The walk back to the mansion was a rare moment of solitude for Olive. With her Thirst satiated, the buzzing desire which was normally so pervasive had dulled in the back of her mind. She could almost ignore it and pretend she didn’t exist as she flitted down the side of the road, as if she were a ghost haunting the woods.
Unbidden, her mind drifted back to the doctor from the hospital and she touched her fingers to the corner of her mouth. How strange it had been, to find a human so willing to give herself up as food with no real assurance it wouldn’t be her last act on earth. It didn’t make sense that she had trusted Olive so easily when they’d only just met.
She smelled nice. Olive’s face flushed at the thought; she’d been around men too long. Maybe that was why she had let Mildred talk her into it, how she had so easily lowered Olive’s defenses. It was a nice reminder of her old life, to just let go and let a pretty woman tell her what to do. She’d only ever gotten in trouble listening to men, after all.
That was a dangerous line of thought and Mildred’s face was almost replaced in her mind by Ansel’s. She frowned and forced it aside; he didn’t deserve a second thought from her.
It was his fault things had happened this way. His fault that her old life had been stolen. His fault that she was wandering that country back road and hoping she might just disappear.
Her wish was close to being answered when a car roared out from around a bend, cutting the corner and coming perilously close to striking her. With cat-like reflexes she leapt backwards into the brush and glowered at the tail lights as they streaked past. The road to the mansion almost never saw vehicle traffic, and she didn’t need to identify the emblems on the side to know it was Sheriff Cutter blazing an erratic path to the driveway ahead.
Peering out at the road, Olive bit her lip before breaking into a run, trailing Cutter up to the mansion. She hated being around the man, but curiosity was getting the better of her. Maybe Baptiste would finally rip his throat out.
No such luck so far when she jogged up the steps to the porch. The front doors had been left wide open and Cutter’s voice carried out into the morning.
“— want answers, God damn you, you fucking cocksucker, I —” and on he went, leaving a trail of expletives for Olive to follow from foyer to reception room.
It was a scene of two extremes: Baptiste sat in his usual spot, head down and eyes focused on the puzzle in front of him while Cutter stood above, his face beet red as he screamed his demands.
He’d have better luck turning away the tide.
When volume didn’t get him what he wanted, he slammed his hands down onto the table, scattering puzzle pieces across the floor and drawing himself down to Baptiste’s level.
“Are you even fucking listening to me?” he raged, spittle flying from his mouth.
The floorboard beneath her feet announced Olive’s arrival with an almost deafening creak. Cutter’s head snapped up to her, the intense fury radiating out of him enveloping her and drawing her into the fight. “You fucking bitch,” he snarled. “Was it you?”
Rational thought seemed to have left the man as he stalked her direction, rewarded by the fraction of fear she knew had danced across her face when he’d looked her way. Whatever he thought he wanted before, she recognized his expression as the naked desire to hurt and punish someone. When she took a step back, he seized on the motion as a sign of guilt and his eyes blazed like hot coals. Quick as a flash he lunged forward and grasped her upper arms, drawing his face close to hers.
Cutter was screaming in her face, Olive knew, but she couldn’t make sense of the words. Let him tire himself out, she wasn’t anywhere in the room anymore. The faint beeps of monitoring equipment and the crisp scent of disinfectant mingled in her mind with a sweet perfume and a pair of warm brown eyes.
Cold green eyes watched her now, she realized with a start, the whip crack of her liege’s Thirst bringing her back.
” —you bitch —”
Cutter’s words were choked off in his throat as Olive turned her full attention on him and loosed her Thirst. A hot surge of energy flowed from her eyes into his, weaving into his pulse and wrapping her will around his own. The color began to drain from his face as he realized what she’d done so effortlessly.
“Don’t touch me,” Olive commanded and his hands sprang away from her like she was red hot. She took the opportunity to sidle away from him and took her place at Baptiste’s side, his head swiveling, eagle-like, to follow her around the room. She found the expression on his face almost prideful and bile hit the back of her throat.
Once out of her line of sight, the thralling over Cutter broke and he juddered forward as if his legs had been cut out from underneath him. Whirling around to face the two vampires at his back, he worked his jaw back and forth. His initial outburst seemed to have used up the bulk of his fury, but what was left still smoldered just beneath the surface of his ruddy face.
“Sheriff Cutter,” Baptiste said, as if he’d only just seen him for the first time. “What is it you wished to discuss?”
“My deputy,” he fumed, clenching his fists at his side. “She had her throat ripped out twenty minutes after one of your parasites killed that dealer in my cells.”
Baptiste’s head tilted to one side. “You knew the dealer was to be killed last night.”
“Not her!” One fist slammed into the wall next to him and Olive suppressed the urge to flinch. “She emptied her gun into someone, but it was just her they found. I know it was one of yours, who was it?“
Olive’s heart leapt into her throat and she cast a sidelong glance at Baptiste for any hint to an answer. His innate connection to his thralls would surely tell him if Slate or Ansel had died, but would he be able to sense if either of them had gone into a frenzy? Would he care? He never kept tabs on what they were doing once a job was finished.
“Why does it matter to me who did the deed?” Baptiste asked. “My thralls only kill for a purpose. Whichever one is responsible had reason to do it.”
“That’s bullshit,” Cutter spat. “She wasn’t even on duty, she did fuck-all to—”
“She pulled a gun on Dog for no fucking reason. Crazy bitch.”
Cutter spun around on his heels towards the voice, coming face to face with Slate’s bored expression. He scratched at his chin, unbothered by the tension visible in Cutter’s neck and sauntered past him into the room. With a wink that made Olive’s skin crawl, he flopped down onto one of the chairs, dangling a leg over the arm.
Baptiste gestured in his direction. “There is your explanation, sheriff.”
The grinding of Cutter’s molars filled the room. “And what are you gonna do about it? I got a family asking me questions, I got reporters crawling up my ass—”
“You’re just mad you have to actually work now,” Olive said with a sneer. She’d grown bolder from her position beside Baptiste, now that the balance in the room had shifted away from Cutter.
Cutter’s expression could have cut glass. “I work. I work every single fucking day cleaning up your shit, covering your ass, keeping your whole fucking operation running.” He started stalking in front of the door back and forth, working himself back up into a fury. “When you leave bodies in my cells, in the woods, in the fucking street for anyone to trip over. And now you’re attracting, what, fucking vigilantes to my city for me to deal with, too?”
“The Hunter should be of little concern to you,” Baptiste said, sweeping his hair away from his face. “Humans are rarely their quarry.”
Cutter’s voice raised an octave. “I’ve had a whole station get an earful about a maniac with a sword and you tell me it’s not my concern?”
Olive followed him with her eyes as his pacing increased and he tugged at the collar of his shirt. For as long as he’d worked under Baptiste, he didn’t begin to comprehend how the man thought, how apart he saw his thralls from the affairs of humans. What did Baptiste care if Cutter had to write more reports or give more press conferences on missing persons and corpses found? Humans were as lowly as an animal to him, their only value was as a beast of burden or as food.
“Hunter,” Cutter said, chewing the word in his mouth. “You expect me to work around this shit when I don’t even know what it is. This isn’t the time to get cagey, Baptiste.”
Baptiste’s piercing green eyes stared at Cutter as if he were a puzzle to be solved. Uneasy beneath his gaze, Cutter rolled his head around on his neck and shook some tension out of his shoulders. “A knight,” Baptiste said at length. “Holy. Divinely blessed, should you believe such things. Their magics only harm us, so as I said: they are of no concern to humans.”
Cutter curled his lip at the mention of magic, even though he’d borne witness to blood magic for decades. “And how many will there be? How long until he builds up a whole fucking army to take you on?”
Signaling his boredom with the conversation, Baptiste turned his back on Cutter and moved towards the opposite side of the room. Slate tensed up to see him approach and Olive felt unmoored to be left alone in the center of the room. Her eyes only landed on Cutter’s incredulous face for a moment before the blinding sensation of Baptiste’s mind enveloping hers hit her like a truck. Gritting her teeth, she let it wash over her as information pried its way into her head, making room for itself and sinking in deep as if it had always been there.
“Hunters are solitary,” she heard herself saying, the words dripping with a contempt that wasn’t her own. “They aren’t like us. When they pass their Legacy — their magic — on to a new knight, it leaves the old one.”
Cutter’s pacing had slowed to a crawl as he took in this information, though his expression was one of naked disgust at having to take the conversation up with Olive. “Sounds like a bunch of self-righteous pricks,” he muttered to himself.
“You’re one to talk,” she said before she could stop herself.
Slate brayed with laughter and she earned a venomous look from Cutter as he bored his eyes into her. Something acidic seemed to rise in his throat and she dared him to say it, but he bit it back. “I’ve wasted enough time here,” he said instead, turning to Baptiste. “Keep your dogs heeled next time.”
There was no movement from the three figures in the room until the sound of Cutter slamming the front door shook the windows on the adjoining wall. Olive’s shoulders relaxed and Slate let out another peal of laughter, slapping the outside of his thigh.
“What a fucking dickhead,” he snorted, looking to Olive for confirmation. When all she gave him was a distant stare, he continued on as if she’d responded. “Who the fuck does he think he is, coming in here, crying over some pig bitch that should’ve minded her own fucking business.”
“She pulled a gun on you?” Olive asked, quietly rejoining the discussion.
“On Dog. She fucking ventilated the poor bastard,” he said, shaking his head.
She blinked, uncomprehending at first before whirling to face him. “What? Where is he?”
Slate only shrugged, sinking further into his chair. “How the fuck should I know? I assumed he’d be back here by now.”
“The whole point of you two going out together is to cover each other and come back together,” she said, shaking.
“Hey, I did cover for him, alright princess?” Slate said, leaning forward and baring his fangs. “But it’s survival of the fittest and if he isn’t fit to survive, that’s not my fault.”
Through their entire back and forth Baptiste had been standing stock still at the window, his arms crossed behind his back. He turned when Slate finished speaking and strode back to the center of the room, looming over the back of the armchair he was in. Sensing his presence, Slate sat up straighter and his eyes darted up in Baptiste’s direction as if he could see him out of the top of his head.
“Fit to survive,” Baptiste repeated languidly, rolling the concept around in his mouth.
Sweat beaded up on Slate’s forehead and Olive watched with a fixed expression on her face as Baptiste’s hand crawled down and grabbed him by the back of the neck. With one strong hand he pulled Slate up and out of the chair, forcing him to his feet.
“H-hey, come on,” Slate stammered, bracing against the hand at his neck as if he might win the contest of strength. “If you want me to move, just—” His mouth clamped shut the next instant, the result of an unheard order passing from liege to thrall. With wide eyes, he silently pleaded with Olive as they passed, but she was looking through him at a spot on the wall. She did turn to follow the pair as they marched out into the hallway, turning towards the back of the house.
Out the windowed doors of the conservatory lay the mansion’s abandoned gardens. In its glory days before the property had all been left to rot, the gardens would have been a spectacular sight: the magnolia trees, now overgrown, still flanked the gravel walkways through the grounds. Deeper in, closer to the property line were a few pecan trees which still gave plenty of nuts in the fall and some evergreens whose names Olive had never learned. At the center of it all was a wide fountain with a tiered sculpture in the middle which had long ago run dry. The only water in it now was the scummy collection of fall hurricanes and winter rains; the basin was filled almost knee-high as far as Olive could tell.
Without any effort or sound, Baptiste heaved Slate over the edge of the fountain and plunged his upper body into the frigid waters. With one last desperate look at Olive, Slate’s head disappeared beneath the surface as Baptiste leaned his body weight down on top of him. The thrashing started then, Slate’s arms grasping at Baptiste’s and his legs kicking wildly in front of him, water sloshing out of the basin onto the brickwork beneath it.
“What are you doing?” Olive said, though her words were so quiet they were swallowed up by the sound of the water. Her feet carried her forward and she put her hands on one of Baptiste’s arms, shocked at how taut the muscles were for as calm as his expression was. “Stop. Stop it.”
Trying to find purchase on Baptiste was like trying to grasp a marble slab. Though Olive strained to dig her fingers into his flesh, to pry him away from Slate, it became increasingly obvious there was nothing she could do. No matter how hard she pushed, pulled, or struck him, Baptiste was unmoving; he was a new fixture of the fountain with Slate trapped beneath.
Her throat closed up when the struggling, desperate noises from under the water slowed and then stopped; she hadn’t even been aware she’d been screaming. She took in a shallow, burning gasp when Baptiste hauled the sopping wet form of Slate out of the water and let it fall to the ground with a sickening crack. Kneeling down beside him, Baptiste pulled his torso towards him and cradled him in his arms in a grotesque mockery of salvation.
In the next instant, Baptiste’s head dipped down and he ripped his fangs into Slate’s throat. His pallid skin was stained crimson as rivulets of blood seeped out from his mouth and down the sides of his chin. Slate convulsed once and was still.
Olive’s eyes, red and wide, met Baptiste’s. Desperately she searched his face, unblinking, for any sort of answer, but he looked straight through her like she was nothing more than another part of the gardens. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he stepped over Slate’s corpse and strode back towards the house, leaving Olive to deal with the mess.