Leo was infuriated. He couldn’t stand Christoph or his stupid ideas and refused to even entertain the newest one with any modicum of seriousness.
“Let’s go on a roadtrip,” he muttered sarcastically to himself. “What a moron.”
On the way to pull his Murphy bed from the wall it was encased behind, Leo kicked angrily at a can on his floor and then stopped to listen to the sound it made as it ricocheted off the wall. He loved all sounds related to chaos, ruckus, and disaster, though the sound of breaking glass was one of his favorites. However, he had promised Dominic there would be no more of it inside the house, especially since the unfortunate accident with the nosy kid.
“I’ll bet they’re not so curious anymore,” he directed toward the unresponsive can that stopped to rest under the windowsill.
Leo had warned the intrusive youngsters the day before the incident that curiosity had already killed their cat but they had pursued their macabre investigations anyway. What, did they think he was joking? Should he have produced their dead feline to enhance his point?
He shook his head and continued his angry gait toward the wall. He wasn’t as tired as he was overcome by the instinct to hibernate and the ability to close his eyes to the putrid world in which he was forced to live for all eternity. Bedtime was always Leo’s favorite part of every day.
Standing before the tuck-a-way bed that was housed behind his bare and dirty wall, he used a long nail to pull the release switch and then stepped back to listen to the sound it made as it hit the floor. Knowing the nightly crash annoyed his pack to no end, Leo appreciated the loud clatter that much more. He could just picture them sitting together in the downstairs den, settling down to their glasses of wine while hiding comfortably behind their ridiculous thoughts when the sudden crash from above destroyed all hope of serenity. If Leo couldn’t enjoy a sense of peace, he decided nobody else would either.
He sat on the soiled mattress and glanced around each of the four walls without expression. The only one in the house without a coffin, he had decided on a more discrete way to enjoy the suffocation and restrictive darkness required for sleep, finding it in the nifty hidden bed. Each morning, he folded himself into the wall, entombing himself entirely as he blocked out every last reminder of his useless existence.
Although it beckoned, Leo wasn’t entirely ready for sleep yet. The instinct to shut down was increasing but it hadn’t yet surpassed the power of his inner turmoil. He didn’t want to think any more about the roadtrip but he couldn’t help himself. To hell with their need for an answer by morning; he lived by no one’s schedule but his own. It was far from some sympathetic sense of duty that thoughts of the roadtrip were inspiring his momentary insomnia. It was something else that Leo didn’t want to admit to himself.
Excitement and a nagging sense of hope violated his brain functioning and though Leo would never admit it to his pack, there was something he wanted more desperately than the rest of them could ever want anything. A deep yearning for revenge pumped up his aorta and he tried to stuff it back in. The sheer possibility that Lucius might actually help him find and destroy his maker made him feel alive and warm inside but he resisted its magnetic draw because of his self-made promise to never again rely on hope.
The television, mounted high on the wall and cat