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Adrian continues, “As you can imagine, my parents weren’t pleased. Mother cut off her head in front of me, and Father made me kneel in that pool of blood, surrounded by armed soldiers, and he put a silver bullet in my head. I was changed. I was a monster, a reanimated creature. So, Father killed me, gave me my final death. Or, so he thought. I have a silver bullet in me with Father’s name on it. Its name is Father. He was too vain to have me staked and decapitated. That was his mistake.” They mutter darkly, “Someone calling themselves your family—that’s only so they have an excuse to betray you. You’re supposed to do everything for family, even if it’s counterintuitive. Even if it destroys you to try to make them happy.”
Lauren?iu understands. It’s hard to believe you can have connections that aren’t somebody wanting you to give up something. In Hell, that idea amplified instead of diminishing.
Expression soft and voice quiet, Lauren?iu murmurs, “I’m sorry. You deserved better.”
Adrian hums. “I’m not so sure. You didn’t see the things I did. I wasn’t popular with anyone outside of the compound. We oppressed them.”
“You were a child.”
“I wasn’t a child when any of this happened. Look at me. I’m not a child. I’m not anyone’s child. I...” They stop, but Lauren?iu imagines they were going to say,I was never anyone’s child.
“You were when you were made to be this way.”
“This way. Do you think I’ve changed, even a little? With the state of the world, is there any point in trying to change? I never cared for religion, all the rules and shame, but I could never tell anyone. Still, it seems like everything reinforces my father’s thoughts about the world, about me.”
“I don’t know. I don’t want you to change.”
“And what do you want?”
He thinks about it. “I just want us to exist as we are. Without needing to worry. Without needing to look over our shoulders. Do you want to go feed when night comes?”
An odd kind of bonding, kneeling over a bleeding deer and drinking from it while Adrian complained that they hated the texture of fur. No different, he supposes, than sharing a meal. Or killing the cannibals with Paimon.
“Yes.”
“We could go train, too.” Lauren?iu decides that he might as well train Adrian in being a vampire. Who else around can?
Adrian keeps rubbing a spot on the side of their neck. “In the middle of the day?”
“If you can bring out your powers even in the day, you’re exceptionally powerful.”
“I suppose that’s true. In a moment.”
When Lauren?iu leaves Adrian as they get dressed, in the hall, he finds Paimon leaning next to their bedroom door and smoking a cigarette.
“Oh, hey. Funny meeting you here. his tail swishes to the side. “Don’t mind me,” he says, as he always does. Already establishing a routine.
“Of course,” Lauren?iu says. “What’s to mind?”
Paimon pops out his cigarette and releases rings of smoke. “You know, every time I meet a guy named Kenneth, he always ends up to be my worst enemy.”
“My condolences.”
“Before you two go out, I was thinking of making pancakes.”
“All right,” Lauren?iu says, wondering if, perhaps, Paimon is trying, in his own way, to do something for Adrian.
Then again, this wouldn’t be their first breakfast together, though it usually didn’t happen during the day. Or perhaps this is for all of them, every night.
These would be the first pancakes, however.
“Pancakes?” Adrian repeats.
“Yes,” Paimon replies, dressed in a red apron that says,Kiss the Cook,“it’s a thin, flat cake made with batter and usually topped with syrup.”
Keeping their elbows politely off the table, Adrian rolls their eyes. “I know what a pancake is.”
“Well, you asked! Now eat, silly.”
