas with great nobility.
"What?" I asked, looking between them. "What did you say?"
"I'll warm up the car," Thomas said, and retreated to the frozen grey outdoors.
[...]
"Right," Thomas said. "Where are we headed?"
"To where they treat me like royalty," I said.
"We're going to Burger King?"
I rubbed the heel of my hand against my forehead and spelled out fratricide in a subvocal mutter, but I had to spell out temporary insanity and justifiable homiced, too, before I calmed down enough to speak politely. "Just take a left and drive. Please."
"Well," Thomas said, grinning, "since you said 'please.'"
-pages 80-81, chapter ten
"Thomas," I sighed. "Give her a visual?"
My brother looked around, then went over to a nearby rack of steel dumbbells and picked up the largest set there, one in each hand. With about as much effort as I'd use to bundle twigs, he twisted the steel bars around each other, forming an asymmetric X shape. He held it up to make sure Billie saw it, and then dropped it at her feet.
[...]
"Cant say as I blame him," Thomas admitted. His eyes locked on one particular girl who was currently at a table, filling out paperwork. She froze in place, and then looked up, very slowly. Her lips parted as she stared at Thomas, and her dark eyes widened. She started breathing faster, and then shook herself and hurriedly looked down again, pretending to read her paperwork.
My brother closed his eyes slowly and then turned his head away from the girl with the kind of steady, deliberate motion one uses to shut a heavy door. When he blinked his eyes open again, their color had shifted from deep grey to a pale grey-white, almost silver.
"You okay?" I asked him quietly.
"Mmmm," he murmured. "Sorry. Got distracted. There's...a kind of energy here."
Which I probably should have thought of, dammit. This building was home to constant, regular acts of lust and desire. Those kinds of activities left a sort of psychic imprint around them, a vibe Thomas must have picked up on."
Vampires like my brother take not blood, but life-energy from their victims. Showing off his supernatural strength might have simplified things for us, but it also cost Thomas some of that energy, the same way an afternoon of hiking might leave you and me particularly hungry.
Usually vampires of the White Court fed during the act of sex. They could induce desire in others, overwhelm their victims with undiluted, primal lust. If he wanted to Thomas could have paralyzed that girl where she stood, stalked over to her, and done whatever he pleased to her. There wouldn't have been anything she culd do to stop him. Hell, she would have begged him to do more, and to hurry up about it.
He wouldn't do it. Not anymore, anyway. He'd fought that part of himself for years, and he'd finally found a way to keep it under control--by feeding in the equivalent of tiny, harmless nibbles from the customers in the upper-tier beauty salon he owned and operated. I gathered that while it did enable him to remain active and in control of himself, it was nowhere near as satisfying as acquiring energy the old fashioned way--in a stalking seduction culminating in a burst of lust and ecstasy.
I knew that his Hunger, that inhuman portion of his soul that was driven by naked need, was screaming at him to do exactly that. If he did, though, it could do the girl serious harm, even kill her. My brother wasn't like that--but denying his Hunger wasn't something that came naturally. It was a fight. And I knew what drove him to it.
"That girl looks a little like Justine," I commented.
He froze at the name, his expression hardening. By gradual degrees his eyes darkened to their usual color again. Thomas shook his head and gave me a wry smile. "Does she?"
"Enough," I said. "You okay?"
"As I ever am," he said. He didn't actually thank me, but it was in his voice. I pretended that I hadn't heard it there, which was what he expected me to do.
It's a guy thing
pages 84-86, chapter eleven
I did, and the shotgun was trained on my brother. "You, vampire. Sword down. Fingers laced behind your head."
Thomas rolled his eyes and complied. "How come he doesn't have to put his hands behind his head?"
[...]
"It's okay," I said quietly to my brother. "I just feel better if someone I trust is watching the door anyway. Just in case someone else shows up." I cast my eyes meaningfully in the direction of the woods where Thomas had said something lurked."
He shook his head. "Whatever." Then he leaned back against the wall, casual and relaxed, his hands behind his head as if they were only there there to pillow his skull.
-page 96, chapter 12
"I've resisted temptation before, Harry."
"Not like this," I turned a frank gaze to him. "It's a Fallen angel, man. Thousands and thousands of years old. It knows how people think. It knows how to exploit them."
His voice sharpened a little. "I come from a family where everyone's an incubus or a succubus. I think I know a little something about temptation."
"Then you should know how they'd get you." I lowered my voice and said gently, "It could give Justine back to you, Thomas. Let you touch her again."
He stared at me for a second, a flicker of wild longing somewhere far back in his eyes. Then he turned his head slowly back to the road his expression slipping into a neutral mask. "Oh," he said quietly. After a moment he said, "We should probably get rid of the thing."
"We will," I said. "The Church has been up against the Denarians for a couple of thousand years. There are measures they can take."
Thomas glanced down at the ashtray for a second, then dragged his eyes away and glowered at the dented hood of his Hummer. "They couldn't have shown up six months ago. When I was driving a Buick."
I snorted. "As long as you've got your priorities in order."
"I just met them, but already I hate these guys."
pages 113-114, chapter fourteen
As a rule, even members of the supernatural world can't detect what a vampire of the White Court truly is, unless he's actually in the middle of doing something vampity. It's a natural camouflage for his kind, and they rely upon it every much as a leopard does its spots.
page 116, chapter fourteen
"Don't even think it," I said. "It isn't worth it."
Thomas ran his gloved fingers over the white scarf. "Isn't it?"
"You saw how those things operate. They'll manipulate your emotions and self-control, and something bad would happen to Justine. Or they'd wait until they had you hook, line, and sinker and you were their meat puppet. And something bad would happen to Justine."
Thomas shrugged. "I've got one demon in my head already. What's one more?"
I studied his profile. "You've got one monster in your head already," I countered. "She barely survived it."
He was still for a moment. Then he slammed his elbow against the workshop wall, a gesture of pure frustration. Wood splintered, and a little cold air rushed in.
"Maybe you're right," he said in a dull voice.
page 118, chapter fourteen
...and Thomas tended to believe that the best way to approach any given combat was with a maximum of power, speed, and aggressive ferocity.
page 142, chapter seventeen
...Another one turned her hair into about a million strips of living titanium blade, and they were whipping all over the place and shooting through walls. Stretched out like twenty or thirty feet."
"I have some customers like that," Thomas quipped.
page 148, chapter eighteen
"Heh," Thomas sniggered. "Expose yourself."
Murphy tossed an onion ring at him, which he caught and popped in his mouth.
[...]
"What? Thomas asked. Though the figure speaking looked like me, the sound of my brother's voice was unchanged, and a spot of ketchup from his burger still speckled one side of his mouth. He looked around for a moment, then scowled, rose, and ducked into my bedroom to look at himself in the little shaving mirror in the drawer in my bathroom. "You've invented a doll that turns people into their ugly half brothers, eh?"
"Get over yourself, prettyboy," I called.
[...]
"If he looks like you, Harry," Murphy said, "doesn't that mean he's going to be attracting some sort of hostile attention?"
Thomas snorted and appeared in the doorway to my bedroom, his face ketchup-free. "Harry walks around looking like this all the time. Now, that would be awful. I can handle it for a few hours."
pages 153-154, chapter eighteen
"Actually, he's right," Thomas said, passing over my duster. "Seriously. I know temptation."
Molly gave my brother a sidelong look and blushed faintly.
"Stop that," I told him.
Thomas shrugged. "Can't help it. I'm hungry. I wound up jumping rooftop to rooftop for half an hour, dodging a bunch of three-foot-tall lunatics with bows and arrows."
page 220, chapter twenty-seven
My brother threw up his hands. "What does a woman need to do, Harry? Rip her clothes off, throw herself on top of you, and shimmy while screaming, 'Do me, baby!'?" He shook his head. "Sometimes, you're a frigging idiot."
[...]
"I..." I sighed. "I've never been hit on by a woman a hundred and fifty years older than me," I said lamely.
"Try to use your brain around women once in a while, instead of just your juju stick." Thomas tossed me my staff.
I caught it. "Everyone's a critic."
My brother purloined an apple from the basket on the island in the kitchen on his way to the door, glanced over his shoulder, and said, "Moron. Thank God Nicodemus is a man."
page 224, chapter twenty-seven
"Even help from one of those dastardly White Court fiends?" Thomas asked.
"Exactly."
"Good. I was getting tired of dodging Luccio. There's a limited amount of help I can give you if I have to stay out of sight all the time."
"It's necessary. If the Council knew that you and I were related..."
"I know, I know," Thomas said, scowling. "Outcast leper unclean."
I sighed and shook my head. Given that the White Court's modus operandi generally consisted of twisting people's minds around in one of several ways, I didn't dare let anyone on the Council know that Thomas was my friend, let alone my half brother. Everyone would immediately assume the worst--that the White Court had gotten to me and was controlling my head through Thomas. And even if I convinced them that it wasn't the case, it would look suspicious as hell. The Council would demand I demonstrate loyalty, attempt to use Thomas as a spy against the White Court, and in general behave like the pompous, overbearing assholes they are.
pages 330-331, chapter forty
I liked to give Thomas a hard time about the Water Beetle, teasing him that he'd stolen it from the prop room of Jaws. But the fact of the matter was that I didn't know a damned thing about boats, and that I was secretly impressed that he could sail the thing around the lake so blithely.
[...]
As I watched, he drew his heavy Desert Eagle from his side, aimed, and loosed a round. A dark form on one of the oncoming rafts let out a cry and fell into the water with a splash.
I scowled at Thomas. He doesn't even practice.
[...]
"Cover me!" Thomas yelled.
He came down from the wheelhouse pirate style, just jumping down, all graceful and stylish despite the roll of the ship, despite the ice and the cold.
[...]
Thomas started hauling me out of the water by the line around my arm, just pulling me up arm over arm as if I'd been a child and not an adult a hundred pounds heavier than he was. He doesn't even work out.
[...]
"We've got to move before we get carried onto the reef," Thomas muttered. He hurried off, pirate style. He looked good doing it. Of course. He doesn't even moisturize.
pages 387-289, chapter forty-five
He snorted. That was all. "Come on. I've got coffee for you in the car."
"I'm leaving everything to you in my will," I said.
"Cool. Next time I'll leave you in the water."
page 391, chapter forty-six
Thomas wasn't telling me the whole truth. My brother wasn't comfortable in hospitals, and I was pretty sure I'd figured out why: They were full of the sick, the injured, and the elderly--i.e., the kind of herd animals that predators' instincts told them were the weakest, and the easiest targets. My brother didn't like being reminded about that part of his nature. He might hate that it happened, but his instincts would react regardless of what he wanted or didn't want. It would be torture for him to hang around here.
page 393, chapter forty-six
"Nonsense," Mab said. "If you died, I would simply recruit your brother. He would be well motivated to seek revenge upon your killers."
[...]
"He isn't a mortal," I said quietly. "I thought the Knights had to be mortals."
"He is in love," Grimalkin mrowled for Mab. "That is more than mortal enough for me." She tilted her head. "Though I suppose I might make him an offer, while you yet live. He would give much to hold his love again, wold he not?"
pages 401-402, chapter forty-six