“I’ll take that as a yes,” he sighed. “He’ll use you up, baby bird. He’ll drain you dry in more ways than one. You're not the first, and you won’t be the last.”
“I’d be more likely to listen to you if you weren’t a bitchy little psycho who chained me up.”
Lorien sighed softly. “You were never going to listen anyway. They never do. They fall in love. They start to believe that they’re special. That they matter. Listen to me now. Nobody and nothing matters to Maddox.”
“Now you just sound jealous. What’s the matter? Daddy won’t give you the d?”
Lorien sat up, his ass pressed against Will’s crotch, his elegant pale hands spread one on Will’s chest, the other on his neck. The gesture was intimate and threatening, and the weight over Will’s cock… well… it risked being stimulating.
“He fucks you because you’re disposable,” Lorien said.
“Yeah? Take these chains off me and I’ll dispose of you.”
“No. I take these chains off, you attack me, I have to break your other leg, Maddox gets angry at me when I hurt the human. I think it's better you stay right there.”
8
Crime and Punishment
“This is it,” Candy said somewhat unnecessarily, given the multiple cars, flashing lights, and cordons around the church which blended into the city street almost inconspicuously thanks to the scaffolding which hid most of the glory of the building behind green tarps. It had been undergoing renovation for quite some time, an attempt at keeping the historical relevant and restored. Maddox felt some sympathy for the big old building.
“Are you going to be able to enter, sir?”
Maddox cast a sidelong cast at Candy. “Yes,” he said simply.
The notion that vampires couldn’t enter hallowed spaces was actually technically correct. However, there were very few truly hallowed spaces left in the world. Simply being a church did not make a space hallowed. Many of them were more corrupt than your average brothel. This one, mere blocks from Times Square, was infiltrated regularly with all manner of pedestrian evil. It would have taken a tsunami of holy water and a phalanx of priests to drive out the demons flirting with the sculptures in this place.
“Do we really need this many officers? They can’t possibly all have clearance.”
“Traffic and pedestrian control. They don't know what’s happening inside. We’ve got the two rookies on tonight, and I called everyone else in. So you’ve got seven, total.”
“Good. This will be a learning experience.”
The doors swung open and one of the rookies rushed out at high speed to be sick in the gutter.
“One rookie,” Candy amended.
Maddox entered the church without further comment. It was a very beautiful piece of architecture in spite of the near pedestrian appearance of the exterior. He had always admired the creativity of such places. Not an inch of the walls, floor, ceiling, or pews was left plain. Every part of the building told a story and boasted fine craftsmanship. This was how previous generations of humans had approached making material things, with reverence and care. Now everything was slick, smooth, and most of all, disposable.
In stark contrast to all the efforts at holiness was the crime scene laid out on the high altar, an act of desecration so profound the church might never be sacred again.
“That’s a mess,” Candy said with her usual talent for understatement.
On this occasion, she was wrong. It was not a mess. It was a work of dark art. There were two bodies on display, wrapped around one another with an incestuous closeness. They were both naked, wrapped around one another in what might have been considered an embrace but for how it had been enforced with thin, long wood stakes. They weren’t so much hugging as they had been hammered together around what appeared to be, on closer inspection, a crucifix. It was desecration, cruelty, and humiliation, all wrapped up in a perverted scene.
Their faces were almost unrecognizable due to the rictus expressions of pain, but Maddox recognized them. He had spoken to them just yesterday. Bert and Ernie were slain, the twin vampire kings of New York turned to pained puppets.
“It looks like this must have gone on for hours,” Candy said grimly. “To have put all those stakes in them.”
“It is difficult to slay the undead,” Maddox observed. “Though not this difficult. A single stake in the right place would have done it, and the final one seems to have.”
“The final one, sir?”
“Vampire flesh does not hold together well after passing. For this many stakes to be driven into their flesh, they must have been alive.”
Candy’s face assumed a horrified expression.
Killing vampires was not illegal in human law, because vampires were already dead. However, technically there had to be some kind of law against what was laid out before the series of disgusted and confused law enforcement officers, all of whom shared the notion that they really should be doing something about this.