were being raised in a tightly surveilled compound and attending a strict Catholic school with only these sanitized blood bags to sustain you.
This precarious bubble we’d created for you, how long could it last?
4
Henri
When you were still in your formative years, you sometimes fell into a mood where you stopped speaking altogether and only communicated in meows and hisses. Xavier thought the less attention we gave to this behavior, the sooner it would pass. But when you insisted upon crawling instead of walking and eating your meals out of a dish on the floor, Santiago put his foot down.
“Two weeks this has been going on,” Santiago complained to me when I showed up for our regular visit. I hadn’t given much thought to it, for there were far more troubling behaviors you might assume than pretending to be a cat.
“Apparently he’s been doing the same thing at school. When I told him to answer me like a young man, he hissed at me.” Santiago shook his head. “Bared his teeth as well. Is that a Nephilim thing?”
I suppressed a smile. It could be a Nephilim thing, for our teeth were our most handy weapons, and we bared them in moments of aggression. “Yes, I suppose it is.”
“It’s terribly rude, and I won’t tolerate it.”
There were several behaviors Santiago wouldn’t tolerate—mostly those having to do with children in general. Thankfully, his devotion to Xavier superseded his irritations, and whenever he’d work himself into a tizzy over you, Xavier was there to calm him down.
“He’s holding court.” Santiago pointed across the yard to where you knelt in the grass surrounded by five of your cats. “Perhaps it would be better if we got rid of them. They’ve killed all of our songbirds. He insists on removing their bells.”
They can’t hunt with bells, you’d told me.
“Let me try talking to him,” I said, and in an attempt to mollify him, I added with a rumble of seduction, “It’ll be just fine.”
Santiago’s features softened and some of the tension left his face. “It’ll be just fine,” he murmured, and I nodded in agreement, but soon enough, his scowl returned. “I’ll be inside. Tell Vincent that if he wants lunch, it will be served at the table with utensils. And he’d better change his clothing, so the cat hair doesn’t give Xavier an allergic reaction.”
Santiago left and I observed your interactions with your cats. One was bunting against your back in long, leisurely laps. Two were grooming themselves. One was stretched out on its back, sunning itself in the dappled light, and the last was crouched as though ready to pounce, staring at you intently with its cabbage yellow eyes. I couldn’t always keep track of their names, but I knew that one—the black stray—was named Spooky, for obvious reasons.
As I approached, a few of your furballs shot me insolent looks, but Spooky took no notice of me. Her level of fixation on you was truly unsettling. I wondered if the animal wasn’t already susceptible to your influence.
“Hello, Vincent.” I knelt in the grass nearby.
Your gaze flicked up to catch mine before quickly dropping again. Your lower lip jutted in an adorable sulk. Judging from your swollen eyes and tear-streaked face, the altercation with Santiago had upset you. You hated to be reprimanded. It was one of the reasons I rarely raised my voice with you. After a few more moments of silence, you began licking the back of your wrist as though cleaning yourself. Fully in character. Despite Santiago’s threat of withholding lunch, I’d brought with me a bowl and a bag of blood. Denying a Nephilim their bloodmeal was never a wise idea.
“Hungry?” I asked. You mewled with indifference, but your dark eyes centered on the bag.
I poured the blood into the white porcelain dish and set it before you as a peace offering. A couple of your cats showed interest, but you hissed at them to back off. With a budding Nephilim grace, you crawled over to the bowl and tried to lap up the blood, but it wasn’t easy to accomplish with your human mouth. Then you tried slurping it, but only ended up making a mess. Finally, you sat back on your haunches, scooped up the bowl with both hands, and drank from it greedily. You tilted back the dish and went so far as to lick the bottom clean. Your parents would have been abhorred to see it, but I sympathized with your reluctance to leave even a drop