<i>Normal </i>was only a farce in the grand scheme of things. He slipped in a sports coat and pants and stood in front of a classroom for the sake of blending into the rest of the world when the reality was that he had over-extended his stay there to begin with. It was this kind of narcissistic behavior that kept him alive. The knowledge that he<i>could </i>keep himself alive, regardless of the means. Lane might have assumed that she had met a man who had raised the bar on her past relationships, but the truth of the matter was that he was a masochistic son of a bitch who didn't have a natural bone in his body any longer. Too much meddling with his own genetic make up had left him half crippled, even if he could hide the fact from the rest of the world.<br/><br/>He took the book when he left her place. He wanted to look at it more closely, he said, and had given her a brief peck on the lips and a caress on her cheek with his knuckles before he had ducked out the door and into the fresh air. Rather than progress his day like normal, he sent the e-mail out from his phone to cancel his classes once he had reached the apartment he called his own, tucked away on the edge of the city, nondescript in that it screamed<i>normal</i>to the outside world.<br/><br/>He had access to a lab at the university; one of the reasons he had maintained this profession over anything else consistently over the years, despite his need to pick up a new identity and a new city once every fifteen years or so. Only so much time could go by before those he saw on an every day basis starting squinting too hard at the fact that, underneath the growth of facial hair he started to keep, his features had hardly changed. Lately, he had noticed small lines around his eyes and mouth. Subtle signs of aging that he briefly stressed over. And it wasn't the first time his age had crept up, through the last fifty years, as if time were finding ways to normalize his biology once more. Only now time was killing him.<br/><br/>He had told Lane Barnes only half-truths regarding his intentions. The burning pain in his thigh that was a constant throb through his veins was only one problem of many. The demon's mark was a nuisance dulled by modern drugs. He had been able to hide it the night before, but alone in the stark apartment with only the bare minimum of furnishings to keep him company, it was a dull roar in his mind that leveraged him to the bathroom once he had tossed his keys on the counter. The shaking in his fingertips was just another indicator as he rifled through his drawer with blurred vision.<br/><br/>The needle he pulled forth was sterilized at the very least by the time he had propped himself on the closed lid of the toilet with his arm showing off its balancing act on his raised knee as he guided the point into one of the popping veins on the inside of his arm. The prick of pain was worth the sigh of relief that washed over him within minutes of the morphine entering his system, leaving any outside sensation nothing but a numb buzz across his skin. Shaking himself, he hid away the tools of this particular vice and soon moved to the office adjacent his bathroom.<br/><br/><i>Here </i>was where the real clutter stood out. It was his own version of a workshop with its myriad of books stacked high on bookshelves and what looked akin to a child's mad scientist lab set where a desk should have been against one wall. Or perhaps it was less the former and more like something straight out of one of those B rated fantasy films, where the old wizard has his collection of vials and beakers archaically labeled to grab off the shelf.<i>Eye of newt.. Farts of a dragon..</i><br/><br/>Only these were not meticulously labeled, nor were they archaic. In fact, the contents of his containers lined neatly in a row on a shelf looked like plain ol' mason jars. Sitting at his desk, he drew the book out from where he had tucked it under his arm and rifted through the yellowed pages to a page he hadn't looked at while he was at Lane's place. His eyes skimmed the lines of its hand written scribble briefly, then went to work. To the naked eye, it simply seemed like he was playing at science. Mixing together a concoction that flared to life as soon as he turned on the Bunsen burner he had set up. To any that knew better, what he infused now was more than chemicals being combined, but a show of his own arcane skills.<br/><br/>Like a drug addict burning meth, smoke curled from the glass like so many toxic fumes. But there was one last ingredient. It was as small as a thimble and only half full of something dark, like syrup inside the tiny vial that hung from a rope like some trinket bought at a Renaissance Faire. The barest drop was added to his cocktail before he curled his hand around the beaker and its substance, tilted his head back, and swallowed it back.<br/><br/>“Bottoms up,” he coughed as the acrid taste overwhelmed his tastebuds despite his dumping method. He almost gagged from it, his features scrunching up on his face as it settled uneasily in the pit of his stomach. Nausea rose, as it always did, and he fought it by leaning forward with his face in the palm of his hands until it subsided with a few long drawn breaths. Numb and medicated, James pulled himself up and turned off his lab for the evening to prepare for his guest.<br/><br/>That at least brought a smile to his face and encouraged him to rummage through his meager offerings found in his pantry to at least be able to scrape together something edible before her arrival. He was even humming under his breath with one hand clutching a spoon that dipped into a pot of boiling noodles and an apron haphazard around his neck and waist when the knock on the door arrived. He set the spoon aside, picked up the ladle from the pan next to it and tasted the sauce inside, then abandoned his station to swing his front door open.