6
Morning
The next morning,Will limped down to breakfast with a crutch. He wouldn’t use two crutches, of course. That would be a sign of weakness.
He discovered that Maddox had prepared bacon, eggs, croissants, and fruit juice. Significantly better fare than Will might have expected to enjoy in prison.
“I hope you are hungry,” Maddox greeted him.
Nothing was said about Will’s escape attempt slash suicide plunge of the night before. There was very little to be gained by dwelling on it. The consequences had been painful and embarrassing enough, Mad judged.
“Thank you,” Will said. He seemed subdued, avoidant of eye contact. He grabbed a croissant and pushed it into his face in a way that Mad found rather charmless. Prison was not known for turning out young men with fine social graces. At least he was eating, unlike the previous evening when he had barely choked down the finest foods.
“What is that smell?” Lorien appeared as inconveniently as possible. “Ugh. Food. What are you doing?”
“William needs to eat,” Mads reminded him.
Lorien’s expression reflected arrogant disgust. Young vampires always thought they were so much better than humans for not needing common food anymore. They took pride in their sanguine appetites to a laughable extent, pretending that human food was the very essence of disgust.
“’Bout last night,” Will spoke up. “I, uh… feel a bit stupid. I wasn’t, uhm…”
Before he could stumble through an explanation that would probably have been fairly unsatisfying anyway, Lorien interrupted him.
“That’s because you are. You can’t help it.”
Lorien had chosen to wear a navy blue turtleneck and chinos. He looked like a preppy baby vampire. The clothing choice also served to hide the wound on his neck. The irony of Lorien’s scorn toward Will was that he was equally as helpless, hopeless, and damaged. He simply refused to see it in himself.
“Lorien, you are not helping,” Mads chided. It was as much of a warning as he intended on giving. Boys would be boys, and these two needed to establish a pecking order.
“Fuck you,” Will swore, looking up at Lorien under dark brows.
Lorien was helping in a way. Not in an obviously useful way, of course, that was a given. But he was a sort of socializing factor for Will and might even help him to lose his fear of their kind. Familiarity bred disrespect.
“Careful, wounded bird,” Lorien hissed back. “You are nothing but human. A wet sack of beating flesh.”
Maddox watched Will’s face transform. The animal was returning. The cold creature who delighted in violence and thrilled to the scent of blood. He felt his cold heart swell, a familiar excitement rising in him. He so adored this side of Will, the side society had rejected and punished him harshly for having. The same side Mad intended on rewarding him greatly for.
Will’s hand curled around the handle of the fork. Egg clung to its tines.
Mads folded his arms over his chest and leaned back, waiting to see what would happen. One broken-legged human against one near mortally wounded immortal. Fascinating.
Lorien hadn’t recognized the danger yet. He was too busy smirking in a self-satisfied way, thinking he had gotten the upper hand because of his loquacious sass.
Will exploded from the chair with surprising speed, given he only had the one good leg to propel himself on. He stabbed Lorien in the shoulder first, hitting the vampire with the full weight of his body and knocking him backward. Vampires might be immortal, but they were not immune to physics. Two hundred pounds of muscular, pissed-off human hitting the upper half of a six-foot-two figure sent it tumbling backward. It would have been too quick for most humans to see, but Mads’ vision allowed him to observe every delicious part of the interaction. While still in mid-air, Will pulled the fork from Lorien’s shoulder and stabbed him two more times in the chest, and then, perhaps by sheer chance, perhaps with the instinct of an apex predator, he lodged the fork through soft cashmere and into Lorien’s wounded throat.
Lorien hit the ground. Will used the motion to keep tumbling forward and out of the way, inevitably crashing into the wall where he scrambled up onto his feet with no small amount of difficulty given the cast.
“What the…” Lorien put his hand to his throat and pulled the utensil out. “… fork?”
Will was smiling, broadly. It was the first real smile Mad had ever seen from him and it was every bit as charming and delightful as he had imagined it would be. It transformed his face, lighting it up from within. His eyes danced with the glee of violence.
Lorien rose to his feet, not by getting up in the way a human might, but simply by lifting his entire body in a dead straight plane. It was another trick popular with baby vampires, but having never seen one before, Will’s eyes widened as he took it in.
“Now you’ve done it,” Lorien hissed.
“No biting,” Mads said, calmly setting a hard limit.
Lorien glanced at him with an oh but please expression. Mad shook his head curtly. There had to be some measure of decorum, and no more harm could come to Will. He had probably already re-damaged his leg with all that rolling around.
“He stabbed me in the neck with a fork. You can’t let humans act that way. They have to be disciplined.”
Will laughed and made an impudent gesture at Lorien.
Will was undisciplined, that much was true. But Lorien was too. They annoyed one another because they shared a great many similarities, including the trait of not knowing when to let something go.
Fuck yes. That had taught the cocky asshole a lesson. Hard to talk shit with metal lodged in your vocal cords. Will couldn’t have been more pleased with himself. And he’d done it with a broken leg too.
But of course the dickhead couldn't let it go. Lorien charged Will, knocked him down and held him there, green eyes piercing into him. He felt a faint pull, somewhat reminiscent of the way Maddox made him feel but without any of the intensity.
Maddox kicked Lorien off with a swift boot to the ribs.
“Get up. He bested you fair and square. Go find somewhere else to be, before I decide the best place for you is the street.”
Lorien hissed and disappeared.
Maddox helped Will up to his feet. “I apologize for Lorien. He is young and impulsive.”
“He looks about thirty-five,” Will said. “How young is he supposed to be?”
“He’s actually closer to ninety-five. Still very young for those of our kind. When a human becomes a vampire, there’s a new learning curve, a new infancy, and adolescence.”
“And how old are you?”
“Oh, positively ancient,” Mad flashed his teeth in a bright smile. “I forget dates, times. Everything seems as though it were a very long time ago, or just yesterday.”
“And who is Lorien? Your son?”
“No. I have made no fledglings. He is closer to a ward. I was close to his maker, once. I feel a certain responsibility for him.”
“Well, I’m going to fucking kill him if he touches me again,” Will growled. “I didn’t sign up for him.”
“No, you didn’t,” Mads agreed, brushing the hair out of Will’s face. “Let me make you some breakfast again, so you can do something more appropriate with a fork.”
Will smirked. He was glad Maddox wasn’t angry at him for fucking Lorien up. Sounded like he found Lorien almost as annoying as Will did, but obviously the other vampire was like family, and Will could understand tolerating family. Or at least, he imagined he could. He’d never had one of his own to have to tolerate.
He sat down at the kitchen counter and watched as Maddox once more cooked for him. It was like having his own private vampire chef. If only the boys from C-block could see him now. He’d landed on his feet, alright. Well, he’d landed on one foot and one leg awkwardly and broken it, but still.
There was something beautifully cozy about watching Maddox prepare food. The sure, elegant movements he made were soothing to watch, as were the sounds of the knife on the chopping block, repetitive sharp thunks followed by the hiss of mushrooms hitting hot butter sizzling in the pan. It was a ballet of the senses and a comforting one at that.