The Mansion was too quiet. Olive hovered by one of the rooms in the western wing with a bundle of plastic trashbags in hand, peering just inside the door. Slate had left behind more of himself than some of the Mansion’s other tenants, even though he’d usually been seen stalking its halls. Discarded liquor bottles, food wrappers, and clothes papered the floor, and the sweet smell of a rotting apple core had attracted a small cloud of fruit flies.
Curling up her lip, she stepped one foot inside the doorframe before hesitating. Dog should do this, he’d gotten on Slate’s case often enough for the sporadic insect problems that he’d probably relish the idea of clearing out the room. She stood rooted to the spot, clenching the bags tighter to herself. The thought It’s this or the mess at the fountain, spurred her to enter at last.
Grabbing fistfuls of Slate’s afterlife and shoving them into a trashbag was not the catharsis she’d been looking for. He was a slob. Dr. Pepper bottles. Doritos bags. Receipts for convenience store pizza slices. Her hand shot up to her chest when she thought she’d heard feet scuttling in a plastic container, but she’d just shifted a pile of beer bottles. Slate had not been a brand loyalist, there were Coors, Budweiser, Corona, and Dos Equis labels mixed together. A cup noodle container near overflowing with bottle caps. A scattered assortment of half finished or wrongly finished crosswords and sudoku puzzles. A stack of battered and dogeared John Grisham thrillers and James Patterson mysteries. She’d never seen him read.
One bag sealed up and she started the next. Socks. Underwear. At least he owned multiple pairs, though he’d never gone to the laundry room. When had the Mansion even gotten a washer and dryer installed? Was it Dog? They didn’t have them in the 20s, right? She ran her fingers over the cracked screen print on a shirt, pale yellow sun on a dark green mountain range. This had been one of Slate’s favorites, judging by how often he’d worn it; the material was thick and soft, the neck tag worn into illegibility from washings and sweat. The scent of stale body odor partially concealed by Febreeze hit her nose as she passed the shirt into the garbage bag and she paused, her hand clenched against her trembling thigh.
A heavy set of footsteps stopped in the hall behind her and she froze, heart hammering in her chest. “What’re you doing? Slate ain’t got you cleaning his room, does he?”
Her hand flew to her mouth, suppressing something trying to crawl out of her throat. She shook her head before grabbing for another fistful of trash to shove in the bag. She couldn’t look at what she was grabbing anymore, her eyes couldn’t focus on what was in front of her.
“Hey,” Ansel’s — Dog’s — face was hovering near her own. “Why’re you crying?”
“Fuck off,” she gasped, wiping her cheeks and finding them surprisingly wet.
“Carmen.” His hands were pulling at the bag, but her grip was too strong and the plastic stretched and thinned under his fingers. “Would you look at me? What happened?”
She swatted at his shoulder and when she turned to focus on him, the concern on his face broke her resolve. “Slate’s—” But her throat closed up, she couldn’t force the words out and fiercely shook her head.
Some unseen arithmetic played out over his face and he scowled. “Where’d Slate go, where’s—”
“Stop,” she said, letting go of the bag. The conversation was going in a dangerous direction and she was desperate to redirect. “I’m just— where’d he even come from?”
He blinked and furrowed his brow, the question succeeding in derailing his thought process. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Baptiste just showed up with him one day.”
She tilted her head to one side as she looked his way. “You weren’t with him when he turned?”
He shook his head and rested the garbage bag on the ground. “Baptiste likes to do that part by himself. I was only with you cuz I asked.”
Her hand clenched at her shirt over her abdomen. “You did?”
He grunted. “Guess I never told you.”
“No, you fucking never did,” she said quietly.
A heavy silence fell between the two of them. Ansel shuffled his feet and knelt down to toss a few items into the trash bag. Carmen watched him with passive interest before kicking at a bottle with her toe.
“Do you remember what you said then?” she asked.
He craned his neck up at her. “When you was turned?”
She nodded, looking as closely at him as she dared. The phantom sensation of stale blood overwhelmed her senses; it filled her nostrils and coated her tongue and was splashed across his face. It wasn’t a night she remembered, so much as a night she felt deep in her bones.
But the bemused expression on Ansel’s face belied his next question. “Did I say something in particular?”
She bit on her lower lip and shook her head. “Not in particular, I guess.”
Sensing he’d gotten the answer wrong, he rose to his feet and abandoned the bag. “Hey—”
“Y’know I never even knew Slate’s real name,” she said breezily.
Ansel at least sensed the discussion was over and picked up the new thread where Carmen had left it. “Neither did I.”
“Fucked up, right?” she sighed, perching on the edge of a bedside table. “Not that I give two shits about it, but I figured you two got close on your boys’ nights.”
“Every word out of that man’s mouth was a lie,” he snorted. “He could’ve told me my hair was red and I’d’ve still looked in a mirror.”
Despite herself, Carmen let out a small laugh and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “He was a fucking asshole, huh? I can’t believe he just abandoned you like that.”
Ansel shifted from one foot to the other and shrugged a shoulder. “I’d’ve done the same to him, I can’t fault him too much for that. Not like we liked each other, and he knew it.”
She picked at one of her jagged fingernails and squinted up at him. “It was still pretty fucked up to do that to you. Whether or not you two liked each other, you got sent out to do a job together for a reason, right?”
He let out a bark of laughter. “Yeah, cuz Baptiste knows it drove us crazy. He’ll never teach me enough to let me go out on jobs alone, he does it on purpose.”
She felt her lip curl despite herself. “I’m sure it’s so hard he only taught you how to shapeshift and use a glamour, you need to be able to turn into a fucking cloud, too.”
He tensed and the expression on his face closed off. “Yeah, actually, it would help a lot. And he didn’t teach me my glamour, I figured it out myself.”
Whatever snarky reply she’d had in mind died before it reached her lips. From the moment she’d been turned, the only way she had ever learned anything had been through Baptiste’s direct actions. The memory of him probing her mind as if his fingers had pierced her skull sent a shiver through her, and the thought that it could be avoided entirely was almost too alien to comprehend. “What? How?”
His mouth opened and then immediately snapped shut as he wrestled with some internal debate. “Can’t tell you,” he managed to say.
She smacked his thigh harder than she’d intended, but didn’t show it on her face. “Fuck you, too,” she said.
“Can’t,” he repeated, massaging his leg. “As in, an order, Jesus.”
Her eyes nearly met his before sliding off to some spot on the wall over his shoulder. “An order’s not everything,” she muttered.
He took a half step in her direction, finger pointing at her face. “You—”
The sudden shift in his body language sent a jolt up her spine and an unmistakable flash of terror hit her face. She braced herself for a blow she knew wouldn’t come and kept her eyes on his hand as his fingers relaxed and he angled himself away from her.
“An order from him…” he said to the floor. “Even after a century, I never managed to disobey.”
With the danger gone, she leaned forward and looked him up and down. Not only did he look embarrassed for his outburst, he looked ashamed to be talking about Baptiste’s orders. This was a level of vulnerability she hadn’t expected, and she wasn’t sure where to go with it. “It’s not disobeying,” she said, “It’s more like ignoring.”
His head snapped up to her like she’d suggested growing an extra arm. “What?”
She waved her hands in front of her, as if a visual aid was all that was missing. “When some guy chats you up and you aren’t interested, you aren’t disobeying him, you’re tuning him out. Ignoring him. He doesn’t exist, right?”
His eyebrows arched up towards his hairline. “Fighting against it always made it worse,” he said. “Fuck me.”
“Not interested,” she said with a coquettish smile.
He didn’t seem to have heard her, he had his hand pressed over his closed eyes and was mumbling to himself. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead, and when he spoke it was through gritted teeth. “It ain’t an illusion.”
Perplexed, she stared at him. “You look like you’re having a heart attack.”
He let out an exasperated breath she hadn’t realized he was holding. “It ain’t an illusion,” he repeated, with firmer emphasis.
She got it then, and leapt to her feet. “You’re talking about glamours, right?” she asked shakily.
Even the brief nod he gave her took a monumental amount of effort and his hand flew to the side of his head. “Fuck,” he growled, exhaling sharply through his nose. “Think reflection. A mirror. Who you really are. Human.”
Her excitement ebbed the more he tried to explain it. “That can’t be it,” she heard herself say.
His concentration broken, Ansel looked in her direction. “That’s the best I can explain it.”
Carmen shook her head. “Do you think that’s how Baptiste does it? That he’s just showing his true human side?” Her face flushed with heat and she couldn’t tell if it was anger or grief. “Bullshit. It’s camouflage, it’s how predators hide from prey.”
Rather than argue like she expected, his arms dropped to his side and he stood dumbfounded. The unbearable silence was broken by the sound of their liege’s voice ringing in her head.
Come to the parlor.
From the way Ansel’s back straightened and his leg twitched in anticipation, she could tell the message from Baptiste had hit them both at the same time. The order echoed in her head like tinnitus and pulled at some thread deep in her chest, urging her out of the room. She dropped the garbage bag in a huff and took one final swipe at her damp cheeks with the back of her hand. “Well, let’s go,” she said to the empty room.
Ansel was outside in the hall already.
The fine hairs on the back of her neck raised and she swallowed down a response as they approached the parlor. Baptiste stood at the window overlooking the front lawn, his hands clasped behind his back, faint rust colored streaks marring the bleached white of his sleeves. Carmen caught her thumb against the jagged edge of one of her ruined fingernails as she ran them together repetitively.
She stopped walking just inside the threshold of the parlor, but Ansel stepped deep into the room, taking his place behind their liege. Though he was the bigger man by most criteria, Carmen was always struck by how he seemed to shrink beside Baptiste.
“I shouldn’t have to summon you,” he said, turning his dull eyes on Ansel. The way the two were able to stare at each other turned her stomach.
“I only just got back,” Ansel said, and then a grimace flickered across his face.
“Where from?”
“I had to feed, didn’t I?”
Carmen had braced herself for a grueling interrogation where Ansel’s story was dragged out of him piece by piece and so was unprepared for their surroundings to shift and waver beneath her feet. The parlor dropped out of sight and a new room appeared in smears of color, like wet oil paints on a canvas. Rather than information, an entire memory was being pulled from Ansel’s mind and put on display.
She took an involuntary step backwards and bumped into a wall which hadn’t existed a second before.
Ansel’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. His face had gone bone white.
They were inside a claustrophobic bathroom, the three observers and some past version of himself, his clothes caked in blood and filth. “A handyman I ambushed, that’s all,” the living Ansel blurted out. “I didn’t know him. I didn’t come back here because I was in a frenzy, I needed to—”
His words were choked off by Baptiste’s stern gaze.
Carmen held her breath. There was no real frame of reference in the memory, but it must have taken place shortly after he and Slate had split up. The faint sound of rain was hitting the bathroom’s tiny window, and he was still haggard from that night’s disaster —
— “She fucking ventilated the poor bastard—”
She narrowed her focus to the bathroom in front of them as Ansel’s ghost cleaned the water off the floor.
“And what did you do between then and coming home?” Baptiste asked.
Nothing but silence answered him, but the memory played on and lurched forward in time from bathroom to bedroom, Ansel suddenly wearing a stranger’s clothes and lying in a stranger’s bed. To Carmen’s eyes the two figures in front of her seemed to faintly glow together in the dim light of the room; an artifact of the memory projection, perhaps.
“What do you want to do?” the man straddling Ansel asked.
“Whatever you want,” he said. “Just don’t touch my neck.”
The heat in Carmen’s face was unbearable even before the scene shifted through time once more, Ansel’s borrowed clothes forgotten in a heap at the edge of the bed. Lost to passion, he moaned under the man’s weight and pressed his face into the pillow beneath him. Her eyes only took in the scene for an instant before she spun on her heels, her hands covering her mouth. Being cut off from the visuals only made the intrusion more voyeuristic; she couldn’t close her ears to the memory.
“Stop,” she heard herself say. “Stop it.“
The real Ansel’s head whipped around in her direction, his face a mirror to her own horrified expression, but the voice belonged to a different version of herself. Melding together with the bedroom was the memory of the Mansion’s garden, of its decrepit fountain, of Slate’s final moments on Earth. She saw herself struggling in vain to pull Baptiste away, to show some small amount of mercy for once in his life.
“Ah,” Baptiste said, his own voice the one thing not drowned out by the memory of Carmen’s raw screams. “We were both busy, Dog, were we not?”
Trapped between the two memories and the men involved, Carmen’s hands moved to shield her eyes, but not before she caught a final glimpse of Ansel with his lover. His back arched and his head rolled to one side and the slashes on the side of his neck danced in front of her.
Something hot and dark and ugly roiled inside her chest.
Both memories disappeared in an instant.
Back in her physical body, Carmen trembled. “You,” she hissed.
Ansel’s eyes darted over to Baptiste who was placidly observing her, but she stalked across the room and glared at his now-concealed scars.
“You go unglamoured around him? He knows?”
His face paled and his expression contorted. “He—”
“And while I was dealing with that—” she threw her arm out in Baptiste’s direction “—you were fucking some—”
“Carmen—”
“Don’t!” she shrieked and her breath caught in her throat. He had been moving to place his hands on her shoulders but he shrank away from her instead.
“But of course he knows,” Baptiste said, answering Carmen’s prior outburst. He circled around Ansel with his arms clasped behind his back, his eyes focused intently on her as he spoke. “Dog is quite fond of this one. In fact, I’ve granted permission for him to claim him.”
She took a step back from both men as comprehension dawned on her. Her face was a rictus of fury. “Sure, keep this one for yourself, nevermind me, right?”
He said nothing in his defense.
“You’re a monster,” she said before turning her back to the both of them and striding out of the parlor.