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Lorien didn’t have to bend over the couch, because the furious Maker was pulling him up and over the furniture as if he weighed nothing.
“You’re going to ruin my pants again, aren’t you,” he said. His voice shook a little with fear. He wanted so badly to be brave, but how could anyone be brave in the face of this beast? Gideon was perfectly in control, for Gideon was the beginning and end of all things.
“Your pants are the least of what I plan to ruin,” Gideon intoned. “Telling Maddox about space is not why you are here. Your attitude when you thought I could not lay hands on you is why you are here.”
“Yes. I know. I’m sorrrreeeeee….” Lorien’s voice trailed off into a screech as a cane landed across his ass. Hard. Fucking hard. Hard enough to lay a line of pure pain into his flesh. Hard enough to rip and tear at the fabric until it came away from his skin. Or perhaps that was the Maker’s clawed hand that did that damage. It was impossible to tell in the general onslaught.
Gideon lashed him with harsh, repetitive strokes, more than three dozen of them all in a row. It was the kind of beating Lorien had never experienced, the sort of harsh discipline his human form could never have taken, but his vampire flesh could suffer through. There was no escaping the creature, or his punishment, and he was terrified that it would not end, that this would somehow be the end of him completely.
He heard himself screaming, and felt his limbs writhing and contorting. He had never taken punishment or pain very well. One was beneath him, and the other was not in keeping with his ironically delicate constitution. Maddox had punished him from time to time, something he had resented, but Mads’ punishments were always done with a certain affection completely absent from this beating designed to do nothing but force his obedience.
“I’m sorry!” He shouted those two words until he was absolutely hoarse, until they felt like the only two words in the language. Brief notions of begging for mercy flitted across his desperate mind and were quickly abandoned. There could be no mercy from this creature. Not ever.
Finally, Gideon grabbed Lorien’s long hair and pulled him up from the couch before dropping him at his feet. Lorien continued to ache and writhe, his fingers grasping desperately at the carpet as he attempted to compose himself, and failed.
“This is your last thrashing, little vampire. The next time you cross me, in any way, you will lose much more than your dignity. I will take the one thing from you that you cannot bear to lose.”
“What?” Lorien was in too much pain to think. His gasped, confused question soon drew a chilling explanation.
“Yes, little vampire. I know all about your indelicacies with wolves. I know of the whelp my own Maddox is obsessed with, and I know that you too, have given yourself to one of the canine persuasion.” Gideon spoke with a thick disgust in his voice, as if the very notion of loving a wolf was an emetic.
“I…” Lorien did not know what to say. “I will obey you,” he said.
“Yes. You will,” Gideon replied, his tone shifting, from censure, to disgust, and finally to a simple statement of fact.
Space was peaceful. Space was beautiful. Maddox felt the distance from his problems, and a relief he had not imagined was possible. He was close to giving in. As the stars wrapped around him, he remembered a time when things had been simple. When he and Will had lain on golden sands and had eyes and thoughts only for one another. A blessed vacation.
The idea of going to space had been Lorien’s. Gideon could, indeed, sense Maddox anywhere on Earth. But he was no longer on Earth. He was over two hundred miles above Earth, in a high orbit shuttle that would circle the planet several times before returning to Earth. But it would return to Earth, and that was the problem. He could not escape to space. He could not escape anywhere. Gideon was a problem to be contended with always.
Indeed, the moment his phone was returned to him after his surprisingly sad jaunt between heaven and earth, it rang.
“Have you gone mad?” Ray’s voice came down the line. “Have you actually lost your mind? Is that what this is? You ran away to space?”
“I did not run away to space,” Maddox sighed. “That would be impossible. I did, however, take a break to think.”
“Really. Because Lorien implied this was a desperate, last-ditch attempt to manipulate him into letting you keep Will for your very, very own.”
Maddox paused. “Did it work?”
“No,” Ray sighed. “No. Maddox. It didn’t work. He knew you weren’t gone. He is obsessed with you. Absolutely obsessed. He gets this way about his youngest. He will let the world burn for you.”
“Then maybe it is time I wasn’t the youngest anymore,” Maddox suggested.
“It’s not that easy. It has been thousands of years since he found anyone worthy of being turned. Do you think he’s going to just conveniently find someone now?”
“I suppose not,” Maddox mused. “But there has to be some means of distraction. I am not that interesting.”
“There, we agree. You are not worth any of this.”
“Thank you, brother,” Maddox said, genuinely grateful. “Now we merely need to convince Gideon of that fact.”
“I’ve been trying to convince him of it since before he made you,” Ray sighed.
“He needs someone broken, someone he can fix, and then break.”
“But who? What person now walks the planet that has not in three thousand years? What supremely warped human being could possibly satisfy Gideon’s many desires?”
“I don’t know. But we will find him.”
