IX
Dog.
Lip curling into a sneer, Ansel responded with a curt, Hold your horses, I’m coming from downtown, and upped his pace. With the day fully broken by that point, he couldn’t sprint at his top speed without attracting too much unwanted attention. He took advantage of every side street and shortcut he’d memorized in his long, long tenure in Odette; he could navigate the city with his eyes closed.
Taller than it was wide, Odette had grown by creeping along the rail line to the north in a bid to escape the bayou of its birth. The train yard was no longer the epicenter, replaced some time in the 40s by the infrastructure built for the wartime effort bringing with it family homes and a nascent downtown which had flourished when soldiers returned home. A grid system had been attempted and abandoned in short order, with only a few sensibly named and arranged streets situated around the newer center of town. Further out, the map grew increasingly gnarled with old roads joined by new cross streets in ways their developers never had envisioned. Several dead-ended without warning or doubled back on themselves in baffling ways, which longtimers insisted gave the city its charm.
Slip your skin.
The command hit him without warning and he stumbled behind a corner to the ground. His glamour fell away and left him momentarily exposed to the world before his beastly form rippled out across his body. In the blink of an eye Ansel went from two legged to four, a massive wolf taking the place of the man he had been. In a streak of rust-colored fur, he redoubled his efforts to reach Baptiste before the man’s mood truly soured.
At the western edge of the city’s limits sat a manor-style house, hidden from view of the old highway in a copse of trees. The Mansion was one of the few constant landmarks of Odette, a building which had defied all attempts the city had made to absorb it, leaving city planners to instead cut around it like a stubborn piece of bedrock. The once lavishly landscaped garden had been reclaimed by the encroaching woods over a half century, leaving a scant row of hedges and a wide gravel path the only delineation between the grounds and the wilderness.
It was roughly as old as Ansel himself was, built in the waning years of Reconstruction when the foul old institutions of the South reinvented themselves for the approaching turn of the century. The house had passed through a handful of generations of sons until it fell into disrepair from one progeny’s disinterest, the man being more taken by gambling than family legacy. How it changed hands from family to stranger and became Baptiste’s domain was a story Ansel had never learned, but he doubted it was too different from what he imagined.
Gravel crunched under his paws as he padded up the drive, panting with exertion. It wasn’t until he reached the first step of the covered porch that he was able to take on his human form again and climb the stairs with his own two feet. His heavy footfalls announced his arrival before he threw open the door and he was unsurprised to see a face was already peering at him from the top of the entryway’s staircase.
Physically, Slate was some 15 years his senior, but he was the mansion’s newest addition; he hadn’t even mastered his glamour yet and watched with greedy, pale eyes as Ansel’s face took on the sudden vigor of life. His dark hair was sticking out at odd angles and framed his cool brown face in an uneven way, an effect heightened by his lopsided smile, bristly moustache, and the tilt to his head. “Parlor,” he announced.
“Thanks,” Ansel said, halfway to turning down the hall before Slate had even spoken. His ears were trained to any sounds behind him, but the man seemed to have crawled back to wherever he’d been sleeping.
Situated near the front of the house to receive guests in its prime, the parlor was awash in morning light spilling in through its large windows. The fireplace at the center of the room had an ornately decorated mantle with a handsome brass-framed mirror hanging above. The old gas lamp sconces had been converted to electric at some point, though the delicate metalwork had been seamlessly repurposed.
What must have once been a grandly furnished receiving room had dwindled over the decades to a handful of chairs, a few tables, and the settee in the center of it all. As vibrant as the day it was upholstered, the emerald green cushions enhanced the oak and vine carvings which snaked along the warmly varnished wood of its frame. It was occupied by two figures, neither of whom looked up at Ansel as he appeared in the archway of the room.
“You don’t need to wear your glamour inside the house,” Baptiste said. His attention was fixed to the table in front of him, a massive and unfinished jigsaw puzzle scattered before him.
“Don’t see what difference it makes,” Ansel said, thrusting his hands into his pockets.
Roused by the sound of voices, the second presence in the room stirred and opened her eyes. Olive was closer to Ansel’s true age — though his lifespan dwarfed hers by almost an order of magnitude — and even her unglamoured face retained a hint of the ingénue she had once been. Her legs were draped over Baptiste’s lap and she stretched like a cat before hauling herself up into a sitting position by putting her arms around his neck. Shaking her curled, dark brown hair out of its loose ponytail to frame her pale face, she snapped the elastic around her wrist and turned her full attention on Ansel.
She did love to see him lectured.
At last, Baptiste turned his dead eyes up to Ansel. Their Thirsts glanced across each other like a pair of butting rams and though Ansel’s eye twitched involuntarily, he held the gaze. What felt like an eternity stretched between them and pinpricks of sweat beaded up on Ansel’s forehead before Baptiste again turned back to the table. When he let out the breath he’d been holding and took in Olive’s look of disappointment from the corner of his eye, Baptiste’s voice cut into his mind.
Drop it.
His glamour melted to a peal of laughter as Olive jeered in his direction. He turned his head sharply away from the mirror over the mantle, but he'd already caught sight of his gaunt face and angry scars reflected in its surface.
Show me your meeting with Cutter.
It was the last sight he had of the room before it blinked out of existence and he was transported to a pitch black road, moonlight obscured by thick cloud cover. It took a moment for Ansel to orient himself in time as space before he recognized the scene as one which had happened some hours prior, a brief feeling of déjà vu washing over him.
Ansel of the past — fully engulfed in his role as Dog — was leaning against a police cruiser. He had no glamour in place and the ragged crimson slashes on his throat were on full display, a stark contrast against the pallor of his skin. The sleeves of his jacket were rolled up past his burn scars despite the chill in the night and he showed no outward signs of being bothered by the weather. He lit a cigarette and wordlessly passed the Zippo back to its owner as if neither of them had any pressing business to discuss. Another flare of light illuminated Sheriff Cutter's severe face and he took a blissful drag, pocketing the lighter. They smoked in silence, each forcing themselves to become comfortable with the other's presence, like predators at a watering hole.
Neither of them noticed Ansel's doppelganger nor his liege, both observing the scene from a scant foot and a half away. This was Baptiste's preferred way of gathering information, by pulling a memory out of Ansel as easily as leafing through a book. It allowed him a full picture of conversation and body language, as well as control over something else which should have been Ansel's sole purview.
"Your boy looks like he's fixing to crack," Cutter said around a mouthful of smoke.
"Shit."
'His boy' was Malczyn, a low-level drug runner and errand boy for one of the crime syndicates Baptiste had allowed into Odette. The Mansion's rum and dope running days were in the distant past, Baptiste having found it more lucrative to act as landlord and enforcer to the groups that had international reach. Ansel's job wasn't too different from when he'd been a bouncer, although Odette was larger than a club and the troublemakers he was sent to deal with were often never seen again.
Cutter gave an unsympathetic shrug. "DA smells he's got something they want, not much interference I can run for you."
"You might could cut him loose."
"And get Holloway breathing down my neck? No fucking way, I still gotta work with these people."
Dog took the opportunity to stare openly at Cutter's neck where it peeked out from the starched collar of his shirt. At first Cutter met his eyes in defiance, but his nerve left him after focusing too long on the unblinking stillness of the implied threat. After twenty-some-odd years of working together, the only major wounds either had inflicted on one another were to their prides, but that didn't stop the occasional posturing.
Ansel felt Baptiste's eyes on him and he glanced over. His Thirst didn't flare in this strange space of memory, but that didn't take away the heavy weight behind his eyes. Ansel couldn't tell if this was a look of praise or critique, and he didn't get an elaboration either way.
"Johnny-boy," Dog said, savoring Cutter's bristling to the name. "Your head's on a bigger chopping block than a lost pension if'n this deal goes sideways."
Cutter regarded him with the cool interest a farmer had for his livestock. With a final drag on his cigarette to coax it into a burning coal, he extinguished the tip on Dog's exposed forearm. Rounding on him, Dog bared his fangs in a snarl that rested easily on his face, but was met with Cutter's jeering laughter. "Settle down, Dog."
Watching the replay, Ansel rubbed idly at the spot where the burn had been. It had healed in an instant, taking any pain with it, but the sting of the action still lingered. Cutter's cruelty was leagues away from Baptiste's own, but that didn't make it less of a bitter pill to swallow. Worse still was the fact that Cutter was compelled to turn every interaction with him into a juvenile pissing match.
Rather than heed Cutter's warning, Dog glowered in his face and let loose his Thirst. It snaked forward, wrapping around the sheriff's pulse and jerked it towards Dog, bending the man's resolve under his own. Only when he felt this encroachment on his will did Cutter step back, eyes widening minutely and unable to look away. Being thralled was not a condition he enjoyed or wished to reexperience.
"I oughta leave you for the buzzards," Dog growled, breaking the contact between them.
Cutter's shoulders tensed as if this might have been his breaking point, but he flicked the cigarette butt deep into the woods. "Your boss'd push your shit in and we both know it," he said, turning back to his cruiser. "I'll see what I can do to keep your boy's mouth shut until his 48 hours are up. You aren't making a mess of my cells."
Dog followed the cruiser with his eyes as the taillights vanished into the night, taking time to savor his cigarette at last before he turned to leave.
The memory froze in place, smearing at the edges like a wet oil painting. Baptiste's eyes were once again on the side of his face and this time Ansel turned to meet them. He only had a moment's reprieve before the force of his Thirst returned, bringing with it the parlor and harsh morning sunlight.
"He has gotten more impudent," Baptiste said, searching Ansel's face for something.
Ansel's lip twitched but didn't quite curl. "He's got moods is all. He'll fall back in line."
After what felt like an eternity, Baptiste turned away, moving back to the settee. Olive perked up at his return, sitting straighter and making space for him.
"Dog, you and Slate will see if Malczyn is released this evening," he said, his slender fingers returning to the jigsaw puzzle. "You will silence him."
Ansel's fingers twitched against his thigh and he cleared his throat. "Can I bite 'im?" he asked.
A sidelong glance from Baptiste where his Thirst skittered across Ansel's own. "You may, if this is how you wish to kill him."
Ansel stayed rooted in place until he was sure Baptiste had no further words for him. At his side, Olive too seemed to hold her breath until the man had withdrawn into himself, snapping jigsaw pieces together. She stretched out over his lap once more and cast a cool look in Ansel's direction, her implied message of You should go, loud and clear. He pivoted on his heel and marched out of the parlor, slipping his glamour back on as he skulked down the hallway to his room for a fitful sleep.