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“You know what?” Will bit out. “Maybe Maddox was right. Maybe I never needed to know who you were. Maybe you’re useless to me. Bye,Mom.”
He said the wordMomwith such bitter sarcasm and biting cruelty that it was more of a curse than any other word could have been. Then he turned around and walked back inside the house.
* * *
“Ishould not have mentioned Carter,” Candy said as Maddox approached. He had been in the shadows, watching all that happened. If a fetid apparition could feel shame and regret, it seemed she felt it quite keenly.
She hung faintly in the dark, stringy hair floating in the light breeze as if it weighed nothing at all, pathetic and horrific all at the same time.
“I don’t know what you could have said,” Maddox replied. “This is why I did not want this reunion to take place. It was better your abandonment never had a face. Now he knows he was left by someone with a loving family, someone capable of being a mother. Now his pain is compounded and deepened…” He shook his head. “I loathe it when I second guess myself. I was right. I knew I was right. I would bear William’s loathing for an eternity to protect him from this pain.”
The wraith of Candy seemed to flutter in the breeze.
“Carter…”
“Did you come back for Will? Or was it your other son?” Maddox questioned. “You keep mentioning him.”
“He’s your son too, now, Maddox. You made him a vampire. And he is in the grasp of evil. Don’t make me do what he asked me to do. Don’t make me destroy him.”
Maddox’s eyes rarely widened. There were too few things in the world to surprise him anymore. But this caused his gaze to dilate by a distinct fraction of an inch. The sheer nerve of the woman, undead or not, to pursue this concern for Carter when Will was emotionally bleeding was unfathomable.
“Goodnight, Candy,” he said.
* * *
Will heard the front door open and Maddox step inside the house. He steeled himself for a lecture about being rude to his zombie mom. He already had all his arguments in place.
“She only cares about him,” Will said bitterly the second Maddox turned the corner into the room. “I’m not sorry I walked away. I never want to see her again. You can’t make me.”
“I agree. And I am sorry. I am too old to have made the naive mistake of imagining that death makes people somehow better. It’s not death that transforms us. It’s life.”
“Wow,” Will said. “I thought you were going to tell me she’s just trying her best.”
Maddox gave an imperceptible shrug. “She very well may be, but her best is not very good.”
Will snorted, and a small smile broke over his face. “Feels like it’s been a long time since we agreed on anything.”
“Your mother has been problematic for a long time. She was a good detective, but a hit and miss mom. And thats, unfortunately, what people are like. They can be spectacularly good and bad at the same thing at the same time. It’s honestly ridiculous.”
Will smirked. Maddox had always kept his opinions about humanity largely to himself. It was very difficult for a vampire not to have contempt for the species. And as for Will, he’d been slaughtering people as a way of working through his personal trauma for weeks now. So.
“I guess we’re all flawed,” he said.
“Perhaps,” Maddox allowed. “That’s a very thoughtful observation.”
Will allowed himself a little smile. There was space inside his body for feelings of lightness now that he no longer had to hold the rage against his mom alone.
“You’re surprised when I say anything that has any thought behind it at all.”
“Well. Again. Perhaps. I haven’t heard anything more than a grunt, a growl, a curse, or a threat from you in a very long time.”
Will smiled a little. “I… I missed you too, by the way.”
“I know.” Maddox reached out and ran his fingers through Will’s wild curls.
“What’s going to happen to us now?”
“Well,” Maddox said. “In some ways, the problems might take care of themselves. Gideon has become fascinated by the pain Candy is capable of bringing, and he has Carter. So.”
