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“Make it stop,” Will whispered.
Mads leaned down, his cold lips nearly brushing Will’s. “No.”
“Why are you doing this?” Will groaned.
“I’m not doing anything besides saving you from yourself. It is not my fault your shame saw you flying from a window with no plan besides giving yourself to gravity. You are impulsive. It could be your greatest strength, but you have made it a weakness.”
As Mad spoke, he let his fingers drift lightly across Will’s forehead. It was a gesture which might indicate caring, but Will did not know if Mad was capable of caring. He did not truly know him at all. They were strangers inhabiting an even stranger world. But there was a level on which he knew Mads intimately. He had been taken by the creature, mated and maybe even broken by him. His primal side knew Maddox as well as he had ever known anybody.
“Doctor is here!”
Lorien escorted a tired looking young man with a face full of stubble and bleary eyes. This was no vampire, Will guessed. This was a human bent to their will. He looked like an ER doc, grabbed from the end of his shift, possibly without any choice.
“Miguel, how are you?” Maddox stood up to greet his guest.
“Very well, thank you,” the doctor replied with a yawn. “How’s the patient?”
“Fractious and willful,” Mad replied.
The doctor approached, glanced briefly at Will’s face, and turned his attention to the obvious wound.
“Broken leg,” he said, as if anybody was in any doubt what the problem was. “We’ll set it, cast it. No problem. Antibiotics for the exposed flesh. Quite nasty. Probably should be in the hospital. There could be other complications. You say he fell? Could be back injuries.”
“We have the medical suite here, remember?”
“Of course I do.”
Medical suite. No. Will did not like doctors as a general rule. Actually, he loathed them. The ones in prison had done more harm than good most of the time and took pleasure in sewing wounds up without anesthetic or pain relief.
Maddox’s influence had slowed the process of connections down between seeing the doctor and having a violent reaction, but it was inevitable that he would eventually lose his shit. A delayed reaction, perhaps an expression of deep shame. There were many reasons that could be applied to the action that followed, a swift uppercut that would have laid the doctor out cold if not for Mad’s swifter than human reaction time in pulling the doctor out of harm’s way.
“No!” He chided Will like an aggressive dog. “Bad boy!”
“Get away from me,” Will said. “I don’t like doctors.”
“I’m going to sedate him.”
“No, you’re fucking not…”
Maddox stood over the insensate and thoroughly medically-tended-to young man. The doctor was packing up and about to leave. Maddox was not happy. He had not imagined that Will’s first hunt would end this way. He had expected to accompany a young cocky vampire slayer home to bed, not handle the rebellions and refusals of a prisoner.
He was much easier to deal with when he was unconscious, that much was certain. He was so handsome too. Heartbreakingly so, if Maddox had a heart.
“The leg will need to stay in a cast for the next three months, give or take.”
“Three months,” Mad mused. It was nothing in terms of the span of his life, just a blink of an eye, but it suddenly felt like a very long time for Will to be out of action. Never mind. He would focus on the whelp’s education in other ways. Will had much to learn. Taking him out so early had clearly been a mistake. He’d overestimated the boy’s mental stability and underestimated the damage prison and early abandonment had done.
“You want me to leave the sedatives?”
“No, that’s quite alright, thank you. I’ll handle him from here.”
Maddox was interested to note that he felt a certain pang of uncertainty having said that, as if he was not entirely sure he would be able to handle Will. Even with a broken leg, the young man was a force of nature to be reckoned with, a storm trapped inside human flesh. Asleep, he was quite beautiful, the hard lines of his jaw still clenched with that eternal rebellion that raged inside him.
He had imagined he understood Will. He was beginning to believe he did not know him at all. He knew the outlines of the boy, the facts and circumstances, but those things did not add up to true knowledge. These weeks might very well turn out to be useful for his study of Will, as much as they would be for Will’s studies of the new world in which he found himself.
“I’ve shown the doctor out,” Lorien said, appearing in the doorway, his long frame leaning elegantly against the wood frame.
“Good.”
He heard Lorien’s impatient sound as he continued to stare down at poor, sweet Will.
