Page 228 of Vampire Kings Box Set

He heard his lover coming down the stairs, his steps slow and heavy. They were the steps of a drained man. He came down the stairs and around the corner and there he was, Maddox’s beautiful boy with his dark riotous curls and his brilliant blue eyes catching the morning light.

“Hey,” Will said, making brief eye contact with Maddox, then letting his gaze dart immediately away in an expression Maddox could only interpret as shy. The explicit intimacy of the previous evening had given way to something else of a morning light.

“Are you hungry?”

“Starving,” Will replied, his stomach growling as if to emphasize his appetite.

“What would you like to eat?”

Again, Maddox braced himself for Will’s less savory meal choices to be expressed. The boy had consumed much flesh over the months. He might very well be unable to tolerate anything besides it now.

Instead, Will walked to the kitchen cabinets and began looking for toaster pastries.

“I think you should eat something a little more substantial after last night,” Maddox said when Will found the box and began tearing into it.

Will shrugged. “Never hurt me before.”

“I never took so much blood from you before. You need a proper breakfast to regain your strength.”

“Maybe the world would be better off with a weaker Will,” Will said, dropping two packs of toaster strudel into the toaster.

“Maybe the world would be better off with a happier Will,” Maddox replied. “I have something for you, if you want it. Not really something. Someone. There’s someone who wants to see you.”

Will turned his gaze from the pastries to Maddox. “Who in their right mind would want to see me?”

Much later that night, as the full moon rose in a cloud-wisped sky, Will finally got what some deep part of him had craved all his life. Maddox escorted him outside the house and told him to wait there. It was like being taken to a surprise party, but a very small one, and one that had a general pall of melancholy about it.

He stood and he waited, wondering what it was Maddox had in store for him. He could not imagine who Mad would entrust him to now. He was surprised that his vampire master had let him be outside unsupervised at all. It would be the work of a moment to take his wolf form and flee back into the wilds to continue his animal rampage.

But he didn’t. He waited, out of curiosity, and something even more perverse and unnatural to him: hope.

He smelled her before he saw her. She smelled of the grave, of decay. She came through the trees, a gaunt and internally illuminated figure of rotted maternity.

It was the same creature he had seen easily wound Gideon, the most unique and dangerous beast any in the paranormal underworld had ever encountered.

His mother.

She was the woman who had borne him. The woman who had abandoned him. The woman who now loved him more than life and death, enough to destroy the beast that came for him.

Candy did not look anything like he remembered in her living life. Her eyes were a milky blue, a sort of opaque haze between them and the world. Her flesh was an unpleasant pale hue with some signs of rot appearing in unflattering places. She had always been a handsome woman, but now the angularity of her face appeared harsh, the lines of her skull all too prominent.

“I’m sorry,” she said, making her first words an apology, as if she knew they might also be her last words.

There was a brief and beautiful moment in which forgiveness might be extended. It passed.

“I’m sorry too,” Will replied. “I’m sorry you put me in a fucking dumpster and lied to me my entire life and let me turn into a fucking monster without so much as a word.”

He’d imagined he’d processed all that anger and grief by a method of no longer giving a fuck, but apparently he gave quite a few fucks. So many that even the grief-animated corpse of his mother making a physical apology still didn’t seem to cut it.

“I wronged you,” she said. “Many times, and I have paid for that wrong by losing all my children, my husband, and my life.”

“You gave me away. You left me without a family, never knowing who I was, or what was wrong with me. You made me what I am.”

“Yes. I did.”

“Fortunately,” Will said. “I like who I am. I didn’t before. I thought there was something wrong with being a flesh-consuming monster, but now I’ve settled into it, it’s really growing on me.”

“That’s not the lesson I had hoped you would take away from these events, but I cannot blame you for turning to your wild side. There is little comfort to be had in humanity. But even wolves need packs. And you are loved more than you know.”