Page 229 of Vampire Kings Box Set

The vicious, violent, animated zombie lingered near Will with a certain amount of ashamed awkwardness.

“I wanted to tell you, but Maddox was right.”

“No, he wasn’t. Maddox is a fucking moron.”

A soft cough somewhere in the very depths of the night, far out of Will’s range of vision, made him aware that Maddox had not in fact actually left him completely to his own devices. Figured.

“So what are you going to do? Hang about taking strips off Gideon from time to time? He loves it, you know.”

“There is no greater masochist than a sadist,” Candy agreed in a death-rattle. “I am here as long as it takes to make amends to you, my son. You are my unfinished business.”

“I don’t know what amends you can make,” Will said, blunt, because he knew no other way to be. “I don’t need you anymore. Especially not… in this… you’re kind of…”

“I know,” Candy rasped. “I’m not at my best right now. You might not know how you need me, but I can tell you one thing, one day your brother will need you.”

It took a second for Will to process what he’d just heard. The first time ever speaking to his mother as his mother, and she was already talking about his half-brother.

“Carter? He didn’t give a shit when I was locked up.”

“He is traumatized and scared, at the mercy of forces far greater than he…”

“Oh, wow. That must suck for him. Kind of like a baby in a dumpster.”

Will was starting to get angry again. Apologies did not mean anything to him, and Candy’s concern for Carter made him feel like an afterthought yet again. Carter was the child she had kept, the one she had loved. Carter was the one who had never wanted for anything, and whose father had been a nice, normal man who had not passed on a Lycan curse. Carter had been given everything, while Will had been given nothing, and that had not changed in the afterlife. He was not her unfinished business. He was not her business at all.

“You know what?” Will bit out. “Maybe Maddox was right. Maybe I never needed to know who you were. Maybe you’re useless to me. Bye, Mom.”

He said the word Mom with such bitter sarcasm and biting cruelty that it was more of a curse than any other word could have been. Then he turned around and walked back inside the house.

“I should not have mentioned Carter,” Candy said as Maddox approached. He had been in the shadows, watching all that happened. If a fetid apparition could feel shame and regret, it seemed she felt it quite keenly.

She hung faintly in the dark, stringy hair floating in the light breeze as if it weighed nothing at all, pathetic and horrific all at the same time.

“I don’t know what you could have said,” Maddox replied. “This is why I did not want this reunion to take place. It was better your abandonment never had a face. Now he knows he was left by someone with a loving family, someone capable of being a mother. Now his pain is compounded and deepened…” He shook his head. “I loathe it when I second guess myself. I was right. I knew I was right. I would bear William’s loathing for an eternity to protect him from this pain.”

The wraith of Candy seemed to flutter in the breeze.

“Carter…”

“Did you come back for Will? Or was it your other son?” Maddox questioned. “You keep mentioning him.”

“He’s your son too, now, Maddox. You made him a vampire. And he is in the grasp of evil. Don’t make me do what he asked me to do. Don’t make me destroy him.”

Maddox’s eyes rarely widened. There were too few things in the world to surprise him anymore. But this caused his gaze to dilate by a distinct fraction of an inch. The sheer nerve of the woman, undead or not, to pursue this concern for Carter when Will was emotionally bleeding was unfathomable.

“Goodnight, Candy,” he said.

Will heard the front door open and Maddox step inside the house. He steeled himself for a lecture about being rude to his zombie mom. He already had all his arguments in place.

“She only cares about him,” Will said bitterly the second Maddox turned the corner into the room. “I’m not sorry I walked away. I never want to see her again. You can’t make me.”

“I agree. And I am sorry. I am too old to have made the naive mistake of imagining that death makes people somehow better. It’s not death that transforms us. It’s life.”

“Wow,” Will said. “I thought you were going to tell me she’s just trying her best.”

Maddox gave an imperceptible shrug. “She very well may be, but her best is not very good.”

Will snorted, and a small smile broke over his face. “Feels like it’s been a long time since we agreed on anything.”