Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ATTICUS
“What the fuck was that?” Julian growls.
“What?” I ask.
“You know Yorick isn’t going to win against him, and you just sent him out to his death.”
“He just went outside. You honestly think he ran off to take on that vampire alone?” I ask. I know Yorick can be foolish, but do they really think he’s that foolish?
“Well, it sure fucking looked like he stormed out determined to do something. I would have followed him if Casimir hadn’t held me back,” Julian says as he gives Casimir quite the vicious look.
“If he wants to run off to his death, let him have at it,” Casimir replies casually.
“I get that you’re pissed that Yorick could have hurt me, but he’s proven again and again that he’ll be here for us. He’s fought for all of us and risked his life to do it multiple times. Yet you’re all fine just standing back while he puts his life in danger?”
I roll my eyes. “Don’t make me laugh, Julian. We’re talking about Yorick. There’s no way he actually left. He’s likely staring through the window wanting to see us cry over him.”
“He got in the car with Morpheus and left,” Johnny says, making me freeze.
“He… he did, did he?” I ask as I slowly look over at him.
Why yes, we did talk about him stabbing Morpheus, but he has to know it’s a fucking death sentence to go off to do it alone.
The plan is for Yorick to weaken him with the poison and then we’ll swoop in and finish Morpheus off…
but the poison takes a while to work and during that time…
he can’t hold him off alone. What the hell is he thinking?
No… no, he’s fine. Maybe he just left with Morpheus to piss me off. Surely, that’s what he’s doing.
“Why the fuck would he have gone? He wouldn’t have gone if I’d been out there. Why the hell did you hold me back from following him?” Julian snaps at Casimir.
“Julian, I’m sorry,” Casimir says as he reaches for him, but Julian dodges him.
“You should be, but that does nothing to help. I’m calling him now.”
I turn around and walk outside, not that I think Johnny could possibly be wrong. Johnny is never wrong. But the car Yorick rode in still sits in the parking lot, and I don’t see that irritating face anywhere.
Morpheus likely just conned him into talking with him.
Yorick’s not really going with him to stab him.
He doesn’t actually think he can do this alone, does he?
Then again, this is Yorick we’re talking about.
He’d definitely run off to do this all alone in the hope that no one else gets hurt in the process.
“He’s not picking up; let me text him. He didn’t do something as stupid as leave his phone here or anything, did he?” Julian asks, coming outside with the others.
“We can try to figure out where they went, but what do we even do when we find them?” Cyrus questions.
“There’s no way I’m accomplishing anything against a man like that,” Ezio says, looking rather shaken up. Did Morpheus’s power remind him of Louis, the man who took Cyrus from him for so many years?
“What did he want?” Casimir asks me.
I let out a cold laugh. “Do you actually expect me to ever know what that man wants? He refused to let me leave his side for three hundred years, and I still don’t know,” I say, not wanting to even think about that time in my life.
“Casimir, when he moved toward you, he wanted you well aware that he can take all of this from you without a thought.”
I wander away from them and lean against my car as Johnny comes over.
“You encouraged this,” he tells me.
“I don’t want to hear it, Johnny. I didn’t mean for him to fuck off and do it alone.”
“You do this with everything you enjoy. You find a way to think you don’t deserve it, so you remove it.”
“Enjoy? You think I enjoy that fool?” I ask.
“You want to tell me that you would go ride around on go-karts for anyone else?”
“Why the fuck were you watching us?”
“You think there’s anything you do that I don’t know about?”
I grin at him. “You should watch yourself.”
He just stares at me before a smile unfolds on his lips. “Yes, sir.”
“There’s no way Yorick is going to do anything. Morpheus has been interested in him for years. He’s not just going to kill him if Yorick is good. And I never once told him to run off alone. But he’ll be fine. Morpheus has always…”
Johnny shakes his head. “You spent three hundred years with Morpheus; you know how unpredictable that man is.”
I grit my teeth, really wanting to punch this asshole.
“You spend your days in isolation. The only time there is a semblance of life in you is when that ‘fool’ comes around. But you refuse to let him into your life because you’d rather punish yourself. You’d rather rot away in misery because of that man.”
I grab Johnny by the throat. “Say one more fucking word and I will tell Casimir exactly what you are.”
Johnny calmly looks away from me. “Of course not, sir.”
“Did you track Yorick’s phone? Where is he?”
“I have to assume Morpheus knew we could track it and disposed of it.”
“Do you know where Morpheus is?”
“I do not but I will find him,” he says, easily removing my hand from his throat before slipping into the shadows.
Julian walks over to me. “Yorick’s still not answering.”
“I didn’t think he’d go,” I say.
“So how exactly did you want him to deal with that man?”
“Yorick is the only one Morpheus allows to get close to him. So if he stabbed him with the poison, we’d only have to keep ourselves alive long enough for the poison to take effect and finish him off. I might have told Yorick to do it, but I never thought he’d just run off to do it alone.”
Julian looks incredulous. “You’ve been around Yorick this long and you still don’t know him by now? He wouldn’t want to put us in danger. You should never have told him to do something so dangerous. What would have kept Morpheus from instantly killing Yorick the second he stabbed him?”
“I do not want to be chastised by a wolf who has barely lived,” I say, getting into my car and driving off before he can say another word.
Do I have any other way to contact Morpheus? Never in my life have I desired such a thing. There has been nothing that ever made me even consider reaching out to that man. He’s always found me. I’ve never found him… and if he disposed of Yorick’s phone, it means he doesn’t want me to find him.
Fuck.
I made a mistake. I should never have encouraged Yorick to deal with Morpheus. Especially when I know that he can’t do it without me… hell, maybe he can’t do it even with me. I’d run with his joke about death, but that was because it was supposed to just be a joke.
My mind flashes to all of those graves I’ve dug.
I vowed I was done digging them.
I grip the steering wheel as I try to think about how I could possibly reach Yorick. Instead, my mind wanders back to the first time I met him, and how he crashed into my life.
Past
I lean back in my chair as I gaze down at the cards in my hand.
Everything on the table is about to be mine.
The problem isn’t whether or not I’m winning this hand, it’s whether or not I can discreetly lure someone away from this place to feed from.
Small towns like this are the hardest. Everyone knows everyone, so pulling one single person away from the others immediately draws the attention of people who are already on edge because of bandits that’ve been causing issues.
I go to toss my cards down before I hear something moving above me. I glance up a second before a body falls down from the rafters, crashing onto the table that breaks beneath his weight.
“Fuck,” the older teenager cusses.
“There you are, you little shit,” a man I’d been playing cards with says as he grabs him by the collar of his shirt. “You try to steal from me? I knew you were hiding somewhere.”
“There’s nothing you own that I could possibly waaaaa—” The last part is cut off by the trader dragging the teenager out.
I toss my cards, letting them flutter into the mess while I eye a pretty woman heading for the door. I don’t even bother saying anything to the table before I follow her. “Miss—”
She turns her head, but her eyes latch on to a young man and she bustles over to him, completely dismissing me. I suppose I could just allure both of them and call it a day. It might be my only solution to finding blood in this place.
I walk farther and hear a commotion. I assume it’s the trader beating the shit out of the teenager for trying to steal from him, but when I step around the corner, I find that the teenager has his arms locked around the trader’s neck, choking him out.
He freezes when he sees me but seems to become more determined when I do nothing but watch. I suppose I will just feed from the trader when he’s done stealing from him.
“I’ll fuck you up too,” the teenager declares as he drops the man’s unconscious body to the ground. “You want to test me?”
“Oh, I am absolutely terrified,” I say sarcastically.
“As one should be in my presence.” His eyes narrow while he looks me up and down, like he’s assessing me for an ass kicking he’s about to give me.
I stare at the teenager who looks like a stick that I could snap in half.
He’s all length and no meat. It’s clear that he thinks he’s something else, and I could doubtlessly allure him to feed from, but the filth kind of makes him less appetizing to eat.
Then he flips open the back of the covered wagon and begins hoisting the trader’s body into it.
“Leave him,” I order, wondering why he’s planning on taking my meal with him when I would prefer he leave it behind.
“Nah, I have big plans for this man. Fun ones for sure. And there’s something about you that I just don’t like, you know that?
” he asks while he struggles to cram the man nearly twice his weight into the back, and I’m genuinely slightly impressed when he manages it.
Then he climbs through the wagon and into the driver’s seat.
He must have untied the horse first because he turns the horse away from me and gives me a wave.
“Good night, Mr. Vampire. I hope you fuck off.”