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They left the house in the car and headed out into the city. Will was not looking forward to this outing. He didn’t want to kill vampires. Being that close to one the first time had fucked his head up. It was like being in the presence of something rotten and fetid and also absolutely terrifying. He'd been disgusted and terrified at the same time, and both of those feelings had combined to overwhelm him. He didn’t see how he was ever going to get past it. How could he kill something he was too repulsed to touch?
He was so preoccupied with the problem that at first, he didn’t notice that their destination was the same building as before, the one overlooking the alley where he’d shamefully lost his nerve and frozen rather than kill his enemy.
“Not here again.”
“Here. Again,” Maddox insisted. “You don't have to do anything tonight. You need to watch and learn. I should have shown you myself in the beginning. What happened was not your fault. It was my fault.”
Will knew that was supposed to make him feel better, but he did not need to be shown how to kill. He’d done it enough times to see it in his sleep, and sometimes in his nightmares.
The alley was much more populated on this occasion. There didn’t seem to be any humans, though. If Will wasn’t very much mistaken, the whole crevasse of concrete was crawling with ferals. Dozens of them, at least, going back and forth from one end of the alley to the other, bumping into each other, biting and hissing like a hive of demented bees. The ends of the alley had been blockaded so they couldn’t get out. It was a very strange scene.
“What is this?”
“Bad news,” Lorien said. “Real bad news. I haven’t seen an abandoned brood of this size in a long time.”
“Abandoned brood?”
“It means someone turned a lot of humans and left them here, either with the intention of returning, or they’ve been rejected as unsuitable and left to burn when the sun rises.”
“That seems cruel.”
“It’s incredibly cruel.”
“Stay here,” Maddox said. “Don't move an inch. If I come back and see that you’re off the spot you’re standing on, you are in some serious trouble, you understand?”
“I get it.”
He watched as Maddox and Lorien descended into the breach and for want of a better word, slaughtered every feral down there. They killed swiftly and efficiently, turning tortured flesh to blissful dust. It took them less than five minutes and it was over, a complete extermination completed without so much as breaking a sweat.
Watching them with a mixture of awe, jealousy, and no small amount of sorrow that he was not allowed to get down there and join them, Will couldn’t help but notice the elegance both Maddox and Lorien brought to their violent acts. Some of the ferals attempted to fight back, but they all fell, one after the other with an inevitability that made their resistance absolutely futile. It might have seemed brutal to an onlooker, but it was an act of mercy and Will understood that.
Maddox and Lorien were back up on the roof in very short order, strolling directly up the vertical walls like they had suckers on their feet. No broken legs or fractured egos for them, they arrived in style.
“Good boy, you didn’t move,” Maddox praised Will, dropping a kiss on his head.
“Yes, what a good boy,” Lorien smirked in agreement.
“We have a problem,” Maddox noted, talking over Will’s head. Will had become background again, not part of the conversation so much as an observer of it.
“A problem? This feels like a war.”
“It is a war. It’s what happens when the dominant vampire is removed from a city. Every pretender to power is going to be making their move. And the lesser vampires, like you, Lorien. The ones less than a few centuries of age, they will be getting their first taste of power, imagining the possibility of becoming more than they are…”
Lorien looked vaguely uncomfortable, Will noticed. His expression had gone from smug and self-satisfied to mildly dyspeptic. Did vampires get heartburn?
Maddox decided it was time to go home. They took a different route on the way back, a path which made it clear that the city was starting to break down into chaos.
There was carnage on the streets, dozens of vampires flowing through the human crowds unnoticed and unseen, hunting one another rather than the people who thronged Times Square for the lights and the sounds, and not the spatter of blood and ash.
“Why aren’t the people paying attention?”
“Most of it happens too fast for them to see,” Maddox explained. “The human mind is a filter. It takes in endless amounts of information and narrows it all down to what it believes to be relevant. It is not, in any way, good at determining relevance. You would not believe what people can ignore, even though it is happening right in front of them. In fact, sometimes, you can even tell people what is happening and that will actually make them less likely to see it.”
“You’re saying people are stupid,” Will said.
“Oh, incredibly,” Lorien laughed.
For a moment, Will thought Maddox might tell Lorien to shut the hell up or similar, but it didn’t happen. Lorien seemed to get away with doing and saying anything he felt like doing or saying, no consequences necessary.
