Page 223 of Vampire Kings Box Set

Carter looked at Gideon with the cold gaze of a vampire whose emotional attachments have been severed by trauma. There was so much latent energy in that dark stare. He would unleash it one day, but not today.

“Mom never told me about him.”

“He was her shame, whereas you are her pride,” Gideon said. “But you are both quite fascinating. There is a strength in your bloodline that I assumed came to your brother through his wolf side. But you and your mother have proven to be exceptional in your own right. It would be quite interesting to do a family tree and see where you come from. Perhaps I will set the genealogists to work doing just that.”

Carter’s expression remained impassive. He was rarely emotional, and this moment was no exception. He was numb to the world, and to the events of the world. He had even made himself numb to his own death, though he remembered it.

Not long ago…

“Mom! Where are my skates!”

Carter came down the stairs, taking them two and three at a time. He was late for practice, and certain that his mother had hidden his skates again, or as she put it, tidied them away.

“Mom! Where’s my… MOM!?”

His mother was cowering in the corner of the living room. His father lay dead on the floor, his throat slashed open by the rancid black claws of a beast that wasn’t animal or human, but something in between.

Carter wasn’t entirely certain that he was really seeing what he was seeing. The thing in the living room, the killing thing, had a terrible appearance. It had tentacles and fangs, and it did not occupy space and time properly. It was enveloping his family, destroying them, changing his world forever.

“What the fuck?”

“Carter!” his mom called out. “Run!”

But he didn’t run. He lifted his hockey stick and tried to hit the beast with the business end. He’d seen sticks do real damage to human faces, but it bonked lightly off the cranium of the mysterious monster, doing less than nothing.

The thing laughed at him, the sum of all human nightmares made incarnate. The monster flashed into the form of a man, a very handsome man. He was still incredibly strong, and still entirely evil. He had long, dark silken hair, and features that seemed to be from some Middle Eastern place, perhaps, or maybe somewhere even older. He did not so much have an ethnicity as he had an originality. Not so much in the sense of uniqueness, but as in he looked as though he could have been one of the original prototypes of man. An archetype. A dark one.

Carter felt all these things instantly and completely, understanding things he had never bothered to think about before in an instant, as he and the creature looked at one another with mutual interest.

“You,” it said, in a voice he was now very familiar with. “You are perfect.”

It grabbed him around the throat and held him fast.

“NO!” His mom rushed forward, burning with maternal instinct to save her child. He saw the expression on her face. There was no fear anymore. There was pure determination and absolute fury. The creature had dared touch her child, and she would not give him up without a fight.

The monster slew her with a single motion of its great clawed hand. Her flesh peeled open like butter beneath the slashing of those infernal appendages. Carter saw the life go out of her eyes, and in that moment wanted nothing more than to join her. He felt an overwhelming sadness, a complete and utter weakness as he gave up instantly, surrendering to the murderous creature and the terrible fate it brought with it. He had no desire whatsoever to survive his family.

Of course, with unerring instinct for cruelty, that was precisely what Gideon had forced him to do.

….

“I have not forgotten,” Carter said to Gideon.

“What have you not forgotten?”

“What you took. What you destroyed.”

Gideon nodded slowly. He did not seem upset or ashamed by Carter’s mention of the misery caused.

“I do not forgive you,” Carter said bravely. “And I will never like you. I didn’t run when the swat team came because I wanted to see them destroy you.”

Gideon smiled, then gave into the smile and outright laughed.

“You deserve to be destroyed,” Carter said. “We all do.”

Gideon’s laughter only grew in intensity and mirth, as if Carter was the most amusing creature he had ever been in the presence of.

“I forget what it is like to be a fledgling,” he said finally, when his mirth died down a little. “It is such a time of tumult and transformation. A lot of vampires assume that becoming vampire happens physically in one night and then is done, but that is not the case. It can take a hundred years to shed all the shackles of mortality.”