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If. No, when the vampire hunter finds the body.
He looks back at the path.
Lauren?iu doesn’t see him. Where—
The body beside them alights. He startles.
Suddenly beside them, Paimon waves. “Did you see that human on the dirt road? He was a silver fox.”
It’s perhaps a little much, but Lauren?iu sets a bloody finger on Paimon’s lip; the demon king’s eyes sparkle in amusement. “Quiet.”
“Don’t worry. He’s gone on. We’re good.”
Lauren?iu’s stomach, sloshing with fresh blood, is uneasy.
Lauren?iu spends over an hour in the shower, the water running ice-cold. He curls on his knees and knits his hands on his nape as he leans forward, submerging his head in the water.
He thinks.
And thinks.
He washes his face, he showers, and he goes to bed with Paimon, who dwells on the bed with his hands behind his head.
Silently, he dresses in a black Def Leppard shirt—funny what could survive the zombie apocalypse—and checkered boxers.
As Lauren?iu gets into bed and crosses his legs, Paimon asks casually, “Hey, are you all right? You seemed rattled after the hunt.”
Lauren?iu pays it off. “It’s fine. I’m just in a mood.”
Paimon makes a small noise. “I see.”
Seeing Anthony’s husband raises a question: Just what is Lauren?iu doing now? This easy life, this good life, it isn’t for him.
He thought that he’d be content with Hell, perhaps with the promise of a crown if he made Paimon fall in love with him. As if that were ever his reason for getting closer to the demon king.
Maybe it’s easier to believe that than the truth. Believe that about himself. It’s simpler to believe that he can’t have both power and love. But it’s not true.
But he’ll miss greasy two AM diner hashbrowns and cars that smell like spilled orange soda and cigarettes, cigarettes, like his childhood home with the beaten floral couch where Mama would smoke a pack a day while, as casually as describing the rain outside, opining about the time her childhood friend’s father and uncle disappeared overnight and were never seen again.
Adrian.
He cannot leave them. Out of anyone, he knows what it’s like to be abandoned. To open up, trust, and regret it, ashamed and alone. No. He can’t do that to anybody. Someone must stay by Adrian.
All I have is revenge and death.
That isn’t true anymore.
I have him.
He thinks about Paimon chatting about Romantic poets and baroque art with him. Seething behind a fixed smile when anyone even insinuated harm to Lauren?iu.
Paimon, his golden lashes and sumptuous red velvet robes.
Alone.
It was never true.
In his worst moments, Lauren?iu was never truly alone. Even in the hospital, there was that one nurse who, even if she didn’t speak, tried to reach out to him in her own way, who gave him an extra cup of chocolate pudding, the only thing he could eat. But he was tired and angry and bitter, so he never thanked her. Allie? Ellie? Where is she now? Dead? Reanimated?
