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“Lorien! Put yourself away before I put you away,” Maddox snarled, drawing on his hidden reserve of dark vampire master energy in a way which made every lesser creature in his realm scurry, except for Will who was pinned in place by his gaze.
“Sorry!” A shout came back from a deeper, more subterranean location.
Maddox perched on the side of the deep black settee upon which Will lay.
“Why did you run?”
“I can’t do what you want me to do. I’m not what you think I am.”
“You are exactly what I think you are,” Maddox replied with a little smirk of amusement. “You are not what you think you are, and that causes you more pain than this shattered leg of yours.”
“I can’t feel it as much anymore.”
“That’s because you are under my influence. It is a talent of mine. Well, a talent of our kind. We have evolved to find ways to soothe humans. It makes the drinking easier if you’re not screaming and carrying on, alerting everybody in the village.”
His lips twisted in a manner which was supposed to amuse. Will let out a dry chuckle which turned to a pained rasp. Mads’ influence was not enough to stop him feeling his wounds entirely. He had the feeling that, like everything else, was intentional.
“Make it stop,” Will whispered.
Mads leaned down, his cold lips nearly brushing Will’s. “No.”
“Why are you doing this?” Will groaned.
“I’m not doing anything besides saving you from yourself. It is not my fault your shame saw you flying from a window with no plan besides giving yourself to gravity. You are impulsive. It could be your greatest strength, but you have made it a weakness.”
As Mad spoke, he let his fingers drift lightly across Will’s forehead. It was a gesture which might indicate caring, but Will did not know if Mad was capable of caring. He did not truly know him at all. They were strangers inhabiting an even stranger world. But there was a level on which he knew Mads intimately. He had been taken by the creature, mated and maybe even broken by him. His primal side knew Maddox as well as he had ever known anybody.
“Doctor is here!”
Lorien escorted a tired looking young man with a face full of stubble and bleary eyes. This was no vampire, Will guessed. This was a human bent to their will. He looked like an ER doc, grabbed from the end of his shift, possibly without any choice.
“Miguel, how are you?” Maddox stood up to greet his guest.
“Very well, thank you,” the doctor replied with a yawn. “How’s the patient?”
“Fractious and willful,” Mad replied.
The doctor approached, glanced briefly at Will’s face, and turned his attention to the obvious wound.
“Broken leg,” he said, as if anybody was in any doubt what the problem was. “We’ll set it, cast it. No problem. Antibiotics for the exposed flesh. Quite nasty. Probably should be in the hospital. There could be other complications. You say he fell? Could be back injuries.”
“We have the medical suite here, remember?”
“Of course I do.”
Medical suite. No. Will did not like doctors as a general rule. Actually, he loathed them. The ones in prison had done more harm than good most of the time and took pleasure in sewing wounds up without anesthetic or pain relief.
Maddox’s influence had slowed the process of connections down between seeing the doctor and having a violent reaction, but it was inevitable that he would eventually lose his shit. A delayed reaction, perhaps an expression of deep shame. There were many reasons that could be applied to the action that followed, a swift uppercut that would have laid the doctor out cold if not for Mad’s swifter than human reaction time in pulling the doctor out of harm’s way.
“No!” He chided Will like an aggressive dog. “Bad boy!”
“Get away from me,” Will said. “I don’t like doctors.”
“I’m going to sedate him.”
“No, you’re fucking not…”
Maddox stood over the insensate and thoroughly medically-tended-to young man. The doctor was packing up and about to leave. Maddox was not happy. He had not imagined that Will’s first hunt would end this way. He had expected to accompany a young cocky vampire slayer home to bed, not handle the rebellions and refusals of a prisoner.
