Meanwhile, in a very nice home, not all that far away…
“I can’t keep calling you Chauvelin. That’s too long a name. You have a first name?”
Ivan was settling into his new den. Lorien watched with amusement, finding it quite fascinating how everything he’d found tedious and weak in Will was so much more developed and likable in Ivan. Ivan was a brute, but a charming one.
“Hold on a sec!” He cocked his head for a split second, then went dashing out the front door, still stark naked. The man had absolutely no chill, as the kids said. Lorien adored it.
“Let me go!” someone was screaming.
“Let me go!” Ivan mocked his victim as he returned, dragging in a parking attendant who had made the terrible mistake of trying to ticket his pickup. Blood smeared the pretty foyer tile a fresh pink. Part of the face was already gone. Ivan had a particularly brutal and messy way of killing. It was the style of kill you'd expect to see from a fledgling with no master, or a predatory animal that had never known its own kind. Privately, Lorien thought Ivan did know better, he just liked the mess.
The man's fluorescent vest was stained with blood as the latest victim writhed and gurgled on the fancy floor. The one remaining eye stared desperately at him as he begged incoherently for mercy that would not come. This was not a house of mercy. This was a lawless den of the discarded, a place of perversion.
Ivan glanced up at them. “You boys want in on this?”
Little fledgling Chauvelin was obviously not going to say no, and even Lorien was somewhat peckish. The poor parking attendant found himself descended upon by three fearsome beasts with great fangs and terrible hungers. It was an awful, brutal, terrible way to go. Lorien did the human the kindness of attempting to sucking his blood down as quickly as possible so he lost consciousness before Ivan truly started tearing into his entrails. Lorien was not entirely certain he was successful.
“I think we should put the skulls on the mantlepiece,” Chauvelin said when they were done with their meal. What was left was not in any way appetizing, even to them, and the conversation around how to get rid of the bits was in full swing.
“Like college kids stacking beer bottles?” Ivan did not sound keen, or maybe he did. It was hard to tell. Ivan’s aesthetic was trash murder hobo, but make it hot. Sometimes he had something close to an alpha vibe, the instinct to hunt for the pack, for instance. That was pure alpha. But Ivan was a loose cannon and could not be trusted.
“It’s also evidence of murder,” Lorien said. “What we do, when we kill them, that’s still murder.”
“That’s still murder,” Ivan mocked him as if he were a pimply schoolboy worried about displeasing a teacher. Chauvelin laughed a little too loud and a little too long.
Lorien was starting to get the very uncomfortable feeling he had fallen in with the wrong crowd. But going back to Maddox would be like crawling back to someone who didn’t even seem to notice he’d gone.
“Skip.”
“Skip what?”
“That’s my first name,” Chauvelin said.
“Skip,” Ivan laughed.
Lorien smirked. “A little vampire named Skip. Adorable.”
“I’m not little,” Chauvelin/Skip insisted. “And I’m not adorable. I was an FBI agent. I was a serious officer of the law.”
“You’re fairly compact,” Lorien said. “How tall are you?”
“5’7. That’s average height!”
Lorien and Ivan both laughed a great deal at that. They were both significantly over six feet, and while Lorien was the tallest, being the middlest was not as bad as being the smallest.
“There's no such thing as average height. There’s tall and then there’s, what are those orange things?”
“The little pill-shaped candies?”
“No. The imported slaves by the cartwheeling candy baron. You know.”
Nobody knew what anybody was talking about, but they were all having a surprisingly good time. Lorien was pleased to discover such a thing was still possible.
Some faint knowledge rang in the back of his mind, something about how times this good always came to a rather nasty end, but he ignored his conscience, or common sense, whatever it was. It would all be fine. Probably.
Chapter Two
“I don’t want to go back in the cage tonight. I’ll be saner tomorrow. I promise.”
Will was free again, after the difficult morning routine was over. He had shifted and become himself again, dressed and all. He’d be sane for the rest of the day. He almost felt normal, though he knew he was anything but. He knew the cage was the only sane choice, but being locked away every evening like an animal was still galling. Every night he felt normal, or at least as normal as he had ever felt before he started eating people meat and turning into a fucking monster every day.