Page 109 of Vampire Kings Box Set

“Who is Lorien?”

“A good question, one I would be hard pressed to answer without going on at great length. He is the closest thing I have to a son, though I have been no father to him. He is my heir, the crown prince of the city. He is willful and he is passionate. He lacks diplomacy, but I have hopes he will develop it in time. Whenever he’s quiet, I can guarantee chaos will erupt. Lorien may seem to be a foppish little dilettante, but there is something about him that links him to power. He was made for it.”

“And you don’t know where he is?”

“He’s not returning my calls, but the unit is able to track his phone. He appears to be staying in a house nearby, one of the residences of the previous kings. I am familiar with it.”

“Want some company?” Henry suggested. “We could swing by after we pick my guys up from the airport.”

“Indeed,” Maddox said. “Let’s swing by.” He said the phrase with a slight twist of amusement on his lips. Henry’s blunt energy was quite enjoyable in many respects. “Shall we bring Will to meet them?”

“Leave him in the cage,” Henry said. “If he gets overwhelmed and sassy, better it happens here than in a public place.”

“Good thinking.”

4

“There’s someone here.” Chauvelin raised the alarm.

“Who?” Lorien asked the question, rising to his feet. They’d all been more than a little concerned that the authorities would eventually catch up with them given what had been going on in the house.

It was still mostly devoid of furniture, but it wasn’t empty anymore. There were bodies everywhere. Some of them were stacked in the corners, others were in the process of being disassembled for use as other things.

Lorien really hoped it wasn’t Maddox. He lived in horror of Maddox materializing one day. Being caught here would be the vampire equivalent of a human college student being caught in a crack den by his parent. He’d known things were getting out of control, but it took the sudden potential for being caught for him to really look at things with fresh eyes. Ivan and Chauvelin had been playing body part arts and crafts with… anyway. It was not good.

“I don’t know. Looks like a van.”

“Do we know anybody who owns a van?”

Ivan was up and at the window. Naked. Lorien had learned that Ivan being naked was generally a bad thing. It meant he was planning on doing something in his most brutal form, and given what he was comfortable doing as a human, that was quite the statement. If he had his way, there would be a few more bodies on the people pile tonight.

Lorien peered out at the van from the corner of the window. They must have made quite the sight, Ivan standing buck naked in the middle of the glass expanse, Lorien peeking in from the far right of the pane, Chauvelin peering from the bottom.

The first out of the van was a very large, very muscular, very tattooed man with a haircut like a 90’s school bully and more tattoos than made sense for anybody to have.

“Well, fuck,” Ivan swore, swinging away from the window faster than Will was used to watching him move. He flattened himself against the wall. He was panting the way he did sometimes before he shifted if he was trying to fight the transformation.

“You boys are going to want to run,” he said to Chauvelin and Lorien, “as fast as your little vampire legs will take you.”

“Who is that?”

“We don’t have time for introductions. Get out. Now.”

Chauvelin was already gone. His sense of self-preservation was the most well-developed of them all. Lorien found himself stuck at the window, staring out at events as they unfolded as an enraptured observer.

One, two, three other men followed the tattooed man out of the van. It was like a clown car of the muscular, for the most part. The last one out was of a slimmer build, but Lorien didn’t get a chance to really observe any of them because something far more interesting was happening at the front door. The tattooed man had made his way up to it and was about to knock. He never got the chance.

The front door exploded with the feral weight of a massive black wolf. Ivan sent Henry tumbling backward, heels over head. When Henry was hit by the front paws, he was a man, but by the time he rolled back onto his feet he was wolf. And he was not alone. Three other wolves were lying in wait for Ivan, gray beasts with pale gold eyes. Not a one of them was larger than Ivan. His sleek black form was at least one and a half times the size of the largest of them, his blue eyes spitting feral fire into the dark New York night.

But he was outnumbered. What the other wolves lacked in size, they more than made up for in aggression, agility, and pack work. In seconds, Ivan was surrounded, attacked viciously by the lesser wolves, his flesh torn, his throat ripped at with sharp and merciless teeth. There had been no warning, no opportunity to surrender. They were simply trying to kill him, and if he had stayed a moment or two longer, they would have been successful.

Instead, Ivan turned tail and fled, the lesser wolves biting and chasing at his heels, teeth sinking into his flanks as they tried to bring him down like a prey animal. But Ivan was no terrified deer. He was a wicked predator making a tactical retreat, shedding blood in frighteningly large amounts as he went.

The ambush wolves did not manage to stop him. Ivan escaped into the depths of night, and they returned.

Lorien decided it was probably about time he left. He went out the back door, figuring the front was going to presently be occupied with a number of wolves who had just viciously attacked the first entity they’d encountered. If they were capable of doing that to Ivan, Lorien did not much fancy his personal chances of escaping a terrible mauling. He could move much more quickly than a wolf, but that all depended on moving before he was bitten.

He exited through the back door as fast as he could go. A hand met his chest, stopping him in his supernatural tracks.