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The countdown for Malczyn's release steadily approached zero, and without further word on the subject from Cutter, Ansel took it as a green light to wait for him to show his face. Once night fell, he and Slate stalked the streets of downtown Odette, the latter with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled down far enough to obscure his unglamoured face. It seemed a needless risk to keep sending him out into the world with his dead features on full display, but Baptiste felt it encouraged the pair to be cautious.

“Fuck this wetworks shit,” Slate muttered into the collar of his shirt. “This is why I went private sector.”

Ansel sighed and let the comment slide. Slate was 10 years out of shape and 20 pounds too overweight to have lived the clandestine life he’d claimed for himself after death. He had alternately been CIA, FBI, NSA, or else a vital part of any number of domestic and foreign espionage affairs. His true history was unknown to Ansel, but he’d bet money the man hadn’t ever left the state, let alone the country. But he knew how to follow orders and how to keep his head down almost as well as Ansel, so the two got along as much as anyone in their situation could have.

When they rounded a corner, Odette’s modest police station loomed large in front of them. Once a small and vaguely Greek revival-styled building when Ansel first saw it, it had grown expansion by expansion until it was as much a hodgepodge of styles and eras as the city itself. The old building was mainly a files annex for the new station, a squared-off, two story brick eyesore that looked like a hostile elementary school. The windows on the back half of the building swapped abruptly from wide and inviting to narrow angry slits in the wall where the holding cells were.

Ansel glanced down at his watch, a battered old thing that nearly matched its owner in age and life experience. The pair had made good time and had ample breathing room to get into position. Their staging point was the building to their immediate left, a community center which was closed for the night.

Giving Slate a knowing glance, Ansel watched as the light around him blurred and then passed through him, his body vaporizing into a near-invisible mist. Now incorporeal, Slate drifted under the firedoor and the latch clicked open a second later. The pair climbed a flight of stairs in pitch blackness and total silence, conversation having left them for the moment in the face of their job. Once they reached the roof, once they confirmed they were alone, once the lights of the street were below them and the police station was the entirety of their focus did they relax.

“I don’t know why you can’t learn to do that,” Slate said, squatting down against the HVAC unit. As was typical, with his part of the plan complete, he immediately grew chatty and bored.

Ansel shrugged, the bulk of his attention turned to the station’s front doors. “He don’t want me knowing how,” he said. “Like how he don’t want you knowing glamours.”

“It’s suuuch bullshit.” He pulled a cigarette out of a squashed pack and lit it, the smoke lost in the fog of the evening. “It doesn’t even make sense. How does that make sense?”

“Slate, you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to figure out what makes sense to that man,” Ansel said with a wave of his hand. A near-century hadn’t brought him any closer to predicting the man’s capricious nature.

“OK I mean logically,” he puffed nervously on his cigarette, “Logically he’s a fucking freak, but even a freak would want to limit points of contact, right? It should only take one guy to do this shit.”

Ansel jerked his head towards the street when a figure left the station, but quickly lost interest when it was apparent the height and build didn’t match Malczyn’s. He threw a glance back at Slate, focusing on an errant piece of graffiti on the HVAC unit above his head. “It’s just how he wants it done.”

Slate chewed on the end of his cigarette, mulling that point over. “I oughta show you how it’s done. Fuck how he’s done it for, fucking, for a thousand years, it doesn’t make sense.”

Ansel fully faced his direction at that, careful to keep his Thirst from crossing Slate’s eyeline. “You ain’t showing me shit.”

Slate bobbed his head as if Ansel had agreed to the idea. “And you could show me glamours. Win-fucking-win.”

“He’d skin us both alive,” he said, drawing his thumb in front of his neck. “Nothing doing. Drop it.”

“Okay, dad.” He worked on his cigarette in sulking silence for the next few minutes before getting up to join Ansel at the edge of the building. Turning his back to the road and leaning against the ledge, he flashed Ansel a conspiratorial smirk. “So what were you up to this morning?”

With a wary eye, Ansel asked, “And what do you mean by that?”

Slate flicked the butt of his cigarette over his shoulder. “I saw you take a 20 out of the kitty and I know you aren’t buying Cutter shit.”

Ansel sucked on a fang in thought before he gave in. “I was buying someone breakfast.”

“Jeeezus, Dog,” Slate said, dramatically clapping a hand over his eyes. “Why do you keep doing this to yourself?”

Though he was in no mood to entertain this new conversation, Ansel was a captive audience and going along with Slate was often easier than trying to ignore him. “‘Cuz I’m allowed to have a little fun every now and then.”

Slate clucked his tongue and folded his arms. “It’s your life, I guess,” he said, chuckling at his own poor joke. “So who is she?”

Unseen factors weighed in Ansel’s mind before he said, “His name’s Hector,” with emphasis on the first and last words.

It had the desired effect of stunning Slate into silence, but it didn’t last nearly as long as Ansel had hoped. “Oh. A guy?” he said, seeming to hold out hope that he’d just misheard or else it was a joke. When the silence stretched a beat too long, he repeated, “A guy, huh?”

“Yeah,” Ansel said, squaring his shoulders in Slate’s direction. “That gonna be a problem for you?”

Being preemptively confronted caused Slate to shrink down into his hoodie and he took a few steps away from the ledge. “No,” he muttered. “No, I guess not.”

Blessed, if tense, silence returned to the rooftop and Ansel checked the time. Not long to go, if Malczyn was going to appear. His hackles raised when Slate piped up again.

“It’s just—”

“Slate.”

“It’s just that,” he pressed on, undeterred. “I thought you were like. Old.”

Ansel’s temper popped like a cork. “What the fuck does that mean?” he demanded, turning away from the police station.

Slate furrowed his brow like a dog trying to do arithmetic. “Weren’t you in like. The Civil War?”

Torn between correcting him and busting his nose, Ansel stared at Slate’s shoulder in stunned silence. Exasperated with the conversation, he blurted out, “D’you think I wasn’t sucking dick then, too?”

Slate’s eyes widened with the sudden change in his worldview and assumptions.

Or that was what Ansel assumed was the reason, until Slate’s arm shot past him, pointing across the street. “Dog. There.”

Ansel whirled around and caught the last fleeting glance of Malczyn before he disappeared around a corner. “Shit.”

Throwing himself at the ledge, Ansel could just hear Slate’s halfhearted “Go get him” before he leapt off into open air. He took the brunt of the impact from the ground on one leg which buckled underneath him as his knee and ankle tore away from their joint spaces. Grunting with pain, the wounds began to mend in an instant and by the time he took another step his leg was whole and undamaged again. Under the veil of darkness, he was free to use all of his terrifying speed as he raced to catch up with Malczyn.

Although he was doughy, Malczyn was tall and he made good use of his long legs to put sudden distance between himself and Ansel the moment he heard heavy footfalls behind him. Sensing that he wouldn't be able to out speed his pursuer, Malczyn cut sharply down a side street, hoping to lose him in the labyrinthine expanse of downtown.

It would have worked, if anyone but Ansel had been behind him. As it was, all Malczyn was doing was tiring himself out and allowing Ansel to narrow the gap. A few more desperate turns had Malczyn heading back to the police station, like a desperate sinner to a church.

Cursing to himself, Ansel slipped his skin and his footsteps were replaced with the threatening clatter of claws scraping pavement. The sound filled Malczyn with a new zeal for life, who shouted in alarm and cut the next corner sharp enough to bounce off a bollard.

Ansel was not really a wolf in the same way Slate was not really water vapor, and he still relied on his very human senses to hunt prey. And so, when he rounded the corner, he was taken by surprise to see Malczyn fast approaching another person and calling to them in a panic.

“Help, help, y’gotta,” he stammered, swallowing half his words as he gasped for breath. Hands pawed at the other figure, clutching at his suit’s lapels, shirt collar, even the exposed skin of his neck and face in a desperate attempt at self-preservation. As he again wept and pleaded his case, Malczyn’s wrists were seized and held away by his would-be savior who cast a startled glance down the road.

Ansel had wasted no time in leaping forward, jaws ready to sink into Malcyzn’s throat and silence him for good. The man pivoted on his heel and flung Malczyn behind him with a sudden intensity and focus Ansel hadn’t anticipated.

Malczyn shrieked and curled himself up like a pill bug.

A fist as solid as a wall caught Ansel in the chest and used his momentum to cast him aside as easily as swatting away a fly. He hit the ground and went head over heels, the wind knocked out of him.

A blaze of light, brilliant and blue arced down at him from above. Running on pure instinct, he slipped his skin into the smaller target of his human form and rolled away. Sparks flew as metal scraped against asphalt in the place where his neck had just been. He sprang to his feet and jumped backwards, panting with a mixture of adrenaline and fear.

His assailant was a man in a rumpled, off-the-rack business suit, a man who stared him down unflinchingly, a man who looked so out of place standing tall against the darkness.

Hector.

He held in his left hand a fearsome sword, gleaming with blue light, its tip trained at Ansel as if it weighed nothing at all. Rather than the weary but charming expressions he'd worn in the month Ansel had been watching him, his face was sharp and dangerous. An aura of cold fire roiled off him into the night like a brume in a holler yet carried with it an unfathomable weight.

"Dog, I presume?" he said, the name a frigid arrow aimed at Ansel's heart. Even as he kicked backwards to send Malczyn sprawling away from the refuge he'd taken between his legs, Hector's gaze never wavered. His whole body was tense with anticipation and the pulse behind his glasses was scarcely elevated. The impending duel was one he'd fought before and one he had every intention to win.

Ansel turned tail and fled.

For a few tense and terrifying moments he could hear nothing but the sound of his breath and the blood rushing in his ears. The route he took through downtown was no less desperate than Malczyn's had been, but it was far more ambitious, sending him down blind alleys and over fences.

Once his hearing had returned to him, he strained for the telltale sounds of pursuit, but found the night behind him to be still. Daring himself to slow his pace and bracing for an attack, he looked over his shoulder to find an empty street. He came to a perplexed halt and bent over, steadying himself against the wall of a building to catch his breath. His guard still up, he waited out this moment of vulnerability until his chest was no longer burning and some of the feeling had returned to his legs. With a trembling hand he wiped his brow and spun in a tight circle to survey his surroundings, but he was truly alone. No flashes of light, no murderous presence lurking the shadows, nothing but his racing mind reminding him of the last time he'd tried to outrun a devil.

Hot terror melted away into a lump of dread in the pit of his stomach. With one last sharp intake of breath, he turned his back to Odette and his failed mission and the man who had appeared before him like a bolt from the blue. Feet as heavy as lead thudded against the pavement as he took up the path back to the mansion.