XVI
Days blurred together and time passed in the hazy, disjointed way it always did when Ansel’s reserves were low, when he had pushed himself too far beyond his capabilities. He was only aware a full five days had been and gone when Baptiste summoned him for his feeding.
The trip from his room to the upper floor's southern wing felt like it took an eternity, his pace hardly more than a shuffle due to his thoroughly tapped reserves. There was no hesitation in his steps, however, not even when he stood before the double doors of the master bedroom and pushed them open. An order had brought him there and an order must always be obeyed.
Baptiste stood before a handsome pair of French doors at the far end of the room, his back to Ansel and his attention focused on something outside the windows. Or on nothing. It was difficult to tell sometimes. His pale hair hung loose, cascading down his back like water. With the early evening light streaming in through the window illuminating him, he had an ethereal quality heightened by his loose shirt, untucked and flowing around his frame.
With what felt like his last ounce of strength, Ansel closed the distance between Baptiste and himself. He stood at attention on wobbly legs behind him and waited in silence. The psychic connection between liege and thrall had announced his appearance long before he had been physically present in the room, a tether between the two men which had only strengthened over a near century of proximity.
Like an eagle wheeling on its prey, Baptiste turned to face him. There was only the barest amount of eye contact, Thirsts raging, before Baptiste broke it off to allow his eyes to rove up and down Ansel's body. After all this time, it still made his skin crawl to be regarded like something put on earth for the man's own amusement. Briefly, Ansel had the unusual sensation of a cold fire flaring up in response to Baptiste's Thirst and he broke out in a cold sweat.
Tucking a stray lock of hair behind his ear in an almost human movement, Baptiste said, "You have been quarreling with Olive more frequently as of late."
Ansel tried to recall how many times made it frequent, but his head was too muddled to make sense of time. "Ain't quarreling," he said.
"It isn't quarreling," was Baptiste's terse correction, with heavy emphasis on the -ing. "What is it, then?"
Words failed him from fatigue and the bitter sting of his speech being nitpicked. He shrugged listlessly, his arms limp at his sides.
"If you've grown tired of her—"
A jolt of panic chased his malaise away. "No," he said, and looked as directly at Baptiste's face as he dared. "She don't — she doesn't bother me when she's like this. She's still a fledgling. I remember how it was."
Baptiste loosely folded his arms in front of him, cradling his elbows in consideration. "True," he conceded after what felt like an eternity. "Even you were a pathetic drunkard for over a decade." One corner of his mouth turned upwards in a sort of smile and the look he turned on him was almost proud.
"Yeah," Ansel responded dully, because the empty air between the two of them was too heavy.
“Still, she would not be so impudent to you had you turned her,” Baptiste said, unbuttoning the cuff on his left sleeve. “She would have been yours to mold."
A shudder made its way up the back of Ansel's neck. He had a brief vision of Carmen in a pool of her own blood. "She would've hated me," he said to the floor.
"She hates you now."
Ansel's nostrils flared and his eyes darted up, a hot reply on his tongue, but was met by Baptiste's crooked smile plastered on his face like a slash in a canvas. Sweat rolled down the small of Ansel's back and he tamped down the urge to leave. Gritting his teeth together, he swallowed his words and glowered at some spot in the corner.
“This beau of yours,” Baptiste began, circling around Ansel in the slow, lazy way of a satiated predator. “Is he of any use to us?”
Ansel’s heart crawled into his throat. “He’s new in town, doesn’t seem to have a life outside his job.” Baptiste had paused behind him and the man’s presence was almost physically painful. “A lawyer, but it’s public defender shit.”
“Un avocat?” Baptiste purred in his ear. “Such a man could prove useful.”
A chill ran down Ansel’s neck. “He can’t be any good at it, he’s dirt poor and—”
Baptiste’s hand on the back of his head silenced him and he suppressed a shudder of revulsion as he stroked his hair. “Well done finding him. You always did have a keen eye for useful pawns."
Chewing on the inside of his lip, Ansel stared straight ahead and willed his body to stay rooted in place. He made a noncommittal sound in his throat that he hoped sounded like gratitude for the praise.
"Would you like to have him for yourself?" Baptiste asked, dragging his hand away from Ansel's head. "I would allow you to turn him, if you wished."
From the moment he'd set foot in the room, Ansel's mind had been racing through every possible question Baptiste might have asked. It had plotted nearly every twist and turn the conversation could take, exhausting itself with the different answers he might give to toe the line of honesty and deceit. It was how he'd stayed alive for so long.
It hadn't been enough. The suggestion caught Ansel so off guard he whirled his head around to face Baptiste, the roar of his Thirst in his face. "I couldn't—" he blurted out before his beleaguered mind sounded a warning.
As if waiting for that prompt, the bedroom melted away to a cold, abandoned jail cell and Ansel stood near the bars, eyes fixed forward. At the far end of the cell, his mortal self was thrashing futilely at Baptiste as his throat was being torn open. It was a nightmare Ansel had revisited often in the past century, but never one he'd seen from his liege's perspective.
In the ghostly present of his position as observer, Baptiste hovered at Ansel's side, somehow feeling closer now than he had in this vision. Woodenly, he turned his head, bracing against a Thirst he knew wouldn't rage in this space of memory, a questioning expression on his face. "Why are you showing me this?" he asked in a thin whisper.
"I am teaching you," was Baptiste's cold reply.
Baptiste rarely shared his own memories with Ansel. The suddenness and the novelty worked together to take his legs out from under him, to allow his liege's mind to bleed into his own. Blood was on his lips, it stained his shirt and hair a savage crimson, his spirit sang with it. Like a surgeon, he had neatly removed his soon-to-be fledgling's soul from its body, and kept it contained within his own. On the floor lay the rest of the miserable souse, silent and still and awaiting his rebirth. A warmth spread through Baptiste's body from his belly, and the Thirst in his chest swelled in response.
Ansel watched. Ansel had to watch. With Baptiste's mind wrapped around his own, he found himself observing with a detached sense of fascination for the process. His own Thirst stirred within him, as if acting out the motions itself. He could feel the orphaned soul inside him as a small flicker of flame, something that had once been white hot but reduced to a smolder. The Thirst that now enshrouded it was inky black and unfathomable, with an immense pressure like the crushing depths of the sea. As if acting under its own desires — though Ansel knew Baptiste was guiding it all along — a tendril split off from it, weaving itself deep within the soul. It buckled and writhed at the Thirst, but was helpless to resist and at last gave in, allowing itself to be smothered and transformed.
Only once Baptiste had stoked this flame back into full, hungry life did he kneel down to the corpse at his feet. Splitting open his own palms with his fangs, he allowed his viscous and foul blood to pool in his upturned hands for a moment before pressing them to the sliced open throat. The befouled soul — now a proper Thirst in its own right — flowed from Baptiste back to its owner. When he removed his hands, the ghastly wounds sealed over into familiar, angry scars, and the fledgling's chest rose with new breath.
The vision ended as suddenly as it began. The chilly gloom of the jail cell was replaced at once by the stifling heat of the master bedroom in full setting sunlight. Ansel stayed rooted in place as Baptiste paced from back to front, his Thirst pressing against his own as their eyes met.
"You will turn him at the first opportunity," Baptiste said.
Though his eyes were fixed on Baptiste, Ansel's mind was a thousand miles away. The order sank down into his core, wrapping itself around his will like an anchor. It was such an open ended command that he felt like an animal circling a concealed pit— he had no way of knowing when the ground could collapse beneath his feet.
"The first—?" he repeated, his tongue rasping against his mouth like sandpaper.
"I trust you to know when that is," Baptiste said, gripping Ansel's chin in his hand and forcing his attention back to the room. "You have proven yourself thus far, Dog. Do not disappoint me."
He said nothing, neither confirmation nor protest. All he could do was stare and hope his eyes didn't betray him.
Satisfied by this, Baptiste released Ansel and rolled up the billowy sleeve of his shirt at last, exposing his powerful forearm. Ansel hesitated even as his body screamed at him to strike when he saw the veins, royal blue against his pallid skin.
"Dog," Baptiste warned.
Before he could second-guess himself, Ansel drew Baptiste's arm close and sank his fangs easily into his frigid flesh. Tepid, viscous blood flowed from his wounds into Ansel's mouth and he closed his eyes, drifting out of himself as his Thirst fed. His liege's blood wasn't nearly as satisfying as a mortal's, but it soothed his frenzy down to a whisper at the back of his mind. Little by little he felt his body coming back under his own control even as his mind wandered farther away.
He never had developed a taste for blood, even though his body craved it. Its scent, sharp and metallic, only reminded him of his time spent recuperating in a field hospital where the air had been thick with it. A bitter time when his old, carefree life had been burned to cinders by the mortar that had left him writhing in agony.
Cold fingers digging into his neck brought him back to the present and he unlatched his jaw from Baptiste's arm with a gasp of shock. Ansel was still as the hand crawled from his neck up the side of his face before roughly pushing his head away. Despite himself, a wave of shame washed over him and he felt disgusting to be dismissed so casually.
"Cutter has called for a meeting," Baptiste said. The wounds left behind by Ansel's fangs sealed over in an instant and Baptiste shrugged his sleeve back into place. "You'll go to him, now that you're fed."
Ansel looked up in surprise. "He say what about?"
There was no answer from Baptiste, who had turned his back on Ansel once again. Taking the silence for what it was, Ansel inched away towards the door, his eyes locked on Baptiste's broad shoulders until he was out of sight.