AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Much later that night, as the full moon rose in a cloud-wisped sky, Will finally got what some deep part of him had craved all his life. Maddox escorted him outside the house and told him to wait there. It was like being taken to a surprise party, but a very small one, and one that had a general pall of melancholy about it.
He stood and he waited, wondering what it was Maddox had in store for him. He could not imagine who Mad would entrust him to now. He was surprised that his vampire master had let him be outside unsupervised at all. It would be the work of a moment to take his wolf form and flee back into the wilds to continue his animal rampage.
But he didn’t. He waited, out of curiosity, and something even more perverse and unnatural to him: hope.
He smelled her before he saw her. She smelled of the grave, of decay. She came through the trees, a gaunt and internally illuminated figure of rotted maternity.
It was the same creature he had seen easily wound Gideon, the most unique and dangerous beast any in the paranormal underworld had ever encountered.
His mother.
She was the woman who had borne him. The woman who had abandoned him. The woman who now loved him more than life and death, enough to destroy the beast that came for him.
Candy did not look anything like he remembered in her living life. Her eyes were a milky blue, a sort of opaque haze between them and the world. Her flesh was an unpleasant pale hue with some signs of rot appearing in unflattering places. She had always been a handsome woman, but now the angularity of her face appeared harsh, the lines of her skull all too prominent.
“I’m sorry,” she said, making her first words an apology, as if she knew they might also be her last words.
There was a brief and beautiful moment in which forgiveness might be extended. It passed.
“I’m sorry too,” Will replied. “I’m sorry you put me in a fucking dumpster and lied to me my entire life and let me turn into a fucking monster without so much as a word.”
He’d imagined he’d processed all that anger and grief by a method of no longer giving a fuck, but apparently he gave quite a few fucks. So many that even the grief-animated corpse of his mother making a physical apology still didn’t seem to cut it.
“I wronged you,” she said. “Many times, and I have paid for that wrong by losing all my children, my husband, and my life.”
“You gave me away. You left me without a family, never knowing who I was, or what was wrong with me. You made me what I am.”
“Yes. I did.”
“Fortunately,” Will said. “I like who I am. I didn’t before. I thought there was something wrong with being a flesh-consuming monster, but now I’ve settled into it, it’s really growing on me.”
“That’s not the lesson I had hoped you would take away from these events, but I cannot blame you for turning to your wild side. There is little comfort to be had in humanity. But even wolves need packs. And you are loved more than you know.”
The vicious, violent, animated zombie lingered near Will with a certain amount of ashamed awkwardness.
“I wanted to tell you, but Maddox was right.”
“No, he wasn’t. Maddox is a fucking moron.”
A soft cough somewhere in the very depths of the night, far out of Will’s range of vision, made him aware that Maddox had not in fact actually left him completely to his own devices. Figured.
“So what are you going to do? Hang about taking strips off Gideon from time to time? He loves it, you know.”
“There is no greater masochist than a sadist,” Candy agreed in a death-rattle. “I am here as long as it takes to make amends to you, my son. You are my unfinished business.”
“I don’t know what amends you can make,” Will said, blunt, because he knew no other way to be. “I don’t need you anymore. Especially not… in this… you’re kind of…”
“I know,” Candy rasped. “I’m not at my best right now. You might not know how you need me, but I can tell you one thing, one day your brother will need you.”
It took a second for Will to process what he’d just heard. The first time ever speaking to his mother as his mother, and she was already talking about his half-brother.
“Carter? He didn’t give a shit when I was locked up.”
“He is traumatized and scared, at the mercy of forces far greater than he…”
“Oh, wow. That must suck for him. Kind of like a baby in a dumpster.”
Will was starting to get angry again. Apologies did not mean anything to him, and Candy’s concern for Carter made him feel like an afterthought yet again. Carter was the child she had kept, the one she had loved. Carter was the one who had never wanted for anything, and whose father had been a nice, normal man who had not passed on a Lycan curse. Carter had been given everything, while Will had been given nothing, and that had not changed in the afterlife. He was not her unfinished business. He was not her business at all.
