Page 203 of Vampire Kings Box Set

In a certain light, Gideon could understand that obsession. Will was a legendary wolf, a creature very rare and very precious, a hearkening back to the old days of glory and easily accessible skulls. However, Maddox did not simply revel in owning Will. He also loved him, and that Gideon would not tolerate.

Ray was rough on the chains linked to the collars about their necks, handling them with unnecessary aggression. It was plain to see that Ray was absolutely thrilled at the prospect of the two of them going out into the human wild and hunting down the beast. He was quite a jealous boy, though he was many thousands of years old. He had never quite gotten over Gideon’s decision to make Maddox.

Speaking of Maddox, Gideon’s second created progeny met them on the way out of the mansion. An expression of familiar pain passed over his face as he looked at his erstwhile lover and ally chained and treated like the beasts they were.

“Where are you taking them?”

“On a hunt,” Ray said.

“For what?”

“For none of your concern, dear brother.”

Maddox looked at Will with a longing expression that was clear to all to behold. Will did not return the gaze. He refused to so much as look at Maddox, seething at his erstwhile lover with the same intensity Maddox looked at him.

“Perhaps I might…”

“No,” Ray said. “Gideon and I will be taking the hounds out alone. You have a baby to look after.”

The look Maddox gave his older sibling would have absolutely destroyed a lesser being. Ray ignored it.

2

Gideon and Ray moved through the park with Will and Henry in their wolf forms, both leashed with thick, spiked iron collars. The wolves sniffed and snarled, excited by the rare outing. They were well secured, heavy chains linking the collars at their throats to leashes around Ray and Gideon’s wrists. Gideon controlled the younger of the two, Maddox’s lover.

It was a certain amount of pity to have them in wolf form. They seemed to feel less humiliation in their animal states, but if he was to be honest with himself, Gideon was beginning to tire of the ritual humiliation. It was not as amusing as it had been in the beginning. In truth, he was beginning to tire of the entire matter and had been considering simply killing the wolves, perhaps in a ritual ceremony of some kind to make a point to all of his coven. The only thing stopping him had been a general sense of ennui and pointlessness, a lack of anticipation.

Central Park was not a vast space, merely 3.5 miles, but it was deeply wooded in parts. This is where the monster had last been sighted. Vampires hunting the unwary used to enjoy these woods. They were devoid of vampires this evening. Rumors of the monster had driven the dark creatures away. Gideon enjoyed some of the sense of isolation, though the roar of the city’s vehicles were still quite audible to his ears, and the stench of humanity somehow managed to wend its way through leaves and branches, almost like a perpetual barbecue of sorts.

He did not scent a monster, but that might very well have been due to the overwhelming olfactory profile of the mass of humanity bustling about the place as if they were the only creatures that mattered.

“I don’t scent anything. The wolves don’t seem to have any kind of scent…” Gideon turned to Ray. “I very much hope you have not brought me so far to waste my time. I prefer to remain outside large population centers, for the safety of the occupants.”

“I understand, but that is the same rationale that draws our kind to such places, as well as their predator.”

“Are we certain? Do we have any verified sightings? If I have been brought this far out due to the urban legends of coddled city vampires…”

Something moved in the bushes. Something that was not animal. Something that disturbed reality as much as it disturbed the physical trees themselves. Gideon felt the tugging of the thing’s presence. It still had no smell, but he sensed it regardless, like a warping of gravity.

He stopped threatening Ray and turned toward the disturbance. The wolves had not scented the thing, or if they had, they were not responding.

“Come out, come out,” Gideon called, his voice resonant, elegant, and formal. He sounded like an older echo of Maddox for a moment.

There was a hesitation. He wondered if the creature felt fear, or if it was simply cursing the fact that it had lost the element of surprise. It was not easy to sneak up on Gideon. His senses were more keen than anybody imagined, a blessing and a curse in these crowded modern times.

The monster stepped out from the bushes.

Gideon let out a laugh of dark amusement.

A police officer stood in the middle of the misty forest. A tall woman with blonde hair, and features he recognized not just from memory, but every time he looked into the face of Maddox’s bratty little fledgling. This face was starting to haunt every corner of his world. He saw it in Maddox’s wolf, and he saw it in Carter, and now he saw it where it had originated, in the woman who knit them both together in her womb.

This was a woman he knew. A woman whose children he had killed. He remembered ripping her throat open, seeing the life pour from her. But that wound had healed and been replaced by fur. She stood before him in the garments of her past, a police uniform ripped, torn, and mended again in red thread.

She was not as she had been. She was not as simple a creature, as easy a slab of meat. Her golden hair was longer and thicker. Her skin was pale, as pale as the grave, more like a concrete gray than a healthy human tone. Her eyes, which had once been blue, were now a glazed opaque green. She did not look alive, exactly, and yet she did not look dead in the way he and his kind were. Gideon was looking at a creature who had no right to exist, and yet she did anyway.

He puzzled over how such a thing could have happened. In his very, very long life, practically nobody he killed had come back alive. The few times it had happened was very early on, a long time before history itself began and the written word started to solidify events in which things either did or did not happen.

He had a brief moment of something like panic, though a creature of his nature could never truly be afraid. It was more like confusion, a certain discombobulation of thought. He was seeing something he had never seen before in all his days. Something new.