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“It’s broken,” a nearby voice said. “We’ll eat him and find another. A stronger one.” There was hunger in those masculine tones, the kind that made Will whimper with near certainty that he was about to be consumed. Lying on the ground, in the dirt, with the grit of concrete bits digging into his wounded flesh, Will gave up on life, abandoning himself in the hypnotic gaze of the dark-eyed master who loomed over him.
The tension was broken for a brief moment as Maddox pulled his gaze away, cursing softly under his breath.
“Lorien, go lock yourself in the basement. Now.”
Lorien hesitated but did as he was told. Or at least disappeared from view in one way or another.
“Two of you,” Maddox sighed. “One as bad as the other in different ways. Are you ready to behave, Will?”
“Yes,” Will whispered. There could be no other answer. Yes. Yes to whatever Maddox wanted. Yes to whatever he might command.
Mad scooped him up from the ground, lifting his couple-hundred-pound muscular frame as if it weighed nothing at all. The pain in his leg was still there, but it no longer felt like something he had to be personally concerned about. It throbbed and ached, pulsed and bled of its own accord.
“What are you going to do with me?”
The question went unanswered as Maddox carried Will back inside and settled him on a long piece of designer furniture which would never be the same after this.
“Do I need to chain you up, pup? Is that it? I thought I told you about the functions of the collar?”
“Oh… I forgot about the collar,” Will admitted.
“Humans!” There was an exclamation from a nearby space that was probably not the basement.
“Lorien! Put yourself away before I put you away,” Maddox snarled, drawing on his hidden reserve of dark vampire master energy in a way which made every lesser creature in his realm scurry, except for Will who was pinned in place by his gaze.
“Sorry!” A shout came back from a deeper, more subterranean location.
Maddox perched on the side of the deep black settee upon which Will lay.
“Why did you run?”
“I can’t do what you want me to do. I’m not what you think I am.”
“You are exactly what I think you are,” Maddox replied with a little smirk of amusement. “You are not what you think you are, and that causes you more pain than this shattered leg of yours.”
“I can’t feel it as much anymore.”
“That’s because you are under my influence. It is a talent of mine. Well, a talent of our kind. We have evolved to find ways to soothe humans. It makes the drinking easier if you’re not screaming and carrying on, alerting everybody in the village.”
His lips twisted in a manner which was supposed to amuse. Will let out a dry chuckle which turned to a pained rasp. Mads’ influence was not enough to stop him feeling his wounds entirely. He had the feeling that, like everything else, was intentional.
“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.
“What is it?”
“This one is so broken,” Lorien sighed. “You’ve had much stronger, and they were destroyed within weeks. He has no chance.”
“Those who seem broken may be stronger than they appear.”
Lorien let his gaze drift away with deference to Maddox’s assertion, but Mad knew very well Lorien did not see the value in the pup. There was something intangible about him, a rare quality that only those who had lived and suffered for longer than a century could have any chance of recognizing. To the rest of the world, he was a thug.
William was his clay. Something to be molded. Someone yet to be made. In time, the world would tremble at their feet. For now, scorn was the most obvious reaction. And that was the problem with Lorien. He was young, and so he only saw the obvious. Maddox’s powers were more developed in many ways, but of all the strange and arcane abilities afforded a vampire, he considered the common and shared talent of simple perception most important of all.
It was a long evening. Mad sat perched next to Will’s bed, watching him sleep through the night. He was deep in thought, planning, pondering, coming to terms with the unexpected complexities William had brought with him.
He looked like a simple brute, but there were traces of elegance about his face too, in the line of his jaw, and the sharp descent of his nose, not to mention the wide set of his eyes. There was innocence yet to be destroyed in this handsome human package.
Will began to stir as light filtered through the curtains.
“Shh. No. Stay sleeping,” Mad murmured, brushing his hand lightly over Will’s forehead.
His charge took the suggestion and settled back into slumber. It was satisfying to have some control over him, though Maddox had to admit to himself that he had far less control than usual. Humans were so susceptible to his influence. This one was different in so many ways. He needed careful handling. Thoughtful treatment. He was much more sensitive than Maddox had ever imagined he would be. And much more alluring.
The first time Maddox fucked Will, it had been as a means of sending a message, a shortcut for hours of tedious conversation. Now his desire connected with something deeper. He wanted to enjoy the young man. He wanted to feel his strength and his weakness, his fear and his desire all gripping his cock with that desperate human grip. But Will needed to rest, and Maddox knew all too well that patience could only put a finer point on lust.
