XV
As Carmen padded down the hall of the mansion's upper floor, she trailed her fingers along the edge of the wainscoting, disturbing the thick layer of dust that had settled over god knew how many years. This wing of the mansion was always grimy, always covered in dust and cobwebs, always less homely feeling than the rest of the building. The lights in the fixtures had long ago burned out, though she had peered at them once and had been surprised to find the bulbs no older than the mid-90s by her reasoning.
She wondered sometimes who would have changed them. Who would have left the irregular patch in the drywall between the master bedroom and the hall closet? Who was the last poor soul who had come before her, who had flicked dust onto the floor as she was now doing?
Ansel, maybe.
About once a month he would be seized with a domestic fit and he would sweep and mop, muck around with the fixtures, check the pipes and furnace. He'd clean behind the stove and refrigerator about every six months, which Carmen had never seen anyone ever do in her life. It might have just been because he was old.
But the hallway she was presently stalking was the true heart of the mansion, where Baptiste kept his private rooms. Ansel would never cross its border unless he was forced to, dust be damned.
She stepped back over it now, passing in front of the handsome staircase which made the centerpiece of the entryway. Hesitating, she hovered by the top step before continuing on to the northern wing which housed the bedrooms available for the rest of them. Her own room was the first on the left and she had left it in nearly the same state as the day she'd been granted it, save for a few clothes in the dresser, a stack of books on the nightstand, a hairbrush and elastics on the vanity. The mirror in the vanity had a vicious spider web of a crack in its surface; someone had destroyed it prior to Carmen's arrival.
Slipping beyond her own room she passed Slate's — his room in name only as he seemed to haunt anywhere but — and paused a few steps away from the third door on the right. It was halfway open, a passive invitation, and she strained her ears for signs of movement inside. Met only with silence, she crept forward and tapped her fingers together in an anxious motion before knocking on the door frame.
"It's open."
Well, obviously, was the snide response on her lips. She decided against voicing it when she recognized how strung out Ansel had sounded, and instead pushed the door open wider.
He was sprawled out on the floor, torso stripped down to his undershirt, a jacket beneath his head for support. Sticky with sweat, he opened one eye to regard her in the doorway, but sagged back into the floor almost immediately, seemingly exhausted by the effort.
"He still hasn't fed you?" Carmen asked, her eyebrows arched in surprise. He managed a grunt in response. "This is stupid, why don't you go out and take care of yourself?"
"Can't."
An order bound Ansel to the mansion, then, and he was too weakened to break through it. Brushing her hair over her shoulder, Carmen squatted down next to his head, arms propped on her knees. "How do you stand it?"
His brow wrinkled in annoyance. "Th' fuck else am I supposed to do? Got no choice but to stand it."
Carmen blew an errant strand of hair away from her eyes. Despite herself, a shudder of sympathy passed over her, a burning sensation licking at her skin over the memory of her own Thirst flaring. Unlike Ansel, she'd only been unfortunate enough to dip close to frenzy a handful of times; she didn't understand how he could endure it almost every month.
"Did you see your man again?" She only asked out of idle curiosity, she hoped he didn't think she was doing him a favor by distracting him from his pain.
A silence stretched long enough for Carmen to think he'd passed out, but when she glanced at his cheek, she saw his eyes alert and staring up at the ceiling. Focused and bitter, he said in a low voice, "It ain't gonna work out between us."
"Hm, that's a shame," she replied, and almost sounded like she meant it.
But Ansel picked up on the undertones in her voice and he huffed, "Did you just come here to devil me?" From the way he winced after, it must have hurt his head to get so worked up.
"I didn't know it would be such a touchy subject," she protested. "You were over the moon the other day." Leaning away from him, she sat down squarely on the floor to give her feet a rest.
Ansel heaved a sigh and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. "Yeah, well," he said, "Turned out we were too different."
Rolling her eyes when he couldn't see, Carmen pulled her hair over her shoulder, tugging it out of its elastic. "What did you expect?" she said quietly, hugging her knees to her chest. "We are different."
Ansel tipped his head in her direction, his stormy gray eyes studying the side of her face. "I don't believe that. I don't think you—"
"We aren't human," Carmen snapped, pounding her fist into her thigh. "What was your game plan here, Ansel? Do you think anyone wants anything to do with us?"
"Now that ain't fair," Ansel said petulantly, hauling himself up onto an elbow.
"This isn't fair! You string people along and for what? For this?" She threw her arm out to the side, gesturing at the oppressive room, Ansel, and finally herself.
Although his face flashed with naked anger, he held his tongue until his expression softened. She glared at his shoulder and a pang struck her heart to see how gentle his demeanor suddenly became. "I'm sorry," he said.
Carmen looked up at his eyes, her Thirst glancing past his own in her surprise. "What are you sorry for?"
"For," he faltered, furrowing his brow. "For making it sound like you deserved this. You don't."
She could throttle him. It would be a mercy. A near decade of knowing exactly what kind of hell she'd been living thanks to him, and still the best he could do was feel sorry for himself. Narrowing her eyes, she buried her face behind her knees. “You’re a fucking idiot,” she said. She’d long ago given up on crying as catharsis, but her face still burned with emotion that had no real outlet.
Cold, rough fingers touched her shin and her head snapped up to find Ansel had rested his knuckles against her in a hesitant gesture of comfort. Bile crept up her throat and bitterly coated her next words. “It’s too bad it didn’t work out with your stranger. I would’ve begged Baptiste for the chance to run him off, too.”
Ansel pulled his fingers back as if her flesh had been red hot. Carmen didn’t dare look at his face. She waited for something to break the tension between them, but nothing came save for sounds of the mundane. Creaking on the stairs told her Slate was moving restlessly from room to room as he was prone to do; Baptiste never made a sound as he passed through the mansion. Rain began to patter against the windowpane and the radiator knocked into life against the chill of the room.
The oppressive silence lingered for what felt to her like an eternity. When Ansel spoke, his voice sounded a thousand miles away from her. “When I was first turned,” he said, his eyes closed to everything but memory, “Baptiste would tailor clothing.”
Carmen screwed her face up in confusion. “What?”
“He’d get shirts and trousers and shit from consignment shops and what have you,” he continued. “Fuck, probably from people he’d killed, too, I dunno. Ain’t important, but he’d take these clothes and he’d alter them. Mending holes and adding detail. He hand embroidered a coat for six months straight, once. Beautiful work, I’d never seen anything like it. Ivy and fleur de lis and shit like that. Gold thread.”
Despite herself, Carmen was drawn into this picture he was painting of Baptiste bent over an article of clothing, needle and thread in hand. His capacity for focus was fathomless, she knew, and he could spend entire days lost in a task, his interest in the world beyond him nonexistent. “And?” she prompted.
“One day, he bundled up everything, doused it in kerosene, and burnt it all to cinders.” He punctuated this story with a hand spread out in front of him, inviting her to imagine it.
Unlike the earlier silence, the one that followed was one of contemplation. Carmen studied the top of his head, waiting for an elaboration that wasn't coming. "Stories usually have a point," she said, at length.
"He does the same to people," Ansel said. "Does whatever he wants, then gets rid of 'em when he's bored. He don't care about you or any of us, and nothing you do can make him."
Carmen folded her arms tight against her chest and gripped the sleeves of her shirt. "I’m not a fucking idiot. And so what? Nobody cares about us."
With what must have been a Herculean amount of effort, Ansel sat up and faced her direction. "Carmen, I care—"
"Don't," she spat. "Don't you dare finish that sentence."
He withdrew into himself as if she'd struck him and she sharply turned her head away. Talk was cheap. If he'd truly cared about her, she wouldn't even be having this conversation with him and they both knew it. She idly rubbed her abdomen as the ghost of a memory threatened to overcome her.
"You need to move on," she said, and her voice was the softest it had been towards him in recent memory. "It sucks, but this is what we are, now. No human wants anything to do with a monster." Circling back to her earlier point felt like twisting the knife, but she needed him to understand. As much as she hated him, she couldn't stand to see him set himself up for failure one more time with one more innocent human.
Ansel had dropped back down to the floor and seemed to be wrestling with what to say. He settled on, "I don't think we're monsters," in a halfhearted defense of the both of them.
Carmen shook her head and got to her feet. Whatever shred of pity she may have had for him froze solid in the depths of her heart. With a particularly chilly glare, she said, "You have a lot more in common with Baptiste than you want to think."
There was a sharp intake of breath and Carmen braced herself for a heated rebuttal that didn't come. When she was denied even this interaction, she stalked out of the room, closing the door behind her.