Page 75 of Vampire Kings Box Set

And then it changed. The wolf shrank, the fur receded, the snout slid back to become a mouth and a nose, two distinct things on a human face of rough handsomeness.

Will’s father looked a lot like him. They had the same bone structure, the same wild hair, the same hard jaw and rebellious set to their features. His father’s hair was thick and long, mostly dark with a few stray flecks of silver through the mane that fell to his shoulders. Will immediately determined to grow his hair out.

“I thought you'd be older,” Will said.

“I thought you’d be younger,” Ivan replied. They had almost the same voice, though his father’s was raspier and richer, a deeper dad baritone.

Will couldn’t stop staring. It was the longest he'd ever looked at a completely naked man without having a single sexual thought. His father was powerfully built and bigger, somehow. Will had never worried about his musculature. He was more than big enough to kill anyone who needed killing. Suddenly, he found himself thinking about protein and gains.

He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to say anything. He just wanted to be here in the presence of his father and bask in this sudden feeling of primal belonging. He made more sense now than he had thirty seconds ago. He was part of something. He was someone. Not a freak. Not a criminal. Not a pet. Not a boy. He was a son.

“Come on.” His father motioned to him. “Need to get out of here.”

There was a pickup truck parked underneath the bridge, next to an ironic dumpster. Will got in without thinking about the potential consequences. His father got into the driver’s side and looked at him again.

“What’s that thing around your neck?”

“Uhm. It’s like a tracking device.”

“Looks like a fucking collar.” His father produced a large knife from under the dash, grabbed Will by the back of the head and started working on the collar. Whatever the knife was made from had to be sharp, it went through all the cables and woven metal like it was nothing. Within seconds, the collar he’d worn since leaving prison was gone. He could feel the absence of it as a certain lack of warmth.

“You’re not a dog. You’re a wolf. A predator. ’Bout time you started acting like it.”

To his surprise, Will felt liberated and strangely naked with the collar gone from around his neck. His father wound the window down and thew the collar into the dumpster.

“Let me put some fuckin’ clothes on,” Ivan said, grabbing some pants from the footwell and pulling them up over his naked lower half. He grabbed some shoes too, dirty tennis shoes. He wasn’t a fashionista in any way. Everything about him was raw and practical, bare bones. Will liked the aesthetic immediately.

When Ivan was dressed, at least in theory—he was still missing a shirt, Will’s father started the pickup. It complained into life, coughing and backfiring with mechanical insufficiency.

“Where are we going?” It finally occurred to Will to ask the question.

His father looked over at him. “Home.”

Meanwhile, Maddox was dealing with the regret of a secret being unburdened after over two decades. Candy sat curled up in his office armchair, a fistful of tissues in her hand, mascara running. It was a pitiful sight, for a woman as strong as her to have been reduced to misery, but Maddox knew better than anybody the way grief and regret could carve channels through one’s soul. The waters flooding from her eyes had been running deep for a very long time.

“So you had a baby. And you abandoned the baby.”

“My parents would have disowned me. They thought I’d put on weight. I wore a lot of big hoodies. It was the style. I got good grades. Nobody would ever have suspected… and then one day, I was at the mall and it… it just came. There was something wrong with it. I thought it was… I don’t know. I thought it was a monster.”

Maddox tried not to wince at the description of Will as an it. He tried to understand that she was relaying the traumatized memories of a much younger person. He almost succeeded.

“So you put it in a garbage…”

“I panicked. I put it in and I came back two minutes later and he was gone. I couldn’t… I couldn’t ask where he’d gone. I had to figure someone had seen me and saved him. And I knew he'd be better off without me.”

“Debatable,” Maddox mused.

Candy struggled to speak as old grief felt fresh and new overwhelmed her.

“I’ve regretted this my entire life. It has haunted me. I have never known who he became. Or what he became. And now…”

“And now you know that baby lives in this very house as a grown man.” Maddox had not bothered to keep that from Candy. He was already keeping a great many secrets. It was nice to relieve himself of the burden of one of them.

Candy sucked in a breath. “He’s a murderer and a criminal.”

“Nobody is perfect,” Maddox said with the casual disinterest of an immortal who doesn’t have to worry about that sort of behavior. Humans so often underestimated how terrible they were on average, and vastly overestimated their capacity for good. The notion of a good human was almost as paradoxical as the notion of a dry ocean.

“Are you referring to him or me?”