"Tell me who had beaten you,.. boy...." Shadow whispered to him in a gentle coaxing voice. "Tell me so I can punish him."
"i can't," the high school senior told him. "i just can't. i-if he fi-finds out, he-he'll hurt me again!" The teen's eyes filled with tears and he began to quietly cry.
"I promise you..you will be safe." Shadow told him, gently stroking the boy's head with the hand he was holding it with.
"b-but-" The teen stammered.
"Shh... you needn't worry...Once I am through with him, he'll never want to hurt anyone...ever again."
"Even my mom?" the teen asked, tears still streaming down his face.
"Especially your mom..." Shadow assured him.
"Really?"
"Yes."
The teen fell into a sniffling silence then, to take a few moments to think about Shadow's offer. Shadow waited patiently in silence for the boy to make up his mind and speak first.
"what sort of things?" he asked after reaching a decision.
"Things like who he is, how violent he is..... how necessary is he to your lively hood.... Things like that." Shadow told him.
"You're not thinking of killing him, are you? He's still my dad." The boy asked him
"No...I may not like him but.... I won't be lenient with him either." Shadow replied.
To him, there was no greater crime than harming a child. But, if his father was an alcoholic or a drug addict, then there was room for mercy. He knew that humans would act differently when under the influence of mind altering substances than they normally would and he, as blood wraith, was no different than them when it came to ingesting blood. Which is why he was being so strict with himself when it was involved.
The teen may have thought otherwise though, of his father. He went silent as he thought about what he was going to tell Shadow about him. It was true his dad had beaten both him and his mom repeatedly when he had first lost his job and started drinking. And it was also true that he no longer did it to him now that he was older and could fight back but his father still beat his mother on a regular basis. She would often try and hide it from him but, whenever he found out about it, he would worry and get into arguments with her about it when his dad wasn't around. His father had become an incredibly violent man and he feared he would go too far with her one day and end up killing her.
But did he really deserve to have a monster set lose on him? In spite of all of what his father had done, he could still remember when they were once a happy family. He longed to go back to that way of life, but those days were long gone and only a distant memory remained. Now, he had a monster asking him what it should do to his dad. It was hard to think and harder to decide with those bright yellow glowing eyes boring into his own and making his mind feel fuzzy and thick.
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