The rain had ceased. Outside James's window, the world was a washed canvas, dripping and clean under a bruised twilight sky. Inside, the boy sat in a pool of absolute stillness, the house around him a hollow shell echoing with the lies he had just confirmed.
His mind, a precision instrument honed over two lifetimes, turned inward. It was time for an audit. A reconciliation of methodologies.
Why? The question was not one of emotion, but of strategy. Why had he, Johan Liebert, the architect of so many beautifully orchestrated ruins, spent two years in this rustic theater playing the part of a recovering child? Why the patience? Why the subterfuge?
In his previous world, the equation had been simple. Humanity was a uniform, predictable mass. Their desires were petty, their fears elementary, their breaking points laughably easy to find. Manipulating them, guiding them to self-destruction, had been an exercise in aesthetic simplicity. A word here, a suggestion there, and watch the dominoes fall. It was like playing an instrument that only had one, easily plucked string.
But this world… this world was different.
A faint, cold smile touched his lips, a gesture that held no warmth, only the satisfaction of a solved problem.
This world has more than one string.
The memory of bone tearing through flesh was the first clue. The healing factor that followed was the second. This body was not a mere vessel; it was a fortress, a weapon, an anomaly. Then, the System. A cosmic interface offering points and power, authored by a being beyond time and space. These were not variables in his old equations. They were new fundamental forces, like gravity or light, that had to be understood before they could be used.
To have acted as he once did—to have whispered his poison and orchestrated a quick, bloody finale in the drawing-room—would have been… wasteful. It would have been the act of a savage, smashing a complex machine to see what made the gears turn. A child's solution.
He was no child.
His purpose had never been mere killing. Killing was the crude, final period at the end of a sentence. His art was in the writing of the sentence itself. The manipulation, the erosion of reality, the moment when a person looked into the abyss they themselves had been guided to create—that was the true masterpiece.
And here, the canvas was so much larger. The potential for masterpieces was infinite.
He thought of the vampires hinted at in the texts. Beings of myth, with their own rules, their own weaknesses. Could they despair? Could their immortal minds be unraveled? He thought of the Shop, with its promises of power that could reshape reality. What symphonies of ruin could be composed with such tools?
A quick, local murder would have brought this provincial investigation, perhaps even confined him. It would have slammed doors before he had even learned they existed. It would have been… boring.
So he had chosen the path of the deep-rooted weed. To grow silently in the dark, drawing sustenance from the lies around him, strengthening unseen until the entire foundation was his to command. He had spent two years not in idleness, but in cosmic and personal reconnaissance.
And the reconnaissance was complete.
His gaze, empty and focused, turned toward the window, in the direction of the Logans' cottage. Thomas Logan. His biological sire. The brutish, entitled cornerstone of this pathetic little drama.
He was the perfect subject for the first real experiment in this new world. Not a kill. A dissection.
The following evening, opportunity presented itself. John Howlett was away in town on business. Elizabeth, pleading a headache, had retired early. The manor was quiet, its usual tensions muted. James, having meticulously observed the patterns of the household, knew that Thomas would be making his final rounds, a task he performed with a sullen resentment that was as reliable as the sunset.
James positioned himself in the main hall, a book open on his lap, a single lamp casting a pool of light around him. He heard the heavy, familiar tread on the porch before the door opened.
Thomas Logan entered, shaking the damp from his coat. He saw James and his face, as always, hardened into a mask of contempt. He made to pass by without a word.
"Thomas," James said. His voice was not the timid whisper of the boy he portrayed. It was calm, even, and carried a peculiar, cutting weight.
Thomas stopped, turning slowly. "What do you want, boy? Shouldn't you be in bed?"
James closed his book with a soft, definitive thump. He looked up, meeting Thomas's gaze directly. The lamplight caught his eyes, and for a moment, Thomas saw not a child, but something ancient and cold looking out from the boy's face. It was the same feeling he'd had years ago in the bedroom, but stronger, more solidified.
"I was just reading," James said, his tone conversational. "About the concept of legacy. About what a man leaves behind."
Thomas scowled. "Spare me your fancy words. I've work to do."
"Of course," James replied, his head tilting a fraction. "The work is never done for a man in your position, is it? Toiling on another man's land. Building another man's legacy. It must be… frustrating. To see everything you want, so close, yet forever out of reach. To know that your own blood is being raised in that other man's house, calling him 'Father'."
Thomas froze. The scowl vanished, replaced by a slow-dawning, bewildered fury. "What did you say?"
"I was just thinking about fathers and sons," James continued, his voice dropping to a confidential, almost sympathetic murmur. "How a son naturally admires his father. Wants to be like him. It must be a peculiar kind of hell, Thomas, to see your son look at another man with that admiration. To know he carries your name, but will never bear it. That he lives in your house, but will never own it."
He was using Thomas's own words, the ones he'd spat at Elizabeth in the passageway, refined and polished into razor-edged darts.
"You shut your mouth," Thomas growled, taking a step forward, his fists clenching. The air crackled with the threat of violence.
James didn't flinch. He smiled, a small, icy thing. "Or what? What will you do? Strike me? The son of the house? How would that look? It would only prove John Howlett right, wouldn't it? That you are just a brute. That I am better off being his son."
He let the words hang, watching the conflict in Thomas's face—the rage battling a deep, humiliating powerlessness.
"You think you're clever," Thomas snarled, but his voice lacked its former conviction. It was the sound of a wounded animal.
"I think I am a product of my environment," James said softly. "And my environment is a lie. But I'm not talking to the man who tells the lies. I'm talking to the man who lives them. The man who stands in the shadows of a life he thinks should be his. Tell me, Thomas, when you look at me, do you see your son? Or do you see your greatest failure?"
Thomas Logan took a staggering step back as if physically struck. His face, flushed with anger moments before, was now pale. The foundations of his world, built on resentment and a crude sense of entitlement, were being dismantled with surgical precision by the very person he considered his greatest trophy.
James watched him, a scientist observing a specimen in distress. This was far more satisfying than any physical confrontation. This was the true art. To take a man's own secret desires and fears and use them as tools to hollow him out from the inside.
He had targeted Thomas first because he was the simplest, the most volatile. A blunt instrument. And blunt instruments are easiest to break. Elizabeth was a more complex mechanism, her guilt and fear a delicate watch that required a finer touch. She would come later.
Without another word, James picked up his book and reopened it, the dismissal absolute. The conversation was over. He had planted the seed. Now, he would let it grow in the dark soil of Thomas's mind.
Thomas stood there for a long moment, breathing heavily, utterly defeated by a ten-year-old who hadn't raised his voice once. Then, with a sound that was half-groan, half-sob, he turned and fled into the night.
The hall was silent once more. James Howlett sat in his pool of light, the serpent who had just tasted blood without ever unsheathing his fangs. The game was truly afoot.
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(My brain 🤕 how was that😅)