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Maddox gave a very slight shrug. “He does not consider himself mine, and I have responsibilities to attend to here.”
If he was lying, he was doing so very convincingly. Gideon could probe the mind of his offspring, but he was not feeling inclined to do so. He had not asked for Maddox in order to perform vampiric psychotherapy on him. The experience of being hurt had excited him greatly. He was eager to repeat it.
“I want you to find this”—he waved his hand in the air—“this woman. You knew her once. You must be able to find her again.”
“The woman?”
Now Maddox was certainly playing dumb. The entire coven had been deep in conversation about nothing else ever since Gideon returned wounded. Tales of her existence had spread from one side of the mansion to the other. It was the most exciting and terrifying news to hit vampire-kind in centuries, if not millennia.
“Yes. The woman you used to use. The woman who bore your wolf and your fledgling. The one who seems to have cheated death in some way we do not yet recognize.”
“She's a zombie,” Maddox said. “Not the traditional shambling, brain-eating zombie humans fear, but a zombie animated by a singular purpose: revenge. That is what she feeds on. She will come for you, time and time again. Hurt you, time and time again. You have become the source of sustenance, Gideon.”
Maddox spoke with great authority, a sureness that made Gideon quite suspicious. Even he did not know what the woman had become, and yet Maddox seemed not only certain, but unsurprised.
“Maddox…” Gideon drew out his progeny’s name. “Is this creature a creation of yours?”
“I believe she would say that she is a creation of yours,” Maddox said echoing Candy uncannily.
“She would. She did.” Gideon paused for a long moment, his eyes glimmering with some unspoken emotion. Maddox stood quite still, inhumanly motionless, waiting for the inevitable question to formulate itself.
“Maddox, I made you so angry with the loss of your pet wolf that you created an abomination never seen before in all of time to destroy me?”
“Perhaps,” Maddox replied, visibly steeling himself.
Gideon spread his arms wide, and a true smile passed over his eternally handsome face. “I have never been so proud.”
“WHAT!?” Ray’s confused shout could be heard from out in the hall.
“I did say, perhaps,” Maddox replied. “I did not confess to such a thing.”
“Of course you didn’t.” Gideon beamed. “You must bring me your new creation as soon as possible.”
Maddox frowned slightly. “You think you will be able to destroy her?”
“Oh, I hope not.”
“Then I am confused.”
Ray came bursting through the door in a rage. “He wants her to hurt him! He likes the pain.”
“Oh,” Maddox said. “Understandable.”
“Really? Understandable? The origin of all evil, the greatest of our number, the purest of our kind. The one without whom we all face oblivion.” Ray was nearly crying from frustration and rage. “He wants to be hurt. Perhaps he wants to die. Do you not know this about your own father? He seeks death inexorably. His sleep is as close as he can approximate, but now you have created something that might actually end him.”
Maddox looked at Ray with the blank expression of someone who absolutely does not care even the slightest bit about the concerns of the person speaking to him.
A long moment passed before Maddox spoke.
“… Okay.”
That singular little word saw Ray lose his temper completely and hurl himself at Maddox with the intention of beating the un-living hell out of him.
Maddox was ready, as every younger sibling has been since the dawn of time, and though Ray was older and more powerful, it had been a long time since Maddox was easy prey. He caught Ray’s mad charge and redirected the momentum of his vampire sibling up and over his head, the result of which sent Ray crashing through the wall, tearing through relatively thin drywall to create a Ray-sized hole.
Gideon looked on with faint interest as Ray clambered back up to his feet in a way that was awkward for a vampire, but elegant for a human, while glowering at Maddox. “You’ve always been spoiled,” he snarled. “Always gotten away with things you shouldn’t. That’s why you ended up fucking a wolf. Perversion is the inevitable result of permissiveness.”
“You’re not my maker,” Maddox reminded him smoothly, in controlled and contained tones that only served to further rile Ray. “If you’d like to critique my upbringing, our maker is right there.”
