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One afternoon, Gideon noticed that Carter was making an odd mewling sound, and for once it did not seem to be coming from his phone.
“What is that?”
“What is what?” Carter tried to distract Gideon with a stupid question, given the backpack he was carrying seemed to be moving. If anybody else had tried such a bold deception, it would have been very painful for them, but Gideon let it slide.
“It is a kitten,” Carter finally said under his grandmaker’s cold stare, pulling the little creature out of his pack. “Look how cute it is.”
The lord of all evil, origin of suffering, and god of war, looked at the fluffy orange creature. He was, of course, familiar with cats. They had been giving him dirty looks since the dawn of time. He had been largely indifferent to the creatures, and in truth his reaction to this beast was one of disgust.
“Can I keep him?” Carter looked at Gideon with big blue pleading eyes.
The answer, had Carter been one of his own fledglings, would have been a stern no. But Carter was the fledgling of his fledgling, the closest thing to a grandson Gideon would ever acknowledge. He found himself experiencing a very odd sensation, the urge to see Carter… happy.
“Very well,” he said. “You may keep him.”
“Yes!” Carter grinned. “We never had a pet before. Something about not enough money or time.”
“You now have endless amounts of both,” Gideon replied. “Enjoy the beast while it lasts.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means cats live, perhaps twenty years?”
Carter eyed the kitten. “Can I make it… can I…”
His thought process was so perfectly transparent, it was quite adorable.
“No!” Gideon snapped the word firmly. “Do not try to turn animals.”
“Why? Does it not work?”
“It works,” Gideon says. “It just doesn’t end well. You are too new a fledgling to turn anything. Not even a fly. Understand?”
Carter nodded. “Understood.”
Gideon was very proud of him. Such sweet obedience.
“Good boy.”
In the very middle of a dark and stormy night, Maddox found himself alert. He had been watching over sleeping Will, as he did every night now. He did not dare let the boy out of his sight, fearing Will’s potential desire for a return to wildness. Their relationship was undergoing deep repair, but it would not take much to damage it again. Will was strong but fragile.
He felt her before he saw her. She carried melancholy on the very breeze, and when he looked out the window, he saw the wraith Candy staring through the glass with an increasingly rotten visage. It was a grotesque and supernatural sight enough to make him shudder. He felt William stir in his sleep, similarly disturbed.
Getting up from the bed, Maddox put a finger to his lips at the figure in the window and went outside to see what it was that had brought her back.
“Carter is not here,” he opened the conversation. “And William is sleeping. I would ask you do not interfere with his rest. He needs it. He is recovering from months of trauma. Well, years. Really.” Maddox’s tone was elegant but pointed.
“I want to see my son,” Candy rasped.
Her desire was not the desire of a living woman. It was not borne of softness or love. This was the desire of a dead thing, a static thing that did not change or evolve, but which banged along with a purpose like a wind-up toy car hitting the same wall over and over again. Candy wanted to see her son, but she could not truly love her son. She could not repair any damage. All she could do was attempt to complete her post-mortem mission.
“He doesn’t want to see you.”
“William. Carter. I want my sons.”
She was decaying. Where she had once had the power to form full sentences, as death reached out to claim her, she was becoming increasingly simple, and ever more dangerous. Maddox noticed the black claws on her fingers dripping with venom, and saw how the teeth in her mouth were largely missing, but those that remained were sharp.
“There is no way to reclaim your son in this life,” Maddox told the wraith of Candy. “William has chosen a new family. I am that family. Slowly, and with great pain, he has discovered that there are some who will never abandon him. I have put a lot of work into getting him to allow for that possibility, let alone believe in it, and I will not have you destroy all the work he has done on himself.”
