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I
Bewilderingly easy, breaking apart a penthouse. This is what Daniel learns, running his hands over the walls as he makes his exit. Bricks exposed where Louis has scraped his nails and splintered the grey plasterwork. The dining room; one of the paintings has been split open, oil rags in tatters on the ground. Fair. Powerful subconscious. Cracks, riven in the heated flooring from one empty room to another. How many holes can you punch into a structure before it becomes a hazard? Daniel treads carefully in Louis’ grieving wake.
What’s the etiquette when you’re the last to leave a host house? Do you turn out the lights, leave the key through the letterbox? Four-star review, state of the art shower, one star docked for intrusive host behaviour. Great copy though.
He’s halted by the smell of burning; delicate fumes in the air. Wood. A magnolia tree, smoking. And Daniel should leave it, he should let the whole place go down in flames. But he’s itching for a final scene, can’t help it, tracks his way to the little enclave, and gets a cold-water shock to the system.
He’d assumed he was alone in the house, that Armand had chased after Louis in the intervening minutes where Daniel had fled the scene to grab his things. But now he finds the vampire standing, statue-still, arms wrapped around himself, watching his precious tree alight, face tilted and lost in a strange, otherworldly reverie. Surrounded by dust and rubble and guilt-laden rocks.
He should go. Leave Armand to whatever’s happening here. Maybe stick some Imbruglia on the system, just to soundtrack the moment. But he can’t tear his eyes away from the scene, let alone leave. The blooms are raining down in delicate little cinders over Armand, flecking him in ash. One of the branches is creaking right over his head – it’s going to give any moment. He doesn’t seem to have noticed, or he doesn’t care. Is he still susceptible to the flame?
Instinct wins over sense; the branch cracks, and Daniel leaps down, shoves Armand away from where it lands. The vampire staggers to the ground, for all the world a fallen maiden, limpid. He looks up through sooty lashes. The amber in his eyes muted, pink-rimmed.
“Mr Molloy,” he says, quietly, as if with great effort. “You’re still here. I thought you’d left.”
“Should have,” says Daniel. He kicks the branch away. “Are you… Do you wanna get up? Put this out?”
Armand says nothing, but eventually, he waves a hand. The flame stutters out. The tree stands, a blackened ghost.
Daniel exhales. “The theatrics don’t get old, huh. Anyway, that’s the second time I’ve saved you, buddy. Thank me later.”
A steeling of the mouth; still nothing, but Daniel’s relieved to see that something’s being bitten back. There’s life in the old liar yet. He goes in again.
“You can get up off the floor, Armand. You’re fine. This damsel in distress look won’t fool anyone.”
Nothing, just the jaw, tightening still. Daniel waits a few more moments, then gives up. He turns his back, and then he hears it. The shifting of pebbles. The minute sound of movement and soft fabrics.
The vampire Armand is standing again. Trembling, a long line of grace.
“What do you mean – you’ve saved me?”
Daniel squashes down the flare of triumph. Oh, they’re back.
*
He still should have left.
But now he’s here, longing to see how it plays out, clanking bottles against expensive glassware from the barcart with an unsteady hand. He keeps it simple; fills a pair of glasses to the brim with whisky. Downs one himself. Armand is watching him like a baleful cat, but he accepts the glass Daniel offers. Purses his lips, then drinks deeply, long neck tipped back. Hands it back, empty, not breaking his gaze.
“Feel better?”
Flashing look of scorn.
“Sure. Vampire constitution. I’ll get you another.” Daniel goes back to the cart, pours himself another for the ride. “This is how I got through it, the first time,” he says, handing over the refill. “You’ll see.”
The deep drink again. The resentment bubbling over. “We are not the same, Mr Molloy.”
“No, but we’ve both managed to tank what should have been a happy long-lasting marriage.”
“The difference is,” snaps Armand, “That you destroyed yours entirely on your own merit – twice, I may add – and then not content to sit and expire in your loneliness and age, you came like a killer for anything else you might find.”
“Rich to call me the killer.”
Ugly laugh. “You may as well have wielded a knife, Mr Molloy. Louis is my life, and you have ripped him from me with your half-truths. Whichever part of me had clung consciously to this earth is gone. Do not sit on your lofty seat and try to judge me, Daniel Molloy, not when your hands are equally blood-stained.”
Daniel waits for the avalanche to subside. “Done?” he says eventually, and tops them both up. Enjoys the seething look, the return to sullen rage-laced silence. “Hey, be honest, Armand. With me, just once. There’s no one else listening, you’ve frightened away the staff. There’s no recorder, Louis wrecked it.”
Armand is stone-still, his grip on the whisky glass turning his knuckles white.
“Aren’t you a little relieved it’s over? That you don’t have to atone, every day, for seventy years, for things you did that you know you’d do again? Because doing that, and maintaining this world – that would have exhausted me, bud.”
Silence. A quiver.
“Go on,” says Daniel. The whisky has him feeling loose now, provocative. “Isn’t there a little bit of you – some tiny traitorous germ – that wanted to be free? Come here. You can whisper it, if you like.”
Nothing, then vampire speed that pins Daniel up against the wall, punctures the breath from his lungs. Armand leans close and he thinks, for an unhinged moment, that the vampire is actually going to whisper into his ear.
“I loved him,” hisses Armand. “That’s all. I loved him, and you have taken him from me, and I should kill you but he has forbidden it. So why don’t you leave, leave with your smoking laptop and the pitiful embers of your life, and be grateful.”
His empty crystal glass rolls on the floor, and he struggles against the vampire. Why hasn’t he left? What’s he doing here, what’s he waiting for? Armand’s claws are in his arms, and maybe he hears Daniel’s thoughts, because his eyes light up with a sort of malice.
"Ah, Mr Molloy, your turn to be honest. You came here, to our house, for more than a story or a cheque, I think. What was it you desired most? Was it to feel Louis' tender embrace, finally, put stamp and seal to a fleeting memory? Or was it to get the gift you think you were owed? Either way, to return empty-handed. My apologies for our shortcomings as hosts."
Daniel tries to laughs – tries to shake him off. “You still think I wanted that? You could drag your open wrist over my mouth, darling, but I wouldn’t take it.”
Armand won't be moved, his arm an iron rod across Daniel’s chest, fingers pricking through the shirt sleeves. Mirthless smile. "Still, this obfuscation? Such hypocrisy from a man who demands truths. You forget that your thoughts have bounced around our home for weeks. It made us laugh, your hot-blooded dreams, roaring after every session."
"Did it really? Pair of chucklefuck clowns, glad that went so well for you both. Get off me, Armand. Stop soliciting. It stops being cute at your age."
Armand's expression turns void then volcanic; Daniel’s heart is hammering. They’re teetering together on the edge of something.
"Look, I've got a book to write. Maybe you could find a hobby to occupy yourself for the next seventy years. Go find a regional theatre to bully. That should suit your skillset."
"Ah. Yes. Your leaving. You seem to be having some trouble with it."
There's still brick in his hair. This close, Daniel could brush it away.
"But what if." Armand’s voice is low, as if entranced. "You mean so much to Louis, with your vulgar curiosity, your white knight ways and champion of justice. I could never hurt that which he cares for, never again. He’ll see that, I believe, he knows that in his heart.”
“Wait – this is your plan – just wait for him to come back? You’re crazy. He’s on a plane as we speak, and we both know where it’s headed.”
Armand pays him no heed. “What if I preserved you for Louis? Shall I give him a final gift? Shall I save you?”
Daniel scoffs, ignores the throbbing in his hand and the chill that’s now spreading through him. "You mean...?"
Armand's eyes are bright, blown wide with the thought; Daniel's never seen him in such a mood. It’s mesmerising.
"Oh, you think you could do it? Five hundred years you've never done it, and you're gonna just do it now, like that. Be serious, Armand. Let me go."
"I think not," says Armand, and he leans forward, puts his nose to the old scar on Daniel's throat. Daniel shivers at the touch, struggles. "What a gift, what symmetry. You think you saved me, with your snooping? Come, then let me save you from your little fatal tremors. Follow Louis' orders to the very letter. How neat, how tidy."
"Always the housekeeper. What was Rashid even for?"
Armand ignores him. "Shall I do it, Daniel?"
"You couldn't get it up," says Daniel dangerously. "You'd need candles first. Dinner. Some little pills."
"Ah," murmurs Armand, and draws back. "Let us not pretend this is something it's not. No bonds to shatter, no feelings of love to demolish. A null, instead, a perfect void between us.”
Daniel raises his brows. “Right.”
“But imagine your life, a reel spinning loose, yours to do with what you will please. Think of the people you could hound about the world, the horrid books you could write. Think of your body, unfettered by disease. The men you could devour. Louis, your lodestar, your guardian, now forever in your orbit."
Is it that final barb that makes Daniel say, irritated, goading, turned on: "Fine, fucking do it then, if you think you can."
And is that what makes Armand pause, then say, with swelling heat: "I will."
Daniel shoves him again. "Go on, stop stalling, do it then – coward – you just talk all the time and you're just full of sh--"
And Armand, with a hiss, fastening his lethal mouth to Daniel's throat. Teeth razor-sharp and relentless.
*
Daniel gasps, from the shock that he's actually done it, then from the blistered pain of soft, torn skin and what feels like tiny hot knives sinking into him, and finally from the dull thump of pleasure that courses through him, as the vampire drinks deep.
He can hear Armand's heart; old, desperately hungry, a whirling chasm of fear. Is that normal? It doesn’t matter – it’s calling out to him, and he needs to hold him fast. He threads his hands through Armand’s dusty curls, pushes the fangs deeper into the wound.
He wants to say something, anything, but his words expire before they're even fully formed thoughts. His body has become a live wire and trembling, and eventually Armand pauses to gasp, to cradle himself against Daniel and become one fused being. The strength fades from Daniel's legs and he slides down against the wall, dragging Armand with him, on top of him. There, thinks Daniel, a strange feeling of relief, as they’re puddled together in a heap, knees locked in legs, finally. Armand must hear that, looks at him inscrutably and brings his blooded lips to Daniel's; they move together in moments of brief, wild muteness.
He's being drained.
And when Daniel is dizzy, dying, undone from the fangs in his throat, he feels the open wrist over his mouth. Maddening, to want it after all he'd said and denied and learned; there's just enough spirit left in him to smack it away at first, to mumble "Go fuck yourself". Armand rocks back on his heels, looking dazed, his golden eyes so desirous Daniel's soul rings with it.
But they've gone this far, and Daniel is parched, needy for life; for his pulse that’s now beating in Armand; for all the shit he’s got left to do. “Sucker,” he says; drags him back and drinks.
Oh. Armand's turn to make strange, small sounds, which spark a thousand pinprick burns in Daniel’s skin. There’s nothing to see between them; no romantic visions. Just a sense of Armand in the dark, his face lit by a candle, still and achingly alone. A slick of paint on canvas; the sound of lapping salt water; the smell of century-old rot and cinder. A baby goat, running through a narrow gully, leading him out. A body in flames. Unloved; wholly desired, in every house and every decade of each century. A longing for blossoms in the dark; a figure in red instead, pale hands outstretched, protectively. Paintbrushes, like knives. Daniel drinks, and aches, and realises something with a jolt. He thinks, broadcasts it fervently like a lighthouse, something he can't bring himself to say but hopes Armand will read, before it's too late.
Perhaps it works. “Daniel,” whispers Armand, before the entire world goes dark.
*
When it's over, Daniel sits up, cramping, exhausted, his vision crystallising before him. He puts a hand to his throat. Healing already, blood drying into crust. The skin on his hands, firming. Within him: something steeling, something else dying. Muscles strengthening. His glasses have fallen away.
"Did it work?" he groans, looking up at a blood-soaked Armand. "Now what?"
But Armand's eyes are wide, horrified. He is on the floor, a foot away.
"I don't..." is all he manages. "What have we done?"
When Ellie was born, Alice had panicked; he’d been there for that one, had held her hand through the fear that had assailed her, wave after wave in the hospital bed while the baby lay at the foot of the bed. Daniel drags himself up and over, puts a hand to Armand’s face. "Stop that," he says, struggling with the effort of movement. "Don't think about it. Just look at me. Focus. Feel me."
There's a roiling flutter of fear, Daniel feels it echoing wildly, somewhere within him. Is this the famous vampire bond? No mind-reading required, just a coursing tide of emotion. Armand’s jaw is tight, quivering.
“Look at me,” says Daniel again, trying to cut through the noise of Armand’s panic. “What do I do next?”
Armand raises his bloody hands to Daniel’s. Their fingers slip, interlock. “You need to eat. More than what I can give you.”
A silence where their heartbeats should be.
“More than I can give,” says Armand again. A sinking feeling in Daniel’s stomach, and he grips Armand’s arms, holds fast.
“No. Listen.” Like talking a cat down from a branch too high. “You’re fine. Feed me, then. I know you’ve got something in the kitchen. Don’t –”
He can’t bring himself to finish the plea. Why had they talked of petty things, of Louis, of getting even. Nothing about this is neat; neither of them have won. There’s a yawning need for sleep within him, a dual cramp of hunger. But he can’t close his eyes. He knows what will happen. He’s been writing this story for weeks, and he’s still knotted himself to a monster.
“Armand,” he says, even as the vampire says, “You should rest, Daniel. I’ll be here when you wake.”
He’s lying, and they both know it. They’ve seen each other in the dark.
“If you’re not,” says Daniel, fighting the urge to collapse in exhaustion. “I will fucking hunt you down.”
Armand huffs a shaky laugh. It does nothing to assuage the fear in the room that surrounds them.
“You think I’m kidding? I’m immortal now, angel. I’ve got all the time in the world, and I’ll devote it to you.”
“Rest,” says Armand, looking sick. “Fledgling. You were born for this life.”
*
It was never a void between them. It was something much worse.
II
The book catapults itself onto the bestseller lists. Daniel’s loud on TV, he spreads his print interviews far and wide. He fires off blunt, outrageous thoughts on the socials; learns how to make stories in portrait mode. Goes on podcasts, panels, laps it up when a respectable writer across the pond describes it as a seminal work of grief, masquerading as fiction. Not a novel, he says. A historical magazine pulls out the story of a little-known village wipeout from France 1943, and weaves together the vampiric allegories with the real devastation so convincingly that Daniel almost believes that’s what’s he’s written. Not a novel, he says, beating out the message like a drum. Monsters are real.
Come and find me, dickhead, he projects into the universe. Tell me to stop.
But his maker has either buried himself somewhere in a cave, no wi-fi, iPad finally out of charge.
Or he truly doesn’t care. This has meant nothing to him.
*
He did look. Six months after he’d left Dubai, and before the book went to print, he’d delved into local news. Amongst the various items that caught his eye, he found a worried article: a pack of endangered bats had relocated themselves from their preferred home of three centuries in an Algerian mountain range. A deepset cave, barely reachable by humans. The article was fretting about the change in the local temperature, but Daniel wondered if maybe, a freakier predator had turned up. Sometimes, climate change looked like an awful lot like an angel with a bad attitude.
At the time, he’d asked Raglan James if there was anything in it. Talamasca sent a drone first. It ascended, hovered a few feet through the gloom, registered a motion and swiftly exploded.
Try again, urged Daniel, and this time they sent an actual agent. A month later, said agent was found ripped to shreds in the Sahara, drained dry. There was no other trace of the vampire Armand, but the bats had begun their journey back to the mountains. Nature was healing.
The book hit the shelves, Raglan got a lot more careful about answering his calls. And everyone started asking him, what’s next? And he kinda knew; had known from the moment Louis and Lestat reconciled. And he would have done it as a straight up sequel, but an interesting producer got in touch, and things developed from there.
He put his maker from his mind. Enough. If the guy wanted to go into incognito mode, Daniel was not indulging it. He had work to do.
*
Interviews with Lestat go exactly as anyone might have imagined. He’s a nightmare, utterly ungovernable, and Daniel is finding glitter in his clothes for days. A fucking wolf story alone takes three days, and there’s a sidecar of mother feelings so truly unhinged it makes Daniel want to go out and saw his own fangs off.
He’s surviving it, just. He sifts through the sands of bullshit and vampire lore and unkempt fucking druids, until he’s left with accidental grains of truth. Gets what he also knew he would, which was never just the damn documentary, but a full slice of horrific insight into his maker. He’s filling a folder to the brim with centuries worth of batshit.
“Uh huh,” he says to Lestat, and then because he can’t help himself; he’s still smarting from the other side of the same decision. “And why would you trust the vampire Armand with the care of your boyfriend, with someone you loved? He was obviously unstable. Why would you leave?”
Lestat looks at him with glinting eyes of azure. No one should have eyes like that. Daniel hates the flickers of empathy he sees in them.
“I did not believe then, what the beautiful little demon was capable of.”
I could have told you, thinks Daniel. But he says, drily, “Sucks for Nicki. Your infinite faith in beauty.”
He switches off the camera.
“Will you come with me?” asks Lestat. “In pursuit of beautiful things.”
Daniel rolls his eyes. So damn camp. A wiser man would leave it there. But alas. They’re hungry and the nights are long. Lestat’s interesting to stupid ratio is kind of appalling, but in spite of that – he’s having the most fun he’s had in years.
“I’m not interested in beautiful things,” he clarifies later, only somewhat under the influence of the coked-out banker’s blood he’s drained.
Lestat, in his head, sounding amused. I believe you, little bloodhound. It is the gruesome that turns your head, no?
*
The girls have clearly had a conflab. Kate, older, bossier, calls him. “I am begging you to get off the socials,” she says shortly. “I get that you’re having fun in your twilight years. Great. I support old people’s rights, I guess. But you’ve got to stop tweeting. I cannot take my friends and colleagues sending me screenshots of your nonsense. I’m trying to do my job, and we still share half a surname.”
El texts: brighter, bit chippier, as if speaking to someone very far removed from her. “You’ve been working hard! Take it easy. You don’t have to say yes to everyone who asks you to do a thing.”
The unexpected gift of vampirism: pissing off his daughters so much they’ve started talking to him again. He grins, and fires up a new article for a trendy literary mag. Top Ten LGBTQIA Vampire Stories.
He texts Louis. Any insights you want to lend? Did Stoker miss an opportunity for some hot same-sex encounters? Nosferatu and Van Helsing deleted scene?
Louis leaves him on two blue ticks.
There’s a rumour Dracula was based on Oscar Wilde. Wanna corroborate? Hear any rumours of green carnations on your travels?
Louis very possibly mutes him.
*
Was anything about Armand real? Daniel’s starting to feel like he was made by a phantom. Some creature who haunts his dreams; who crops up in ghost stories; whose resentment is still quivering through the earth’s membrane and is the only thing telling him that he’s not ash or fifteen feet underground.
Daniel tries to remember the days locked together in San Fran; looks over the fragments spilled in the Dubai sessions, cross-references whatever conflicting stories were shared with Louis and Lestat. He wonders about Delhi, pores over the files and his notes again. It’s a jumble of myth and memory.
Nothing shows up when he looks up logbooks for the right period, not that anything would, explains the historian from Aligarh he met at a litfest once. She tells him, Delhi was a thriving marketplace back then, crawling with labourers making the buildings that are now ruins in the park she used to play in as a kid. A healthy young lad might well have been sold and put into a domestic role or manual work, or, well, dancing. Then of course there was the rich export over land, out of India and down the trade routes, past the Persians and into Uzbek, Kazak, etc. Perhaps this is how his boy wound up there? Would he have made a good soldier for the mercenaries?
No, says Daniel. He’s never fought for anything. Historically speaking.
The historian’s Bengali, with dark skin and dancing curls and clever, kohl-rimmed eyes that make him ask, what are the chances the boy wasn’t from Delhi. She smiles wryly. Says, listen, chum, the most beautiful people are from Bengal; they might have been purchased for other reasons. The boys and girls. Equal opportunities.
Daniel thinks back to when he caught a glimpse of Armand’s mind. Small gullies, an escaping goat.
Incidentally, says the historian on email a few months later, she’s happened upon something, found a boat that left the ports in Gujrat with a cargo including a runaway lad named Haroun, only named in the trader’s letter because the boy wouldn’t stop moping, so they dressed him in beautiful silks and bangles one day and they say he looked like a little princess. They would have been bound for the Ottoman, further. Is this who he’s tracking?
The names aren’t right, nor are the places or the years. Nothing really adds up. But this much is true: when he factors these into his research, a youth with wide eyes turns up in a picture a few years later, in a miniature carried by a merchant travelling back up the Silk Road. Aroun, says a scribble on the back amongst other names, and it could have been a list of people who owed the merchant money, or a gift for someone, but the more Daniel zooms in on the faded pigment of the sullen youth, robed in white and looking like a wild angel in the scene, and distinct from the other figures – the more he believes different.
The merchant was killed savagely, castrated, no great imagination required as to why, but his beautiful wooden box containing the art and a pair of decorated gilt cups made it to an institution in Tehran, which was looted after the revolution and, Daniel discovers, eventually found its way into the hands of a property magnate who, get this, had an empty house in London but stashed the items in his brother-in-law’s house in Abu Dhabi. Full fucking circle.
Come to NY, he tells the historian. I think I owe you a drink.
Not in your climate, friend, she says cheerfully. I get enough of that. Come here instead. Do your research on the ground. Stop fucking around with these vampire stories.
Can't, says Daniel. Gotta do something first.
Standing in the Abu Dhabi house laden with ill-begotten goods, petty crimelords bleeding out on the floor, Daniel stares down at the painted scene, and the miniature of Armand. Unmoored, unloved, unturned.
He wants to time travel and set them all on fire, the slavers and silk traders and painters, the cursed pack of them that brought his maker to Venice and laid hands on him and delivered him into the arms of a vampire, and passed him around for the next four centuries. Coven to coven. Studio to museum to a pervert’s penthouse. No fucking wonder Armand’s crazy.
The whimper from the floor gets his attention.
“I’m keeping this one,” he says, before getting started on dinner. He used to think the pen was sword enough for vengeance, but vampirism is proving a pretty satisfying alternative.
He heads to Louis’ for a nightcap.
*
None of it means anything. He’s just gathering information on a guy who doesn’t want to be found, doesn’t want anything to do with him. It’s been well over a year now since it all went down. He doesn’t even feel anything towards him anymore. Just intellectual curiosity. Unfinished project type shit, you know.
“Okay,” says Louis mildly, and changes the subject. Daniel is faintly aware of a role reversal.
It’s weird, being back in the penthouse. Even though it’s been done up differently, been shot through with colour, has artefacts that reflect a different world, has a lightness to it that seems to brighten Louis up from the inside. The place doesn’t even groan the way it used to. The library is fucking cosy, the bookshelves are at eye-level now which is handy as neither of them can fly, and there’s an old record player. They put on LPs from the old days, reminisce.
But it’s easier when they hang out at Daniel’s in NY. Because when they’re here, he can’t switch off the part of his brain that thinks, that’s where Armand used to sit. That’s where the magnolia burned. That’s where Armand took him, on the floor.
He shifts uncomfortably. Gets up to skip a track.
*
Back in New York, the filming should be wrapping up, narrative lined up with Lestat’s arrival to New Orleans, but he’s dropped more weird, choice gems, and suddenly it’s got interesting again. See, this is why you need someone to chronicle this shit, because vampires are all so fundamentally self-absorbed and incurious about their state. Why don’t they care where they’re from? Who’s making these rules? Why is their lore essentially an extended game of Chinese Whispers?
Also…
“Sorry. Tracking back. You’re telling me you buried yourself in the earth for a hundred years, and then magically woke up and found the way to an ancient vampire goddess’ lair. Just. Unaided.”
Lestat shrugs. “The slumber was restorative. If you encounter heartbreak, I may suggest it.”
“Not that easy to break,” says Daniel shortly. “But I don’t buy it. What took you there? What woke you, Snow White?”
There’s a stage missing and Lestat’s hiding something. There’s a look in his face of a man who hasn’t been challenged in decades and has become used to sharing exactly as much as pleases him, not a word more. Sure, this is why Claudia wanted to kill him. He’s uniquely murderable.
“If Akasha’s silent,” presses Daniel, “if she doesn’t speak to you, and neither does her statue hubby, how do you know everything you know now? And why won’t you tell me?”
Lestat puts on a show of being bored, gets up to fiddle with his piano, plays out a little ditty. Daniel frowns at him, tries to piece it together.
“Someone dug you out and brought you there. And they told you all about her and what was happening. And it’s someone you’re protecting, or don’t want me to know about, for some reason.”
Lestat says, rolling his eyes, “You theorise like a cheap detective, Daniel. Like a rancid little fox on the scent of a rat in the wind. You are chasing nothing.”
“Okay, man.”
The problem is, Daniel sucks at the mind-reading gift so far. He can provoke and persuade with the right questions; he’s spent his entire life sifting through the spaces between people’s words and reading between the lines. He can trick out answers just coming up the other path. Dipping into their brains and getting the answers feels like cheating, somehow. Which means if he does try, the reluctance sits heavy in his technique, and it’s easy enough for Lestat to shut himself off against him. But he can work this out, old-school. It’s fine. He’s a professional. He’s run classes on this.
“So it wasn’t Talamasca, because you don’t have any friends there, and I’ve looked - their notes on Akasha are pure guesswork, they read like a rejected Indiana Jones treatment. It’s probably not The Vampire Armand, Louis didn’t think he’d heard of her. If Gabrielle had come back for you, promoted to a high priestess, I think you’d have shared it with the class. So go on. Who’s the font of all this wisdom that digs you up, chooses you?”
It’s the stupid lies that trip his subjects up. Innocuous, an oversight, until you ask why. Just like the photos mixed in a box, amateur and professional. Same damn thread leading him back to his maker, always. He pulls on it, works out an answer.
He looks at Lestat, stricken, and the name is ringing so loudly in his mind that he doesn’t need to say it. And the way Lestat darts his gaze away, guilt-stricken, he knows he’s right.
Fucking Marius. Alive.
*
When the girls were little, they used to play cat's cradle, pop their fingers in various loops and tangle themselves up. Sometimes together, sometimes on their own. Strange shapes binding their hands. And all for the fun of letting themselves out. Kate tried to show him how once: she’d come to him, all in knots. You have to pinch the opposite pieces together. Wind them around your ring finger and pinky. Or something. He couldn't really be bothered to get the hang of it, and it sounded like he was going to get knotted in whatever happened, and he was on deadline, battling the fax machine to get the latest dispatch, and she’d stomped off in a huff.
Not long after the divorce, he bought El a piece of string he saw in a toyshop, thought she could take it to the playground, and she was too nice to say anything but Kate said sharply she hadn't played it in years. That was the end of that. He left it in their cupboard, and it’s probably still there. Unsolved.
*
This is his work. He doesn’t need to think any more about his thankless maker, and the deeply fucked up set of circumstances that led him to vampirism in 16th century Venice. He just needs to focus on getting to the end of the story. The concert’s soon, and he can get a rough cut done in a few weeks, so the producers can get their notes in. Start pitching to the festivals. Documentaries, whole new ball game. It’s great.
He texts Louis. Hey. Did you know Marius wasn’t dead?
Louis reads it immediately. Starts typing. Stops.
Hours later, the reply. No.
Daniel says, Your boyfriend has been sitting on that for a century.
Immediately: Not my boyfriend. Then the hesitation over the keyboard again. What are you going to do with the information?
There’s a name ringing around them both; neither of them will say it first. Daniel sends him a shrugging emoji, then says, I need a drink.
He goes hunting, finds a woman with blow-dried hair and manicured nails who fights him every step of the way like it’s a personal insult he’s picked her. Well, it is. She thrashes him round the head with her expensive handbag, screeching in the dark and calling for the cops. He dips back into her brain, confirms that she’s the most annoying person on the PTA; that her colleagues have stopped engaging in political chat around her. Her kid is embarrassed to be around her, afraid to bring their gay best friend round. Daniel’s doing them all a favour, the teachers, the kid. It’s an early Christmas present for her ex-husband.
Why is he any better than the others? Daniel enjoys the fight with this woman. He likes the violence of her language, and the way she stamps on his feet with her heels and the stabbing pain in his toes, the way she pepper-sprays him. When he finally wins, when he finds her blood tastes like disappointingly like unseasoned salad and over-sugared margaritas, it’s still worth it.
He fucking hates how gay these vampires can be. Fuck Marius and the sway he has over the lot of them. Fuck Armand, and whatever he was at fifteen when Marius bought him. Fuck Lestat becoming Marius’s new chosen one. This is not Daniel’s drama. This entire circus is nothing to do with him, apart from the accident of his (re)birth, and the blood that’s in him. He’s just chronicling them. The only one worth shit was Claudia, and they killed her. He hopes she’s haunting every single one of them.
The woman is twitching on the ground. He kicks her phone to the wall as he leaves, takes great satisfaction in the sound of it smashing. She’s been getting her news through Facebook for years.
*
But if there were pieces missing in your life, wouldn’t you want someone to find it, put it in place finally? Isn’t that what he did for Louis? Doesn’t everyone deserve the whole picture, unbiased?
He texts Louis. I think I’ve got to find the bastard.
Read. Unanswered. Fair enough.
III
Too annoying to ask Talamasca.
He knows someone at Reuters over in Rome, a woman who's been there too long to retire. Giulia. She’d been posted to NY for a while in the 80s and they’d spent a few deeply enjoyable years getting blitzed and bitching about their respective democracies; later they’d both wound up doing freelance for a non-prof, before funding ran out and she finally had to go back. He trusts her, and when he asks her about regional bodies turning up, she sends him a local link immediately.
“Four months,” says Giulia, over the screen. “Someone is slaughtering the deserved across the country. The first body turned up in the Aeolian islands – although there was one in Tunis a month earlier that I think was linked, but their men covered it up. Anyway, then in Rome, behind my favourite wine shop, that’s when I started paying attention. The next in a field in the Tuscan countryside, next to a fistful of olive pits. Seasoning. Most recently in some shithole out of Pisa. They all look like reasonable deaths, health issues, heart attacks, petty crime victims, debt-related suicides. But they were all were young, arrogant, built like horses. Unsavoury sorts, crooks I think, but apparently unlinked.”
Daniel opens up a tab with airline fares.
“Some online commentators think it's political,” she says scornfully. “But these are idiots, goons, would be worth shit to agitators.”
They're hefty bodies though, Daniel sees in the photos she’s sent. Would be a pleasure to drain. He has a fancy flask for the leaner times, takes a sip of blood through the straw. Giulia eyes him through the screen.
“Doctor has me on supplements,” he shrugs. “Swears by it. So where’s the trail heading now?”
“Bologna three days ago,” she says. “Saving the best till last, I would say. Although, they don’t like bodies in Venice, bad for the tourism. Daniel Molloy, you are a famous novelist now, no? Do you hunt murderers too?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
Giulia frowns. “This trail, it is not a hard one to follow if you’re curious. It makes me worry. It means whoever is doing it is either impulsive, thoughtless – like a psychopath, perhaps. Or… they don’t care. They have nothing to fear from being found. They would have to be very powerful, then.”
“Could be both,” suggests Daniel.
“Mm. And what will you do when you find them, this very powerful psychopath? Tell their story?”
“Not this one,” says Daniel, tapping in his details for the next flight out. “I just want to talk to them. I don’t know, I’m going to have to feel it out.”
“Your third act is a strange one,” says Giulia, as a grandchild climbs on her lap. “Most of us are content to write long-form articles no-one but our peers will read. Ciao, Daniel. Good luck. Don't die from the chase.”
*
It's a valid question.
He doesn't know what he wants from this. He needs to speak to him, but his want is something so indefatigable at this point, he can’t begin to define it.
Is that the bond he can feel? A tug of fear, rage, churning in the Venetian lagoon as he rides the boat in the early hours of morning. It’s desolate on the black lapping waters, vast, and the cold bone of December is deep set. The hypnotised taxi driver, barely visible through his bundle of coats, is whistling to stay alert by the wheel. The sound skims back Daniel’s way, pierces him. The basilica looms in the distance; a pale, fat sphere in the last of the moonlight.
Something is out there, tuning into his fear like a radio frequency. A shiver runs down his body.
The driver hits land. Daniel alights on the cemetery island and passes out in a secluded grave, scattering out the remnants of the former tenant with an apology. Knapsack as a pillow. Moments from sunrise.
*
Venice, in the immediate liquid aftermath of sunset is a city bubbling with undercurrents. Daniel gets to mainland and roams over bridges, watching the river taxis, the lovers, the artists. He's been here a few times: holidayed with an editor while they conducted a brief, ill-advised affair. Another time: a producer had flirted with the idea of optioning a book, had invited him for a screening at the festival. Third time: half-hearted research for a story that never went anywhere. Come to Venice! City of bullshit possibilities.
Not this time, though. His maker is somewhere in this city: he can feel it. But as the night races away from him, he realises his approach is wrong. He’s scraped over the whole membrane of this city, and not found him. He’s looking in the wrong place.
He messages Giulia from beneath the flaming torches on a bridge. Know anyone I can bother about historic Venetian architecture?
She texts him an academic’s name, with the cry laugh emoji. She's laughing, but she's the one still up. Writers make for great vampires, he thinks. Remind me to buy you a drink when this is over.
She teases back, You owe me from ’96. If you are still with us after this, I will buy you the drink.
He hears it before he sees it: a whisper on the breeze; soft and dangerous. Fleeting movement in black, far over down the canal, across another bridge. Something moving fast down the unlit ways.
His skin prickles and he finds he’s suddenly rooted to the spot. He wants to stay where he is, on a popular crossing, and with cheerful tourists in a nearby bar, and with the messages of an old friend in his hand. He doesn’t want to know what’s down there.
Fuck. He stashes the phone in his pocket, follows the ripple of sounds. Purring, persuasive, nightmarish. Down the cobbled path, until the lights eventually flare out. Through a passage, past a small square. Over the unlit bridge; past the glittering purse with its torn strap on the ground. Before him is a long, covered archway. He stops in horror.
A vast shadow, shrouded, crouched over a body. The body, a woman, sighing something. He watches, frozen, as if from faraway; hears her faint words, gentle nothings that fall like music. She's a young woman, with a beautiful mop of red hair and a soft plump body and sweet lips, and she's telling this monster everything he wants to hear. He's drinking from her throat and soothing her at the same; a gruesome caress.
Daniel's transfixed, his stomach twisting, mouth dry and useless as if in a dream. Some part of him - the part that still feels human and naturally kin - desperately wants to save the girl. But it's too late, her arm is falling, flopping loose against the paving. And then the monster stops drinking suddenly and is looking over at him and rising, horribly tall, orange eyes glowing violent in the deep.
He still can’t find his voice, like a dream. The monster hisses and flicks his hand wordlessly, and Daniel is flung back onto the bridge. And by the time he's scrambled up, back throbbing, the vampire Armand has fled, leaving only the girl behind.
But she’s not completely gone. Daniel crawls up to her under the archway, holds her body. Her eyes are closed, and there's a strange, dreamy smile on her pallid face. She seems oblivious to the blood loss, to the precise holes in her throat and the trickle of red running down her collar. There’s a flickering beneath her eyelids, as if she's trying to remember something.
"Can you email the school? They'll need to arrange cover on Monday. We’re doing oxbow lakes."
"Sure," says Daniel, feeling sick.
"Thanks," she says faintly, head lolling in his arms. Heavy now. Same age as El. "Nice to have a break, though. Almost there."
“You’re okay,” he says.
Her eyes flutter open to look at him, and her face crumples in horror. "Oh my god -- your eyes -- they're like his -- oh god. Help me. Oh my god."
*
Daniel's a vampire too, but not like this. Just because he's not got Louis' luxury ethically-farmed flexitarian diet, doesn't mean he's like Lestat and Armand, taking whatever, whomever. He dines on idiots. He takes people who vote the wrong way, or worse, waste it. He takes people who shift their shit onto other people and coast through life, somehow blameless. He takes predators and criminals and people with offshore accounts and moneyed dickheads and he loves the tussle and he never ever wants this acquiescence. Look a monster in the eye and fight to the death.
What the fuck is wrong with Armand.
He puts the girl out of her misery. Put his mouth where Armand's was and drinks. Strokes her beautiful hair till she’s gone.
*
Underground; the bastard’s underground somewhere. Sewer rat behaviour. And difficult to pull off when the entire place is water. He needs a place with some forgotten lair or crypt. Packed back in his coffin on the cemetery island, still shaking from the night’s encounter, Daniel pulls up the translation of the book Giulia suggested. Tries to settle himself in the research, as the sun rises.
Adoration of the Shepherd, painted by a guy who was big in Venice, mainly worked to commission for churches. Found time to paint every passing beautiful Venetian into his scenes, including – obviously – Daniel grimaces, the prostitutes great and good. When that was painted, he was sharing a studio with a lesser artist, one who mainly produced studies of a local church, in Via... Daniel checks his little tourist map. Nothing there, no road of that name, no church, no obvious parallel buildings. He goes back to the book, finds an old map in the appendices, zooms in and compares it with the new one. There.
He’s had some really exceptional drugs over the years, and the blood of one particular freak which means he’s maybe ruined forever. But still, there’s nothing quite like the adrenaline shot of a trail finally warming up.
He lies there in the coffin, rakes back over the night’s affairs. He dreams of monsters. Of Kate and El, melded, bleeding out on a street, their hair staining red. When he wakes to the darkness, he feels like a thousand pieces.
He calls El from the boat as he heads back to mainland. It goes to voicemail, in the sort of considered way that suggests she’s rejected his call. He tries Kate, who picks up after about a minute.
“What, Dad?”
“Nothing. I’m in Venice. Just wanted to check you’re okay.”
Silence. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know. Dark world out there.”
Click of the tongue. “I do not have time for crank calls. You’re violating the whole beautiful no-contact code of conduct we’ve established.”
“Uh huh.” What do you say to your daughters, before you go off vampire hunting for real? Before you find a guy so unhinged anything could happen? He watches his driver cuff another passing boatman in friendly greeting. “I’m, uh. Glad you’re okay. Glad El’s okay. Hey, say hi to her.”
“Dad, are you dying for real now? Is that what is this?”
“No! I’m fine. I’m actually in the best health I’ve been in years.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Great. Listen, I'm trying not to take it personally that you wrote a whole goddamn novel about fathers killing their daughters, like, the self-flagellation's a bit over the top, you could have just paid for the therapy and rehab instead of, I don't know, producing genre-fiction, I mean, I’ll give it to you, it’s an innovative way to explore guilt, right? The point is -- " she pauses for a breath -- "We're actually here, El and I, unlike your weird-ass metaphorical progeny. Actually trying to live our lives despite everything you flung at us. So… no offence, but sure, go tour Europe on your late-stage drug-fuelled gay bender. Just, leave us the hell out of it.”
She hangs up, leaves him. But that’s okay. They’re okay.
*
He's reached the street from the book, and it requires some reassessment. The building is nothing like a church anymore. It’s a block of holiday rentals (all occupied), an antique shop (closed), a café (closed), and a newsagent (strip lighting on, open). There’s nowhere obvious for a sewer rat to hide, but he is so damn close. He can feel it.
His eye falls on a drain cover in the cobbled path.
The newsagent is run by a tired-looking Bangladeshi who's watching a film on his phone, and who eyes Daniel with some irritation when he comes in.
"Hey, buddy," says Daniel.
"Yes," says the guy, not taking out his headphones.
"Got a basement?" Not a normal opening question; the guy looks askance. Daniel shakes his head, reframes. "I'm doing a blog on places in the city you can get a Fanta after midnight," he says. "Need some colour for the piece though. If I can say something like four floors deep, packed with everything you could ever need, it pushes the word count up, you know?"
Wariness turns to profound disgust. "I have a basement, yes," he says.
Daniel nods, grins. "Great." Turns to leave, then on a whim, adds:
"Was that your kid I saw outside earlier? Curly hair, kinda skinny, kinda beautiful? You think he'd want to be in a photo? Be great for the ’gram."
The guy pales. "Not that man," he says. "I don't know him. I don't know why I see him, here, there, every other night in the shadows. He doesn't buy anything. Isn't looking for company, isn’t staying up in the flats. Don't speak to him. I want him gone. He's probably stealing from me. Venice is full of strange people."
Daniel buys a Fanta, triumphant, and, utterly unobserved in the dark, slips down the drain.
He follows the trail down its blood-stained path, well-fed rats running down the dark corners. The bricks scratched w fingernails too long, hard. Ah, and there, the dregs of another drained body. Days cold, throat ripped open on this one, face bloated and neck broken. Daniel keeps going.
And finally, the path opens out to what must have once been a church crypt. The faded patina of red on the walls. And in the middle, curled in on himself on the ground and lit by long candles, the vampire Armand is writing in a book, looking for all the world like one of the painted martyrs from the old walls around them.
He looks up as Daniel approaches. Says, quietly, “You found me, then.”
Daniel, heart like a rattle, says, “Want a Fanta?”
*
After last night’s encounter, Daniel had feared the worst, imagined Armand might just set him on fire at first sight. He hasn’t heard of maker-on-fledgling murders yet in his vampire research, but if anyone could scale things up to a Greek tragedy, it would be his maker. But so far, the stillness. No flame. No violence. A second death on pause.
For someone who’s holed up with rats and bodies, Armand’s not looking terrible. The curls are loose on his face, untended, and it makes him look younger, weirder. He’s in a shrouded, draped affair, a far cry from the sleek fashion he used to sport.
“Interesting digs,” says Daniel. “Bit draughty. Also, hate to break it you, pretty susceptible to damp.”
Armand’s mouth twitches. “There is a canal behind the wall. We used to run along it, in my youth. Hundreds of years ago. I was never happier. This little corner is all that is left of what was once a sacrosanct chamber. The rest is now stockrooms for hostels. But it will do for the present. It allows me the quiet I seek – or has done, till now.” He frowns. “You are a very loud vampire. I felt your presence in this city immediately.”
“Uh, right back at you,” says Daniel. “You might want to work on your general aura. I might not be able to read your thoughts, but I’ve never known Venice to feel so actively repellent before. And I’ve had some really shitty breaks here.”
Armand blinks, looks intrigued for a moment.
“So, what have you been upto? Other than binging on a Mediterranean diet and littering bodies round the place. Like that girl you made me kill last night. Remember her?”
“Oh, please.” Armand turns back to his book, as if bored. “You interrupted me. She would have died in sweet bliss had you not blundered on scene in your typical fashion.”
“Yeah, quick question. What's wrong with you? What’s actually wrong with you?”
“Oh, you do you not eat!”
“I do – obviously.”
“Then forgive me if I do not engage in an ethics debate with you! Raised by Louis, no doubt, and now a preacher at my heels.”
“Raised by -- I'm sorry, did I imagine the part where you left me?”
Armand sniffs. “That was for your own good, Mr Molloy.”
“No. I'm calling bullshit. You just got scared. Can never stand by anything you do.”
“As I recall – ” a sudden flare of temper – “You said you would find me. It has been 22 months since you drank my blood. By my reckoning.”
Daniel lets out a long breath. “You know, for an immortal guy, you sure have a bad habit of counting the days,” he says. “I was busy.”
“You were with -- ” Armand stops himself sharply, bites his lip. “I cannot see another person lost in the vortex of that man’s vanity.”
Daniel chokes on his incredulity. “Lestat – I'm not – I’m interviewing him. For a documentary. It's nothing else!”
“Ah, your unquenchable thirst for interviews! Your incalculable contributions to journalism!”
“Sorry, you thought one bite and I’d retire? You’re not that good, babe. And it's just as well someone in this wide world sat him down and got him to spill secrets, because I am uncovering so much.”
Armand has the gall to look disdainful. “What have I unleashed upon us? You are a plague on vampires, a tawdry little gossipmonger. What was I thinking, turning you.”
“Oh, be honest, Armand. You weren't thinking. You and me in the penthouse... that was pure impulse. I preferred that. The only time you've done something without planning it six weeks in advance.”
Armand purses his mouth mutinously. "You're right," he cedes. "I wasn't thinking. And I have paid the price."
Daniel snorts. "Come on. You didn't have to go into hiding. You’re not a fucking princess in a tower. You could have stuck around. Tried living a different life, instead of hiding and rotting on your own. Found out what it’s like, bringing a brand new vampire into the world.”
Armand smiles, coldly. "You have flourished, Mr Molloy. You had your beloved Louis to guide you through any particulars, as predicted. I don't think you needed me at all."
Daniel stops short. There's a sentimental answer, but he refuses to say it. “You're right," he snaps. "You've been pretty irrelevant, since Dubai. Since the book came out. Why would anyone need you?"
The blow lands, he can see that, finds to his surprise that he regrets the words almost instantly. Armand’s jaw works and he busies himself again with his book and ink, brow set in deep frown. They stay in weighted silence for a few minutes, till Daniel gives in, comes closer.
"What are you doing?"
“I’m decorating,” replies Armand. "I have never possessed the skill of creation. I can neither write nor paint. But I can enhance, I believe." Peevishly, he adds a vine to the margin of text. Daniel watches, scans the text on the page. It's in Latin, something to do with a fire. A house. A dog.
"And for those of us who don’t count Latin as a mother tongue," says Daniel.
"It's a description of the devastation from Vesuvius," says Armand. "They discovered the ruins long after I’d left Rome. My fauna is ill-matched, I fear. This is poor work." He puts his pen down, looks fiercely at Daniel.
"You are a liar, Mr Molloy," he says. "You would not find me in Venice, track me down through field and town and drain, if I was irrelevant."
"I had to tell you something," says Daniel, defensively.
“…Sending a pitiful Talamasca agent on me, like I’m a common criminal…”
“Hah, it was you. In the bat cave. I knew it.”
“And what did you do with that knowledge, my dear, clever Mr Molloy,” spits Armand. His voice is dripping with venom. “Nothing. Record one hundred interviews for the undeserving American masses. Go on book tours.”
“Okay, so you did have wi-fi.” Daniel’s on the backfoot, can’t work out why he’s being made to feel like the bad guy. He’s the one who was left bleeding out on a floor in Dubai, this is such classic Armand bullsh--
"-- And your eyes turn colour. Did you know that? They were green before, your original hue, when you first came in here. Now... " He pulls Daniels face towards him, ungentle, long fingers firm in grasp. Daniel closes his eyes in frustration, betrayed by his own body.
"Yeah, yeah. Mood ring eyes. I know.”
"No. Not quite." The tone of voice makes Daniel open his eyes again. “Mine, in fact.” Armand’s thumb, brushing of their own accord over Daniel’s cheek, jaw. Parting Daniel’s lips. Examining him like a dentist.
"Get off me," Daniel says gruffly, turning his face away. "This is how accidents happen."
Armand goes pink - how does he do that, without blood? - and releases him in a strange flutter. Unwillingly, Daniel remembers the night in Dubai. The fighting, the drinking. The fleeting moments between.
"I heard your last mortal thoughts." say Armand quietly, as if he’s thinking of the same thing. "In Dubai. You directed them at me."
"Right. Well. It was a weird evening. Blood loss is a bitch.”
“Liar, still,” exclaims Armand, flushing, provoked, and Daniel curses, pushes forward, kisses him roughly. Tells him what he won’t ask.
Brief, ragged silence, before Armand comes at him like a wildcat.
Swift work from both of them with buckles, with pulling away the jeans and jackets and drapes just enough to reach skin. Staggering back into jagged bricks, and hectic bites that fall into hectic kisses. Tussling, arm around the shoulders, fingers up the column of neck and breathing in, licking a stripe up the throat. Bruising lips, pressed deep. A slide down, slick of heat. Knees scraping stone. Fists, urgent spit, and cries choked out in this strange, sacred place.
In the aftermath, Armand’s damp forehead, trembling, resting briefly on Daniel’s shoulder, hands gripped to his hip, a weird parody of a slow dance. They barely regain their senses before they’re clawing at each other again, mouths crashing. Come here. Harder now, fangs in skin and drawing blood. Here. Glass-sharp nails dug in the back of thighs, raking down the spine and the back of arms, red beads spouting in lines. Here. Here, with their bodies juddering together, aching. Fused, full.
Apart afterwards, sitting boneless, exhausted. Daniel can’t bear to look at him; is longing to gather him in his arms. To breathe in his skin.
Nothing resolved. Another knot instead. This wasn’t what he’d planned.
He shifts, summons the courage to reach out; just as Armand gets to his feet, gathering up his belongings and wrapping the drapes back around him like a shawl. Considers for a moment, takes Daniel’s discarded jacket. Petty.
Says, voice brittle, “I hope you got what you came for, Mr Molloy.”
Daniel says nothing. Can’t, not when his words have ground down to dust.
“What is it, by the way?” Armand looks down at him. “What is you wanted to tell me?”
Oh. Shit. Daniel drags himself up against the wall. He would have chosen to do this literally any other way.
“No. Fine. Okay. So. Turns out, sometimes fires aren’t as fatal as they seem. In the long-term.”
Armand says, in irritation, “What are you saying?”
“Um. Marius. De Romanus. He survived your fire. He’s alive. He always has been. Sorry. I thought… I just thought you’d want to know.”
Turned stone still. Flicker of something in the eyes? Impossible to tell.
“You destroyed my life in Dubai,” Armand says finally. “Now you dare to come here and desecrate my memories of my happiest days. You are a curse, Daniel Molloy. Stay away from me.”
He leaves, into the dawn light where Daniel can’t follow.
*
This trail is easier to shadow now. In the crypt, Daniel is surrounded by a job lot of old manuscripts and books. They’re all simple practice paper for Armand. He runs the content through on his phone. Crude Latin poetry. Retellings of mythological transformations. Diary after diary. Histories.
But over and over again, Armand has returned to the pages of Vesuvius. Written them out himself when the material has run its course. Filled the margins to horrors with deep colours and patterns.
Pompeii, then. It’s a never-ending Interrail trip.
*
Crimson walls, with figures in various poses of sublimination.
In the twilight, the site closes early, day-trippers preferring to return to the bars in the local towns. Daniel has his run of the place, but he’s untethered, doesn’t care, can’t take in a thing. His encounter with his maker has left him gouged with a strange, permanent ache. He’s searching, calling out for him, and he knows it makes him look pathetic but he’s beyond caring. He can’t even seem to hunt in this state, hasn’t eaten in days. He currently exists on a plane somewhere between need and longing – he has to see Armand again, touch him, fuck him. Fight him again, if that’s what’ll get him off. Anything. He feels like he’s gone mad, not only for the blood, but for whatever strange new thing has been unlocked between them. He can’t concentrate, feels like he can barely read, is reduced to reliving every word and movement between them. He’s become nothing but longing.
So it’s a relief when Armand takes pity on him, and emerges from the shadows of a fresco.
“Daniel,” he says softly. “Come,” and guides him from the house, hand to elbow. Puts an arm about his shoulders. “You haven't eaten. This is foolishness. Come. Drink.”
And Daniel wants to fight that, still, he doesn't need to be looked after by Armand, not after all this time, not after the other day. They’re still out in the open. But Armand is drawing him into his throat, to the soft column of pulsing blood, the sweet smell of it, and Daniel remembers the taste. Warm, shot with copper, like the sting that comes with stolen honey – he pierces the skin and drinks deep, filling himself desperately. Armand’s hand at the nape of his neck, curling into his hair, caressing. A cradle. Murmuring something.
When Daniel pulls off, he's alive again, blazing with new, tumultuous confusion. "Why is it only your blood that feels like this?" he demands.
Armand doesn’t reply. Takes Daniel’s hand now, and places it over his open wound. Daniel bites off the questions. Breathes, focuses. Stitches up the skin beneath his fingers.
“Thank you,” he says, chastised.
Their fingers lock a moment, before Armand releases him. “Come,” he says again, and leads him on.
They walk together in the gloom, in silence, through the labyrinth of ruins and stunted columns. Through the archaeological digs that are cordoned off from the public. Crunch of their boots on the gravel. Frozen air that Daniel breathes in just to feel the burn in his lungs, to scorch out whatever rot Armand planted in there when he wasn’t looking. But there’s nothing he can do to escape. He thinks he’d have to scrape off every particle of skin and start again, if he wanted to get free of this.
He looks at Armand, his thoughts whirling. Angelic, slim jeans, enveloped in Daniel’s battered leather jacket. In a weird reversal, this might be the calmest Daniel’s seen him. It’s unnerving.
“May I ask you something?” Armand’s voice is light, as if they’re simply continuing a conversation. “You knew I was in Venice, yes? That’s what you said, the other night. That you felt me.”
“Listen. I don’t know how this works for others, but I know you across continents. I can feel you always, and that’s not a compliment, by the way. You’re like a scissor caught on silk thread.”
Flash of a small smile. “Mm. For what it’s worth, Daniel, I feel you too. Only, you are more a boulder."
“Is that a joke?”
“Perhaps.”
Daniel stops. “Why are you asking?”
Armand looks thoughtful. “Because for three centuries I failed to detect my maker. I cannot now be so naïve as to think we were never on common soil. Therefore, I would posit that either the bond that was forged was of a different mould to you and I. Or, he severed our link, masked himself from me. Maybe it is something that was always in his power. This seems more likely.”
“You’re taking that notion… well.”
Armand nods gravely. “It is taking some doing, although I suppose I don’t know everything yet.” He hesitates. “I left you ungently in the crypt.”
Daniel wishes he could lie, say it was nothing. What’s a bit of hate-sex between vampires. Standard, right? How you endure. But his expression betrays him, or the boulder-ness of him. He shrugs wordlessly.
“I also asked you to leave me be, and yet you are here.”
Daniel pulls a face. “What can I say? I don’t do as I’m told.”
A touch of warmth. “No. You do not. So now, this is where I need you to settle something for me.”
“Oh?”
Doorways yawn on either side before them, black, uninviting. There are plaster bodies held within, the moments of their death forever encapsulated.
“I may have inherited my maker’s power. Would you like me to learn? How to do this, how to block you? We can carry about our eternal lives without all this burden.” Wide golden eyes, serious. “Ask it of me, Daniel, and I will. Shall I free you?”
Daniel cocks his head. “Yeah, no. No, that sounds infinitely worse, actually.”
Armand threads a slender arm through his, and they continue walking.
Daniel starts feeling stronger for admitting it. “And what do you think, by the way? Got an opinion on this? Any of this?” He gestures broadly.
“I am glad of your answer.” And Armand leans in, kisses him tenderly beneath the violet sky, in the epicentre of destruction. Takes him to rooms nearby, to the coffin he’s prepared for them both, to bed. Lies him down and undresses him slowly, deliberately, peppers him with soft kisses till he’s aching, almost crying, works him to fever pitch and brings him back, does it all again as if he can’t bear to stop; smiles once, shyly, when Daniel swears at him, which is enough to undo Daniel completely. This is different to the crypt, different to Dubai and the encounters with men he can remember. It’s a bed where Daniel feels so cherished and so bare it makes him want to cover his face. He’s trembling, and then Armand places a hand over his eyes, is like a wave over him, sweeping him in, again.
*
Five hazy days of them, six surreal punchdrunk nights of them. And then on the sixth, Daniel resurfaces, remembers who he is beyond body and desire and discovery. Finds his phone and sticks it in a charger. When it comes to life, it starts buzzing with alerts so violently it dives off the dresser. Armand watches with a touch of amusement, as Daniel groans, retrieves it from the floor and starts going through his messages.
Guilia (concerned); Louis (checking in); Lestat’s fucking legal (icy); Kate (ratty); El (ditto but better at covering it); the production guys (eager); publicist requests (polite); publicist chasers (sooo polite); translator query (impenetrable); etc; etc.
Before he knows it, he’s agreed to take a quick call with another financer, hyping up the doc in buzzwords while Armand sits curled on the bed quietly, listening, sun rising, and then he’s got to look through the follow-up notes from the assistant while Armand sits with furrowed brows, clanking sounds of the town waking up, and then. And then by the time he looks up from the hotel desk, Armand has disappeared.
They’ve not been apart yet. It’s fine. The hotel clock informs him it’s mid-morning beyond the blackout curtains. Explains why he’s suddenly exhausted.
He’s not worried. It’s fine. He climbs into the coffin, waits, reads reports and writes work notes on his phone till vampiric sleep sinks through him.
Not quite dusk when he wakes to Armand slipping in behind him. Nuzzling down, cold nose and feet pressing into his back and legs. Slender arm winding about his middle. Daniel nestles backwards into the embrace, flooded with relief. Something is coming though, he can feel a whirring of thoughts in the space around them. Forehead press to the back of his neck. The sweetness at odds with the way the arms are tightening around him, like a boa. The fresh smell of earth.
“Where have you been, weirdo,” he asks affectionately. “I missed you.”
“Darling…” he hears, mumbled into his spine. He wiggles, to show he’s listening.
Nothing then, just a long silence. He doesn’t mind. Rather enjoys the quiet in the coffin’s heavy night. But it’s thickening with unvoiced thoughts. Daniel runs the pad of his thumbs across Armand’s tense arms, over the fine hairs, until the grip loosens. Their legs entwine and loop, his toes rubbing over the delicate bones in Armand’s ankles. Eventually Armand sighs, lips at his neck and earlobe, long fingers now reaching up and running through his hair, over his scalp. He pushes into Daniel, gently at first and then more insistently, until Daniel turns and faces him, their noses bumping, their open mouths seeking each other. Slow; the enforced closeness making them clumsy; the clumsiness tugging a small smile from Armand’s lips. Daniel draws his hand beneath Armand’s silken clothes, across the plane of his chest, down past his stomach; enjoys the shiver and moans, the curl of the arm around his shoulders, the gathering, the small damp desperate sounds that escape against his neck and fill the coffin.
They say nothing of consequence for a little longer yet.
*
Later, they leave the hotel and sit on a high, lonely rock that looks out over the gulf and the glittering boats on the bay. The sea breeze whips around them; Armand buffeted in Daniel’s jacket, which he seems to have permanently stolen. They sit there, leaning on each other, watching the fishermen come in and the handful of tourists at the bar. It’s definitely off-season.
Eventually, Armand lifts his head from Daniel’s shoulder and produces something from his pocket.
Oh. Showtime.
“Will you do something for me, Daniel. Will you wear this. I think it’s your size.”
Daniel examines it. It’s a gold pendant, encrusted with earth in its small scratches, dangling on a long chain. Old, centuries old, possibly more. At its centre of the pendant: a small flaming red stone, clasped to its bezel with four tiny gold teeth.
“Did you dig this out from the ruins?” he asks, fascinated. “Is that what you were doing this morning?”
Armand blinks.
“Did you hypnotise the entire team at the dig? Or did you find your own spade and your own patch of earth?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yeah, I’m obsessed with everything you do, you should probably know that.” He pecks Armand’s cold cheek, amused. “How did you find something so old and so… undamaged? Is that, like, scavenger’s luck? Or is this a regular side-hustle for you?”
“There are bits of earth deeper than the rivers of fire could run,” says Armand, prissy despite himself. Daniel grins, tries to focus.
“Right. And why are you palming vintage jewellery off on me like I’m a cheap lay?”
“Please,” says Armand again. “It will keep you safe.”
“You put a spell on it? You’re a witch now as well? Gotta tell Talamasca, brand new powers just dropped.” He's joking, but the faint crease of Armand brows means he’s closer to the mark than he thought. He's looks at it again; is drawn to the strange, beating heart of the stone. It has a faint recognisable thrum. He holds it up to the light. It glimmers. Christ.
“I understand,” says Armand quietly. “You feel you have a life. A job. And outside this – our coffin, these ruins, this city – you despise me, and I must remind you this is mutual, whatever else occurs between us. How could you not? Your book has already lain waste to my character, your documentary will say many more things, narrated by the world’s greatest jester. Your dearest friend would fain kill me on sight, I think. We are an impossibility. Nevertheless, you are mine, and you are reckless. I can let you go, but I will not have lesser vampires threaten you. Wear this. It will keep you from harm.”
“Mmm.” Daniel fiddles with the pendant thoughtfully. “This is your blood, right? In this stone? What does it do?”
“It will ward off other vampires,” says Armand, frowning. “They will sense an elder’s protection.”
Daniel snorts. "You’re the garlic," he says.
"You find this amusing?" says Armand stiffly, and Daniel recovers himself. He pulls the living embodiment of tension into his arms, holds him tight beneath the jacket until he feels Armand’s body start to yield. He puts his nose in the sea-salt flecked curls and breathes in the scent. He runs his thumb over Armand’s minutely flexing fingers. It’s like soothing an anxious gazelle.
“I've got a different idea,” he says eventually. “Instead of you running away again at a sunrise of your choice, and making me pull in non-stop favours tracking you down, and instead of you turning a random vial of blood into my personal GPS stalker-come-bodyguard, and instead of neither of us getting anything done, again, you could... you know. Stick around. Or better, you could come back with me.”
Armand swallows, peels away. “We will burn through each other.”
Daniel considers this. “It’s a possibility,” he agrees, honestly, and Armand's mouth tightens, a miserable, thin line. “But we could try not to. We could try really hard, and I think we might manage, because I reckon I know at least thirty, thirty-five percent of what makes you crazy now. And you know nothing turns me on like a bit of truth, so that's an easy solve if we're fighting.”
Deep furrow in the brow. “I have followed my heart before. It has led to devastation, every time.”
Daniel nudges him. “I think this time it might be different. You were a sleeping volcano to the others. But I know you. And you’ve seen the inside of my brain. Nothing left to hide, right?”
“Wear the chain, Daniel,” begs Armand.
Daniel shakes his head. “That’s the easy option, babe,” he says, and Armand makes a deep sound of frustration; lunges at him as if he’s launching an attack. But he only buries his face in the crook of Daniel’s throat.
“If it helps,” murmurs Daniel. “I don’t think I’ve ever despised you. I think I only found you mesmerising, whatever your guise, whichever the century. Whatever the edit.”
A muffled sound. “That makes it worse, Daniel. You must see that.”
“Come on. Come on. Chasing you wreaks havoc with my deadlines.”
They stay like that, deciding, perched on the cliff’s edge.
IV
When Daniel married Alice, she was a busker and a bartender and a teacher and she sang in a band with two other guys who wouldn't play her songs. He was an underpaid, overworked journalist with more compulsions than sense, but he fell in love with her, almost by accident, and he tried his best. He just loved everything on offer, wanted it all and only noticed the collateral damage when she left their Manhattan flat with the girls in tow. Left him there with the mouse in the wall, and the remnants of his addictions, and the tottering piles of books and cassettes and kid’s toys, and the VCR blinking a broken version of the time. It’s a deep, spiky, long-term bruise from their parting, the sort that only comes from a mutated young love, and she doesn’t speak to him. Has no need anyway. Practices ventriloquism via the girls if strictly necessary, like the time El was briefly engaged. She teaches a course on music and protest these days, organises an annual music festival with friends they used to share from the scene. He’s not allowed. The hazards of sharing a city and a social circle.
When he married Sophia, they were older, wiser, already successful, having an affair on her side, and in love with the notion of each other as much as anything else. It was a spur of the moment marriage, and they both knew almost immediately upon signing the papers it was a mistake. He threw himself into another book, and she left him after fourteen months, took on a job at the UN. He’s like a blip on her CV. She’s blandly cordial if they ever bump into each other. She’s probably a spook, these days.
You’d think immortality would make you better at this, but he’s essentially asked Armand to move in after a week and refused to think about anything further down the line, only knows he can’t let him go, not yet, maybe never. This neediness is brand new, unnerving. When they get to his street, Armand knows where to turn. It shouldn’t mean anything, Daniel doesn’t think about it. Because they fall into each other, in a strange, dreamlike bliss, and nothing else matters.
*
They hunt together, or rather, Armand comes along every night as Daniel finds his victims. One idiot after another, men straying late night at parties and women working late screwing over people. He watches with open fascination, and waits, and helps with the clean-up and then gathers Daniel in his arms, in the dark streets. They often go to the riverside afterwards, and they watch the lights. They roam the city at night, and watch stupid films at late night viewings, and bed down together.
It's an early, unformed, stage of love. They don’t speak of the important things. Improbably-alive Roman makers they leave, by mutual unspoken agreement. They jostle instead over the hundred little things instead that can crowd up a life. History, art, politics. The affair doesn’t magically align them. Armand has a wilful lack of engagement with anything beyond his stupid vampire bubble, happy to snack on mortals but never mind their problems.
“What do you mean, you don’t care he’s been elected again? He’s an active threat to democracy. I had a friend who was covering it back in '02.”
Lofty, maddening, perpetually bullshit reply: What is he but a seedling. He will expire within the decade. Land lasts longer - you have an infant’s perspective of threat.
“He’s trying to eliminate the history of your people, friend.”
“Not my history, dear.”
What do you say to that? It’s like arguing with a kid who deliberately won’t read the news, has no ties to the earth. It drives Daniel crazy. We could do anything he says. Take out anyone. Come on. And Armand simply smiles, turns a page of the book.
Illuminations on anything. On Ballard; Zola; Greene; Ashbery; Lahiri; on translated copies of Daniel’s books that are sitting gathering dust on a shelf. On the old Nancy Drews the girls used to read; on coffee-table books and histories and political diaries from leaders for countries that no longer exist. Armand consumes them all like fresh produce, leaves himself behind on the pages.
Daniel's dreams are still fitful, variations on a theme. This time -- two sisters, must be the girls, berating him. Burying him. But they have red hair, and are both older and younger than his girls. Vampires. But then it's Armand, waiting for him with love, embracing him while they turn to ash.
He wakes alone in the coffin, and for a moment, is filled with a deep and terrible dread, the same that caught him when he woke in Dubai. He's alone, has been abandoned by the only person who knows him.
But no. There's comfort in the air. When he lifts the lid and follows the scent, Armand is in the kitchen, fiddling with the stovetop. Soft-eyed, amber in the dusk, still in his silk pyjamas.
"You're awake," says Armand, and comes to him, nuzzles him like a cat. He smells sweet, safe. Stupid notions to attribute to his lover, but irresistible in the haze of waking. Perhaps Armand senses something in the flutter of Daniel's heart, looks at him questioningly.
"Do you ever get stupid dreams?" says Daniel. "Really vivid, really Hammer Horror heavy?"
Armand shakes his head. "Not I," he says. "I haven't dreamed in centuries. I don't miss it. But you are new, and I think, perhaps-- " he angles his head -- "sensitive to the subtext of the dreaming world. But they mean nothing, remember that. We are porous in our sleep, that's all."
"Good," says Daniel. He looks at the coffee, bubbling over. "Neither of us are going to drink that," he says, amused.
"No," admits Armand. "But you said you missed the daily rituals. I thought it an easy fix."
Armand's different, here in New York, with him. Hasn’t picked up the damn tablet once. Did find some reality tv and left it running for three days in mute fascination. Has recovered his bank card, or refined his shoplifting technique; Daniel awakes most days to find clothes gathering in his cupboard, and then more clothes. There are rings collecting on the mantlepiece, in the bathroom. They’re an ear piercing away from being a 90s cliché.
Two years out of a divorce and the terrain is starting to reform.
Daniel’s plants start developing an addiction to caffeine. He’s got a rubber plant that’s growing like it’s in the rainforest.
*
It can’t last.
*
“You knew where I lived,” says Daniel, carefully.
“Hmm? Darling?” Armand is knee-deep in his brand new air fryer, cooking forks or frogs or something else unlikely. He seems entranced by the endless possibilities of domestic appliances, something Daniel chalks down to a spoiled and moneyed existence over the past several decades. Nothing like reloading a dishwasher to cure all curiosities.
“You knew where I lived before we arrived,” repeats Daniel. “You did, don’t pretend.”
Armand puts the book down and places the brushes on their stands. Rises slowly.
“I think you’ve known more about me all along than you’ve ever admitted,” says Daniel carefully.
Armand cocks his head. “You know we had our eye on you. You were summoned to Dubai because we had kept you in our thoughts.”
“Sure. Putting an address on a package, that’s easy. Knowing where to turn in a road…. That’s precision, baby. Armand. You’d been here before.”
Flutter of lashes. “We kept tabs. Darling, you know that. We needed to know you didn’t remember.”
“We?”
Long pause. “Very well. I. I needed to know you didn’t remember.”
"Okay, but. I moved to New York years after our encounter," says Daniel. " You were still keeping tabs on me that closely?"
"Louis was keeping tabs on you too," says Armand defensively. "I don't see you flaring out at him."
"Yeah, he read my books. That's different. Loads of people have read my books. I've won literal prizes for my books. I think you're telling me you were lingering outside the flat. Watching me work my way first across San Fran, then New York. Be honest. Did I ever see you?"
"No," he says. Flicker of uncertainty.
"Armand. Did. I. ever. see. you."
"No!” Hesitation. “I don't believe so. When I ... when we were in in Divisadero Street... I was thorough. I wanted to be sure you would never know my face. You should have never known me.”
"But I could have done. I could have seen you, lurking in the shadows while I got my shopping in. I could have seen you on a street. In a bar. You’re not invisible. Even if I didn't know I'd seen you. Something in me might have known you. Tell me I’m wrong."
Stiff, frozen in guilt. "It is a possibility."
"What if that's why...? God. The two of you really did a number on me, you know. What if that's why I'm like this, about you?"
Armand says, quietly, "And what would explain the reverse?"
"No! You don't get to do that. Stop that." Daniel takes a deep breath. "Do you promise? Do you promise that's all. You didn't, I don't know, go on a power high, torture me for another week, drink from me? Or, like, seduce me in some dive and wipe my mind down an alley later? Because I was pretty stupid at that age, I'd have said yes to you in a heartbeat. And I was stumbling around out of it for years."
"I didn't, Daniel. I promise. I was careful. I didn't do that. I was so angry with you - with the idea of you and what you'd done - I couldn't have had you like that."
"Do you swear? Because if you're telling me we've done this - any of this - before..." There’s bile rising in this throat at the magnitude of such a lie.
"I promise you, Daniel." Armand lurches forward, takes his face, anguished. Kisses his eyelids. "If I had allowed myself to you touch you once, I could not have resisted a second or third time. If we had been together, I think I would have loved you, and if I'd had to make you forget an affair, I could not have borne it. Please, believe me."
And this is the practical problem of loving Armand. How can you ever know if you trust him? Daniel tries desperately to look for any glimpse of truth or lie in his face, but all that's there is their damn attachment, he can feel that vibrating desperately. But that proves neither one thing nor another.
“What did you even get from this? God, you really needed a hobby, you know that?”
A flash of self-loathing. “Nothing. Daniel, I gained nothing. Is that what you want to hear?”
“Obviously not!”
“Listen to me. You excavated my life, and now take umbrage that I did the same to you, decades ago. Yes, I know how you like your drinks, and I know how you conducted your affairs. But tell me if this puts us out of balance.”
Oh, that’s annoying. Daniel goes for a walk, get a great relief from slamming the door. The streets are largely empty at this hour, and he puffs out silvery air as he walks, mind twisting. His fault for choosing someone who has kept secrets for five hundred years, doesn’t know how to operate on a remotely normal plain, wouldn’t admit anything unless he was on a rack, and God knows he’d enjoy that too much.
He can't even talk to Louis, the only person who would get it, because that would mean admitting what’s happened since Venice.
He pulls out his phone, texts Kate for the sheer hell of it. Sends a link to his latest, most respectable article. Asks, How's Marti?
Three irritable question marks buzz back. Fair enough, he's not asked about her personal life in years.
She replies, snippishly, We finished over lockdown. Turns out I'm a pain to live with. Genetic defect, I'm guessing.
Daniel says, quite sincerely, I'm sorry. He hadn't met Kate’s Marti, but he'd been pleased she'd found someone. What is this legacy he's given his girls?
Whatever. Go to bed, she tells him. I’m working.
He should eat while he's out, but he's got to no appetite for a chase now, not even a quick sly sip from some unsuspecting bystander. He finds himself on the subway in his distraction, takes a ride across town. He watches the dregs of society rattle around in this tin can. Drunks and delivery drivers and kids entwined. The lights flicker, plunge them into darkness for a few seconds; he looks up as the door between the carriages swings opens. Eyes blazing, Armand slips in.
The delivery guy looks between them warily; Daniel rolls his eyes. "Are you joyriding right now? I'm gonna pull the emergency stop. City can't afford you."
"Daniel," says Armand, not bothering to lower his voice. "Stop this foolishness. Come back home."
They've alerted the attention of the drunk, who starts jeering in a half-hearted way. "Yeah, Grandpa, go on back home. Your loverboy wants you..."
Armand frowns at the interruption. "No thank you," he says, and motions the drunk so he slams his head back into the window, knocks himself out. The delivery guy starts up with an exclamation, clutches his bag and bike, thinks better of it and shrinks into himself. Armand clicks his tongue, puts the whole carriage into a time lapse. They sway, their heads bobbing eerily. Silent chorus to the main production.
Daniel's had enough. "Fuck this. You wanna do magic tricks all night? Knock yourself out." He strides down the carriage; Armand follows mutinously. The lights blinking as they pass.
"Or what, you want to share the shit out of me? Good news, asshole, you can't, because it turns out you've already been haunting me all my adult life. I’ve developed immunity."
Armand catches up with him as he pulls open the interconnecting doors; hauls him back by the jacket.
"What?"
"Daniel," he says, fiercely. “I will not apologise for this, and I will not let you leave me for this. Nothing happened, and you have done far more to affect my life since we met. I will follow you and I will drag you back to your flat and I will lock you in your coffin if you so much as try to leave again. I’ll starve you of blood and air before I let you do something so stupid.”
Daniel fumes, grabs the overhead handle as he lurches with the motion of the train. “Cool, okay. As long as we’re being normal about this.”
"Normal," echoes Armand. He sounds incredulous. "Normal, like a little public spat on the subway, normal? Is that what you want? We are -- "
Daniel seizes him close. "Vampires," he hisses, against Armand's mouth -- "I know that. And I still want something that's normal about us, something that's real, because in case it isn't obvious, I'm very fucking crazy about you, but you're more powerful than me. And I hate the thought of losing even a moment of us. So drag me back home, if you can, but don't you ever steal a damn thing more from me. I want you, every second of you, the good and the bad. Promise me that."
Armand closes his eyes, brows a deep knot. Lips parted like he's trying to drink in Daniel's breath. Like he’s extracting a promise of his own.
“I promise. I’ll break every clock before we lose any more time together. Daniel, I promise you.”
They stay like that, swaying together till the train draws into the station and deposits them on the deserted platform. It departs, taking along with it its hypnotised passengers.
*
Easy to say it. But Daniel’s starting to realise – there may always be secrets. Five hundred years is an absurdly long time to let habits marinade – he’s had seventy on this earth and can’t imagine trying to rewire himself. He can’t even stop wearing glasses.
“Anyway,” he says later. “I guess I set up a lot of Google alerts on you over the last two years. I think I’ve found at least four of your bank accounts. Just. If we're being honest about the whole stalking thing.”
V
There’s a chance the work is always going to be the thing that comes between them. Daniel gets a text about the concert. He looks sideways at Armand, curled about him in bed. He doesn’t want to crack the bliss, but nothing for it.
“The concert’s not far off,” he says, winding his fingers through Armand’s hair. “The crew’s just confirmed their schedule.”
Armand purses his lips, as he always does when they speak of the documentary. He treats it as though Daniel has an unsavoury habit that must be endured. He remains firmly of the view that opening their lives for public consumption endangers them, despite the book being a roaring success and having no impact on their general safety. Well, vampires chatting shit, but they do that all the time anyway, is what Louis says, and none of them has actually dared start anything.
“I guess I’ll go down the day before.”
Armand changes tack; pulls Daniels wrist to his lips and kisses it. “Must you?”
Daniel chuckles. “Yeah, I must.”
Soft caress, lips to each finger. “What is you think you need to do,” he murmurs. “A camera crew can capture the lunacy of this vampire concert. They are competent, they will not miss shots. You don’t need to ask Lestat anything more in this life, and certainly not before the performance, where he will be indulging in… whatever nonsensical ritual takes his fancy.”
“Would you have missed a performance? A single performance, back in the day?”
Armand stops mid-seduction, glowers. “Theatre is a different creature, Daniel, delicate, ever changing, moulded to the shape of the audience, balancing on an infinite number of circumstances. No two nights are the same. Your subject is a static popinjay in pursuit of one thing only.”
Daniel tamps down a laugh, considers this. There’s an element of truth here: Lestat hasn’t changed a whit over this experience. He’s told a tale and balanced the scales, but he’s never truly come to an understanding of why the bullshit circles him. And sure, Daniel’s never been under any illusion as to why Lestat agreed to the project in the first place; it was only ever to win back Louis. He’s piling a lot of hopes on the concert – although, on last check, Louis wasn’t convinced he was coming.
It’s a lot of… fuss, Louis had said doubtfully, when they’d caught up on the old mind-phone.
Yeah, I think it’s all for you.
Lestat doesn’t need to do that. He knows that. He has my heart.
Big gestures. Your boyfriend puts a lot of stock in them.
Not my boyfriend.
Your love.
My love, then. He doesn’t need to do big gestures.
Maybe not. But since he’s gone to all the effort, don’t you want to come and see?
Armand says carefully, “Louis will be there.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“They will have yet another emotional reconciliation.”
Sizable bite of spite. Daniel nudges him. “Hey. Little less of the obvious jealousy, if you don’t mind.”
Armand sits up with flash of heat, takes the blankets up with him so he resembles a resentful yurt. “It is difficult, Daniel. You are the fulcrum of a situation you have created. It does hurt me, and yet you are mine. We cannot untangle this. You reconciled them, set Lestat aflame and on this idiot’s path. And now you will go that concert and direct the cameras as love wins. And in the mean time, I will sit here quietly, and no one must ever know the epilogue. Your book, your documentary – they are falsehoods.”
“Hey, it’s not my story. I’m barely a footnote here. All this is drama predates me by centuries.”
“Daniel, you are being oblivious. You cannot pretend you are simply a chronicler here. You have inserted yourself and changed all our lives. I would be in Dubai still were it not for you.”
“Oh, you wish you were still there? Go on then, go back, give it a try, get back into bed with a seventy year old lie. I forgot how you love a shackle.”
Armand hisses out a breath. “I’m not saying I want that. I’m saying, you are a vampire now. You are one of us, and anyway, you were never impartial.”
No, there probably is no untangling this. Daniel sits forward, takes hold of Armand’s wrists. “Babe. What makes this better?”
Armand shrugs mutinously. The covers fall away. “Nothing, beloved. Your narrative is clear to you, all that remains is for you to film your conclusion. The Vampire Lestat has aired his tale.”
“Well. He’s filled in a few gaps,” says Daniel. “He’s pulled open a lot more. You all turn unreliable narrator into an art form. You wanna have a go? Make it a trilogy? Would that work?”
Thin smile. “Forgive me if I decline. I'm not interested in you stitching together the pieces of a corpse you ripped apart so immaculately in your previous volume. I do not have the gift of retrospection, and I certainly do not possess the luminous personalities of your other subjects.”
Daniel eyes him, plants a sudden, fervent kiss to his bare shoulder. “You’re right, I was never impartial. You know when you drove me craziest? When you were pretending to be perfect. When you were sitting there on your sofa, smiling at me, trying to tell me what to write. I wanted to scratch your skin off until I found you beneath, the real you. Something of me must have always remembered you.”
The lamp flickers, and Armand lunges forward and straddles Daniel’s legs, pins his arms above his head with a vampiric force that means Daniel can’t move them if he tries. Bites his mouth open and draws blood; lowers his fangs where Daniel’s heart used to beat. Tongues deep like he’s looking for gold. Daniel gasps from the pain – arches up – tries to push him further into the gash.
“You wanted to carve me open,” Armand says fiercely, before dipping back into his chest. “You were longing for a monster.”
Not any old monster, thinks Daniel, or maybe he admits it aloud, tender words being pulled from him involuntarily, the riptide of emotion too strong to contain. You. Armand rises over him, a vision in crimson, hair dripping blood, shuddering. Daniel fights against the invisible restraint, desperate to touch, hips bucking fruitlessly. You. There’s a diamond studded in his chest. Lights refracting, blinding.
*
Okay, you know what, he doesn’t actually have to go to the concert. It’s worth typing up four hours of notes for the moment he shares his decision with his lover, who’s so delighted he puts his arms around Daniel’s neck, hoists his legs around his hips, and covers him in crushing, grateful kisses.
A knot slips loose, something like a magic trick.
*
He’s finished the structure for the next book, but something’s bothering him, in a way that writing book one in the immediate fever of the turning didn’t.
It’s dizzying, thinking about years now. He can’t write about it in the same impersonal way he did last time. Daniel knew he’d become immortal, in the way you learn about yourself, like you’ve picked up an incurable disease, or made a shortlist, or been put on a security blacklist. But it hadn’t felt real, not when interviewing Lestat, not when hanging out with Louis, not when draining morons in alleyways.
Not in the same way it does now, when he’s with Armand. There’s a redwood he scratched into with a compass as a kid, a tree that’s roughly the same age as Armand. That’s what he’s in bed with every day. A seed in the ground, five hundred years ago, and Armand, doing whatever. Three hundred years away from freaking out a freshly-turned Lestat.
He shuts his laptop, defeated. Armand looks up fondly from the floor where he’s sitting, inking marginalia into a signed copy of Midnight's Children.
“What’s wrong?”
Daniel takes his glasses off, sighs. “I’m not a good novelist,” he says. “Louis was so fucking young, compared to the rest of you. I knew what he was talking about, there’s records, there’s books and music. Cameras existed. Lestat could be describing his hallucinations and it would take years of research to point this out. I don’t have years. Or, I do, but I know the kids in publicity are hanging their Christmas bonus on this. Try telling 20 something girls you’re literally aging out of their schedule.”
Small, wry smile. “If I tell you Lestat is absolutely hallucinating, does that help?”
Daniel snorts. “No. But thanks.”
Armand waits.
“I just… I need something real.”
Armand puts the book down. Says, carefully, “I think you are looking for truth where it no longer becomes possible, darling.” He stops, bites his lip. “I think it is also not Lestat that troubles you. Not really.”
God, he really is transparent. Who needs vampiric gifts to read his mind? He gives up, swivels in his chair. “Okay. You’ve got me. It’s not just Lestat.”
Unwavering gaze, meeting his own.
“Tell me something, babe. Tell me anything, as long it’s real.”
Armand fiddles with the pen for a few moments, a small frown. Part of Daniel wants to tell him to forget it, wants to join him on the floor and pull him onto his lap. Kiss away that look. Who cares about writer's block? It’s dusk outside, and the light has filtered through the blinds where Armand is sitting, bathing him in the last of the golden light. End of the week; he can hear the kids outside coming back from school, shouting gleefully as they knock into each other.
He holds his tongue, and Armand looks back at him, soft.
“Daniel. You love details. I have watched you cross-examine and rake over every inconsistency. But I will never remember everything. That I remember anything is a testament to the stubbornness of the heart. Ask me the year, ask me about the kings, I promise you I won't be accurate. But I can tell you about an unfinished archway that sat, half-made, for weeks, when the builder went home to his family. I can tell you about the days where the skies opened and poured. They had to stop their work on the river: it rose and flooded the banks. I watched it happen, watched a man whirl down and sink. Can you imagine. Apparently the river is nothing but a mud-filled channel now, running through bits of the city, something to be crossed, dry in corners, barely noticed. But in the monsoon, it seemed like a monster to me. I loved it. There was a warmth in the air; a strange grey light; a sticky damp when I ran, barefoot.
“I remember something else. I remember a wheel, and watching it spin, for hours. Thread, spooling. I suppose someone in the house made cloth. I had a little scrap, barely the size of a handkerchief, stitched up for me. A tree in the middle, little motifs around the edge, the raised threads, little bumps. They were figures, I think. I used to keep it in my pocket, once we were separated. I liked to feel it beneath my fingers, when I thought of home. I don't remember having it later, on the continent, in Venice. I must have lost it on the way.
“Someone dressed me as a princess, once. It must have been in my house again. I'd been crying, and they put finery on me. The wind was so sharp that day it stung my eyes, but I enjoyed being wrapped in the silk, the way it felt. They dressed me in jewels, in gold necklaces and heavy pearls.” He frowns. “That can't be right. Why would they have had pearls. I must be mistaken.”
He shrugs. “You see, Daniel, it’s a fog, and nothing is real, not as you wish it. It was nothing to me. It happened, it was a fraction of my life, it only returns in dreams, and I don't want to know. My life only truly began when I was rescued from the brothel, when my maker found me, and I have no interest in picking up rocks to examine insects. We will divine no truth from it. There are places you don't revist, places like a poisoned river, like a city of broken glass. Keep it there, go around it if you must. I was unloved then. Maybe I always was.”
Daniel goes to him. Brings him back.
Drowns him in love.
*
Best-laid plans. Red haired women, murder, Lestat, the underground Egyptian queen. The visions, meaningless fragments all this time, scattered over nights in pieces, but now finally as one. Flooding Daniel’s dreams, an unmistakable warning.
A voice splinters Daniel’s brain into waking. It’s Louis. Danny, wake up. Have you been having strange dreams, by any chance?
Kinda wish I hadn’t. If we’ve both had them, that means something, right?
I’m here in America, with Lestat. I’m trying to dissuade him from the concert. He won’t listen, but there’s danger in the air. And not from an enemy I know.
I hate to say it, I think I do.
Will you come down and tell me? And help me?
Be there in a few hours.
When he opens the coffin, Armand is already up, fully dressed and sitting upright in a chair, eyes wide and nervous, blazing. “You dreamed it too?”
Daniel jumps out. “I did. What was it? What did it mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s something ancient, and terrible. It has a purpose.”
“Did you get the redhaired women? Who the hell are they?”
“I don’t know, love.” Armand sounds stressed. “There is much I do not know of our kind.”
“See, this is why I keep saying, written records. Right, we’ve got to go, babe.”
Armand doesn’t move. Tracks his movements.
“Where do you want to go, Daniel?”
Daniel glances at him. “We’ve got to go down. I’m sorry, but I reckon Lestat’s going to be the eye of the vampire hurricane, and we need to try and stop it.”
Armand gets up, fretful, leaves the bedroom. Daniel throws a few things in a knapsack for himself, a few things for Armand. He calls out.
“Hey, angel? You ready? We should make tracks.”
The sound of something smashing in the kitchen. Daniel goes to find him, finds him staring at the fragments of a broken mug, as if willing them to reform with his mind. The microwave is lit up and spinning an empty cycle.
“Hey. You okay…?”
Armand comes to at the question, takes Daniel's hands and holds him fast. "Darling. I have a private island. Let's go there instead."
Daniel must have misheard. "You what? Private what?”
"I have a private island out in the Floridian waters," says Armand impatiently. “Let us go there, and sit this out. Daniel. I cannot keep you safe from this threat, it is beyond me, I think, and I --" his pupils are dark; the microwave goes ding -- "I believe other vampires will come. They’ll know what they're doing.”
Okay. Daniel goes to the microwave and pulls the plug and tries to think.
Armand's afraid, of course he is. He doesn't want to come face to face with so many potential enemies. Or with Marius, who seems to be the one to have let Akasha out the cage, and will doubtless be chasing her here. An inept motherfucker, to add to his list of crimes. God, they should have talked about it.
"Babe. I get that it's a convention of maybe the last people on earth you want to see, but we've got to go. We can't leave them. I can't let Louis do this alone. It’s dangerous."
The microwave starts humming a new cycle. In the living room, it sounds like the TV has switched itself on. The news, blaring from a distance.
"Daniel. You cannot possibly help Lestat. You are a child, barely born. You cannot do anything, practically speaking. I will not watch you die."
"Well, I can't hide away. You're the one who told me to stop sitting on the fringes. This is me, getting in. Someone wants my new vamp friends dead. They want your vamp friends dead."
"These are not my friends."
"They were something more."
"And now they are something less. Daniel, cease this foolishness. We should leave."
Fuck. Is this how it happens? He’d had such great plans for how to handle the big disagreements, and they’ve all evaporated.
"You go," says Daniel. "You run to your secret fucking island, Dr Moreau. But I've got to go. Louis is calling."
"Daniel. Don’t do this." A desperate press of the hand again, trying to take the knapsack. Daniel clings to it.
"So come with me. We’ll be okay together, I promise, I’ve got you. I need you."
But Armand’s shaking his head, not listening. "I can't. I can't."
How is such a powerful vampire so perpetually frightened? It drives him crazy. If he stepped up to fight for a single thing, he’d be unstoppable. Instead…
Daniel kisses the vampire Armand’s knuckles. Leaves the apartment, tries to ignore the stabbing pain in his stomach as he gets further and further away.
*
Hours before the concert, three vampires in a room together for the first time. Daniel watches Louis and Lestat with a curiosity, despite himself. Different to how Louis had sat with Armand in Dubai. No careful performance of love. These two don’t sit on each other’s laps, but they’re breathing as one. It doesn’t seem to make it any easier on each other – Louis’s brow is furrowed. Hazards of choosing an idiot hurricane as a soulmate.
Daniel tries to focus on the matter at hand. Doesn’t matter; Louis cocks his head at him.
“Daniel. You look terrible. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
Lestat says idly, “His heart is broken. It will heal, my little bloodhound.” Daniel rolls his eyes, but he wonders, for the first time, if Lestat has divined more than he lets on.
Louis says, “I didn’t know that.” A little suspicious. Darts a quick probe towards Daniel’s mind, frowns deeper when he’s blocked.
“It doesn’t matter,” says Daniel shortly. “I’m here. Are you seriously going on stage?”
Lestat smiles at him, glittery and thrilling, and utterly impervious to anything either of them have to say for the next few hours.
It does matter. In the arena, when chaos implodes and finally forces Lestat to take cover, when death stalks through the concert and kills vampires and humans and alike, when the documentary crew have been shoved in a storeroom but Daniel’s transfixed and seized the camera, and can’t seem to stop filming the scenes around him.
And now, when Daniel thinks he’s finally going to die, properly, forever, because a demon has him by the throat and he’s here, alone, about to be ripped to shreds – this is when he’s hauled to safety by his fucking maker, who has come for him after all, is powerful and fuming, and radiating a desperate sort of love.
“What is fucking wrong with you,” says Armand. Daniel’s not sure if he’s talking about the events at large, or the camera to which he’s still attached. It doesn’t matter. He came back.
They wait for Akasha’s shadow to pass. Armand’s arms around him in a protective embrace. Daniel, clinging back in kind for anyone to see.
*
Okay, says Louis, later.
Yeah, says Daniel, defeated, his heart pummelled, utterly owned.
*
Days after the entire Akasha thing.
After Lestat is kidnapped by the Egyptian queen and eventually rescued, Disney princess that he is. After the flame-haired vampire women finally show up and turn out to be reasonably well-adjusted despite their trauma. It transpires they’re family – Maharet, missing her ancient sister, and her granddaughter Jessie by a thousand years, a nerdy, 20-something kid, newly-turned and quick to learn. Daniel watches them together. Realises something, for after.
After Louis and Armand go from not looking at each other to. Sort of sometimes letting their eyeballs float near each other, whilst maintaining a deeply uncomfortable twelve-foot-wide berth that everyone can see.
After fucking Marius turns up and takes Armand for a long reconciliatory walk, with the understanding that forgiveness is baked into the eternal lives of vampires, and Daniel has to go and talk to some other ancients just to distract himself. He’d met an old Hollywood actor at a party once. One of those British closeted double Oscar-winning call me Daddy nonagenarian fucks, charming, wise, faintly wistful, so used to people hanging off his every word. Sure, and illegitimate kids and lovers popped up from the asylum the day after he died, damaged little daisies out the ground. Same damn vibe. Armand returns, his expression unreadable. Eventually slips an arm through Daniel’s.
“If it helps,” mutters Daniel, because one of the ancients, the unkempt one, is pontificating to the room at large. “I’m not going anywhere. Pop me on a fire and you’re stuck with my crispy remains. Planet could explode in global warming and it’s you and me and the muskrat on Mars. I’m like the gum on the sole of your fancy shoes. You’re stuck with me, babe.”
Armand stifles a faintly hysterical laugh, and Marius meets his gaze across the room as if he can hear the whispered words. Looks amused, as if he’s sharing the joke. Looks fond. Daniel shudders.
Akasha – firstborn mother, monstrous, ravenous, deadly – that sort of direct villainy he got. This is something else to reckon with. Something awful and complicated, a knot that might take years to unpick.
*
Later, after Gabrielle kisses her son on the mouth and leaves him, and Daniel and Louis have to try really hard not to melt down their telepathic wires. After Louis and Lestat leave together for New Orleans, Lestat divinely unbothered by the nonsense he’s responsible for. After Jessie takes his number and sends him three funny gifs about what they’ve just experienced and leaves, red hair bouncing in its ponytail. After Raglan James sends a fairly ratty message about the clean-up.
*
After all that, the last on Armand’s private island, far from everyone, just the two of them curl up on a sofa by the vast windows, watching the waves lap the shore at midnight.
Daniel groans, exhausted. “Enough. That’s enough spooky shit for a fucking decade.”
And Armand starts laughing, and laughing, and laughing, helpless with it.
“I have never enjoyed the company of vampires,” he admits eventually, merry and remorseful at once.
“They’re way too much. There should be laws on how many are allowed in a single room at once. And I’m going to have redraft the whole damn book now. Probably turn it into a two-parter. God help me. My editor’s going to have a field day. And the camera broke in the stadium, so we won’t have any of that killer footage from the concert.”
Armand, laughing at his plight. “Darling, you are the maker of your own problems. We could stay here forever and never once think of them again. You could be free of editors whenever you wanted.”
Daniel sinks his head into Armand’s shoulder. Fresh scent of sea-spray. “That would be the dream. Let’s not leave this place for like, fifty years minimum. Just wipe all their brains first so they won’t know where to find us.”
Silence for a few minutes; Armand’s fingers tangling through his hair.
“You know you wouldn’t want that.”
Daniel sighs. “No. I know. Addicted to all the nonsense life throws at us, what can I say. That’s why I wanted this all along, I guess.”
A nose to his cheek. “I know it. And I thought I could take no more of it, the noise and nonsense. But it’s different now, with you. Funny. All these years… thinking of you as a curse. But you were a gift, all along.”
“Yeah? You’re not still mad about how it all went down? You weren’t embarrassed to have the only person visibly entitled to their pension attached to your side in that room? I can’t believe young and hot is an actual Law someone immortal decreed with their actual words, by the way.”
Merry eyes, sly unbuttoning of shirt. “I think, darling, in five hundred years I have never been happier to have someone by my side.”
*
Every night for the next thousand years could evaporate like this, thinks Daniel later. God, he’s really gone.
Waning moonlight through the glass, and a gentle patter of rain. The tide is pulling back. Daniel clears his throat.
"So, I've got a notion," he says. "I don’t think you’ll like it, but it’s happening. So, you know. Get ready."
Armand raises an eyebrow but otherwise doesn’t move from where he’s ensconced in Daniel’s arms. "I’m not so foolhardy as to tell you what to do."
"Good. Hold onto that thought."
"Dearest." The smile, tugging at his lips, giving Daniel hope.
"Okay. So, when we go back home, I'm going to tell my girls. What I am. I actually think, once again, that the great laws are stupid, arbitrary, and invented by weird old Europeans on a power high. So, I'm enacting vampire Brexit. I think Maharet had exactly the right idea with Jessie. The girls are bright young women, they take after their folks despite their best efforts. And one day, maybe next month, maybe next year, Kate or El will barge in through the door, notice I’ve shaken off a degenerative disease; see you and make some agonising assumptions; and they will make such a ruckus I promise you, there’s no amulet you could make that’s strong enough to protect us."
Armand is quiet, still. Daniel pushes him up, searches for any signs of dissent.
"Don't get me wrong. They'll still be mad and hate me. They'll find a way it's my fault. They'll make even you feel like dirt. But that's okay. That's their prerogative. That's daughters, and it’s what you get if you ignore them all their childhood in favour of chasing stories. But… the more I think about it… we're immortal. I don’t know what that means yet, but I'm not wasting the next sixty years hiding from them only to lose them anyway."
He's interviewed both Louis and Lestat now, and if there’s one lesson loud and clear, it’s that there’s no punishment in life worse than being haunted by the thought of your daughters. He doesn’t say that. Probably never will, not to Armand. That’s a Claudia-shaped knot that may never be freed.
Armand still hasn't made to speak. It's making Daniel itch.
"Okay," he says awkwardly. "That's me done. So go on. Lay it on me."
Armand leans forward. Kisses him so gently, so damn sweetly it makes Daniel's chest ache.
"Dearest," he says again, and his expression is impossibly soft. "You change what it means to be a vampire every day. I would not have it any other way."
"Really?" He looks him in the eyes. "You're not going to get weird about this? Not even, like, ninety years down the line?"
Armand smiles. "Come, Daniel," he says. "Let us return to New York, and upset your daughters."
"You think you're kidding. They're going to be so mad."
"And then, in return, I think I must tell you something."
“Oh my god. Go on.”
A moment of hesitation. Then: “This has been a strange year. Recent events have had me casting my mind backwards, and I think I would like to travel a while. You are going to be busy with your books and films, and I would like to discover something of my own.”
“Anything on your wishlist?”
Armand looks thoughtful. “You know your dossier on the third shelf I’m not supposed to know about?”
“Sure.”
“I imagine much of it is wrong, dearest, but I would like to read it. Use it as a prompt. I would like to roam east a while, and see what I remember.” He bites his lip. "I think I will look at the broken glass."
Daniel pulls him close. Two things tugging inside him. He doesn’t wanted to be parted for even a second -- and his heart is filling at what's hearing. “And you want do that alone?”
Armand entwines long fingers with his. “I don’t think I’ll be alone. When I need you, I think you will come. When I call you.”
Barely a question. Shorn of complexities, of who they are, or were. Daniel looks down at their hands, old and young, linked and knotted, in love. Nothing about them should make sense, but there’s still a simplicity to the conclusion.
He thinks for moment. “You still have that amulet for me somewhere, right?”
Affectionate. “I do. Of course I do.”
“Well, there we go. Let’s put your blood on mine. Call me and I’m yours.”
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