Will stirred in his repose. It was not sleep. What William was engaged in now was closer to what happens to a caterpillar inside a chrysalis than the sweet rest of sleep. He was being changed from the inside out. He might look the same from the outside, but that was temporary. Soon he would be different. He would be what he was always supposed to be. Not a violent man, but a fully realized beast. The shadow inside Will would cast itself over the city, and it would be a very long shadow indeed.
Maddox sat beside his boy, watching even as he grew past manhood into a new entity. In his unconscious state, Will reached for his hand. Maddox gave it, feeling a great sorrow and an almost equally great surge of pride.
“Shhh,” he comforted Will, gently brushing what would have been the boy’s hair back from his forehead if Will had still had his longer hair.
Their road was never easy and trying to spare Will from the worst of the pain only seemed to intensify it.
“You are the only man in all creation I don’t know what to do with,” Maddox confided in the insensate William. “You drive me mad with the need to protect you, and yet your every instinct, your very DNA demands that you seek danger. I am fighting nature when I try to keep you safe, and yet I cannot help myself.”
This late confession was good for Maddox’s soul, if he could be considered to have one.
“I love you with all that I am,” he told his boy. “I know that you will hate me, because I have done to you that which you resisted your own flesh doing. But it was too late to fight it. You have to be what you are, even when it hurts. Perhaps especially when it hurts.”
Will snuffled in his sleep.
Maddox knew that the eager-to-please little whelp who had once felt so bad at disappointing him he’d made himself sick was gone, as was the prodigal boy returned, desperate for forgiveness and collar. What was coming next, who was coming next, was going to be an entirely new creature altogether.