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“I killed the twins. Not Maddox. He didn’t know anything about it until afterward and he was really not happy about it.”
“You!” Chauvelin looked Lorien up and down. “No. It’s not possible. You are too young and too weak to ever have slain such powerful creatures.”
“I poisoned them first,” Lorien clarified. “And then I… well… anyway. They shouldn’t have crossed me. They humiliated me. Painfully.”
“I suppose they did,” Chauvelin allowed. “That is a better reason for them to have died. Oh well.”
There was what might have been described as an awkward pause. Chauvelin really no longer seemed quite so angry, or at least, not so angry. He was a very hard creature to read. Maddox was not certain he had ever known anyone like Chauvelin, and he had known as many people as it was possible to know.
“Where is William?”
“I really don’t know. His father took him.”
Maddox stared. He did not know how to process that information. He'd had no idea that Ivan was so close. He realized suddenly that he had not had any idea of what was going on with Will. He had not only been lied to. He had been completely cut out. He had become a distant authority to be avoided and ignored. And now Will was gone with arguably the most dangerous creature in the world.
Chauvelin smiled at his reaction and then outright laughed. Loudly and without fear of consequences. His mad amusement pealed around the many empty rooms and halls of the old vampire residence, echoing out into the night.
“Argh! Fuck!
There was suddenly a great deal of screaming. Maddox had plucked the fledgling up and was holding him aloft with great fury.
“I have wanted to hurt you for quite some time,” Maddox told Chauvelin. Chauvelin’s soles were almost two feet from the floor, but the two were nose to nose with how he was being held. “The very first moment I saw you, I thought what a perfect ornament you’d make. Not a pretty one, but a perfect one.”
“Let me go, vampire king,” Chauvelin hissed. “Or you will never find your precious pup.”
“I have no doubt I will find him again,” Mads replied. “But first I will hurt you a great deal. Interfering with my boy is punishable by death, but I intend to ensure you survive this. I want you to have to endure it.” Maddox looked back over his shoulder. “Lorien, get me a toolkit.”
“What kind of toolkit?”
“One with a hammer,” Maddox said, his dark eyes boring into Chauvelin. “And some nails. It’s a little bit modern, but I feel like something Biblical is appropriate here.”
Chauvelin paled. “Listen. I was helping him. I didn’t know it would offend you, that was an unanticipated bonus. He wanted to meet his father, and his father came all the way here to find him. It was sweet. You’d have enjoyed it.”
“I found a hammer!” Lorien called from somewhere deep in the house. “I don’t see any nails.”
“Use the claw end and extract some from the wood. We’ll need eight or so. Two for each extremity,” Maddox shouted back.
Without Will in his vicinity, Maddox felt no compulsion to behave in a civilized way. This was the excuse he had been looking for to unleash some genuine brutality. There could be no better target than Chauvelin, someone who deserved it and would in all likelihood benefit from it.
“You don’t want to do this,” Chauvelin said. “You know I won’t let it go. We’ll be stuck in a spiral of revenge from now until forever.”
“You are going to wish that William destroyed you when he first turned. You are going to yearn for the wolf’s teeth,” Maddox promised him.
Lorien was back. He had an old mallet in one hand and a handful of rusty nails in the other. Many of the nails were bent and at least a couple of them were screws.
“Perfect,” Maddox intoned, pressing Chauvelin against the wall. “Now, if you could hold onto him and just extend his arm out like… yes, there, that’s perfect.”
Chauvelin was babbling something that was probably an attempt at apologizing but was lost in a guttural cry. It did not last long. Or perhaps it did. It was hard to tell over the sounds of hammering.
11 THE MEAL
Seven states stood between Will and his father’s home. They were in Pennsylvania, but there was still Ohio, Iowa, and Nebraska to go before they reached Wyoming. This was a cannibalistic road trip he had not bargained for.
He’d been tempted to flee the vehicle several times now. Occasionally, when they went over a bump or pothole in the road, the corpse in the rear would thunk around with a heavy, meaty sound.
It wasn’t the murdering that was getting to him, though perhaps it was. Will had killed many times in his life, but it was always for a reason. Revenge, usually. Killing someone without a motive, or just for something to eat felt deeply wrong. Will was surprised to discover something he considered wrong. Was this what having a conscience was like?
Later they stopped off the road in a forest clearing several miles deep. It was the sort of place hunters went to set off on hunting expeditions, and the kind of place you went if you wanted to dispose of a body.
