Chapter Text
Daniel Molloy wakes up with a violent start.
His head immediately bangs into something hard, producing a dull flash of pain. One of his hands is clapped over the side of his neck, and he can feel something sharp digging into his bottom lip.
His throat works. A taste lingers on his tongue—sweet and fresh. Despite himself, he swallows again.
But the sensation fades fast. Daniel lets go of his neck and pushes up. The lid of the coffin swings out, and suddenly he can hear the sound of rain beating on the windows outside.
Summer has not yet released its grip on the city, although September is already gone. New York is sweaty, damp, languishing under humid dawns and stormy nights. Fucking climate change, Daniel thinks bitterly. That’s why he’s losing it. Probably just climate change.
Daniel lies on his back, staring up at the ceiling, and listens. Slowly, the sound of the rain, the traffic, the hum of his air conditioner that he doesn’t need and probably shouldn’t use anymore fades away into the background.
A buzz of thought surrounds him, the hum of minds on the floors above and below, the fainter whispers from out on the street. He lets the noise wash over him in a comfortable blur, pushing out further and further with single-minded intention.
It seemed fitting that he had taken to this particular gift quickly. Natural predisposition, he likes to think. Lestat had suggested ‘ancient blood,’ but that had been a clear ploy to piss Daniel off. A ploy that had, unfortunately, worked.
He finds Louis’ voice eventually, a familiar if distant thread to follow.
Another point of data for your study. Can confirm getting turned into a vampire doesn’t get you off the hook for dreams.
Louis’ response has a hint of fondness to it.
Were you hoping otherwise, Daniel?
I wouldn’t mind keeping the occasional sex dream. But I was hoping I wouldn’t have to keep reliving your asshole ex tearing my throat out for the rest of eternity.
That will pass, Louis replies, although Daniel is not sure if that is a promise or a hopeful speculation. Silence sits between them for a moment, their connection fading slowly back into the blur of other minds.
You haven’t heard anything, have you? Daniel forces himself to ask.
Nothing, Louis assures him, as he has done now for nearly a year. It’s probably for the best, Daniel. Even if you wanted to take your revenge, he’s too dangerous.
Revenge? Me? Come on, Louis. I feel fantastic. Haven’t felt this good in decades. I’m just hoping for the chance to shove it in my absentee Maker’s face. He wanted to punish me; I’m eager to remind him that I’m thriving.
You’ve been spending too much time with Lestat, Louis sighs.
And you’ve been suspiciously quiet during this three-week break before his band takes off on the last leg of their tour, Daniel points out.
Always a pleasure, Daniel.
Great work not getting yourself killed out there by angry vamps, Daniel signs off. Try not to break up again before the tour. It’s hard enough getting a coherent answer out of him when he’s in a good mood.
He feels Louis’ presence fade as he breaks their connection. The sound of the rain against the glass returns.
Daniel listens for a moment longer, temptation tugging at him.
It would be so easy to spend the whole night just listening, picking out the thoughts of strangers, drawing out their little secrets and buried truths. He could sit like this forever, completely absorbed in the snippets of other people’s stories.
But the physical hunger must be sated first, he decides. Even when he was young and stupid and shooting up every day, he still knew that he should eat something before he indulged.
Pulling himself up and out of the coffin is surprisingly easy. His body remembers being old and sore and slowly dying, which means he has a tendency to underestimate his new strength. Another bright side. He can finally stop thinking about his nerves slowly decaying.
The apartment around him has not changed much since his unexpected conversion into one of the living dead. He honestly hasn’t had time to change anything. First it had been the book, then the book tour, and now the new documentary, the studio sessions, the upcoming tour recordings. The windows of his East Village co-op are blocked up and there’s a coffin in the bedroom, but the vestiges of his mortal existence remain largely untouched.
A few forks sit in the dish drainer, never put away, never again to be used. A row of pill bottles he no longer needs line the counter in the bathroom. Beside the couch there is an old legal pad with jotted down notes for a self-indulgent op-ed he won’t ever write. All of it is preserved as though in a museum. The Daniel Molloy Memorial Museum of Daniel Molloy’s Shitty Life.
He needs to get out more, Daniel decides.
Before he leaves, he checks his cell phone—the strange point of continuity between his old life and his new not-quite life. There are a few messages from agents, tour managers, Lestat’s publicist. Nothing particularly urgent or particularly interesting.
Buried beneath, Daniel finds a text from his youngest daughter. Nothing about the message sounds accusatory. In fact, it is quite impersonal. No bitterness, no worry, no ‘hey dad, care to tell me why you decided to tank a pulitzer-prize winning career in journalism by writing a delusional book about gay vampire drama?’
Just a single question: ‘how are you?’
Daniel does not reply to his daughter’s message. It’s too late anyways, he tells himself. She’s probably already asleep.
Outside, the rain falls in sheets. Lights reflect in the sidewalk puddles, giving everything a strange mirrored glow. Passersby walk with their heads down, eyes hidden under hoods or the lips of umbrellas. New York is anonymous, gleaming like an oil slick.
It’s still close enough to sundown that the subway is packed. Daniel jumps on the first train that arrives at the platform, shouldering his way through a few damp, sweaty commuters. Everyone around him looks miserable, wet and hot and tired. Still, one woman stands up to offer her seat to him. He declines with a slight grin, relishing in the strength and steadiness of his limbs when the train begins to move.
For the past six nights, Daniel has ridden the subway from nightfall to an hour before dawn. He takes trains up and down, out to Brooklyn, Queens, even the Rockaways. Eventually, he will find himself a meal along the way, but he’s a bit of a picky eater.
Eating innocent commuters holds little appeal, and he avoids the hardcore criminal types partly because they’re harder to find and partly because he retains a slightly irrational fear that one of them will have shot up right before he sucks down a few quarts of their blood. So when no appealing target presents itself—the perfect combination of insufferable, selfish, and unrepentant—the subway provides plentiful vermin.
And, of course, there is another benefit to the subway—one that Daniel is far less willing to contemplate.
He leans against the wall and lets his eyes wander. As he focuses on each face, their thoughts grow clearer and clearer in his mind. Discomfort, annoyance, anxiety, excitement, hunger, anxiety, exhaustion, satisfaction, anxiety.
Daniel listens until they leave, prying at the edges of their thoughts until he is deep down into the core. It is a familiar ritual, although the Mind Gift makes it considerably quicker than the old reliable tape recorder.
Before his unaware subjects reach their stop, Daniel makes contact. Only once, he ensures. He doesn’t let them know where it comes from either, delicately slipping the image into their thoughts while his body remains still and unobtrusive, a tired old man leaning half-asleep against the wall.
The picture that he flashes into the minds of mortals every night on the subway inspires many different reactions. Confusion, often. Attraction, also often. Fear, not uncommonly.
Once or twice, recognition. But after a few brief moments of euphoric thrill, the mortal mind inevitably crushes Daniel’s hopes.
The young man whose face they imagined for no discernible reason is not their cousin, not their old college roommate, not the barista from the coffee shop. That face, with its terrible beauty and eyes like burning coals in a furnace, does not belong to any of the people that they believe they see in it.
It is through this method that Daniel Molloy reassures himself that the Vampire Armand is nowhere in New York City, nor has he been there in a very long time. Nevertheless, every night he is compelled to check again.
Daniel takes the train up to the Bronx, then back down to Manhattan. Around three in the morning, the car clears out entirely. For a while, he is left in silence, alone with his thoughts, nothing but the rattle of the track and condensation fogging the windows.
Without meaning to, one of his hands returns to caress the left side of his neck. His mouth feels dry, a ravenous hunger building in his throat.
Come to me, you bastard. Come and find out what you made. Come and let me drain you dry, Maker dearest .
He changes to another line and heads east. His new train holds a few sleepy drunks on their way home, or on their way nowhere. Their thoughts are barely coherent enough to bother with. Glumly, Daniel begins to consider turning back, returning to his apartment and to the exorbitantly expensive bags of B negative he keeps stacked in the freezer.
In Brooklyn, however, his luck finally turns. He swaps cars at a platform and finds one with a young man all alone. He’s got money, Daniel can tell at once. Fancy headphones, expensive shoes, that stupid haircut with the shaved sides. Beneath a flop of platinum blond hair, Daniel can hear that his thoughts are alive with abstract plans to buy another property, to renovate it as cheaply as possible, then to jack up the rent and squeeze every cent out of it.
Passive-Income-Grifter-and-Gentrifier, he grins to himself, meet the Vampire Daniel Molloy.
When Gentrifier reaches his stop, Daniel follows. The platform is empty, a single flickering fluorescent left to light it. Gentrifier heads towards the stairs, headphones on and totally unaware. Daniel taps him once on the left shoulder, then goes in fast from the right.
As his fangs enter the young man’s neck, Daniel feels him relax. When Louis had told him about this strange phenomenon, he’d been skeptical. Maybe vampires—feeding as they often did upon the bottom-dwellers, the subaltern, the ones so exhausted by fighting through life that they had no strength left when death came at them—simply overpowered their victims. But it is more common than he had expected, this strange surrender, the swoon. As long as he doesn’t go out of his way to torment and terrify his meals, they often let themselves be drained without much protest.
Daniel drinks, feeling the blood pumping slower into his mouth as the Gentrifier’s heart rate gradually falters. Thoughts and memories come with it, a story richer than anything he might have gleaned through a background check. Here is a young man with ambition, a pathological need to see himself as successful, to be treated as successful.
He is thinking about his girlfriend, who is small, sleek, decorative, and unkind to him. He is imagining her running her lacquered nails down his cheek. Both of them are fashionably starved and glossy and entirely self-obsessed. But at the moment of his death, he still pictures her. He wishes she were there to watch him go.
There could be a story there, Daniel thinks. And the moment that he thinks it, he feels his fangs retracting back into his gums. The Gentrifier sags against him, so far gone from blood loss that he can barely move. And yet, he lives.
Daniel’s memory immediately supplies the term for this: the little drink. According to Lestat, it took a lot of restraint to master. Well, Daniel disputes the claim. All it takes is one addiction triumphing over another; obsessive curiosity outweighing the pleasure of the kill.
Unfortunately, it also leaves him holding an unconscious body on an empty subway platform in the middle of the night.
He could finish the meal. Or he could walk away. The result would probably be the same either way.
Or, he could take this shitty, net-negative, morally bankrupt idiot up the stairs and back to his brownstone apartment in Williamsburg. He could let the narrative play out, the same way that Louis once did for a little wannabe journalist from Modesto. Maybe he finds the right words to put into this shaven, platinum head that can change him forever, turn him into someone worthy of a life.
As the scenario unfurls, Daniel feels keenly aware that the notion does not appeal to him for any ethical reason.
No, he realizes, looking down at the Gentrifier’s pale, bluish face. What really appeals to him about the idea is the deeper implication. He would, technically, be once again breaking the so-called Great Laws. The thought brings a smile to his face.
I know you can’t hear me, asshole, but you’d better come and stop this, he projects out, as broadly as he can. Somebody tell the Vampire Armand, come get your fledgling. He’s about to make a mess. Big embarrassment to the ancient blood, maybe worse than the book was.
The fluorescent light flickers. Daniel waits. A distant rumble suggests the impending arrival of another train. Trash flutters around the can as the air is pushed down the line. Daniel waits.
By the time that the train arrives on the platform, he is gone. The Gentrifier lies on the concrete by the stairs, left for chance and dubious human compassion to decide his fate.
Daniel walks through the rain, hands in his pockets, head bowed. He is, in more ways than one, unsatisfied by the night’s hunt.
—
Going insane, Daniel Molloy worries, would be pretty damn embarrassing at this point.
For one thing, he’s too old to go crazy. He lived a full life and had been fine. To keep it together through decades of marital collapse, the gradual withering of a once-reputable career, and heavy psychedelic drug use only to crack up now? Embarrassing.
And, of course, who could have been better prepared for his current condition? His whole life is pretty much the byproduct of vampire nepotism. After listening to Louis tell him a pretty comprehensive tale on the common pitfalls and existential crises of immortal existence, Daniel has no excuse for making the same mistakes. For a journalist who has done his research and gotten a pretty good tip about his undead prospects to still start losing his mind? Embarrassing.
Worst of all, Daniel knows, if he starts to get weird about being a vampire, he’ll be giving satisfaction to the one creature in all of existence that he least wants to satisfy.
To imagine his Maker hearing that his one and only fledgling has gone crazy, that he did succeed in making him equally miserable for eternity?
Fucking embarrassing.
Only a week and a half until The Vampire Lestat’s tour starts up again and he has the documentary to distract him, Daniel reminds himself with forced cheer. Tonight will be a fantastic night to not lose his mind!
Which means it’s probably for the best if he continues to ignore that message from his daughter and instead goes out to grab a quick bite. The lacking final act of the night before has made the hunger particularly acute.
Daniel vacates his apartment. The street outside is wet, although no rain is falling yet. Fog steams up out of grates, creating clouds to hide him as he hurries to the nearest subway. This time he will be focused, he promises himself. Find a real piece of work, track, drain, responsibly dispose.
He has to shove his way onto a crowded train to head downtown. A few people part for him, reading in his expression an archetype of the grumpy old man. This time, Daniel takes the seat when it’s offered.
Once the train begins to move, Daniel scans through the thoughts of the humans riding alongside with impatient speed: Hungry, tired, anxious, horny, tired, anxious. Nothing that strikes his fancy. Just young people going out to see other young people, and old people desperately trying to get home and away from all of these fucking young people. No one insidious. No one who wouldn’t be immediately missed.
It’s great to be a vampire, he reminds himself firmly. He’s healthy and strong again. He’s better at his job than he’s ever been. He’s going to try to learn how to fly.
But he has to hand it to Louis on one point—the hunting is occasionally crap. It reminds him of when he was just starting out, sitting for hours on the police scanner aching for something to happen, then feeling like shit that he’s hoping and praying for a juicy double homicide. Journalists and vampires, he thinks with cynical pleasure, both require the world to be pretty damn bleak in order to survive.
He changes trains again and heads north towards the Bronx. As the hours wear on, the car clears out, especially the further they get from downtown. Around 149th, Daniel is contemplating whether he might be willing to eat a financial advisor with a crippling addiction to mobile phone games.
However, when the man gets up to leave the train, Daniel suddenly notices that there is another person sitting in the corner seat. How he escaped Daniel’s notice before is unexplained. His mind has been entirely quiet for the duration of the ride.
There is nothing remarkable about the stranger’s appearance. Daniel would place him in his forties, a lean and handsome figure with fair coloring and a strong profile. He wears a finely tailored grey suit, not flashy apart from a red silk tie that gleams out from his neck. His posture, the way that he holds his fingers laced together, the quiet acknowledgement in his gaze when it meets Daniel’s—all of it reads as perfectly ordinary.
Except, of course, for the fact that he has clearly been sitting here and watching Daniel for some time without him noticing.
“Talamasca,” Daniel guesses, raising his voice to be as loud as possible. If the alleged ‘Raglin James’ wants to keep sending people to follow him, he wants to ensure that it is inconvenient. “Just checking in? Or do you need me to break-up another vampire marriage?”
The man uncrosses his legs and stands up. He walks with unhurried dignity over to the seat across from Daniel’s and sits again. With graceful ease, he leans back and lets his pale gaze thoroughly evaluate Daniel.
That is unsettling. Every motion that the man makes appears completely natural, casual, easy, and yet the situation is so bizarre that this only increases the surreal quality of the interaction.
“Hey,” Daniel tries again, “I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume that you’re here to talk to me. If that’s the case, maybe make it quick? I’m late for my lunch.”
“We haven’t yet been introduced,” the man finally begins, speaking without any urgency. He has a calm, oddly accent-less voice, the sort that suggests a multilingual background. “And yet we share a great deal. The failure is my own, to have postponed this meeting for as long as I have.”
Daniel instantly prickles. Politeness, in his line of work, is usually nothing but a power play. Fine then, he decides, if the Talamasca wants to play games, he reserves the right to cheat. He fixes his gaze on the man sitting across from him and focuses his whole mind on delving into his thoughts and memories.
And he gets… nothing.
What you are doing might be interpreted as hostile by many of our kind, the man’s mild voice speaks directly into his mind. Daniel resists the urge to flinch. I am aware of your circumstances and am therefore inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt. However, I must request that you have some respect for my privacy if we are to continue on in company.
“Vampire,” Daniel replies aloud. “Shoulda noticed that. Didn’t notice that! You’re very natural.”
“I am over two thousand years old, Daniel,” the stranger answers with a slight smile. “I have had a great deal of time to practice.”
Two thousand…? Daniel pauses for a moment to work out the calculation. Or, no, maybe that was just a rhetorical flourish, a hyperbolic turn of phrase.
It… doesn’t actually seem like it was just a turn of phrase.
“You’ve never pretended to be a domestic servant in your own house just for the fun of it, have you?” Daniel asks sarcastically. “Because if that sort of thing is your taste, man, I’m not sure—”
“Who you are referring to, Daniel, is indeed the reason for my visit.” The stranger speaks before he can brush him off.
An intriguing response. Daniel falls silent.
“I feel a certain obligation towards you. While you have adjusted more quickly than most who receive the Dark Gift do, you are, nevertheless, a fledgling. Without clear guidance, the ancient blood you carry within you could be a cause for concern.”
“So, you’re here because, what? You’re going to rein me in if I decide to go nuclear?” Daniel flashes a grim smile. “You might be a little late, pal. The book already made the bestseller list.”
“And was received as you knew it would be,” the stranger follows up cheerfully. “As a delightful fiction.”
“So you’re not Talamasca. You’re not with a coven looking to immolate me for breaking the Great Laws. Why are you here?”
“I am here,” the man says firmly, but not without a glint of mild amusement in his tone, “because I wish you to use the rather exceptional gifts that our blood provides well. Because I wish you to experience a rich and thoughtful path to eternity. And because you have been abandoned by the one who should have protected you until you learned to make your own way.”
“ Our blood?” Daniel repeats.
The stranger’s smile widens, as though pleased by Daniel’s cleverness. Despite himself, Daniel kinda likes the guy. He isn’t morose, like Louis, but he isn’t manic either, like Lestat. An emotionally regulated vampire, Daniel muses, what a discovery.
“Our blood indeed, Daniel. Forgive me my late introduction. I am known as Marius de Romanus.” The stranger stands up as he says it, beckoning Daniel to follow as the train arrives at the next stop. “Might I have the pleasure of your company on a walk? I believe we have a great deal to discuss.”
—
“So,” Daniel begins as they reemerge from the dark, damp tomb of the subway and back onto the street. “Marius de Romanus. You’re basically my vampire granddad, yeah?”
“I am sure that you’ve been told more than that,” Marius remarks lightly. He waits for a moment, inviting Daniel to speak the rest aloud. “You spent time in Dubai, after all.”
“Well, I saw a picture of yours in the dining room. Christ and a whole posse of devils? A little more, uh, touch-and-go than some of the ‘harrowing’ paintings I’ve seen,” Daniel adds.
“A private donor with, shall we say, a taste for the dramatic. Come now, Daniel, do not withhold. It is a long walk we have ahead of us and I am certain you have misgivings. A rational mind should always doubt.”
Daniel sizes up that comment for a few moments before he responds. Apparently Marius would rather have it all in the open. Maybe living for over two thousand years makes a person immune to the infantile opinions of paltry seventy-two-year-olds.
Or, Daniel considers, maybe living for two thousand years makes a vampire so absurdly powerful that no matter what he says next, Marius can cheerfully and easily incinerate him if it pisses him off.
“What I’ve heard,” Daniel begins carefully, “was told to me by a vampire named Louis de Pointe du Lac, recollecting a conversation older than I am, told to him by my Maker, who lies more frequently than he breathes.”
Marius’ expression turns graver at that. His brows draw together and for a moment, his eyes look far away, lost in some other time and place.
“Armand,” he finally says, slightly wistful. “He is, in some ways, no more than a stranger to me now. What was his tale, which came to you through the mouth of another?”
Despite himself, Daniel feels a surge of adrenaline at the name, finally spoken aloud. In the back of his mouth, he imagines that taste again, sweet and fresh, pouring down his throat. He remembers the pain, the nightmare of his own body dying around him, the terror and hatred and then… the knowing.
Fine then, he decides, let’s get it all out in the open.
“Well, according to Armand, you bought him from a Venetian brothel at fifteen, made him your artistic muse, model, and, uh, I guess the modern term is ‘sugar baby’? Then you pimped him out to friends and associates, and eventually conceded to turn him into a vampire because he came down with the plague.” Daniel lifts an eyebrow. If Marius sets him on fire for this, at least he can say he saw it coming. “So if that’s not the case, it would be pretty great to hear.”
Marius does not react to the tawdry list of accusations with much emotion. He merely nods, puts one hand in the pockets of his grey suit, and continues walking.
“So that is the story that Santino poured into the mind of the vampire Armand,” he finally says, pensive rather than rushing to deny the accusation. “I will not say that it is without any truth.”
“In that case,” Daniel’s expression tightens. “I think I might prefer to head home by myself.”
“However,” Marius continues, “I would dispute some of the… semantics, I suppose. The general sketch of the events are present. My reasons, my philosophies, the whole intellectual world in which I was immersed—that is another consideration entirely.”
“Is this gonna turn into one of those, ‘oh, it was a different time, a different culture—’”
“I am as I have always been,” Marius interrupts, his expression entirely serious. “A rational, thinking, feeling creature. Our capacity for good and for evil does not wax and wane, Daniel. You have lived a full life. That alone, I am certain, has granted you some of that same wisdom.”
Daniel pauses. It is rare for him to hesitate this much, he realizes.
“I’d like an actual answer to my question,” Daniel says. “Before I sign up for your vampire master class.”
“The actual answer is complicated,” Marius replies. He turns to glance at Daniel, his pale eyes glinting in the dark. “But I am willing to share it. I understand that you remain in the business of professional listening. Lestat de Lioncourt tells me as much.”
“You’ve spoken with Lestat?”
“We are old friends,” Marius nods, the thought of Lestat apparently inspiring some near-fatherly level of affection.
“Not necessarily an endorsement.”
“Will you consider the offer, Daniel?” Marius asks, still completely unflappable. “I will share with you the tale of the Maker who you lack, who you long for, and then you can assess for yourself if I am a worthy guide through eternity.”
“Long for—?”
“Whose name and face you have paraded across the city until it is impossible for any other immortal to ignore.” Marius' voice sharpens abruptly. “Perhaps Armand has created his own immortal enemy, rather than a treasured companion, but the bond between you remains. You long for him, even if what you long for is to see him ruined once again at your hand.”
The flawless guise of humanity drops like a cheap mask and suddenly Marius is completely still, as though his flesh has instantaneously ossified. There is something about him that makes Daniel want to drop to his knees and plead for mercy.
Daniel feels an irrational urge to punch Marius de Romanus right in the face. He resists.
This is not going the way it usually goes. Usually he plays the provocateur, needles and picks at the scab until he finds something real underneath. He shouldn’t be letting Marius run circles around him already.
“You talk,” Daniel finally agrees. “I’ll listen. But we do it on the record.”
“Naturally,” Marius says, his warmth suddenly returning. In a flash, he becomes the vital, benevolent man of forty, leaving behind all trace of that terrible, frozen monster. “My address and contact information has already been sent to your cellular device. And here we are.”
Marius pauses in front of a brick apartment building and casts his eyes up to a third floor window.
“This is your lair?” Daniel asks skeptically.
“Your meal,” Marius corrects him cordially. “I have just summoned her down. She is fifty-one years of age. She works at a home for the infirm and the elderly. What she does to her patients, I assure you, should condemn her to a far worse fate than this. In her spare time, she visits local pet stores, brings home rabbits and parakeets and kittens, starves them slowly—”
“I don’t need the play-by-play,” Daniel interrupts, his stomach already twisting. “I’m about to see it all, aren’t I?”
“You are,” Marius nods. “And that must be your penance. You will take the life of the evil-doer, and in doing so, you will do evil. The innocent must be spared both torments, Daniel. That is the only reasonable way to endure ourselves—knowing that so many remain pure and unblemished because of our existence.”
“Lesson number one,” Daniel observes dryly. “Thanks, Obi-wan.”
“You will come to speak with me again tomorrow night just after sundown. I give you my word, I will share with you all that I can about your Maker, my own part to play in his life, and the ancient bloodline into which you have been brought.”
Marius leaves him with those words. Daniel has no idea how to feel. He stays for long enough to eat the sadist when she comes stumbling out of the lobby, and then he stashes the body around the back of the building and heads south to the East Village.
As he walks through the night, the blood and the pleasure of the kill still singing in his veins, Daniel’s mind buzzes with questions. Marius de Romanus is not what he expected. He has no idea what he had actually expected. He could try asking Louis for his take, but he suspects that Louis knows no more than he does about the ancient vampire.
It might be stupid, but information is always better than ignorance. Even if Marius intends to manipulate him, Daniel prefers to at least understand how and why he is being manipulated.
And his gut is telling him that, on some level, Marius’ intentions are just as he claims. Trusting your gut can be wrong—or right, but fatally stupid—Daniel knows from experience.
Still, he cannot shake the idea that Marius truly plans to share his wisdom, his philosophies, to somehow cultivate in Daniel a similar perspective on the centuries that lay ahead of him. If Louis summoned him to Dubai out of a genuine desire to understand his own story, then Marius seems equally eager to take on a willing student.
Daniel reaches his neighborhood about an hour before sunrise. Trucks rumble down narrow streets outside, making early deliveries to the restaurants. Groggy, unsteady people stumble off towards work, clutching thermoses of coffee.
At the point of transition, the night feels alien and liminal. Neon signs still glow from delis, bars, pharmacies, reflecting on puddles of dirty water. A few rats pick through a pile of spilled garbage on the sidewalk, scuttling between Daniel’s feet as he walks.
By the time that Daniel returns to his co-op, it is nearly time for him to rest. Still, he drops his coat and kicks off his boots at the door, and then heads to his office, intent on fitting in some research so that he will not go into the morning’s conversation quite so completely unprepared.
He doesn’t bother to turn on a light as he goes. His eyes do not require it to perceive the same old detritus of his life—forks in the dish drainer, pills in the bathroom gathering dust, a pile of advance reader copies of Interview with the Vampire stacked up on the desk.
In the office, he flips his new laptop open, its cold, electric glow casting long shadows across the room. His fingers rest against the keys as he thinks of what to type.
Before he can begin, there is a crash from the room behind him.
Daniel leaps to his feet with more agility than he can ever remember possessing. The door to his apartment hangs askew from broken hinges, the dim hall light now pouring into his dark living room.
And there is a figure standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the light, and yet he knows who it is instinctively, immediately.
“Took you long enough,” he remarks, folding his arms over his chest to indicate how deeply unimpressed he is.
A force as irresistible as gravity slams him back into the wall, hard enough that he sees a crack snake through the plaster.
“You will not speak to him,” a voice commands, trembling slightly with suppressed fury, and when Daniel raises his head and refocuses his eyes, he can see that the shadowed figure from the door now stands directly in front of him.
The Vampire Armand appears, for lack of a better term, worse for wear. His once-soft black curls now hang in damp clumps over his face, which is smudged with dirt and dried blood. His lips are chapped and peeling, his clothing similarly disregarded. The skin around his eyes seems darker, more shadowed, and his irises shine nearly iridescent yellow.
“Going to murder me again?” Daniel asks instead, fear surging through him even as he smirks. “Didn’t maître Louis tell you? I’m off limits.”
“You will not go tomorrow,” Armand snarls, completely ignoring him. Daniel feels his feet lift slightly off of the ground as his body is crushed back harder into the wall. “You will ignore his invitation and you will stay away from Marius de Romanus. Understand, fledgling?”
“What are you so afraid of?” Daniel shoots back, although it is beginning to become difficult to move his mouth as the pressure builds. “What is he going to tell me, Armand? Amadeo?”
The dark is pieced again, this time by the flickering red glow of a fire springing to life in Armand’s fingers. He holds it close to Daniel’s face, close enough that Daniel can smell his hair burning, feel his skin blistering.
“Go to him and you go to your own destruction,” Armand croons, each syllable packed with all of the lacerating cruelty he possesses.
His eyes are wide and bizarre, quivering with rabid-dog intensity as he flexes his power. To see him now, Daniel can barely recognize the soft-spoken, elegant vampire of Dubai.
This creature is a feral thing, a demon wearing the ill-fitting skin of a young man. Daniel has the strangest urge to laugh with relief, to reach out and caress the cheek of his horrible, vile thing that made him.
“You will obey. You will never speak with him again,” Armand repeats, and the tips of his fangs are visible now as he bares his teeth.
Daniel grunts in pain. The fire against his face blazes like a branding iron and he feels the moment when one of his ribs cracks. He opens his mouth, but he cannot find the air to speak.
Armand abruptly drops him.
The fire goes out and Daniel collapses to the ground, showering the hardwood floor in chips of paint and broken drywall. He heaves in an agonizing breath and then coughs on the dust.
When he looks up, the apartment is empty. The door hangs ajar, hinges cracked, spilling in that one beam of light from the hall. Daniel picks himself up carefully. Already, he can feel the pain in his chest dulling as his new body rapidly heals.
Slowly, he limps over to the door and shoves it back into position. Let maintenance mess with it tomorrow. Then, he goes to the bathroom to rinse off the blood and dust from his face. In the mirror, he is slightly alarmed to see that he is grinning.
So, I finally got you, he thinks, although he knows that Armand will never hear him. Still, the consolation prize is pretty unbeatable—Daniel is positive now that he’s still watching. That he has been watching all along.
That the beautiful, unbreakable chain of hatred that he forged between them has a short stretch, and they are both still bound by it.
