V

To Ansel’s great surprise, consciousness returned to him with the force of a drowning man breaking the surface of the water. Gasping and clutching at his chest, his eyes snapped open to the raw wooden beams of the ceiling and he lay there panting with exertion. He was sore, disoriented, and wrung out like he’d been laid up by an ague, some unknown illness that had plagued him before leaving him for dead.

He blinked and dragged himself out of the rumpled heap in which he’d found himself to prop his back against the wall. He ran a hand over his face and found both to be stone cold with beads of perspiration forming at his temples. His shirt felt stiff, caked with grime and filth, and the stale tang of blood clung to his nostrils. When the collar of his shirt brushed against the side of his neck, he hissed at a sudden pain, and clamped his hand down to the source — a burning pair of slashes cut into the side of his neck — out of instinct. Searing heat exploded out from under his palm, a white-hot burst of agony that brought tears to his eyes. 

Swallowing a sob, he jerked his hand away and bit at the inside of his cheek to distract himself from the pain. His teeth sank cleanly through his flesh and a tepid gush of some foul liquid flooded his mouth. He reeled forward and spat out a gobbet of something dark and rust-colored into the dust. The wound sealed over even as he probed at it with his tongue, leaving him with the splatter of blood on the ground the only evidence he’d wounded himself. He opened his mouth wide and examined his teeth with pale, trembling fingers, finding sharp fangs in place of his canines.

His breath quickened with the revelation, and he turned his attention inward, all the while struggling with the notion that his body was transformed and unknown to him. His sternum and ribs, once battered and broken, were mended and whole. The cuts on his knuckles, the bruising that had pooled under his skin on his arms and legs had vanished without a trace. All that remained of his prior injuries were the raised slashes, two on either side of his neck which felt as smooth as fresh scar tissue when Ansel could bear to touch them again.

A shadow moved against the wall outside the cell door and Ansel jolted, pressing himself against the brick behind him. Some of the tension melted away when he recognized the silent man from before, his eyes fixed on some point just above Ansel’s head. “An’ what’s your story, morning glory?” he asked with a sneer. The man hadn’t been any sort of ally, but neither had he been as hostile as Baptiste.

“You’re staying here until you get a feeling for your Thirst,” he said. His tone of voice was too gentle for how ghastly his face looked, overrun by smallpox scars and the same sunken eyes as Baptiste. “Orders. Sorry,” he added with a helpless shrug. 

“Thirst?” Ansel repeated, wrinkling his nose. “Th’fuck does that mean?” Pulling himself to his feet, he braced back against the wall with an unsteady hand. The movement caused the whole room to dip and his vision blanked out for a moment. When he had recovered, the man was gone, leaving his question hanging in the air.

Rather than any sort of relief, Ansel felt a creeping dread when he realized he was truly alone at that point. One shaking set of fingers found their way to his wristwatch and he worried at its face like a talisman. Though the hands had stopped an untold amount of time before, he wound the stem to start keeping track of the hours as they passed. 

He paced the narrow length of the cell door like a caged animal, clapping his hands in front of him repeatedly and singing snippets of whatever tunes came to mind. Once, he raised his voice as loud as he could stand before the sound was choked off by the rawness of his throat, wracking him with a coughing fit.

He made it to the three hour mark before he began to succumb to the grip of his old addiction. His heart, languid as it was, pounded erratically in his chest and the sensation caused his stomach to churn. Panting, he clasped the cell door with clammy, trembling hands and gave a wordless shout into the darkness beyond. He knew no one was coming to his aid, but still he hollered until a violent tremor overtook him and dropped him to his knees. He’d never been through a withdrawal so severe and terror seized his throat, closing it up and convincing him death was imminent.

But death wouldn’t come for him again so soon. As he lay there, motes of light dancing behind his eyelids, a dull heat started to build deep within his core. A prickling sensation scratched at the scars on his neck and skittered outward, like insects crawling beneath his skin. He tugged at his collar — the shirt now drenched in sweat and too confining — but nerves lit up like a struck match when he dragged the fabric along his skin.

When Ansel had been burned in the war, his initial suffering had been short-lived as endorphins had flooded his system and he’d lost consciousness soon after. The blistering heat that was building in him in that desolate cell was incomparable in every way. The pain from his throat scars was unbearable, sending jolts of agony through him with every beat of his heart. He fell flat to the ground, desperate for the cold of the floor to sap some of the heat out of him, but it was too deep to reach. Wave after wave coursed through him until the fire reached a roaring crescendo and his mind was overwhelmed with the anguish of every nerve in his body exploding into hot, furious life.

Ansel went away from himself and some new presence overtook his body. He howled in pain as a beast raked at the inside of his chest, trying to spur him to take action, to move, to do something. He was too weak, too confused, and too hurt to do anything but writhe on the floor no matter how hard the fury within gnawed at his heart.

Just when he felt he might lose himself completely to the monster he was hosting, the two of them were stilled by the sound of metal sliding against metal. His head snapped up and his eyes honed in on a new presence in his cell, a curious strobing in his field of vision and the overpowering scent of something he craved. The strobing became a racing pulse which pulled at him, entwined itself with his flames, beckoning him closer. There was a strange noise which Ansel couldn’t make sense of over the sound of his own desperate panting. 

He rushed forward with a speed and strength he didn’t know he possessed, mouth open and ready. His new fangs tore easily into a quivering mass of flesh and something hot and wet flooded his mouth. Like dipping into a spring-fed pool, all the heat in Ansel’s body was quenched in an instant. With a jerk of his head, muscle and sinew and skin were torn away, leaving dark arterial spray to freely coat his face. His powerful hands gripped the figure even as it feebly pushed away from him and instinct once again brought his head down for another bite, his victim’s blood satisfying him like nothing else ever had.

When at last he’d had his fill, he felt rejuvenated and an eerie calm spread through him. The veil over his mind lifted and he took in the grisly scene before him with sudden clarity. Remnants of a man he’d never seen before were strewn all around him, deep gouges cut into his throat and his fingernails filthy where he’d dragged them across Ansel’s face in a desperate bid to stay alive. 

Horrified, Ansel stumbled back from the corpse and he clamped a hand over his mouth. His gorge was rising, but he didn’t dare vomit, not with what he knew sat in his stomach. Desperate to focus on anything else, his attention landed on a glint of something in the hall beyond the cell.

An emerald green pair of eyes watching him with cold focus.

Baptiste entered the cell, stepping over the corpse like it was discarded trash. Ansel shook his head and backed away out of instinct, dreading the thought of being confined with him again. Baptiste’s head snapped to even this small amount of movement and he favored Ansel with a small smile.

Don’t move.

The words pierced Ansel’s mind, sharp as a knife. His body locked into place and even his trembling stopped as Baptiste closed the distance between the two of them. Desperate to escape, Ansel strained at his unseen bonds even as a sweet voice at the back of his mind told him to just give in.

Baptiste was too close and his cold fingers pressed against Ansel’s cheek. “Look at me,” he said and Ansel’s eyes moved to obey. When their gazes met, the beast in Ansel’s chest reared back in fury, reacting to the discordant sensation of his Thirst fighting against Baptiste’s own. Whereas his hapless victim’s pulse had been inviting, this was rotten to his eyes, a powerful warning to steer clear. 

Beneath this flash of poison, potent as it was, Ansel could sense a tether between the two of them, an ebb and flow of that same energy he’d felt in the boarding house but more powerful. Baptiste’s consciousness probed at his own, exposing the darkest corners of his memory with cold, probing fingers. 

Ansel’s stomach churned. Scrabbling his meager mental reserves, he pushed back at this foreign presence as he jerked again at the command holding him in place. He managed to move a hair’s breadth back, but his success was short-lived. 

Like a hawk falling on prey, Baptiste’s hand latched onto Ansel’s throat, frigid fingers digging into the fresh scars. His scream of shock and pain caused Baptiste’s grip to tighten and his smile to grow even wider. 

“Dog,” he said, relishing the sound of the word. “If you ever. Displease me. I will put you back in here. And I will not come for you again.” Each sentence was punctuated by a more forceful squeezing of Ansel’s neck and by the end, stars burned bright in front of his eyes. “Do you understand me?”

Teetering on the border of consciousness, Ansel’s answer was little more than a desperate whimper and an almost imperceptible nod of his head. Satisfied, Baptiste released him and his strange commands left his mind as suddenly as they had entered. Although he was at last alone with his own body, Ansel’s Thirst twitched in his chest, as if missing Baptiste’s touch. Ansel swallowed hard past the lump in his throat and collapsed in on himself, weeping bitterly.

Baptiste flicked his hair over his shoulder and turned away. “Come, Dog,” he commanded, without so much as a backwards glance.

Silent tears spilled out of Ansel’s eyes as he followed at Baptiste’s heels and the darkness swallowed them up.