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Carter looked blankly at Gideon, though not with a complete lack of understanding. The rumors of his mother being alive had percolated through the mansion, of course. The coven had no secrets.
“So it’s true. My mother survived what you did to her.” Carter bit out the last of the sentence, his fangs snapping with the effort not to call it what it was. Murder.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Is she a vampire too?”
There was an adorable level of hope in his voice. He was just eighteen years old, still very much a baby. He wanted his mama. Gideon could not relate to the desire. He had been created from forces of pure evil and therefore had no corporeal mother.
“I do not believe so.”
“And my sister?”
Gideon had almost forgotten about the little female. She had been a tasty morsel.
“There was nothing left of her to save.”
Carter’s blue eyes flashed black, just for a moment. Gideon was not foolish. He knew that Carter’s rage was tremendous, his grief profound. No vampire gained the gift of eternity without paying the toll of misery.
“She did not suffer,” Gideon said. “And I can assure you, that was a mercy. She was not aware of her passing, and she was never subjected to the great human curse of growing old. Your sister never knew what it was to become adult, to be burdened by responsibilities and cares, to be betrayed by her body, and to eventually pass. I ended her swiftly before she knew I was there. It was the greatest mercy I was capable of bestowing.”
“You expect me to be grateful for that?”
Gideon’s eyes were dark with compassion. “You should be. Look at your own pain, this torment you are suffering. In the years to come, you will watch the young and the strong, your current contemporaries, become the weak and the old. Only time will give you the perspective necessary to appreciate the gifts I bestowed upon your family.”
“My family. Including the wolf you imprisoned here. My brother.”
Carter looked at Gideon with the cold gaze of a vampire whose emotional attachments have been severed by trauma. There was so much latent energy in that dark stare. He would unleash it one day, but not today.
“Mom never told me about him.”
“He was her shame, whereas you are her pride,” Gideon said. “But you are both quite fascinating. There is a strength in your bloodline that I assumed came to your brother through his wolf side. But you and your mother have proven to be exceptional in your own right. It would be quite interesting to do a family tree and see where you come from. Perhaps I will set the genealogists to work doing just that.”
Carter’s expression remained impassive. He was rarely emotional, and this moment was no exception. He was numb to the world, and to the events of the world. He had even made himself numb to his own death, though he remembered it.
Not long ago…
“Mom! Where are my skates!”
Carter came down the stairs, taking them two and three at a time. He was late for practice, and certain that his mother had hidden his skates again, or as she put it, tidied them away.
“Mom! Where’s my… MOM!?”
His mother was cowering in the corner of the living room. His father lay dead on the floor, his throat slashed open by the rancid black claws of a beast that wasn’t animal or human, but something in between.
Carter wasn’t entirely certain that he was really seeing what he was seeing. The thing in the living room, the killing thing, had a terrible appearance. It had tentacles and fangs, and it did not occupy space and time properly. It was enveloping his family, destroying them, changing his world forever.
“What the fuck?”
“Carter!” his mom called out. “Run!”
But he didn’t run. He lifted his hockey stick and tried to hit the beast with the business end. He’d seen sticks do real damage to human faces, but it bonked lightly off the cranium of the mysterious monster, doing less than nothing.
The thing laughed at him, the sum of all human nightmares made incarnate. The monster flashed into the form of a man, a very handsome man. He was still incredibly strong, and still entirely evil. He had long, dark silken hair, and features that seemed to be from some Middle Eastern place, perhaps, or maybe somewhere even older. He did not so much have an ethnicity as he had an originality. Not so much in the sense of uniqueness, but as in he looked as though he could have been one of the original prototypes of man. An archetype. A dark one.
Carter felt all these things instantly and completely, understanding things he had never bothered to think about before in an instant, as he and the creature looked at one another with mutual interest.
“You,” it said, in a voice he was now very familiar with. “You are perfect.”
