XIV
The distraction from Mildred only worked for as long as it took Hector to cross the threshold into his apartment. Once there he busied himself tapping into his network of wards, the magical threads that criss crossed over, around, and through his living space which functioned as alarm spells and repellents. He found them annoyingly undisturbed. No signs of forced entry while he’d been away, no hint that a malevolent force lurked nearby, nothing out of place. Even his Honor was undisturbed, slumbering away inside his chest rather than plucking away at him.
Too amped up for sleep, he stripped out of his sweat-soiled clothes and showered with the door wide open, senses alert to any change in his surroundings. When no attack came at his most vulnerable, he allowed himself to fill the sink basin and shaved his face before brushing his teeth, trying to let the motion of familiar routine ground him. He flipped open his medicine cabinet and pulled out a small bag of supplies, drawing up his dose of testosterone and injecting it with a practiced hand.
With his morning ritual completed and with nowhere to be for the day, Hector perched on the edge of his bed, drumming his fingers against one knee. The percussion continued for another few minutes before he retrieved his tablet from the night stand and pulled up some random show he’d been meaning to watch.
The first episode was punctuated with tense pauses as he strained his ears for any lurking danger.
The second was uninterrupted.
He then binged the rest of the season.
At some point in the middle of the next season he fell asleep, only noticing when he awoke with a start to complete darkness. His wards remained undisturbed and the room around him was quiet and still. He allowed himself a deeper sleep after that, waking to the morning sun spilling around his blackout curtains. He again spent the day locked away, but less on edge than he had been 24 hours prior.
He read a book.
He cleaned his apartment.
He watched a three hour video essay about some video game series he’d never played.
He slept.
By dawn of the third day, he couldn’t take it anymore.
The moment he woke up, he leapt to his feet like a soldier at reveille. Dressing in a flash, he took the stairs out of his building two at a time and burst out into the crisp morning air. He paused, considering his bike, before shaking his head to himself and marching down the sidewalk.
It being early morning on a weekday, Hector was able to walk directly up to the counter where his usual barista was wearing an unusually serious look on her face. He lowered an eyebrow at the change in her personality and she did a double-take when she recognized him under the layer of stubble on his normally clean shaven face.
“That redhead guy’s been asking for you, like, every day. Like, multiple times a day,” she whispered, leaning forward and gesturing at the patio with her eyes. “Do you need us to get rid of him?” Behind her, the tall, silent barista whom Hector had never spoken to nodded at him as he manned the espresso machine.
Hector put his hand over his mouth to suppress the involuntary laugh building in him; it was sweet that they’d appointed themselves his defender, even if a vampire would tear through them like tissue paper. “No, no, I got him. I’m sorry he’s been bothering you.”
Once his order was in hand, Hector pushed open the door with his hip to confront the specter who had been haunting the cafe. The redheaded vampire looked up in surprise to see Hector and for a moment he seemed to want to bolt from his seat but he held firm.
Hector suppressed a sneer to see him. Glamours and concealing magics were useless against a Hunter’s piercing gaze, and from the second they’d crossed paths, Hector had seen the vampire as he truly was. That morning, his gaunt face looked even more haggard somehow, his corpse-like skin even paler against the ugly scars across his throat. Dead eyes trained on Hector and turned vaguely hopeful.
Well, Hector was holding two cups of coffee. He closed the gap between the door and the table, setting one down at arm’s length on the table. “You scared the staff,” he said coolly. “They thought you were a problem for me.”
Vicious fangs flashed in the sunlight as the vampire laughed. “Little do they know, huh?” he said, taking the cup. Hector had never known a vampire to enjoy human food or drink, and he supposed their first meeting had just been him keeping up appearances. To his quiet surprise, though, the vampire took a long pull from the cup.
“Figured I should pay you back,” Hector said, taking a seat.
“Is that some kinda Hunter honor thing?”
Hector blinked, his own drink hovering an inch away from his face. “What? No. Why would my Honor care about a fucking cup of coffee?”
The vampire shrank into himself like a snake coiling up, he almost looked embarrassed. Hector stared at him for a beat too long before coming to his senses and turning his head away; nothing about the situation was sitting right for him. From the first time Hector had spotted him sitting alone in broad daylight at a cafe, almost none of what this creature had done was what he’d come to expect of a vampire. For a month Hector had gone out of his way to visit Misty day after day to keep tabs on him, but the only human he’d ever taken an interest in that whole time had been Hector himself.
He was struck by the sudden realization that their conversation earlier in the week had been honest flirting. Momentarily dumbstruck, he stared off into space and was only brought back to earth by the vampire loudly clearing his throat.
"I said," he was evidently repeating himself, "That you probably know all about me."
Hector regarded him over the rim of his glasses and set his coffee down. "Baptiste's Dog? Yeah, I've heard a thing or two."
The vampire's face twitched as if he'd been slapped. "Don't call me that," he said in a small voice that didn't match his fearsome visage. In fact, in the light of day with his slumped shoulders and hangdog expression on his morbid face, he just looked pathetic.
Hector weighed some unseen variables before giving the barest of nods to the vampire — to Ansel. "Alright," he said, spreading his arm out. "You have me here, Ansel. Now what?"
Ansel opened his mouth to speak, but closed it and reached for his coffee instead. His fingers were noticeably trembling as he grabbed it and steadied it with his other hand to keep a tremor from spilling it over the table. With a shuddering inhale, he tried to bring the cup to his lips, but only managed as far as his chest before he clutched it tight against himself.
It didn't even occur to Hector that Ansel was crying until a few miserable tears rolled down his cheeks.
“Fuck,” Ansel gasped. Words caught in his throat when he tried to say more and he collapsed in on himself, his whole body struggling with the effort to hold his emotions in check. As Hector sat across from him in bewildered silence, Ansel finally yielded and he was overcome by sobs, burying his face in his arms on the table.
Dimly aware of the optics, Hector swiveled in his seat to look for any voyeurs to the scene, but found the cafe blinds closed and the tables around them empty. A small mercy, he didn't think he could face the barista if she thought he'd broken this man's heart.
Ansel seemed less concerned by his surroundings as he wept, his body wracked with a grief that — to Hector — came out of nowhere. After what he felt was an appropriate amount of time, Hector put his drink off to the side and tapped the table's surface with the flat of his palm. "Hey, hey," he hissed. "Could you pull yourself together?"
A snorting kind of hiccup sound escaped Ansel as he tried to do just that, but holding his mouth shut just moved the sobs deeper into his chest. After a few false starts where Hector was afraid the weeping might start again in earnest, he more or less fell silent. His lifeless eyes were rimmed with red and tears still rolled down his face, but he swiped at them roughly with his knuckles and tried to clear his nose.
"What the fuck was that all about?" Hector asked, folding one hand over the other on the table in front of him.
Quick as a flash, Ansel's own hand whipped out at him like a cobra. Instinctively Hector jerked his arm away, but Ansel held fast and for a frightening moment overpowered him with sheer determination.
"Hector," Ansel choked out, "I need your help."
Somewhere in Hector, a cold fire was stoked to life. As he stared disbelieving into a pair of stormy gray eyes, a sigil on the back of his left hand — a crossed pair of swords visible only to its owner — flared, sending a chill coursing through his veins. His Honor awakened in response and tendrils of fate stretched out from his chest and wrapped invisibly around Ansel, binding the two men together.
Hector finally wrenched his hand away with a look of unmasked terror. "What did you do?" He was met with an expression of confusion so genuine that it sent his mind reeling. It had to have been a deliberate act, there was no way Ansel had invoked an Oath accidentally.
Had he?
"What — I just," Ansel stammered, faintly hurt by Hector's reaction. "I only asked for your help. If you don't want to, then just — "
"Stop," he hissed. "Stop talking, you — " He paused, realizing Ansel's words had come to him unclouded by interference. "You aren't lying." His fingers pressed themselves against his lips and he felt ill. "Do you know what a Hunter's Oath is?"
Direct skin contact, a genuine plea for aid, there was no way he hadn't known. When Malczyn had invoked it the other night, that had clearly been an accident, but this? It had been too overt. It was a trick, a trap, some cunning ruse to —
"I got no idea what you're talking about. Oath?" Ansel's voice rang through as clear as a bell.
Hector's fingers spread to clamp over his mouth and his face paled. Try as he might to ignore it, his Honor had an unmistakable magnetic pull towards the creature sat across from him. It wasn't possible. It shouldn't be possible. Hector's Honor was old magic designed to fight against these creatures, to protect humans, and yet—
And yet.
Hector turned his eyes to face Ansel, now that the shock had worn off. He was met with an anxious and hollow expression, a silent, desperate plea of someone truly at the end of their tether. A heavy weight formed in the pit of his stomach to see it and for an instance he could picture what Ansel must have looked like alive. "What do you need my help with?" he whispered, as if he had a choice now whether or not to give aid.
The sorrowful expression was dampened by a scant few new tears at the corners of Ansel's eyes. When he blinked them away, a spark of determination took their place and almost danced with life. Fangs bared in a wolfish smile that rose the fine hairs on the back of Hector's neck, he said, "To kill Baptiste."
Despite himself, Hector’s mouth twisted into a matching predatory grin. The very idea of helping Ansel still turned his stomach, but if it was in service of taking down a greater evil — he could overlook his revulsion for that.
Ansel’s smile flickered and faded, replaced with a look of annoyance and he glanced off to an empty spot in space. The same had happened the other day and Hector had recognized it for what it was immediately; Ansel was enthralled to another vampire, he wasn’t free to act outside the limits imposed on him by his liege. To be a thrall was a hellish existence, forever lashed to the monster who’d killed you and forced to obey its every whim. No wonder Ansel had begged for help, he was living a cursed kind of life that would only end with the permanent death of thrall or liege.
“Speak of the devil,” he mumbled. “He’s calling me, I gotta go.” He stood almost automatically and turned away.
“Wait.”
A sour look passed over Ansel’s face and he pivoted, still walking backwards. “I can’t wait, you know— ”
“Text me when you’re free,” Hector said. “We have a lot to talk about.”
An awkward smile spread across Ansel’s lips and he shrugged, rubbing at his neck. He nodded before wincing as another command forced him into a jog, then a sprint, and he rounded a corner, disappearing into the chill morning. Once out of sight, Hector rubbed some warmth back into the sigil on his hand, long since faded from view. His Honor still stirred in his chest, restless as a caged animal, but he did his best to ignore it; there would be time to satisfy it later. He sipped at his coffee, the flavors dull and cold on his tongue, and his head buzzed with a heady mixture of adrenaline and anticipation.