Predators (Vampire Kings 1)

10

His Kingdom For A Toaster

Morning came,and so did Maddox’s hunger. He left Will sleeping soundly and walked down to a kitchen that was useless to him. He was not surprised to find Lorien there. The younger vampire had a talent for being in the wrong place at the right time.

“I was waiting for you to come back and finish our conversation.” There was something accusatory in Lorien’s tone, and indeed, in his actual words. “What’s happening? You love the hound now?”

“Quiet, Lorien.”

“It’s not like you to spend entire nights with humans. You must have been so bored. All that lying there awake…”

It had been a pleasure to lie in the dark and listen to Will breathe. He was so strong but so delicate, so broken and yet so whole. Lorien was right that there had been others before. None like this one, though. None Maddox wanted to hold as much as he wanted to fuck, as much as he wanted to care for as much as he wanted to use.

“I think it’s sweet,” Lorien smirked. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone that the great Maddox has a weakness now.”

It was to be expected that Lorien saw love as weakness. Mad had taught him well, and he had learned better than Mads had expected him to. Caring for Will, becoming enchanted by Will was dangerous for them both.

“They call us immortals,” Lorien mused. “They probably shouldn’t. We’re actually very mortal.”

“Yes, we are,” Maddox agreed. “I need to find someone to eat.”

“There’s a human upstairs.” Lorien gestured upwards.

“I don’t want to weaken him, not while his bones are still healing.”

“You want me to get delivery?”

“I don’t want anything that’s been fed from a dozen times. I want something fresh.”

“Like, a baby?”

“No, Lorien. Not like a baby.”

“Definition of fresh.”

Maddox fixed Lorien with a glare. “Tell me you have not…”

“I know you’d slay me yourself if I did that. I’m joking. Maybe we can go to the club and find an innocent newbie. Oh, wait. We can’t because it’s eight in the morning, when proper vampires are pretending to be afraid of the sun so they don’t have to socialize with all the humans that infest everything these hours.”

“I don’t think we should be out socializing at a time like this.”

Lorien cocked his head to the side and smiled. “Because you started a turf war that’s going to turn New York into a sea of blood and ash?”

“Why do you insist on assuming that I slew them?”

“Because you did. Because you love me too. You’re just loving everybody nowadays, aren’t you, Maddox? Going soft in your ancient age?”

Maddox cuffed the brat over the ear and carried on his way.

“I’ll have some of the refrigerated stuff.”

“No, don’t do that. I’ll hunt you something fresh, Daddy.” Lorien winked. He was in a very good mood. Too good of a mood. He had called Maddox Daddy only twice before in their association and it had never ended well. He didn’t use it in the endearing fatherly meaning, or in the kinky dirty one either. He used it in a very specific, I am going to be very bad sense, which only applied to him.

“Lorien, be careful. I’m not going to forbid you to leave the house, because I know that will only make you sneak out. But it is dangerous out there. More than one vampire has already come to the same conclusion you did. It is possible retaliation is coming.”

“It’s possible you’re going to get flowers and candy from everybody they terrorized for hundreds of years.”

“Possibly. I need to make Will some breakfast. He will be up soon, and he will need to eat.”

“Breakfast?”

The word had summoned the whelp.

Will walked into the kitchen, messy bed head, stubble on his chin, and that pair of bright blue eyes searing out amongst it all. Maddox paused for a breath he did not need, just to take the boy in. He was shirtless, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. That put his beautiful body on muscular display, the hard-won ripples of his abdomen and swelling of biceps and delts and quads and glutes… he was breathtaking, even to one who had no need to draw breath.

“No need to make him breakfast,” Lorien interjected, far too proudly for Mad’s liking. “I picked up something when I was at the grocery store.”

“Since when do you go to the grocery store?”

“Look in the cupboard above the oven.”

Maddox opened the aforementioned cupboard. There was a brightly colored box lurking there, festooned with pictures and large text, a sort of idiot’s cavalcade of offensive design that was entirely out of place in Mad’s kitchen.

“Toaster strudel! Yes, please!” Will’s eyes lit up. He practically ran to the cupboard and grabbed the box. “This was like gold in prison. You could get anything for these. Tell me there’s a toaster.”

There was a toaster.

Maddox watched as Will made his own breakfast, if such a concoction could be called a meal. Processed pastry sugar and a hefty dose of coffee on the side was not what he would have considered appropriate nutrition for one of his charges, but Will's arrival seemed destined to break every mold. Usually by now he’d be trained to a chain. He’d be kenneled when he was not working, slaughtering ferals at night and sleeping during the day, until he was inevitably wounded. He was not supposed to be grinning about toaster strudel in the kitchen. Maddox wondered if he was softening in his ancient age. Or perhaps there was something special about this one. How unfair it was, that some should be used, abused, and discarded, and others should be found worthy of pastry.

“We do spoil him, don’t we?” Lorien sidled up to Maddox, speaking softly out of Will's earshot.

“Since when do you have any interest in making Will happy? He was stabbing you in the throat the other day.”

“What makes Will happy makes you happy. And you killed Bert and Ernie which made me very happy. So, you’re welcome.”

Still with the assumption that Maddox was behind the brutal, cruel execution of the ancients.

“You think a two-dollar box of toaster strudel makes us even?”

Lorien smirked and shrugged. “It’s a start, right?”

“Barely. I do have a use for you, however.”

Lorien’s brows rose in surprise. “What’s that? I’ve never been useful before. It would be a novel experience to be useful.”

“Wouldn’t it,” Maddox agreed. “I want to use you as a training target. Will froze the first time he approached a feral. I don’t want that to happen again.”

“So tell him…”

“No. There will be no telling. You can take some damage.”

“True, but he doesn’t fight like a typical human. He fights like a beast.”

“Are you afraid of him?”

Lorien cocked his head and smiled at Maddox in a way that was rather like looking in a mirror for Maddox. “I’m not going to be dragged into being your brat test dummy.”

“We will see.”

“What are you talking about?” Will asked the question after demolishing the entire box of toaster strudel. It was the best food he’d tasted in a long time. In prison, toaster strudel often had to be eaten cold. It was the toaster that really made the strudel what it was.

Maddox turned toward him with one of those smooth, elegant movements that made Will feel like a clunky hunk of flesh.

“You are injured, but that doesn't mean you can’t learn, and it doesn’t mean you can’t work.”

“What do you want me to do?”

Maddox beckoned him over. Will went, glancing briefly at Lorien. Lorien was easier to read than Maddox. He saw amusement in the younger vampire’s eyes, as if whatever was about to happen was going to entertain him immensely.

“Look at me,” Maddox intoned, capturing Will’s attention entirely. Will looked at Maddox and saw his beginning and his end in those dark eyes. There were shades and shadows, horrors and terrors lying within.

Will found himself relaxing throughout his body, losing tension he didn’t even know he had stored up in his muscles. It was an involuntary response, as so many of his responses to Maddox were. When he was around this creature, he felt like an animal himself. Something rose inside him, something powerful and dark, something that answered the call of Mad’s gaze.

“I want you to kneel.”

Will swallowed, though all the food in his mouth was long gone.