Page 81 of Wicked Vile King
"What's up with the lockdown?" I ask, taking a seat on my bed and cracking the needling ache from my knuckles.Fucking guards."What'd you hear?"
"Don't know," Kill answers with a shrug. "Hard to hear shit when you're three seconds in and getting tackled by a motherfucker."
He lifts the loose curls of his blond hair to show me a bruise swelling across his temple. I think I can watch it turn more purple by the second. It's going to hurt like sonovabitch for days.
"Ouch," I tell him.
I normally would offer to help fuck-up whichever guard did it—it sure would be fun—but knowing Kill, he's already making plans, and whichever one was stupid enough to hit him will be down for the count within twenty minutes tops of the lockdown being lifted.
"Heard it was a suicide attempt," Gabe says eventually, licking his lips as he studies the orange-and-blue flame of his lighter. "Our overlords are being real tight-lipped about this one, so I'm guessing the poor fuck went all-in and made it count. Betcha you two zombie-fuckers got a fresh body down in the morgue for your freaky-fun fetish."
"No thanks," Kill says with a groan, carefully rubbing his busted temple with one hand and waving at me with his other. He can't be paying attention or maybe the hit is starting to catch up with him and he feels as bad as that knot on his head looks. Normally, he's a bull in a china shop and Gabe's necrophilia jokes are a bright red matador's cape. This last one would've almost certainly ended up with one of them bleeding.
Not me though. I ignore Gabe's jab. Hell, I might even deserve it considering how much time I've spent down in the morgue over the years, though I've never gone all necrophile and earned my blue wings.
No judgment here for those who enjoy it, but I prefer my holes warm.
Hot damn, fucking my pet really must have me feeling benevolent today. I'm only mildly annoyed by Gabe's bullshit this afternoon.
"Where have you been hiding for the past hour?" Gabe asks, simultaneously taking a drag of his cigarette and closing his lighter. He rolls the silver Zippo back and forth like he's flipping a quarter across his knuckles.
"We thought you'd been taken to Butcher," he remarks, sifting smoke through his straight teeth before he exhales the rest up to the ceiling with a flick of his pierced tongue. He passes me the cherry. I take another hit of nicotine and hand it back to him.
"I was preoccupied," I finally answer.
Gabe waggles his eyebrows at Kill. "He was with the girl. Fucking called it."
Kill mutters who-the-fuck-knows-what and throws what may or may not be a twenty-dollar bill at Gabe's face. It's so crumpled, though, it could be a fifty or a hundred for all I can tell.
Gabe catches it while still rolling the lighter across his knuckles like he's practicing a magic trick. He slides the bill into the pocket of his black uniform slacks a moment later.
"So how's your new pet treating you?" Gabe asks, leaning back in my chair and propping his feet up on my desk. "Is she everything you hoped for? Obedient? Breakable? Fuckable?"
Kill gives up any pretenses of attempting to avoid this conversation and perks up in his bed.
"You jealous?" I ask Gabe. "All your little pyromaniac freaks and not a single one has ever learned how to startyourfire, yet?"
Kill looks between us and snorts when Gabe flips me off, cigarette still in hand. If he wasn't so concerned about his cigarette and playing dominoes with his lighter at the moment, he'd probably try to hit me for the jab. Not that I'd let him, but he certainly would try.
I'll admit it though. My dig at his devotees was a low blow on a hypersensitive subject for Gabe. If any of us ever apologized for anything, I might be inclined to apologize right now, but since we all have the emotional capacities of mute slugs, I send him the middle finger right back.
Gabe used to love his little clan of fire-starting freaks. During freshman year, he sat with them in the dining hall for every meal for like six months straight. He was—and is—a goddamned legend to them thanks to what he did before he ever even stepped foot on campus. He's the guy who transferred in from one of the bigger, mainstream reformatory academies upstate, the pretty ones you see on the news and shit forreforming young mindsandensuring a bright future. I guess it sure was bright all right.
From what I understand, he was at his fancy old academy for less than a week—well, six days, to be exact—before he burned the liberal arts building to the ground and caused four million dollars' worth of damages to it and the surrounding structures. Now, if that ain't a big ol' fuck you to his father and to every bastard at that place, I don't know what is.
Fucking legend.
If he wanted to, Gabe could burn everyone at the Asylum to a crisp right now and would probably get away with it. He's the worst kind of pyromaniac, the kind with a photographic memory who's self-motivated and inclined to read a hell of a lot of books on incendiaries.
There was a girl at one time who quelled Gabe's nastier instincts.Aisling. She was a spitfire. She told him off, spat in his face, and once even drew him an actual one-way ticket to hell that she hand-delivered by sending his tray to the floorjust afterhe sat down to eat and replacing it with a trip on the devil's Express. Well, she was a spitfire at least, that is until he finally won her over, and then she washisspitfire. After that, she could get him to put down the lighter if she asked nicely enough, but she was even more into that fire shit than he was and not nearly as smart about it.
Last December, she tried to start her own personal blaze in the tunnels from the old typhus hospital days, but she didn't plan her escape route properly. Or, fuck, maybe she just stood there too long and watched all the pretty colors. Who knows? Regardless, the result was catastrophic. She set herself to broil and burnt to a crisp in these hallowed walls, and Gabe hasn't been the same since. He just exists somewhere in between complacent and moderately unlikely to kill himself.
I understand the feeling all too well, unfortunately.
Something about the fight makes the win that much sweeter. Aisling fought Gabe back then. Willow fights me now. Without the tooth-and-nail battle and the hard-fought win, the subsequent rewards—power, praise, even sex—it's all just dull and monotonous.
Any good pet needs to be broken, and if they don't bite you or piss on the carpet at least once, are they really a pet at all?
