Children of Vice (Children of Vice 1)

PROLOGUE

“Monsters make choices. Monsters shape the world.

Monsters force us to become stronger, smarter, better.

They sift the weak from the strong and provide a forge for the steeling of souls.

Even as we curse monsters, we admire them.

Seek to become them, in some ways.

There are far, far worse things to be than a monster.”

~ Jim Butcher

ETHAN

I’m not sure when it happened…

When it began to crack and alter shape…

Looking back, there are so many moments that could be the one, the origin.

If you asked anyone who wasn’t family, they’d say it happened the day I was born.

That the moment I came into this world as a Callahan, the innocence, the morality, and the virtues that are normally common to everyone else, were defective. Like a house with fractured windows. If you asked anyone within my family they’d say the windows were not fractured but frosted and bulletproof because that is how it should be. After all, the people who were pointing at my windows were the same people who used blinds. That was my family all right…stupidly rich, dangerously powerful, unspeakably ruthless, and obsessed with extended metaphors. But the thing was…I didn’t care if I was a house with fractured or frosted or bulletproof windows. If people were curious to know the type of man I was, they were free to find out at their own peril.

What I cared about was when.

When did it happen?

When did I understand what it meant to be a Callahan?

To be Ethan Antonio Giovanni Callahan.

Staring up at the waters above me until my eyes drifted closed, one memory, one moment came forward…

ETHAN - AGE ELEVEN

He looked like what everyone said Santa Claus was supposed to look like…with everything but the long white beard, though, which made his red-faced, white-skinned, fat body, cloaked in red robes disturbing to see.

“Why is there a screen here if I can still see you?”

He laughed. “Is this your first confession, boy?”

I don’t like him. I thought immediately and for three good reasons too.

One, he laughed, when I was being serious.

Two, he didn’t answer my question.

Three, he called me “boy.”