IV

Head pounding, Ansel came to on a concrete slab, his cheek frigid and sore where it had pressed into the ground. He propped himself up on his elbows and groaned as a wave of nausea washed up from his stomach to the back of his throat. With a shiver he curled into himself, clutching at his midsection and forcing himself to take steady breaths — he must have been out for the better part of a day if withdrawal was kicking in.

When the room stopped spinning, he hauled himself to his feet and braced against the exposed brick wall of the room he was in. It was a jail cell, a 6 by 8 foot bare space with a narrow window set into one wall and a set of bars along the opposite. The bed had long ago been stripped off the wall, bare posts were all that were left. 

He strained his ears against the darkness beyond the door, but it was as silent as the grave. His ragged breathing borne of anxiety and exhaustion were the only living sounds to be heard. 

He groped the back of his mind as he tried to piece together the sequence of events that led him there. The first and least likely answer was he had been arrested, as if his encounter with Baptiste had just been an alcohol-fueled hallucination. He shook his head like a wet dog, casting the thought aside. With its heavy layer of dust and thick mass of cobwebs spread out in its corners, it was clear the cell had been abandoned for some time.

Maybe he had been, too.

Ansel shifted his weight from one bare foot to the other, hugging his elbows and shivering. He tried to banish that thought, but doubt gnawed at his insides and turned his legs leaden. He spun in a slow circle, mind racing with the possibility that he’d been left there to starve for days, weeks, however long it took. That Baptiste had only dangled the promise of survival over his head to watch him flounder as he snatched it away.

Spurred to action by this new existential dread, Ansel followed the fresh trails that had been cut into the dust up to the door and pressed his face against the bars. He saw nothing in the desolate hallway but the shadows sliced by slivers of light from the cells further down. With a noise halfway between a sigh and a whimper, he stepped away from the door.

He backed into something as cold and solid as a marble pillar.

In a blind panic, he screamed and spun on his heels, slamming into the door hard enough to see lights explode in his vision. Dazed, he clutched at his head and forced his eyes to focus on the figure that had appeared in front of him.

Baptiste said nothing as he loomed large in the center of the room. With vague curiosity, he turned only his head to follow Ansel who stumbled in a wide arc away from him, to the far end of the cell.

“Jesus fuck,” Ansel gasped and his eyes roved around the confined space. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, no way to escape the trap that was closing around him.

Baptiste faced him now and his eerie beauty turned haunting as his skin blanched, his features turned gaunt, and his eyes drained of their vibrant color. The cold light of the cell bounced off his face casting deep shadows along his nose, his cheekbones, and the razor sharp fangs that were bared in Ansel’s direction.

Ansel’s hand crawled to his throat in a desperate attempt to comfort himself, to still his pounding heart and to jolt himself out of the nightmare. Baptiste’s pale eyes had him pinned against the wall like an insect under glass, the ragged brick digging into his shoulders. “What—?” he managed to say in a thin, desperate voice.

His final words were cut off when Baptiste slammed into him, his vicious smile tearing into one side of his throat. The wind was knocked out of him and his chest compacted painfully between the man and the wall, turning what little breaths he could take in into something searing and reedy. Ansel’s hand rose on its own, to clutch at the long hair that was soaking up his blood as it poured out of his wounds, but his strength was no match and was fading too fast. 

His knees buckled and they tumbled together to the ground, Ansel dimly aware of something in his chest finally snapping from the force of impact. Baptiste’s head shifted away as if granting him some reprieve before he turned to rake fresh gouges into the other side of his neck. His jaw then clamped down to catch every last drop of Ansel’s blood as it turned from a fountain, to a stream, and to a dribble until it was nothing at all.