Page 65 of Vampire Kings Box Set

One girl was hurrying down the street. Her eyes were cast to the pavement and the phone in her hand. She was texting, her face lit by the screen’s glow. She was bundled up against the cold, a scarf around her neck, a hat pulled down on her head, but there was no mistaking the general feminine outline of her body. She was slight in built and there was a delicacy to her movements she could not help. She was what she was, and what she was under these flickering street lights and graffitied walls, was prey.

By Will’s reckoning there were no fewer than six men watching her, and three vampires. Nine beasts had their gazes locked on her, some from ahead, some from behind, others from cars. A taxi driver’s pupils tracked her down the street like a lion tracking a gazelle across the Serengeti.

Then she stopped suddenly and went into one of the buildings, presumably to an apartment above the television repair store below. Safe and sound at home. Perhaps. Or perhaps some of the lurking watchers had taken additional interest. Perhaps they now had a location and a target.

Will had never worried about the fate of others before. It was a strange and uncomfortable consideration. It suddenly seemed to him that almost everybody was uniquely vulnerable, and that anything could happen to anyone at any time. He’d always known that, he supposed. He’d just never cared. Something was changing inside him. A transformation even more strange than the one that turned him into a massive fucking wolf.

He was so focused on the fate of the girl he did not notice that he was also being hunted. The awareness came over him slowly in a faint tingle that started at the back of his neck and moved down his spine all the way to his cock.

She had stepped inside a building. Was she safe? Perhaps. Or did several late-night lurkers now know the flimsy doors and windows through which to burst.

“You can’t save them all,” he muttered to himself. “Can’t save any of them, really.”

“Talking to yourself?”

He heard a voice coming from behind him.

Will turned around slowly to see that his little corner of the dark park was being filled by vampires melting out of the crowds and shadows to almost completely encircle him. Their leader was a greasy looking ratfink with half his head shaved and the rest of his hair unwashed. He looked like a punk. Must have been turned in the 80’s. Young. Inexperienced. Fucking stupid.

“Look who it is, boys,” he said in the shittiest, snidest tone possible. “It’s the king’s very own pet. The one who was coronated with him, whose human ass desecrated the seat of undead royalty.”

Will had been jumped in prison several times, so he knew what was about to happen. A broad smile spread over his face in the anticipation of violence. He was going to hurt these creatures terribly. He was going to unleash on them all the fury he didn’t dare unleash on Maddox or Lorien. He was going to hurt them.

“I say we kill the human.”

Will laughed. It was not the kind of sound a sensible person would have wanted to interact with. It was more like a howl than an expression of amusement, an anticipatory invitation.

There was a hesitation among the group. Some of them seemed a little concerned by Will’s reaction. Some of them might have been bright enough to work out that any human who became the consort of the vampire king wasn’t going to be an average human. Some of them might have heard rumors before. Some of them might have already melted back into the very shadows from which they came. But five, at least five, remained. And they drew closer. They put themselves almost within arm’s reach.

Ratfink let his fangs drop. They were short, and his eyes didn’t change. They remained milky and tedious. When Maddox became himself, when his fangs emerged, his entire face transformed. He became a beast, a dark thing with pitch black soulless eyes and a face marked by evil. This pissant waste of time looked like a cheap Halloween costume. Will laughed again, but this time it was because he actually found it funny.

“I am going to bleed you,” the vampire announced. “I am going to suck you dry.”

“You’re going to die tonight,” Will said.

He’d once been so terribly afraid of these creatures. Their coldness. Their absence of soul. Now he was wondering if it had ever been fear at all. It might have been a deep disgust, a revulsion and loathing that went to the core of him. Now he thought of them more like gross bugs to be squished. He had no fear at all. There was no room for fear, only disgust and that unique violent impulse that felt so much like home.

A few more melted away. They were cowards, these young vampires. At least, the smart ones were.

“Looks like your friends don’t want to die with you,” Will smirked. He was enjoying himself more than he had in a long time. He was feeling powerful. He was feeling dangerous.

They’d picked on him because they thought his humanity made him weak. It was such a mistake. Even if he had not now known wolf blood flowed through his veins, the wooden stake plucked from his back and now clutched in his fist was all he needed to destroy them.

He twirled it casually, as if it were a toy. Ratfink hissed like a cat. The sound was weak and sick, pathetic. Will leaped and swung the stake over his head in a harsh arc. The vampire had faster reflexes and more power, but neither of those things mattered because Will had the element of surprise and when he moved, he struck like a wolf, viciously, and with intent to kill.

The stake struck home right in the center of the vampire’s chest. It was satisfying and yet somehow anticlimactic as the creature collapsed into a pile of ash. Every other vampire in range of the kill fled, their super human movement putting them out of his range in a flash.

“You want me? Come and get me!” Will shouted defiantly to the night.

He twirled the stake again, thinking idly how easy it actually was to slay vampires. They hid because they were eminently destroyable and outnumbered by a species that loved to kill.

It was the first time he had ever put down a vampire as a mere human, and the rush he got from having done so lasted most of the night. He prowled the city looking for another opportunity and was saddened when another did not present itself.

Eventually, when he was tired and hungry and the cold of the night had infiltrated his bones and not even the rising of the sun had helped, he dragged himself home.

“You're late,” Maddox noted as Will strolled in around seven in the morning, his stake tucked into the small of his back and hidden by the loose fit of his leather jacket.

“Yep,” Will agreed. He was surprised Maddox had noticed. Since he’d burst into tears and been locked in his room there had been what could only be described as an uneasy truce between them. Will was pretty sure Mad didn't know what the fuck to do with him. He was too emotional, too unstable, too violent, too irrational. He’d heard it all before from others.