(3) Two vampires, a ghoul and a shifter.

"No, no way, no how. I won't."

"Pierson," Roderick said sternly. "You will. I need you to be there."

"Find someone else. The estate is bloody boring. There's nothing to do there but…but read and ride and, and nothing. Making me go there is inhuman."

Roderick snorted. "In case you haven't, noticed in the last hundred plus years you haven't been human."

"You damned well know what I meant. Come on, Rod, have a heart. I'm a city boy. You found me in the slums of New York, and yeah, before you start telling me how lucky I am that you did, I know that, but the city life is in my blood. You want someone at the estate, send Linden."

"Oh he's going, too. In the first place, he can't survive without you and you know it. Secondly, my young friend, you need a keeper and a companion and he'll be both."

"What about you? Aren't you coming, too?"

Roderick shook his head. "I'll visit as much as I can, Piers, but my duties give me little leeway to stay in one place for very long right now."

"What if I stake the King? Then you'll have all the time in the world," Piers grumbled, pouting.

Chuckling in amusement, Roderick gave him a hug. "Spoiled brat, that's what you are."

Piers leaned into the hug, not wanting Roderick to release him. If he had his way, he would spend every moment of every day with his Sire; not because Roderick was his Sire but in spite of it. Piers knew the rules, the edict passed down by the supreme King of the Vampires to all of the regional kings, and from them down to all of their subjects. 'No Sire is to have a relationship with any of their Children other than that of a parent to a child.'

The reasoning for the edict was selfish and logical. The supreme King, long before he had become that, had fallen in love with one of his Children. The female had betrayed him in the worst way possible, with a human male, revealing to the male precisely where he could find her Sire. as well as many other of the vampires that he'd sired. While the King escaped assassination, he never forgot. He hunted down his Child and her human lover and destroyed them both, slowly, terribly. Then, when he finally became a territorial king, and then the King supreme, he passed the edict so that no others would have to face the depth of betrayal that he had.

Looking up at Roderick now, Piers grinned. "If I'm spoiled you have only yourself to blame you know. I was pure, innocent and unspoiled when we met."

Roderick snorted out a laugh. "You were none of those and we both know it. If I remember correctly, and I do, you were in the process of robbing the man who had paid you to let him fuck you. You're lucky the constables didn't find you before I did. You would have been punished harshly if they had."

"Okay, so I wasn't quite that innocent but for damn sure no one ever spoiled me rotten the way you have. So it's all on your head." He ducked away when Roderick took a swipe at his ass.

"Go start packing, we leave as soon as it turns dark tomorrow evening."

Piers opened his mouth to protest again before thinking better of it. It would do no good, and if he seemed to accede to his Sire's wish now, perhaps the strictures on his 'confinement' to the sixteen thousand acre estate would be minimal once they arrived.