Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

One more pull, just one more. The man’s blood is viscous with the dehydration of long, chemically fuelled hours on the dancefloor—he isn't one of those dealers who are above getting high on their own supply—but it surges into Daniel's mouth like it wants to be there. Each mouthful leads irresistibly to another swallow, which draws another mouthful, which requires one more swallow, and the fresh mouthful follows: a smooth, seamless sequence. With each swallow comes a flash of memory as intoxicating as the blood itself, drawing Daniel’s mind deeper into his victim’s.

This one had lived a small life, sleazy and grasping. In the blood, he becomes worthy. In the blood, there’s a fascinating savagery in the violence he’d inflicted and poignancy in his many disappointments. The few moments of happiness and connection he’d experienced shudder and spark like magic, all the more precious for being buried in failure and mediocrity, unseen and unnoticed until Daniel unearthed them. Perhaps it's the flash of the man's son that finally gives Daniel the strength to stop drinking—he’d barely seen the child since leaving their mother, but there’s a helpless affection in the images, and what right does Daniel have to judge an absent father?— but more likely the stuttering beat of the man's heart sends a subconscious signal to withdraw. By the time Daniel detaches the man is nothing but dead-weight in his arms.

"Fuck!"

Daniel flings the body at the wall. It hits with a wet thud. His instinct is to rip into the guy’s corpse like it’s his fucking fault and storm back into the club for more victims until he’s so glutted he can’t finish one, but instead Daniel covers his face with hands, blocking out the sordid alley and the mess he’s made, and concentrates on forcing the hunger and fangs back inside, on exhaling the rage into the dark night.

He'd really meant not to kill this time.

Daniel has been keeping half an ear on his surroundings in case another desperate addict stumbles out of the club looking for a place to score, and his ears are pretty goddamn sharp these days, so he jumps and spins round when someone behind him, already close enough to touch, speaks.

"I wouldn't lose too much sleep over that one, fledgling."

Despite the unfamiliar voice, Daniel’s first thoughts on who might be lurking in the dark and calling him "fledgling" leap horribly, traitorously to his maker. This is the only excuse he has for taking a solid second to piece together who has actually crept up on him in the night. Blonde hair. Stupidly sculpted jawline. Palpable main character energy. Fucking hell.

"He was planning to take all the valuables you had, including,” Lestat's eyes drag up and down Daniels' body, a mocking curl to his mouth, “your snazzy leather jacket." He caresses Daniel’s lapel with a sharp, gleaming nail. "He thought you a helpless old man." Simultaneously, his tone manages to convey both how stupid the mortal had been to think he had the upper hand, and how helpless and young Daniel is compared to him.

Over the past year, the healing power of being back in Louis de Pointe du Lac’s good books has done its work and Lestat appears to have shaken off the aftereffects of decades dining on rats and failing to call a plumber. His clothes are clean and modern, his attempt to assert control of the interaction is practiced, and he exudes power.

Daniel no longer has a true digestive system, but something in his guts tightens. Back when he’d been a thin-skinned, piping-hot vampire ready meal he’d gone toe to toe with not one but two immortal beings, murderers who had a history of leaving him for dead, and he’d barely blinked. Faced with Lestat, it’s a struggle to stop his eyelids fluttering and his head bowing in submission. Only decades of practice bullshitting keep his neck straight and his eyes steady.

Is it that he has more to lose now? Or is Lestat doing some kind of Level 4 vampiric mind magic bullshit that Louis, in his gentle naivete, forgot to tell Daniel about? That’s come up a few times, starting about half an hour after Daniel was turned when he discovered how much of the shitting-yourself-extensively stage of the process had been glossed over. 'Another question about the tractor salesman Louis, you mentioned Lestat’s bloody shirt-cuffs, but were you also caked in your own effluent?’ is absolutely on his list of questions for the sequel that he hasn’t entirely given up hope of.

Or is the root of Daniel’s fear that he recently published a best-selling non-fiction book about how this particular powerful immortal being fumbled the love of his life? That could be it. If Lestat murders him, a sequel is definitely off the table. Daniel summons the spirit of every particularly pathetic Lestat moment that Louis disclosed to him, and leans into his tried and tested instinct to be an asshole.

"He thought I was a pathetic old fag who'd blow him for the promise of a few pills and never make a fuss when he beat me to a pulp afterwards." Daniel gropes in his pocket for a cigarette. Having something to do with your hands always helps in awkward social situations, and there is something about the draw and burn of the hot smoke that eases you down from the high of a feed.

"And still, you curse his timely demise?"

"Yeah, well, I've never been a believer in capital punishment."

Lestat tilts his head. He has the unblinking gaze of a cat. Daniel makes a mental note to keep track of his own blinks. It's more of a giveaway than a seventy-year-old man with a French manicure that something is not normal.

The tip of Daniel's cigarette sparks to life before he can fumble out his lighter. Is that a favor or a threat? The book has only been out for a few months, and Louis had told him the man wasn't a big reader. Maybe he hasn’t read the book.

"Yet you do not balk from the kill," Lestat observes. "This is the second person you have killed tonight."

"I've also never been a believer in going hungry unnecessarily."

"A pragmatist then. That can be a useful trait for a vampire. For the first century or so."

Daniel draws deeply on his cigarette and doesn't take up Lestat’s obvious attempt to engage him on the nature of vampirism. He's torn between irritation at yet another know-it-all immortal who thinks they can see the whole span and worth of someone's life at a glance and hunger for guidance wherever he can get it. But Daniel is a stubborn old bastard, and he's sure that, between the two of them, Lestat is the one with the greatest urge to hear Lestat's voice. Sure enough.

"Reason and practicality can get you through a crisis, fledgling, but eternity requires more subtle tools."

Daniel's spine prickles with irritation at the word fledgling. “I've heard people accuse you of a lot of things, but no one ever mentioned subtlety."

The instinct to freeze or flee before a superior predator kicks in before Daniel's conscious mind registers the shift in Lestat's mood, less of a darkening than the withdrawal of a conviviality Daniel hadn't recognized until it was gone.

Reader or not, the book is about Lestat's number one hyper-fixation. He's probably read it.

While Daniel’s instincts have braced him for an attack, reason points out that his throat hasn’t been torn out. Lestat's eyes are instead fixed at some point beyond Daniel. He risks a glance over his shoulder. There's nothing there. Ah, the thrill of working with the unhinged.

"No." Lestat's voice has grown quiet and a little distracted, like he's listening to something that even Daniel's preternaturally sharpened ears cannot hear. "It's never been one of my gifts."

Perhaps he can back slowly out of the alley while Lestat is otherwise engaged. Or perhaps he has about as much chance of evading him as a new-born gazelle does a lion.

"Look man, if you're here to shoot the messenger, the whole point of the idiom is that you shouldn't do it."

Lestat's attention snaps back to him. "Ah yes. Your message. And whose message do you carry? Louis? The Talamasca?" Lestat draws closer. "Your treacherous maker?"

"A little of all three, though I tried to use the latter sparingly, given the givens." If Daniel had an ounce of self-preservation, now would be the time to try and soothe the savage beast. Maybe flatter Lestat a little. "And your daughter, of course." Shame that he’s about as good at flattery as Lestat is at being subtle.

Immobility seizes Daniel’s body as Lestat leans in close enough to bite. "Yet only one of them faces the wrath of all our kind.”

"Louis can take care of himself."

A fond smile quirks the edges of Lestat’s mouth. His psychic grip on Daniel’s body remains firm. "He is formidable. But greater numbers can overcome even the strongest among us. And in all that looking inward, he misses more than he realizes.”

"Are you here to rip my head off, or not?" Daniel bursts out.

Lestat keeps him in suspense for several long, long seconds. "Not," he eventually concedes. The force clutching Daniel flows away like water, but he resists the urge to scurry back from Lestat immediately. No, he steps away in his own time, dignified, unhurried, nothing to do with the churn of fear and arousal that close proximity to Lestat’s coiled power has set off.

"Well,” Daniel says, “if that’s all then I'd better do something with this corpse before anyone else comes looking for a quiet place to catch up."

"I have a proposal."

No doubt one that Daniel shouldn’t even entertain, but as ever, his curiosity gets the better of him. "So far listening to proposals from your kind has a one hundred percent success rate at getting me bitten and drained."

"Poor little fledgling." Lestat's voice deepens in faux sympathy. "Rich, strong, immortal, a best-selling book-"

"You know what, fuck you."

"-chosen to be the sole heir to centuries of power… but abandoned to twist in the wind." Lestat continues, softer now, even as his eyes bore into Daniel, inexorable, alien. "I know what that's like. I know how important guidance is."

As much as he doesn't want it to, a spark of empathy lights in Daniel's chest, and he can't tell if he kindled it or it's some kind of Armandesque mind-fuckery. Worse is the bit of him that perks up, ready to beg like a mutt for a few scraps of what, mentoring? From Lestat? This is a new low. He is sure he keeps the longing from his face, but Lestat seems to know anyway.

"Did Louis not offer to help you, little fledgling?"

"Louis has his own shit to deal with." Which is true. Equally true is that Daniel, guiltily, has had a book to write and sell that he was hoping to get forgiveness rather than permission for. "And I'd rather be a serial killer than live in Dubai."

Unexpectedly, Lestat laughs, loud and genuine. "It is a soulless edifice." He steps back, withdrawing with disconcerting abruptness into a matter of fact tone. "It takes a level of control to succeed at the little drink that few fledglings possess, but you have lived more life than the typical fledgling and had strong blood infused into a strong mind. I believe you might be able to learn it a few decades earlier than usual. With assistance."

"And you're offering that assistance."

"I am."

"Where was all this openness when Louis was learning?" asks Daniel, suspicious.

"If we cannot learn from our mistakes, what hope do we have for eternity?" he replies, which is avoidant at best.

"Thanks for the hot tip." Daniel hopes the sarcasm wasn't as obvious as it felt.

"I offer more than bromides."

Daniel waits, but no elaboration is forthcoming. "In exchange for what?"

"Another generous gift: the chance to correct your painfully one-sided journalism."

The initial shock stuns Louis into silence.

Louis? Daniel says into his mind, Are you there?

I assume you’re not asking me for permission. Louis wouldn’t say that he’s holding a grudge about the book—the scales between them are very much weighted in Daniel’s favor, and getting mad at him for publishing a story is like getting mad at a scorpion for stinging you when in 1973 you were the one who programmed it to sting—but he has a healthy awareness of Daniel’s independence.

Would you give me permission if I did? Daniel asks, his tone as close to tentative as it gets.

You’re both free to do what you like. And apparently what Lestat wants to do is break the habit of a century and tell his story, not to Louis, but to Daniel, of all people. Daniel, whose last book drove a wedge of silence and awkwardness between Louis and Lestat that is yet to dissipate. He suggested it?

Left New Orleans and came all the way to New York to find me.

Did he say why? Louis has been practicing giving Lestat the benefit of the doubt, but it’s hard when shit like this gets sprung on him.

I’ve got some theories, but they’re as yet unconfirmed.

Such as? Louis asks.

Revenge, distraction. Or maybe he just misses the spotlight.

Revenge, Louis has come to understand, several decades too late, is not typically high up Lestat’s priority list. He can be wrathful, sure, but he’s too mercurial for grudges and drawn out plots.

If he was going to hurt you over the book, he would have done it already. Lestat isn’t much of a planner, he tells Daniel.

Once, this had been a quality that frustrated Louis. The machinations of his more recent ex have cast it in a more flattering light.

A distraction, now that is a very real possibility. The one thing Armand hadn’t exaggerated was how pissed off all the other vampires would be about Louis blabbing and, among the many things about the book that Lestat hasn’t taken well, the threats to Louis put him particularly on edge.

The spotlight too is plausible: Lestat loves its warm glow. But would he really sell his story, the precious secrets he’s clutched close all these years, to get in it? Lestat goes into the spotlight to put on a show, to play at being something else, not to bare all.

Why don’t you ask him? Daniel barges back into Louis’ thoughts. Aren’t you two friends these days?

We are. Louis affirms. They haven’t had a formal falling out this time. But… communication hasn’t been as open of late. You could say that books and the past are particular sore spots.

Not that a single word of actual recrimination for the content of the book had ever passed Lestat’s lips. If it had, Louis could have pushed back. They could have had it out, for better or worse. Instead, there’s just been worry that Louis would endanger himself, which is hard to hold against someone, and an end to whatever ease they’d all too briefly had between them.

Maybe if you read the book yourself you two could talk about it, Daniel suggests.

And maybe when Louis publishes a book about the failure of Daniel’s first marriage, he’ll finally understand why Louis isn’t exactly keen to go over it all again.

I told you, it’s on the-

Top of your pile, Daniel repeats with him. I’m starting to think all your claims to intellectualism were posturing, that pile is moving so slowly.

Just, be careful, Daniel, that’s all. These are deep waters.

Careful with him, or careful of him?

Typical of Daniel, to cut to the heart of the issue with a single question. What to give more weight to? Lestat’s power and anger, flaring hot and sudden? Or Lestat’s vulnerability, the rawness Louis had seen in that shack in New Orleans?

Both, he settles on.

Within the week Lestat—the Lestat, a small part of Daniel can’t help but help but crow—is sitting in Daniel’s apartment, in the most comfortable armchair that Daniel usually sits in himself, casting his gaze over the clutter of Daniel’s human life with an unimpressed expression.

They’ve discussed the ground rules, and while neither has exactly compromised—Daniel refused to concede editing power over the book’s contents to Lestat, Lestat made it clear that if disputes over the final version cannot be resolved to his satisfaction he will learn from Louis’ mistake and immolate Daniel alongside his laptop—they both know where they stand. Neither of them want to involve the Talamasca and, to Daniel’s surprise, Lestat is not only okay with Daniel discussing the contents of the interview with Louis, he seems positively keen for Daniel to do so.

“So, where do you want to start?” Daniel decides to seize the bull by the horns. “Top ten grievances about the book?” If this interview is an ass-backward way of getting his complaints to Louis, it would explain a lot.

With his eyes, Lestat manages to convey that a top one hundred would be insufficient to capture the magnitude of Daniel’s literary sins, but with his mouth he says, “I am not here to pick over what has already been said. If that is how Louis sees things, that is how he sees them.”

They’re only beginning their journey together, so Daniel refrains from an active scoff of disbelief. “That’s very mature,” he says instead, and if there’s a ring of sarcasm to it, Lestat is going to have to either get used to it or tear his throat out now. “Is there anything you’d like to add any context on then? Or perhaps you’ve got some questions? The Talamasca made me take out a lot.”

The bait dangles between them for a long moment before Lestat responds. “There are things that Louis was not aware of or misunderstood. Perhaps, in time, we can discuss some of them. However, in essence, he was right. I destroyed our family with my secrecy and greed. I let him and Claudia down, not once, but many times.”

‘Secrecy’ Daniel isn’t surprised by, other than by how readily Lestat has admitted it. ‘Greed’ gives him a moment’s pause—what was Lestat hungry for? Sex? Blood? Power?—but he decides that it’s not the moment to pursue it. Daniel prefers to already have at least some idea of the answers he’s seeking, and ideally proof they happened, before he goes after them openly.

Vampire memory exceeds anything Daniel experienced in either his chemically enhanced youth or declining later years, but out of habit he likes to use a notepad. In it Daniel scribbles: New Orleans = secrecy and greed. When he looks up, Lestat’s eyes are boring into him so hard he’s surprised there aren’t two holes in the top of his head, and Daniel has the uncomfortable sensation that Lestat knows exactly what he’s written and is not impressed. Daniel braces himself for a jab, verbal or mental, but Lestat simply shakes his hair back and moves on. For now, he’s sticking to whatever his own agenda for this interview is.

“What little you included about my life before I met Louis is so laughably inaccurate that it would be more effort to correct it than to tell my story from the beginning. We can address your errors in that regard as they arise.”

“Great!” says Daniel brightly, ignoring the jab. After everything Louis told him about Lestat’s secrecy, Daniel has been braced for a cagey, point-by-point rebuttal of his book, in which Lestat asserts Daniel’s mistakes while offering as little of his own story as he can get away with. Daniel is ready and willing to fight for every scrap of backstory he can, and expects to get more than Lestat offers willingly—he’s never been as on top of his game as he is in immortality—but he hasn’t prepared for having it openly handed to him. It almost knocks him off his game. “Where and when is that? Paris at the end of the 18th century?”

“I was born in 1760, the seventh son of a Marquis,” Lestat begins, at the beginning beginning, apparently. “Our lands were in the Auvergne, a backwater wilderness. There was a saying in France in those days, that if you lived in the province of Auvergne you could get no farther from Paris. True in spirit, in my experience, if not geographically."

"You're an aristocrat? Why doesn't that surprise me." Daniel makes a note to set his researcher on the track of the De Lioncourts of the Auvergne, just in case Lestat is a charismatic conman, claiming a vaunted European lineage in classic conman fashion.

"If any man gave lie to the idea of noble blood, it was my father,” Lestat replies. Of course he hates his father. Daniel would have put money on that, if anyone was taking bets, even without the hints he’d got via Louis. “Successive generations had squandered any wealth the family had until we squatted in our crumbling castle like rats."

"Aw, your castle was too draughty?" the dig slips out before Daniel can police his tone, but this at least, Lestat does not seem precious about. He takes no offense and actually nods in agreement.

"Draughty, old-fashioned, dirty. Our lands were beautiful, but largely consisted of wild forest. What little farmable land there was had sickened after years of mismanagement, and most was untenanted. My father's execrable personality and inflated sense of his own dignity did not allow him, or any of us, to pursue forms of enrichment outside tithes, taxes and marriage, so we rotted there, like the vines on our mountainsides.”

One of Daniel’s favourite parts of starting a new project is that moment, at the beginning, when you first begin to sense the possibilities in the story. At least five lines of enquiry have already illuminated in his mind, each tracing a different path to the heart of the thing. He forces himself to take them in calmly rather than haring off down the latest one and starts methodically at the beginning.

"The seventh son: that's a big family."

"I was the seventh of eight children, but only three of us survived to adulthood. I was the youngest to live, heir to nothing, a spare for the spare."

"No sisters then?" Daniel tries to picture a castle full of Lestats in the French wilderness, but it simply doesn’t compute.

"No. At least as far as I am aware, we were all boys. Though my father didn't consider that girls were worth much, so I cannot attest with confidence to anything that happened before I was born. I wouldn't have put it past him to expose a baby girl in the forest to avoid the spectre of dowries. He had a medieval sentiment.”

Okay, Lestat really hates his father. Check and double check.

“How did five of your brothers die?”

“I am not precisely sure. Most of them died before I was born, or when I was very young, and it was not something we talked about. Babies often died in those days, from childhood conditions that are now easily treatable, or infection, or the misfortune of being born before a hard winter.”

"How did your mother handle all this tragedy?"

So far Lestat has told his tale with a matter of fact detachment that Daniel had not expected. But at the mention of his mother, the mask cracks.

"Gabrielle," he says. The first family member he's deigned to give a name to, which feels significant. He doesn't continue immediately, but his face journey, as the kids say, indicates he has a lot to say.

Sensing that Lestat is lost in thought rather than stonewalling, Daniel waits.

"She withdrew," Lestat continues eventually, "most completely. Perhaps to protect herself, but at the time it felt like she truly did not care. She looked through us to hide the contempt in her heart, for my father and, as they grew into his coarse and vulgar image, for my brothers."

"Did she have contempt for you?" Daniel asks, forgetting, as he always does, that he’s trying to be on his best behaviour for at least the first hour.

"Non," Lestat snaps back, more quick than certain. Daniel can tell that Lestat heard how unconvincing his own answer was and wonders if he'll admit differently. "No," he reaffirms instead, “not contempt. A lot of the time, she was… indifferent, but she cared for me more than the others, in later life if not when I was young and unformed. Most of the time she was as cold to me as she was to everyone. She didn't intervene between me and my father or brothers, as brutal as they could be, but in private, she would trust me with some of her secret thoughts, and when I was desperate, when I truly needed her, she would help."

This strikes Daniel as a relatively low bar for motherhood, even setting aside that the “young and unformed” stage seems like the ideal time to get involved if you don’t like the way your children are turning out. With great self-restraint, he resists writing “mommy issues” on his notepad in case it seems trivialising. But maybe Lestat is in his head because, despite Daniel’s tact, he grows agitated. From one moment to the next Lestat’s body fills with energy and Daniel wonders if he’ll get up and pace, but he stays in his seat, leaning out of it towards Daniel as he speaks.

"I do not want you to think that she was some mere meek and broken wife. Gabrielle was extraordinary.” For a moment, Lestat seems to struggle with the enormity of encapsulating his mother's extraordinary qualities. Then the words begin to tumble out. “I never, in all the years of my human life, heard her speak only to say something ordinary. She didn’t engage with the sordid realities of the de Lioncourt household, because she truly was better than the rest of us.

“She was Italian by birth, from a large and wealthy family, and although she was barely more than a child when she was sent to marry my father, purely so that the rest of her family could say their daughter was a marquise in France, she had already lived in Naples, London, Rome and Paris, seen more of the world than the rest of us combined, been educated by the best tutors. She was," Lestat adds, with a wry twist to his mouth that acknowledges the absurdity of what he is about to say, "the only one of us who could read."

Daniel can't help his eyebrows going up at this revelation. "You couldn't read?" he asks, too aghast to temper his tone.

"Not truly until I was in the blood, when it became easy to pick up. I began to learn in the monastery, as you heard from Louis, but did not have the chance to cover more than a few basic prayers. For the most part I relied on memorisation for prayers and, later, plays."

"Your mother didn't try and teach you to read?"

“No.” Lestat falls back in his chair, mood swinging back towards sombre. "I believe that she enjoyed being the keeper of this one secret knowledge, this clear evidence of her superiority to us. She had books, many books it seemed at the time, though her collection could not compare to more cultured noble libraries, and whatever fresh hell arose around her, she could always retreat into them. She would sit there, as my father raged at all of us and my brothers raged at me, and she would do nothing, she would say nothing, she wouldn't even look up from the page. Like none of it was happening at all. She didn’t need any of us. She never needed anyone. Only extreme pain in me could ever wring from her the slightest warmth or interest." He laughs, “How I hated those damn books.”

As Lestat speaks, an image forms in Daniel’s mind, so crystalline-sharp that he knows it cannot have originated from him. A woman, in her fifties if he had to guess. Her hair is a soft, thick cloud, shot through with grey, but with enough blonde left that it shines gold in the light. Her face is unmistakably the progenitor of Lestat’s, a little softer than his, but angular and well-structured. Her eyes, the shade again familiar from Lestat, look past him. All he wants, with a surge of longing so powerful that it swells painfully in his chest, is for her to turn her eyes on him, to look at him, to see him. Her eyes remain fixed beyond him and as the image fades, she turns away.

Daniel comes back to himself on the awkward realization that his eyes are welling with actual blood tears over Lestat’s mother, which he blames on whatever psychic backwash blew that image into his mind. The only saving grace is that Lestat himself is occupied in staring into the distance while copious blood tears run unchecked down his face and doesn’t seem to have noticed. Daniel dabs discreetly at his own eyes with the large, navy blue handkerchief he’s started carrying around since most of his bodily fluids transmuted into blood. He’s not much of a crier usually, but he does run hot, and nothing freaks people out like blood sweats.

“Difficult mothers,” Daniel says, scrambling for something to yank Lestat back, “that’s something you and Louis have in common.”

Lestat’s attention snaps back to him so completely it’s like two hands grabbing Daniel’s face. “Florence had an admirable vicious streak, but she was a small woman, content to take the fruits of her son’s labour with one hand and turn him away with another, hiding behind God to justify her cruelty, unable and unwilling to think outside the rules society proscribed. She never appreciated everything Louis did for her.”

“Uh huh.” Tender spot located. Not wanting to get bogged down in mother-in-laws when mothers remain on the table, but noting Lestat’s unabated protective streak when it comes to Louis, Daniel steers the conversation back to the 18th century. “Did Gabrielle appreciate what you did for her?”

To his surprise, Lestat laughs. “She may be the only one who truly did,” he replies, amused. “Not that I could do much for her when I was young, beyond the hunting I did for all the family.”

“You were a hunter?” Again, Daniel finds himself re-assessing his view of his subject. Despite Lestat’s talk of his childhood poverty and his reputation as an avid hunter of people, taking down animals in the great outdoors seems at odds with his urbane sophisticate persona.

“Eventually. As you touched on in your book,” Lestat manages to imbue the word ‘book’ with so much disdain Daniel has to swallow down the urge to interrupt and start a fight about it, “I made several attempts to leave the family fold. Legitimately, through joining a monastery, and a few years later when I stowed away with a travelling troupe of actors that had passed through our village. Both attempts ended in my being forcibly dragged home and punished with beatings and confinement. Both times I lost all hope that I would find purpose and freedom in life, I gave myself up to despair and ennui. There was nothing to do and nowhere to go. Both times, my mother came to me and offered me a lifeline.

“After the monastery, she took me to a kennel and procured me two mastiff puppies, which with time I bred into a fine kennel of hunting dogs. After I was dragged back from the acting troupe, an even greater transgression with a more severe punishment, she bought me a flintlock rifle and a mare. Because of her gifts I could hunt game on our lands, I had company and affection from the dogs, but more than that, she gave me purpose and legitimacy, one area in which I was more than a nuisance, where I could take action, where there was something other than the deadly ebb and flow of life without change that everyone else gave themselves up to without thought or complaint.”

Right, right, he’s not like other girls. At this early stage, Daniel refuses to be distracted from the practical. “I thought you were all broke. Where did she get the money?”

“Gabrielle kept a few jewels, handed down from her grandmother. Each one had its own precious history, but on the most vital occasions, she sold some.”

“So she’d part with jewels when you were sad, but not when there was a particularly lean winter?”

Lestat looks unimpressed by this question. “That kind of run-of-the-mill expense would have seen them all sold before I was born,” he says dismissively. “She had her own priorities, and in this case, it was an excellent investment in all our meals. By the time I was sixteen I was bringing in enough game to feed the whole family.”

“Finally giving you a role within the family. Did that improve your relationship with them?”

“Hah! Anything I did for them was only their due. Indeed, after my two older brothers married and began to propagate, it became something of an affront, that they needed their failure of a little brother to eat. They had to act like my contribution was nothing, or face up to their own inadequacies. Non, things continued as they were, all of us a little better fed, all of us full of resentment, me the wild creature who would not conform, they my oppressors and jailors. Until the wolves.”

“The wolves?” Daniel asks. Just from the way Lestat says the word, he knows something important is coming.

“In the winter of my twenty sixth year, one of the worst winters that I could remember, a pack of wolves began to terrorise our lands. The wolves were stealing the sheep from our peasants and even running at night through the streets of the village, so the villagers asked me to kill them, as was my duty. I loaded myself up with every weapon I and my mare could carry—an excellent flintlock rifle, my muskets, my father's sword, a mace and flail from the armour on the walls that hadn’t seen action in centuries—and I set off with my two biggest mastiffs into the frozen forest to find the wolves. I was unhappy and ferocious and I wanted a good battle.”

Once again, Daniel finds an image that is not his own forming in his mind: the white snow, the dark woods. Lestat’s deep voice coils around Daniel and draws him deeper in, enfolding him until the weight of the cold and snow-muffled silence lays heavy on his skin, in his ears, in his lungs. Lestat is talking, at least Daniel thinks he is, but the words and the syntax that Daniel would normally pay close attention to fade and blur like brushstrokes, loose and expressive at first, but soon too precise and controlled to be discerned, even by vampiric senses. There is only the memory, in all its sharp brutality, as Lestat finds the wolves. Daniel lives and breathes through Lestat’s eyes as lives spray gorily across the forest floor in a frantic, rage-fuelled fight to the death: wolves, dogs, horse, all ripped apart. But against all odds, not Lestat.

When it’s over, it takes a few moments for Daniel to reorient himself in the warm, well-cushioned present.

“What the fuck was that?” he asks.

Lestat flicks a non-existent bit of lint off his knee. “A pivotal moment for me. As a journalist of integrity with a dogged thirst for the truth, surely you want every detail?”

“Is it memory? Imagination? A scrupulously accurate recording?”

“Memory, as much that can be unentwined from imagination. As you know, these things are rarely clear-cut.”

“I can barely remember my thirties, and you remember 17-something like an HD movie?”

“Forgetting has always been more of a struggle than remembering for me.”

“Alright for some,” Daniel mutters.

“A mixed blessing on both sides, let’s say.”

This, Daniel can concede.

“Have you considered the role that external factors might have played in your memory issues?” Lestat asks.

Daniel tenses. He doesn’t want to discuss his memory issues. “Extensively.”

“Substances, yes of course, you wrote of them at length in your biography,” says Lestat, with a dismissive wave. He has apparently done his research. “I was thinking of more focused, personal interventions.”

Daniel has been thinking about grappling, from the safety of his new, Armand-sealed vampiric brain, with some of the holes in own life, but he’s not sure if this is the time, place or guide he would choose to go deeper with. “We’re not here to talk about me.”

Thankfully, Lestat lets the notion go with a small shrug.

“Can all vampires do that?” Daniel asks. “Take you inside a memory?”

“It takes a practised grasp of the mind gift, but it’s not uncommon. A less controlled version happens when blood is shared.”

With a start, Daniel remembers Louis saying that, at the trial, Lestat took him back to his memory of the night Claudia was turned. He hadn’t thought Louis meant it so literally. Although, shouldn’t Louis’ mind be inaccessible to Lestat, as his maker? Was what Louis felt a sort of resonance or backwash, from other minds in the theatre that Lestat could communicate with?

A barrage of questions has erupted in Daniel’s mind. He sets them aside for later, and forces his attention back to Lestat’s ongoing story. Get the story straight first, the details come later.

“Things were different after the wolves,” Lestat says. “The last vestiges of fear and respect for my father and brothers evaporated, they seemed like nothing after what I had faced. Hunting was no longer the escape it had been, my wanderlust returned… and I met Nicki.”

Nicki, as in Nicolas the violinist? Despite Lestat’s warning that Armand had misconstrued a lot, Daniel feels his whole perspective bracing to shift.

“You knew him when you were human?” Daniel asks. At some point in Dubai he had written Lestat’s hapless first love off as, at best, a pale proxy of Louis, the proto victim-slash-lover to the eventual eternal companion-slash-preoccupation that Lestat would find in Louis. Nicolas as a connection to Lestat’s human life, a partner met on a more equal footing, feels weightier.

“Yes. Nicolas de Lenfent.” Lestat collapses in on himself, just a little, like releasing the full name has taken something physical out of him.

“Tell me about him,” Daniel prompts.

“He was from the village, our village, the son of a local draper. Our paths had not crossed often as he was six years younger than me, but we had been to the same school, the same church, the same festivals. By the standard of the day he was my bourgeois inferior; in reality, he was my superior in every way.” As Lestat talks, the words flow with greater ease, and his whole posture softens. He seems almost to take pleasure in saying the name of his late paramour. “Nicolas was brilliant, beautiful, brave. Artistic. His father was very successful in his trade, a rich man, and had sent Nicolas to study law at the Sorbonne in Paris, but while he was there he had fallen in love with the violin. He abandoned his legal studies to study with Mozart-”

“The Mozart?”

Lestat blinks at him with unconvincing innocence, like he isn’t enjoying this little name drop. “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, yes. Normally he would not have taken on a pupil who only started to play the violin in adulthood, but Nicki was so talented, so devoted, that he won a place with him. His father was furious. He cut his son off, summoned him home, and threatened to break his hands if he did not set aside the violin. Nicolas was forced to practice only in secret to avoid his father’s wrath, but he refused to return to Paris to study the law. He defied his family and would not renounce his art, even for them.”

In contrast, Daniel infers, to Lestat’s own capitulation to his family’s edicts. It’s not lost on him that Lestat, according to him, experienced actual violence rather than only being threatened with it, but Lestat’s admiration for Nicolas’ bravery in sticking by his dreams seems sincere.

“How did the wolves bring you together?” Daniel asks, trying to steer Lestat’s words without disrupting them.

“The villagers were grateful to me for killing the wolves, and as I said, his father was a draper. They used the fur of the wolves to line a red velvet cloak, a token of thanks, and Nicolas presented it to me, with some new boots.” Lestat’s eyes turn dreamy, and Daniel is ready this time for the image that Lestat slides across to him, a young man with big brown eyes in a long brocade jacket. Attractive enough though, in Daniel’s opinion, not a patch on Louis.

“It was a beautiful cloak, finer than any clothing I had ever owned, but I could barely focus on it at first, he was such a vision. He had the same dark, curly hair he had had since he was a boy, the same beautiful brown eyes and sensitive mouth, but he was now arrayed in all the latest fineries of the style they wore in Paris. I stood there in threadbare clothes mended seventeen times over, ashamed at the contrast between us, but his eyes were shining as they looked at me. He had volunteered to present the gifts because he wanted to hear the story of how I killed the wolves. My brother Augustin was annoyed to see me given such grand items of clothing and said I would be impossible, but Nicolas whispered to me, as he kissed my cheek goodbye in the custom of the day, that he too was considered impossible, and that only the impossible could do the impossible.”

Daniel’s ears prick up as something in what Lestat says rings familiar. Where has he heard that phrase before?

“It was only when Gabrielle told me about how he had gone to Paris, how he had rebelled against his father, that I understood why I felt a connection to him, that we might have a hunger for more in common,” Lestat continues. He comes to an abrupt halt, more in affront than obedience, when Daniel holds up a hand to stop him.

“Back up. Only the impossible can do the impossible. Aren’t those the first words you said to Louis?”

“Technically, I said them to Lily.”

This, Daniel does not dignify with a rebuttal. Lestat huffs impatiently as he explains, “Nicolas was on my mind when I met Louis, and so the phrase slipped out. There was a certain similarity between him and Louis that had initially caught my attention.”

“I’m assuming it wasn’t physical,” Daniel interjects.

Lestat gives him a flat look. “They were both very beautiful, but no. When Louis pulled a knife on his own brother I looked into his mind, this exquisite, violent man. I saw at first glance, in his cynicism and self-destructiveness, in his capacity for philosophising and ruthless self-examination, the very twin of Nicki.”

“How romantic.”

“However,” Lestat continues, packing a truly impressive level of condescension into the word, “that is only what drew me to Louis in the moment. I followed him all that first night, as he tended to the kingdom he’d painstakingly built up from the paltry resources allowed him—beset by dependants and enemies, bowed down by his country’s tedious, hypocritical morality—and I saw that, for all his voluminous sorrow, there was a ruthless pragmatism and a passion for beauty that offset that darkness.” Lestat’s voice is soft, almost enraptured. “Perhaps I wanted to rescue him, as I had not been able to do Nicki… but I also saw in him the chiaroscuro of a beautiful soul, wonderfully balanced, deep enough to sustain for a thousand lifetimes.”

“So what,” Daniel asks, “you thought it would be cute to use your ex boyfriend’s pickup line on your new squeeze? How does that work?”

His words snap Lestat out of his romantic mood. “It simply happened to be when Louis appeared,” he says, acidly, “I had no control over what time he arrived at the brothel, I was not poised to spring magic words into his head at the perfect moment. If he’d come ten minutes earlier or later he would have heard some banal back and forth about local drinking houses or transatlantic ferries. He probably did, and it was so dull it didn’t stick in his head.”

“Uh-huh.”

Lestat’s voice grows impatient. “If I was half the mastermind that you seem to think I am, we would have nothing to discuss for this book. And we are not talking about Louis right now.”

“Feels like we are,” Daniel can’t resist saying.

“Nicolas,” Lestat stresses the name, “would not be as well equipped to live with his darkness as Louis. But for the moment, things were not yet that dark.”

Daniel pretends that he needs to flick back in his notes. “You said his father threatened to break his hands,” he counters.

“We had troubles. We also had each other. I dawdled a week before going to find him, but when I did, we talked and drank wine all day. The words poured out of us. He told me everything about Paris, all that I had hungered to know for years: the theatres, the people, the fashions, the dirt and the glamour and the art. I told him of my life as I'd never done another person before. We talked about a thousand things we had felt in our hearts, varieties of secret loneliness—how I hunted my father’s lands and sometimes didn’t speak to another soul for days, how he was surrounded by people at home and in Paris but found no kindred spirits—and the words between us seemed to be essential words the way they only ever had in those rare occasions my mother talked to me.

“And the music! He played Mozart on his violin for me, and I could not believe the sound he made. Music then was the church, and folk ditties in peasant gatherings I wasn’t invited to, and whatever travelling performers churned out if they passed through the village. This was like nothing I had ever heard before: the rawness of it, the intensity, the rapid glittering torrents of notes, each translucent and throbbing, that came out of the strings. He played with a passion I had never seen given to art before, he played with his whole body, he pressed his soul like an ear to the instrument. When he finished I could only stare, until he was frightened and asked me what was wrong, and then I kissed him, I kissed his violin, and I cried, helplessly, I couldn’t stop.” Lestat laughs, as far as Daniel can tell half self-deprecating and half proud of his extreme reaction, and there are tears in his eyes at the recollection. “He was overwhelmed to have produced such a reaction in me, but not disgusted, and the very next morning I was underneath his window. I asked if he wanted to come down and go on with our conversation. And he did.”

For the next couple of hours, Daniel allows Lestat to draw him into a detailed portrait of his burgeoning friendship with Nicolas, seemingly as intense and whirlwind as any his daughters had had as teenagers. When Lestat gets particularly caught up, images and immersive memories swirl out from him and scoop Daniel up, deposit him in the stout little wooden room in the inn they talked in throughout the night, at the campfires in the woods that provided a safe haven for Nicolas to play music to a rapt Lestat and for “our conversation”, which with the timeless arrogance of youth that straddles endearing and infuriating, they considered ground-breakingly, uniquely intimate and sparkling. If Daniel concentrates on the words within the memories he can see they are speaking not just French, but some antiquated, differently accented version of French that the little of the modern language he knows doesn’t help with at all, but lodged as he is Lestat’s point of view, the meaning of the words is clear to him.

Against his will, a certain fondness for the two naive youths starts to build in Daniel’s chest. He shoves it down as best he can. Lestat may have “a way about him”—thank you Louis for that understatement—but Daniel is damned if he’s going to swallow everything down on his terms.

“I’m not getting cynicism and self-destruction from all this,” he says eventually. So far, the Nicolas Lestat sees is at worst sardonic.

“Neither did I, at the time. I thought Nicolas was worldly and sophisticated, sarcastic and dark-humoured. We would debate… everything. I hoped the new secularism that was bubbling up in the years before the Revolution would free people from superstition; he thought it would erode the ties that held society together and leave us lost in a sea of relativism. I told him that I thought art and music and those who made them were blessed and good, that the joy they brought was holy in its own way, that to give and receive happiness was always good, and he told me flatly that sin always feels good.”

Lestat’s shoulders rise and fall in a very French parody of confusion.

“I thought he spoke as the educated city dwellers spoke, for the sport of debate as much as from belief, and that had I told him acting was a sin he would have defended it. I thought he found the same joy and connection that I did in our relationship, in his music. Hadn’t he defied his family for art and passion?” Lestat leans forward and addresses this question to Daniel with intensity, like Daniel could give an answer that would mean anything, then falls back in his chair, strings cut. “I thought we were happy.”

“Now you think differently.”

“Now, I do not know. I never will know. I believe that there was always more darkness in Nicolas than I appreciated, but I hope not as much as he later claimed.” Lestat trails off, in the grip of some memory Daniel itches to probe, but then snaps back. “We are getting ahead of the story.”

“You finally had a friend,” Daniel says, summarising the past two hours.

“Yes.”

“Were you lovers?”

“Of course,” Lestat replies, seemingly genuinely nonplussed that that had not been clear. “We made love in the little room in the tavern, in the woods, in the-”

By now, Daniel can sense a certain tang in the air when a memory is coalescing in Lestat’s mind with intent to share, and he rushes to interrupt. Not that he wouldn’t be at least a little into that—he has eyes and a newly reinvigorated libido—but presumably whatever “evidence” Lestat has to show him is ten times more intimate than Louis waxing poetic about black tar heroin sex, and it feels reckless to slip into POV pornography mode in their very first session. Daniel is not going to risk Louis ripping his head off unless it’s for something really good.

“Was he your first male lover?” he asks.

“Yes.” Lestat settles back down to conventional story telling with a smug air that suggests he thinks he won something when Daniel turned down his last show-and-tell offer. “I believe Nicolas had had a dalliance or two with fellow students in Paris, but there were fewer opportunities in the Auvergne. I had lain with several girls from the village, and with an actress from the drama troupe I had tried to run away with, but no one of the same sex.”

“And?” prompts Daniel, when Lestat does not elaborate.

“And what?” Lestat parrots back, insolent and confused.

“And what was it like, exploring your sexuality in a time when the god-fearing masses considered even good old-fashioned heterosexual fornication a sin? Were you afraid? Were you shocked? Had you thought about being with men before?”

This time, Lestat’s laugh rubs up Daniel’s back like a cat being stroked the wrong way, harsh and braying. “Perhaps it is hard for someone raised in this puritanical Protestant outpost to understand, but it was not that big a deal to me.”

“So what, you were openly making out in the tavern? Going round to meet his family? France may have been the first country in Western Europe to decriminalise sodomy,” yes, Daniel has done his research, “but that didn’t happen until 1791, and you’ve just spent all night telling me how backwards and medieval rural France was, so I find it hard to believe that there was zero conflict in-”

“Non, non,” interrupts Lestat, “of course, it was forbidden. Of course, we kept it secret, we fumbled our way through, we felt like were discovering something new and unknown. Yet life is full of forbidden things that continue to happen, and there was not the same focus on sexual purity that permeated your,” he corrects in the face of Daniel's glare, though his tone is not sincere, “apologies, other countries even a century later.”

“Rural 18th century France was a bastion of sexual equality, got it.”

“You put words in my mouth.”

“When the ones coming out of yours smell like bullshit.”

Exasperated, Lestat throws his hand in the air. “It was not a transgression that shook me at my core, to love Nicki. It was a practical impediment that we could not be together openly, but it was more revolutionary to me to connect with someone as an equal, on an intellectual level, to discuss feelings and hopes and dreams, to make love and feel it was a communion of our souls. That was the part that shook my foundations, that thrilled and terrified me, not that he was a man, or what a god that had already forsaken me might think.”

In Daniel’s opinion, there’s some rose-tinted hindsight going on in this explanation, but some sixth sense makes him feel he’s approaching the limit of how hard he can push. “And Nicolas was similarly iconoclastic?” he asks, in as neutral a tone as he can. Let’s say, mildly sarcastic.

At first, Lestat simply shrugs, like he is done with Daniel's prurient and childish disbelief in his advanced sensibilities. But then, almost against his will, he seems to engage with the question, and turns thoughtful. Since Lestat is trying, Daniel gives him a few long moments to consider.

“I assumed so at the time,” he eventually says, haltingly, like new ideas are occurring to him as he speaks. “I often assumed that we felt the same way for the same reasons. Although he spoke of sin, called us partners in sin even, he did not shy from our union. He was enthusiastic, and tender… but there was a self-destructive urge in Nicolas that I only perceived later. He may have welcomed a forbidden, sinful relationship as another way to court disaster,” Lestat swallows, “and corrupt us both.”

For a moment tears brim in Lestat’s eyes, but before Daniel can regret pushing so hard, Lestat snaps, “Does that satisfy your parasitic urge for misery?” and puts Daniel’s back right back up.

“It’s a start.”

They stew for a while in mutually affronted silence, avoiding each other's eyes. The burst of anger has dissipated Lestat’s tears, but hasn’t entirely cleared away his newly introspective mood. Eventually, Daniel feels the weight of Lestat’s disapprobation, which had been palpable enough that Daniel is once again unsure if mind magic or sheer force of personality is at play, lift. He represses a sigh of relief and takes the opportunity to study a pensive Lestat de Lioncourt. Although he must sense Daniel’s scrutiny, Lestat does not react. Daniel wonders if this is because a fresh young fledgling is so beneath his notice that it doesn’t register as an intrusion, or if Lestat simply doesn’t bristle at attention, if some part of him courts it no matter the circumstance.

“I was aware,” Lestat begins, just as Daniel has almost been lulled into a hypnotic state by his perfect profile, “even at the time, that I had underestimated the magnitude of the struggle that Louis faced with his sexuality. I saw, or thought I did, how much guilt and shame he struggled with in his human life, but I overestimated the power of the Dark Gift as a weapon against this guilt and shame. I was not patient enough when Louis struggled, not once my mind was closed to his ordeal. When finally my mistake did begin to dawn on me, I turned what should have been self-recrimination into yet more impatience, because I did not want to face yet more ways I failed him.

“Your book, Daniel, showed me how much I was wilfully blind to, even where I thought I had plumbed the depths of my failure. And now, on our first night together, you show me the sin stretches back even further than I thought. I can see what they both see in you.”

The words are complimentary, but Lestat’s tone is bleak. Daniel has to bite back the urge to ask what his maker sees in him.

Lestat’s attention shifts to the other side of the room and automatically Daniel looks over at the same spot, only realizing when there is nothing there that he had instinctively expected someone else to have entered the room. They are alone.

“Yes. You are right,” Lestat breathes, still avoiding looking at Daniel.

“Holding yourself responsible for homophobia in 19th century Louisiana might be a slight overcorrection,” Daniel says, uneasy, glancing again at the empty spot Lestat seems fixated on. After a moment or two, Lestat drags his gaze back to Daniel. “The one thing that could help Louis escape that was time. Which you gave him.”

The only person more startled than Daniel that he’s said something to comfort Lestat is Lestat himself. For a moment, neither of them know what to say.

“Upon reflection,” Lestat says, resuming his story without comment, “there were additional factors that contributed to my, as you observed, unusually enlightened state.”

“I never said that.”

Lestat continues as if Daniel had not spoken. “We were isolated in our lonely castle, but in some ways sheltered, given the chance to form ideas free from the pedestrian limitations that wider society and the church might impose. Once the illusion of my father’s moral authority was shattered, which happened early, there was no one to tell me what I should think or feel. No one I would listen to anyway.”

“What about your mother?”

“You are right. I always listened to her.” Lestat’s face softens in a way that Daniel has quickly come to associate with Nicolas and Louis. And his mother, apparently. “But Gabrielle was never conventional, and she never reproached me for breaking the rules. We were not, on the surface, very similar. She was contained, I was… too much, always causing a fuss and upsetting people. Despite this, we understood each other. If anything, she is the one who guided me to see that the rules we followed were conventions agreed by those with power, not actual right or wrong.”

“Can you give me an example?” Daniel asks. He feels like they’re on the edge of something important.

Lestat sighs, but complies.

“At first, after I killed the wolves, I was not well. I went to my bed, in the same clothes that were soaked in the blood of the wolves, my dogs, my horse, and I stayed there for days. Even more than my failed attempts to run away, it had changed something in me, the orgy of violence and death. I had gone to the wellspring of anger and hate that long brimmed inside me, and found it deeper and more satisfying than I had dreamed.

"I had previously fantasized about killing my father and brothers,” Lestat admits this casually, without shame, “but it seemed like a distant, idle thought, something dropped in my head by the devil, not something I would ever do. After the wolves, I hated the rest of my family more than ever for their stupidity and lack of understanding of what I had gone through, and in that hate the violence felt closer than ever. For the first time I thought I could actually do it, enact the evil that lived in my soul. I did not want to be bad. I would even say that, in my human life, I had a preoccupation with goodness. It was this feeling that I might already be evil that paralyzed me.

“I might have stayed paralyzed forever, if my mother hadn’t pulled me out of my malaise. I could barely explain it to her, but Gabrielle understood: about the inertia and hopelessness of our lives, about the ordeal that sets you apart from those around you. About the rage that drives your mind to dark places, but does not have to define you.”

A faint memory-image forms in Daniel’s mind, of Gabrielle, a little more haggard perhaps than she had been in the previous image he’d seen, limed in firelight that draws out the dark shadows under her eyes, but still beautiful. A desperate urge to reach out and touch her wells within the memory, but he knows she would not welcome it. A small laugh from Lestat dispels the ache of the scene and returns Daniel to the present.

“Of course,” Lestat is saying, “as she told me that night, although she understood my murderous urges, her fantasy was of abandoning the reason and responsibility that confined her, stripping all her clothes off, going to the inn, and taking any man from the village who would have her into her bed, no matter how crude or old or ugly.” Daniel blinks, but Lestat is already moving on. “That was also the day she first told me that, though she thought she had years left yet, she was dying. I had observed her declining health, but had not realized how serious it was. Perhaps after all it was the spectre of losing her, more than anything else, that distracted me from my despair about the wolves.”

Daniel opens his mouth to backtrack and query the casual way that Lestat delivered that supremely fucked up anecdote about his mother’s gang-bang fantasies, but something stops his words. The memory of Lestat’s fragility, so recently dissipated with regard to Nicolas and Louis, hovers into view, and for the first time he hesitates to pursue a line of questioning not because he fears Lestat’s anger or distraction, but because it feels like he might be about to turn over a stone that Lestat may not be able to cope with.

An inconvenient urge to protect the interview subject from the interview process isn’t unusual, but Daniel is mildly disgusted with himself that it’s happening this early. With Louis it had at least taken a few days. But in Dubai Daniel had a human’s self-righteous sense of moral superiority to buoy him up against an evil, predatory species. Now, he’s on the inside, a predator himself.

Officially, Daniel considers the matter deferred rather than cancelled. It may not yet be clear if it’s worth pursuing the inadequacies of Lestat's long-dead mother, but in his mental notes he underlines “mommy issues”.

“She was the only one whose opinion I truly valued,” Lestat continues, seemingly oblivious to how heavily his elegy to Gabrielle’s unconventionality has landed, “and she was happy that I had someone. It was her dying wish that I break free of our prison and pursue my dreams, in Paris.” He claps his hand together briskly and stands. “But that is a story for another day.”

Daniel glances at his watch. “Already? We’ve got time.”

“Not if we are to fulfill our other purpose. Let us hunt, Daniel Molloy.”

They go to Prospect Park, where Lestat does something to confuse a reckless late-night jogger deeper into the park. With the emotional detachment of an experienced coach assessing a new prospect, Lestat watches Daniel attack and drain the man. The exertion of the run heats the man’s blood and pumps it hot and fast into Daniel’s greedy mouth, so that he feels like he’s drinking from a fire hydrant. His victim is forty-nine, four years out from a divorce kindled by apathy and ignited by an affair with a colleague. The divorce, initially taken lightly, had devastated him in a way he hadn’t expected, and it is only recently, with fifty approaching, that the man has decided to climb out of the pit of loneliness and failure and live life again. Getting fit was the first step, but he was too embarrassed to run during the day, when sleek young people would inevitably outpace him. With the men, he could take it in his stride, young bucks flexing as he once did in his time, but the bouncy young women brought an unbearable awareness of his lost potential and physical deterioration.

When Daniel fails to stop before the blood loss is fatal, Lestat doesn’t criticize or wince. He steps in for the last few faltering beats of the man’s heart and uses his own blood to heal the neck wound before carefully wiping away the residue, explaining that obfuscating cause of death is helpful whenever possible. Daniel already knows this, but to be polite, he lets Lestat explain it to him anyway.

“You never know when the police will be lazy, perhaps declare it a heart attack.”

In this case, the man is a bit too blood soaked for Daniel to hope for that, but he has been working on being a less messy eater, so he takes the advice on board.

Lestat bids Daniel conceal the body, then reviews Daniel’s performance while Daniel hauls the corpse to a particularly steep, densely wooded area. His new strength means the weight of the body is almost negligible, but the undergrowth is a bitch, especially if you’re trying to leave it undisturbed.

For the most part, Lestat gives him a good review, but he concludes by saying, “You go too deep, fledgling. As fascinating as it is to crack open the human soul and dive inside, your hunger is too strong, and the blood and the story combine into an irresistible force.”

“Fascinating? I thought human beings were barely a step above cattle to you?”

“My darling Louis, in his quest to make sense of the chaos of the world, remembers the things that fit his agenda and lets the inconvenient slip away.” It’s the closest Lestat has come to a rebuttal of Louis’ interview so far, and Daniel’s ears prick up. Perhaps his subject’s determination to pretend to be the bigger man will slip more easily in a less formal interview setting.

“So you never called human beings our ‘savoury inferiors’?”

“Ha!” Lestat snorts in amusement at his own historical wit. “Well that is a simple fact, well said. It does not negate the beauty to be found in death.”

Having successfully ensconced the body in an overgrown area where it will hopefully not be found immediately, Daniel stumbles back to the path. “How do I fight an irresistible force then?”

“You must hold your fascination with them in check before you begin to drink. When you reject this indulgence, restraint for the blood itself will follow.”

“That sounds a lot less fun,” grumbles Daniel.

Lestat shrugs. “If you wish to indulge, we can focus on more sustainable disposal methods for your home territory, but I thought you sought not to kill.”

“I seek not to kill because I'm hangry. I want to indulge when I choose, not every time.”

“Sensible. In this day and age, especially when you are a public figure, it is good to be in control of your wake of destruction. We will go again. There is another human heartbeat not far away and it will help if you are less hungry.”

He strides off into the darkness, and after several minutes following him, Daniel hears it too, the enticing thread of a single heartbeat in the ceaseless cacophony of the city. This time it’s a vagrant, conveniently already isolated from other human eyes, and with Lestat’s advice ringing in his ears (and admittedly, the full belly), it is easier to detach from his vein before it’s too late. When Daniel lays the unconscious man down next to his belongings, his life is largely a frustrating mystery, but crucially he is still breathing. With a mixture of guilt and gratitude, Daniel tucks all the cash he has on him deep into his victim’s pocket. Unexpectedly, he feels worse about this one because he isn’t dead and will have to cope with the blood loss. Vampire morality: entirely nonsensical.

Despite feeling more warmly towards Lestat than ever before, Daniel can’t help but ask, “Where was all this useful advice on moderation when you turned Louis?”

“Today’s interview is over.”

“So it’s off the record then. I just don’t understand, when you knew he was struggling with killing, why this wasn’t something you tried.”

“How do you know it wasn’t?” Lestat asks, evasively.

Well he’s going have to evade much harder than this to shake Daniel off. “Are you claiming you did try and teach him the little drink?”

Lestat sighs. “Louis was young, in human years as well as in the blood and, as much as he might wish to deny it, restraining a lifetime of well-earned contempt for most of humanity. He did not have the control for un petit coup, or the patience to endure me as his mentor as well as his lover.”

“Ah yes, a good teacher always blames their students.”

At first, Lestat seems ready to brazen his claim out without elaboration, but as they walk his eyes swing to his other side, almost as if there were a third person walking with them, and he sighs and says more.

“I too lacked patience. I had decided to embrace my monstrousness whole-heartedly, and I wanted the same for him. Demanded it, in fact. I told myself it was best for him. Conveniently, it was easiest for me. You find me a more mellow monster these days. And, I have had practice.”

“Practice?”

“When you are a vampire of certain power and age, established in one location, fledglings are drawn to you. You can either immolate them at a distance until they learn to stay away—that is the approach your maker has taken since the destruction of the Paris coven—or teach them enough that they leave you alone. I have found mentoring the occasional fledgling a reasonable trade for their help catching rats and advising me on the modern world.”

“And why were you catching rats in New Orleans?”

“Enough! I have had my fill of your questions tonight. We will resume tomorrow.”

And with that, he’s gone. “What time?” Daniel shouts uselessly into the dark trees. Great. Now he’ll be stuck hanging about his apartment for half the night. The man’s worse than FedEx.

Chapter Text

The sun is close by the time Daniel gets home, but he fights off the pull of sleep as long as he can, reviewing the night’s notes and impressions.

Against all odds and expectations, not only had they covered a lot of ground in day one of their interview, being mentored by Lestat hadn’t been awful. Out of loyalty to Louis, Daniel tries not to compare them, with mixed success. In the first chaotic days of Daniel’s turning—after he awoke in an empty, lightly cracked penthouse, bursting with hunger, new life, and the last stinking dregs of his human digestive system—Louis had been a life-raft, he can’t deny. It had also been awkward as hell.

On the one hand, Louis had felt guilty for leaving Daniel alone with Armand to be murdered. On the other, Daniel had just spent two weeks hearing how much Louis didn’t enjoy exactly the kind of hunting that he now had to teach Daniel to navigate, and the second thing Daniel had done (after his first murder, but before a much needed shower) was check that the interview Louis had tried to destroy was still in the Cloud. They’d powered their way through the minimum level of mandatory vampire training and parted with goodwill and mutual relief.

In contrast to both Louis’ teaching style and Lestat’s own more emotional behaviour during the interview, Lestat had taken a detached, analytical approach to their hunt. Maybe it’s a mark of Daniel’s desperation more than anything else, but he’s… grateful. Having someone who knows what they’re talking about seriously contemplating practical advice for him soothed a panicked part of him he hadn’t fully realized was there.

Even in the privacy of his own mind, it’s an embarrassing realisation. The little humiliations of this second adolescence just keep coming.

Daniel reviews the tapes from their first session and discovers, with surprise and a little amusement, that even during the portions of the tape when they were sharing memories Lestat is still talking, not painting in every visual detail, which would be impossible, but conveying the gist. Do the words conjure the images? Or is it the kind of mental multi-tasking that he has discovered comes so much more easily as a vampire, psychic conversations ongoing as the body operates seamlessly in the human world?

These are all questions he can’t prioritise. As much as he has to learn, it’s important not to get distracted, or complacent. The interview may have been easier than expected so far, but even the vague shape Daniel has of Lestat’s past tells him they have much, much worse to come. The known incidents could cause several explosions. He dreads to think of the known unknowns—a week with Magnus, Nicolas’ suicide—let alone the unknown unknowns.

No, dread is the wrong word. Daniel prides himself on being as ruthless as himself as he is with anyone, and he knows it’s more like anticipation. What a fucking story. If he plays his cards right, book two will outsell the first one.

Daniel had been raring to get right into Paris the next night, but apparently human Lestat was as melodramatic and unstable as immortal Lestat, and they have a whole-ass nervous breakdown to dissect before the story moves on.

According to Lestat, while debating with Nicolas if and how they could theoretically live in Paris while penniless and presumably disowned, he spontaneously faced the bleak vastness of death and entropy and was driven to the point of madness by the understanding that he would never understand anything, that there likely was nothing to understand, and all that awaited all of them was the abyss. He raved until he and Nicolas were thrown out the inn and then wandered the halls of his family home crying like a demented wraith, questioning his family about the meaning of existence until they all thought him mad.

“Had you taken anything?” Daniel asks. “Sounds like a bad trip to me.”

“The tawdry paths of your mind drive me to despair,” Lestat responds. “If you had been there to counsel Nietzsche we would have lost reams of philosophy.”

Which is not precisely a denial, but LSD was probably harder to come by in 18th century Nowhereville, France, so Daniel lets it go, along with the implication that Lestat considers his existential questioning to be on the level of the greatest modern philosophers: he just doesn’t have the patience for that conversation.

“A homegrown manic episode then. Had that happened to you before?”

Daniel sees, through the door that Lestat has left ajar between their minds, the vague shape of other incidents. He gets only a few details—various tantrums, crying jags or inappropriate bouts of laughter over the years, Lestat often confined afterwards, alone and ignored in cold draughty rooms, sometimes for days, until he could get a hold of himself—before the thoughts are folded away.

“Not to this extent,” Lestat says. Then, he reconsiders and adds, “At least, not since I had become stronger than my father, who grew blind and decrepit in his dotage, and vital to filling the dinner table. My behaviour placed my family in something of a dilemma, now I was harder to discipline. They ran away from me and my existential questions about death and God like chickens fleeing a fox.”

Away from the ajar door between their minds—Daniel isn’t completely sure yet, but he thinks it goes both ways—Daniel tries to get a firmer hold on the few details he did manage to glean from Lestat’s mind. He writes the witches’ place? and bipolar disorder?? on his notepad.

Out loud he asks, “What ended the incident this time?”

“Nicki,” says Lestat, voice weighty with reverence. “He took me to one of our favourite clearings in the woods, sat me in the sun, and played to me until I could no longer deny the beauty in the world.”

The image of Nicolas as he was passes between them, hair and violin gleaming in the sun, so tall to Lestat’s eyes that Lestat must have been curled on the ground like a child as he watched him play.

“And that fixed it all?” Daniel asks, a little dubious.

“It was enough to hold onto in the moment: the goodness of beauty.”

It’s not the first time that Lestat has mentioned goodness, but it jars as harshly as ever with the entirely amoral, hedonistic Lestat that Louis and Armand had described. Was this a preoccupation that had faded with time, or one that been shattered by circumstance? Did it endure to become a blind-spot of Louis’, or was it no more than an affectation Lestat was trying on now for the sake of his future public image? More fundamentally, what does the goodness of beauty even mean?

“Equating beauty and morality tends to be a slippery slope down into nasty things,” Daniel says, trying to sound out Lestat’s meaning.

“I am more than aware that the worst monster can wear the handsomest face,” says Lestat, conveying with the arrogant tilt of his head that he refers, proudly, to himself in both instances, “but I speak of the beauty of nature and human creation, which can be found anywhere from a finely carved statue in a church, to village children dancing at a festival.”

Daniel’s eyebrows lift, buoyed irrepressibly by his scepticism. “Are you claiming to have a reverence for human life?”

“These are the notions that filled my head at the time.” Lestat shrugs and sweeps a hand through the air, casting both beauty and morality aside as unimportant with the gesture. However, the delicacy of the memory is clear to see in his expression when he says, “Nicolas’ playing returned me to myself a little.” His eyes softening even further he adds, “And my mother helped.”

“She deigned to come down from her tower once more. Generous of her.”

Lestat narrows his eyes in real annoyance. “She was ill. Facing the knowledge that far too soon her soul would spin off into an abyss, her body would rot and putrefy, and that all her life would amount to nothing but the years she had suffered with us all.”

Daniel holds his hands up in mock surrender. Message received: don’t take jabs at Saint Gabrielle.

“I had tried not to let my madness touch her,” Lestat continues, “but despite all she was going through, she came to me, her whole manner tenderness, concerned that it was the spectre of her death driving me to distraction. I tried to explain it to her, poorly as I barely understood it myself, but as always she comprehended more than I did. Even Nicki thought on some level that I did these things to torment normal people and set myself apart, and wished I would quietly let it go. My mother knew that I had to fight and rail, that I knew no other way.”

Once again, Daniel is lifted from his chair in New York to sit before a fire two hundred years ago. Gabrielle seems smaller, and has lost something of the regal bearing she had in Lestat’s earlier memories of her. The hollowness of her face, the brittle round bones of her wrists, send a sharp stab of futile shame through Lestat, him the provider, unable to provide her with anything. He wants to fold those delicate bones gently in his hands, to warm and hide and protect them, but such gestures have never been welcomed by his mother.

"You're such a fighter, my son,” she says. The wall that usually sits behind her eyes is thin, and behind it is an intensity that answers the intensity in his, or rather in Lestat’s, chest. "It has always been that way with you. But you'll get over this. For the moment, death is spoiling life for you. You’ll come to see that life is more important than death.”

“She knew that Nicolas and I talked of leaving,” Lestat says, and it is almost a shock that the sound comes from the room in the New York, from another person and not Daniel’s own mouth. He drags his eyes away from where Gabrielle had sat, back to Lestat, the real Lestat, with difficulty. “She had gold for us, the very last of her gold. I did not want to leave while she was alive and abandon her to die alone in that place, but she said that if she did not die knowing that I was in Paris, that I had escaped, she would go mad.”

“No more gifts!” cries Lestat’s voice from the past, and Daniel is back in the memory.

Gabrielle is standing in front of him now, her normally calm voice angry as she says, “You must go. I don’t care what you do when you get there, whether you dance while Nicolas plays the violin on Champs-Elysees or turn tricks in Pigalle Square, you must go.”

Suddenly, she is in his arms, or he’s in hers, and it’s so unfamiliar that the analytical part of Daniel’s brain wonders if this is the first time Gabrielle has hugged her son. Lestat holds her as tight as he dares, marvelling at the desperate strength and heartbreaking fragility of her wasted body as she presses her cheek to his chest and speaks with feverish intensity.

“I have kept you here, as surely as your father, out of selfishness, to be the other half of myself.” She pulls back and runs her hands down his arms. Her hands are small enough that she is not able to wrap her fingers round his biceps, and she seems to look with satisfaction on the contrast, squeezing his arms a little too hard. “I have kept you here for the pleasure of seeing you ride out on your horse, upright and beautiful, to roam the mountains and carouse with the village girls. For the thrill of you angering your father and brothers, questioning everything, letting nothing go, ruining the complacent peace of their lives.”

Her fingers comb into his hair now, covetous, proprietary. Her voice drops to an eerie whisper. “You have been the man in me. The secret part of my anatomy. The organ women do not have. I have been afraid to live without you.”

For a long moment, she looks into his face. The wall behind her eyes is fully down now, and for all that Lestat has talked of some perfect unity of understanding with his mother, in the memory he is full of confusion and turmoil, her words a shock to him. She releases him. “But now, you must leave, and be free for both of us.”

The memory ends more abruptly than usual, and Daniel is not sure if the prickle of unease running over his scalp is his or Lestat’s.

“What do you think she meant by saying that you were her,” Daniel reaches for the most neutral tone of voice he can, frankly not ready to get into some of the questions he’s got, but unable to let it go completely, “uh, organ?”

Brushing the question away as if he has barely heard it, and it’s a trivial one even if he has, Lestat says, “You would have to ask her.”

“What was wrong with her?” Daniel asks.

Lestat glares and the air in the room grows thick and heavy with his offense. While Daniel has been trying to formulate a way to ask if Lestat’s mom wanted to fuck him or be him that won’t bring this whole interview crashing to a halt, that hadn’t been his intention in the moment. He's planning to work up to it.

“Her illness,” he clarifies.

Lestat breaks eye contact with a speed that suggests confusion and perhaps a little embarrassment. “I don’t know,” he says.

“Your standard old-timey wasting disease then. Let me guess, she had a cough?”

“One didn’t expect answers to such questions in those days, and there was little to do if you received them. If you sickened, you healed or you died, and the doctor was less likely than the village wise-woman to have anything helpful to say.”

It’s disappointingly plausible. God knows he hadn’t ever listened to his mother’s medical complaints when she’d been alive, and he’d heard of antibiotics.

“After she gave me the gold,” Lestat says, “I ran straight to the village to find Nicki. A fortnight later, we were in Paris.”

Once again, Daniel finds himself at the mercy of a vampire bent on describing Paris. Lestat’s account, he has to admit, has more colour than the post-War years: Marie Antoinette at the Tuileries garden, the corpses of the dispossessed rotting in alleyways, dukes in pastel slippers tripping through the same muddy streets as barefoot, begging children, death and glamour round every corner. As Lestat talks about his and Nicki’s first delirious months in Paris the images fly between them so thick and fast that Daniel struggles to separate his imagination and Lestat’s memories.

Even harder to reconcile are the Lestat that Louis and Armand painted and this new, human version. Their Lestat, a powerful vampire who is disdainful and at times almost fussy, might come to be real, but he melts before the joyful enthusiasm of young Lestat, fresh to the city and all its wonders, eager to meet it all.

To him, Renaud’s, the rickety, quasi-legal boulevard theatre where Lestat and Nicolas find menial work, is a showcase of beauty and talent and the best the human race has to offer. The draughty little garrett that Lestat shares with Nicolas is a palace, its plaster walls a modern luxury to Lestat’s countrified eyes and its tiny fireplace a marvel of convenience, so much easier to fill than a huge stone hearth. The lumps and possibly fleas in the laughably small bed—Lestat is tall for his time, but 18th century beds are skimpy by everyone’s standards—he and Nicolas share are secondary to being able to curl up together every evening and wake up together every morning. The freezing winter evenings are an excuse to wrap Nicolas up close and share his wolf-fur cloak as they walk.

When Lestat finally gets the opportunity to get on the stage, stepping in when one of the actors vanishes and immediately landing the role of Lelio as a regular gig, Lestat tells the story of his triumph with a level of boastfulness that verges on parody, so flagrantly self-aggrandizing that it’s more funny than aggravating. Perhaps he pulls it off because he brings those around him into his success, rather than putting him down. His Lelio works because he bounces off Luchina, the actress playing his romantic interest, who according to him combines experience and talent equally. It is Jeanette, one of the other actresses, who parlays Lestat’s first successful turn on stage into a promotion while Lestat is still overwhelmed with excitement at the thought of doing more than mopping. Nicolas’ growing influence on the music for the shows and the day Renaud agrees to let him play some of his own compositions are lingered on as much as Lestat’s speaking part.

It’s—God or Satan or whoever help Daniel—endearing.

For the next three years of his story, Lestat will admit to nothing less than domestic bliss between him and Nicolas. And so it would have continued, he insists, if the politics of the day had not taken a dark and bloody turn, political upheaval becoming glorious revolution becoming a reign of terror, until public executions are Paris’ primary pastime. Under the strain of it all the death induced nervous breakdown that first afflicted Lestat in the Auvergne, which Lestat refers to grandly as his “malady of mortality”, comes back, manifesting in what, to Daniels’ modern eyes, are obviously anxiety attacks. He’d be anxious too, if he was a runaway Marquis’ son in the heart of a city with an unquenchable lust for aristocratic blood.

Lestat, however, won’t be drawn too deeply on what the fuck was actually going on with him, claiming that modern medicine has invented rather than codified half the human ailments going round these days. Instead, he is happy to dwell at length about how understanding Nicolas was whenever Lestat stumbled on some distant twelfth cousin of his being beheaded and freaked the fuck out, how his Nicki soothed him, and did what he could to steer Lestat away from incipient spirals with apparent patience and affection. According to Lestat, despite the violence and upheaval—because of it even—cheap theatre for the masses was more vital than ever for public morale, and he started to see their work more and more as a moral calling.

But Daniel is Daniel, and he can’t help but try and puncture every balloon he sees. Lestat’s stories of the 18th century Parisian theatre scene might be less depressing than Louis’ tour through the Mediterranean theatre of World War II, but Daniel has a similar sense that Lestat is either stalling or avoiding something.

“I was mentioned favourably—or so people who could read the article assured me—in a review in The Spectator,” Lestat is saying, “and sent the clipping off to my mother.”

They’re coming up on three hours of Lestat holding forth with a mixture of stories about how well he did and his opinions on where Louis XVI went wrong, which Daniel is sadly too historically ignorant to critique effectively, since he didn’t actually think they were writing a book about the French Revolution. Lestat looks entirely too comfortable and perfectly capable of going on in this vein for days.

“What of the cynical, world-weary Nicolas?” Daniel asks, taking an idle stab at a potential tender spot. “Was he as enamoured with all that Paris had to offer? Did he cheer when Marie-Antoinnete’s head rolled? Did he embrace the birth of liberal democracy?”

“His nature was more melancholic than mine and he was pessimistic about the new regime—justifiably so, as history would prove—but even through that, we were happy to be together, following our dreams.” A certain testiness in Lestat’s voice tells Daniel he is aware of what Daniel is trying to do, and he does not approve of such attempts to nudge the party line. “In the midst of the chaos, we found joy in each other’s small successes, which did not seem small to us at the time.”

As he talks, Lestat volleys a memory of the night after he first went on stage at Daniel: Nicolas dragging the whole troupe up to their attic rooms to drink wine and dance all night while he played the violin, oblivious to the complaints of the neighbours and the fact they all barely fit into the small apartment. Daniel, more practiced now at fielding such volleys, can’t help but see an undercurrent of desperation in Nicolas’ frantic fiddling, the crowd of friends a shield against being alone with Lestat’s success. Echoes, perhaps, of Lestat presenting a house full of soldiers to Louis a century later.

Lestat crushes the memory bare moments after Daniel has grasped at and re-angled it.

“We supported each other,” Lestat grits out, tossing out the night that Nicolas first played a composition of his own at the theatre, the hush that fell over the raucous crowd, the pride of knowing that other people saw, briefly, what Lestat saw in Nicolas.

There’s a bittersweet tinge to the feeling, but Lestat is flinging over a new memory too quickly for Daniel to parse it, this time of the hours that Nicolas spent helping Lestat learn his lines, drilling him late into the night on the scripts he couldn’t read. Sensing more to the memory tucked away, Daniel pulls on it before Lestat can react, and Nicolas rolls his eyes and says caustically, “You could learn to read them if you applied yourself. Are you too lazy or too stupid?”

The psychic force with which Lestat knocks Daniel out of the memory feels like a full-body slap.

“Fils de pute, is this what you did with Louis?” Lestat bellows. “Stick your filthy little fingers into every good thing until it was all as soiled and sordid as your own life?”

“Louis came pre-soiled.” Which is perhaps a bit of an offensive way to talk about a friend, if Daniel takes a moment to consider it, which he doesn’t. His brain is throbbing like a muscle that’s been targeted by a particularly devastating weight-lifting exercise for the first time, but he feels an undeniable thrill at a new skill discovered, and he almost believes in the memories more now he’s not only seen how they can be edited—it has all seemed too good to be true so far—but also knows he has a chance at detecting it.

He’s braced for more vitriol, but instead, he seems to have struck a chord, and Lestat says nothing. Not for the first time, Daniel gets the impression Lestat is listening to something Daniel cannot hear. Is he talking to another vampire?

There’s the image of a young woman, familiar from Louis’ photos, at the edge of Daniel’s mind, but it slips away when he tries to grasp at it like he did before. A memory of something Claudia said perhaps? No doubt more vicious to Lestat than anything Daniel is likely to dig up on his third day knowing the man.

“You were hardly the only one messing with Louis,” Daniel concedes instead. Lestat lost and speechless is hardly conducive to a good interview, and truthfully, he had been thinking of Armand and Louis himself as much as Lestat with his comment, both of them rifling through Louis’ imperfect past with Lestat and trying to bend and shape it to fit an ending that didn’t exist, until everything became inevitably distorted. “You wanted him to be happy. But you can’t make someone happy by wanting it.” This, he tries to say without saying, could apply to Louis or Nicolas.

“Things don’t have to be perfect to be good,” Lestat replies.

“I agree. So let’s stop pretending they are. Spare me the rose-tinted glasses, and give me the truth.”

If they’ve come to an accord about honesty and facing up to things, Lestat doesn’t let on. His mind is closed once again.

“Don’t worry fledgling,” he says, “your pound of flesh is coming. Tomorrow. I have things to do tonight.”

Abrupt as his goodbye is, Daniel considers it progress that Lestat stands and walks out at a pace he can actually see.

The e-mail is there when Louis wakes, a few rows of unassuming pixels on his phone. It feels wrong for something so momentous to arrive with so little fanfare and take up so little space.

From: Daniel Molloy
Subject: The Vampire Lestat sessions 1 and 2

‘Before you go doubting my journalistic integrity, Lestat is happy for me to share the interview with you. Or as he put it, “I have ached to be more open with Louis for decades, but the wounds from my secrecy run so deep that I fear if reopened they will never cease to bleed”. Make of that what you will.

Enjoy!’

There are four attachments. Two word documents, and two mp3s. Louis’ hand trembles as his fingers hover over them, but he doesn’t tap. Not yet.

Chapter Text

There is a strange, heavy energy in the room as they begin their next session. Lestat dips his head at Daniel in sarcastic concession as he launches into his story, not waiting for Daniel to ask a question first.

“I do not claim that things were perfect for Nicki and me. The times were difficult for everyone. The political turmoil roiled on, fear and death, modernity and blistering new philosophy rubbing along together, and despite the seemingly egalitarian philosophy of many of the various new regimes, the ranks of the less fortunate and the starving swelled larger than ever, while the discontent of those scrambling not to tumble to their level deepened. Yet, we survived. For the most part, we were happy. When things were hard, people needed distraction and entertainment of the calibre Renaud’s provided more than ever, and we almost always had money enough for food and coal and a bottle of wine to share. A little to send home to my mother, even, in high season, or if I could get a role in another play that fit around Renaud’s. When things were lean, we still had each other. For eight years, it was enough.”

“What changed?” asks Daniel. He can tell Lestat doesn't want to talk about this, but as they’re not writing a book about the French Revolution, they have to get to the hard stuff eventually.

“Things became particularly difficult, particularly personal, in 1794,” Lestat says. “It was the final year that Nicki and I spent together.”

The word ‘final’ whets Daniel’s appetite, and the dread Lestat cannot keep from his voice sharpens it. He is expecting to finally get some honesty about the personal tension clearly brewing between Lestat and Nicolas.

Instead Lestat says, “Although it is the executions of the elite that capture the imagination, then as they do now, the majority of nobles were not put to the blade during the revolution. Successive governments targeted their political enemies, or went after figureheads to make a splash, but an aristocrat unengaged in politics was not a priority.”

“Weren’t tens of thousands of people executed?” asks Daniel. So far Lestat has leaned into the chaos and death of 18th century French politics, so this attempt at nuance, or minimization, or whatever the hell it is, sits oddly.

“Oui, it was a bloody and vicious time,” Lestat waves a hand dismissively, “but outside of Paris, violence was not as pervasive. Local lords might be pressured to dissolve the contracts of their tenant farmers, perhaps their houses were looted and they fled to some other place where the grievances against them were not as personal. Executions were not that common.”

“Those with power and resources are often the least likely to face consequences, I’m familiar.” This injustice is basically the bedrock of Daniel’s journalistic career, he gets it. But where is Lestat going with this insight?

Quickly, Lestat says, “That winter we heard word from home that the people in our village had risen up and my family had been killed.”

It’s such an abrupt disclosure, Daniel has trouble absorbing it. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“My father and brothers were no great loss.” Lestat delivers this line with practiced detachment. Too practiced to be convincing. “Three more vulgar and brutal men you would have struggled to find, even on the Comité de Salut Public. No doubt they would have been too stupid to relax their demands for taxes, no matter how incendiary the mood, and too friendless and poor to flee when the tide turned against them.”

“Still-” Daniel begins, but Lestat speaks over him.

“That they might all have been killed: my sisters in law, my nephews and nieces, most of them still children, my mother,” Lestat voice falters, “was a shock.”

“How did-” Daniel starts to ask, but Lestat continues to bulldoze over him in a completely natural way that doesn’t seem at all like he wants to move on quickly.

“The account, passed through the mouths of multiple people as a piece of titillating gossip, was garbled. Nicki wrote to everyone either of us knew in the region, begging for details and clarification, and I clung to hope that we might yet discover a different story. There was nothing to do but hope, and hold onto each other.”

Lestat says this with finality, as if there is nothing more to say on the topic of his entire family, including the mother he’s obsessed with, dying, que sera sera. Daniel has zero intention of letting the issue actually lie, but he also recognises that it can be easier to tackle Lestat on particularly thorny issues when he’s unaware. For now, he sits back while Lestat steers them round the subject.

“Hope did come, in the form of a conflicting report that the women of my family had been spared. I almost returned home, desperate to put to rest the uncertainty. If I had, we would not be sitting here.”

Neither of them would be. Even if Daniel hadn’t burned out at 27 like he’d expected to right up until his 28th birthday, even if he had managed to carve out a career without Louis’ voice in his ear, his Parkinson's would either have killed or confined him by now.

“I gather you didn’t go back,” Daniel prompts, when Lestat appears to be lost in his contemplation of the world without the vampire Lestat.

“One of Nicki’s cousins was travelling to the region, and he promised to ask around and send word. I sent all the money I had with him, to pass onto any of my family that might remain. It was not much, but I thought it possible—hoped—that my inconsistent acting income might soon have to support more than just myself, if some number of my family had survived but been ejected from their lands, and I did not want to risk my role with with theatre.

“It was then, as the days grew shorter and the nights more freezing, as hope hung in the balance," Lestat swallows, pauses, and Daniel feels it in his own throat, the tension of a rollercoaster at the peak of a climb, “that he found me.”

“Magnus?” Daniel prompts, when Lestat does not continue.

After a moment, Lestat says briskly, “But you have already gone over that in Louis’ book. I vouch for the accuracy of his account. Pad it out if you wish, with whatever febrile, gothic imaginings will sell more books.”

Daniel reminds himself that he was expecting outright stonewalling eventually and takes a deep calming breath. “I’d like to hear it from you directly,” he says.

“I told you, I don’t want to rehash old ground. I want to talk about new things. We have much to get to, including my introduction to your maker. It is a fascinating tale.”

It’s artful bait, but Daniel bats it aside. The less his subject wants to talk about something, the more he knows they have to. “A second hand account that you gave unwillingly to two semi-hostile witnesses is hardly ground well-covered.”

“Fine!” Angry, Lestat talks in a rush. “He took me from my bed in the middle of the night-”

Daniel cuts into what he has no doubt will be a zero-value-added rehash of the passage from the book. “Was that the first time you were aware of him?”

Although he didn’t know it when he asked the question, Daniel can tell from Lestat’s reaction that it wasn’t. He looks away, like a child in their first years of lying. Grudgingly he admits, “No.”

Daniel waits, trying to exude a calm and dogged commitment to the topic.

“You asked me to write this book,” he reminds Lestat when, uncharacteristically, silence is not enough to draw him out, “and there’s no book without your story. The real story. Isn’t that why we’re here? To tear down the secrecy of the past?”

When that also doesn’t work, Daniel gets out the big guns. “Don’t you think Louis wants to hear the full truth?”

Eventually, Lestat speaks, voice artificially steady. Slowly at first, as if he is turning up these details through speaking them, and has to examine each as it comes into view.

“I was on stage, the first time I saw him. He was a face in the audience. A strange, immobile face, like a mask. He returned, not every night, but often, and wherever this face was, from the middle of the stalls to high up in the gods, I would see it. A face so pale it glowed, a fixed point, even as others moved and laughed around it, like it was the axis we all turned around. It would distract me until I almost forgot what I was doing and where I was, until the stage seemed like a dream, so that Luchina had to cover my missed lines...” Lestat seems to lose the thread for a long moment. When he picks it back up, he has an unconvincing airy tone. “Luckily the plays were always half improvised, so my slips were not apparent to the eyes of the masses.”

“You were being hunted,” Daniel says. Lestat looks at him so sharply Daniel wonders if he can tell he’s paraphrasing Louis, though that exact quote didn’t make it verbatim into the book.

“Yes.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“I tried to tell Nicki.” A memory bubbles up, and although Daniel can sense the reluctance, Lestat hands it over.

“I have had this feeling lately,” the Lestat of the past says, trying to keep his voice casual, feeling foolish, but afraid enough to say it anyway, “that there’s someone watching me.”

“Everyone’s always watching you. That's what you want,” Nicolas replies, a little sharp. He’s crouched by the grate in their long-ago Parisian room, and although Daniel wouldn’t have known this himself—he’s not much of an outdoorsman—he can tell through the filter of Lestat’s understanding that Nicolas is trying to arrange an inadequate amount of kindling in a way that will burn long enough to catch their last handful of coal.

“As you so astutely deduced,” the current, modern-day Lestat cuts in, and implicit in his sarcastic tone, or perhaps latent in the stronger connection between them when he’s showing a memory, is the base, underhanded methods by which Daniel made his deductions, “Nicki struggled at times. In spite of his ear and skill and the way he had captured the hearts of the theatregoers we played to, he had a much greater mountain to climb as a violinist than I did to become a successful actor. He was not satisfied with the profound emotions he produced in our audiences and the rest of the troupe, or even with playing his own compositions in the show. He wanted to be a great violinist, and he no longer believed he could be.”

Being no fool, Daniel is aware that this openness about Nicolas comes as a convenient distraction from the topic of Magnus, but leads offered as distraction are leads, no matter the intent.

“And I’m sure your name in the papers didn’t help.”

“One paper, Daniel,” Lestat counters, “my ego requires no fluffing.”

No shit, Daniel doesn’t say.

“He said he was not envious,” Lestat says. “A wish more than a truth, perhaps.”

“Things are easy for you,” the memory of Nicolas says, still facing the fireplace so Lestat cannot read his expression, even though the kindling is stacked, the tinder placed, and all he’s doing is turning the flintbox over and over in his hands. “What you want, you get. You think things are possible that are not possible for the rest of us, like killing the wolves. If you wanted to play the violin, you’d be playing at court by now.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, I couldn’t even get a note out of that thing.”

“You know what I mean,” Nicolas replies, refusing to be jollied, refusing to turn around.

“Nicki, this talk is poison.” Lestat grows impatient. “There is no court anymore, I’m playing to the same crowd you are, and there’s meaning in it if you let there be, the only meaning there is in life, to bring joy where we can before death-”

“Not this again,” interrupts Nicolas, dropping the flintbox and spinning to face Lestat, unexpected viciousness on his face as he sneers, “not this malady of mortality, this malady of goodness. You romanticise! We’re a pack of cheap entertainers pandering to the lowest denominator. We can’t even be buried in consecrated ground. We’re outcasts.”

“And yet still, we create beauty. We do good, I feel it-” Lestat falters, not because he doesn’t believe what he says, but because the fact of the face comes back to him, and along with it, a certainty of evil.

“Lestat, I love you,” says Nicolas, and even in memory, even in the midst of an argument, a warmth blooms in Lestat that tells Daniel Nicolas doesn’t say it often, that Lestat is ready to cast whatever disagreement they’re having aside if this is the turn the conversation takes, “but you’re a fool.”

It cuts deep, to so quickly find the thorn under such a rarely bestowed endearment, and Lestat laughs in response, as if following the command to be a fool.

“I thought these notions of goodness would change when you had to live in the real world,” Nicolas says, his voice brimming with disdain, “but still, they persist. How much evil must the world show you before you accept it?”

“Instead of mocking me, why don’t you tell me what you believe in for a change?”

“As I see it, there’s weakness, and there’s strength. There’s good art, and bad art. If there is goodness, it’s not in us, it’s certainly not in Renaud’s theatre.” He spits the name of the dear place like a curse. “What we’re making on stage is nothing more than bad art, and when I play my little solos there I don’t play for them, I play for me.”

Hurt fills the memory of Lestat, but present day Lestat says, almost fond, “He was a snob, truth be told. Like so many of the bourgeois.”

In the past, Lestat turns away, genuinely crushed, not sure he has the heart for the fight when so much else is on his mind, but to Daniel’s surprise—he’s starting to think Nicolas is a bit of a dickhead—a hand on Lestat’s arm turns him back, and all the bravado has drained from Nicolas.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and however much of a grudge-holder Lestat might become, any anger he felt then is gone in an instant. The supercilious snob of a moment ago has been replaced by a sad young man, as beautiful as he’s always been, out of his depth, alone in the world except for his lover.

“Forget it, we’re both tired,” Lestat says. He cups Nicolas’ face in one hand and gives him a gentle, conciliatory kiss. “Let me light the fire, we’ll drink some wine and go to bed.” He goes to move past Nicolas, but Nicolas does not release the grip he has on Lestat’s arm.

“The truth is,” he says, “that you have a radiance in you, a light that draws people to you. It drew me to you, because in me, there’s only darkness, a vast darkness. I wanted your light.” There’s a strange intensity in Nicolas’ eyes that reminds Daniel of the last time Lestat saw his mother, a hungry, covetous cast to his affection. “Instead, I’ve corrupted it. Given you this malady.”

“Nonsense.” Disturbed, Lestat pulls his arm from Nicolas’ grip, then draws him even closer by the shoulders and gives him a small shake. “If you could see yourself, hear yourself, the passion and the magic in the room when you play, you’d know how wrong you are. I make them laugh, but you transport them. Light and darkness come together in you in a thousand different patterns.” He means it, Daniel can tell, an ache in him that Nicki sees himself as this greedy, grasping thing, when to Lestat he is a wonder every day. There’s also confusion over the way that Nicki sees him, when Lestat knows that eventually he himself is the one who overwhelms and spoils everything around him. He could give a hundred examples, if it wasn’t too humiliating to bear.

The argument and the memory end with nothing more said about Magnus, or their future prospects, or which of them is the one more wrong and twisted inside: a dissatisfied question mark on all fronts.

“Maybe he was right,” Daniel says. Angry, Lestat opens his mouth, no doubt to deliver an affronted paean to Nicki’s undimmable brilliance, but Daniel keeps hold of the reins and yanks them back on course. “About people being drawn to you.” Daniel isn’t above a very small amount of judicious flattery, in a particularly tough moment with a subject. “Magnus was drawn to you, wasn’t he?”

Sulkily, Lestat subsides. “He was.”

“Did you ever manage to talk about him to Nicolas?”

“A few days later I fumbled my lines on stage worse than ever, and he asked me what was wrong.”

This time, the memory of Nicolas is sitting next to Lestat on their bed, looking at him with concern, that little furrow Lestat hates to see between his brows.

“Lestat?” Nicolas says. He repeats the question Lestat is struggling to answer. “What happened out there today?”

Lestat reaches out to smooth the furrow flat. How often does he put it there? Why does he always have to be so troublesome to the people he loves?

“Sometimes I can scarce remember my lines with you fiddling away in the pit,” Lestat says, deflecting the concern with flirtation. He turns the sweep of his thumb on Nicki’s brow into a hand that draws him close for a kiss. Nicki indulges him for one, two presses of their mouths, but just when Lestat thinks he has successfully moved them on, he pulls back. He doesn’t go far though, putting a grounding hand on Lestat’s thigh and maintaining eye contact.

“And the notes blur when I hear your feet on the boards,” Nicolas says, “but we will be caught if you let your mind wander like that.” Lestat turns away from Nicki’s worry. He knows it will only make him look suspicious, but hopes that Nicki will take it for his usual disinterest in discussions about shame and secrecy. They leave their friends room to pretend that they don’t know, that is the closest Lestat cares to come to denying Nicki.

The gambit fails, and Nicki turns him back with a gentle hand. “What is it really?” he asks, eyes searching Lestat’s face.

The concern makes Lestat’s throat ache. How he longed all those long years in the Auvergne for someone who would care enough to notice, let alone ask, if something was wrong. And now he has it, and he pushes that person away.

“I told you.” Lestat struggles to keep his voice steady. “There is someone watching me.”

This time at least, Nicolas doesn’t dismiss him out of hand. “A special someone, beyond the hundreds of people who watch you every night?” he asks.

“He’s not-” not a person, Lestat wants to say, but the nonsensical words dry up in his mouth. “He knows me,” he says instead.

“Someone from home?” Nicolas asks. “Could it be-” he hesitates, clearly searching for a name to suggest that isn’t either one of Lestat’s possibly murdered family or one of their potential betrayers.

“No, I don’t know them.” Lestat brushes away Nicolas’ hand and stands up, agitated. This is impossible to explain.

“But they know you,” Nicki repeats, dubious. “A fan who is a little too dedicated? Well, perhaps tonight’s bizarre performance will show them you are human after all.”

“Not a fan.” Not in the normal sense of the word, anyway. “He wears a mask. He never moves or laughs.”

“If he wears a mask, how do you know he never laughs?” Nicolas asks, and his calm logic is infuriating.

“He knows about the wolves!” bursts out of Lestat.

“You mean you’ve spoken to him? Or has he sent you something?”

“No, nothing.”

“Then-”

Lestat interrupts him, cutting off another no doubt eminently reasonable, entirely unhelpful question. “I don’t know how he knows, but he does. He knows about the wolves, about us, about our secret clearing, about the witches’ place, about every secret, every shame.” Lestat can hear his voice rising out of his control, like a hysterical woman, and wrestles it back to a fraught whisper. “I see him and memories come back to me, things I have not thought of in years. Good, bad, mundane, he knows it all.”

Now, at least, all levity has left Nicolas. He is clearly trying to keep the fear and pity from his face, but the line between his eyebrows is deeper than ever.

“It is probably some distinguished person who does not wish to be seen at Renaud’s,” he says, “and that is why they wear the mask.”

“You are not listening!” Lestat shouts, gesticulating wildly.

Nicolas stands and takes Lestat’s hand in his. He does not speak immediately, waiting for the flare of Lestat’s anger to die down, managing Lestat’s moods. It is hateful, condescending. Worst of all, it works. When Lestat is still, Nicolas pulls him back down to sit on their bed.

“I am listening,” he says, “but you are not making any sense. How can you know all these things about a person you have never seen, never spoken to, never communicated with? How could he know anything about you, when your real name is not even in the programme?”

“He could be a sorcerer,” suggests Lestat sulkily.

“Yes, a wicked sorcerer, entranced by your beauty, come to whisk you away.” Nicki smiles and caresses his face. “Who could blame him? I’d do the same, if I didn’t know you’d come home with me.”

Lestat huffs, but irritatingly, the playful flattery soothes him. How hideous it is to be known and understood, how humiliating.

“Is it not more likely,” Nicolas says, “that this is a new manifestation of your old weakness?” Ready to deny this charge—his malady of mortality has not struck in many months—Lestat pushes Nicki’s hand aside, but he remains implacable. “With everything that has happened with your family, everything we still don’t know, it is natural that your thoughts would turn to home, and that you would be worried and distracted. You imagine something that you can blame that worry on, that is all. You have always had a very strong imagination.”

What Lestat wants to do is stand up and bellow at Nicolas that he does not need some made-up phantom to give him permission to be angry and upset about what might have happened to his family. But then, Nicki knows him so well. He is the clever one, the educated one. Is it not more likely that he is right? Is it not better, if he is right?

“Perhaps,” Lestat says, grudgingly.

Nicolas smiles at him, affectionate and only a little patronising. His lips do not move and his expression does not change as a voice says, clear and distinct, Wolfkiller. Lestat feels all the blood drain from his face, even as his heart beats fast and hard in his chest.

Seeing that Lestat has not been fully placated, Nicolas suggests, “Make me a signal, next time you see him. I’ll look for him too, and tell you if I recognize him.”

“I will,” Lestat croaks, but he knows it is hopeless. He is either mad, or he is being hunted by something he cannot explain to Nicki.

As the memory ends, Lestat’s eyes remain distant, looking deep into the past. “Perhaps, if I had not spoken of him to Nicki, we would have had more time. But that very night, he came for me.”

For the first time, Daniel doesn’t wait for Lestat to bat a memory over to him. Tentatively, he reaches out first, not into Lestat’s mind—he’s not that much of a masochist—but towards it, palm open, if a mind can be said to have a palm.

Almost vindictively, Lestat drops onto him the curdling moment of horror when he first woke and saw a figure outlined by the dying embers of the fire: tall and bent, wrapped in long black robes, something unnatural in every angle, like an unmanned puppet. The figure’s face is white and smooth between deeply etched lines, and so still that Daniel understands instantly why Lestat thought it was a mask. Only the eyes, gleaming wetly with a predatory intelligence more animal than human, show that the figure is in fact alive. It would seem like a nightmare if it wasn’t for the smell, a thick, mouldering rot so strong that over two hundred years later Daniel still chokes on the echo of it.

Desperately, Lestat looks round the room for some method of fight or flight, but every path closes off as soon as he considers it. The door is locked, the window barred, Nicolas asleep and vulnerable beside him if he flees. His rifle and sword are put away. Before Lestat can fully visualise scrambling for them, let alone make a move, he is wrapped tight in his own red velvet wolf-cloak, swaddled as immobile and impotent as a newborn baby in the creature’s arms. Lestat has only enough time to breathe in and scream Nicki’s name before they are bursting through the window in a shower of glass and wood.

Snowy rooftops fly past under them so fast that Lestat’s 18th century mind can barely comprehend it, faster than a rushing river swelled by snowmelt or trees whipping past a galloping horse, an inhuman, demonic speed. The lights of Paris are behind them in an instant, and almost as quickly, so is the darkness beyond, as they close in on a dimly lit building. To Daniel’s eyes, it isn’t particularly remarkable. Perhaps a little military looking—something between a house and a fortification, with dark stone walls, an enclosed yard, and small, barred windows—but the abundance of moss on the walls and the large tower at one end turn it into the kind of picturesque building an American expects to see dotting the French countryside.

The sight of the building freezes his—freezes Lestat’s—insides to a solid block of ice, but the memory ends before they reach it.

“He kept me there for a week,” Lestat says, “feeding on me at night. I thought he would kill me, but instead he made me his heir.”

The word ‘heir’ sticks in Daniel’s craw, but he chokes it down as less important. It appears that they’ve returned to the pulling teeth stage of the interview. Lestat sits still and taut, equally the predator about to pounce and a tower of poorly stacked glassware that will topple at the lightest touch. Either outcome might tear Daniel to shreds.

“Where did he take you on that first night?” Daniel racks his brain for the scant bits of description Louis and Armand gave him of Magnus’ lair, but few come back to him. He was a little preoccupied with his imminent coup de grace at the time, mentally lining his ducks up and still limited by his single-track human capacity. “To the basement, with the corpses?” he hazards.

“Non,” Lestat admits. “We landed on the roof, in the snow and the darkness. I tried to fight him with everything I had. I beat him with my fists, I kicked, I gouged, I bit, I screamed with rage.” He smiles, small and cold. “It was as effective as it ever is when they try and fight us. He let me do it. It amused him. The brave, strong Wolfkiller, helpless. He would have let me go on until I exhausted myself or the sun came up for the sheer fun of seeing me beat my fists black and blue against him, but I nearly fell off the roof in my exertions, and he couldn’t have me killing myself so quickly. He drank from me, there on the roof, and for the first time I realized what he was. Or thought I did.”

“And what did you think he was?”

“This was before ‘Dracula’ or ‘Carmilla’, but we had folklore, and there had been a rash of clunky German poems on the topic of vampires a few years earlier. I knew they drank blood, and that they were against God. I said it, when he released me. Vampire. Or perhaps I only thought it. He laughed, and he took me inside.”

Remembering the sense of paralyzing dread the building invoked in Lestat, Daniel tries to keep them on the practical side of the narrative, one small thing after another. “How did you get in?”

“Through the window.”

Daniel opens his mouth to probe—gently!—what kind of windows a basement has, but Lestat waves an impatient hand.

“He did not take me to the other room then. He took me to a room at the top of the tower. A small square room with a straw pallet and a heavy, iron bound door. Dawn was not far away, though I did not yet realize the significance of that, so we did not have much more time together that night. He laid me down on the pallet and… he looked at me.” Lestat pauses, swallows something unsaid. “He cannot have drunk that much from me, or I would not have survived the following days, but I felt dazed and half dead from exhaustion and terror. I fell asleep, or perhaps he put me to sleep, and I didn’t see him leave.”

“When did you wake up?”

“Sometime the next day. Afternoon or evening perhaps. The daylight was still short at that time of year, and it was not long before the sun began to descend.”

“What did you do?”

“What could I do?” Lestat shouts back, like the question was an accusation. “I was trapped, helpless! I pounded on the door, I pried at it till my fingernails were bloody. I felt all round the window for a handhold. There was no escape.”

“How did you feel when you woke up?”

“Thirsty,” says Lestat, after a moment’s contemplation. “I burned with thirst. I had been dreaming of home, of the mountains, and a particular cold, clear spring I knew the place of. When I woke, lo and behold, there was a bottle of white wine on the floor beside my pallet, as if I had summoned it. It was as ice cold as the stream would have been.” He touches his lips. “It tasted of apples.”

“You drank it.”

“Down in one go, as I recall, first thing. I was drunk as a lord still by the time the sun set and he returned to me.”

Daniel wonders if Lestat will offer a memory, but none is forthcoming.

“What happened when he returned?”

Lestat gives him a flat look. “What do you think? He drank from me. I tried to fight it, but I swooned in his arms, as mortals do.”

“Did he say anything to you?”

There’s a voice deep in Lestat's mind, powerful enough that Daniel, straining for any clues from Lestat, hears an echo of it. You’re perfect, my Lelio, even more beautiful without the lights of the stage.

“Nothing of note,” is all Lestat says aloud.

Christ, this is like trying to get blood out of a stone. “Did he tell you his name?”

“Not yet.”

“Did you ask him anything?”

“I begged for my life a fair amount, I expect. I forget the details.”

“How long did he stay?”

“Till the sun rose.”

Daniel starts to lose patience. It is obvious that Lestat is not telling him everything. “So Magnus spent all night with you—that’s what, fourteen, fifteen hours at least in winter?—and he didn’t say anything of note, and you didn’t say anything of note, and he didn’t drain every drop of blood from your body?”

“He wasn’t an accomplished conversationalist.” At Daniel’s scowl he adds, “I passed out on a couple of occasions. I can’t vouch for what happened then.”

“Alright. Day 2: surprisingly boring.” Daniel writes that down on his notepad with exaggerated care, relishing, with the petty part of him he despises when it’s not fired up to do battle, how every stroke of the pen ratchets up the tension in Lestat’s body. “Five days to go. What happened the next day?”

“There was wine, again. And beef stew this time. I drank and I ate. He came later, a few hours after dark, just when I wondered if there might be a reprieve. He must have been feeding on someone else, because he was softer and flushed with blood. Invigorated.”

Again, Lestat stops, like he’s run into a wall.

“What happened next?” Daniel asks, resentful of how inane the question makes him sound. Lestat’s reluctance is regressing him to his 1970s self.

A long pause. Daniel waits it out this time. “I displeased him,” Lestat says, eventually.

“How did you do that?”

“The day before, I had still been defiant, angry. He liked that. But this day, I had lost the energy to struggle. I was weepy and full of self-pity. I let him do as he liked. He grew bored and contemptuous. I thought the moment had come when he would kill me and I cried out to God.” Although Daniel does not react, Lestat forces a wry, self-deprecating smile. “Yes, for all my talk of the unknowable chaos of the world, I turned to God, as all desperate humans do. I begged Him for salvation, for relief. This disgusted my captor, and he left.”

To Daniel, this seems like a good thing, but Lestat does not look relieved. He looks more haunted than ever, and his story comes out in staccato bursts.

“It seemed that prayer had brought relief. I found my faith renewed. As the sun rose, I fell to my knees in gratitude. I prayed for hours. I swore fealty to the Lord. I made wild promises. I dragged up every fragment of catechism the monks had given me. I slept only briefly, and I dreamed of the safety of the monastery, and I woke to pray some more. When the sun set, I think I truly believed, in my heart, that God had listened, that I had won his favour and I had a shield against evil.”

“I take it that wasn’t the case,” Daniel prompts, when Lestat doesn’t continue of his own accord.

“He appeared in my window, the very moment the sun dipped the horizon. He was… enraged. It seemed my prayers had fallen no further afield than his ears and tormented him all through his slumber. That is when he took me to the other room.”

“The room with the corpses.”

When Lestat forgets to be willfully obstructive, he can’t but lapse into description. “He opened the door, the one I had wrestled with with all my might, torn my nails and bloodied my fingers on, but it opened under his hand as lightly as a paper screen. He grabbed me by the arm and dragged me down the winding staircase as easily as a child with a doll, down down down.”

The image rises up between them as unintentionally as the first one of Gabrielle, as if Lestat is recalling the moment so vividly he can’t keep it inside without conscious effort and he has no effort to spare. There is a different feel to this memory, raw and wet, like something freshly unearthed. The winding stone staircase is lit so sparsely by torches that to Lestat’s feeble human eyes it appears they are descending through the layers of the underworld, from the yawning pit of unknowable darkness to the flickering flames of hell and then back into the pit, ever downwards. His legs are too weak and slow to get underneath him and so his back and limbs scrape painfully on the stone, thump, thump, thump, and it’s all he can do to twist his neck so his head doesn’t bang on the stairs and pray his churning stomach contents don’t rush up his throat to choke him.

Still, when they reach the room at the bottom, and his captor wrenches a barred gate in the wall open and throws him inside, Lestat longs for the lost torment of the stairwell.

There are tens of corpses, dozens, perhaps hundreds, piled all around him. At some point an effort must have been made to push them back, because the bulk are banked against one wall like logs, but it’s not a consistent effort, because they also lie strewn across the floor, hanging from chains, some skeletal, some fresh, most rotting. It’s warm and damp with the putrid vapours from the decomposing bodies, the centre of the pile radiating heat like embers. The floor is pulpy and wet under his back and his hands, the air so foul and fetid that it feels solid in Lestat's mouth, and already he knows, with the instinct of a man of his time used to life without efficient sewers and modern waste disposal, that there are rats and maggots and cockroaches and foul, stinking disease in the hearts of the hot, rotting piles around him, all those small creatures as ravenous for fresh meat as the creature that brought him there.

He scrambles to his feet, slips, struggles up again, his legs regaining their strength on a surge of adrenaline, and runs at the gate, ready to throw himself at his captor’s mercy, cling to him, kiss his feet, anything to escape this place. He almost makes it. In a perfectly timed bit of cruelty the gate clangs shut again just before he reaches it, so that he can only stick his arms through the bars and beg for freedom.

“Ask God for your freedom,” says the creature, and leaves. Shortly after the dragging train of his black robes has vanished round the bend of the stairs, the only torch on the wall winks out, plunging the place into darkness.

The memory ends on Lestat’s desperate scream, ringing into nothing. The familiar surroundings of Daniel’s apartment come back to him slowly. By the time he feels confident he won't revisit the human habit of hurling his guts up, Lestat is eerily calm.

“Will that do?” he asks.

“For what?” Daniel asks, still a bit dazed.

Lestat twirls his hand in the air, as if to indicate something frivolous is afoot. “A bit of gothic color and melodrama for our book,” he says, lightly.

The emptiness the memory left behind fills abruptly with rage. “Is that all that was?” asks Daniel, rising to his feet, as furious as he’s ever been in an interview, ready to walk out if he doesn’t get the answer he wants, or hell, maybe throw a punch. “Was any of it real?”

He knows he’s made a mistake as soon as the words are out of mouth. As Lestat springs up, his own body slams itself back down into his chair with enough force he’s surprised it doesn’t shatter, following Lestat’s commands with more alacrity than it does his own. His hardy vampire body doesn’t hurt at the rough treatment in the same way his human body did when Armand took control of him, but the helplessness, despite how strong Daniel is now, makes it an equally unpleasant experience.

Yet more than the fright or the loss of control, what makes Daniel regret his words is the near-instant knowledge that they were wrong. It may be possible to manufacture a memory, he doesn’t know, but every instinct he has, from decades of panning for the truth in the lies, from the hours he’s already spent in Lestat’s head, tells him that the memory was the truth, at least as Lestat recalls it. That all the memories he’s shown have been, curated and elided at times—clumsily, for the most part, when they are—but nonetheless filled with the kind of unintentional disclosures, the humiliating human details, that only the truth brings.

“I haven’t brought you here to fill your head with pretty lies,” storms Lestat, and Daniel forgoes mentioning it’s his damn apartment and no one brought him anywhere. “I give you free reign, and you want facts. I give you facts, you want lurid detail. I give you lurid detail, and you call me a liar!”

The father of lies Claudia had called Lestat. Daniel is still deciding how fair that was.

“I’m sorry,” Daniel chokes out, and means it. Sincerity has a deflating effect on Lestat’s rage. He sits stiffly back down, every economical movement a rebuke, and Daniel’s body returns to him. “I believe you. I think you’re not telling me everything, I've made that clear. But that's not the same as lying.”

Lestat refuses to look away, but they both know he wants to.

“How long did he leave you in there?” Daniel asks.

Lestat takes a breath, and returns to the matter of fact tone from earlier. “The rest of the night. The following day.”

Daniel tries to imagine spending such a stretch of hours in the grim room from Lestat’s memory, but he can’t. Terror cannot sustain itself for that long, but how could it ever abate in that nightmarish place? It’s unfathomable. “What did you do?”

“I screamed. I vomited. I called to God, as he suggested. I pried at the bars with all my might, praying for divine strength or my heart to burst with the effort so that it might be over. And when none of that achieved anything I stood in the darkness with my back pressed to the bars, kicking and stamping at anything that moved towards me, my feet slipping in muck, and tried to forget what I had seen.”

Unwillingly, Daniel’s own mind returns to the image of that room. “When did you realize?” he asks.

“That they all looked like me?”

“Yes.” Daniel can’t be sure if he would have put it together in the brief look he got if he hadn’t already known.

“It was a notion that crept up on me gradually. I had seen the room, of course, when I was first thrown in, but I was in too much of a panic to analyze it. With the light extinguished, I could see nothing at first. After a few hours my eyes adjusted enough to detect the faint glow from some more distant torch, likely several turns up the staircase, but it did little more than gleam in the eyes of rats that approached from a certain angle. Nonetheless, in the darkness, the vision of the hell I was in kept coming back to me.

“That they were all men was within the realms of personal taste. That all the ones I had seen had blonde hair of at least some length was harder to explain. It was not precisely rare in those days, but it was also not particularly fashionable, and many men kept their hair clipped short and wore wigs. That the few that still had eyes had blue eyes, I pretended I imagined. I told myself that I had not had a chance to see them properly, that most had rotted away beyond the point I could tell what they looked like, that I was as self-obsessed and vain as people had always told me, to have only noticed the ones that looked like me, and ignored the rest.”

“What happened the next night?” Daniel asks, for once dreading the answer.

“He came to me then as a saviour. At first just a light growing stronger as it approached, gradually driving back the dark to show me my worst fears had been right. By the time he arrived, I didn’t care that he’d kill me and toss me in there with the others, I only cared that events happen in that order, that I not die slowly in that cage, like the ones in chains or the ones with their arms stretched towards freedom had.” Lestat’s voice rings with dark, damning amusement as he says, “I wanted to please him.”

“How did you go about pleasing him?” Daniel asks, impressed with his own ability to keep his voice steady.

“I tried compliance first. Never my strong suit, but never before had I had such powerful motivation. I did not indulge in the snivelling that had angered him before, but a calm, placid compliance. I didn't precisely know yet that vampires could read minds, but by then we had spent enough time together that I sensed anything more complicated and insincere than my genuine desire to engage his good graces would backfire.”

“Did it work?”

“He took me out of the cage.” Here, Lestat hesitates. “He bathed me.”

“Ugh,” is all Daniel can say to that.

Lestat huffs an almost laugh in acknowledgment. “Repulsive, but necessary. I was caked in human effluent and covered in scrapes and bites, from him and from the rats. He used some of his blood to heal me, which helped, but if I had survived the week, I might well have died from an infection eventually.”

“Did he take you back to the top of the tower?” Daniel hopes he took him back to the top of the tower.

Daniel thinks he can see the urge to obfuscate or storm off enter Lestat's head, and then the moment he rejects it. He'd like to think their dialogue about honesty had something to do with it, but possibly he’s just worn Lestat down.

“No. We stayed in the basement. On the other side of the gate, but within sight of, of them. And when the sun began to rise—or at least, I think that was when, I had not seen the sun since he dragged me down there—he immobilized me with his mind, closed off my senses so I could not see or hear or feel, and when he released me… I was in his tomb with him. I suppose that was a sign of his favour and trust. Or perhaps just of how little threat I posed to him.”

The horror of ‘closed off my senses’ echoes round Daniel’s mind a few times—could he do that to a victim himself? Would he ever want to?—and it takes him a moment to process the end of Lestat’s sentence. “His… tomb?”

“He slept in a stone sarcophagus: not uncommon among the ancient of our kind. It is not practical for travel or many modern houses with weak floors, but it is more secure than a coffin.”

“Why?” Daniel asks, baffled, horrified.

“As I learned when he let me try and flee, the stone lid of a sarcophagus is typically too heavy for a single human to lift.”

Which doesn’t answer the question Daniel was actually asking. “You’re saying he kept you inside his sarcophagus with him while he slept,” he clarifies. “All day.”

“A most extraordinary intimacy, now I know how deathless the day sleep is once you have succumbed. I would never take food into coffin with me.” Lestat shrugs, continues. “The day passed slowly. This was no silken, padded affair, such as I prefer to sleep in now, and my flesh was still tender and human. My skin scraped on the stone and my muscles ached and spasmed from inactivity. Though there must have been some flow of air, I nearly suffocated from the stench of damp and mould that clung to his clothes.” Lestat looks into the distance again, and for once Daniel hopes there isn’t a memory coming his way. “Yet still, I found myself clinging to him. As repulsive as he was, he was the softest thing in there, the closest thing to comfort and warmth.”

Every time Daniel thinks it can’t get more fucked up, it does. Daniel asks, “Did you think about trying to kill him while he was asleep?”

“Of course. It was a long day. Unfortunately, I had no notion of how it might be done, and no scrap of a weapon beyond my broken nails and blunt teeth. The most effective method would have been to immolate us both—the ancient ones go up like kindling once you get them going—but I didn’t have so much as two sticks to rub together to start a fire.

“When the sun set he drank from me again—breakfast in bed—but only a taste. I must have been nearly drained by then. He locked me back up with the bodies-”

“Again?” Daniel can’t help but interject, aghast on Lestat’s behalf.

“-with a light this time, which was almost worse. The rats were slightly less bold, but I had leisure to look around at all the undignified stages of death and decay that awaited me. I was just as afraid, at first, as the first time I had been put in there. Then, a curious thing happened. I grew angry again. Hadn’t I given up my rage, to please him? Given up my prayer? Yet just like God, it made no difference to him what I did. He put me back in there just the same.”

There’s a darkening in Lestat’s face, and Daniel feels the ruthless predator of the present day and not the hopeful man of the past take primacy.

“I grew almost contemptuous of all these dead facsimiles, wondering if they had died desperate for his mercy, trying to think of some way to please him, as I had been doing. When he came back, carrying yet another body to add to the pile, some ill-dressed peasant who was barely ash-blonde, I pitied the boy, but I felt no kinship. When the door of the cage opened, I walked through it. I did not speak defiance, but I felt it.”

“How did he take that?”

“It pleased him more than my compliance ever had.”

There’s a flicker of a memory between them then, unintentional, something like a smile contorting the stiff, white face. For the first time Daniel sees that Magnus’ only teeth are his fangs, protruding almost comically from the pink pockmarked mass of his gums. Wolfkiller, he says in Lestat’s mind, and Daniel wonders if the lack of teeth means he’d lisp if he talked out loud, there you are.

“I was not punished for my change in attitude, but I was no longer trusted to sleep in his sarcophagus with him. He took me back to the room at the top of the tower, where once more there was wine and stew, and, after he left, the last sunlight I would ever enjoy.” Lestat frowns, lost in thought. “Perhaps that is why he took me back there for that final day, so I could enjoy the sun a final time. The window was angled west so you could see it set. I never thought of that before.”

“Or he didn’t have a lot of options for escape-proof rooms with more beds than corpses,” Daniel says, not liking this recontextualizing. If Magnus joins the list of people he’s not allowed to trash to Lestat, he’s going to fucking lose it.

“Most likely,” Lestat agrees, but there’s a churlish note in his voice.

The narrative, which had been flowing along so nicely, stalls again. For a long moment, no one speaks.

“So,” Daniels prompts eventually. “Your final day. How did it go?”

“The tower room, after the depredations of the days since I left it, seemed full of comfort and opportunity. I scoured every inch once more for a weapon or an escape route. There was wood in the pallet of the bed, and I thought perhaps it could form a weapon, or brace enough fabric for me to lower myself from the window. But the wood was so soft and rotten it crumbled under my hands, and no matter the risks I dismissed or the lengths I imagined I could jump, there was no handhold or ledge I could reach. Escape was as impossible as it had ever been.

“I considered jumping from the window anyway, or fashioning a noose from the scant bedclothes, if only to deprive him of the victory of my death at his hands, but even then, I didn’t have the stomach for such blatant self-annihilation. Instead I slept, for a few fitful hours, and I gazed out of the window, and I thought of Nicki and of my acting friends, wondering what they would think became of me. I thought of my mother, who might survive a massacre to learn I had vanished. Or perhaps she was dead after all, and I would soon join her and the rest of my family in the afterlife. That was some comfort, at least.”

“And then?”

“And then the sun set, and he came to me for the last time.”

Daniel thinks he’ll have to prompt Lestat again, but he continues, faster now they are near the end.

“He struck me hard across the face. A final test perhaps, because when I flung myself at him and tried one more time to fight back, he was pleased. He let me expend my rage and fear on him, as implacable as a gargoyle. Then he bit me, and he drew deeply this time. Flashes of my life played in my mind, and I saw flashes of his. I knew his name was Magnus, that he was many centuries old, and that in life he had been a great and powerful alchemist. When he drew back, I knew I was dying. He offered me the Dark Gift, wanted me to ask for it, but I would not. I was resigned to dying. But he was resolved to have me as his heir, so he poured his blood into my mouth, and I drank it.”

Something about this ending strikes Daniel as profoundly unsatisfying. He wants to ask ‘that’s it?’, but it seems impolitic. He needs to dig in around the edges. “Did you understand what he was offering you?”

“I knew that he offered to make me like him: a monster. I did not want that.”

“Like him…” Daniel repeats, thoughtful. Lestat meets his eyes defiantly.

What, Daniel wonders, was Magnus like? Perhaps that’s the question that’s haunting him. They’ve been talking about him all night and he still doesn’t have any real sense of the man and what drove him. As twisted as he was, he was a thinking, feeling being, as surely as Daniel, Louis and Lestat are. Nicolas, Gabrielle, even Lestat’s brothers and fellow actors: they have come alive in Lestat’s words and memories. Lestat has talked almost freely of himself in periods of his captivity when Magnus wasn’t there. Yet Magnus remains a far-off, flat grotesque: a terrifying face seen at a distance, an implacable hand dragging him to hell, the whisper “Wolfkiller” in the back of Lestat’s mind. What drew him to Lestat in particular? Was he oblivious to the horror he inflicted, too far from humanity for it to register, or was the horror the point? Is Lestat still holding back, or does he not know himself?

“You didn’t want to be like him,” Daniel asks, “even when the alternative was death? The oblivion of that abyss you’d been so concerned about?” It doesn’t fit with the portrait Lestat has painted of himself so far, of a survivor, someone who loves life.

“You do not understand the process, because the memory of your turning has been taken from you,” says Lestat, with practiced superiority. It hits Daniel like a slap in the face.

“That’s beside the point.”

“Is it?” asks Lestat, dripping with faux innocence. “How would you know?”

How would he? Inexorably, or perhaps he has Lestat’s guiding hand to thank for the direction his mind takes, he returns to the empty, aching hole in his memory: the stunned silence that Louis left behind him, the mingled triumph, terror and anticlimax of having made his move and carried the day, the sudden awareness of Armand still there with him, the adrenaline spike of knowing that the only control over Armand that Louis had ever had was the control Armand chose to give him. And then nothing, till he woke up on the floor over a day later, a vampire, alone.

“Armand must have taken every scrap of the experience he could before your mind closed to him forever and then put you to sleep on the instant,” Lestat muses. “A delicate operation, masterfully done, if inexplicable. Louis thinks spite motivated him, but I think there must be a quality in you that he hasn’t encountered in five hundred years, to make him act so.” He leans in close as he asks, voice low and confidential, “Is it a good thing, do you think? Or something uniquely repellant?”

It’s nothing Daniel hasn’t thought of himself, but it still burns. “I don’t need to remember my turning to know that there’s more to yours,” he says through gritted teeth.

At the failure of his plot to deflect Daniel, Lestat’s face darkens. “Tread carefully, fledgling.”

“No one would judge you,” Daniel says, trying, in the spirit of the shit he’s selling, to keep his voice non-judgemental, but too angry with Lestat to be entirely successful, “if you said yes to something you didn’t understand, with death as the only alternative.”

Why is he even pushing this point so hard? Is it about Lestat, or is it about him? He asked for the so-called Gift once in San Francisco. For all he knows he asked for it again in Dubai. If Lestat, who boasts of the glee and panache with which he kills, really rejected it, then what kind of monster is Daniel?

Maybe Daniel is about to relent, but he’ll never know, because the next moment Lestat’s patience snaps and he gives Daniel what he wants.

He’s falling as the memory begins, and for a moment it’s so like the sensation of falling in a dream that he thinks he’ll wake when he lands. All that happens is that his back hits the pile of bedding on the floor—little more than a few layers of sackcloth on stone after he tore the place apart all day, looking for a weapon or an escape route—and with the impact the scant breath left in his body rushes out and something cracks in his ribcage. It shouldn’t matter, a drop in the ocean of pain that surges and throbs in every part of him: his hands are bruised and swollen from trying to claw his captor’s eyes out, his limbs ache and burn from struggling fruitlessly against his grip, a sharp agony in his face tells him something is likely cracked in his skull, he cannot seem to move his right wrist, which is hot and swollen. There are so many mysterious hurts all through his body that his mind cannot catalogue them. Some, he cannot bring himself to think about. Yet the breathlessness from the fall makes the panic worse when the vampire is suddenly on top of him, both of Lestat’s wrists gripped in one hand, as immovable but curiously light as he always is, like a hollow bronze statue. Not again, please, Lestat thinks.

But no, it’s not that. It’s only the teeth, those two horrible teeth, plunging so deep into his neck that the vampire’s fleshy gums gnaw at him like a teething babe. And as before, no matter how hard Lestat tries to hold on, when he begins to draw he sucks Lestat’s mind out of his body with the blood and plunges him into a fractured dream world of sensation. Lestat knows by now that it can be a gift or a nightmare, anything from the sun shining on Nicki’s curls as he plays to him in the amphitheatre of the mountains at home on a beautiful spring day, to the existential horror of the witches’ place when he was a child, when he first embarrassed his father so much that he locked him away where no one would see.

This time, there are flickers of his home, of his mother, of Nicki, of the audience at Renaud’s on their feet. But there’s also something new. Memories that are not his own. Magnus’ memories, the name coming to him like he’s known it all along.

His lifelong quest for gold and immortality, for power. The long sought answer found and then denied; despite all he’s sacrificed and amassed the beautiful blood drinkers tell him he is too old and ugly and used up to join their ranks. It makes the shock all the sweeter when he does what he’s always done when denied and takes it anyway, when he finds the secret sleeping place of one of the oldest and most beautiful among them and uses all his arts to bind him, when he drinks the so-called gift straight from his veins and leaves the creature half-dead, broken by the wiles of a mere human.

The fascination of the memories briefly conceals what is different this night: he isn’t stopping. Lestat feels it suddenly, how deep the vampire, how deep Magnus is drinking. So deep and fast that Lestat has been plunged into Magnus’ soul just as Magnus has speared into his. And Lestat’s life, his blood, his thundering heart are a slippery rope, running faster and faster through his hands, the end of it approaching, and once it whips away he’ll be helpless to do anything but plunge into the abyss. He doesn’t want to die.

“God, don’t desert me, don’t let it stop,” he finds the strength to say. Or maybe he only thinks it. Magnus hears just the same.

Yes, fight, Wolfkiller, he sends him, smiling into the meat of Lestat’s neck, don’t go into hell without a battle. Mock god!.

Lestat’s fury and despair surge even higher. He doesn’t mock! Why, why, does no one ever believe he is sincere? Even when a monster can reach inside his head and pull out his deepest memories, even when his soul is at stake, the monster doesn’t believe him! Is there something wrong with him that everyone else can see? Is that why God never answers?

Magnus goes on sucking at his wound, on and on, until the thundering world first slows, then stops, suspended. Magnus is no longer drinking. No longer latched onto Lestat’s neck. He is leaning over Lestat, tender, fatherly, a hand cupping the back of Lestat’s head. Lestat’s body is mercifully numb, nearly empty, nothing in him but the last drops of life and then, suddenly, an aching, unbearable thirst. The thirst deepens as Magnus brings their faces closer together, gleaming black eyes boring into his, intent and devouring. Every shallow breath is a struggle, and the air burns through Lestat’s dry throat like fire.

You’re dying, Wolfkiller. Magnus croons, mournful. With a long, cool finger he brushes back the strands of hair that have stuck, sweaty, to Lestat’s face. The light’s going out of your blue, blue eyes, as if all the summer days are gone.

“No.” He doesn’t want to die. “Please.” He’s so thirsty.

Ask for it, child. Magnus’ face has never looked softer or more compassionate, no matter the praises or intimacies he’s heaped on Lestat in their days together. He looks almost human. He looks like he loves him. Ask for it, and I shall give you the water of all waters.

Uncomprehending, Lestat gazes up at Magnus’ almost human face. Water? He needs water. He’ll die without water.

Ask for it, and you will live forever, live forever on my body and my blood.

Now Magnus holds him poised above the abyss, as dark and endless as Lestat has always feared. He can feel its gravity pulling at him. The liquid depths of Magnus’ eyes are soft and inviting in contrast. Only a drink, only his soul, and Magnus will lift him safely up.

Life everlasting.

There is not enough strength or breath left in Lestat to speak. He turns his face away and his skull slips from Magnus’ palm. His head lolls back. He will not ask.

Stubborn Wolfkiller.

Stubborn? Not stubborn. Brave. He will tumble into the emptiness of death rather than bow to this horror. Rather than become like Magnus.

With a small regretful sigh, Magnus does what he always does when he’s denied. He takes what he wants anyway. With one hand, he gashes his own throat. With the other, he grasps the back of Lestat’s head once more and pushes his mouth to the gaping wound.

Lestat’s mouth opens in a reflexive gasp of horror and disgust and the blood spurts between his lips. The thick, hot liquid spreads, as smooth and soothing as honey, into all the cracked and burning crevices of his mouth, down his parched throat. Before Lestat is aware of it his mouth is open, his own arms have come up to lock Magnus against him, and he is drinking in great sucking draughts. He drinks and drinks and drinks, and even so it is not enough to take in all of the torrent that flows from Magnus’ slit throat. The blood flows into and over all the numb, dying parts of his body, warming him inside and out, bringing him back to life, not in agony, but in bliss.

The memory fades out, leaving Daniel still reeling from the rollercoaster of horror to ecstasy, and Lestat slumped and panting, as if with exertion. For several long moments, neither of them speak.

Eventually, Lestat makes a visible effort to pull himself back together. “Was it everything you hoped it would be?” he asks.

Daniel flips him off. Lestat seems to find the triumph of rendering Daniel speechless heartening, because he sits up straighter and resumes his story.

“Afterwards, he was a bundle of sticks, so drained of life he could barely move under the weight of his blood soaked robes. Having been through a throat slitting myself, I don’t know how he managed even that. All his strength and power and vitality had been poured into me, as his sole heir. I marvelled at the beauty of the world around me, even the mundane, even the ugly, even him. Especially him. He was lovely to me.

“Despite his weakness, he took me in hand, and gave me the only guidance he ever would. He told me the sparest rules of our existence: avoid the sun, avoid fire, drink only the blood of the living. He showed me yet another room in his lair, this one filled more deeply with jewels and treasures than the other had been filled with corpses, and told me it was all mine. He showed me the path to his tomb: there was a tunnel, hidden behind a stone that no human would be able to move. We would have had to crawl through it on our hands and knees, and he didn’t have the strength, but he told me it led to his sarcophagus, where I should sleep from now on. Then he took me to a final room, a room with a grand fireplace already piled with wood, and he told me that after he was gone I must scatter his ashes, or he would come back, rend me limb from limb, and find a new heir for himself.”

“What a tender guardian,” Daniel mutters.

“I hadn’t realized until that moment—you will think me stupid Daniel, but I was still dazed with my recent changes, not taking in the implications of his words—that he meant to kill himself. I did not want him to. I begged him to stay with me, as piteously as I had ever begged for my life, for one night, for one hour, not even to teach me, though I longed for guidance, but just so I would not be alone, unmade and remade into this strange new thing. I offered him anything: heart, body, blood. But despite all we had shared, he was as implacable before my pleading as he had ever been. He lit the fire and jumped into it with the same thought, and he was ablaze in moments. He danced and laughed as he burned until he was nothing but embers and ashes, happy to be on his way to hell, and I wept for him as he went.”

There’s a brief flash of the fire between them, a roaring, energetic conflagration with a wizened, blackened figure at its heart, barely humanoid. Daniel can tell that as Lestat watches he is on his knees, face wet with new blood tears, skin stiff with a layer of Magnus’ dried blood that feels as thick as a coat.

“That’s it,” Lestat says. “That’s the end of it.”

There’s nothing else, echoes in Daniel’s head. He’s as unconvinced as he was the last time he heard it.

“I still have a few questions.”

“More doubts?” asks Lestat, a warning in his voice. “You think I schemed like my maker to become this? Maybe I held him captive in the tower until he gave me the gift, and burned him to a crisp afterwards to cover my crime?”

“I don’t doubt what you’re telling me, I just know you’re not telling me the whole story.”

“I have told you everything important. Shortly after Magnus burned I purged the last of my human bodily fluids, and then later I drained a wicked old human servant he had apparently had the whole time. The servant was content to let Magnus murder all the blond men he wanted for the faint hope he might learn some black magic of his own, so I counted him no loss to the world. There was also a stable boy, but I let him live. He never entered the main house and doted on the horses. We can get into all that tomorrow if you want, but it grows late.”

It doesn’t grow that late, but nonetheless Lestat shifts like he’s going to get up and leave. Daniel holds up a hand. “No, I mean I have questions about the week you spent there before you were turned.”

Lestat huffs impatiently. “We will be here a week ourselves if I go into every detail.”

“That’s okay.”

“And it has been over two hundred years! I don’t remember all the details.”

“Maybe I can jog your memory.”

“Putain! Why are you so fixated on this one week, when there is much story left to tell? This is boring, we have covered it.”

Ignoring him, Daniel begins. “Magnus takes men. Blondes. Your build, your age-”

“Some looked younger, some older.”

“-your colouring. That’s very specific.”

“He had a type. Many of us do.”

“I don’t,” says Daniel. He doesn’t feel the straw he’s accidentally offered until Lestat grasps it.

Lestat’s lip curls in a predatory smile. He cocks his head. “You truly think so, don’t you?”

“I don’t,” Daniel repeats stubbornly. Lestat may think he has something, but Daniel doesn’t have a fucking type.

“It’s melancholy that draws you in, Daniel.” Lestat’s voice is low, intimate. “Sad little humans whose sad little lives trace repetitious circles around their unfulfilled potential. You think you are being sentimental about humanity, finding traces of the divine in the trite and the maudlin, but in truth it makes you feel better about your choices, that you burned others down rather than let yourself be trapped by fear and duty and expectations, that you made the selfish choice, again and again.” He tilts his head. “Their smallness validates you.”

It’s a devastating blow. Because it’s true, Daniel sees, all at once. He absorbs the humiliation of learning a fundamental truth about himself from a narcissistic vampire. Again. And shakes it off. There are stories that need to be told.

“Fine. Maybe you’re right. I’m a selfish ass and everything I do is about me, film at 11. Louis once told me that your most triumphant kill was the young man, because they stood on the threshold of the maximum possibility of life-”

“This was not in your book!” Whether Lestat is more offended by the assertion or the fact that not everything Louis said made it to print, Daniel doesn’t stop to find out. He’s forging on.

“-and there’s a certain common thread there sure: validating ourselves through those we kill and all that. But nothing except blonde blue-eyed men, decades of them, slim but muscular, the summer days in their blue eyes: that is another level of specificity. It’s a fetish.”

Lestat rises, paces, pulls outrage over fear. “I am not responsible for your filthy mind and base suppositions. You talk to please yourself, and your hordes of tabloid-loving readers desperate for more titillating nonsense.”

They were getting close to the heart of the thing.

“It was winter when you were taken, is that right?”

“We have been over this,” Lestat says, wary.

“It was cold in your room, even with the fire, even with Nicolas beside you.”

“Paris is a city of extremes. What is your point?”

“You slept nearly fully dressed in winter, everything but the boots and the waistcoat. I saw it in your memory. You were all bundled up when Magnus took you.”

Lestat has no denial to offer.

“Then you were naked when Magnus dragged you down the stairs and threw you in the cage. I saw that in your memory too. In fact, you were naked in all those memories of the tower that you just showed me.”

Silence.

“What happened to your clothes, Lestat?” Daniel’s voice rises to a shout. “Why would he strip you naked, this ancient monster with a fetish for beautiful young blonde men?”

But Lestat is gone, blowing out of the room with a speed that cracks every window in Daniel’s airy, natural-light filled living room. Fuck.

Chapter Text

Once the fever hot drive to win the conversation has broken, Daniel doesn’t feel great about how the last interview session went. Sure, on the one hand, Lestat is a centuries old murderer who has committed tens of thousands of atrocities and also, he’s an ass; he doesn’t need or deserve kid gloves. However, on the other hand, Daniel is in the glass house of blood-drinkers with him now and he’s actually fucking loving it, so maybe he needs to stop throwing stones and reexamine his own hypocrises and double standards. It could be that confronting his interview subject with the likely sexual violence that they experienced in an attempt to crack them open like an egg is not a fair or efficient interview technique.

He catches up on his transcription of the interview so far, tidies up his notes, and fleshes both out with details from Lestat’s memories. It sounds worse the second and the third time through.

Lestat doesn’t show the next night, and Daniel’s attempts to reach him mentally echo into nothing, so he calls out to the only person he thinks Lestat won’t ignore.

Louis! How is it going?

Shouldn’t I be asking you that? Louis asks.

You’re the one being hunted by vampirekind like John Wick, I figure you can take priority. No Daniel’s not delaying, not at all.

They’re getting more resourceful in order to avoid a direct confrontation, but I’m dealing with it. Why are you really calling?

I was just wondering if you’d heard from Lestat lately. If Louis has, then Lestat is fine, and Daniel can start needling him over the vampire airways in a few days.

Not since the two of you started your interview. What happened?

Shit.

We got onto some heavy stuff, and he stormed out. Grudgingly, fairness compels Daniel to add, I uh, maybe wasn’t the most sensitive.

How unlike you, Louis says, wry.

It would just be good to know if the interview is still on. And I’m maybe… Fuck, he can’t believe he’s actually going to say it, a little worried about him.

He’s more robust than he seems, says Louis.

Robust would not be Daniel’s go to word for Lestat. Didn’t you just find him seventy years into his agoraphobic era?

Well I told you to be careful!

I’m not saying come over here and fix him, I’m just saying, maybe text him and remind him you still exist so he doesn’t bury himself in Central Park for a century?

What the hell did you talk about?

I take it you haven’t listened to the recordings I sent you yet? Daniel takes Louis’ silence as confirmation. Any of them? Seriously man, there’s some juicy stuff in there.

Daniel, Louis grits out, impatient.

We talked about his turning.

That bad? Louis asks tentatively.

Daniel only got the sanitised version and it sickened him, but that feels like too much to explain without more context. Already, he can feel the seeds of a frustrating and potentially disastrous split loyalty germinating in him, and when you mix that with the mild guilt, he doesn’t feel up to sincerity, or to encapsulating their last session in an ironic quip.

Just, if you could call him, that would be great.

Although it’s far from the first time Louis has done it this century, calling Lestat on the phone is still several miracles rolled into one. There’s enough of the 1900s left in Louis that the ability to talk to anyone in the world wherever they are can still give him a thrill, if he lets it. Then there’s the freedom Louis has granted himself to acknowledge, after decades of denial, that most of the time Lestat is the living being he most wants to talk to. Dwarfing both is the relief of knowing that he doesn’t have an unquenchable longing for his daughter’s murderer. It’s a rich, heady brew: the kind of intensity that Louis schooled himself to avoid for fifty years, along with colours other than black, so that now he craves and cringes from it in turn.

It takes several tense rings for Lestat to answer, but as with every time Louis has called, he picks up.

“Hello Louis,” Lestat says, in his deep, rich voice. The way he pronounces the name counts as its own little miracle. The tension that has thrummed in Louis’ chest since Daniel called him relaxes.

“Hello Lestat,” Louis echoes back. Their own little call and response. “Are you doing okay?”

“Of course,” replies Lestat, playing innocent. It would probably have been convincing for anyone who hadn’t cradled a weeping, dusty and underfed Lestat in their arms moments after they claimed to be “living”, but Louis has done that, so he remains sceptical.

“You’ve got Daniel worried about you. He thinks you might bury yourself in Central Park and go to sleep for another century.”

Lestat snorts. “I would never consign myself to the earth of this cold, anonymous city.”

They fall silent for a few seconds. If Louis concentrates, he can almost persuade himself he can hear Lestat’s heartbeat on the line, pounding in time with his own.

“It is more difficult than I thought,” Lestat says, eventually, “recalling the events of the past.” Given he’d refused to do it for over a century, this is an alarming statement. “And your pet journalist, he questions every detail relentlessly.”

Louis recalls how quickly his certainty about his own story fell away under Daniel’s incisive analysis, and how raw and exposed that made him feel.

“You don’t have to do this.” The words slip out before Louis can police them. This interview is the closest Louis has ever got to answers from his maker, why is he giving him an out?

“I believe I do,” is all Lestat says, after a slight pause.

“Well, then you don’t have to tell the world everything. It’s okay to keep some details to yourself.” God knows Louis has regretted some of the things he disclosed in his interview.

“You did not tell Daniel everything?” Lestat asks, hopefully.

“Not even close.” There were reams of things Louis left out, for time, from embarrassment, because he was in denial, or because he’d full-on forgotten.

“It-” Lestat’s voice, or maybe their connection, frays for a second. “It gives me heart to think that there is more to your memories than what is in the book, cherie.”

“You have to think about the story you want to tell, and what events tell it.” Even if that story ends up having a completely different meaning than you thought it would at the outset.

“I see.”

“And with Daniel, sometimes you have to tell him where the line is and what you’ll do if he crosses it, because he’s always going to want to push things further. That’s what makes him good at his job, but it also make him an asshole sometimes.” The boundaries he’d had to draw with Claudia spring to mind.

“Thank you for this advice, Louis.” Lestat sighs. “I suppose you will be upset if he does not live through this interview?”

He’s probably joking—Lestat prefers to seek forgiveness rather than permission—but to be sure, Louis tells him, “Very,” in his firmest voice.

What exactly Louis says, Daniel isn’t sure. The next night Daniel is stalking a pompous— and decidedly not melancholy, fuck you Lestat—advertising executive with enticingly prominent veins through midtown Manhattan when Lestat announces into his brain that he will be over soon. By the time Daniel gets back to Brooklyn, Lestat is already seated in his usual place, a little more dishevelled than he’s been on previous occasions, but calm. Weirdly calm, for Lestat. Daniel settles down across from him warily.

“There is truth in what you say,” says Lestat.

No fucking shit, you don’t run away for two days over things that didn’t happen, Daniel thinks, but he does it quietly and waits for Lestat to elaborate.

“It was sexual, this feeding on blonde, blue-eyed men. I do not deny it, but that is all I will say on the subject. We will move on.”

“Don’t you think we’re missing a huge piece of the picture if we ignore-” Daniel begins, but Lestat cuts him off.

“I have plumbed the depths of that week as deeply as I care to,” Lestat says. If he’d bellowed, Daniel’s grit might have risen to meet his ire, but the firm finality in his voice leaves nothing for Daniel to pry or jab at. “The salacious details we have covered so far will have to be enough to whet the public’s appetite.”

“People will speculate, and you won’t be able to control what they say,” Daniel warns Lestat. As he predicted to Louis it’s already happening with Claudia: a subsection of Claudia-ite book fans who claim everyone she ever murdered deserved it, debate viciously and with remarkable conviction over the content of the missing diary pages, clamour for Daniel to write or release (depending on how credulous they are about the non-fiction label) Claudia’s unedited diaries, and excoriate Daniel for his cheap and sensationalist “decision” to have his only major female “character” be sexually assaulted.

Fuck. Some of them are going to think he’s putting Lestat’s ordeal in the sequel just to placate them, and all it’s going to do is wind them up.

“We move on, or we end the interview here,” Lestat says.

For a moment, Daniel hesitates. It’s unlikely that Lestat has a true grasp of the internet echo chamber, but the thought of explaining the nuances of fandom and social media to a two hundred and fifty something year old is exhausting. The threatening aura of heat that begins to gather dangerously around Daniel’s notebook, laptop and hands settles the matter.

“Fine,” Daniel says, making the mostly practical decision to drop the subject, “oblique hints it is.”

After all, there is a thin line between writing from a place of truth and exposing personal history that should probably be talked over with a professional for a few years before it hits the bestseller list.

“For all I had resisted the Dark Gift, I was captivated by its wonder in those early days,” says Lestat, and they’re off.

By his telling, for all his human horror of the quote-unquote Dark Gift, Lestat got over any squeamishness when it came to being damned and drinking hot blood remarkably quickly. He was defiling churches and romping through the streets and salons of Paris within days, rich and strong and beautiful. It’s not completely absurd. Now that he too drinks blood to live, Daniel knows how quickly a callous attitude to murder can develop, and how thrilling a powerful, pain-free new body can be. Drinking blood is ghastly to a human, but nothing more or less than elemental to a vampire: everything, momentous, yet also simply what you do. Louis, in his distaste for the act, is the outlier.

Nonetheless, Daniel pushes back—gently, or as close as he comes to it, they’re still regaining their rhythm after the recent breach—on the obvious return of the rose-tinting, and under this pressure Lestat admits to having some questions about his new state of being, maybe even some qualms.

One notion that haunted him was the possibility that only one vampire could exist at a time. If true, it would explain why Magnus burned himself immediately after Lestat’s creation, and why the vampire that Magnus stole the gift from wailed as disconsolately as he did as Magnus bled him. There were a few clues Lestat clung to when he contemplated the bleak fate of being the only one of his kind forever: the discovery of multiple elaborately carved sarcophagi in Magnus’ tower, which seem a strong hint that Magnus had once shared the space; the impression from Magnus’ memories that it had been a group of blood-drinkers that refused him the Gift; and a presence that Lestat intermittently felt watching him that felt, on some ineffable level, like him. Armand, Daniel presumes, though Lestat refuses to confirm or deny.

However, what truly tormented the newly turned Lestat, as surely as it did Louis and does Daniel if he doesn’t keep busy, were the humans he’d been ripped away from. Instinctively, Lestat believed that he should stay away from the people he loved. Inevitably, he struggled. All the parties and victims and fine clothes in Paris could not distract him from missing Nicolas, from his yearning for the life he’d had. No pile of treasure could bring his family back, though on that front, Lestat did his best. Through his new lawyer Roget, he poured money into the investigation, sending whoever Roget could hire to the Auvergne to seek out the truth until his lawyer had to tell him he risked the safety of any surviving family with the level of attention more activity would bring, and that he must wait for answers.

In response, Lestat focused all his protective and caring urges on Nicolas and his theatre friends, refusing to see them or explain, but heaping them with gifts. He had Nicolas set up in the finest rooms in the city, arranged all the violin lessons he could stand and a Stradivarius violin to take them with. He became a generous new investor in his old theatre, until the shabby building transformed and Renaud himself became embarrassed at the largesse and pressed Lestat’s lawyer to simply buy the building and company from him, which Lestat proceeded to do.

As so often with gifts, for the people that matter the most, they were a paltry substitute. Just as guns and mastiffs couldn’t stop Lestat feeling alone in his childhood home, just as six years of gifts couldn’t heal the breach with Louis and Claudia a century later, it wasn’t enough. Roget reported that Nicolas harassed his office daily with questions about Lestat. Where was he? What happened? Why would he not see him?

“I tried to distract myself with the ongoing investigation of what had happened to my family. Even though I could now read-”

“You could?” Daniel asked, unable to keep the relief from his voice. He’s not sure he’d have survived telling Louis that his ex-ish partner of several decades had been illiterate the whole time.

“After a lifetime of effort and embarrassment, it happened without me even trying. At first, I entered the minds of the people reading letters to me, impatient to overcome the millisecond delay before they spoke the contents. One day I realized I no longer needed them as middle-men.”

“Huh.” Daniel wonders if he can apply this method to learning other things. Maybe he’s already learning antiquated French through Lestat’s memories?

“I could now read the reports Roget received from the agent he had sent to the Auvergne, which I did, compulsively, like picking a fresh scab, despite knowing that they contained nothing but the refusal of the locals to speak of what happened. But I also sought out arrivals in Paris from the Auvergne, scouring their minds for knowledge of recent scandals and executions. What happened to my family was talked of in some circles, as an example of both repression and rebellion taken too far, but always vaguely, by people who had heard of it from someone who knew someone, all of it frustratingly inconclusive.

“All the while, I was in the same city as Nicki, possibly the only living person left who I loved, knowing that he sought me, and knowing I must stay away. I thought of him every waking moment.”

“And the resolve to stay away began to weaken,” Daniels says, more a comment than a question. He can see where this is going.

Lestat doesn’t bother to deny it. He looks into the distance and twists a ring on his index finger, lost in recollection.

“One evening,” he says eventually, “I climbed up to the window of his new apartment, merely to check that it was good enough for him. I chose a time when he was out, and told myself I would not linger. It gave me great satisfaction to see how richly appointed the rooms were. The books I had sent to him were piled on the table, the fireplace was heaped with coal to keep him warm, the china was new and expensive. I ran lightly along the windowsills to peer in every window, taking the time to imagine him in each room, cosseted in luxury as he deserved to be.”

“You lingered.”

“I lingered,” Lestat accedes. “I lingered until I heard the sound of him approaching, and how could I leave then? When he was so close? Was I not there to check on him? Eyes look your last! It was only fair.”

What is it with vampires quoting Romeo? Daniel wonders if Louis would find it less cringeworthy coming from Lestat than he did from Armand, and is pretty sure he knows the answer. “‘Eyes look your last’ is followed by ‘Arms, take your last embrace,’ as I recall,” Daniel says.

Lestat gives him a dirty look, but doesn’t let Daniel derail him. “And he was there, my Nicki, even more beautiful to my immortal eyes than he had ever been. The same delicate but strong limbs, the same large, sober brown eyes. His clever mouth, as always, ready to be kissed. His head, filled with tangled and uncompromising thoughts.”

“You could read his mind now,” Daniel realises, intrigued. It’s one thing to meet someone and know them inside and out right away, another to gain that ability when your perception and dynamic is already set. What long held illusions might be about to be swept away?

“I could have. Yet, I shied away from delving deeply into his soul. It felt wrong, just as it felt natural with all the rest of humanity.”

“You were afraid of what you might see.”

“Perhaps,” concedes Lestat. “Yet, even without making a conscious effort to look inside him, I sensed something different in him. He was with Luchina and Jeannette, and in their minds I saw what I usually saw.”

“I want food, I want sex, I want to go home?”

“Along those lines. In Nicki, however, there was the echo of a vast, secret terrain.” For the first time this session—they’ve had a good run—Lestat’s eyes brim with tears.

“You don’t think you saw more in him because he mattered to you more?”

“Non!” cries Lestat, always more sensitive to contradiction when he’s already emotional. “I do not. It was the darkness that Nicki had spoken of to me, that I had never understood, that I still did not understand even then, because I was even more afraid to look at it now I knew it was real, afraid to enter that grim landscape.”

Lestat trails off, but from the tension in him, Daniel can tell he’s gathering himself for a disclosure, not avoiding one, and gives him space.

“What I could not help but realize,” Lestat says, voice low and full of self-reproach, “now that I saw him in the flesh, was the horrible thing I had done to him. He seemed the same on the outside, better even. The once fine clothes of his former life, which had long worn thin, were replaced with new, even more resplendent finery. He wore a jewelled ring I had picked out and sent to him on his finger. He talked to Jeannette and Luchina as they ate their evening meal together, discussing changes to the theatre… but soon I saw, in the girls’ open and simple minds, that he made them uneasy. That he was brittle in his rage and grief, and that slowly, despite their fondness for him and the loyalty that my gifts had bought, he was driving them away. Driving them all away with his endless insistence that something was wrong, that I would never be ashamed of them no matter how grand I became, that I had been taken, with a desperate cry, impossibly, in the middle of the night, against my will. They did not believe him, but it was all true!”

Lestat’s tears spill over. “He was so fragile. More fragile than I had ever realized, and I only saw it now when it was too late, when I had already done this thing to him, cast him into an untenable anguish of uncertainty, set him against all our friends by giving him secret knowledge that they could not understand!”

“You were kidnapped from your bed and you cried out, anyone would do that in those circumstances,” Daniel says, trying to bring a dose of reality to the conversation.

“And then I sent him gifts, as if it never happened. And stayed away, as if I never loved him.”

“You were trying to help.” When Daniel became the Lestat apologist in this conversation he doesn’t know, but if Lestat’s not going to do, apparently he is. He must still be feeling bad about their last session.

“And with every attempt to, I harmed him more. Perhaps if Magnus had killed me after all, and he had only one uncertainty to live with, he would have been able to get over it.”

“Or perhaps he would have still been tortured by your disappearance, but this time with rent to pay.” Daniel’s suggestion bounces off Lestat, who is mired too deeply in regret to listen.

“I hung, in an agony of uncertainty, outside his window, every part of me longing to reach out. I made not a sound, not a movement, but suddenly, he turned, as if he heard a secret voice. As if, in the monster I had become, there was still a trace of the man that he knew and loved, and that man had cried out for him.” Lestat’s chest heaves with emotion. “It was only my preternatural speed that allowed me to swing up onto the roof before he saw me. After a moment, he came to the window and leaned out. I saw his naked hands on the windowsill, so close. If he had lingered even a second longer than he did, I could not have stopped myself from reaching out.”

“But you did stop yourself?” prompts Daniel, when Lestat doesn’t go on. He’s getting caught up, he can’t help it.

“He withdrew. I thought the danger was over. Then he got out his violin, and he played, one of his own compositions. It was not the first time I had heard music since I became a vampire, I had attended dozens of concerts and recitals at the best halls, but it was the first time I had heard Nicki play. And oh, how he played. The shivering notes cleaved into the night, the purest thing I had ever heard. It was as transporting as the first time he ever played to me. But beyond the perfection of the sound itself, his composition spoke to me more clearly than ever before, and the more I listened, the more it chilled me to my core. I heard in it the very essence of despair, as if Nicki was making the violin say what he had never been able to say, and I could only now understand it. I lay on the roof, and the tears coursed silently down my face,” says Lestat, tears coursing silently down his face, “and I might have laid there till dawn if he hadn’t gone to bed.”

“How long did you hold out?”

“How cynical you are, Daniel.”

“Pollyanna could see where this was going.”

“The next night, I went to Renaud’s theatre. I know now, it was a mistake.” Lestat stops. Admits, “I knew then it was a mistake. I lied to myself at first, as I dressed in my best clothes, as I walked towards the area where Renaud’s was. I would not go into the theatre, I would simply see how the renovations to the outside had proceeded. I would go in, but I would not stay for his solo. I would watch his solo, but wouldn’t let him see me. And then, when he actually stood to play, and I saw all the fear and confusion that still tangled up in him, I told myself that maybe, if he saw me, it would calm the tangle. I do not even know if I made the decision consciously, or if it was a moment’s impulse that might have passed, but my heart called out to his, sharp and clear.”

“Let me guess, it said ‘Come to me’?” As has become usual, Daniel’s sympathy for Lestat is followed closely by exasperation. These fucking vampires, for real.

“Nothing so coherent. It was only enough to make him turn and look, to find me at the back of the audience.”

“A face in the crowd, just like Magnus?”

Lestat flinches like Daniel has struck him, but Daniel is too frustrated at the cyclical patterns they all seem to be trapped in to go easy on him. Magnus stalks Lestat, Lestat stalks Nicki, Armand stalks Lestat, and then just when it’s calmed down for a few decades, everyone stalks Louis. There and then Daniel resolves that, regardless of how goddamn lonely and desperate the vampiric afterlife gets, he will not be picking up anyone up via stalking. He’s going to go and talk to them, the normal way. Not just because he’s starting to feel left out! It’s clearly a terrible fucking idea.

“Hardly a fair comparison,” says Lestat, coldly.

“Let’s see how it turns out and circle back to the question of fairness.”

If Daniel didn’t already know the answer was ‘very badly’, he’d guess from how quickly Lestat moves on from the comment like Daniel never made it.

“It was perhaps not the most opportune moment to make myself known. I am sure it was quite the scene when he abandoned his place among the musicians to follow me out of the theatre.”

“Did you let him catch you? Or was this more of a campaign of harassment, over several weeks?”

“He caught up with me just outside. We embraced. For a few blissful seconds, I was even arrogant enough to think that I had done the right thing.” Lestat gives a bitter laugh. The mirth passes quickly, and returns him to melancholy. “I had, when I was first turned, wondered if I was still capable of love in my new form, if what I felt were the dying phantoms of my former self, and with time my love would become the cruel, implacable love of Magnus. As I held Nicki in my arms, I believed that if anything, my feelings burned deeper and brighter than ever before. A premature conclusion perhaps, but it is what I thought at the time.”

“How did Nicolas take your sudden reappearance?”

“Nicki’s relief that I was whole and alive flared brightly and eclipsed his anger and confusion. I do not think the reaction lasted long. I cannot be sure, because I was overwhelmed, to my horror, by a convulsion of hunger.”

Daniel’s first reaction, not one he’s proud of if he examines it closely, is an empathetic but awkward pity, like he’s heard an embarrassing story that he knows could have easily applied to him had the dice fallen differently. Newly turned, it can happen. Lestat however, looks so devastated that Daniel’s second reaction is worry that Lestat is going to accidentally drain Nicolas right there and then. Surely not? They haven’t even met Armand yet!

“You must understand that,” continues Lestat, “until then, I had fed exclusively on the scum of Paris. Cutthroats who swarmed from the shadows if I turned down a dark alley in a fine coat, the occasional preening merchant who was poisoning his dowdy first wife so he could marry his mistress, and so on.”

This is news to Daniel. “Wait, what?” Lestat has mentioned off-handedly feeding on a mugger or two, but not that everyone he’d fed on had been some form of ne'er-do-well.

“I had also mixed extensively with people,” Lestat continues, oblivious to the bombshell he’s dropped, “in small salons, in big crowds, and was soon able to suppress my bloodlust among them, well-fed as I was. In short, I had dragged, without realizing or questioning it, a pale human morality into my new life, and thought it natural. Thought that it almost made me natural. That belief shattered, all in an instant, under the weight of my longing for Nicolas’ blood. I wanted desperately—more than I had wanted any of the evil-doers, more than Magnus’ rich and heady lifeblood—not just Nicki’s blood, but his death, and my love for him only made that destructive urge all the more acute. Why should his blood be denied me? When I wanted him more than anyone, extraordinary and vital, flowing through my body? I was thrown from the cozy assumptions I had made about my nature. It was ruination, and only ruination, that was natural to me.”

Between the implication that vigilante vampirism is cozy and the revelation that Lestat had tried vampire vigilantism, Daniel’s head is in a whirl. He gets the story straight first. “Did you bite him?”

The distant, pained expression on Lestat’s face gives him no clue.

“I rested my lips on his neck. I saw it, so clearly it felt like reality: his mind and body emptying into me, all his complexity flickering out like a candle. I wanted it. It was what I had been made for.” The silence between them is heavy as Daniel waits for Lestat to continue. “Non. I did not bite him. I had self-control enough for that, at least. Or I was simply too horrified to take advantage of the moment when the hunger was at its most acute. I only held him in my arms, so tight that he cried out.”

The memory opens up to Daniel.

“Ah!” Nicolas cries out, in real pain. In an instant, Lestat releases him. For a moment, they only look at each other.

“You are well,” says Nicolas. Lestat can see him taking in the richness of Lestat’s clothes, his firm, straight limbs. All too quickly, Lestat can feel the flare of Nicolas’ joy die down, and the hurt rise up. “Where did you go? Where have you been?” There are too many accusations crowding his mouth for them all to emerge. “Why have you played these games with us?”

In Nicolas’ anger, his heart pounds even harder. Lestat draws back, fearing his hunger will rise again, but Nicolas flings himself at Lestat, grabs at him with desperate hands. “Do not run! Speak!” He tries to shake Lestat, but with his weak, mortal strength succeeds only in moving himself, Lestat as immovable to him as a wall. This is the first clue, too subtle to register consciously with Nicolas, that something is wrong. With an unease he can’t yet explain, he looks into Lestat’s face.

“What he saw,” present day Lestat narrates, “I don’t know. It was probably my eyes. They did not glow orange like the flames of hell,” he waves a hand at Daniel’s orange eyes, “but they had gained that iridescent shimmer our kind possesses. I can not be sure that my teeth were normal, that my skin was not firmer and cooler. Maybe I smelled different. Whatever it was, I saw a terrible certainty gather in him that I had changed.”

It’s a subtle shift in Nicki’s face, only just beginning, from the anger of a lover to shock and disgust at something inhuman. Lestat cannot bear to see it happen. Almost before he can consciously recollect Magnus extinguishing the torch in his basement, the lamp on the wall near them goes out, glass cracking.

Nicolas’ eyes dart to it. “What power is this?” he gasps, and why, Lestat asks himself despairingly, did he do that? Any cover the greater darkness gives is more than counteracted by the inexplicable way that the lamp went out, and Lestat sees with dismay in the surface of Nicolas’ mind that his own eyes now have a slight gleam to them in the lower light, flat and reflective, as wolves’ eyes are. A force Lestat didn’t know he was capable of surges out of him and pushes Nicolas away, like he has been caught by sudden gale. It is so strong that Nicolas’ back slams against the wall and he loses his balance and falls to the floor.

For a moment after the impact Nicolas doesn’t breathe, and Lestat fears, with a sickening wash of nausea, that he’s broken his back, fought the lure of blood only to kill his Nicki in an instant, by accident, without even getting to taste him. He must have been only winded however, because he gasps a moment later. Before the breath is complete, Lestat is gone.

“I thought maybe being angry at me would help.” Lestat says, winding the memory back in. “If he didn’t want to see me, if he thought I had abandoned him merely on some whim, he could eventually move on, hating me.”

A familiar move, thinks Daniel, remembering Lestat letting Louis think the worst of him for seventy long years after Claudia was killed. “Did that work?” he asks.

“It might have, eventually,” Lestat replies. “The experiment did not run for long.”

He doesn’t seem eager to get back to the story of Nicki’s downfall, gazing broodily down at the floor, so Daniel takes the chance to return to some of his own outstanding questions.

“So. The scum of Paris. You’ve kept that to yourself so far. How long were you the vampire Punisher?”

At once, Lestat is reluctant. And not in the usual way, like explaining is as painful as flaying his own skin off to show Daniel some horrifying internal organ that no one else has. He tries to look bored, but he seems… embarrassed, almost awkward, neither of which are common emotions for Lestat.

“It was a passing fancy, not stuck to.”

“Why not?”

“I was young, too impatient and hungry for such rules.”

“And even more against them a hundred years later, when you knew Louis didn’t want to kill people. What, you couldn’t be bothered to try with him?”

“I tried!” Lestat’s emotions flare at the mention of Louis. “You talk of it in your book. He suggested we hunt among the wicked, I found him a wicked man, and he drank an innocent cat instead, probably breaking some poor child’s heart when their pet did not come home.”

“I’m sure it was a real full-throated effort,” says Daniel, sarcastically.

“Why do you not ask him why it took years for him to suggest it?” shouts Lestat. “It is the most elementary idea, to kill killers, it came to me without me even thinking, as an instinct.”

“You didn’t have you breathing down your neck, steering you towards harmless tractor salesmen and throwing a tantrum if you didn’t want to torture a tenor for a few hours before drinking him.”

“How do you know the tractor salesman was harmless?” asks Lestat, and that gives Daniel a moment's pause.

“Are you saying he was a secret serial killer?”

“He was no paragon. The horse he considered buying for his daughter was a gift in proportion to the extravagance of his neglect, away eleven months of the year, working.” Lestat pronounces the word ‘working’ like it’s an affectation.

“Oh come on-” starts Daniel, ready to vociferously defend the working parent whose neglect comes as a side-effect of providing, especially to a treasure-laden aristocrat.

“He slept with a prostitute in every town he travelled to, and always picked the weakest and the smallest among them, because he could only feel potent when he knew he was more powerful than them, and could have taken what he wanted if they weren’t selling it.”

Which is a little more deflating. “Well that’s really fucking grim, sure,” says Daniel. “It’s not a capital offence, if he was in fact paying them, not forcing them. Thoughts aren’t crime.”

“Ha!” says Lestat, apparently counting this admission as a victory. “This is my point. It is not simple, to hold a human life in your hands and judge it. The tractor salesman did not think he forced himself on any prostitutes, because he did not think of himself as a bad person. Would you trust his judgement on that?”

Daniel doesn’t answer, because he knows he wouldn’t. People’s capacity for self-delusion is boundless.

“The mind is not a book to be read and the lesson is not always clear,” Lestat says. “As a student of human nature, you know this.”

“There’s a gray area, of course there is,” Daniel replies. “But don’t pretend someone with bad urges or an ambiguous level of guilt is the worst you’ll be able to find every night. You said yourself, you only had to step into a few dark alleys to find a murderous thief. And you did find someone who had done bad things when you looked with Louis.”

“Who, I remind you again, since you seem to have forgotten the contents of your own book, he didn’t drink.”

“Because you made it weird! You broke his neck, he was convulsing.”

“What difference does it make to the so-called morality of his death, if his neck was broken? Would Louis have been less aware he was taking a life, if the man had still been capable of struggling with more purpose? Would it be easier, knowing until the last moment that if he stopped the man might live, rather than knowing I had already taken his life when I snapped his spine, and his body only had to catch up? The death would not even have been at his feet, not truly.”

Which, fine, Lestat has a point and maybe he snapped that man’s neck with good intentions, for a certain loose definition of “good”, at least. Daniel is never going to make headway on technicalities when he’s only heard a fraction of Louis’ story. That doesn’t mean he’s ready to drop the point.

“You’re talking about specific cases,” Daniel says, “but the point is about your whole approach. You could have tried different paths with Louis, you could have been more supportive, you could have had this exact fucking discussion, instead of trying to control him, instead of bullying him and telling him he was doing it wrong!”

This strikes home. Lestat droops, a little of his righteous irritation draining from him.

He speaks slowly. “You are right. I regret, more than you know, my approach with Louis. When we met, I had already learned many harsh lessons, gone through disappointments and failures. I found it difficult to talk about them, so I told myself that I could show Louis the way that I believed we should live. Then I got angry that he was not able to understand what I would not explain to him, angry that he did not want and enjoy what I wanted and enjoyed.”

“Right,” Daniels says, uncertainly. Lestat agreeing with him is even weirder than discovering the tractor salesman’s proclivities.

“In the end,” Lestat says, clearly off in his own world, where Daniel barely registers, “Feeding on the evil-doer would not have made things simple and easy for Louis. He likely thought of that option the first or second time he killed, and dismissed it. Louis didn’t want to feed on humans, any humans. And not because he admired them! I lived inside his mind for months before he was turned, I saw, when he embraced the kill, how magnificent he could be. He despised most people, rightly, for their hypocrisy and selfishness, for the part that all but the most vulnerable play in maintaining our sordid, unjust world. That outlook could have stood him in good stead for killing, depressing as it is.”

Keeping his face impassive, Daniel mulls over this accusation of misanthropy. It isn’t something that Louis has verbalised, but there is a ring of plausibility, if not quite truth, to it. Who can blame him, a black gay man born and raised in such an unjust era? Humanity does suck. But if Lestat understands Louis correctly—the jury is still out in Daniel’s opinion—it puts Louis’ distaste for killing in an even more unusual light. As a human interviewer, Daniel had accepted the received wisdom of not wanting to murder people, and hadn’t actually pushed Louis that hard on why he struggled with it. As a vampire, he can respect Louis’ choices, but they are undeniably strange.

“But Saint Louis,” Lestat continues, “he is a contradiction, and as ruthless with himself as he is with others. He despised himself, in equal measure, for the same reasons. He denied himself, with his iron will, not for them, or even to spite me, who made him into a killer. He did it for himself, to punish the side of himself that he did not like.”

Reluctantly, Daniel again accepts that Lestat may have some insight into Louis. There is—or maybe was, Louis seems to have had a weight lifted in recent months—more than a tang of self-harm to a lot of Louis’ actions. Louis’ reenactment of his desperate words the night he was turned ring in Daniel’s head. I know what I am, the big man in the big house, stuffing cotton in my ears so I can’t hear their cries.

Right or not, it doesn’t make up for the jaw-droppingly bad job Lestat did guiding Louis through his difficulties, when he was the one with all the power, and all the knowledge, and all the experience. But at least Daniel believes that Lestat has grappled with the issue. And maybe Daniel understands both of them a little better.

With an effort, Lestat shakes off the dreaminess that too much thinking about Louis seems to bring on, even when thinking about what Daniel would call his less alluring qualities. “Myself,” says Lestat, “I never had the self-control for such a sustained effort at self-flagellation, or Louis’ patience with philosophy.”

Having heard a metric fuckton of flowery philosophy and self-reproach over the past few days, Daniel is unconvinced, although he’s willing to take Lestat’s word for it on the self-control.

“You did drink the evil-doer though,” he says, trying Lestat’s phrase for vampire vigilantism on for size, “for a while, at least.”

“It was only an illusion. A lie I told myself to hide what I was.”

“If an illusion spares innocent lives, doesn’t that give it substance?”

Lestat sighs, somewhere between weary and exasperated. Daniel perseveres.

“Was it just wanting to bite someone you knew that put you off?” Daniel asks. “Because I don’t know what to tell you man, that happens, humans you want to fuck smell particularly good. No harm no foul, in my opinion.”

Lestat glares at Daniel, presumably for simplifying his feelings for Nicolas so crudely. “That was but one element.”

“Well, what else? Let’s get some of your philosophy in this book, alongside the titillating gothic horror.”

With affected effort, tipping his head back and rolling his eyes like Daniel is a demanding child, Lestat complies. “At first, as I said, I fed on those who attacked me, or on those in whose mind I saw some evil deed. It was a time when many subsisted on violence, and there was little to check them. From time to time I would cross paths with a wealthy murderer, one who happened to be preoccupied with their sin when I dipped into their mind, but for the most part I found my prey in the seamy underbelly, in the thieves and criminals who thought me a wealthy fop, ripe for the taking. It was easy and it was fun, to let them strike and then turn the tables on them, to let them fight me before I made them pay, and drink their hot blood with all the satisfaction of the wronged party.

“One night, not long after my confrontation with Nicki, when I wandered the streets of Paris, despondent over my failure, I walked past a woman, a beggar, sitting in a doorway. Her heartbeat was faint. The child in her arms was already dead. It was a sight you could see everyday in Paris, if you looked. The lower stratas of society lived on a knife edge, and they slipped into starvation and sickness with one piece of bad luck or one wrong decision.”

“And what, you killed her to put her out of her misery?” Daniel asks, not seeing where this is going.

“I recognised her.”

“You knew her?”

“I had killed her husband, weeks before, on some night of revelry. He accosted me, blade in hand and I saw he had used it before. I let him drag me to the shadows and there, I killed him. I saw as his life flowed into me that he had a wife and a child, but he had started it and I was hungry, so it did not give me pause. This was justice.

“Usually, I would not have recognised someone only from the memories of a mundane kill, but she was unusually beautiful, despite the predations of her life, and I had wondered as I drank him how this brute had come to win such a jewel. Alone in the world, she had fallen to this, on the brink of death in the street, her child already gone. Her husband had been a murderous thief, it is true. But he killed for survival. Not just his, but hers, their child’s. He was grist for the mill as much as she was. Just as so many of my victims were, driven to sin not by their nature, but the desperation of their circumstances.” Lestat is calm as he tells this story. “Then yes, I put her out of her misery. She had a particularly slender, pretty neck and tasted much better than her husband.”

Hot on the heels of appreciating Lestat’s insight, Daniel feels as irritated with him as ever before. “So your solution to structural inequality and killing having unintended consequences is to not even try to think about the consequences?”

“Yes!” Lestat says, like it's the only, obvious answer. “When you weigh up the worth of a human before you kill them, you take on the role of judge, jury and executioner. And all the while, a vampire has a soul blacker than the worst human! It is preposterous and impossible to make murder moral. I do not pretend to be better than my desires and appetites, I simply follow them. Why should misfortune not fall, like the hand of God, randomly?”

“Now you’re the hand of God?”

Lestat rolls his eyes. “It’s a metaphor, Daniel.”

“It’s a simile, Lestat.”

Lestat dismisses his pedantry with a sweep of his hands. “I am nothing more or less than a being following their instincts, be they preternatural or supernatural in origin, culling the herd.”

It seems like a convenient cop-out to Daniel, but he is aware that his current approach to food and leisure, which veers between pragmatic and the manic gluttony of Rumspringa, has more in common with Lestat’s than Louis’ or what he knows of Armand’s. He has a vague idea in his mind that he’ll sort it out one day, get good at finding bad guys or doing the little drink or rob a blood bank or something, but he’s been having too much fun living to settle the details.

“There’s also not killing, that’s an option,” he points out nonetheless. He’s a journalist, not a role model. He’s allowed a little hypocrisy.

“I like to kill. I enjoy it.”

“But when Louis found you, you were eating rats. Why was that?”

Lestat looks away, making it obvious that Daniel has struck a nerve. “You skip ahead,” is all he says.

“Okay.” Daniel had known that one was a long shot. “Do all vampires see things your way?”

“Not at all.” Lestat looks a little incredulous that Daniel would even ask. “There are as many different approaches as there are vampires in existence. It is a very personal matter.”

“Yeah well, I’m new, humour me a little.”

Lestat slips smoothly back into professor mode. “There are those who hunt the evil-doer exclusively. It might even be one of the most ancient creeds of our kind. Each will have their own definition of evil, and their own level of self-righteousness about it.” He leans in confidingly. “Some of them are so smug it drives you to a killing spree.”

“A smug vampire, I can’t imagine,” Daniel says dryly.

“There are those so distant from humanity that they are truly indiscriminate, either because they are consumed by base animal instinct—they usually gorge unwisely and end up dead by their own hand or put down by other vampires, it is not a sustainable way to live—or because they have grown so isolated from any passion that even blood has no hold on them. This isolated state is one that tends to come with great age, and less need to feed.”

Lestat goes distant again, and Daniel is on the verge of asking him who he’s thinking of, or perhaps who the oldest vampire he’s ever met was, but Lestat launches back into his speech before he can, and the moment slips away.

“These days, I believe Armand,” he sneers the name like a curse, “likes to pretend he kills those seeking death. Half the time he puts the thought in their head himself and calls that mercy! When I met him he led a branch of the vampire cult known as the Children of Darkness or the Children of Satan, who actively sought out the innocent, the helpless, and the good to murder, all the better to serve Satan, as they believed God intended them to do. They were particularly foul, but at least they were honest devils when it came to their evil.”

“When do we get to them?” Daniel asks, hating that his ears pricked up at the mention of Armand.

“Soon. All too soon.”

Their little diversion into murder philosophy has at least served to settle Lestat’s mood, and he is calm and pensive as he returns to Nicolas’ plight.

“I was correct that Nicolas had sensed a change in me, but wrong to hope that it might drive him away. After we talked, Roget reported that Nicki came to his office almost every day, asking after me with great anger, railing against ‘my kind’. My poor little lawyer nearly quaked with embarrassment over some of the things Nicki was saying. He was convinced that I had been inducted into a circle of wicked aristocratic sorcerers that had escaped the recent purges using their dark powers, and that he was excluded due to his common blood. He despised me for refusing to share these secrets with him. It was both preposterous, and so close to the truth that I wanted to cry.”

“Are you telling me you didn’t cry?” Daniel can’t help but ask, unbelieving. With dignity, Lestat ignores him.

“It was unexpected, this belief he had, sprung fully formed, that there was a cabal of nobles keeping secret magic from him, let alone that I would join it. They were superstitious times, it is true, but I never considered the class difference between us meaningful, and he had never mentioned it except as a practical issue. It baffled me.”

“People with privilege don’t tend to notice it.” Daniel says. “There’s been a big discourse about it this century. You were probably a hermit at the time, but it’s worth catching up on.”

“Even before the revolution, I had considered him the privileged one, with the opportunity his wealth gave him, the freedom he had to choose his own path. Then when we ran away together, we shared everything, we were equals.”

“You may have considered the two of you equals, but that doesn’t make it true in the eyes of others. I’m no expert on French class structures, but being the son of a Marquis must have given you an edge, a glamour, a cachet in certain sets, or on stage.”

“Perhaps, in years where it wouldn’t get me killed, and if I told anyone, which I didn’t. The theatre troupe all knew me as Lestat de Valois, they had no idea of my background.”

“I’m sure it helped you at all those fancy balls you went to once you were a vampire, understanding the manners and having the confidence you belonged.”

“There were not a lot of balls in the Auvergne, I assure you-” Lestat begins, but then he appears to grow tired of parrying Daniel’s questions on the topic, and cuts himself off. “You are trying, as usual with all the delicacy of a hammer to the back of the head, to make a point.”

He’s right.

“Does any of this—being oblivious to certain privileges you have by birth, insensitive to and dismissive of the struggles of those without those privileges—sound familiar to you?”

Lestat doesn’t respond.

“I’m talking about Louis and Claudia,” Daniel says, in case Lestat still isn’t getting it.

“I am aware.” After a pause he says, “Well, there was no secret society of aristocratic sorcerers, and my family was executed for their noble status, so our privilege did us little good.” It’s technically true and technically tragic but, in context, such a playground comeback that Daniel chalks the exchange up as a win for him. He’ll let Lestat chew on that one for a while.

“My failures with Nicki were many,” Lestat says, in a sardonic tone that means he too acknowledges a point scored and doesn’t like it, “but I had no immediate plans to disabuse him of his false ideas or see him in person again. In fact, I wanted him and every person attached to my former life gone from Paris, safe from my destructive influence. I arranged for Renaud’s theatre troupe to go to London to perform and shuttered up the old theatre, which I now owned.”

Lestat picks up a copy of ‘Interview with the Vampire’ from Daniel’s side table. “What I did not do,” he says, opening the book and turning a few pages while maintaining eye contact with Daniel, “is murder my friends backstage. They left, happy, excited and well-compensated, and I never saw them again. One of the many vindictive little lies that your maker told in his account of me.” He tosses the book onto the coffee table between them with a loud thump.

“Why do you think he said it?”

“The labyrinthine paths of the gremlin's mind have long been closed to me,” Lestat says, with finality.

Fine. It’s not like Daniel is the one who brought up Armand, but he’ll move on. “Did Nicolas go to London with the theatre troupe?”

“Non. He was not interested. In another attempt to get him to leave Paris, I suggested that Roget ask him to go to the Auvergne and look for answers, since so much of his own family was in the village. They might talk to him, when they would not talk to others.”

“Let me guess, he wouldn't go.”

“It quickly became irrelevant. My mother came to Paris.”

Daniel’s assumption has been that Gabrielle had exited the narrative for good, so this is something of a surprise. “She survived?”

“She had been the only one to escape. In her canny way, she had evaded all my attempts to find out what happened through proxies, and come to Paris to find me.”

“That’s great,” Daniel says cautiously. It seems like more complication in a complicated situation, and he has questions about how Gabrielle escaped the fate of the rest of the De Lioncourts, but surely Lestat had to have been happy about it. “How did she make it out alive, when no one else did?”

“Luck, mainly.” Lestat waves a hand, as if sweeping the question away, which is sometimes one of his tells that there is more to say. Daniel makes a note to pick up the question later. “More importantly, her illness had reached its final stage. She had come back to me… but she was on the brink of death,” Lestat says, heavily.

Ah, of course. “She wanted to see you one last time.”

Lestat nods.

“And you came running,” Daniel says.

“Wouldn't you?” cries Lestat, already at a six out of ten out of nowhere, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the conversation. “I had once tried to resign myself to never seeing her again, but to refuse to see her, when she was so close, when it was her final wish? How could I do that? She had spent her last strength to reach me! We had been so much to each other for so long. I couldn't imagine the pain it would cause her, if I turned her away then.” Remembering the distant mother Lestat had described, Daniel thinks maybe Lestat could. As if he is responding to Daniel’s unspoken thought Lestat says, “Or maybe I knew it all too well, and that was why I could not inflict such a rejection on her.”

Lestat shakes away the thought and continues.

“The sun was near rising when I got the message, so I was not able to go to her for a full day, which passed in an agony of waiting. As soon as the sun began to sink below the horizon I threw on a heavy cloak for protection and galloped towards Paris on my fastest horse. I didn’t plan what to say or how to hide what had happened to me, I thought only of seeing her and holding her in my arms. I realized that I had never truly thought her dead, these long months without answers. Even as I raced to her, it seemed impossible that she might die, a catastrophe that would stop the earth.” Lestat is almost short of breath, remembering the panic of that day.

“Did you get to her in time?” Daniel asks.

“She was still alive. Nicolas was there. He had lost weight from fretting and drinking and his heart was full of scorching malice when he looked at me, but for once, I could not think of that. Roget had hired one of the best doctors to attend to my mother, but he could only tell me that she would likely not live out that night, that only her desire to see me one last time had sustained her through the day.”

Daniel enters the memory as Lestat quietly opens the door to Gabrielle’s room. She sits by the window, barely illuminated by the glow of the dusk sky. It is enough to see that illness has ravaged her since they parted in the Auvergne. Her face is lined with pain, and her breath is shallow and sweet with the scent of decay. Delicately, Lestat slips into her mind. The pain and weakness is such that she has not heard him enter, but even so, she is praying for it to worsen, because it is only when the pain is at its most acute that she is able to face death calmly, as she wishes to. The rest of the time, she is terrified. The only other thought in her head, alongside the pain and the fear, is Lestat, Lestat, Lestat.

Lestat gasps sharply at the turmoil in her, and Gabrielle turns around. Her face smooths into blankness, but Lestat can see into her mind now, and is stunned to see that her mind is still filled with him: gladness to see him, and the supreme effort that it takes to keep the pain she is in off her face.

“She will not see the priest,” says a voice behind Lestat, and Daniel knows without seeing him that it is the fancy, useless doctor.

“No. She wouldn’t,” replies Lestat. He senses the doctor about to say something else and without turning around, blanks the doctor’s mind for a brief moment as he closes the door between them, leaving Lestat alone with his mother.

For an instant, Lestat is almost happy. He feels young and human. He admires, with the narcissism of a son who resembles her, how the underlying beauty and symmetry of Gabrielle’s face has not fully deserted her, even in her final days. With the startling clarity of his new vampiric mind, he remembers the sensation of being a small child sitting in her lap in the carriage, gazing up at her face, as enraptured then as he is now. Love and admiration well up in him until it cannot help but spill over to her. And somehow, though she cannot know what she does, Lestat feels her send her love back to him. He has the absolute thought, for the first time, that she loves him and always has.

“Light the candles and come closer,” she says.

Lestat ignores the candles, still wary of the changes he has undergone being visible to her and remembering how eerie his new eyes had seemed to Nicki, but goes to kneel at her side. He looks at the intricate carpet of this expensive apartment, at the rich fabric of her skirts, the burnished legs of the chair, but cannot bear to look up into his mother’s eyes, afraid of what she will see in him, afraid of what he will see in her. She tips his face up to hers with a cold, trembling hand.

“Can’t you talk to me?” Gabrielle asks softly. “Can’t you tell me what has happened, and how you have been? How did you come to be so rich?”

The usual mortal lies that Lestat weaves with immortal skills are on his lips. Loathe as he is to lie to his mother, he knows the only peace and contentment he can give her now is the belief that he will be happy and prosperous after she is gone. And yet.

The memory pauses, as if on an indrawn breath. A vast and terrifying possibility is teasing the edge of Lestat’s mind.

Daniel blinks. It clicks into place. “Holy shit, you turned her.”

“Oui,” says Lestat.

“Your own mother.”

“I would hardly have turned someone else’s.”

Slightly unfairly, Daniel is furious. Turning your mother seems to be about as far from severing ties to your human life as you can get, and although this isn’t advice Lestat has given him directly, it feels hypocritical. “You were a vampire for what, a few months-”

“Almost two seasons.”

“-and the second time you reconnected with anyone from your human life, you ended up turning your mother.”

“It was her imminent death, rather than some imagined cooling off period that drove the timeline.”

“You bit into her neck, you drank her blood, you fed her yours-”

“We are both familiar with the process, again, what point are you trying to make?”

On being pressed, Daniel realizes that his point might be to do with Lestat and Gabrielle’s weird fucking vibes. However, he’s not quite ready to step into that minefield yet, so he falls back to his secondary outrage.

“And what was it you said to Louis about the importance of cutting ties with your human life?”

“That was excellent advice based on first-hand experience.” Lestat twirls his hand round the room. “Is that not what we have been talking about today?”

“There’s going round to your old home for dinner looking a few years too young. And then there’s birthing your own mother into a new existence.”

“I regret that I did not tell Louis more of the experience that my advice was based on.” Lestat says, with exaggerated patience, unaware or uncaring of the irony that he is literally trying to shut the topic down as he speaks. “Perhaps it would have eased his transition into vampiric life to understand the reasons for my advice more fully. At the time, I thought I could prevent him from making the same mistakes I did without exposing those mistakes.”

Luckily for Lestat, bigger things than grasping at opportunities to talk about Lestat’s reflections on Louis are intruding into Daniel’s mind. Some part of him, not as easily ignored as usual, is thinking of the days to come when his daughters will inevitably die. He has been a selfish father his whole life, but he’s never had to face that possibility, and he can’t be sure how it will feel when it comes. “Show me,” demands Daniel.

Almost eagerly, now the ice is broken on the revelation, Lestat folds him back into the memory.

Gabrielle’s hand is on Lestat’s face, and in the long seconds that the lies stall on his tongue, she has a realization.

“Something has happened to you.” Her face is stricken.

Lestat lays a reassuring hand over the one she has on his face. “I am only changed,” he says, and then he opens his mind, just as Magnus did in their final feeding, just as he will do to Daniel centuries later, and he shows her: the night, the strange new beauty of the world, the way he cuts through them like a blade. He is not sure before he does it that she will understand and receive his thoughts, but she does.

“How?” she asks, and the weakness of her death is gone, her voice as firm and implacable as it has been his whole life.

The tale flows from Lestat in intermittent psychic bursts, Magnus at his fireplace and then Magnus draining him for the final time, nothing but a flash of despair between the two that he prays has slipped past Gabrielle without her grasping it. Instead, Lestat lingers on the stone sarcophagus he sleeps in, the cavern full of treasure, and the blood. Above all, the blood and the thirst and the death, he holds nothing back there. Gabrielle lets it all pour into her, silent. She lists to the side and puts a steadying hand on the arm of her chair. Then her mouth opens on a gasp and blood oozes out of it. For a hysterical moment Lestat thinks it is a rejection of the blood of his memories—its evil is drowning Gabrielle!—but then she is coughing and hacking and he realizes it is only a human paroxysm, a surge of the sickness that has been haemorrhaging her from within.

Only, he thinks about the human illnesses that seem to mean so little to him now, but then as the coughing worsens, as her breath doesn’t return, panic seizes him. He has to make sure she understands. Gabrielle slumps out of her chair, wracked by the coughs and too weak even to sit up. Lestat catches her and carries her over to the bed. Her body is writhing in an agony that could soon be death, but he needs to make her understand. Lestat takes his mother’s face between his hands and leans over her, so that his eyes are all she can see. He doesn’t know how to do this, but he has to do this. He plunges into her mind and holds her body still from within so that she can think, for a few brief moments. He doesn’t know how to let her breathe without coughing so they have only the length of a caught breath to decide.

I know nothing of how this Gift works, he says to her, I do not know if it is mine to give, or what the price is, or when it is due. You could die at my hands. I could wither away once the Gift passes to you. We could share the strength of one immortal life between the two of us, trapped in some halfway-hell forever. We will likely both be damned. But if you are willing, I will risk this, for you. And if it works we will discover it all, whatever the mystery and the terror, together. He thrusts the question into her mind, not knowing if she can hear him.

With her whole being Gabrielle says, Yes.

For a moment, Lestat hesitates, some invisible barrier holding him back from crossing this line. Then he breathes deeply through his nose, letting himself acknowledge, for the first time, the scent of the blood that has run from her mouth and spattered her clothes. Even in this form, it smells delicious. He kisses it from her waxy lips to whet the hunger and then he tenderly eases her head to the side and bites into her neck.

It’s everything that both Lestat and Daniel have experienced with every feed—the intoxicating hot rush of blood and life, the irrepressible urge to gulp it down, the kaleidoscope of memories—and nothing that either of them have felt so far in their short immortal lives, a connection unlike any other. Gabrielle’s early memories, as warm and idyllic as a tourist ad for Italy, are all too brief, and as they die away and the long, echoing loneliness of her marriage engulfs her, Gabrielle and Lestat’s memories deepen and reverberate with their shared resonance.

Daniel sees the Marquis for the first time in their blood as both Lestat’s brutal father and as Gabrielle’s vulgar husband, and their mutual fear of him is exceeded only by the distaste and disbelief that fate should hand such an unworthy person complete power over them. The Marquis is a debilitating shock after Gabrielle’s cosseted childhood, uninterested in his young wife beyond her money and her ability to pump out babies. The babies last longer than the money, a parade of them devouring her with their hungry mouths and abandoning her for their father or their graves, each of them smaller and less human seeming than the last as she becomes smaller and less human, pieces of her carved away to make them until she no longer knows who she is.

At first, Lestat is just another squalling mouth, all the more irritating for being louder than the rest, and she turns from his need with indifference. In response, Lestat’s own painful memories of her coldness, his longing and his anger, swell up like a beating heart between them. Their resentments—a hundred closed doors and curt answers that barred him from her, the coveted freedom he barely notices he has even as he grows into it with every passing year—do battle until both split open, and within they are the same: loneliness and pain and indefatigable strength of will.

Gabrielle stiffens and jerks, and Daniel becomes aware as Lestat does that she is clamped tightly against Lestat’s body, both his arms crossed behind her back. His teeth are driven so deeply into her flesh that they nearly grate on the bone. Lestat groans into the bite at the realization of how close they are, body and soul, and he gulps down the last swallows of her with desperation, knowing that the well will run dry in three, two, one more mouthful. It is almost too much, to give up that last draught, even when he does it for a chance of eternity with her. In the moment before Lestat’s mouth disengages, Daniel is sure that he won’t be able to.

Somehow he does, teeth sliding smooth and wet from her flesh, feeling longer and more sensitive than usual. Lestat uncurls an arm from behind her, almost stiff with how hard he has been squeezing her, and cuts a deep, narrow slit in his own jugular with his thumbnail. He feels the wetness spurt from the wound immediately. Gabrielle opens her mouth towards the fount, thirsty, but needs the strength of Lestat’s hand lifting and guiding her head to reach it. At first, more spills out over her face and Lestat’s neck than she can sip down, and she chokes. Lestat feels a bolt of fear that this won’t work.

Drink, maman, Lestat thinks at her, all the urgency of her death looming back up, hitching her closer against him. And on the next gout of blood, she does. Her head lightens in his hand as she presses her face into his neck and locks her mouth onto him. Gabrielle’s body lengthens and tenses underneath him and she draws so strongly and rhythmically on his blood that a wave of weakness washes through Lestat, and his full weight presses her down into the bed. She welcomes him, pulling his body into hers with both arms, legs falling open to allow him closer.

They tumble back into each others’ minds on this second exchange of the blood, gleeful this time, passing their admiration back and forth: how foolish the contrast with Gabrielle’s austere dignity made her husband look, how small Augustin felt when he had to wait for Lestat to return with game before they could eat, the gloating joy of admiring Lestat’s excellent seat and strong thighs when he rode his horse thundering out of the yard, the hours that Lestat could gaze at the curve of Gabrielle’s nose when she sat to read, bathed before the gold light of the fire, in the evening. It goes on and on, this ecstasy of blood and memory, until the edges of Lestat’s vision start to dim, and he is forced to wrench away from her.

He rolls off her and flops down onto the bed, both of them panting, mussed, and daubed in the blood they shared. When Lestat looks over, Gabrielle’s face and body are restored to the fullness of ten years ago, before her sickness set in, and her eyes are like two crystals gathering the light, the twins of his. Once again they are made of the same stuff, inside and out.

The memory recedes like the tide pulling out to sea.

“Fucking hell.” Daniel hasn’t wanted a cigarette this much since 1993.

“Oui,” says Lestat, dreamily. He leans louchely back in his chair. “Only Louis’ turning is more precious to me. Only our joining—in the church, on the altar—can compare to the intimacy and tenderness of that first time, with Gabrielle. We were one flesh, one mind, one soul.”

“Extra literally on the flesh,” Daniel says, “seeing as she’s your mother.”

“She did not feel like my mother anymore, after we had shared what we did,” Lestat says.

“I’ll say.” It certainly hadn’t seemed like anything a parent and child would share, that Daniel agrees with.

“She never wanted to be anyone’s mother, and it brought her years of misery.” Lestat insists. “From this moment on, she felt like nothing less than herself. She was Gabrielle to me.”

Whatever the hell that means.

“Did she take to it?” Daniel asks.

To his surprise—Lestat’s doomsaying on the topic of human connections so far has presaged only disaster—the brightest smile that Daniel has yet seen blooms across Lestat’s face. “Magnificently.”

It is by now obvious that Lestat actively enjoys leaving Daniel on a cliffhanger, since he refuses to say anything about his and Gabrielle’s post-prandial activities until their next session. Daniel respects the story telling hustle, as irritating as it is personally.

They go for another hunt, and this time Lestat observes and critiques while Daniel scans the minds of a crowd outside a bar, then guides him through planting suggestions that lure one of the more pliable humans away from the protection of the herd, looking for a bit of peace and solitude. Daniel gets his target to the corner, but can’t seem to make her step into the darkness of the alley around the corner. She keeps hesitating and glancing back over her shoulder at the people and the light.

Shame is the most powerful leverage for separating people, second only to desire, Lestat mind speaks to him, when the woman’s behaviour is starting to get weird. And then, when Daniel is still too thick to get it, She’s a smoker. She finally slips out of sight of the other humans as one hand goes to the pack she’s promised her girlfriend she doesn’t carry anymore, and dinner is served.

Once it’s over, the woman left unconscious but breathing in the alley, Lestat, suddenly distracted, claps Daniel on the arm in friendly, only mildly condescending congratulations and departs to do whatever it is he does these days. Daniel has to remind himself not to enjoy Lestat maybe being proud of him.

Back home alone, Daniel works the fact-checkable clues he’s been given in the past day or two into a vaguely plausible e-mail to his researchers, asking them to dig up what they can about Parisian theatrical entertainment in the late 18th century: playbills, theatre names, reviews, theatre closure notices, the names Lenfant, Renaud, Lioncourt and de Valois, any troupes that might have travelled from Paris to London. They’ve been working on the lives and alleged eventual executions of the de Lioncourts of the Auvergne for a few days and once he would have been wary of the number of billable research hours he was wracking up, but these days he’s a multi-millionnaire with a recent best-selling book, so he figures fuck it. Throw in general Parisian suspicious deaths from the time too, if anyone was bothering to write that down back then, and if they need to fly to a French archive or tap in a European colleague then have at it. Billable hours for all!

The Talamasca, he’s sure, could drop him a terabyte or two of relevant information tomorrow, but he’s already in deeper with them than he wants to be. As the sun teases the horizon and the suffocating exhaustion it brings falls over Daniel—he hasn’t needed this much sleep since he was a teenager, Christ—he feels overwhelmed by the tangle of new alliances and potential enemies he’s found himself in, centuries behind the story and all alone. He wants to call Louis, but it’s afternoon in Dubai, so instead he crawls into bed, and sleeps.

Chapter Text

As they start their session the next evening, Daniel finds it hard to get a read on Lestat’s mood. Despite his bragging over how well Gabrielle had taken to the gift, he is almost solemn.

“We were giddy,” Lestat begins, not sounding giddy at all, “with the success of our wild gambit. I had hoped that Gabrielle would be saved from death and pain—my injuries had all healed when I received the Gift—but I had not dared to dream that she would be as restored by the blood as she was. All the vitality that her illness and cares had stripped from her returned, and with it, a joy I had never seen in her before.”

Swept up again into Lestat’s memories, Daniel returns to Lestat and Gabrielle, both lying on the bed, exultant. The sickly figure of mere minutes ago, haggard and barely clinging to life, is gone, like she was only ever a trick of the light. Gabrielle laughs, unrestrained and sudden, and Lestat marvels at the sight as he would a shooting star.

With no effort at all, Gabrielle springs off the bed. Lestat props himself up on his elbows to enjoy the view as she flexes her limbs in wonder.

“I feel so strong,” she says.

“You are so strong, ma chérie,” Lestat replies.

“And I look…” Gabrielle stares at her hands, turning them over and running a thumb over the back of one. Then she turns, and steps towards a mirror on the wall, eyes wide with wonder as she takes in her reflection.

As a mature inductee to vampirism himself, Daniel thinks he understands what she’s experiencing. It is not so much that the Gift has turned back time—they are both fixed forever at the age they died—but that it has poured a new lease of health and well-being into a body that was running on fumes. For Daniel, it had been almost explicable externally: a healthy colour, the loss of the shadows under his eyes, internal strength and lack of pain that made him stand straighter than he had in years. In other words, a medium-sized glow up that made people wonder if he’d given up smoking, or taken up salads, or started using tinted moisturiser. For Gabrielle, who had been slowly hollowed out by illness for almost a decade, the change is as transformational as Louis had described it being for a burned and barely breathing Claudia. If Daniel had seen Gabrielle walking down the street in New York he’d have assumed she was one of those late middle aged women who had been wealthy and stress-free their whole lives, doing yoga twice a day and never suffering an e-number to pass their lips.

“You look magnificent,” Lestat says, voice full of pride. He cannot believe that he did it. He saved her, and made her into this. It is worth any amount of suffering and uncertainty, to be able to do this for her.

It’s hard to be sure when you’re sort of in someone’s brain, but Daniel is sure that it’s Lestat’s eyes more than his that drift over Gabrielle’s arms, stronger and rounder than the wasted twigs of before, and her breasts, which are more constricted and heaving than they had once been in her dress.

As if she senses his gaze, Gabrielle puts one hand on her chest and one low on her waist, where her bodice’s boning is at its narrowest. She takes a deep breath, or tries to. “I seem to have overgrown this new dress your lawyer gave me.” Turning her back to Lestat she says, “Undo my stays.”

So far, the sight of Gabrielle’s happiness has filled Lestat too completely to admit any other thoughts, but gradually, something is dawning on him. Instead of rushing to fill her request, he frowns and sits up. Focuses.

“Are you closing your mind?” Lestat asks, before he can check the hurt and confusion in his tone. He wasn’t even aware that that was possible, and he has been a vampire for several months. If anyone is going to figure out how to do it and then do it at once it would be Gabrielle, she of the closed door and the impenetrable silence.

And her mind is silent. As silent as everyone’s had been, before he became what he is now.

“Lestat,” Gabrielle says, sharply, instead of answering his question, “my dress.”

Quickly and silently, Lestat stands and starts loosening the laces at the back of Gabrielle’s dress, the motions familiar and automatic from years of helping Luchina and Jeanette in and out of their costumes, his mind numb and preoccupied. With a bit more distance from the situation, Daniel can imagine that being laced into an elaborate corset tightened for someone a significant number of inches smaller than you is relatively urgent, but in the moment the evasion is almost all the confirmation Lestat needs to answer to his question. Already, he is anticipating the tiny, condescending frown with which his mother will answer his question when she is ready. Of course her mind is closed. Why would it ever be open? Another one of his foolish questions and demands.

Contrary to his expectations, when she can breathe again, Gabrielle turns around with a thoughtful expression. “You cannot hear me as you did before?”

“I cannot.” Lestat has the sudden, horrible thought that he might have been right about only one vampire existing at a time. What if this is the first stage of his powers transferring to Gabrielle now he has passed on the Gift, and the horror of feeling his powers slowly drain away is the reason that Magnus threw himself into the fire so quickly? However, a brief cast around shows him that he can still read the minds of the humans in the rest of the apartment. They are all wondering at the propriety of laughter and thumping about at a woman’s deathbed and wishing someone else would knock at the door and see what is going on. “Can you hear my mind?”

“I don’t know.” Her expression is still more open than it ever was in life, and with relief, Lestat accepts her words. Whatever is happening, Gabrielle is not doing it on purpose. She isn’t.

“What about the people next door?” he asks.

She frowns over at the door. “I hear their voices, their hearts,” she stares even harder, “the rumblings of their stomachs and the breath in their lungs.”

“The mind is another organ,” Lestat explains, “focus on one heartbeat, and then reach for the organs around it, until you find the brain.”

After a few moments, Gabrielle gasps. “I hear it! The doctor is impatient. He knows he will receive the same fee whether I die now, or in a few hours.”

“Yes!” Lestat is entranced by his pupil’s aptitude. It had taken him much longer to separate the rhythms of the brain from other bodily functions, with nothing but trial and error to guide him. “Now, can you hear me?”

Gabrielle turns her concentration on him. She steps close. One of her hands goes to Lestat’s chest. She tilts her head, listening with all her might. “I can hear your heartbeat. The blood in your veins.” She looks into his eyes, her luminous blue gaze boring into his. But not penetrating. “Nothing.”

Lestat covers her hand on his chest with his own, trying to conceal the sharp pang of disappointment. “It is no matter,” he says, even though he wants to scream for the loss of the certainty he had of her in her last moments of her human life. This is too happy a moment for his tears, and he must stay strong now, for Gabrielle, so that she does not have to embark on her new life with doubt and uncertainty. “Perhaps our kind are always sealed off from each other, as humans are from each other.”

Briefly, Lestat recalls the presence he has felt from time to time. True, it calls to him like-to-like, but that could be a trick of his loneliness, or the presence’s lie, or the presence could be some form of demonic cousin, related to what they are, but not the same.

He wants to embrace Gabrielle, but with their minds closed to each other again, hesitates. Miraculously, she does it instead, wrapping her arms around his waist and letting him hold her close before—incredibly!—lifting him off his feet and whirling him around, spinning them both back into the glee of her situation. When she sets him back down, she is not even out of breath.

“I haven’t been able to do that to you in about thirty years,” she laughs.

Did you ever? Lestat thinks, then crams the thought down. She must have, she just said so, and he has forgotten.

This time Lestat embraces her, curling over and turning his face so he can bury his face in her soft grey and gold hair, as he has longed to do so many times before. What of it if he cannot read her mind? They will keep each other so close that it will not matter. They will be together forever, and nothing will separate them. He kisses her cheek, then the corner of her mouth, so happy that he has to laugh.

Their commotion must have tipped over into too much, because there is a soft rap on the door.

“Give us a minute,” Lestat calls. To Gabrielle he whispers, “we have to get out of here.”

“Shall we drink them all?” she asks, not bothering to whisper, not even bothering to keep her voice to the clear but low tones she had often used in life.

“Nicolas is out there!” hisses Lestat, holding her by his side when she looks ready to start the slaughter immediately.

To Daniel’s more critical eye, Gabrielle’s reaction to this injunction looks like a dismissive shrug. Lestat only reminds himself of the hysterical hunger of his first few hours and focuses on the task of getting her someone to eat. Soon, he recalls, her human body will have its messy death throes, and they will likely be easier to bear if she has sustenance, and easier to conceal if they aren’t in this clean, well-appointed bedroom. He considers calling in the doctor to be her first human meal—Nicolas and Roget are under his protection, but the doctor’s thoughts grow more irritating every moment—but then they will also have a corpse to get out of the house, so instead, he strides to the window and flings it open.

They are several storeys up, but not especially overlooked, and the building is built on generous proportions and lavishly decorated, with plenty of carvings and ledges to hold onto. Lestat swings himself lightly up to straddle the sill and turns to offer Gabrielle his hand, maybe his back to cling to while he climbs down. She hesitates for a moment, then ignores his hand and springs up to perch next to him, both feet balanced easily on the sill despite her impractical silk slippers and heavy skirts, peering down at the drop without fear.

“Is it too far to jump down?” she asks, and seems to be coiling her muscles to spring before Lestat can place his vote on the matter.

He catches her shoulder before she can carry out such a real world test of their landing abilities, which Lestat has not yet pushed so far. “Let’s climb,” he suggests.

“We sped off into the night,” Lestat of the 21st century says as the memory fades away, something wistful in its tang, “and all the long years to come that had seemed so bleak seemed instead full of possibility. She was with me. That was the world.”

“Maybe women are better suited to being vampires,” Daniel doesn’t know he’s going to say it before he does, but once it’s out there, he wonders if he’s on to something.

Lestat raises his eyebrows. “Pourquoi?”

“So far, I’ve heard about three turnings where the subject seemed to take it in their stride, rather than descending immediately into an existential crisis: Gabrielle, Claudia and Madeleine.” Several possible explanations come into Daniel’s mind, none of them flattering to his own gender, but he realizes he might be derailing them. “I’m not explaining, I’m merely observing,” he says, holding up his hands.

“Are you having an existential crisis, Daniel?” Lestat asks, which Daniel isn’t expecting. It’s uncomfortably like a real conversation.

“I’m an undead multi-millionaire, and I’m here interviewing you for another goddamn book when I should be at the club. You tell me.”

“A purpose can ease the burden of eternity.”

Daniel isn’t sure he buys that. A purpose can be its own kind of burden. Only the bare bones of what happened in the 70s made it into the book—too much personal trauma to unpack in the middle of someone else’s story—so Lestat won’t be aware of the little pep talk Louis gave Daniel. Unless Lestat has plucked it from Daniel’s mind, which seems entirely possible given how often Daniel thinks of it.

You’re a bright young reporter with a point of view, Louis had affirmed to him, and his subconscious had taken it as an order. Is his whole career nothing more than a compulsion from somebody else? Will he carry that compulsion into his new life forever? Will he still be blogging when he’s two hundred and seventy years old? Daniel does what he’s been doing since he was turned, and tells himself to get over it. Compulsion or not, he’d be dead or a nobody without his career. If an eternity of journalism is the price he has to pay to avoid an ugly duplex back in Modesto and a job in an office with drab carpets and flickering lights, it’s worth it. So far.

“What’s your purpose?” Daniel asks, deflecting and distracting.

“Beauty and decadence,” drawls Lestat, but the delivery isn’t up to his usual standard.

Daniel could dig deeper. Instead, he decides to give the guy a break. They’re in the middle of unpacking his shit after all, it’s a bit much to expect him to have it in order already.

“What was Gabrielle’s?” Daniel asks instead. Not that much of a break. He’s still working.

“For that night, much the same,” Lestat says. A deflection if ever Daniel has heard one, but Lestat is leaning into it, and the momentum of the story is pulling them both back in. “It was one of the most incredible, the most glittering, the most joyous,” he huffs with amusement, “and the longest nights of my existence. I thought to ease Gabrielle into our world, but she was a force to reckoned with immediately. She was untainted by fear, regret, or uncertainty as I had been.”

Oh so now they’ve moved on and he thinks Daniel won’t backtrack, Lestat is admitting to fear, regret and uncertainty when first turned. Typical. He considers pointing out that Gabrielle hadn’t just been tortured and assaulted for a week, which probably helped her adjustment, but references to Lestat’s turning tend to start fights. Instead, he lets Lestat continue.

“We jumped from the first floor onto the roof of a carriage and rode it through the streets of Paris, laughing. She took her first kill expertly, gladly, luring a gentleman who thought her a distressed noblewoman in need of assistance away from the well-lit street. I didn’t even have to suggest the gambit.”

“No concerns about the evil-doer?” Daniel asks.

“Gabrielle did not have trouble separating herself from humanity.”

An attitude that no-doubt shaped Lestat’s own, which by Lestat's admission was in flux in those days. As much as Lestat might like to think they left their human roles behind, Gabrielle had been setting him on his path most of his life back then—hunter, provider, runaway—and no topsy-turvy mother-son, mentor-fledgling dynamic was going to erase her influence instantly.

“What kind of things did you get up to on this joyous bender,” Daniel asks, “other than carriage surfing and murder?”

“Gabrielle wanted to see it all, the hidden world she’d been denied. We broke into houses and businesses, to look and to steal—she thought it extremely eccentric of me to continue to purchase items using money when I was in a position to simply take what I wanted—and we walked from the brightest boulevards to the darkest corners of Paris, hand in hand. It was a marvel to Gabrielle that none of these places held any danger to her anymore: violence could not touch her, polite society meant nothing.” Lestat leans forward, enthusiastic as always to extoll the virtues and enumerate the trials of his loved ones. “I thought that I had shaken off the expectations of humanity, but Gabrielle showed me how much I still clung to.”

“Uh huh,” Daniel says. Sometimes it’s easier to agree and keep things moving.

“We went after a finely dressed couple. I thought to steal the woman’s dress and jewels for her as they were particularly fine and fashionable, but she surprised me, as she so often did. She stripped the young man of his clothes and put them on.”

An image of Gabrielle in what Daniel has come to recognise as the fashionable fop costume of the time flickers between them. Her shapely legs are displayed to obscene perfection—or so it seems to 18th century Lestat, who is definitely controlling the gaze dragging slowly up Gabrielle’s body—in clinging cream stockings. A frock coat, gathered at the waist, highlights the curves of her figure. Her long hair has been unpinned and surrounds her in a loose cloud. Her face glows like a flame.

Great, thanks for the very important information about how hot your mom looked, Daniel just about manages not to say out loud.

“Womanhood had been a shackle and a cage to her,” Lestat says, oblivious, “and she revelled in her new freedom. I revelled in her happiness and her company. Even when we felt the presence, which reached out to us more clearly and malevolently than ever before, calling us outlaws as clearly as it had ever said anything, it came with an element of relief, because at last I had someone to discuss it with.”

“This presence-” Daniel begins to ask. As with the first time Lestat had mentioned it and Daniel had asked what the hell he was talking about, Lestat cuts him off.

“That will come soon. At the time, I understood it no more than you do now, and was glad to share that uncertainty with someone. Everything I used to do alone I would now do with her.” Lestat smiles, a little wistfully. “I was exhausted long before Gabrielle, ready to retire to safety and companionship for some portion of the night, but it was only when dawn grew pressingly close that she could be torn from the world and agree to return to our home”. There is an almost imperceptible hesitation before Lestat calls Magnus’ tower his home.

“I began to learn,” Lestat continues, “by the way that the sun’s call dragged more heavily on her during that journey, that we all have our own natural rhythms in relation to the day, and that I required fewer hours sleep than many of our kind. Left to my own devices, I could happily watch the first tentative traces of dawn and retreat to sleep only when they began to burn, then wake before the sun had entirely gone, but Gabrielle was almost always asleep before me and asleep when I woke.”

Daniel tries to look like this isn’t news to him. “And that’s not just a new vampire thing?”

“Certainly the need for sleep lessens with age, but we were not that far apart in the blood.” Lestat shrugs. “I’m not explaining, I’m merely observing,” he teases, quoting Daniel’s words back to him.

“Did Magnus’ house feel like home?” Daniel asks. It’s an abrupt segue, but one that sets them firmly in their usual, lightly antagonistic footing.

The traces of levity drain from Lestat. He looks away. “It felt like a fortress against a newly uncertain world.”

“Safe?” Daniel prompts.

“Not quite that.” Lestat admits. “It was both better and worse to return there with someone else and see it through their eyes. There were parts I had not returned to since I was turned, and parts I was eager to show her, such as the treasure.” He trails off, swallows, and shakes himself out of it. “Thankfully, I had seen only seen a small number of the rooms with Magnus, and there was plenty of space in the main building, between the stench of the basement below and the terror of the tower above. And benefits to my mind being closed.”

“So you didn’t tell her about the week Magnus kept you there?”

Lestat pauses in that way he only does when Daniel’s questions genuinely surprise him. “Of course not,” he says blankly.

“You were close.” Daniel thinks he is successful in not making the word ‘close’ sound loaded. “You said you were happy to have someone to confide in. Why not tell her about that? Perhaps she could have empathized, as she had done before.”

“Why?” Lestat asks challengingly, “because she was a woman?” There is a warning in his tone.

“That’s part of it,” he says, voice level, refusing to be put off by Lestat’s threatening tone. “I assume she knew what it was to be rendered powerless by relative physical weakness, to-”

“It would not have interested her,” Lestat interrupts. “She had left humanity, with its trials and degradations, behind. We both had.”

As a last ditch defence, Lestat tosses them into a new memory. He and Gabrielle are in the windowless internal chamber that holds multiple sarcophagi. Gabrielle, visibly drooping with exhaustion, trails her hands over the carvings on one of them.

“She might have been dead by now, your mother,” she says. Lestat’s heart pangs at her words, though neither he or Daniel are sure if it’s at the reminder of how close Gabrielle came to death, or hearing his mother spoken of at a remove, like she no longer exists. “I can only imagine the humiliation of it. Defenceless as strangers touch her and bathe her and lay her out to be gawped at. Whispered about by pitying, gossiping nobodies. Rotting, like so much meat.”

Her tone is detached, indicating the distance she already feels from this theoretical dead Gabrielle. In contrast, talk of rot and being touched and bathed by strangers hits a little close to home to Lestat. The room of sarcophagi seems suddenly macabre and unsafe. He shoves roughly past the feeling. Such fears are behind him now.

“Can you move the lid?” he asks. Lestat has found the stone lids of the tombs take effort to move, but not so much effort he worries about getting out. If Gabrielle is less strong than him, he does not want to risk her being trapped.

Instead of replying, Gabrielle puts both hands on the lid and pushes. The action seems to stretch her strength a little more than it does Lestat’s, but the stone moves, and she is able to pivot the lid enough to give her space to climb in. Despite how tired she clearly is, she doesn’t get in.

“It is peaceful, once you are inside, and more comfortable than it looks” Lestat says, thinking that climbing into the uninviting symbol of death is giving her pause. “Don’t be frightened.”

“Don’t worry on that account,” Gabrielle replies. She draws out of her pocket a pair of golden scissors that Lestat had seen her take from one of the houses they had broken into that night. He thinks she will set them aside, so they are not uncomfortable in her pocket as she sleeps, but instead she grabs a hank of her hair and cuts it off.

“Don’t,” Lestat cries, instinctively. But she doesn’t heed him, and the great long locks of her hair fall to the stone floor, snip snip snip, until her head is shorn close all over. The cut is uneven, but the curl of her hair disguises much of the roughness. Lestat cannot help but reach out a hand to feel the newly small, vulnerable curve of her skull. She looks almost like a boy at first glance now, before her curves and wrinkles come into focus and confuse the issue.

He looks mournfully down at the gold-grey drifts around them. “We could have tied it back,” he says, “it will be harder to fit in with people without it.”

“Why would I need to fit in with people?” Gabrielle asks.

It’s too big a question for the early hour—has she truly left all practicality aside? It has been a wonderful night, but tomorrow they will need to explain, come up with a story—so Lestat only takes Gabrielle’s hand and guides her to lie down in the sarcophagus.

Almost as soon as she is horizontal, her eyes close. She crosses her arms over her chest and lies still. Her breath stops. She looks dead. Lestat watches her for long moments, the chill of the sight building to panic. Does his breath stop when he sleeps? There is no way of knowing. He touches a hand to her cheek and finds it cool and firm. He shakes her shoulder, just a little, and she only moves with the motion. What if her sleepiness had been so much greater than his because she has been granted only this one night of life, before death comes for her as it intended all along?

Hands trembling, Lestat makes a shallow incision in his wrist and drips his blood onto her lips. If this doesn’t work, then all is lost, and he is not able to make new vampires. Unless... If he burns himself up as Magnus did, will she wake in the morning? As the blood hits Gabrielle’s lips, they part, and her eyes open. She is awake. Lestat pulls her up and close, the relief so intense that it feels like a hand squeezing him has let go. In the blankness of that relief, he kisses his blood from her chin, from her lips.

A trifle abruptly, the memory ends, but Daniel would swear the kiss got a little French.

“Yeah, you were leaving humanity behind alright. Trials, degradations, taboos.” Daniel gives Lestat a significant look on the word “taboos” but Lestat ignores the bait.

“The next sunset, I woke first, as I had not yet realized would be the norm. It all seemed a dream. Could she really be here with me? I thought I must be mad, and cursed myself for burning her hair before I slept the night before; it might have helped convince me it had all really happened. In the clarity of a new night, I could not bring myself to open her tomb, not even to check she was there. It seemed impertinent, and the liberties I had taken the night before, watching her sleep and trying to wake her, were almost the most absurd part of the whole confection. At home, I would never so much have knocked on my mother’s bedroom door, let alone opened it and crept in to peep at her asleep.” Lestat broods. “A mortal shame.”

“I feel like there might be a third option, between bleeding into your mother’s mouth and being afraid to knock on her door,” suggests Daniel.

“Only the other heartbeat within the room kept me sane. It was proof I was not alone, but it was so slow and faint that I began to wonder if she would ever wake, if I had been right in my fears the night before, and missed my chance to pass my full Gift to her as Magnus had done to me. Fear thudded through me all the long time until she awoke. But awake she did, as strong and full of life as she had been the night before. I was finally able to show her all the fascinating things about our new abode: the treasure, the hidden tunnel and so on.”

“Not the basement?” Daniel asks.

“We both found it repellant, and resolved not to bring our food home unless we could help it,” Lestat replies, willfully missing the point.

“Did she tell you what happened to the rest of your family?” Daniel asks.

“She confirmed that they were all dead.” Lestat looks away. “She had managed to flee as the mob approached, but had not been able to warn anyone else. It was a painful topic for both of us, so we didn’t linger on it.”

“Right.” Daniel makes a note to return to the issue later, ignoring the way that Lestat's eyes flick back to him as he does so, clearly irritated. It feels like a topic where there is a lot more to say.

“I believed that we should go back to the city before the hour grew too late. I wanted to talk to Roget and try and untangle what we had snarled up the night before. We needed a story, however ridiculous, that could explain why Gabrielle was not dead and why we had left. I was aware,” Lestat’s voice wavers, “that I had again left Nicki with an inexplicable empty room and an open window to torment him.”

“What was Gabrielle’s response?” Daniel has an idea, based on the level of concern she had shown about Nicolas the night before.

“She could not understand why I cared. Why, she asked, did I bother with them? Why have a lawyer? Why, even before she was turned, had I spent money and time trying to find my human family? What were my relatives and friends to me, now I had left humanity behind?”

“Finally, a vampire willing to make a clean break,” Daniel says thoughtfully. Part of him has always accepted the long-term wisdom of cutting ties with human life, but it sounds remarkably cold-blooded laid out like this.

“I wanted to retort that Nicki had sat at her deathbed, commiserated with her, even when he thought I had betrayed him, but I knew she would think it sentimental.” Lestat gets louder, worked up at even the memory of the discussion. “And truthfully, I was as baffled by her as she was by me. Why would I forget everyone I knew and loved, including her? Even though I had changed, I wanted her to be happy and safe! Would she have preferred me to forget her? Would she have forgotten me, if the roles were reversed, and left me to wonder what her fate had been forever? Was I half as fundamental and fascinating to her as she was to me?”

“Did you ask her that?”

“She said that she would not have forgotten me if she had been turned first, but…”

“You didn’t believe her?”

Rather than answer, Lestat calls up the image of Gabrielle, looking up at him with confusion.

“Do you not feel it?” she asks.

“Feel what?” Lestat asks, yearning for the hundredth time that night for that brief, blissful time he had been able to see inside her mind.

“We are not part of them.” Gabrielle’s voice is slow, sounding out her meaning as she speaks. “We are cut off, separate. I can see, taste, feel the world, but not affect it.”

“That’s not true,” Lestat begins, wanting to reassure her. If anything, he’s affected the world and other people far more than he’s wished to.

“It’s not bad,” Gabrielle says, cutting him off, “we’re beyond them now, safe. Better.”

Her words are chilling. Lestat still wants to comfort her, but can see that she doesn’t need it. She is not upset. His own feelings are as truly incomprehensible to her as hers are to him, but even that disconnect is more confusing than distressing to her.

She is right that mortals cannot truly touch the loneliness of eternity. Any relationship with them is incipient grief, one need only look at what happened to the rest of their family to see that. It is probably precisely that kind of pain that Gabrielle seeks to keep at bay, by denying its power. Yet, if she had felt the loneliness that Lestat has felt, the way it deepens every day with no end in sight beyond an end he would have to choose himself, she would understand. No living being, even her, could stand to live forever without love, without companionship. She has not yet faced this trial, not in her immortality, and therefore it is not real to her, that is all.

Gently, Lestat tucks her hair behind her ear, cups her cheek in his hand, and tries to think of a way to warn her of the pain of vampire loneliness. Before he finds the words, Gabrielle’s gaze sharpens, and she speaks.

“You don’t mean to share the Gift again, do you?”

“No,” replies Lestat, truthfully.

“Not even with Nicolas?”

“No!” Especially not with him.

“Even though he could die?” she presses.

The thought of it is a dagger, but he is resolute. “Even then. It is not the same as with you. Nicki is young, he can live a full life. That is why I gave him money, and why I must speak to Roget and explain things, so that he can still be taken care of.”

“He could be hit by a carriage tomorrow.”

“He could. And yet… I don’t know if he is strong enough,” Lestat admits, though it breaks his heart to do so. “He is fragile. Not like you.”

Succumbing to the relief of Lestat’s answer, Gabrielle smiles at him approvingly, which perversely does more to make him regret his words than any questions she could have asked. Daniel is a little relieved to know a teenage rebel lurks in Lestat somewhere, though they seem to be buried deeper than they usually are, even in adulthood.

Gabrielle pushes her hair behind her ear, a habitual action she has likely performed a dozen times this evening already. This time, the action makes her pause, and dread floods from Lestat to Daniel, the moment before horror fills Gabrielle’s face. Her hair. She grabs two handfuls of her hair, long enough to draw over her shoulders and into view, despite how close she’d shorn it the night before. As long as it has ever been.

Neither Lestat or Daniel expect her to take this well, but the scream that Gabrielle lets out, so loud and piercing that Daniel is sure it would have shattered windows had there been any windows, is a shock. It stabs a sharp pain through Lestat’s head and leaves him dazed.

Gone is the confidence of the being who has transcended humanity, replaced by a wild creature, terrified of their own body. She yanks at the handfuls of her hair, and only Lestat’s lunge to enclose her fists in his larger hands stops her scalping herself.

“Stop!” he cries.

She twists out of his grip and looks frantically for the scissors, but they have been left in another room. They are close to the treasure room however, and Gabrielle bolts for it, seizes a jewelled dagger from the pile, and hacks at her hair. The dagger is blunt enough to be bad at cutting her hair, but sharp enough to cut her. Lestat tastes her blood on the air and wrestles the dagger from her, heedless of it slicing his own hands in the process.

When he flings the dagger on the floor, the madness leaves her, and she sags silently in his arms. At first, Lestat does not know what to do; he is the one who has tantrums and breakdowns, and she is the one who waits calmly until they are over and tells him what to do.

Well, no matter. As companions, they will take care of each other. Limp and placid as she now is, Gabrielle is a mess, hair in clumps, clothes torn and stained with both their blood, so cleaning her up is a good first step. There are fine women’s dresses among the heaps of stolen treasure, but he doesn’t think that will go down well, so instead Lestat leads her to the room where he keeps his own clothes. He sits her down, loosens then removes her cravat, and unhooks the ruined shirt. She wears nothing underneath it. Her body is as pale as his own, apart from her pink-tipped breasts. He slips the finest of his shirts over her shoulders, guides her unresisting arms through the sleeves, closes the shirt, and ties a fresh cravat around her neck. Through it all, she watches him, expression unreadable.

“Are you ever afraid?” Gabrielle asks.

Yes, thinks Daniel, from the privilege of his Lestat-eye-view. He’s afraid all the time.

“I don’t see the point,” is what Lestat replies, which is not technically an answer either way.

“Did you know that would happen?”

“No. Or…” Lestat sighs. “I have not tried to cut my hair, but wounds heal while we sleep, our nails grow back if we cut them. I should have guessed.”

“So I will be this,” Gabrielle asks, voice hoarse, “exactly as I am, forever?”

Once again, Lestat has the sense that he doesn’t understand Gabrielle’s words. He searches for reassurance for a problem he can’t grasp. What is wrong with her as she is now? “We can cut your hair and burn it every night. It will be how you want it to be. Would you like me to do it now?”

“And if we didn’t burn it, it would fill the tower, over all the long nights to come. Just as the bodies fill the dungeon.”

It should be comforting, perhaps, to see that Gabrielle is not as completely calm about the concept of eternity as she has seemed, but Lestat only feels a harried despair that they are still not on the same page. Is this not a simple problem? Why does it cause her such torment?

“Every wound will heal.” Lestat smoothes his hands over her shoulders. “Nothing can damage you. You are a goddess, that is all it means.”

She cuts her eyes away from his, and Lestat ends the memory.

“Why do you think she was so upset?” Daniel asks.

“Truthfully, I have not thought of that night in decades,” Lestat replies, “and I find I am still not sure.”

They sit in contemplative silence for a few minutes. It’s not entirely comfortable on Daniel’s part, he has theories he could air, but he’s also aware that silence can draw Lestat out more than questions when he isn’t actively trying to avoid a topic.

“Until then,” Lestat says eventually, “she had seen only the freedom that leaving humanity behind gave her. In that moment, she saw that immortality too can be a trap, even harder to escape.”

“Wherever you go, there you are,” Daniel agrees. “Whether you’re a woman in the 18th century, or Black in the Jim Crow south, or-”

“Fourteen forever,” says Lestat. His eyes are fixed on the empty couch. “Not even the relentless march of history can free you then.”

While Claudia had been precisely who Daniel was going to reference next, he’s a little surprised Lestat said it first. “Immortality doesn’t fix everything.”

“Another lesson I allowed myself to ignore,” Lestat murmurs, still far away.

As well as Claudia, Daniel is thinking of promises Lestat had made to Louis once, to swap his sorrow for a dark gift, but honestly, Lestat looks so sad Daniel’s’ killer instinct fails him, and he doesn’t say it out loud.

“What did Gabrielle want to do?” he asks instead. “Since she didn’t want to run human errands?”

It works to bring Lestat back into the conversation.

“She wanted to go into the woods.”

“The woods?” That, Daniel hadn’t been expecting. He thought she’d want to eat some virile young men and race across the rooftops or something.

“The woods!” repeats Lestat with relish, spreading his hands with shared incredulity.

“Why?”

“Daniel, I never understood it, but she had an unquenchable passion for the outdoors. In life, she rarely left our castle. In death, she wanted to spend all night exploring the trees and hills and fields.” Lestat leans in close, like he is imparting a piece of particularly salacious gossip. “She actually suggested that we leave our tombs and sleep in the raw earth, as if we were potatoes.”

“Did you go to the woods?” Daniel asks.

“Not that night. She did not go to the woods, and I did not go to Roget. We stayed together and we hunted in Paris, neither of us satisfied.”

“Ah, the joys of compromise,” says Daniel, “I’m familiar.” From his marriages.

“We were joyful,” insists Lestat. “At times. At others, she was silent and obscure, and I wondered what she was thinking. And of course, the presence was more present than ever.”

“Are we finally going to talk about what the hell ‘the presence’ is?” Daniel has maybe one more deferral of the topic in him before even his respect for telling a good yarn runs out. Only the fact that in context he is sure it must be Armand and his old coven, paired with Lestat’s relative indifference to ‘the presence’—his primary emotion whenever he’s mentioned it so far has been irritation—has let him hold off on pinning Lestat down for so long.

Case in point, Lestat’s irritated sigh as he concedes, “I suppose we have come to that point in the story.”

Fucking finally. Daniel waits, alert.

“Now that Gabrielle had joined me, the presence was stronger than ever, ripe with malice and angry confusion,” Lestat says. “We both felt it, intermittent and changeable as we went about our lives. That it hated us was obvious. We came gradually to realise that perhaps even more than that, it feared us.”

“Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate,” quotes Daniel, basically against his will. He can’t help it! Even as an addict who’d been mind-fucked by two vampires, you couldn’t live through the late seventies and early eighties without permanently absorbing that bit of cod-wisdom.

“Exactly,” agrees Lestat. Mercifully, he seems to be unaware that Daniel is referencing a sci-fi film trilogy. Daniel suspects he would consider it beneath his dignity, even though sci-fi and fantasy are basically the same genre and vampires in literature aren’t that different functionally to aliens. “We came to understand that it feared us, that it did not understand us, that it was not one thing, but many, and that conflict was brewing within it.

“Things came to a head not long after I turned Gabrielle. I am not sure exactly what triggered them—we had been to listen to a choir in Sainte-Chapelle, that is one possibility—but as we rode back to Magnus’ house, we felt the presence, not at the edge of our perception, not scattered, but massing in our path.”

A road materializes before Daniel. It is night, unsurprisingly, but between the bright pre-industrial stars and vampiric senses the immediate surroundings are clear and should be unintimidating. The road has been passing through fields, but ahead turns into a wooded area.

A snort and a shift, and Daniel realizes that Lestat is on a horse. That he and Gabrielle are both on horses, and that they have drawn to a halt on the road because the horses do not want to go on. It is a road that they have ridden down before without incident, but today, the woods are angry. Or rather, something angry is in the woods, oozing malevolence so thick that the horses can feel it.

“It’s stronger,” Gabrielle says. “They’re stronger.”

Her horse shies and rears, high enough that a human might have fallen off. Any trepidation Lestat felt begins to transmute into anger at the presence, lurking and threatening them, but never making themselves known. He’s had enough of being hunted.

“We can go back to Paris and seek shelter there,” Gabrielle suggests.

It could likely be done. They have money and the unnatural ability to influence. But why should they scurry backwards to a thrown-together place of shelter and sleep vulnerable in some strange place? What will happen tomorrow, if they run away today?

“No.” Lestat draws his sword. “If we run from them, it will never end.” Gabrielle’s horse, even more nervous than his, tries again to back away, and Lestat has a moment of concern about taking her into the gauntlet. “If I ride into them you will likely be able to go around,” he says, “or if you return to Paris, send word to Roget where you are staying and I will find you tomorrow.”

“Don’t be stupid,” is all Gabrielle says in reply. She draws her own sword—part of an outfit she had stripped wholesale from a now dead young man that very night, and thankfully sound enough to use, rather than cheap and mainly decorative as can be the case with the fashionable bourgeoisie—and Lestat can tell from the sudden way that her horse calms that she has entered its mind, in the rudimentary way they are able to do with animals.

Lestat has mentioned this ability in the course of their interview, but Daniel is fascinated to experience it for the first time in a memory as Lestat projects his will into his own horse’s mind. It’s both easier than using mind control on a human, because the horse has no true perception of its own consciousness, let alone of others’ consciousness, and therefore no sophisticated communication or artifice is needed, and harder, because of the potential for strong instinctive behaviours to surge faster, more powerfully, and less predictably than they do in humans. It’s like holding a smooth round stone with oily hands: easy to pick up, but tricky to hold onto. Especially, Daniel realizes as they begin to gallop towards the trees, when you run with it.

As Lestat and Gabrielle storm into the woods, the presence breaks over them like a cold, dragging wave. First mentally, as the anger and hate hit them, and them physically. Arms and claws and filthy faces contorted with rage erupt from around and above. At first it seems the trees themselves have grown limbs to tear at them, nature finally revolting against Lestat and Gabrielle’s demonic natures. Then Daniel realizes that it is indeed hordes of vampires, more than he’d ever realized had been in Armand’s previous coven, not only surrounding the horses on the ground, but swarming up the trees so they can claw at Lestat and Gabrielle’s faces and fling themselves at the horses’ flanks. All of them are filthy and stinking and desperate, hair matted and bodies wrapped in rags so that they merge with the dark forest and each other. It’s a nightmare blending the visceral fear of the wolves and the existential dread of Magnus’ face in the theatre, the wildness of animals driven by the depth of personal hatred that only the human and the once-human can feel.

If Daniel had been in the driving seat he is pretty sure he would have fallen off his horse screaming, but Lestat, he grudgingly admits, is made of sterner stuff. He hacks at the limbs that get close enough with his sword, lopping at least some parts off. He keeps a firm hold of his horse’s mind, letting out just enough of its desperation to escape to drive it to run faster, crushing vampires under its hooves wherever it can. And that instinctive force that has rushed from Lestat in times of distress, rises again and again in him, pushing back their assailants in waves.

They are nearly through the woods when a jolt behind Lestat tells him that one of the vampires has successfully landed behind him and clung onto his horse. A filthy clawed hand grips onto Lestat’s shoulder, but slackens before it can find the leverage to rip him from his seat. Lestat glances back to see an arm and the vampire it had once been attached to already falling away with an anguished scream, a scream that cuts off when vampire and limb are pounded under the feet of Gabrielle’s horse. She flicks the vampire’s blood off her sword, then turns to swipe away the renewed assault on her other side. They break from the trees together at top speed, the horde falling behind shortly afterwards, and Lestat laughs wildly with the triumph of freedom and the adrenaline of shared victory.

Home—and for perhaps the first time, Lestat is truly able to think of Magnus’ house, with its thick, high walls and small defendable windows, as a place of safety and comfort—is only a short ride away at this speed. Lestat is not so naive to think they won’t be pursued there now battle is joined, but has a faint hope that their pursuers might give up once he and Gabrielle have made it inside.

The mental force that Lestat has called so successfully so far rises again to push the gates open, so that they ride into the walled yard of the building, where the stables are, at near top speed and have to pull the horses up sharply. Lestat is able to push the gates closed again behind them with his mind, and Gabrielle jumps off her horse to slide the huge latch closed. There are also thick chains to wrap around the bars of the gate and hold it shut, though Lestat has not bothered with them since he was first brought here. He is nearly foiled by the heavy padlocks—if Magnus has anything as mundane and practical as a key drawer, they have not stumbled across it—but in his desperation Lestat grasps again for his powers, reaches into the lock with some combination of the delicacy of mind-reading and the solidity of pushing an object away, and miraculously is able to open them. They lock the last one into place as the vampires come into sight, bloodied now as well as filthy, but no less set on tearing Lestat and Gabrielle limb from limb. If opening locks is a common vampire power then all the effort to lock the gates has been pointless, but Lestat doesn’t think he felt anything like his force from their attackers in the woods.

Regretfully, they abandon the horses loose in the yard. Lestat knows they have been ridden hard enough that they may sicken and die without attention, and that the terror the other vampires will inflict on them even from a distance might finish them off if the rough treatment doesn’t, but Gabrielle won’t hear of him staying outside long enough to do even a rudimentary rub-down.

“If we survive this, we’ll get you better horses,” she hisses, which doesn’t answer Lestat’s qualms. But Lestat also knows she won’t go inside until he goes inside and the other vampires will be there in moments, so he settles for unbuckling the horses’ saddles and opening the stable door so they have somewhere to hide.

By the time they get inside the house, the building is surrounded. On the ground floor, the windows are high and set with thick iron bars, and Lestat doesn’t think that the other vampires will be able to get through them. They both listen anxiously by the front door for the sounds of the vampires breaking into the yard, but the gates seem to hold. Only the sickening stink of the graveyard, the waves of psychic hatred, and the vampires’ angry cries make it in.

Now that the headlong rush has turned into a siege, Lestat starts to listen to what they’re actually saying.

"A curse on you, blasphemer!” a voice screams from one side.

"A curse on the profaners, the outlaws!” screams another.

Something clatters against the bars, and another vampire shouts, "A curse on the outlaws who dared to enter the House of God!”

At first, it’s comical; Lestat laughs, breathless and lightly hysterical in the wake of their fight and flight. These filthy, ragged creatures, fellow murderers themselves, call them blasphemers? They are angry that Lestat and Gabrielle have been into churches? It’s as ridiculous and confusing as one of Lestat’s young nephews crying inconsolably because they didn’t want their apple cut up a certain way, too silly to be upsetting.

Curious, Lestat drags a table close to one of the windows and stands on it to peer out. Gabrielle, face even paler than usual, holds onto his arms as if to stop him, but he has to see.

There are maybe twenty of them in view, even dirtier and more ragged than Lestat had supposed them to be when he’d only seen glimpses of them. They are all beating and clawing ineffectually at the sheer stone walls below the window and doing stupid things like throwing rocks. If Lestat had to break in, he feels sure he’d make a better go of it. Can one of them not jump high enough to grab the bars, and from there try and scale to a higher, bigger window? Do none of them, truly, have the power to move things as both Lestat and, to a lesser extent, Gabrielle, do? Can none of them fly, or use whatever power it was that Magnus used to reach the high room in the tower? Have they heard of rope?

Tentatively, Lestat reaches out to feel their minds. They are curiously similar to one another, all angry and simple. In a way, they are like the minds of the worst-off beggars Lestat has passed on the street, the ones who don’t have much longer to live: so consumed by basic, primal needs, so starved of the various forms of sustenance that humans need to stay alive, that it is like their higher functions have been switched off, not enough resources left to fuel them. These vampires don’t seem close to death—they are still strong enough to tear any human apart and no more hungry for blood than Lestat is within a few hours of drinking someone—but it is as if some other form of deprivation has pared their reasoning back until they are only fear, anger, and instinct. For reasons that are not yet clear, they see Lestat and Gabrielle as an existential threat, and have been sent by their unreasoning instinct to blot them out.

One of them must spot Lestat’s face at the window, because suddenly they are swarming underneath, two or three deep.

"May the wrath of God punish the profane!” one of them shouts.

“Those who break the sacred laws will burn!” cries another.

Being clustered together seems to give them the unfortunate idea of climbing up each other, and suddenly some of them are on the shoulders of others, high enough to grab the bars with clawed hands. Lestat jerks back, but the bars hold steady under the assault.

“Don’t aggravate them,” hisses Gabrielle.

“They can’t get in,” Lestat replies, but internally he admits that the siege is much more unnerving now that several filthy hands are scrabbling and yanking at the bars.

With an impatient huff, Gabrielle jumps up onto the table and draws her dagger. Through a combination of stabbing and banging the grasping fingers with the hilt, she drives the hands away, but more reappear only slightly faster than she can hack them away.

“They aren’t strong enough to damage the bars,” Lestat says, hoping that it’s true.

“There are hours yet until sunrise,” Gabrielle retorts. “We have no idea if the bars will hold on for that long, or if they’re breaking through or climbing the gates right now.”

They have the option of retreating to Magnus’s personal tomb. Even if the vampires got in the house, they would then still have to find the tunnel to that chamber, move the stone that blocks it, and crawl through faster than he and Gabrielle could chop their heads off as they entered. The thought of being trapped in an even smaller space, back in the place where he spent a terrifying day with his maker, freezes Lestat to the bone, but he is on the verge of suggesting it anyway—perhaps Gabrielle would prefer to retreat, and he could protect the entrance?—when there is a clatter from another room and, worse, the smell of fire. Lestat dashes out and along the corridor, looking for the source.

He was hoping they were too stupid and primitive to think of fire.

“Those who break the sacred laws will burn!” one of the creatures repeats.

It makes more sense that they’d be enthusiasts.

Two doors down, Lestat finds the burning branch that one of the more enterprising of the vampires must have managed to slip between the bars. It has nearly guttered out from the combination of the fall and the inflammable stone floor, but he seizes it up anyway, and shoves a chest under the window, uses the still glowing tip to more effectively drive away the hands that have made it up to this window. Remembering that he saw Magnus light torches, Lestat rekindles the branch and drops it out the windows on their damn heads. They cringe and scatter like wild beasts.

“You’re right, we can’t give them too long to test the defences and think of new mischief in any one place,” Lestat says to Gabrielle, who has followed him in.

With her usual efficient practicality, Gabrielle understands him immediately. “We can keep them at bay, but we will have to patrol all the rooms.” She takes a more sustainable torch from a bracket on the wall, holds it towards Lestat so he can light it with his mind, and they set to work.

“For the hours until dawn,” present-day Lestat says, wrapping the memory up “we ran frantically from room to room, beating them back and stamping out any small fires they managed to start. It was dirty, exhausting, repetitive work. I had not yet heard of the game ‘whack a mole’, but it was rather like that. Finally, as the sun truly threatened, they scurried back to their nest.”

When and how Lestat did hear about Whac-A-Mole is an intriguing question, but Daniel isn’t in the mood for chasing down the tangent.

“This really isn’t how Armand told it.” Daniel is surprised at how surprised he is. Even the first time he heard the polished, fast-moving story of how Lestat betrayed and abandoned Armand, he assumed things were being left out. Confirming that Armand had a flexible approach to guilt-trips had only reinforced his assumption. But there’s flattening the motivations and reactions of those involved in your story to gloss over the kidnapping you did, and then there’s failing to mention that someone’s first contact with your coven was basically a scene from a zombie movie.

"Ah, Armand. My grubby little bête noire.” Lestat sighs. “While he is and always has been an inveterate liar, I believe our siege happened against his wishes. It wasn’t his style, and later Celeste told me that his only instruction to the coven thus far had been to stay away from us, or either he or God would strike them down.”

“But he knew that it happened,” Daniel checks.

“Oh, he knew.” Lestat has turned brooding and sullen, the way he does when they are approaching something he finds both painful and enraging. “He knew as soon as they attacked. And he made his own plans.”

As eager as Daniel has been to get to Armand, he suddenly feels reluctant to go on. For the first time, since Lestat has been consistently reluctant to talk about Louis for more than five minutes at a time, he’s going to hear a significant amount of new information from Lestat about someone he has a personal relationship with, however brief, painful and mystifying that relationship might be, and he’s not expecting it to be good.

The bigger question should be, does he even want it to be good? Armand tortured him mercilessly, drove him to the brink of suicide, tried to kill him, and then erased it all from his mind, leaving Daniel thoroughly fucked up for reasons he didn’t understand for fifty years. Then he tried to make Daniel feel grateful for a made-up version of their first encounter, drained his blood, connected them for life by turning him into a vampire, deleted that too and fucked off. Daniel should be chomping at the bit for every scrap of the brutal truth about what a devious, cowardly, manipulative little shit his deadbeat bastard of a maker is. Instead, he has a horrible premonition that it’s going to make him feel sad and defensive. Maybe it’s the “cord” Louis was always bleating about, and which Daniel privately judged as an exaggeration if not a fabrication, in action.

“What did he do?” Daniel forces himself to ask.

“The vampires scattered before dawn. They were not so far sunk into mindless rage that they forgot the need to get back to their crypt before the sun rose. For added safety, in case any had managed to sneak in and were waiting until we were vulnerable to attack, Gabrielle and I retreated to Magnus’ hidden chamber to sleep, and shared his sarcophagus. She fell asleep next to me, pulled into the death sleep as soon as dawn threatened as was usual for her, and it seemed the crisis had paused, for a time at least.”

“Let me guess, it hadn’t?”

“Before I could join her in sleep, a new hatred pierced my mind like a blade, more focused than what we had experienced before. And for the first time, it came with images, not merely broken words and vague feelings. I had entirely forgotten during the siege about my poor, dumb stable boy. He never came in the house, but tended to the horses in the day and sometimes slept with them at night when he did not return to his family's farm, an arrangement of Magnus’ that I had continued. Sheltered in the yard while the vampires focused on the windows, he had evidently made it through the night, though I expect that the terror of the experience would have driven what few wits he had from him. But now, though the sky glowed with the first traces of dawn and the gates remained sealed, someone was murdering him, most viciously, and they sent his fear and pain to me as directly and viscerally as if they were doing it to me.”

Daniel looks at Lestat appraisingly. “You seem upset about his death.”

Lestat waves a hand dismissively. “He was harmless, but also unremarkable. I might have eaten him myself one night, if I had a mind to and it was more convenient.”

Lestat makes this claim with certainty, but Daniel isn’t entirely convinced. Sure, vampires don’t tend to care about individual human lives... right up until there’s a particular human they get to know for more than the time it takes to kill them. Then, murder can suddenly become rude. Judging by how quickly Lestat had become protective over his lawyer, being a tractable employee who is good with animals might have been enough to get the stable boy on Lestat’s no-murder list.

“That particular night, I hadn’t a mind to!” Lestat continues. “Someone else was doing this, not because they were hungry, but to send us a message, and they were doing it in a time and place that I had thought safe from other vampires.”

“Armand?” Daniel asks.

“Yes. I know now that Armand had the cloud gift just as Magnus did, which made it easy to get into the yard and then return to Paris faster than the rest of his coven. Indeed, he could easily have broken into the house and killed us then had he wished to, or burned the place to the ground with us inside. He had other plans.”

Daniel braces himself.

“The next night," Lestat says, "I was outside as soon as the last rays of the day’s sun faded. The gates were locked as tightly as they had been the night before, but the bodies of the horses and the stable boy were displayed in the yard. All appeared to have died in a rictus of terror. The horses had been disembowelled.” Lestat pauses, and his eyes line with blood red tears as he says, “The boy had been forced into a red velvet frock coat.”

This slightly weird flourish seems to have hit Lestat hard. Daniel gets the sense that he’s missing something.

“It was a fine and expensive item of clothing,” says Lestat, voice taut with emotion. “I took it as a reference related to my own red velvet wolf-cloak.”

“He wanted to scare you, to make you submit to him,” Daniel says, groping for the meaning behind the incident. His rejections only inflamed me, Armand had said. I had to bring him under control by any means.

“It was Gabrielle who recognised the coat.” Lestat pauses, and Daniel realizes before he speaks what he is about to say. “Nicki had worn it, through the long day he sat by her bedside, both of them waiting for me.”

“He took Nicolas.” Of course, Daniel had known along that this was something Armand did, even in his own version of the story. It feels worse, now he knows how much Nicolas meant to Lestat, and the knife-edge his sanity already sat on.

“Yes.” Lestat’s sadness turns to anger. “How the gremlin twists the story, though he’s the villain in even his own perfidious telling. He imagines a braver, bolder him! He didn’t come to me as he claimed, and take Nicki openly, after a warning. He stalked me for months in indecision, put off the moment of action until he lost control of his coven, and then stretched his cruelty to be more sophisticated than theirs in order to take that control back. Does that sound familiar?”

“The Paris playbook,” murmurs Daniel. He sees the parallels. The ambivalence decades later towards Louis’ status with the coven, resentment left to fester in his flock until it erupted into rebellion. And then the dramatic showpiece of the play, dispatching the problem while reminding the coven of Armand’s power and abilities. “He wanted to draw you in for a public defeat.” Daniel refocuses on Lestat. “It’s obviously a trap.”

“The best traps are ones you cannot help but spring, whether you know about them or not.”

Traps baited with people Lestat loves. Yes, Daniel sees the parallels. He is about to try and broach, again, the subject of Louis and Claudia’s trial, when Lestat stands up.

“We will spring the trap tomorrow.” He leaves, no offer of a hunt.

Alone, Daniel has little to distract himself from grappling with this different account of the past. Or to be more specific, with his maker’s duplicity. It’s ridiculous, because of course, it’s not like Daniel had ever actually trusted Armand. He’d been sceptical from the moment the shock of the unmasking dissipated, of all of it: the claims that Louis and Armand were a happy couple, the reasons Armand gave for hiding who he was, how culpability was apportioned. He’d been sceptical enough to unravel a decades long lie, for fuck’s sake!

All that he should be feeling is vindicated and satisfied, the way he usually does when the real story starts to emerge—and for all Lestat’s boasting and avoidance and inevitably blinkered perspective, Daniel grudgingly accepts he’s mostly telling the truth as he sees it—but instead there’s a horrible, squirming discomfort to the whole thing, and nothing better to blame it on than a stupid cord Daniel still isn’t sure he believes in. Part of him dreads knowing more, but in typically masochistic fashion, he also needs to know more, every dumb, freshly vampiric cell in his body yearning for more information. The wait until the next evening seems interminable.

What might pass the time in both a satisfying and a useful manner is discussing—okay, gossiping about—the contents of the interview with the only person even more personally involved than him, but unfortunately Louis has yet to respond to any of Daniel’s dutiful e-mail updates and it’s daylight in Dubai, so instead Daniel is forced occupy himself for the rest of the night and wait until the sun sets again before he harasses his friend.

Louis! he begins, thrusting his mind vaguely Eastwards. As Daniel feels Louis’ attention turn towards him, he’s desperate enough not to try and ease into the subject. Have you listened to the interview yet?

Louis, in now characteristic fashion, remains stubbornly calm. Not yet.

If this becomes a repeat of the situation with his book, Daniel is going to have to start looking for a new immortal BFF.

Come on man, I need to share some of this shit with someone who’ll appreciate how juicy it is. Aren’t you dying to know? Are you going to wait till we publish, like you’re just some normal member of the public?

I’ll get to it, Louis replies, and there’s almost an edge of testiness to his voice.

Daniel knows that he probably should respect Louis' boundaries and timeline etcetera, but he’s also bursting with questions. Did Armand ever mention Lestat’s mother? slips out before he can stop it.

His mother? Now Louis just sounds confused. No. He pauses. You’re not going to tell me Armand killed Lestat’s mother are you?.

No, Daniel admits. Though honestly, the story I’m getting from Lestat is so different from what Armand said that I wouldn’t be that surprised if he had.

Neither of them are exactly trustworthy, Louis replies.

Which is another thing Daniel would love to broach with Louis. This is as good an opening as he’s likely to get, but still, he hesitates, feeling obscurely like he’s treading on Claudia, with her conviction that Lestat was “the father of lies”, as much as Louis’ by even asking. They’re not exactly the same though are they?

Louis doesn’t reply, so Daniel prods further.

Don’t get me wrong, when Lestat isn’t bragging worse than an Instagram influencer I have to prise the facts out of him word by word, but I get the sense he’s telling me the truth, even when it’s not the whole story. Unlike Armand, who has no problems making things up, start to finish. And Louis here is one of the few people on the planet who can help close down the last stupid little bit of Daniel that wants, inexplicably, to give Armand the benefit of the doubt, even if the cost is admitting his own current judgement of Lestat is completely wrong. How often did Lestat actively lie about what happened?

Antoinette springs to mind, Louis snaps. Then he heaves a deep mental sigh. Not that he was particularly good at lying about her. I always thought he wanted me to know. No, Lestat’s more of a lies of omission, exaggerates for a good story type, I see that now.

It still counts, Daniel says, trying to be comforting. And hey, Armand does lies of omission too! On a whole different scale. Case in point, Lestat’s mom.

I’m sure I’ll regret rising to this, but why do you keep bringing up Lestat’s mother?

Normally Daniel wouldn’t spoil his own story, but in this case, Louis might need his curiosity whetted with a few salacious details. Oh, she was Lestat’s first fledgling, he says, casually.

His mother! The shock Daniel can feel emanating from Louis is everything he could have hoped for. He assumes that Louis is picturing turning Florence, and recoiling.

In his defense, she was on the verge of death. Come to think of it, was Antoinette the only fledgling Lestat hadn’t turned on the verge of death? Daniel keeps this new thought away from Louis. Two Antoinette mentions in one conversation might set him off.

And Armand knew about this?

Oh, she was there the whole time. When he stalked them for weeks, when he kidnapped Nicolas. I’m embarrassed to discover that even I overestimated Armand’s attachment to the truth.

The silence, as Louis processes this, feels distinctly overwhelmed, and Daniel tries harder to reign himself in.

And another thing, in however the fuck many hours of recording, you couldn’t have mentioned how much Lestat cries?

At that, Louis laughs. Yeah, he replies, fondness back in his voice. He was always very emotional. I’d... I’d forgotten, when we talked. That he wasn’t just quick to anger.

Daniel shouldn’t say it. He’s pestered enough for one conversation. He says it. Well, if you want to remind yourself, for better or worse, what the real Lestat is like, maybe you should listen to the extensive interview with him that I’ve provided.

Goodbye Daniel, Louis says, and firmly seals Daniel off from his mind.

Chapter Text

At their next session, a deadening calm seems to have come over Lestat. He takes his seat like a death-row prisoner resigned to their fate and talks Daniel through the long night that he and Gabrielle spent trying to chase down the ragged coven of vampires and recover Nicolas with uncharacteristically consistent detachment. Told with his usual showmanship it could have been an exciting tale: Gabrielle and Lestat racing around Paris, closing in on their prey’s malevolent intent again and again only for the other vampires to scatter like cockroaches whenever they got close. Instead, the story is flat and a little confusing.

“Didn’t they want you to find them?” Daniel asks. The coven’s plan seems incoherent at best.

“They barely had a plan, Daniel,” says Lestat, answering his unspoken thought. “I doubt that Armand fully explained his abduction of Nicolas to them, or that they could have followed any order more complex than ‘run away’ if he had. They were poorly organised, controlled only through fear and ignorance, given vague edicts by a leader who despised and disdained them. The Children of Satan gloried in scaring and exhausting their victims, and so led us in circles, savouring our increasing desperation.”

Believable, though the whole thing still seems like a mess to Daniel. As usual, he can’t decide whether Armand is a Machievellian genius, or a scared boy with too much power who defaults to cruelty and secrecy as much to cultivate a protective air of mystery as for a love of cruelty and secrecy.

“As dawn approached, we were no closer to finding their lair, or even of talking to them to find out who had taken Nicki and what state he was in. Gabrielle began to feel the pull of the sun, and we would normally have returned to our house, but all we knew at the time was that at least some of the coven could enter it whenever they wished, including after the sun wore heavily on Gabrielle. It was no longer safe. I suggested that we sleep in a church, since the creatures we were chasing spoke of entering churches as a sin and a great feat. If physical barriers could not stop them, the ones enforced by their own delusions might protect us.”

“You sought sanctuary in God’s house?” asks Daniel, a little ironically.

“Something like it. Gabrielle, for all her scorn of religion, balked at the idea. She hadn’t expressed any concerns about churches previously, but it seems the fanaticism of our fellow vampires had got to her. As stalwart as she had been throughout our ordeal, it wore her down, to have passed through the veil into the promise of eternity, to believe herself safe and strong, and then be in danger again. Eventually I coaxed her into the crypt beneath Notre Dame.”

“Fancy,” Daniel can’t help but comment. Of course Lestat isn’t going to settle for an obscure, local church.

“If a church repelled them, a cathedral must surely be inviolate,” Lestat shoots back.

Gently, Lestat unfurls the memory. He is in a narrow stone space that had until that evening—or so Daniel infers from the bones kicked unceremoniously down by their feet—been some poor dusty skeleton’s peaceful resting place. Gabrielle is cradled against his chest, and even through the panic and grief of knowing that Nicki is out there, dead or suffering, the weight of her kindles a gentle, protective flame in Lestat’s chest. All is not lost.

Although the pull of the sun must be heavy on her by now, Gabrielle is still tense. "What if they're right," she whispers, "and we don't belong in the House of God."

"Gibberish and nonsense.” Lestat keeps his voice firm and certain. It’s a relief for once to understand her fears and feel equipped to address them. “God isn't in the House of God. "

Gabrielle gazes at him for a long moment. So long, Lestat starts to feel a little discomfited.

“You truly aren’t afraid of anything,” she says eventually. Daniel wonders how she knows her son so well, yet understands him so little. But then, Lestat is little better at decoding her. They both buy too easily into each other’s facades.

"What does it matter if I am or not?" Lestat asks, which again, is not really an answer, though Gabrielle seems to take it as one.

“We must find them tomorrow,” Gabrielle says eventually, squirming a little. “I cannot endure a third day squashed together like this.”

The memory ends sharply, with an embarrassed air, but not fast enough for Daniel to miss the bitter pain Gabrielle’s offhand comment caused, when Lestat had just been thinking how good it was to have Gabrielle safe and close all through the long day, and wondering if they could sleep this way always.

“I woke during vespers,” Lestat says quickly, “and perhaps Parisians were better singers, but I had never appreciated the magnificat as I did that evening, hearing it echo through the stone floor of the cathedral above. Even in a matter as foolish as God, people create extraordinary beauty, and we needed such solace that night more than ever.”

“The acoustics of the building were probably better,” is Daniel’s unromantic suggestion.

“Whatever the reason, Gabrielle did not appreciate the artistry. When she awoke, all the terror of our situation overcame her again, and though it would have been infinitely more sensible to wait until the service was over and the congregation had all left, she could not lie there in silence. We left the tomb, which helped quiet her panic a little, and managed to slip back upstairs into the transepts unseen, a little more dusty and dishevelled than was strictly respectable, but passable in the candlelight. That is when we felt the other vampires surrounding the cathedral. It seemed our fresh sacrilege had not gone unnoticed.

“We had been looking for them, but nonetheless, to be ambushed was unsettling. In most of them, I sensed the same unreasoning, near animal instincts that I had when they attacked our house. But there was one that felt different. Not a shallow whirl of chaos, like leaves blowing in a ditch, but a fathomless ocean.”

“Armand,” Daniel says. He wants to sound detached and ironic, but his scalp prickles. A fathomless ocean; here be monsters. You might be crushed by a deep-sea tentacle or left to die alone, slowly, floating in nothing. Apt.

“At first, he sent us a sense of peace. Come to us, he said. Come to us and you will not be harmed. Perhaps if he had not kidnapped Nicki and slaughtered my staff and horses, I would have listened. It was a powerful call. The urge to give in and trust him was so strong it seemed to originate in some fundamental internal instinct, as if a deep part of me recognised him as my leader and caretaker. If I let go, it whispered, he would take care of me.”

“He was using the mind gift on you.”

“Yes, though I did not truly understand it at the time.” Lestat looks at Daniel, studiedly neutral. “I believe he uses a similar technique on his victims today.”

Truthfully, Daniel can still feel it, that undertow of peace and despair. He can still hear it. Rest. It has been the whisper in his ear for fifty years, when he pauses long enough to let it catch up to him. All that changed in Dubai is that now he’s able to recognise it for what it is.

Like a warm bath. Maybe that’s why he prefers showers.

“Did you use the mind-gift when you turned Louis?” Daniel asks, abruptly. It’s decidedly not the moment, but it’s a question that crept up on him as he wrote the book, when he revisited Louis’ account of his turning with his memories of what happened in San Francisco restored.

It is difficult to explain how his words disarmed me, Louis had said. How succinct and impenetrable his argument was. Impenetrable and difficult to explain because his own feelings couldn’t explain it, perhaps?

All my conceptions, even my guilt and my wish to die seemed utterly unimportant, and I completely forgot myself and the barbaric scene that surrounded me. There is a certain similarity to the way Lestat is describing the feelings Armand thrust on him, of inexplicable peace in the wake of Armand’s barbarity to Nicolas, and to Daniel’s own memories, of all his lust for life and interest in other people draining away under Armand’s gentle but implacable hands.

Daniel feels he cannot go on with Lestat until he knows the answer, cannot know how to categorise him if he doesn’t know this.

For once, there is no prevarication on the subject of Louis. “No.” Lestat doesn’t shout, but his voice has a resonance even deeper than usual. His claws curl into the arms of Daniel’s favourite armchair until the upholstery is definitely damaged. “Is that what Louis thinks?”

“No.” Daniel considers. “Well, if he does he’s never told me.”

“I have never used the mind-gift to make Louis feel anything,” Lestat hisses at him, “only to speak to him with words. Feelings imposed on him from the outside have no value to me.” He seems to have grown a little larger in his outrage, like a cat puffing out its fur.

“Unless you’re imposing on him through fear?” Daniel asks, unable to let that claim go unchallenged.

“I always strove to prevent Louis from fearing me, fought my nature a thousand times,” Lestat snaps. But he’s deflating, his burst of defensiveness fuelled by the final fumes of his self-righteousness. He looks away from Daniel. Twitches his head like he heard something he didn’t want to hear and flexes his hands where they are clamped on the chair’s arms. “Almost always. I failed, more often than I should.”

“Your maker’s temper?” Daniel quotes, softening not an inch.

If anything, Lestat gets even smaller. “My maker’s, my father’s… my own,” he admits, still avoiding Daniel’s eyes. “I am sorry for every time it got the better of me with Louis. And Claudia.” He makes eye contact again. “But I never used the mind gift on either of them that way before our minds closed to each other, and I wouldn’t have if the ability remained to me. The idea repels me.”

Again, perhaps Daniel is a fool, but he believes him. Lestat’s craving for genuine connection with his loved ones is apparent and consistent in every story he’s shared, and despite all the ways Lestat lies to himself, Daniel doesn’t think that manufacturing their feelings for them is one. Not to mention that he keeps turning his loved ones into vampires himself, thereby drawing a veil between their minds forever.

Daniel’s maker, on the other hand, might not have any kind of concept of internally generated feelings being more valid. Suicidal despair, romantic love, calm acceptance. As far as Daniel can tell, once Armand imposes them, he doesn’t care where they came from. He’s as indifferent to genuine internal motivations as the average john with a sex worker. Which is quite the comparison, if Daniel thinks about Armand’s history. Not for the first time, it occurs to him that someone with an impenetrable Armand-specific veil around their mind might be the only kind of person Armand could have an equal and trusting relationship with. How’s that for irony? All the centuries Armand has believed that fledglings will always grow to resent their makers, and it might have been the key to his success the whole time.

In an effort to keep Lestat from getting unbearable, Daniel does his best not to let on that he’s been convinced.

“Did Armand ‘persuade’ you to go outside?” he asks.

Lestat accepts the return to topic with relief. “Non. He had played too cruel a hand so far, and I hesitated. Gabrielle, who was already better than me at the subtle nuances of the mind-gift and far more detached, was even less convinced. When Armand's gambit did not work immediately, he lost his temper and sent me images of Nicki being tortured,” Lestat’s pupils expand and Daniel swears the room drops a few degrees in temperature, “he showed my Nicki hung by his arms until his shoulders dislocated, and then left to scream in the dark. Gabrielle assured me that it was made-up, the images awash in unreality like a nightmare if I looked closely, but I could not bear to. I fought back, I called him a coward with everything in me.”

“He must have loved that.” The outrage that Armand is able to feel at entirely just accusations never fails to impress Daniel.

“His next salvo was more subtle. From nowhere, my mind returned to the helpless feeling of being held captive by Magnus. That third day, when he had broken me so thoroughly even he did not want me anymore. Was I not, in truth, as helpless as I had been then, before this vampire’s ancient power? How else could he already have Nicki crushed beneath his yoke, despite my desire to keep him safe? I had already failed.” Lestat takes a shuddering breath. “I was not yet experienced enough to shield my mind or truly understand what was happening, but some instinct told me that my thoughts had not turned there of my own volition. With great effort, I turned them away. Yes, I had despaired, but in the end, I had not surrendered, even to Magnus. I would hardly give in now, to this horde of religious fools. Again, I broke free of his influence. We would not come out simply because he commanded it.”

“And then what?” Daniel asks, rapt.

A moment’s hesitation. “Would you like to see?”

From Lestat, it’s almost touchingly considerate to ask, recognition that this is sensitive ground for them both. For a moment, Daniel is in danger of tearing up himself. He shakes the rush of emotion off and tries not to examine it too closely. He’s been spending too much time in Lestat’s head, developing some weird affinity with him and his wild surges of emotion, that’s all. It has made him overreact to the surprise of someone acknowledging that, for good or ill, Armand is significant in his life, maybe even that he is significant to Armand. Louis still thinks of Armand as his ex and Daniel’s turning as a way of getting back at him. And hell, maybe that’s true. Armand hasn’t deigned to tell anyone any different.

If Daniel is honest with himself, it doesn’t feel true.

If he’s even more honest, he wants his turning to be about him, at least a little.

Instead of answering verbally, Daniel reaches out and takes the mental hand Lestat has extended to him, realizing as he does so how much easier this mind-shit has gotten in just six sessions. Well fuck him, he’s been learning the whole time without even realizing it was happening.

Notre Dame materializes around Daniel, soaring, solemn and beautiful. He’s been there in real life—attendance is basically compulsory for any American tourist in Paris—but the 18th century suits it better. Or maybe it’s the filter of a younger Lestat who, for all his confidence and brazen hedonism, has seen little beyond his birthplace and Paris, and sees evidence of the divine in humanity’s creations. Daniel is so busy absorbing the surroundings, wishing Lestat would look up and around at the ceiling again, that he feels the memory of Lestat’s shock before he registers what caused it.

Everything in the room has stilled. The hushed silence of the church, in reality the sound of people trying to be quiet while shuffling, whispering, and breathing, has dimmed sharply to true nothing. The people are as unmoving as statues, even those halfway through a step, in poses so unstable the greatest Greek sculptor couldn’t have captured them. The candles on the walls are frozen, like golden stars. High in the vaults above, a bird hangs in the air, mid-flap. Lestat gasps, and his freedom to do so is a relief.

With a bolt of fear, Lestat’s eyes fly to Gabrielle. If she too is an immobile mannikin, he will run mad. She looks back at him, free, but equally amazed.

“What sorcery is this?” she whispers.

And into that frozen moment, walks Armand.

Now, Daniel knows what Armand looks like. Frankly, he’s seen him looking a lot better than he does here. He’s seen him with his hair softly curled like a cherub, and slicked back like a nightclub owner. He’s seen him in crisp thousand dollar black shirts, crisp thousand dollar white shirts, and v-necks so low they’d have made twenty year old Daniel blush and sidle over to talk, but not in a gay way. Perhaps most notably, he’s seen him clean. 18th century Armand is none of these things. He’s filthier than a street urchin in an overly on the nose production of ‘Oliver!’, wrapped in rags that manage to be both formless and distinctly old fashioned.

Yet the sight of him hits Daniel like a ton of bricks. That fucking cord.

Plausibly, he can lay at least some of the blame at Lestat’s feet. Lestat hasn’t seen Armand before and has rarely had access to running water, so the grime is less of a dealbreaker. Filth and all, Lestat is genuinely struck by Armand: the delicacy of his features, his orange eyes like two suns dwindling on the horizon, the glow to his skin that not even grave-dirt can fully suppress.

A moment behind this aesthetic appreciation, like commentary on a satellite delay, comes another, far more powerful surge of emotion. At a remove from Lestat’s original experience in the memory, and not exactly inexperienced in Armand’s mind-fuckery, Daniel can take a step back and see that they aren’t Lestat’s feelings. That they’re projected from elsewhere to subdue and control him.

In the memory itself, Lestat is caught like a mouse in a glue trap.

This being, this miraculous being, is not just beautiful, they’re indescribable! The only thing that Lestat can compare it to is the moment—and honestly, Daniel is glad Lestat turfed him out of the memory before he got to this part, because the echo of it is sick enough—that Magnus’ beauty suddenly became apparent to Lestat, right after he had been turned, and he’d felt, just for a few moments, that he loved Magnus more than anything else in the world. And yet here, Lestat’s soul sings, is an even more incredible creature, with an infinite complexity and depth which Magnus had not possessed. It’s the kind of beauty that cannot be experienced without an edge of sadness, and in an instant, that sadness too opens to Lestat: all the anguish of an immortal life where nothing else will ever compare to him.

For Daniel, it’s fascinating and awful in equal measure. Part of him is pragmatically evaluating how useful developing his skills in this area would be when it comes to hunting. Part of him is, as Lestat had said when asked about using this power on Louis, repelled. It’s a violation of the soul even deeper and more intimate than murder, or reading what is already there: to plunge a hand into a person’ depths and twist until they are not themselves, but your own creature.

Armand stops in the centre of the nave, so that the Gothic arch of the entrance frames him perfectly. His lips do not move, but nonetheless, a voice speaks directly to Lestat’s heart. Come to me, it says. Come to me because only I can end the loneliness you feel. And something touches a well of inexpressible loneliness that was already in Lestat’s chest, so that the echo of the touch rings through the well, and he sees it is bigger and deeper than he ever realized. He can’t live like this, alone, with no one to guide him! He must go to the voice, the only source of solace.

Someone takes his hand, and tugs him backwards. For a moment, it’s as meaningless to Lestat as getting his coat snagged on a nail—he just has to yank himself free, and proceed—but then Gabrielle’s voice penetrates his awareness.

“Lestat,” is all she says, but just the tone of her voice, taut with fear he doesn’t ever want her to feel, shatters the magic’s hold on him. It all comes rushing back to him: Gabrielle, Nicki, the pitiful, rabid state of these other vampires, their ranting, illogical beliefs. All the people dearest to him endangered and tormented, likely by this very being - how could he have forgotten?

Churning sickeningly underneath the danger of the immediate moment are the implications of the way that this new magic resonates with Lestat’s memories of his turning. Perhaps it is not so new after all? At times, Lestat has found some solace in the brief tenderness he’d felt for his maker, wondered if it was the surfacing of the connection between them that Magnus had sensed all along, or the measure of his maker’s true intent, and he’d only forgotten how easily scared and torn humans were. At other times, the memory has made him feel sickened and guilty. What kind of needy, fickle creature must Lestat be, for him to have forgotten everything Magnus did so quickly? And now the revelation of this new magic. Does it absolve Lestat? Or show how rotten his vampiric origins have been all along? It is too much to deal with on top of the current crisis, and Lestat pushes the questions away.

“Where is Nicolas?” Lestat demands, instead of going to the new vampire.

There is no reply, yet Lestat sees that he has surprised this filthy, fey creature. Clearly, he had never considered that a full frontal assault would fail to subdue them, and does not know how to proceed now that it has. The false veneer of confidence Lestat has thrown up strengthens into something closer to real, at this evidence of misjudgement and human pride.

Gabrielle, clearly engaged in her own interaction with the new vampire, makes a small, scornful noise, and the sense of puzzlement at their defiance flares into a withering, wrathful heat, the other vampire’s face briefly twisting into a mask of anger before he calms, and the sublime saviour reappears. The mask works less well every time he puts it on.

“Why, where?” Gabrielle asks, in response to some question Lestat couldn’t hear.

Without warning, a force emanates from the other vampire, a force that tries to bow and press Lestat to the floor. This at least is a power Lestat recognises. Instinctively, he resists it, fighting back with his own power and staying on his feet. Again, the primary reaction is shock. Taking advantage of it, Lestat uses his force to push the other vampire back, and he stumbles.

Your leader is in here, Lestat sends to the vampires milling outside, and you could be too. God is as powerless as Satan to stop you!

With a cry of inarticulate rage, Lestat is flung into the wall of the cathedral.

“He lies to you!” Lestat shouts, marrying voice and mental projection. “Come into the church and see for yourselves!”

“Keep your ignorant mouth shut,” hisses the other vampire. He clenches a hand in front of himself, and Lestat feels the echo of the grip squeeze and hold him. He tries again to push back, but this time nothing happens, his own paltry power stuttering to nothing against the unrelenting, superior strength of the other vampire. Then Lestat is dragging across the stone floor, Gabrielle scrambling after him. The doors of the cathedral open as Lestat reaches them and he sails through them to land heavily in the square outside. Vampires surround him and Gabrielle.

“Don’t fight them,” Gabrielle hisses, as several vampires seize her, hauling her horizontally up into their arms, like a log. “It’s useless to prolong this, and they’ll take us to Nicolas.” Surrender goes against every instinct Lestat has, but he lets the other vampires pick him up—tens of dirty hands grabbing at him and stroking his fine clothes and clean hair—and bear them away into the sewers.

Once Lestat and Gabrielle have been dragged, via a dizzying network of tunnels, into the heart of the Children of Darkness’s lair, under the Cimetière des Innocents, Lestat’s account of the disbanding of the coven dovetails much more closely with Armand’s than anything else has so far. Daniel is almost disappointed. There are differences, of course. For one thing, as if roles for women in this little drama weren’t sparse enough, Armand cut not only Gabrielle from his version, but the ancient female vampire who also had a leadership role within the coven.

Lestat’s lines are at least much the same in substance, but rather than sashaying in like a Drag Race contestant and coolly dismantling the coven’s beliefs, Lestat is dumped in a heap into the middle of his own trial for treason, full of terror and disgust. The stench of rot in and under the cemetery—overstuffed from Paris’ rapid population growth even without the coven bringing their victims there—is so powerful, so reminiscent of Magnus’ dungeon of horrors, that Lestat vomits blood. After this unprepossessing start, he claws back the bravado needed to destabilise the coven out of sheer desperation, reading the reactions to what he’s saying in the simple, shallow minds of the coven and improvising like a Second City alumnus.

He is less polished than Armand’s version, but in some ways more impressive. Especially as Armand also failed to mention that half of the coven were still noticeably bruised and lacerated from their attack on Lestat and Gabrielle, swathed in filthy bandages like a cross between zombies and mummies at a Halloween party, and presumably quite pissed off about it.

Most damning of all—if you’re daming Armand for being small and petty, which in this instance Daniel is—is the way that Armand down played his own silent, ineffective confusion as his coven fell apart around him. His claim of silent complicity in the coven’s destruction is more tenuous than ever, and there’s a pattern that Daniel is starting to see in Armand’s lies and edits: Lestat as a glossy, swashbuckling anti-hero, narratively important but emotionally invulnerable, and Armand as the victim of his careless attitude, wise enough to see the damage coming but just a little bit too guileless and deeply wounded by life to stop him. Everyone other than the two of them is barely worth mentioning.

Or perhaps Armand thought that if he let on to Louis and Daniel that he’d frozen time in a public place so that he could kidnap his fellow vampires and take them to a kangaroo-court execution, a scheme that then failed because Lestat turned the tide of audience opinion, it would put ideas in Louis’ head about his own “trial” experience. Again, the parallels are a little on the nose.

“I can’t believe he tried it again with Louis and Claudia,” Daniel says incredulously, once the memory of Armand’s first coven splintering under the weight of new ideas such as washing, and having nice clothes has dissipated.

“Although he was a more accomplished director by the 40s, Armand is as trapped as anyone in the oubliette of his trauma and inflexibility,” Lestat replies. The vitriol is half-hearted. He’s entering the state he reaches as they approach something he particularly doesn’t want to talk about, careening between eloquent tangents to delay, below-the-belt jabs to distract, and clamming up to deny. “Turning you was the first interesting new idea he’s had in at least three hundred years.”

Daniel is pretty sure by now what they’re avoiding. He’s had a front-row view of just how much of Lestat’s speech to the Children of Darkness was seat-of-his-pants bullshit—laughing at and insulting them with hysteria more than any genuine amusement or sense of superiority—but if anything Lestat is perversely proud of that. Why plan when you’re brilliant enough to succeed by your wits? More significant is what Lestat hadn’t been able to think about. Through all the scene with the coven there had been a burning coal in the back of his mind: Nicolas, who lay bruised and insensate in a small cage.

“The Children of Satan,” Lestat says, engaging ‘delay’, “were always a doomed death cult. The leaders perpetuated the ignorance of their followers through carefully designed rules. They made suffering a virtue, in their members and their victims. They lost scores of vampires to the sun and executions every year, then replaced them just as lightly. It was easy to do in a society inured to cruelty and death. They turned only the weakest and most vulnerable humans, entombed them until their minds broke from fear and hunger, and then released them to an after-life of ignorance and deprivation. Half of them believed themselves already in hell.

“If a vampire attained any strength and independence through age or natural ability, they would be condemned to death for defiance and bricked up to starve. It was a high crime for any vampires except the youngest to make another vampire, because they understood that the fledglings received a portion of their maker’s power, and that those born from older, undiluted blood,” Lestat encompasses himself and Daniel, the only children of centuries old monsters, in one gesture, “would be born into a strength that would allow them a fatal independence of mind.”

“Uh huh.” Daniel is interested in an abstract way in the history of religious cults among vampires, but keen in a personal way to move on.

“Armand had spent so long as the biggest fish in the stagnant pond of his own devising that he had forgotten other vampires could have their own ideas, let alone the strength and will to stand behind them. He expected us to yield as easily as every other new vampire had for the past several centuries, and when he was wrong he was too stunned to react in time to save what he had.”

Here at least, Lestat has hit on something Daniel is interested in. “Armand told me that your words had been his thoughts for half a century, that he engineered your coming there,” he says, playing Devil’s Advocate particularly literally.

Lestat snorts. “Armand would take the credit for vampirism itself, if he had the imagination. I believe he enjoys gloating more when he knows his claims are baseless, because he is more proud of his ability to deceive than he would be of any actual achievement.”

The shameless way that Armand had tried to guilt both Daniel and Louis on the basis of his supposed rescues of them plays in Daniel’s head, and Lestat laughs bitterly. “Exactement. As the coven scattered, and I said whatever I could to placate Armand and the coven’s queen-”

“What exactly did you say?” Daniel asks.

“That a new age required a new evil, some such thing,” Lestat replies dismissively. “I could see, as Armand reeled from what had happened, that he had never believed the rules of his coven to be true. It was a thousand times worse! He knew they weren’t real, and believed in following them anyway. He thought it was the best way for them all to live. He may not have joined Satan’s mad army by choice-”

“He didn’t?” Daniel asks, springing on this hint about Armand’s past.

“We will come to that,” is all Lestat will give him. “He came to the cult against his will, as most did, but eventually he chose, with open eyes, to perpetuate the lies.” Lestat appears genuinely incensed, giving the lie to his supposed pragmatic indifference. “So many centuries wasted, for nothing, for a nonsensical, contradictory illusion!”

“And he just gave up that illusion?” Daniel presses, “After so long?”

Lestat makes an impatient noise. “How you interrupt today!” he snaps. “So desperate for scraps from your maker’s table? If you seek to know him, you have come to the wrong person. I have never understood Armand and I doubt I ever will. He is a nest of contradictions and lies, even to himself.”

“But you don’t think he wanted the coven to break up?”

Lestat rolls his eyes and lobs a memory at Daniel like a water-balloon.

“They are on the Devil’s Road to great adventure,” the ancient female vampire says. She is bedraggled and prone to fits of laughter and vacant staring, but nonetheless exudes a power and energy that sets her apart. “We have no right to interfere in what the centuries have in store for them.” She gestures at their ornate but filthy surroundings. “This is all finished and done.”

They are in the crypt beneath Cimetière des Innocents that has housed the Children of Satan for centuries. Most of the members have scattered out of sight, though not out of earshot, into the tunnels, but the queen vampire, as Lestat calls her, and Armand, whose name Lestat has finally learned, remain, facing Lestat and Gabrielle. Nicolas is a formless shimmer on the edge of Lestat’s consciousness. Alive, but more than that Lestat cannot tell without reaching out, and he fears giving away more than he gains if he does so.

“Silence!” shouts Armand, and the seething anger that had risen in him in the cathedral flares. Daniel recognises it—tormented, and blindly hungry to visit that torment on others—from the week he spent at Armand’s mercy in San Francisco. Armand must have learned to bank and bury it deep over the decades, but this is a rawer, less polished Armand, and his anger is still close to the surface as he faces Lestat and Gabrielle. “You do not understand these mysteries! You shatter them like so much glass, but you have no strength, no power save ignorance. You only destroy things, without care or thought. I could speak for centuries, and not tell you what you have destroyed here.”

Lestat thinks this is rich coming from Armand, the enforcer of ignorance, but he has the wit not to say it out loud.

“Why did you do it?” Armand asks, and his voice breaks with confusion. “Tell me why.”

He is like a child having a tantrum because he hasn’t yet learned that unfair doesn’t mean any outcome he doesn’t like. And to this child, Lestat thinks desperately, we are beholden. His thoughts would be clearer, his arguments more cogent, he is sure, if he could know the state that Nicolas is in, but Armand’s pleading gaze will not give him even a moment to look.

“Do not the forms of goodness change with the ages?” Lestat asks, groping for some poetic way to dress up the natural death of the medieval ideas the coven was built on. “Once upon a time there were martyrs who took up arms and performed miracles. Now the saints are obedient priests and nuns, who build hospitals and orphanages instead of summoning angels. God grows bored of the old ways, and requires something new of his followers.”

This seems to pique Armand’s interest. Lestat continues, a little more sure, finding his footing. “Why should evil not also change its face? Modern men turn their backs on the superstitions of the past, and look to science and philosophy. This new age requires a new evil, invites death that doesn’t lurk, but walks proudly among humanity, rousting them from their most hallowed halls, be that the church or the concert hall.” Seeing Armand listening avidly, Lestat launches his final bomb. “Even this place is to be destroyed.”

“What?” Armand tenses like he expects an imminent attack.

“The people are sick of the cemetary’s stench and filth. They plan to dig it up and build something new and modern on its remains.”

“You are lying,” Armand whispers, though Lestat is sure he can see from Lestat’s mind that he isn’t, “Les Innocents has existed for centuries.”

“It is a new age,” Lestat says, “and we are a new evil, for that age. They destroy the dark places, and in doing so, free us from them. Now there is nowhere they can hide from us.”

The old queen laughs. “These are fiends of high-blown ideas and great reason.”

Armand is almost on Lestat’s hook, Daniel can see it. He wants to accept his words, to make this great change a part of a story rather than a random blast of chaos. Lestat struggles against his urgency to end the conversation and flee with his companions, letting the bait sit when he wants to snatch it away.

“You cannot live among men,” Armand says, pleadingly, “the passing years will drive you to madness. The old ways are our salvation.”

“We may all go mad,” says the queen vampire. “Am I not mad, for all I have lived by the old ways all this time?” This silences Armand. “But there is much you do not understand,” she says to Lestat and Gabrielle, “that you will only come to understand with time.”

“What is that?” asks Lestat, respectfully, though inside he vibrates with impatience. Even Nicki’s heartbeat is hard to hold onto firmly, with so many excited vampires hiding in the crevices around them. What if it stops or stutters, and Lestat misses it?

“The great danger of living among mortals,” she replies, “is that you grow to love them. I talked of it often with Magnus. He suffered from that, as he did all things, by the end.”

This is so absurd that Lestat laughs, despite his resolution to say whatever will win these people over. “Magnus love mortals? You are madder than I thought. How did he love them, his captives? The way boys love butterflies when they rip off their wings!" The memory of the dungeons, the corpses, the way Magnus played with him, idly and avidly by turns, feels momentarily like a huge, painful pressure he cannot contain. If it erupts, he doesn’t know what it will do. “You must have been monsters when you were alive, to think that is love.”

That any of these creatures—cut-off, unchanging, locked together in mutual misery—would talk to him of love is ridiculous. Lestat already has love, for Gabrielle, for Nicolas, for his friends in the theatre that he sent away, and the humans feverishly making art of all kinds to show each other and illuminate a bleak world. Love is not some unknown danger lurking in his future.

The old queen is unperturbed at his outburst, confident enough to be amused by it. Armand, Daniel notes, has that ‘half blank, half apocalyptic look’ on his face, and he’s gazing fixedly at Lestat. If Daniel still had a sense of his body, he’s sure he’d shudder.

"You will come to understand all things in love, " the old queen goes on, "when you are a vicious and hateful thing. This is your immortality, child, and your hell. Ever deeper understanding of it."

“You are in hell already!” cries Lestat. He is no vicious hateful thing, and he will not become one.

Sunrise is growing closer, and by his side, Gabrielle is weakening. Lestat finally allows the impulse he’s been suppressing, and glances at Nicolas. He is alive. He is awake. He has been stripped of jacket, waistcoat and shoes, though they have left him his jewellery, including the ring Lestat gave him, and his shirt is torn and bloodied from small wounds and bites. They have been feeding on him, hurting him. His mouth is almost smiling, but his eyes are full of hate, as if it amuses him to see proof of all the perfidy he has heaped on Lestat.

It’s now or never.

“We will leave you in your hell,” Lestat says with confidence, and no one stops him as he strides past Armand, rips the top off Nicolas’ cage with his bare hands, and scoops him up in his arms. Nicolas lies stiffly in them, every muscle straining away like he wants as little of himself as possible to touch Lestat, but he makes no protest as they leave.

“I wasn’t thinking about Armand then, except to scramble for whatever I could say to escape him,” Lestat says once Daniel’s mind has returned to his apartment in New York. “He let us go, that is all that mattered to me at the time. Maybe he ran out of energy for the fight. Maybe he believed me. It wasn’t his plan, I am certain of that much, but you couldn’t get him to admit it now on pain of death.”

Internally, Daniel agrees. However Armand came to feel about the end of his coven, he wasn’t keen in the moment. Overall though, the whole encounter has left him with more questions than answers.

“What do you think she meant, that you would come to understand all things in love?” Daniel asks. It sounds like something a hippy or a new age priest would say, not an ancient murderer.

“For many years I told myself it was little more than the ravings of a vampire not long for this world. And yet,” blood tears line Lestat’s eyes, but don’t spill, “love has made me a vicious and hateful things many times. Perhaps that is all she meant.”

“That’s not love.”

“Love is not the simple, happy fool your generation’s music made it out to be: all you need, easy. Love destroys and corrupts as much it sustains and feeds.”

Though he wants to, Daniel suddenly doesn’t feel qualified to argue with Lestat, a rare feeling for him. When has his love done anyone any good? Hell, when has someone else’s love helped him, in the long-run? In his experience, it all turns to shit eventually.

“Speaking of love destroying you…” Daniel half expects to get walloped for that segue, but in this moment sadness makes Lestat mellow rather than volatile, and he doesn’t make Daniel force him back to the topic at hand. Perhaps this is an older sadness, too long priced-in to get angry about it now.

“Nicki. Yes. We raced the sun home, ransacking houses we passed for blankets and food and wine.”

“You went back to Magnus’ house?”

“If Armand or the other ancient wished to pursue us, there was nowhere else in Paris we could go. Nicolas was unconscious by the time we made it back. I locked him in the room at the top of the tower-”.

“Where you were a prisoner?” Daniel interjects, aghast.

“There was nowhere else!” Lestat snaps back. “Should I have l put him in some windowless dungeon cell, like a prisoner in the Bastille? Or left him to wander free, still not understanding anything, into the yard filled with rotting horses and a dead boy dressed up to look like him?”

Daniel can’t think of a riposte to that, but tells himself it’s because Lestat has been cagey with the detailed layout of the house, which seems to sprout new areas only when the story needs it. “There’s always the treasure room,” he grumbles.

“I’m sure that would have soothed the, as your country so charmingly puts it, ‘chip on his shoulder’,” Lestat shoots back. “I healed what wounds I could with my blood, but was afraid to use too much. I still did not fully understand exactly how the process of making one of us worked, but I knew he had been drained by the others, and that an infusion of blood was the next stage.”

Lestat’s eyes unfocus. “I knew too well how the day would pass with him, in fear and rage, and I hated to leave him to it. But there was no time to do anything else. I was so exhausted, I could barely climb the stairs. I could see that he was having nightmares about what they had done to him, and I wanted nothing more than to lie down with him again, as I used to… but Gabrielle was still there. She drew me away and to our chamber below.”

“What did she make of this mess?” Daniel is pretty sure that compassion for Nicolas wasn’t top of her mind.

“She told me that in the morning we would send him away, out of France, or to the New World, with money enough to make him a great man. Or perhaps to London, with Renaud’s. Or we could leave, give up Paris to him and explore. She had a thousand plans to extract Nicolas from our lives, and was sure any of them could work. In short, she begged me, in every way she could without saying the words: do not do this thing.”

“And you did that thing.”

In silent confirmation, Lestat offers up the memory.

In his sarcophagus, Lestat wakes to Nicolas’ voice, raised in anger. At the top of the tower his lover is hammering on the door that Lestat once hammered on. Gabrielle is still in the death sleep, and will be until the sun is fully down.

Do not do this thing. He hears it in her voice as clearly as if she had said it.

It doesn’t feel like a decision when Lestat moves towards the stairs. It’s simply something that is happening, that he is observing his body doing, as helpless as Daniel is within the memories to change the course of anything. Nicolas’ angry cries echo down the spiral stairwell, a whirlwind of rage that draws Lestat up to its apex.

The smell of Nicolas’ blood and the psychic waves of his resentment only increase as Lestat reaches the door.

"Lestat! Do you hear me? Lestat!" Nicolas bellows, and his fists thunder even harder on the door, as if he can sense his enemy is close.

He smells like food, of course, salty and hot and savoury after the day’s long fast. His scent is redolent too of all the love and secrets that used to be between them: their little room at the inn when it grew hot in the sun and the resin in the wooden walls warmed up, the tannic tang of the cheap red wine they’d pass between them at night in their garrett, the sweet smell of the make-up and face powder they’d apply together backstage. Is this what it has all come to? Their conversation, the solace they had been to each other when they had no one else, the things only they had known and felt about each other: all shattered.

And yet, what can be pieced together from the wreckage? It is all very well to talk of sending Nicolas away, or leaving themselves, but what would they leave him to? He has seen too much. Oh no one will believe him, and even if they do, it will all be forgot within a few decades, a drop in the ocean of time that Lestat and Gabrielle have left. But Nicki will be more removed from humanity than ever: more bitter, more damaged, more alone. He was already drinking too much and driving everyone away before this ordeal, what will he become afterwards? A joke, a lunatic, a cautionary tale for those who disobey their parents. Tragic for a few years perhaps, while he is still beautiful, but soon contemptible in his repellant, unflattering paranoia. There isn’t money enough in the world to make such a man respectable, not even if he were a duke.

More practically, he knows them. Knows Lestat and Gabrielle’s name, their kin, their secret place in Paris, their lawyer. He will be an unceasing enemy, as committed to ruining them as he is to ruining himself, and as outmatched as he is, who knows what damage he will do, when he is willing to destroy himself, and Lestat cannot bear to see him destroyed?

“Come up here and face me Lestat!” Nicki screams. His voice shreds with the strength of his cries, but he doesn’t lessen the power he puts in. Lestat knows him: his fixed ideas, his vicious instincts, his self-destructive bent. He will never go quietly to another place. Gabrielle will be awake soon. And Nicolas wants this. There isn’t long, if Lestat is to take the opportunity.

Now that he has acknowledged the possibility that he might do this thing, Lestat’s heart pounds in anticipation. Yes, it is unwise. But what if from having nothing, he gets them both? Gabrielle and Nicolas, both his loves. Hasn’t Lestat managed it before, turning a terrible hand into a stunning victory? He was once here in this very tower, as naked and vulnerable as a worm squirming on a flagstone. He had no bigger hope than to die on his own terms, and even that was taken from him, but he emerged strong and handsome and rich beyond his wildest dreams. He was on the verge of losing one of the people he loves most to death forever, and instead he forged a true companion in the Dark Gift, even more magnificent in death than she had been in life. The very night before, an ancient cult of vampires that for all he knows is as old as Jesus, led by a vampire perhaps even more powerful than Magnus, rose against him, and Lestat brought them down with only his words! Things are never as hopeless as they seem.

He slides the bolt open, and Nicolas falls silent and steps back from the door. Lestat hesitates, on the cusp of this inversion of his own time trapped in this room. Now Nicolas is the helpless prisoner clinging onto his soul, and Lestat is the monster, a demon from the worst nightmares sent to drag his beloved to hell. Step by step, the devil has stalked Nicolas, longing and aching for him, teasing him until he is no longer fit for the sunlit world. Is Lestat ready now, to take that final step? To be the devil to Nicolas that Magnus was to him? But no, it’s not the same. Nicolas wants this. And Lestat will never abandon him.

With relief and anticipation, Lestat pushes open the door. His eyes are eager to see Nicolas. Finally, he can give in. Finally, he can tell him yes, you can have it, here it is. I will give it to you, as I would give you everything. The distance between them can end, and Lestat can make him happy again.

Nicki stands against the far wall, blanketed by shadows. He is sweaty and dishevelled from whatever has occupied him all day—eating, drinking and ripping up the room, by the state of it—still pale with blood loss except for the high colour in his cheeks, but God, as handsome as he ever has been. His hair has tumbled free where it is usually tied back, and his cravat is long gone, so that his shirt hangs open and his taut flesh can be seen through the torn linen. Lestat has been picturing him weak and ill, closer to death than life, but in this moment he looks gloriously vital. He still has the ring that Lestat sent him on his finger, and it gives Lestat hope to see it there. Even if he has only kept it because of its value, surely it means something? He hasn’t removed it from his finger, he has worn it all this time, through all his outward anger at Lestat.

“All those times you talked of goodness, of your horror of death,” Nicolas says, and his voice is low and vicious, “and I comforted you—poor, needy Lestat, the light that should never be dimmed or snuffed out, the one everyone is drawn to—did you know even then?”

“No-” Lestat begins to say, taken aback, even expecting the anger, by the hatred that swells and lashes from Nicki like a whip.

“And when you did have it, you shared it with her!” Nicolas shouts, his questions apparently rhetorical. “The lord's son giveth to the lord's wife his great gift, just as it has always been. The ones who live in the castle share the magic and knowledge, and what does your lowly ‘love’ get?” Nicolas throws a wine bottle at Lestat. He ducks, but the bottle still smashes on the wall, raining shards down in a sharp, glittering rain. “Lies!” He picks another bottle up and throws that too. “Coin! Like a servant to be paid off! That’s all I’m worth to you!”

With this expulsion of recriminations, Nicolas’ hate fuelled strength ebbs, and he staggers a little. Lestat rushes forward to catch him and doesn’t let him twist away, looking for a place he can set Nicki down, in all the wreckage of the room, now covered in broken glass.

"How could you keep it from me?” Nicolas whispers, giving up on escape. Lestat tries to pick something specific out of the surface of Nicolas’ mind, but it’s a chaotic mess of images and ideas, fantasy and memory inextricably entwined: solemn magic rituals performed by candlelight, a secret network of chambers under the city that only the inducted know about, richly dressed nobles drinking peasant blood from a special cup, noble blood pouring from severed necks into Nicolas’ cupped hands, the terror and ecstasy of the vampires feeding on him in the cage.

"You have misunderstood everything!" Lestat’s voice sounds terrible to his own ears, deep and fractured, like something demonic. He is hurt, but he only sounds angry.

"I would have shared anything I possessed with you!” Nicolas screams in his face. He brings a hand up to rake his nails, soft human things already worn down by his attempts to escape, down Lestat’s cheek.

“Even damnation?” Lestat shouts back, shaking Nicolas to dislodge his feeble attempt at a claw, which is surely hurting Nicki’s fingers more than it is Lestat’s face. He drags him away from the glass and drops him down into the remains of the nest of blankets he’d made the night before.

“It is you who doesn’t understand, you who has never understood,” says Nicki, tears in his eyes, and that at least is true. He doesn’t understand. All Lestat’s hope from a moment before is withering. The turmoil and desperation in his lover are greater than any he’s felt before. Will answering it be a cure or a curse? Lestat feels even more like a monster than ever, looming over Nicki as he lies on the floor, so Lestat kneels beside him instead, near weeping himself.

“You can still have your life,” Lestat tells him, willing him to listen. If Nicki doesn’t want to be turned, he won’t do it. Maybe that is the only thing that can stop him doing it, and if so, he must persuade him not to want it. “You can go anywhere you want in the world, with enough money to be anything you want. This thing isn’t what you think it is! It is not simply power. It’s death and damnation. You’ll be in the darkness forever.”

“Even now, you don’t see, you don’t understand. I’m already in the darkness! I was meant for this, always, it explains everything. It’s confirmation of everything I’ve always felt. Of pure, sublime evil.”

“Evil isn’t sublime!” Lestat is so angry it’s a struggle not to hit Nicolas, to suppress the violent urge he no longer has to repress in the world. Over a hundred people he has murdered since the winter, and none of them had wounded him as profoundly as Nicolas has wounded him. He lets the beast inside him rise, his fangs lengthening. “Were those filthy animals that drank from you last night sublime? Scrabbling in the dirt and the rot, almost too stupid to talk?”

For a moment, Lestat sees the fear and degradation of the past two nights flicker in Nicolas’ mind, the true awful sordidness of it, but Nicki pushes it away.

“Yes! More than you, lying to yourself, lying to me. They were pure.” Nicolas tries to shove Lestat away, but of course, he can’t.

“I don’t lie!” bursts out of Lestat. But this is a pointless discussion. He has to make Nicki see. How can he make him see? Lestat makes a conscious effort to soften his stance. To lean gently over Nicki like a lover, not bear down on him like a beast.

“I didn’t want this,” Lestat says. It’s hard to admit. Shameful, to turn back and acknowledge the frightened man that would rather have died than become what he is. Is it the human he’s ashamed of? Or their failure to hold onto themselves? “I tried, with my last breath, to say no,” Lestat isn’t sure what he’s trying to tell Nicki until it wells up out of him, as uncontrollable as the stream of hot, iron tears suddenly streaming down his face, “I tried so hard to stay the man that you loved.”

Nicolas’ hand comes up to Lestat’s cheek again, soft and open this time, not curled in a claw. It feels like comfort, until he pulls his hand back and stares at the blood tears staining it in wonder. Is he even listening?

Nicolas looks back up into Lestat’s face. “Then you’re a fool,” he says. “You always were. I thought you kept it from me out of pride, but you’re just too stupid to know what you possess.” He laughs, a sharp bark of wonder at Lestat’s inadequacies, again and always. “You’ve always believed in things that don’t matter, now you have it, the answer to it all, the only thing that does matter, and you still don’t see it.”

Abruptly, he grabs Lestat’s face between his hands, lunges up at him, and licks his cheek. For a confused moment, Lestat wonders if this is a kiss, sloppy with desperation. Then he realizes that Nicolas is lapping the blood from his tears, trying to steal the Gift, and Lestat shoves him back to the floor. Nicki has learned that much at least about how this all works, though how Lestat isn’t sure. Had Armand taunted him with the knowledge?

“Give it to me,” Nicolas demands. He tries to sit up, but Lestat pins him back down with one hand.

“Do you want me to beg on my knees, like one of your subjects, is that it?” Nicolas sneers. “I won’t! I’ll take it from you first!”

With all his strength, Nicolas lunges up at Lestat again, teeth bared this time. In his mind’s eye he sees his teeth, blunt and human as they are, sinking into Lestat’s neck, tearing a piece off him like a haunch of meat, and slurping up the blood. The image is so vivid Nicolas can already feel the flesh yielding under his teeth as every muscle propels him upwards.

He barely moves an inch off the floor. He tries to twist sideways, but Lestat holds him easily in place with his other hand. He tries to claw at Lestat, prise himself free by gouging at whatever of Lestat’s skin he can reach, but between the awkward angle and his cracked nails, he may as well be scratching at a cliff. No matter how wildly he thrashes, he cannot dislodge himself.

Lestat watches him, almost unable to process the sight, it’s so ridiculous. It’s like nothing so much as holding one of his mastiffs’ wriggling puppies as it tries to bite him with blunt baby teeth, except that instead of being playful and innocent, Nicolas’ eyes are full of hatred. In that moment, Lestat feels truly disgusted. He almost expects Nicolas to soil himself, like the puppies sometimes do.

The ineffectiveness of his attempts to get closer only drive Nicolas to fight harder, every muscle straining, saliva sputtering from his mouth. “I’ll cut your head off,” he raves, “and then I’ll roll it down the mountain to join the rest of your family, and gorge myself on your blood!”

As always, words are Nicolas’ most potent weapon. If Lestat wasn’t too surprised to move, it might have worked to make him withdraw. They never, in all the weeks after they got the news of what had happened to Lestat’s family, discussed the possibility—indeed, the positive likelihood—that Nicolas’ family was involved in murdering Lestat’s. But Lestat sees that connection in his mind now—the sudden certainty that fills Nicolas that his people had already risen up against Lestat’s people and defeated them, the triumphant image of the bloodied corpses lined up in the village square, from Lestat’s father to Lestat's smallest niece—and sees him use it to fuel one last desperate fight.

To no avail. Everything Nicolas has to give amounts to little more than a convulsion in Lestat’s grip.

Finally, Nicolas goes limp. He lies back and screams in frustration, a wordless cry of futility, and then begins to cry. “You don’t want it,” he sobs. “You don’t deserve it. Give it to me.”

The anger simmering in Lestat’s chest boils over and fills him, searing away the hurt and embarrassment. If this is all that matters to Nicki—more than his soul, more than his dignity, more than the sun they walked in, the wine they shared, more than the love they’d given up their home for—then yes, Lestat will give it to him. He will pour his ichor into this brittle boy until he is unmade, until he sees which of them is right, which of them understands this darkness, which version of Lestat is worth more.

Lestat yanks them both to their feet and drives Nicolas back with a straight arm and a fist in his shirt until they’re standing several paces apart. Let him not come to his death cowering, if he wants it so very much.

“You want this?” Lestat asks, and he embraces the deep, cracked, inhuman resonance of his voice. Feels his pupils dilating to take in every detail of Nicki’s trembling form. “To walk on the devil’s road, forsaking sunlight and goodness, feeding on blood and bringing indiscriminate death, for eternity?”

Something in Nicolas quails, and Lestat sees a flash of himself through Nicki’s eyes: a white bloodied face fixed in blankness like a commedia mask, his eyes the two holes, except that they gleam like a predator's in the darkness. Monstrous. Full circle.

Nicolas shakes it off, reminding himself that he is finally to have all he has been denied. All he has always had a right to. A detached part of Lestat observes how small he seems in this moment, how petty and short-term his desire to get his is.

“I want it,” Nicolas says. Then, damningly, “I deserve it.”

“Then come to me.” Lestat holds out his arms, hands steady now in the cold of the place he has ascended to, offering his embrace. He feels solid and paternal, not just a lord beckoning a supplicant closer, but a god. “Come to me, and it shall be yours.”

Unsteadily, braced for a trick, Nicolas steps closer: one step, two, then into Lestat’s arms. And even in this cold place beyond hurt that Lestat has found, he feels good there. Hot, alive, tangy with salt and sweat. His heart pounds so hard that Lestat feels the vibration of it like a drum skin even before their chests touch, a fast discordant rhythm set incoherently against his own.

When Lestat accepts him with no more resistance Nicki’s eyes clear, and the hatred that has been pulsing in him like another living being stills. The avid expression on his face is close to the old fondness. His mind opens to Lestat, and it feels like Lestat’s opens to his, like they are truly connected, as he was with Gabrielle before he turned her. Hanging between them are the memories they share and the future they could have had: growing old together, a mortal kind of forever.

Then Lestat sinks his teeth into Nicolas’ neck, and everything they were and could have been falls away.

In his chair in New York City, from his place at the back of Lestat’s mind, Daniel is braced for the usual avalanche of memories that come in the blood. He’s interested to see fully inside Nicolas, still something of a question mark after all this time: is he the deep, tortured, artistic soul that Lestat sees, or an ordinary, self-centred person who thinks the chip on his shoulder makes him interesting? He’s prepared for the experience to be more intense because of Lestat and Nicolas’ shared memories, as it was with Lestat and Gabrielle. That could be normal. Daniel wouldn’t know any differently, he’s never drunk from anyone he knows, not that he remembers at least.

Instead, Lestat tumbles into a vision so strange that at first Daniel thinks they’ve gone into some entirely different memory: he’s soaring, or maybe falling, through an icy blue sky. It’s impossible to tell which from the disorienting void around him. There is only the force drawing him on, or up, or down, on and on until the sky around him turns silver, then dims to black. He is tiny in the vastness, and everything he’s known or loved, seen or touched, is far beyond him forever. It is only when Lestat opens his mouth to scream and finds the blood again, rushing hot into his mouth from Nicki’s artery, the only good, satiating thing in this bleak universe of nothing, that he remembers what is happening. It is only then that he realizes the bleak vision is the full, unfiltered vastness of the secret terrain he has sensed in Nicki since he first looked on him with vampiric eyes.

The blood is good, but the vision: Lestat cannot bear it. He didn’t know it would be like this. He clings to the lifeline of the blood, drinking faster, drinking Nicki down to his dregs as fast as he can. It can’t take long; there was so little left of him.

When his heart slows Lestat pulls back. Nicolas is a crumpled thing. He hangs in Lestat’s arms like a felled deer, long frail limbs and big terrified eyes going blank. The vision is still there, a void filling both their minds. One more swallow would end him. Lestat almost thinks it would be best. He didn’t know it was like that, in Nicki’s mind. But then Nicolas strains towards him, still wanting, and even now, Lestat cannot deny him. He lowers Nicki to the floor, one arm behind his back to sit him up, gashes his own wrist, and lets Nicki drink.

This time, Lestat feels the veil materialise between them. This time, it’s a relief. Yes, throw a cover on it, that horrible bleak landscape, no one should see it. But Nicki sees it. He’s had it in him all this time. He was right that Lestat didn’t understand. The tenderness Lestat thought he might have lost wells back up, thick with regret for the way he’d given the Gift. When he feels himself weakening he pulls his wrist away gently and cradles Nicolas in his arms like a child.

“Nicki?” he asks.

No reply. Nicki’s head lolls back, eyes open and empty. Lestat shakes him, just a little, and his head rocks back and forth on the end of his neck.

Trying not to panic, Lestat lowers Nicki fully to the floor. He can still hear Nicki’s heart, he can, he’s not dead. He presses his head to Nicki’s chest, just to be sure, and there it is. And yes, the bruises and scrapes Nicki had had, the slight gauntness of two days of captivity and bloodloss, they’re gone. Physically, he is restored to perfection. Lestat puts a hand on his face, tries to keep his voice calm as he says again, “Nicki?” and then leaves calm behind as he shouts it, loud enough surely to penetrate down into the void, “Nicki!”

Nothing. Slack face, limp body, eyes looking past Lestat into the distance.

“Oh my son.” He turns around to find Gabrielle standing in the doorway. “Disaster.”

Not for the first time, Daniel doesn’t know what to say when he lands firmly back in his own body.

“Kind of her not to say ‘I told you so’,” he settles on eventually.

“She had a clarity of vision that I have always lacked.” Lestat has evidently been crying copiously while they shared that little trip down memory lane, but now wipes his hands across his face and seems almost collected. “Other people’s opinions were not important to her. Why would she deign to rub it in?”

“Or that.”

“What was the crux?” Lestat asks. “That he wanted it? That he had screamed over and over that I had denied him the power? Or was I simply waiting for the excuses I needed to bring him to me, as I had wanted to do from the first moment? I am curious to hear your opinion on the matter.”

“Only you can answer that question,” Daniel says. He has an opinion on what the crux of the matter is, but he doesn’t think Lestat will like it.

“But you now know as much as any living being about the matter, as much as myself, perhaps more. As Nicki told me frequently, I am very skilled at lying to myself.” Lestat tilts his head. “Normally you are so keen to inflict your opinions of my behaviour on me.”

While Lestat had somehow found the worst possible option, Daniel can admit it was a fucked situation. The vision of the vast void lingers and makes Daniel shiver. Maybe if Nicolas could have lived long enough for them to invent Prozac he’d have had a chance, but this isn’t an observation that feels constructive.

“What do you think you could have done differently?” Daniel asks instead.

Lestat stands and walks over to the window.

“I still do not believe he could have returned to a normal life, not after the coven took him,” Lestat says, his back to Daniel. “Yet I know that what I did damned him more completely than any other path.”

There isn’t much Daniel can say to that. If what Lestat said in the play is even half accurate about Nicolas’ fate, it’s true.

“If I had never seen him again after I was taken, left Paris immediately, sent him money some other way, more discreetly, he might have moved on.” Lestat is pacing now.

“Maybe.”

“Or if I had gone to him immediately to explain, before he drove himself mad with speculation and worry, he might have been stronger. He might have taken to it better.”

“I don’t think he was ever going to take to it well.”

“Even if I had,” Lestat stops, takes a breath, “killed him, in that very last moment of humanity, it would have spared him suffering...” Lestat’s voice trails off, but Daniel still thinks there is something he isn’t getting.

“You wanted to turn him the whole time, sure”, Daniels says, “but in that moment, why did you do it?”

Lestat stops, struck into perfect stillness by Daniel’s words. Daniel’s early fear of being squashed like a bug returns, but all Lestat does is stand there. After several long moments, he speaks, voice a hoarse whisper.

“Yes. For all the times I wanted to turn him out of love, to have him with me for eternity, in that moment I turned him in anger and bitterness, to pay back his hatred and prove him wrong. I did it to hurt him.”

Neither of them add, and it did hurt him, but the parallel to Lestat’s apology during the Trial play echoes in the room nonetheless.

If asked, Louis would have said he was ready for answers from Lestat about, oh, a century ago. He would have thought that he meant it. The ever growing list of answers sitting untouched in his inbox begs to differ.

It takes a while to unpick why he’s struggling to listen to the recordings, but these days Louis is trying to live more honestly, so he commits to the work. If it allows him an extra day or so in procrastination, that’s an incidental benefit.

There’s the obvious. After decades of separation he and Lestat found each other again and reunited in the still, small eye of the storm, in a place of peace and understanding. Hurts that Louis had carried for so long he’d forgotten they weren’t just how things were healed. It was essential, elemental. And yet, so fragile. A few slightly bitter words shooting to the top of the bestseller list had pushed them back apart, and those bitter words had been about a time they’d both lived through. Lestat has over a century of potential secrets behind him. There are literally so many things that Lestat could say or Louis could hear that would knock them back into the whirlwind.

Eventually, in the privacy of his own head, when Daniel isn’t listening, Louis is able to admit that he is maybe a little more attached to the version of Lestat he’s had in life so far—the one that sprung into the world fully-formed in the devil’s image, contextless, historyless, obsessed with Louis—than he’d like to admit. He’s afraid, pure and simple, of what losing that will do to him. If there was a plausible way to do it and he wasn’t already on the record as wanting answers, Louis could have put listening to this damn interview off forever. But there isn’t and he is, so he plays the recordings.

At first, Louis wonders why he built up the danger of listening so much in his head. The sound of Lestat’s deep voice is a pleasure in and of itself. Louis can let it wash over him without having to police his own reactions and make sure he isn’t giving away too much. Lestat doesn’t launch into a stinging rebuke of Louis’ interview, even when Daniel prods him for one. He accepts it, eerily mature, until Louis starts to think that Daniel has been making too big a deal of the whole thing.

And the story, Lestat’s story, is fascinating. Things that have been disarrayed for a century slot into place, finally, when Lestat talks about his upbringing: the poverty, the isolation, the loneliness, the lack of control he had of his own destiny, how hard he worked to prove himself to his family, only to have them spurn him, again and again. Louis revaluates every argument Lestat ever picked to tear him away from a book, and regrets maybe half the jabs he ever made about Lestat’s literary failings (only half - his opinions on Flaubert are so bad they transcend personal sensitivities). Louis had had no way of knowing how precisely burying himself in reading to escape reality echoed Gabrielle’s coldness and neglect, but he had known that it wounded Lestat. That was part of why he did it.

That Lestat’s erratic moods have been with him since childhood makes Louis consider them in a whole new light, just as the modern world has made him think about his own bouts of melancholy from a new, more forgiving perspective. Like Lestat’s father and brothers, Louis had always found Lestat’s manic periods baffling and infuriating in equal measure: couldn’t he simply control himself? Perhaps no more than Louis could just cheer the fuck up.

Fascinating too, is Lestat reflecting, on any level, on goodness and morality. Over the years, Louis had come to see Lestat’s refusal to engage with Louis’s philosophical struggles with vampirism as a sign that for him, these things truly were simple. Lestat had certainly done all he could to reinforce that image: he enjoyed killing, and so he killed. Of course, it makes sense that as a human Lestat didn’t have such a casual attitude to murder. If that was a requirement, every vampire Louis had ever met would have been a serial killer in life. But hearing Lestat talk about the goodness of beauty, the crises that his violent encounter with the wolves and his mother’s looming death threw him into, Louis wonders if he, like so many people, has mistaken one of Lestat’s many masks for his true face, and thought him shallower than he really is.

When Louis grasps how vividly Daniel experiences Lestat’s story, going inside his memories, he regrets the damn veil that the ‘architects of their creation’ have drawn between them as bitterly as he ever has. It doesn’t feel like enough, just to hear Lestat’s story, when he could see it, live it. That Daniel does get to see that deeply into them causes Louis a certain possessive pang: no one should get to know Lestat better than he does.

The real source of discomfort, the thing that sours the tapes to the ordeal he instinctively felt they’d be, sneaks up on Louis slowly. It can be summed up in one word: Nicki.

It’s a bit of a shock to find out that the ex Armand had always treated so lightly—just a twink violinist that Lestat probably wouldn’t have bothered turning if Armand hadn’t created a crisis out of the issue by half killing him—is in fact more of a boy-next-door fantasy, someone who not only got to know a human Lestat who is forever inaccessible to Louis, got to walk with him in the sun and share a bottle of wine with him and fuck him in forest clearings, but someone who taught Lestat as much as Lestat taught him. Despite being younger, Nicki opened up the wider world to Lestat: Paris and music and sex with men. He even sneaks his way, retroactively, into Louis’ goddamn meet cute. “Only the impossible can do the impossible,” whatever the fuck that means. And Lestat has the gall to call Louis pretentious.

At first, Louis shakes it off. It’s never been a secret that Lestat had a tragic first love. It was one of the few things Lestat did tell Louis about his past. Louis is the one Lestat chose in the end, the one with a soul “deep enough to sustain for a thousand lifetimes”, a description Louis will never admit made him feel a little smug. But the more the interview goes on, the more Lestat talks about Nicki, the more Louis starts to see that this should never have calmed him down. It’s not soothing honesty that indicates nothing to hide, it’s a warning sign of how important NIcki is.

Every mention of him hits harder, and in those first two recordings, there are a lot of them. Nicki this, Nicki that. Nicki Nicki Nicki Nicki Nicki Nicki. Beautiful Nicki. Talented Nicki. Precious, fragile, tragic Nicki. There to love Lestat, and withhold from Lestat, and even make cutting comments to Lestat: that's Louis’ thing! Or, he’d thought it was. Nicki was doing it before he was even born. Nicki composed sonatas so beautiful they made Lestat cry. It's not hard to do that, sure, but the closest thing to art that Louis has produced is a few years of photographs that only document. Throw some Gabrielle in there for good measure, because Louis is third fiddle if he's anything, behind Lestat's mother. His mother.

The seemingly endless tales of Lestat and Nicki’s happy, bohemian life together in Paris—a century before Louis was even born, and somehow they’re liberated from all their social and sexual hangups, how nice for them—is so over the top he has to listen to it twice to be sure it wasn’t a jealousy induced hallucination. Feeling more sympathy for Armand than he’s felt in decades—the self-flagellating urge to repeatedly listen to tapes of Louis talking about his ex and then torture Daniel over it is suddenly a lot more relatable—Louis skims forward in Daniel’s notes to identify some of the choicest parts yet to come. And his worst fears are right. Apparently as well as making Lestat happier than he’s ever been, Nicki also makes him sadder.

The emotion in Lestat’s voice when he talks about Nicki gets to Louis almost more than what Lestat says, though that packs a punch too. After he and Lestat first reunited there had been a gentleness that felt like vulnerability between them, but that has fallen away since the damn book came out. Lestat is always so measured now when they talk. Louis hasn’t heard the kind of passion there is in the tapes from him since the night of hurricane, and that was as much for Claudia as for him.

As he listens and reads, a sliver of doubt starts to worm its way into Louis' brain. It took a century for Lestat to get over Nicki, but he was Lestat’s first love and they never got a chance at closure. What if eighty years and change has been enough for Lestat to start getting over Louis?

Chapter Text

At Lestat’s suggestion—“we must not let your education fall by the wayside, Daniel”—they hunt before their next interview session. It feels like a delaying tactic, probably because it is a delaying tactic, but Daniel goes along with it. His sixth sense, honed by decades of reporting, tells him that the story is on a downward trajectory, and maybe he wants to let loose before things get too bleak.

They hit the New York club scene with Lestat on excellent form and practice slightly more public feeding, small sips in dark corners that leave victims dizzy but conscious. It’s a longer and more involved process to lure multiple people in one night, but it’s also fun—a new form of predatory thrill that combines exhibitionism with deception—and for the first few hours, Daniel feels like they are the main characters of the evening, a whirlwind of fun and glamour sweeping through the city and drawing victims in like iron filings to a magnet. It’s enough to make Daniel wish he and Lestat could hang out without the harrowing prospect of the interview hanging over them. But by one am, there’s a brittle edge to Lestat that even the humans are starting to notice. When they stop melting into Lestat’s arms at the first hint of flirtation and start eying him warily, Daniel steers them back to his apartment.

“Where did we get to?” Lestat asks when they’ve settled into their usual seats, as if there’s a chance in hell he doesn’t know.

“Nicolas was catatonic.”

“Of course.” Lestat fixes his eyes on the corner, and keeps his mind closed as he begins. “Although Nicolas remained silent and locked away no matter my pleading, Gabrielle could see into his mind. His conscious thoughts were lost to bleak emptiness, but she was able to reach out and spark enough awareness in Nicolas that he would sit up and stand, follow us if we led him, allow himself to be dressed, and even feed, if we assisted.”

“How convenient,” Daniel can’t stop himself from observing.

“It was a boon in practical terms, but he was an eerie, pathetic sight, trailing us silently and blankly through the corridors.”

While Daniel is 80% sure that Lestat means pathetic as in sad, rather than pathetic as in inadequate and contemptuous, he probes a little anyway. “Did you miss being able to read his mind?”

Lestat twitches in a way that Daniel reads as irritation. “I did not crave that closeness with Nicolas as I did with Gabrielle. There had been nothing but hatred in his mind for weeks,” he says, brusquely.

Daniel says nothing, and Lestat seems to reconsider his somewhat glib answer.

“And something further had changed between us, broken by our vindictive exchange during his turning,” Lestat admits. “By what I had done.” His breath hitches. “Gabrielle’s turning had been so beautiful. The blood had restored what mortal life had taken from her and left her stronger and more vital. With Nicki, I felt I had watched him die-” he stops, corrects himself. “I felt I truly had murdered him. To look at him was to be reminded that I was the one who had held him, crushed him, cracked him open so that the vigour of life drained away and the void rushed in, leaving me with only an empty shell. And so, I could not bear to look at him.”

“Let me guess. You ran away?”

“Like the basest coward. Of course, I told myself as I fled the scene of my crime for Paris, leaving Nicki in Gabrielle’s care, that I had to finally visit my poor Roget, who I had not seen since the night I went to Gabrielle. I expected that all my wiles would be needed to explain what had happened, but he fed me half the story himself. Within ten minutes we had it settled that I had taken Gabrielle out by the servants’ door, although I hadn’t known such a thing existed until Roget told me, and that she was staging a remarkable recovery with Nicolas in a nunnery outside the city. It was an early taste of how eager humans are to jump on any nominally reasonable explanation.”

“Especially when you pay them.”

“Certainly it did not hurt that I happened to bring a box of jewels and a sack of Spanish gold for him to liquidate,” Lestat concedes. “My other purposes in the city were to hunt, which I took my time over, dreading returning and pretending not to, and to find Nicolas’ violin. Gabrielle told me that music was one of the only things still in his mind, and I hoped that it might help draw him further back into our world.”

“What else was on his mind?” Daniel asks.

“She would not say.” Which, unless Gabrielle had developed a sense of delicacy and a sudden respect for Nicolas’ privacy, almost certainly meant Lestat, in a bad way. “When dawn grew too close to put it off further without acknowledging that that is what I was doing, I set off for Nicolas’ apartment to look for his violin, but on the way, I was accosted by members of the Children of Satan.”

“Attacked by them?”

“Worse. They asked for my help. They told me that after we left the queen vampire called the coven back, then set the firewood that they had planned to burn us on ablaze to be her own pyre. Once she burned, Armand flew into a rage. He drove most of the coven members into the flames, and only those who managed to escape and flee into the city survived.”

Daniel gets a brief glimpse of six or seven vampires clustered imploringly around Lestat like hungry kittens around their mother. He recognises Celeste from Louis’ photos of the coven in the 40s, but none of the others. Then, he gets a third-hand flash of Armand backlit by a huge fire—surely unwise underground, but what does Daniel know about living in a dusty crypt—full of writhing, screaming figures. One of the figures in the fire threatens to claw their way out, and Armand seizes a long piece of wood and drives it through their chest and into the heart of the fire, so that they’re pinned even deeper.

“Right,” says Daniel. It’s technically kinder than starving to death, but sickening to watch. “So when he said his children went mad and threw themselves into the flames…”

“No doubt he tells himself he was helping that oh so inevitable process along.” That does sound like Armand. “I had limited patience for them, but not being as willing to eradicate my fellow vampire as others were, I gave them the benefit of my wisdom.”

“Go wash in the Seine?” Daniel suggests, remembering that this had been one of Lestat's many injunctions to them when he and Gabrielle had first been kidnapped and taken to their lair.

“They appeared to have already followed this advice—a vast improvement—but I advised them to steal better clothes and money from their victims. I also suggested that they try their hand as street performers, since even their paltry immortal gifts would make them excellent dancers and clowns.”

“You thought the crowd of zombie zealots would be good entertainers?” asks Daniel, doubtful.

“I do not know if only the least addled had escaped, or if even a short time free of the coven had cleared their minds, but they had grown more cogent. One of them, Eleni, was positively practical. She begged that they be allowed to return to Magnus’ house with me, but this I could not allow. Instead, I gave her leave to seek shelter for them all in Renaud’s theatre, which I still owned, but which had been closed up since the troupe departed for England.”

“And thus, the Théâtre des Vampires was formed?” Daniel asks, a little surprised it’s happening so abruptly. He was expecting more of an inspirational run up to Lestat's stroke of artistic genius.

“Thus, the ground was prepared,” Lestat corrects, “and some of the pieces moved into place. At the time, I was only concerned with extricating myself and continuing with my errand, which I eventually did." His eyes look beyond Daniel, into the past. "I could tell as soon as I came in sight of Nicolas’ apartment that something was wrong. The curtains were not just drawn, but gone, and a light burned in every window. I climbed up cautiously to peer in and found chaos inside: every piece of furniture turned over, every box and drawer tipped out, the drapes torn from the windows.”

“From Nicolas being taken?”

“That was my first thought. And yet, the candles would not still be burning, and no kidnapping could have required such a thorough ransacking of every corner. He was there.”

“Who?” asks Daniel, though he thinks he knows.

In answer, Lestat opens his mind and draws Daniel in.

In 18th century Paris, Lestat stands in a sea of splintered wood and torn upholstery, every muscle tense. From deeper in the apartment comes the sound of pages turning and then, sharp in the silence, paper tearing. Cautiously, Lestat eases closer. He cannot sense another mind in the vicinity, but knows from this very absence who he’ll likely see, since he is sure that Nicki and Gabrielle must still be at home. The actual sight of Armand still drives the breath from his lungs. He should look ridiculous outside his natural habitat of a crypt, but instead the surroundings seem to bend around his slight, filthy form, acknowledging him as their centre.

As Lestat watches—and Armand must know he is watching, but with his indifference he makes it clear Lestat is no threat—Armand flicks through the pages of a book, running his eyes across each page so quickly they seem to vibrate. It can’t be possible that he’s read the pages so quickly, but somehow, Lestat knows that he has, that it is only after the content of the pages has been absorbed that Armand tears them free, crumpling and shredding them, adding them to the drifts of paper on the floor. To Daniel’s modern eyes, Armand is reminiscent of a computer, scanning and uploading data. With no such reference in his experience, the Lestat of the past can only marvel at information taken in in such quantities and at such speed. Or perhaps consumed is more accurate, since Armand is destroying the books as he goes, as if to establish exclusive ownership of the knowledge they contain.

Armand looks up at Lestat and hisses like a cat, baring his inexplicably dainty fangs. He drops the veil around his mind and his mental presence blooms into perception like a drop of ink landing in water, a small explosion of spite, and a lesson in how much Lestat still has to learn about his vampiric gifts.

“You dare to accuse me of destruction?” Armand spits. “You, who have destroyed everything?”

Daniel is astonished all over again, not so much at the strength of Armand’s anger, but at how close to the surface it is. He is a creature of instinct and deep emotion, almost unrecognisable as the cool, controlled, sophisticated partner who lived with Louis for decades.

Though it is hard, Lestat tries not to show how having his thoughts so casually and silently plucked from his head affects him, or how the destruction Armand has wrought disturbs him. He does not allow the shudder of it into his head. He cannot block his thoughts as effectively as Armand, but he can be the bold and decisive devil that broke the Children of Satan. And what does it signify if the apartment is ruined, when Nicolas has left the human world behind to join him? It is only things.

“Catching up on the modern world?” Lestat asks. “I can recommend a tailor, if you are done with books. And a laundress.”

“So you can make a clown of me too?” Armand sneers.

Again, it takes all Lestat’s already flimsy self-control not to cringe. He had spoken to the remnants of Armand’s coven and recommended they disguise themselves as street performers less than an hour before, when Armand must surely have been here already. Yet somehow, he knows. Was it him that Armand stalked, or his old followers? Would that change, now that Lestat had offered them sanctuary in a building he owned?

“No matter,” Lestat says. “I have only come to-”

“It’s not here.”

Lestat does not bother to ask what Armand means, or to think of carrying out his own search. He will retreat, and go to the Rue de Rome, where the music shops are. Better to buy or steal a new violin than remain here with this creature any longer.

“Do you think it will bring him back to you?” Armand asks. His voice is calmer now, anger quietened by finding a wound to dig into. “Your most silent child? Do you think the violin will make him love you again?”

The question freezes Lestat in place. Armand lets the book he was reading fall forgotten from his hand and turns to face Lestat fully. His face shines with the gentle radiance of a Saint in an icon. Even the dirt on it seems to speak of his humility and suffering, of his purity. He speaks directly into Lestat’s mind, using the very connection that can never exist between Lestat and the ones he loves the most.

Love can never last between master and fledgling. The silence is too great. Only estrangement and resentment can flourish in that silence.

“No,” Lestat says, “you are wrong.” Gabrielle loves him, more surely now than she has before. And Nicki... Well, if truly hates Lestat now, then that hatred was already there before Lestat performed the dark trick on him.

Armand grows wistful. We used to say Satan came between maker and fledgling, so that no one could be greater to us than Satan. He tilts his head at Lestat, eyes curious and intent. Do you really not know these things?

It makes Lestat angry, as it always does when people accuse him of ignorance. He knows enough, and all of it he taught himself. Flickering in his mind are a thousand times that people denied him—trying as a young child to clamber into Gabrielle’s lap and look at her book with her, only for her to silently stand up and walk out of the room; the pride of the Abbott at the monastery telling him he had great potential, and then his brothers, dragging him bodily away; the acting troupe he ran away with as a teenager sharing their craft with him, and then his brothers, dragging him bodily away; Nicki, laughing when questions about the basics of life in Paris poured from Lestat, fondly it seemed at the time, but now he cannot be sure; Magnus leaping eagerly into the fire, desperate to be free of Lestat—and Lestat realizes, in a rush, that it is not him raking up all these slights. He turns his mind from them, and it is like turning a runaway horse when the bit has fallen from their mouth.

Poor thing, says Armand. His tone is so tender that any anger Lestat felt at his mind being manipulated drains helplessly away. Has no one ever cared enough to teach you?

The humiliation of knowing no one has stays Lestat’s tongue.

I will teach you. We are the only ones left who are worthy of each other. I am the only one left who can help you.

Armand… help him? It comes back to Lestat, in a flash, how absurd it is for him to claim to want to help after what has already passed between them: the blame of mere seconds ago, Nicki, catatonic because of what this vampire set in motion.

He doesn’t have to say anything. Armand reads the answer in his mind, and the edge returns his gaze, his eyes flaring from starlight to hellfire.

“In time, you’ll see.” Armand’s voice is cold now. “Only I have the answers. Only I am worthy. They'll leave you, and you’ll come to me, and I’ll be waiting. Alone, as you have made me.”

Dignity buckling, no heart for even anger in response, Lestat backs out of the room. As soon as he is out of Armand’s sight, he flees.

Even now they talk to each other, Armand whispers into his mind, and it prickles down Lestat’s neck like his lips are hovering by Lestat’s ear, even though Lestat is halfway down the wall of the building and Armand is nowhere to be seen. He lets go and drops the remaining three storeys back to the ground. They talk to each other, and not to you.

That prickle chases Lestat all the way back to Magnus’ lair, rippling over his scalp and his shoulders, carrying with it a whisper so subtle that he can’t be sure if it’s memory or ongoing, active intent: come to me.

By the time Lestat reaches the house, forgoing a horse to run with preternatural swiftness through the fields and woods, dawn is less than an hour away, and Gabrielle and Nicolas, his little coven, have gone to sleep. Dawn is close enough that Lestat could follow them, but there is a restless energy in him still, the energy of flight. His breath will not slow, and his legs feel ready to spring back onto the road, to run him anywhere in France. To run him back to- He cuts off the thought. Armand is no sanctuary.

What Lestat aches to do, what feels like the only thing that might soothe and quiet him, is to open Gabrielle’s sarcophagus and crawl in with her. Feel the soft length of her body next to his, and close his eyes knowing that she will still be there when he wakes up. He goes to the stone lid that covers her heartbeat, strokes his hands over it, but cannot bring himself to lift it. The old mortal shame of disturbing her rises, and with it the echo of her saying, in the crypt of Notre Dame, that she cannot endure another night of them sleeping in the same coffin. It is exactly the sensation he had as a young child, on the nights in the castle when he was too cold and hungry to sleep, or woke from a nightmare. On those nights he would often find himself by his bedroom door, carried there by some instinct to seek help that should have been long dead, before he remembered that there was nowhere else, not a warm bed or a sympathetic ear in the whole building. Nowhere to go but back to his own cold, musty sheets.

Nowhere to go this night but his own cold tomb, where he will lie alone, as he always does, as he always will. The thought of the cold stone repels him suddenly, as viscerally as if he were still a human man in mortal horror of death, and instead of going to his tomb, Lestat runs from the room, up the stairs, to burst gasping onto the roof.

It is still dark, but the stars have faded into delicacy in preparation for the dawn light soon to come. Something in the great arc of the sky soothes Lestat. On another night, it might have terrified him, that vastness, even emptier than usual without the stars to fill it. Tonight, it reminds him of how much possibility there is out there. The wide world, and no death to beat the drum and call him from it.

In that moment of relief, the voice spears back into Lestat’s head like a knife. Come to me. Lestat flinches, turning away as if from a blow, but the voice has already sunk inside, he cannot escape it. It coils round his heart and down into his belly, showing him that it is not the pain of an attack, but the yearning of the same loneliness he feels, reaching out. I’m so alone, it says. They do not want you, but I do. Brimming in every word is the knowledge of how easy, how good, how natural it would be for both of them to find what they need in each other. The warmth of that promised love and acceptance glows in him. Come to me, and we will be together, we will be happy.

Even in the grip of it, Lestat questions how that could be. How could they be together, after what has passed between them so far? After he destroyed Armand’s coven, and Armand destroyed his lover? But the fantasy of the acceptance is so good that he pushes the questions down and tries to wrap the warmth of it around himself.

Yes, my love. We can be together. It would be so easy. All Lestat has to do is free himself of his silent children, the ones that do not even want him. As neatly as anything, the solution is there in Lestat’s mind. Open their coffins, lift their sleeping bodies in his arms, bring them to the roof for sunrise. All in an instant, they will blow away, peaceful, dust in the wind. The mistakes of his immortal life will be unwound, and he can begin again, with someone worthy, someone who sees who he is and wants him anyway.

Lestat recoils from the idea. I could never do that. How could anyone think he would? How little this creature knows of him, of love, of the world, to think that that would win him. It’s such a pathetic gamble, he has more pity than anger for the one who tried it.

The image of Gabrielle and Nicki on the roof returns to him, but this time there is no peace in it. The sun wakes them into a searing world of agony. Their bodies thrash, their faces contort with pain. They scream, and their skin flakes away as ashes, revealing blood, and then muscle, and then bone. Every layer the sun strips from them is a new torment, until finally, they are released into oblivion and nothingness.

“Get out!” Lestat bellows. He clenches his hands in his hair, trying to find some way to grab hold of Armand inside him. It’s like trying to grasp a beam of light.

Armand withdraws in his own time, slowly, so Lestat feels every moment of the loss of him. Even knowing it was all a trick, the empty space he leaves behind aches for him.

The memory dissipates gradually, so that Lestat’s feelings seem to live inside Daniel for long moments before they fade away. As can happen when a memory gets particularly intense, when Daniel is sunk in it so deep his real self is far away, it takes several heartbeats for his critical faculties to catch up with what he’s seen. There are dozens of questions on the tip of Daniel’s tongue, hours of potential discussions on the ambiguous boundary between Armand’s natural allure and the outright brute strength of his mental powers, how clearly Lestat recognised them at the time, and if his perspective has changed over the decades.

What Daniel comes out with is, “I see where you learned to handle rejection.” It’s not the most politic, or even the most useful follow-up, but torn between irritation at Lestat—every time Daniel starts to admit he could like the guy some fresh destructive nonsense surfaces—and a deeper, harder to name feeling about Armand and his fucking games, he can’t keep it in. Do these vampires not see how trapped they all are in the same damn patterns?

Lestat looks affronted. “I would not-”

“Chase someone home from their brother’s funeral bellowing ‘come to me’ in their ear?”

It takes a visible effort for Lestat not to lash out, and the air grows heavy with his leashed anger. “I did not lie to Louis,” he says, voice tight. “I never tried to impose feelings on him that were not his own.”

“No, you just terrorised him and made him doubt his sanity. Completely different.”

Briefly, Daniel feels Lestat’s power surge into the room, suffocating, immobilising. When Letstat stands, he expects to feel a hand around his throat. Instead the power snaps back into Lestat like a rubber band, and he paces away, to the other side of the room.

“He thought of me, every day, for weeks,” Lestat says. “I could feel him! But he did not come back. I was angry.”

“Ah good, the old anger excuse. I guess you shouldn’t have pissed Armand off, and everything would have been fine.”

“This is who we are, this is what vampires do!”

“In that case, we are all damned to an eternity of loneliness.”

Lestat laughs, loud and grating. Some of his anger seems to dissipate with the expulsion. “I have been trying to decide if that is true for two centuries.” As suddenly as he’d filled with rage, he turns sorrowful. “It is an excuse. I was angry. And scared. Louis' mind was in turmoil, spiralling down into darkness. When I believe I will lose him… that is when I am at my worst.”

“That’s not how you talked about it in the trial.” Daniel deepens his voice in imitation of Lestat, but spares them both his attempt at the accent. “I, a vampire, was being hunted,” he quotes.

“It was not a trial, it was a play. I had my lines.”

“Like you cared about the-”

“I had to be most judicious with how I rebelled!” Lestat snaps. “To delay, but not derail. To maintain enough of the fantasy of my compliance not just in the coven’s mind, the audience’s mind, Armand’s mind, but in Louis and Claudia’s, so that the play was not brought to a premature end.” His attention turns inward. “You are not the first to notice the parallel. Armand was particularly proud of that line, which turned the blame for my actions on Louis. He put it in, not only to anger Louis, but to draw out the shame of it, that I repeated his actions, and to blame me, in his classic backwards way, for calling him that night with my need and my loneliness.”

That Daniel can believe. But he’s also seen the script, and he knows it wasn’t all in there. “What about the part where you said it was Louis’ own voice, speaking his own unspeakable desires, screaming them into the darkness?”

“Ah.” Lestat looks away. “There, I admit to a little embellishment. I did not yet understand how Louis came to see our courtship.”

“So you stand by it?” Daniel asks, a little incredulous.

“He did want me.” Lestat’s voice is quiet. “Whatever happened later, however things changed, for those first months, every step I took, I took with his encouragement. Not the encouragement of an idle passing thought or fantasy, but a soul deep yearning that answered my own, walled in by needless shame. He may have come to regret his feelings, but they were there. They were real.”

Lestat’s words are certain, but his voice, his eyes, plead for Daniel to agree. And on some level, Daniel gets it. He is well aware that Louis’ denial and guilt can obscure his past motivations and actions, even from his own self-lacerating examination. Even when Louis had been desperately searching for reasons to hate and blame Lestat, he had had warm and affectionate things to say about their courtship. The reality is likely even more romantic than he was willing to face during the early stages of their interview. But still.

“Did he want you to put a fist through a priest’s head?” Daniel asks.

The plea in Lestat’s eyes vanishes as if it had never been there. “He did not mind that as much as you might think,” he says, dismissive.

“But whatever dance you were doing before Paul’s funeral,” Daniel insists, “whoever was leading it, you lost control the night you turned him. You felt him at his weakest, and you struck.”

“If he had gone home to sleep it off, I would have left him alone.”

The scepticism on Daniel’s face at this claim is reply enough.

“I would!” Lestat cries. “Louis was in the grip of a crisis. When he said he wanted to die, he meant it, and God’s ineffective messengers had no true solace to give. What do you think they would have offered him, in response to his revelation that he had lain with a man? In response to his ravings about the devil? Comfort and absolution? Or more shame, dressed up as a path to redemption? The very shame that burdened him!” Lestat shakes his head. “No. I could not abandon another lover to that fate, no matter how much they screamed for me to leave them alone.”

“Once again, I think you’re presenting a false choice: abandonment or triple murder.”

“And once again, I think you forget what I am, what we are.” Lestat straightens, smooths his clothes. “Love and death. This is what I have to offer. I showed both to Louis, and he chose to accept them.”

Not even Louis at his most stubborn tried to deny that, but Daniel’s blood is up, and he is damned if he’ll concede.

“I guess we’ll never know if things could have gone differently,” he says, “had you shown more self-control. It’s something of a theme in your life.”

The hit lands. Lestat’s face tightens.

“You have drawn us off course,” he says, coldly.

“Then by all means,” Daniel replies, mirroring his tone, “let us return.” He sweeps a hand at Lestat's chair in sarcastic invitation, and with a slight sneer, Lestat sits back down and resumes his story.

“The next night, I told Gabrielle of all that had happened. I believed that the three of us should leave, abandon the remnants of the coven to their fate and get as far away from Armand as we could. Let them have Paris! I was even willing to go into the damn wilderness and study the patterns of falling leaves with her, if that would get her to agree.”

“She didn’t agree?” Lingering irritation makes Daniel’s prompt come out more clipped than he intended, and he makes a concerted effort to push past it. Yes he's a journalist with a point of view and an attitude problem, but he’s also meant to be a professional.

“She thought that it would be a mistake to leave when there were still so many unanswered questions about the origins of the coven and our powers. And she thought we had to try more to rouse Nicolas, before we went travelling together.” Lestat broods. “I should have tried harder to explain. It was hard to put into words, the way that Armand frightened me, and I could not speak of it clearly to her.”

“She thought you weren’t scared of anything,” Daniel recalls. Not communicating your needs from fear of disappointing a loved one, that’s a goddamn classic.

“I had already done enough, with my reckless turning of Nicolas, to disappoint and burden her,” Lestat agrees. “I was ashamed to admit to more ways I had let her down. A few days later we returned, all three of us, to Paris. To the theatre.”

The memory of Renaud’s theatre rises before Daniel. Lestat passes through the doors into the stalls and takes in the sight of it mournfully. These seats used to be filled with people, a spectacle of life and laughter, a place where anyone with a few sou to spare could come for happiness and distraction. Now it is empty and dark. It looks small. It looks dead. Another thing he’s drained the life from.

Gabrielle stops beside him, taking the sight in calmly, as is her wont. To Lestat’s surprise, Nicolas, who had trailed behind them silently all the way, showing no spark of his own initiative, keeps walking past them. Lestat moves to stop him, but Gabrielle tugs him back.

“When he thinks of music, he thinks of a stage,” she says. And sure enough, Nicolas goes all the way down the central aisle and springs lightly on the stage. Lestat waits, heart in his throat, to see what Nicki will do. He has never been an actor, but he has gone over enough lines with Lestat to know the parts. Perhaps this echo of a spotlight will unlock something in him. Lestat has not heard his voice since it was raised in anger and recrimination, and even if all he does is declaim some tawdry poetry, it will be the sweetest music.

All Nicolas does, however, is walk to the centre of the stage, turn to face them, and stand there, silent and empty. The disappointment burns.

“I will look for his violin,” Lestat says, and he flees from the sight of him, leaving Gabrielle to keep watch.

It’s only a brief distraction. The Stradivarius is in the first place Lestat looks: the tiny dressing room that he and Nicki used to share. Despite the months since he was last there, the room has been left undisturbed. His make-up is haphazardly strewn across the table, an old outer-coat of his is tossed over the back of the chair. Other than the fine layer of dust, he could have been about to breeze back in and prepare to step onto stage as Lelio.

Almost reluctantly, now that the moment is upon him, Lestat picks up the violin in its case and brushes the dust off. What will they do if this doesn’t work? Take Nicolas out of Paris, he supposes. Find some quiet place to live, isolated but not too isolated, as Lestat will have to hunt for them both somewhere. See if time and peace can bring Nicolas back, and pray that Gabrielle will stay, or that she will visit if she will not. Live out the years with the hollow statue of his Nicolas. It will not be exactly like being alone.

Lestat enters the stage behind Nicolas, who is standing exactly where Lestat left him, perfectly and completely still, without even the reflex to breathe that no other vampire Lestat has seen could eradicate. Gently, Lestat takes the violin and the bow from the case. He stands behind Nicolas and sets the instrument at his chin, holds it at the angle he has seen Nicolas do so many times.

Slowly, Nicolas brings up his arm to hold it in place. Lestat presses the bow into his other hand, slack at his side, and it curls around it. At first the movement seems like nothing so much as the instinctive grasp of a baby at anything that touches its hand, but then Nicolas readjusts and his hand grips the bow with real intent. Lestat walks around to look him in the face, and for the first time since he performed the dark trick on Nicolas, there is something there behind his eyes.

“Play for me?” Lestat asks, heart in his throat.

Nicolas’ lips part. His chest lifts. He looks down at the violin and the bow. Takes them in.

“The devil’s instrument,” Nicolas rasps. It’s so good to hear his voice, Lestat doesn’t even care what nonsense he’s spouting. He feels his eyes fill with tears, and tries to keep them back, struggles not to blink and spill them, afraid that the blood will remind Nicki of what happened between them in the tower.

“Yes,” Lestat says, and his voice cracks nearly as badly as Nicolas’. How could he ever have thought that his feelings for this man had soured or diminished?

Trembling, Nicolas goes through the motions of tuning the instrument, turning the knobs, testing the sound. At first it takes all his concentration, but each adjustment comes easier than the last, and soon he looks as confident as he ever did when he was human.

When it is done, Nicolas adjusts his clothes and shifts his feet. He resettles the violin on his shoulder. His back straightens. He brings the bow down across the strings.

The sound pours like water from the stage: a waterfall swelled by a mountain’s worth of melted snow, a river breaching its banks, a raging torrent of melody that sweeps all before it. The notes flow faster than any human could draw them, a depth and breadth of sound that a string quartet would struggle to produce. It rolls over and through Lestat with the same physical quality that Gabrielle’s screams had when her hair grew back, striking bone and washing the breath from his lungs. It’s beyond beauty, or noise; a sensation that crowds out every sense. In the middle of it, Nicolas twists and bends as he plays, arm working faster than any human could, caught in the music’s current as surely as anyone else. Lestat wants to scream, but some primal part of him fears that if he opens his mouth, he will drown. He looks back at Gabrielle and sees she has her hands on her head and her eyes closed, as if to protect herself from the onslaught.

Gradually, meaning takes shape in the sound. A lamentation. It’s the story, Lestat realizes, of how the darkness in Nicolas exploded and consumed him. The deluge of the music, pouring endlessly from and into that darkness, but never touching it, serves only to show how deep and fathomless the void is.

Transfixed, it takes several minutes, maybe longer, for Lestat to realize that it is no longer just the three of them in the auditorium. The renegade vampires from the coven have appeared, and they too stand watching Nicolas in stunned silence. Unlike Lestat and Gabrielle, their faces are filled with awe. Eleni has her eyes closed, a beatific smile on her face. Celeste tips back her head and gasps as if in ecstasy, opening her arms to the sound and leaning into it, accepting as much of it as she can into her body. It is as if Nicolas has distilled the sound of evil into his music, the same evil that these vampires have worshipped all their immortal lives, and they have been drawn to him, commanded to come by their beautiful new Satan. In the centre of the sound, Nicolas no longer seems at the mercy of the music. He casts the tendrils of it out like a spider, weaving his web and drawing his prey in. He is hungry, malevolent.

Horror and disgust unstick Lestat’s limbs. He staggers backstage, plunging deep into the warren of rooms behind, closing every door he lurches through in a futile attempt to stem the flow of the sound. His breath is coming in short pants, his heart is pounding, and both get worse instead of better as he thinks about them. It’s as if he’s woken into a recurring nightmare. This malady—this weakness!—was supposed to be behind him, with his mortality. Yet his body, his newly strong and perfect body, is as helpless with it as it ever was, wracked by fear with no clear source.

When he’d felt this way before, it had been Nicki who looked after him. Nicki who steered Lestat to some private corner and stood before him like a shield so that others would not see his affliction. Nicki who assured him that it was only fancies and delusions that plagued him. Nicki who loosened his cravat and told him firmly to breathe. Now that Nicki is gone, drowned in the darkest past of himself. And it was Lestat that held him down.

Muscle memory carries Lestat back to his dressing room, to that staged scene from his human life, a monument to what he used to have and used to be. He collapses into his old chair, wondering if he might faint, almost wishing that he could, if it would help him escape this moment. But this body will not let him off that easily.

Lestat concentrates on his breathing until it slows back down to a normal rate, and watches his reflection in the small, clouded mirror mounted above the table, his chest rising and falling in a simulacrum of humanity. There is something ghastly in the sight. For the first time, he thinks he grasps a little of what terrified Gabrielle the night her hair grew back. The skin he once powdered into evenness is preternaturally smooth and perfect, despite his agitation, and the eyes he highlighted with kohl on stage glimmer like jewels set in some gaudy statue, no cosmetic needed to draw attention. All this beauty, and it’s nothing but a shell to hide the corruption underneath. Magnus was more honest, a monster outside as well as in. The Children of Satan were more honest, soiling themselves with dirt and hiding in shadow. If there was truth in the world, Lestat would have stayed bruised and broken, as he had been when his maker made him.

By the time Lestat gets himself back under control, the music has stopped. Footsteps approach, but Lestat cannot feel the mind behind them. It must either be Armand, or one of his silent children.

Nicolas strides in. Lestat would almost say he is returned to himself, standing tall and walking with purpose, but there is a hard set to his face that Lestat only ever glimpsed in their worst arguments. He sweeps his eyes around the room, and despite the veil between their minds, his contempt is clear to read in the curl of his mouth.

“You will give me the theatre,” he says.

“I will?” asks Lestat. Nicolas’ certainty, his superior, commanding tone, set his teeth on edge.

“You will give it to me, and we will build the new evil you promised, serving Satan not in the shadows, but on the stage. The theatre of the vampires!” He flings his arms wide as he shouts the name, and then swoops into a mocking bow.

“You think people will pay to listen to that cacophony?” Lestat can hear his voice rising. “They’ll burn the theatre down!” He should be more gentle—Nicolas has only just come back to him—but he can still feel that horrible music ringing through his whole body. And even now he has returned to himself, even now Lestat has given him the immortality he wanted, Nicki won’t stop looking at him like an enemy.

“People,” Nicolas sneers the word like a slur, “will walk happily into hell with only a little encouragement, as they have done for all of time.”

“People come to the theatre for an escape,” Lestat insists. “They want to laugh and feel good, not listen to whatever that was.”

Nicolas laughs, at him and not with him. “It’s so exactly like you, so exactly like the fool you have always been, to stumble so close to the answer and fail to see it. I told you, time and time again,” he leans over Lestat, in his low dressing room chair, face close, and whispers, “sin always feels good.”

Lestat pushes away from him, scraping the chair back across the floor, unable to bear the false intimacy of Nicki’s face so close to his.

“Are you hoping I’ll ask nicely again?” Nicolas asks. He pitches his voice up, high and silly, and lets a little of the regional accent of their home come back into his voice as he says, “Oh please my most generous lord, great patron of the arts, won’t you endow us? Won’t you give us your gold and help us bring your sublime vision to the stage?” His eyes gleam with hate and fanaticism as he repeats Lestat’s own words almost perfectly, replicating his voice eerily. “Death that doesn’t lurk, but walks proudly among humanity. Rousting them from their most hallowed halls, from the church, to the theatre.”

A burst of applause comes from the hallway. The former coven vampires are standing there, their faces alight with joy and hope, directed at Nicolas.

“It won’t be the music,” Eleni, so far the most capable of the refugees from Armand’s coven, says. Her eyes dart between Lestat and Nicolas, clearly unsure what is going on between them, but her voice is steady. “Or, not just the music. We’ll do plays, dancing. People like to be scared and shocked, in the right amounts.”

And in her mind, Lestat sees a clear vision of their intent for the first time, still nebulous, but cobbled together from a mixture of Nicolas’ tumultuous thoughts, the speech they overheard Lestat making to Armand and the queen vampire, and the short but already surprisingly successful time that Eleni and the others have spent aping street performers. Boldly declare what they are, so that people think it a farce. Tease and titillate the unsuspecting masses with vulgar spectacle. Hide their real killing in an orgy of melodramatic stage violence that makes any true suspicion seem absurd.

“We will have the theatre,” Nicolas declares, “and do more of Satan’s work. We’ll drain gold as well as blood from them, and make them complicit in their own destruction. Isn’t it glorious?” The question is the first time he’s sounded truly sincere this whole conversation.

“It’s petty,” spits Lestat. “It’s not glorious. It’s only clever and empty.” In that moment, he means it, with everything in him. Where is the glory in mocking mortals this way? In killing them? They kill for survival, for food, for fun, but it’s not sublime, it’s the shabbiest, the most mortal thing of all.

Nicolas’ face darkens. “You’re still God’s fool,” he hisses, “too stupid to understand the gifts you receive, or the gifts you give.”

The hate on his face, dripping from his voice, is so strong that, briefly, Lestat’s confusion outpaces his anger. They had loved each other so much once, hadn’t they? In this very room, they kissed, they ran lines, they planned their future, they made love furtively, too desperate for each other to wait till they were home, despite the risk of getting caught. Is it really possible, even with his act of viciousness when he turned Nicolas, that Lestat has killed that love in its entirety? Nicolas has hurt him many times, and he loves him just the same.

“Nicki,” Lestat says, and he tries, one more time, to reach back to what used to exist between them. He holds a hand out to Nicki, helplessly, palm open, as he used to do, in the time when Nicki would have taken his hand and pulled him close for a kiss. “I must be a fool, because I don’t understand any of this.” It’s not enough to explain what he’s asking, he is still groping for the words, can only beg, “Please. What happened?”

“Oh my love,” Nicki croons. He ignores Lestat’s outstretched hand, but takes two steps towards him, and in this small, narrow room it is enough to bring them close enough to touch. “It is all a misunderstanding.” Hope surges in Lestat’s chest, then freezes as Nicolas cups his face in his hands, not tenderly, but too firmly. “All of this has been a misunderstanding. I only ever played the violin to hurt others, you see. To escape my father’s plans for me, and secure a path to destruction and ruin. You..." he saves a special disdainful tone for the reference to Lestat, "I loved you to debase myself.”

Lestat should push Nicki away, cut off this poisonous flow of words, but he cannot move.

“When we came to Paris,” Nicki continues, “we were meant to fail. It was an absurd plan, a joke! An over the hill violinist and a penniless country bumpkin of a lord, running away to the theatre. We would starve and freeze and go down, down, down, to die in the gutter in obscurity.” He squeezes Lestat’s face. “But you didn’t! You kept going! You succeeded! You made all of them love you, and look at you, and you tried to drag me into the light as well. You ruined it. Even when true, sublime evil found you, and you finally could have given me something I wanted, what did you do? You kept it from me. You tried to be good. As if anything could be more ridiculous.”

It is too loathsome to be touched in hate. All Lestat’s hurt and anger boils up inside him, and before he can even fully process the movement, he has slammed Nicolas into the far wall so hard that it cracks and dents under him, one hand around his throat. Nicolas only laughs, high and manic, so Lestat squeezes until he can’t make that sound anymore.

Despite the gift that Lestat has bestowed on Nicolas and the new strength it has given him, in that moment Lestat can feel how much stronger than his fledgling he is. Vampires they both may be, but Nicolas is as much under his power as he ever was. Lestat can rip his throat out, drain him dry, beat him to a bloody pulp. The same coldness that descended on him in the tower, the night he turned Nicolas, settles round him like a cloak, soothing away the hurt of Nicolas’ words. He’s the one in control.

He almost does it. Almost wipes Nicolas out there and then. If it wasn’t so similar to that moment in the tower when he turned Nicolas, the moment he has regretted so much in the days since, he might have. If he didn’t still have the echo of Armand’s visions in his head, showing him his loved ones dying, and his own claim in response—I could never do that—he might have. But Lestat catches his destructive urge—barely, by the very tips of his fingers—and releases Nicolas.

Gasping, but still smiling his hollow smile, Nicolas slides to the floor. Lestat watches, feeling slightly removed from the situation, until Nicolas gathers himself and stands back up. He slides the ring that Lestat gave him off his finger, the one he has worn all through his anger and disappointment in Lestat, and tosses it onto the dressing table, with the rest of the detritus from their life together.

“I despise you,” Nicolas says, as if that wasn’t abundantly clear. “I am done with you. I have the power, I will have the theatre, and I will do the evil you are too weak and foolish to do.”

The vision fades on the sensation of Lestat, mentally letting Nicki go.

“And that,” Lestat says, “is how the ‘Théâtre des Vampires’ was formed.”

“It wasn’t even your idea.” Daniel thought he was done being surprised by Armand’s lies, but every so often some new facet to them surprises him still. Armand had made the theatre sound like a gift from Lestat to him, when in reality it had had remarkably little to do with either of them. “Why the fuck did they hang your portrait on the wall and say you founded the place?”

“I was a founder,” Lestat says, bleakly. “Against my will and taste perhaps, but doesn’t that make it worse? The nonsense that I gabbled to appease Armand was the blueprint that inspired Nicolas and the others. It was my money that bought the theatre and funded the company in perpetuity, and my experience that guided Eleni and the others through the practicalities of how to run a theatre company in the early days, when half the coven had never so much as seen a show and Nicolas was too manic to give practical advice.” Lestat shrugs. “Giving me sole responsibility? That is one of Armand’s cruel little jokes.”

“He takes the credit for things he didn’t do,” Daniel says slowly, understanding crystallizing in his head as speaks, “and he gives you the credit for things you wish hadn’t happened.”

“Exactement. And in one fell swoop, he also erases Nicki, with his mess and his frailty.”

“You weren’t kidding about him struggling with vampirism.” Even the memory of a memory of that music makes Daniel shiver.

“That was the beginning of his most lucid period. For many months, he was prolific. He would sit in the back of the theatre and write all night, pouring out twisted little plays that always ended in death, and virtuoso violin concertos with something ineffably rotten at their core. I believe the coven used his work as the basis of their performances for decades.”

Although he is relatively calm, there is a hollowness and exhaustion in Lestat’s voice that Daniel hasn’t heard before. Against his will, he’s concerned. Lestat filled with hysterical energy, he’s gotten used to. This flat, weary Lestat feels like a new, dangerous low.

“I’m not saying you didn’t fuck up, several times,” Daniel says, “sending him money, when you let him see you, when you turn-”

“I ruined him,” Lestat says wearily, cutting off what Daniel had actually intended to be a comforting speech, though admittedly he was taking a while to get there.

Daniel tries again. “Nicolas played his part in what happened to him. He had problems that were nothing to do with you. He made choices as well.”

Predictably, Lestat’s eyes fill with tears. “Such excellent choices I left for him.” He is fidgeting, almost wringing his hands, spinning the ring on his index finger around and around, and fresh from the memory, Daniel suddenly recognises it as the ring that Nicki had discarded. Lestat must have kept it, all this time. Must have retrieved it, if not that night then some other, from where Nicolas had carelessly thrown it away.

“You weren’t exactly overwhelmed with enticing options yourself,” Daniel says.

“No. You were right, when you said it was more of the same. More of my anger and loss of control. I was stronger than him. I should have protected him. Instead, I destroyed him, because he would not be what I wanted him to be. Because he wouldn’t love me and,” Lestat gasps a strangled laugh, and his tears spill over, “because he hurt my feelings. And then after he paid the price, I did the same thing, again and again. To Louis, and to Claudia.”

Daniel can’t deny it.

“It was bullshit, that speech of his,” Daniel says instead, throwing professionalism and impartiality out the window. Apparently.

Lestat’s breath catches. “You think so?”

“I once told my second wife that I never loved her, after the divorce, when she’d left me for a nice, sensible lawyer who made her happy. It wasn't true, of course it wasn't true. I was miserable and I said it to hurt her, and because I didn’t want our marriage to be something good I’d fucked up, I wanted it to be something bad I escaped.”

Lestat is looking at him with big wet eyes, stunned, like this is the most incredible thing he’s heard in a century. Fuck it. Daniel leans in.

“He was suffering. He couldn’t make sense of what had happened. So he told himself a story, a story where he’d always been damned, and he’d always known it, and he wanted it, because then everything that happened to him—depression before they invented depression, being disowned, the society he lived in crumbling, losing you, being kidnapped and tortured by vampires—would have happened for a reason, and he still had control. But that was just a story. It wasn’t like that. Yeah, things weren’t perfect between you, but things don’t have to be perfect to be worth something. It wasn’t a misunderstanding.”

By the time he finishes his little speech, Lestat is, inevitably, crying again. But the lifelessness, so unnatural to him, is gone.

“Thank you.” He doesn’t sound even a little sarcastic.

Daniel wants to say, and that’s what Louis did. Don’t listen to the story he’s trying to tell in my stupid book, where he tries to convince both of us that he never loved you, read between the lines, for fuck’s sake. But loyalty holds him back.

More than once in his life, Louis has been accused of a shocking lack of curiosity. What people don't seem to get is how often the pain of knowing isn’t worth it.

Would it have changed anything if Louis’s father had told him how close the family sugar business had been to failure before he died? No.

Would his mother and Grace and Paul have been happier if they’d known more about the pain and sin that kept their big house running and their table full? Of course not.

What use would it have been, if he’d truly tried to get answers from Lestat about how he froze a whole poker table of people and spoke without moving his lips before he was ready to know? None! It only would have made things more complicated.

All this to say, yes, from time to time, Louis has asked himself why he didn't push harder for Lestat's past. He knew, in his core, that Lestat told the truth when he said he could never say no to Louis, that if he’d been willing to scrap for it he could have knocked down Lestat's walls, particularly in the early, simpler days. But he left it. Worse, he let Claudia batter herself against those walls in his stead, hiding behind her quest for meaning so he didn't have to admit he was aimless, letting her assume that he'd exhausted himself before she came along when he'd only taken a handful of half-hearted runs and barely questioned the scraps Lestat did let slip.

Two days into listening to Daniel’s recordings, Louis thinks he finally understands why he never pushed that hard for more of Lestat’s past. Two days in, he feels crazier than he has since the 70s. He should have listened to his instincts and deleted the damn recordings. All this time, Louis must have sensed the danger of discovering how much of Lestat wasn't his. All this time, his subconscious must have known that Lestat's love for him, Louis’ primacy in Lestat's life, has been Louis’ lodestone this whole fucking time. Now, it’s too late to put the genie back. The thought that he is the rebound for some 18th century French fop with manic depression and no stomach for eternity has undermined the foundations of Louis’ world until he's ready to burn the whole place down.

He stops listening to the tapes fully early in the story of Lestat’s turning, too angry to cope with having to feel sorry for him, and fasts forwards to get to the good bits. He skims forward in Daniel’s notes for highlights that confirm his worst fears about how much Nicki is to come. Then he paces around his apartment, gums itching to bite somebody like they haven’t in years.

This is the corollary of how much Lestat makes him feel. The good, sure, and it’s welcome after decades of numbness. But also frustration, jealousy, and blind fucking rage.

He goes to his memory room, and tries to centre himself by looking at Claudia’s dress. God, he’d kill about a thousand people to hear the cutting remark she’d make about Lestat’s mommy issues. It would be cheap at the price.

Fuck. The dress isn’t working. There’s too much Lestat bound up in their daughter, when he needs to focus on anything else. He spins to look at Paul’s portrait. His baby brother has got nothing to do with that French devil.

Except now he’s thinking about how Lestat was the baby of his family, and no one looked after him. And how Lestat had his own delicate and volatile loved one, whose self-destruction came to define him. Jesus H. Christ there is nothing that man won’t wriggle his spindly roots into.

It’s honestly a relief when he hears the sound of another vampire moving in the living room. They know enough to suppress their breathing when attempting an assassination, but they don’t have the control to slow or dull the beating of their heart, which is hard and fast with anticipation. He reckons they’ve got thirty years in the blood, max. And only about thirty seconds more to go, if Louis has anything to say about it.

Chapter Text

All too soon, Louis has sucked his would-be-murderer’s heart dry; waste not want not, as his mamma would have said. If there’s one positive from being the undead’s Most Wanted, it’s having plenty of guilt-free, vitamin-rich vampiric aggressors to drink up. He’s barely eaten a grebe in weeks and his staff tell him the fridge is backing up with deliveries from the farm.

Unfortunately, the brief fight—if ducking a single machete swing and then plunging your claws straight into someone’s chest cavity can be called a fight—has only taken the edge off Louis’ agitation. Reckless, he slides the balcony door open invitingly, and deliberately turns his back on it.

When a second wave doesn’t immediately arrive, he does a quick calculation on the time difference with New York—the sun will be up there soon, but he’s still in the window—and reaches out to Daniel.

Hey man, Daniel sounds pleased to hear from him, but a little worried. Louis doesn’t usually call him. Everything okay?

Peachy. Louis tosses the desiccated heart onto what remains of its owner, and sets the pile on fire, scorch marks on the expensive floor be damned. How is the interview going?

Heavy, Daniel replies. There were so many tears today that he stained my favourite armchair. I’m thinking I’ll wait till we’re done and just have it reupholstered.

Perhaps this should make Louis feel sorry for Lestat. He feels irritated. He was probably crying over Nicki. Again.

Have you listened to any of it yet? Daniel asks. Louis thinks about denying it. If he never admits he’s listened, he can’t be caught out when it comes to any petty feelings about what he heard. Unfortunately, he has some petty feelings he's itching to air.

I’ve listened to some, he admits.

And? What do you think?

Why does it feel like you're going easy on him? Louis asks.

Mistaking the vibe, Daniel laughs. You think so? Yes, Louis fucking thinks so. Well, not that I admit I am, but we are kind of on the same team now.

Yeah, you scrambled off that moral high ground pretty quickly once you got the chance to eat people. This isn’t the first time Louis’ mild irritation about this fact has surfaced, but it is the first time his guilt over what happened to Daniel has subsided enough to say it to his face.

You should be glad if I’ve developed some self-preservation instincts, Daniel continues, like Louis didn’t say anything, his tone light, he’s almost as volatile as you were in 1973. But mainly, fuck you! I’m not going easy on him.

Briefly, at the mention of Lestat’s volatility, the memory of how fragile and open Lestat had been in that shack in New Orleans comes back to Louis. He shakes it away.

Is there something in particular you think I should follow up? Daniel asks.

What he sees in that violinist maybe, Louis replies, immediately wishing he could take back the thought. If they’d been having this conversation in person, he never would have let it slip out.

Hah! You’re jealous. Of course you are. I swear, you’re the one I went easy on, when I let you convince me you were even ten percent less fucking unhinged about him than he is about you. You’re meant to be the reasonable one!

I am the reasonable one, Louis says, unreasonably.

Daniel does the mental equivalent of sighing deeply and, perhaps taking pity on Louis for how pathetic he’s being, makes an attempt at sincerity. If you think your relationship with Lestat got fucked, you haven’t heard anything, he says. It’s a trainwreck with Nicolas, I swear to God. When you get to the latest session, you’ll see.

So he was crying about Nicki. Again. By the skin of his teeth, Louis manages not to project his instinctive hurt that Daniel thinks someone else fucked up Lestat more than him. He barely even talks about me, he sends instead, which is barely less humiliating.

Louis gets the sense that Daniel’s jaw has dropped, which he knows Daniel has to have projected intentionally. Are you kidding me? He's all about you.

Not from what I’ve heard. If Lestat cares that much about anything Louis said about him in his book, it’s not reflected in what he talks about.

Have you read any Austen Louis? Does the phrase “if I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more” resonate with you at all? Because frankly, it should.

You’re quoting Austen at me Daniel. Really? Lestat isn’t Mr Knightly, he hasn’t shut up his whole damn life. Even as he says it, Louis knows that isn’t completely fair. Well, he can and will defend it on the technicalities because the man could talk for France in the Olympics, but he acknowledges that prattling on is not the same as saying what matters.

I can’t believe you’re about to make me advocate for Lestat, Daniel groans, but it's happening, and I don’t want to hear any shit about it either, because you’re driving me to it. Apart from the fact you haven’t even been born yet in the period we’re talking about, he’s trying to respect your perspective on your relationship.

Wordlessly, Louis scoffs.

I’m serious! You’ve put your account out there, and it’s not a gentle one-

Whose fault is that?

At least partially the person I quote who never gave me any notes when they got a chance to comment on the first draft. And the second draft. And the thir-

None of which I wanted you to write, Louis cuts in.

That’s why I’m conceding to ‘partially’. Look, I’m not saying he has a leg to stand on when it comes to your first marriage falling apart-

Louis starts to protest at this characterisation of their relationship, but weakly, so Daniel is able to bulldoze over him.

-I’m just saying that not fighting about the specifics is him trying not to be the vicious, impetuous, selfish man he was with you. It’s not a sign he doesn’t give a shit, not that you’d ever think something so colossally stupid.

Louis wants to believe this, but the loving way that Lestat described Nicki is still beating like a wardrum in the back of his head. Brilliant, beautiful, brave. Artistic, talented, devoted. Passionate, sophisticated, well-dressed. An equal, an intellectual, a kindred spirit. And then here comes Louis, the very twin of Nicki. Yeah, when it comes to all Nicki's worst qualities! Except Louis is more robust. Is that in fact the main thing Lestat chose him for? That's he's tough? That he’d taken shit all his human life, and kept on smiling?

And what did Louis say to Daniel about Lestat that wasn’t fair anyway? Up until the very end of the trial, Louis stands by it! Lestat can at least agree with him, if he’s not going to engage with the book in good faith.

Maybe this would all make more sense, Daniel says, getting testy now, if you read your own damn book.

With no more sound than a leaf touching down the ground, someone has landed on Louis’ balcony. Two someones, if his ears don’t deceive him. Fucking finally.

I’ve got to go, he tells Daniel.

There is an unexpected lightness between Daniel and Lestat when they settle down to their eighth interview session; a sense that they aren’t opponents, but collaborators on the same project. Daniel hopes it can last.

While it does, he gets in a question that’s been bugging him since he heard Lestat’s account of how the theatre was founded.

“How did the Paris coven end up with your portrait on the wall?”

Lestat slow blinks at him like this should be obvious.

“Armand painted it.”

“Armand paints?” Daniel blurts out, surprised out of any pretence of coolness. How had they sat around discussing art and Louis’ photography and how many centuries it had been since anyone painted Armand without anyone mentioning that?

“Yes.” For once, Lestat doesn’t appear to be ladling out his revelations with the intent to amaze. “Did this not come up?”

“I guess not.” Daniel doesn’t embarrass easily, but in the face of Lestat’s apparently genuine expectation that being a painter is a basic fact about Armand, he finds himself trying to reel his surprise back in. Maybe it isn’t that big a deal; as a vampire you have so much opportunity to collect and discard skills it’s probably expected that you’ll be an expert at least ten things that don’t even matter to you. Daniel should take up whittling now, so in a couple of centuries he can casually carve a cabriole chair leg and astound everyone with how much he doesn’t care.

Still. Had Louis known? He can’t say positively that he didn’t, but there had been something in the tone of every reference to art between them to indicate that, despite being hung in Louvre, it had been Louis’ thing—Louis at the salons, Louis with the camera, Louis with The Eye—more than Armand’s. Armand of the past had seemed almost scornful of the modern paintings Louis loved, and Armand of the present engaged with the practicalities of buying, selling and displaying art as status symbols, but not with the art itself.

Unfortunately, Lestat doesn’t fall for Daniel’s show of nonchalance. “As a child, before he was enslaved, he was a scribal artist. Then in Venice he was an apprentice in his maker Marius’ studio, as well as a model, up to and after his death.”

So, not a trivial part of his life then. Was that part of his past so painful for Armand that he couldn’t bear to discuss it, even though Louis clearly admired and, on some level, aspired to be someone who created art? Or had he sensed that very insecurity in Louis, and quietly cast off that aspect himself on his quest to remake himself into the perfect anti-Lestat, the person that Louis could have no good reason to leave? Was Armand’s need to hold onto Louis so deep and hungry that he would cede the entire wide arena of art to Louis to understand and monetize, rather than risk exposing himself?

If he thinks about this too much, Daniel is going to gaslight himself into feeling sorry for Armand again. Whatever reason Armand had for suppressing or destroying his past as an artist, it comes from the same unfathomable well of manipulativeness that all his many lies do.

“Did you sit for the portrait?” Daniel asks.

“Non. He painted it from memory after I left. One of the many ways he has sought to strengthen my tie to an endeavour that he knows I despised.”

An image coalesces in Daniel’s mind. Or possibly, he realizes as it takes shape, he’s drawing it out, his burning curiosity about his maker manifesting as an intrusion he didn’t intend to embark on. It’s Armand, not as he was in the 18th century, ragged and near feral, but immaculately turned out in the fashions of the 1940s. His kohl-lined eyes gleam like rose-gold does by candlelight, like beautiful things used to in a century that hardly anyone else here remembers, and something tugs in Lestat’s chest, the connection that he’s never been able to fully deny or completely resist. He’s so damnedly beautiful, this fallen cherub. And so sad, even all these decades later.

“Did I capture your likeness?” Armand asks, and Lestat follows his gaze to find, inexplicably, a portrait of himself, high on the wall, where it can overlook almost all the backstage space. “It hangs there always, so that none of us ever forget everything you did to make all this possible,” Armand says. And there, inevitably, is the electric shock of pain that always comes with grasping Armand’s gently-offered open hand. Lestat has the sinking sensation he’s made a mistake.

The memory cuts out.

“We are not there yet,” Lestat says, sharply.

“Meaning that we’ll get there eventually?” Daniel asks. Now that the topic of the 40s has been broached, he doesn’t want to let it go without assurances.

Assurances do not spill from Lestat’s lips. “It will surely be dull for readers, to go over what has already been covered so extensively.”

“It’s my job to worry about the writing,” Daniel counters. “And trust me, no one is going to find the full story of what happened in Paris dull. Half the readers will probably skip straight to that chapter.”

“But then they will never understand it fully,” Lestat says, looking uncharacteristically worried.

“I’m kidding.” Mostly.

“I do not want our book to be a rebuke to your first book.”

A rebuke to Louis, he means. “Look,” Daniel says, “it’s not just Louis’ version of the story that’s out there - he only saw half of it, and he knows that. The rest of it is Armand’s.”

“Louis knows now that he lied.”

“But not what actually happened. If you don’t tell your side, all that will be left to fill the space are the same old doubts.”

Daniel can’t tell if he’s persuaded Lestat. However, he has learned by now that pushing Lestat is a high risk strategy—you might be showered in an explosion of messy revelations, or you might get a firewall of denial and a flounce out—whereas letting things percolate can be surprisingly effective.

“Where were we then?” he asks, letting Lestat retreat back to the comfort and simplicity, relatively speaking, of the pre-Louis era. “Ah yes, Nicolas had just declared his intention to found the Theatre of the Vampires.”

“I was devastated by Nicolas’ words,” Lestat says, more frank than he usually is out loud about the topic of his first love, “and my only solace was Gabrielle.”

He unspools the memory between them.

The malady rises to choke Lestat once more as he and Gabrielle leave the theatre, without Nicki. The breaths that he doesn’t need but cannot suppress come faster and shallower, until Gabrielle drags him from the main street and embraces him.

Desperately, Lestat engulfs his mother in his arms. He holds her so tight and close that she is lifted off her feet and buries his face in the velvet softness of her neck. It is just the two of them again. As it always should have been. As it always will be. They are as solid and inseparable as a statue of two lovers carved from the same stone. Slowly, this certainty brings him back to himself and breathing is restored to a thoughtless reflex.

“Oh Lestat,” Gabrielle murmurs. She is stroking the back of his head with one hand, and the action activates some deeply imbedded instinct to be soothed in him. Why is that? It is not something that he ever remembers her doing. It is the kind of comfort that he imagined receiving from her many times; perhaps that past longing is enough to make it feel familiar and right. Or maybe she did soothe him this way, in some early time he cannot consciously recall, and that was always what he harkened back to. “It will all be alright. You are free of him now,” she says.

Lestat marvels at her single mindedness. It gives her great clarity, but it also blots out what should be obvious.

“How can you say that?” Lestat asks, a little ashamed of the childlike, plaintive tone of his voice, but unable to suppress it. “He doesn’t know what he is, what he plans, not truly. He’s gone mad.” And only then does the real danger crystallize, a shard of ice in his heart. “How will I keep them safe from Armand?”

Gabrielle sighs as the memory ends, in an emotion that Daniel interprets differently than Lestat did at the time. While she may not have said “I told you so”, Daniel is pretty sure she was sick of the Nicolas drama before it even began, and didn’t give two shits whether he murdered half of Paris or got immolated by Armand, except that her son would fuss about it.

“Nicolas didn’t come back to Magnus’ house with us,” Lestat says, “he slept at the theatre with the others. The very next evening he was harassing Roget for the deeds to the property.”

“Did you give them to him?” If Nicolas had been the actual owner of the theatre and Armand had gained control after his death, it has the potential to cast an even darker light on his premature death.

“Non. I had almost resolved to, but I found him so wild the next day, on the verge of killing my poor lawyer and talking of calling back our old theatre troupe to be turned—something I could not allow—that I put Eleni in charge of the property and finances.”

Another vampire, Daniel notes, who didn’t make it to Louis’ time, and he doesn’t entirely write-off his fleeting suspicion as to why.

“She was entranced by Nicolas’ art,” Lestat says, “but sensible enough to understand that his self-control and common sense were not to be trusted. She quickly became adept at facilitating his writing while not indulging his more destructive urges.” Lestat drops his eyes to Nicolas’ ring again and runs his thumb over the gem. “As far as I know, he barely left the theatre for the rest of his life. It became his whole world.”

If the early incarnation of the theatre was anything like the one Louis described, then that world was a simple one where evil always triumphed and Nicolas was in control. It makes a horrible kind of sense for him to retreat into that.

“I knew that this new venture could not be kept from Armand,” Lestat continues. “He stalked the minds of his former coven like an abandoned god still entitled to know all their concerns.”

Once more, Daniel finds himself struggling to reconcile the aggressive, super-powered Armand Lestat encountered with the more controlled vampire he’d met.

“What I don’t understand,” Daniel says, “is how 18th century Armand could be so completely in everyone’s mind, but 20th and 21st century Armand lets his coven run riot, lets Louis get away, lets me—a human!—figure out what he covered up.”

“You forget what swathes of time separate the two.”

Daniel raises an eyebrow. “Are you going to tell me that we’re all capable of change?”

“You don’t believe we are?” Lestat asks the question lightly, but his tone doesn’t fool Daniel. For an immortal, this is existential.

Daniel offers his honest opinion not knowing how Lestat will take it. “Sure. It’s hard, but everyone can learn to some extent: new behaviour, new strategies. And hell, things can always go downhill. Fundamentally though, we are who we are. True change for the better is rare.”

Slightly disappointingly, Lestat only nods, like this is exactly what he expected Daniel to say.

“Fundamentally,” he says, “Armand is a poor leader. He misjudges the level of power he should exert on his followers. He grows bored and careless, and then panics at the idea of losing control.”

Pot, meet kettle. With great restraint, Daniel doesn’t verbalize this thought.

“His capabilities are vast,” Lestat continues, “he has one of the strongest mind gifts I have encountered. However, there is an element of vampiric politeness-”

“Oh come on.” Daniel can’t even let him finish that sentence.

“No mon ami, I am serious! It is at best déclassé to barge into someone’s mind and stomp around, at worst a declaration of your intent to subjugate. Of course, you take a sidelong look in through the windows of the mind, you get a sense of how much you can discover without them realizing, you do the little dance of who is more subtle and powerful, but if you want to coexist peacefully, let alone be companions with someone—true, equal companions—then you do not start out by showing them that their mind will never be safe from you.”

“Like Armand did with you?”

“Exactement. When I met Armand, he had not been living in polite society. The Children of Satan required vampires to live unnatural lives of discomfort and degradation, and he used the mind gift liberally to enforce the rules, it was the only way. The minds of those under his power, already created to be purposefully weak, grew fragile and shallow, while he grew complacent on his total control. Courtesy and subtlety withered until he didn’t know how to use them. He barely conceived that other vampires could have minds of their own!”

“He thought you and Gabrielle would both roll over for him instantly.”

“Oui. It took several failures for him to realize that his approach was not going to work, and by the time he did, he had shown his hand too clearly to us both. If he had treated his new coven this way, they would not have been fit to perform on stage and walk through the modern world. If he had treated Louis and Claudia this way, they would never have trusted him, even for an instant. In short, by the time he met Louis, he was not the same wild, feral creature as when I met him.”

“What about me?” Daniel asks, hating the vulnerable note the question strikes. “I was just some puny human.”

Lestat looks at him thoughtfully. “He planned to kill you at first, non?”

“Yeah. He did his whole ‘your life is so shit you may as well die’ schtick on me, but Louis stopped him going through with it.”

“And then later, he wiped your memories?”

“I thought I’d spent one night interviewing Louis and then holed up the rest of the week in a drug den. I didn’t remember that Armand existed, even though I spent six days with him.”

“So, when you met again he had already delved deeply into your mind and planted suggestions.” Lestat nods as if confirming something to himself. “It is possible to develop a sensitivity to another vampire’s intrusion, especially if they meddle with you extensively. It may be that when you met again even small incursions risked disturbing what he had already done.”

“I didn’t start having full-on flashbacks to what had happened in the 70s until Armand got more involved in the interview,” Daniel says, slowly. How often had one of the flashes of memory he’d had in Dubai come on the heels of Armand’s penetrating gaze turning on him? And how often had they ended with Armand looking away, oddly furtive?

“Et voilà. It would be unusual for such sensitivity to happen after only a week, but you do have a strong natural gift yourself. Every time he looked in your mind, he risked you remembering what had happened, or shattering your mind altogether.”

It fits. Except, Daniel realizes, unable to stop his mind picking apart the explanation in his usual analytical fashion, for one thing. “But then why did he stay out of my mind after he knew that we knew what had happened in San Francisco? The cat was out of the bag by then.”

“Perhaps he did not want to risk damaging your mind further,” Lestat suggests.

Daniel makes a noise of impolite disbelief, sure that the only priority Armand had had at the time was Louis.

“I meant it,” Lestat insists, “when I said that there must be more to him turning you than an attempt to get back at Louis. I have incurred oceans of Armand’s spite, and it has never driven him to sharing the Gift with a human, even though there were ones he could have turned that would hurt me.” Lestat cocks his head. “Or perhaps, there are more of his secrets in your head, yet to be unearthed.”

This suggestion makes Daniel uneasy. What else could there be?

“You must have got Armand on board somehow,” Daniel says, bringing them back on course. “How did you do it?”

“The theatre was an extension of ideas that had interested Armand, so I sent out my thoughts to him and told him that we were bringing the vision of the new evil that I had promised him into the light. Even when he knows you are lying, he is willing to buy into a deception if it is a good one.”

“And he bought it?”

By now, Daniel is tuned in enough to Lestat to sense the stickiness of his reluctance building in the air around him. He hadn’t expected it on this topic. Lestat finds it satisfying to complain about Armand.

“We are gonna have to talk about it,” Daniel tells him. “The origin story of the theatre with Armand as director? That’s a big bit of the first book, people are going to want to know.”

“I do not bare my soul to satisfy your fans,” snaps Lestat.

“By all means, let's talk about why you are baring it,” replies Daniel, knowing Lestat doesn’t particularly want to get into that either.

Lestat shakes his hair back in annoyance, but after a moment, complies. “While I had anticipated that his coven’s plans to move into the limelight would enrage Armand, once they were underway he seemed almost unbothered.”

This does strike Daniel as unlikely. But then, unbothered can be a stance that Armand takes to lull you into a false sense of security.

“What does that mean exactly, he ignored you? He told you he didn’t mind?” Daniel asks.

“He didn’t ignore me. He said very little on the topic of the theatre, on any topic, and he would not show himself to me.” Lestat speaks slowly, and Daniel can’t tell if it’s reluctance, or if he’s genuinely unsure. “But we communicated. For many weeks.”

“Mentally, you mean?”

“Yes. He sent me strange visions.”

Well, this is new. “What kind of visions?”

“Some could have been memories: decadent masked balls, nighttime gondola rides through Venice, a banquet in a room full of corpses and the like. But he also showed me fantastical visions of pure imagination, like scenes from The Garden of Earthly Delights. They would start lush and sensual, but turn sinister, pleasures becoming tortures, verdant greenery thickening to fleshy, carnivorous plants that bled human blood when you bit them. The visions would come upon me unexpectedly, particularly when I was alone close to dawn or dusk, and rip me from reality.”

Truly, what the fuck.

“These otherworldly phantasmagoria were deeply unsettling, yet I did not attempt to turn them away. I told myself that it was too dangerous to risk inflaming Armand with another rejection when the others were so vulnerable, but in truth, they fascinated me as much as they repulsed me.” A situation that, in Daniel’s opinion, is fast becoming a pattern between Lestat and Armand. “One night, he plunged me into a vision of myself as a mortal so vivid that I thought it was real, that my lost humanity had returned to me, and that all that had passed since Magnus took me had been nothing more than a particularly vivid night terror. It was only the pain of the sun rising that woke me from it, and if I had not been close to home, I could have burned to nothing.”

“Do you think he meant to kill you?” Daniel asks.

“Qui sait?” says Lestat, carelessly. His casual attitude holds up for a few seconds, then collapses back into a brooding thoughtfulness. “What felt like the sharpest cruelty was how wonderful the vision was. Discovering that it was humanity that was the dream felt like dying all over again. The stories I had told myself about what a glorious, gleeful devil I was lay shattered and had to be rebuilt again, piece by piece. But Daniel, do you want to know the most absurd part?”

“Of course.”

“As I lay in my tomb that morning, skin stinging from my brush with the sun, anguished all over again at the loss of my humanity, he called out to me with words for once. He apologised and told me he’d meant it as a gift. And I believed him!”

Lestat laughs, head thrown back, a long, hysterical peal that makes Daniel shiver.

“In truth, I did not understand Armand at the time, and all the centuries since have not served to explain him to me. Was there a test that I failed to comprehend, let alone pass? Was it courtship? Or was he just toying with me, as the cat does with a bird? I do not know!” Lestat throws his hands up in exasperation. Daniel can relate.

“How were things progressing at the theatre?”

“Rapidly. Nicolas was not much practical help and had to be restrained from attacking every tradesman who came to help us with the final touches to the sets and wardrobe, but Eleni was a wonder. I had spent enough time in the theatre to know what had to be done, and she never had to be told anything twice. We opened, still with no sign of either Armand’s wrath or his approbation.”

“And how were you received?”

“With open wallets and bared throats, exactly as Nicolas and Eleni had predicted. I had half hoped that the venture would fail, that people would clamour for the comedic tales of love that Renaud’s specialised in and shrink from our dark vision, but I overestimated Parisians. We were something new and different, and as long as they could tell themselves that none of the death and blood was real, the humans enjoyed being shocked and a little disgusted.”

“How was Nicolas doing? Was he okay keeping the gore plausible?”

“He played every night, but outside of the shows he was preoccupied, committing the phantoms and horrors that tormented him to the page. Writing, playing music, Satan, and disdain for me: this was all that was on his mind. Even hunger was frequently secondary, and the others would bring victims to his little room when he forgot to eat, lest he lose control in the middle of a show, when hundreds of human heartbeats pressed in close.”

Another lover with disordered eating. Of course. God forbid that any aspect of Lestat’s immortal life go unparalleled.

“We were packed to the rafters every night, the new avant-garde sensation. It seemed that Gabrielle and I were the only ones in the city who did not want to be there, and unlike her, I could not avoid it. I feared that any night I stayed away would be the night that Armand would take his revenge. While she explored the fields and the forest, I was tied to my box, night after night.”

“You didn’t act in the plays?” Daniel should be over these inconsistencies with Armand’s story, but every one still rankles.

“A handful of times.”

“Did you ever play Harlequin?” Daniel asks, thinking of Armand’s account of how he had first approached Lestat, on stage with his human company, and Lestat had pouted, flirted, and ultimately bent over and shown Armand his ass. While Daniel now believes it didn’t happen the way that Armand said, it had been such a specific, vivid image: Lestat, the patronised, tarted-up dervish. He wouldn’t be surprised if Armand had simply lifted parts of his imagined scene from later events.

“Hoping to prove your maker right?” Lestat replies, a warning flash in his eyes. Daniel hadn’t expected it for this relatively innocuous bit of fact-checking.

“Trying to get the story straight, regardless of who is telling it.” The lies might rankle, but Daniel is long past any actual doubt that Armand will make a story up out of whole cloth.

“Harlequin was never my role, as Armand is well aware.”

Lestat still seems more irritated than Daniel’s question, or Armand’s story, warrants. Is the role of Harlequin such a downgrade? Daniel tries to step back and consider what the recast means, from Armand’s perspective, and from Lestat’s. Armand’s message to Louis and Daniel is pretty clear: Lestat is sensual, amoral, and important to but essentially floating above the events of the play. Harlequin might steer the action, but in the end, he’s hollow. A seductive clown.

The message to Lestat, who was tortured, assaulted and murdered because Magnus got a hard-on for him while he was on stage, has a potential darker cast. The worst being: you asked for it. You stood on stage and seduced the whole room, you bargained with your beauty, you flirted with an ancient monster, and you enjoyed it.

“Perhaps your friends at the Talamasca can dig up some old playbills for you,” says Lestat, impatient with Daniel’s wool gathering, or maybe keen to head off any reflections on his turning. “If they do, you will see that the Théâtre did not stoop to anything as commonplace as the Commedia dell'arte. Nicolas wanted to push the boundaries.”

“Regardless of what role you played,” Daniel says, “why did you only act a handful of times? Wasn’t that your passion?” In his own mind he can admit to considering, in half the stories Louis told of Santiago’s powerful stage presence, if the legendary Lestat’s original performances might have been even more compelling.

“It had been,” Lestat says, dismissive, “the glamour paled with time.”

Daniel tilts his head, unconvinced. It’s a bit too much like Armand’s increasingly discordant parody of Lestat, so bored after a few months that he screws Armand in a theatre box and hightails it out of town.

“When I was on stage, it seemed to unsettle Nicki,” Lestat admits, reluctantly. “He would grow paranoid that I was trying to sabotage him and rewrite the roles I took so that my character appeared foolish and said things I did not wish to say. During the performance, he would miss his musical cues glaring at me. Every rehearsal was a battle. It was better for me to step back.”

Ceding the stage to Nicolas, as Armand ceded painting. Interesting.

Lestat’s eyes drop to the floor, so that his expression is harder to make out. He takes a deep breath.

“Almost two months after we opened I was in my private box, buttering up an unpleasant mortal couple that I planned to eat for dinner later—in their own home, once they had been seen returning from the theatre, I wasn’t stupid—when they both stood and walked out of the box without a word of goodbye.”

Ah yes, the vampire equivalent of the Imperial March playing. “Armand was there.”

“It was the first time I had seen this power, and it awed and bewildered me, as I assume he intended. He likes to start a conversation with his partner off balance.”

“I’m aware,” Daniel says, dryly.

“At last, he had ditched the trappings of his defunct cult, and dressed himself in the fashions of the day.”

“He cleaned himself up for you.” Like an idiot, Daniel can’t help but long to see what that looked like: Armand in silken stockings, maybe wearing velvet, maybe a ribbon holding his hair back.

With only a minor eye roll, Lestat surfaces the image in his mind. And damn if Armand doesn’t look good. His hair, now clean, curls like gleaming streams of ink around his head. His skin glows by candle light, as Daniel had known it would. He wears his fine coat of dark green brocade magnificently.

In the modern day, Lestat sighs in acknowledgment. “Yes, he was beautiful. And after months of talking in our minds, I was more drawn to him than ever. Never had Nicki, mortal or immortal, been so alluring. Never had Gabrielle held me in such thrall. Of course, Gabrielle had not ever used her spell gift to literally enthrall me.” Lestat delivers this line with an ironic smirk, which doesn’t last. He turns thoughtful. “And yet, there were moments, then, when his pull was like nothing else.”

The memory of Armand sits next to Lestat in the box and leans in close, his lips slightly parted, his eyes glowing invitingly like flaring embers in the hearth. “Who can love us, you and I, as we can love each other?” he asks. And Daniel can feel, like ice cracking, the moment Lestat’s resistance gives way before that warmth.

Ridiculously, Daniel actually springs to his feet, filled with outrage. “You two did have sex in a theatre box,” he says, accusingly. That had long been the part of Armand’s version of their relationship that Daniel had rated least likely to be true, and here Lestat is about to admit it actually happened!

“He weaves a few scant threads of truth into the tapestry of his deceptions.”

Slightly awkwardly, since his betrayal is technically baseless, Daniel sits back down. “What made you give in?”

“A multitude of things, impossible to untangle,” Lestat says wearily.

“Not just him finally taking a bath?” Daniel asks, deflecting Lestat’s deflection. He’s unwilling to let Lestat skate by this question.

“I wanted him to leave the others alone, and giving him something he wanted made that more likely.”

Believable. Fucked up, but believable. By then, Lestat already knew his body was one of the main things he had to offer.

“I was tired,” Lestat continues, “so tired, of Nicki’s hatred and disdain, radiating at me wherever I was, the way he fought me at every step. I cannot recall if I still thought he might be jealous, but even if he wasn’t, to be touched with desire again, by someone who claimed to know everything about me and had repeatedly said that was why they wanted me, was tempting.”

Reckless and needy for affirmation wherever he thought he could get it, that was Lestat alright.

Finally, Lestat swallows, admits, “Armand was beautiful. Is. And I- At least, I thought…” His voice trails off. Attraction should be the easiest reason to acknowledge—one of the main reasons people have hooked up for all of recorded history—but Lestat is clearly wrestling with something. His gaze bounces around the room, landing anywhere but on Daniel, like he might find a way out of this conversation tucked away in one of the corners.

“What did you think?” Daniel asks, implacable.

“It began as a trick he played on me. For all I know, that might have been all it ever was. But I thought I felt, I did feel… love for him.” The admission releases the restless tension in Lestat and he finally makes eye contact again. “Enough that I believed, for a brief time, that it didn’t matter how or why I did.”

By this stage, Daniel is hardly shocked to hear the terms on which Lestat will grasp at love and affection. “And yet, he claims you left town the very next day.” It’s the crowning glory in the tale of swashbuckling-Lestat’s callous disregard for Armand’s tender heart.

“As ever,” Lestat says, darkly, “he omits the most crucial elements.”

Unexpectedly, Daniel finds himself back in the theatre box, sprawled on the floor this time, so that it is not a window into a room of hundreds, but a cocoon for two. Even Nicki’s glares from the orchestra pit can no longer wound Lestat, not with Armand’s power wrapped, protective and concealing, around them both. And thank God he has the wherewithal to maintain their cocoon, because Lestat has nothing to spare for anyone or anything but the divine creature in his lap.

Thankfully—in the sense that Daniel is not yet ready for such a practical test of his feelings about his maker—Lestat has skipped the bulk of the action while choosing the timing for his flashback, but they are both naked, pressed together and panting as they come down from the high of their long anticipated coupling. Sipping kisses languorously, blissfully, from each other’s mouths. In the moment, Lestat cannot fathom why he has resisted for so long. Hasn’t he had a sense, almost since the first moment he laid eyes on Armand, that his path led inexorably to Armand? What did he truly have to fear, when everything Armand has done, as ill-judged as much of it has been, has been done to try and bring Lestat closer? Is that not exactly where Lestat wants to be?

Lestat tangles one hand into Armand's hair and brings the other up to trace his thumb around his new lover’s exquisite, perfectly formed mouth. His hand looks huge and thick, almost coarse, in contrast. There is something fascinating in the dichotomy between the delicacy, almost the daintiness, of Armand’s fangs, and the immeasurable strength that thrums inside him. Daring, Lestat pushes his thumb inside Armand’s mouth, teasing his skin on the needle sharp point of a fang. Armand allows it, mouth falling further open, and Lestat presses deeper-

“Where is this going?” Daniel asks, breaking free of one of the memories of his own accord for the first time. The image of Armand, naked and glowing with exertion, leaning tenderly in for another open mouthed kiss, feels like touching a hot stove with his brain. He recoils from it with the feeling that it might melt something irreparable.

“You will see.”

The memory returns. Lestat has both his hands framing Armand’s face as they gaze into each other’s eyes. Armand, his heart beating a pounding rhythm only slightly out of sync with Lestat’s, leans in close once more, not for a kiss, but past Lestat’s wanting lips, to his neck, fangs bared. The two hot shafts are driven hard and deep into Lestat’s flesh as Armand bites him. They feel larger than they look.

“I do not know if you have yet had the pleasure, Daniel,” Lestat narrates from the present day, “but drinking from another vampire can be a transcendent experience. In the right circumstances, it can be more intimate than sex. Even between a fledgling and a maker, an emotional connection opens. Gabrielle and I shared blood often in those days, and I was far from averse from sharing the experience with Armand.”

In the memory, for a long, luxurious moment, Lestat lets the physical pleasure of the penetration ripple over him, a wash of sensation that envelops the whole body. Automatically, he dips his own mouth towards Armand’s neck, but Armand’s hand fists in his hair and keeps his head in place. Alone, this is not enough to alarm Lestat. It can be fun to take turns, to play seducer and victim, when you have trust between you.

No, it’s the emotion in the blood, which Lestat opens his mind to expectantly, curious to see how sharing blood with a vampire he is not related to and can read more fully affects the experience, that turns ecstasy to fear. The primary emotion in Armand is triumph. He is not drinking Lestat’s blood like a lover, even a hungry one who grows a little inconsiderate in the heat of his desire. Armand is sucking down great, greedy, giddy draughts, a hunter excited to finally have his kill. He is draining Lestat.

Lestat tries to struggle, but his limbs will not respond to his commands. He tries to scream, but his frozen lungs will not inflate. He is suddenly certain that even if he could there is no one to hear that can or will help him. He is helpless, again. Alone, again.

As the fight sparks and dies in Lestat, Armand gentles, slowing down, whispering soothingly into Lestat’s brain. Yes, dearest one. You are helpless, you always have been, underneath the unnatural strength that Magnus gave you when he broke our laws. That will all be over, when I have taken your strength into myself and coupled it with my own.

Is that how it works? Lestat has no idea. Compared to this violation, to the cold and emptiness that he can already feel creeping through him, he and Gabrielle have only drunk from each playfully, and they are almost the same stuff to begin with.

The thought of Gabrielle sends a jolt of fear through him, like a convulsion. What will become of her, if Armand is able to take his power? He will go after her too. Lestat will have destroyed them both with his foolish, reckless trust.

Lestat’s body grows cold as his blood flows into Armand, and just like in the tower with Magnus, he feels the rope of all his strength and life and future running uncontrollably through his hands, reeled in by a stronger, more merciless master.

Don’t fear, coos Armand. There will be nothing but peace and sweetness in my arms, once this defiance is purged and behind us.

His words are enraging. How many have thought they drained the well of Lestat’s defiance? Serried ranks of them, from his cradle to his grave, everyone except Gabrielle. All of them have been wrong.

Relax, Armand insists, when Lestat’s muscles tense. You cannot defeat me now. Peace and sweetness, or I send you into oblivion. This is how it must be.

No. No! Lestat will not let this lying, angel-faced demon, so twisted and damaged by the centuries he can barely hold a proper conversation, be the one who wins. From some hidden well of anger and will Lestat finds the strength to grip onto the end of his rope and retake control of his body. He musters all his remaining power, all his rage, and flings Armand off with an inarticulate roar.

Gore spills from the place where Armand’s teeth were torn from Lestat’s neck, the flow startlingly red and hot against Lestat’s cold, nearly bloodless flesh. In contrast, Armand is flushed and warm with both their power. But the same paralytic surprise in the face of failure that had frozen Armand in Notre Dame holds him now as he sprawls on the floor, eyes fixed, unblinking, on his would-be victim, and Lestat’s wrath burns bright enough to power him to his feet. He crouches, like an animal, and feels a growl he has never made before rattle out of his chest.

Before Armand can gather himself, Lestat springs. He pins Armand’s limbs to the floor with hands and legs and bites into Armand’s chest, as deep and hard as all his remaining strength can take him, bones cracking under the immense power of his jaw. Armand screams, but it’s too late. Lestat has already reached heart’s blood. Hunched over Armand, body undulating from the force of his swallows, Lestat drinks his power back right from the source.

As Lestat gluts himself, the blood that had been flowing down his chest and back from the wound in his neck slows, and the wound itches furiously as it begins to clot and close. It is potent stuff, this ancient blood. Lestat’s first taste, from Magnus, had transformed him forever, yet in Armand he finds an ambrosia more powerful and intoxicating than even his maker’s. Heady too is the surrender that Lestat feels in Armand’s blood, as shock gives way to acceptance.

Then, acceptance gives way to a giddy, euphoric submission and Lestat recoils from the feeling, ripping his teeth from the fount.

What right does this traitorous wretch—a Judas who cracked open his deepest desires and vulnerabilities and lured him in with a mirage of companionship and love, only to betray him, try to control him—have to roll over and show his belly like it’s something worth seeing? Lestat doesn’t want his obeisance, he wants the companionship that was promised him! And if he can’t have that, he at least wants someone who will fight back.

Almost as soon as Lestat pulls away the edges of the hole that he rent in Armand’s chest begin to knit back together, but Armand remains compliantly still in Lestat’s grip, looking up at him with big, shocked eyes. With a growl, Lestat releases him. At that, a spark of Armand’s old anger gutters back to life.

“Too cowardly to follow through? You’re a child still,” he hisses.

And yes, that is what Lestat needs, if he cannot have love. A being on whom he can finally loose all his rage. With a roar, he seizes Armand and throws him bodily. A gory arc sprays across the walls and floor as the door of the box splinters and Armand lands heavily in the corridor outside. When he doesn’t immediately rise to his feet, Lestat grabs him by the shoulders and slams him into the wall, so hard that the plaster dents and cracks under him. With a fraction of his usual strength, Armand tries to push Lestat away, so Lestat slams him into the wall again, and again, stopping only to wrap both his hands around Armand’s neck. His neck bulges under the pressure of Lestat’s hands, his eyes pop, and a fresh gout of blood wells from remnants of his chest wound.

It is satisfying, to have this ancient creature helpless before him, as he had tried to make Lestat. Armand’s mouth opens and closes soundlessly, and if he has something to say then Lestat wants to hear it, wants to hear him beg for his life, so he releases him to slump on the floor. Let him use his voice to plead for mercy—the same powerful, cunning voice that had told such cruel, unforgivable lies, tricked Lestat, for a couple of pure and dazzling hours, into thinking that there could be love and acceptance and understanding between them instead of recrimination and struggle and bitterness—and in reply Lestat will tear the heart from his chest and eat it in front of him. They’ll see if he can live like that.

Lestat waits, poised, for the final burst of recrimination that will power his anger over the threshold to Armand’s grave. But nothing comes. He only lies there, this powerful master who’d promised to break Lestat, gasping and broken himself, his usual barriers down.

And in that openness, all Lestat can sense from Armand is sorrow and an ancient, palpable weariness. He has marched through centuries of evil, bleak and repetitious, and they have left him untouched. Still, at his core, is the same scared, needy youth that has always been there. Desperately, he had tried to vanquish what he could not understand. Even more desperately, Lestat had beaten him back. They are of the same ilk.

“And there you have it.” 18th century Paris inverts itself back into 21st century New York. Lestat’s voice is rich with sarcasm as he says, “Our grand romance. His blameless trust. My inexplicable, unexpected abandonment.”

Your violent, destructive rage and insatiable hunger to be loved, Daniel doesn’t say out loud, since Armand did start it. He thinks from the twitch of Lestat’s head that he may have heard it anyway.

“So uh, what did the theatre goers make of two naked, post-coital men duking it out in the hallway?” Daniel asks, falling back on the practical while the emotions of it all are still settling.

“I believe the show had ended at some point during our earlier dalliance, we enjoyed each other for some time before Armand’s betrayal. Or perhaps the others cleared them out, I am not sure. I only know that the place was empty when I carried him out of the building.”

“You took him with you?” Daniel asks, incredulous.

“Back to Magnus’ lair. I still needed his assurances that he would not go after the others, and Gabrielle wanted answers before we could leave. This seemed our best opportunity to get both.”

“And did you get them?”

“We sat round the fire, in the grand chamber where Magnus had burned, myself, Gabrielle, and Armand. I hated him. I couldn’t stop looking at him. Gabrielle cleaned him up, examining his incredible healing, his skin and nails and hair as she did so, like a scientist who has finally got their hands on a live specimen. And we talked.”

“What about?” Daniels asks.

The memory of Armand reappears between them. His clothes are as rumpled as you’d expect undressing in the throes of passion and redressing in haste while still bleeding semi-profusely to leave them, but essentially he appears whole. That ancient blood is powerful stuff.

“You are leaving Paris,” Armand says, slowly. Then, in a rush, “Please, take me with you.”

Gabrielle casts a fraught look at Lestat that could not say ‘don’t’ more plainly if they had telepathy.

“No,” says Lestat sharply. After what just passed between them? What is wrong with this damnable imp?

At his answer, Armand slides from his chair, kneels at Lestat’s feet and grasps Lestat’s hand in both of his. What can I do to make you love me? What can I give? he asks.

“There is nothing,” Lestat says out loud, rejecting even the secret of this form of communication, which Gabrielle is likely unable to hear.

I was driven by nature, by duty to try and destroy you, Armand pleads, eyes large with mute appeal, but I love you all the more because I could not. Have mercy on me. Take me with you.

And absurdly, after all that has happened, he still has a pull. Lestat tears his hand from Armand’s grasp and steps away. “I could have destroyed you, but I didn’t. That is all the mercy I have.”

“That you couldn’t have done,” Armand says out loud. “You don’t know how.”

He is always so sure of himself, even now, after Lestat has defied his expectations so many times. Frustrating, impossible creature!

“No, I am wrong. You are destroying me now, by leaving me,” Armand says. “Take me with you, not forever, just for a few years, so I can teach you all I know, as recompense for what I tried to do.”

And there it is, that pull again. Counteracted now by an equal and opposite upwelling of fear and mistrust. The one thing Lestat now knows is that he cannot fathom the deep, treacherous waters of this one’s soul. “No.”

Anger contorts Armand’s face and he springs to his feet, hissing and spitting like a cat. “Then I curse you! Love mortals, love your silent children, do all that you can to keep them close. But there will come a time when only the love of your own kind, and not the ones you make,” he flings a careless arm at Gabrielle, “can save you. Remember me then.”

“Be quiet,” Lestat orders. He doesn’t want to hear this. Armand’s gaze swings to Gabrielle, and he sees, from the tightening of her features, that they are talking now, with their minds. “And leave her alone!” he barks.

“The ones you make will always hate you,” Armand sneers, “for taking their life, for trying to teach them, for being stronger than them, for needing them, or for not needing them. The silence will always be between you, a wall that cannot be breached, and no matter the legions you might make, you will always, forever be alone.”

“Your words mean nothing,” Lestat says, despite how deeply they wound him.

Gabrielle’s face twists in hatred, a rare strong emotion from her. What is he saying to her? What is he doing?

“This one,” Armand points at her, “who you covet more than any other, who keeps you close for now, has been made colder by the Dark Gift. How long will she need you? Who will she turn to, in the moments when she fears eternity? You, who trapped her in it?”

“You’re a scared fool,” says Gabrielle. “I chose this. I treasure it.”

“Will she wonder sometimes why you tried to protect the violinist from yourself, but you never tried to protect her?”

“Quiet!” shouts Lestat. “You say you want my love, but you try only to make me hate you!”

“Neither of you can ever understand the true depths of each other's suffering, or resentment, or love,” Armand continues, defiant. “Even now, she wonders how she will break free of your entanglements and your neediness.”

“You understand nothing,” Gabrielle says. She is calm again, after the sudden storm of her emotion.

Armand turns back to Lestat, furious and pleading. “Can’t you see that you will try, again and again, to find love and acceptance where it cannot exist? Can’t you see that you will fail, again and again, and lose more of yourself every time? It will be a miracle if it lasts half a century, with this one, with any of them.”

“Stop,” pleads Lestat.

“None of them can know how bravely you fought for your humanity, against impossible odds. None of them can know how truly you wanted to spare others your fate, how deep and fathomless the loneliness you were willing to submit yourself to was, is, will always be.” Armand whispers the words, the very picture of sincerity, eyes brimming with the pain of Lestat’s refusal to believe in him. “None of them can know the true size of your soul.”

“What do you want?” Lestat asks, more torn than he could have believed he would be at the start of this conversation.

“You!” Armand cries, “You and her! Let us become three, now, and we can avoid all that misery. I can teach you about your powers and our history. I can be the conduit between you.”

He would only destroy them. Slowly, Lestat shakes his head.

“Then I curse you,” Armand spits, and neither Lestat nor Daniel can tell if it is his loving facade crumbling, or a mask he pulls on to hide his hurt, “though you are already cursed. Remember me when you children rise up against you.”

He turns with the intent to leave, and Lestat sees, as clearly as the moon in the sky, that he will blow out from this house like an ill wind and bring destruction wherever he can.

“We can’t part like this,” Lestat says, desperately. “It cannot be how you want it to be, not now, it is too soon. But we have a long time on the devil’s road together, all three of us, and we will meet again sooner if we do not part in hatred.”

This seems, surprisingly, to work. Armand lets Lestat guide him back to his chair at the fireplace. Faced with his expectancy, Lestat falters, but Gabrielle takes charge and pulls a chair round so she sits facing him.

“You speak of love,” Gabrielle says, “and of travelling with us, and of sharing your secrets and powers, but you give us nothing but lies, recriminations, and fear mongering based on experiences you will not explain. You try and trick us into compliance, and strike at us when you fail. How can you expect us to trust you?”

“I tricked you when I thought you were weak," Armand replies. "I see now that I was wrong.”

“You try and trick us still,” Gabrielle insists. “Even now, you try to drive a wedge between me and my son.”

“I tell you the truth, to prepare you for what is to come. You knew full well that it was a bad idea to turn Nicolas, but Lestat did it anyway, and brought all this down upon you. It is his fault. You do dream of cutting ties with all of humanity and with other vampires, of freeing yourself from the demands of the world.”

It is everything that Lestat has feared and felt in his heart these many months.

Gabrielle cocks her head. “How simple you make it sound, as if all the complexities of our hopes and fears can be so neatly summed up. You must have been young and naive indeed, when you were turned.”

Armand looks away, irritated.

“What you say might be true," Gabrielle continues, "but it does not encapsulate my full passion for my son. I love him as I have never loved another being on this earth, and in the loneliness of eternity, he is everything to me. How can you not see that?”

And this is everything that Lestat has never dared to hope, that Gabrielle’s love for him might outweigh all her other considerations.

“You are the one who does not see,” says Armand, soft and poisonous again now. “If you had ever felt real love for another being, you would know that what you feel for Lestat is nothing at all. A single flower, blooming for a season on a vast, barren mountainside.”

“It is futile to talk of this,” Lestat says. In the moment, he cannot stand to hear Gabrielle’s reply. What Armand claims is a lie, like everything he says, that is all that needs to be said.

“No.” Gabrielle does not look away from Armand. “Even now, he thinks he can divide us, when he has only the barest understanding of what he speaks of. In sixty years of life, I have never met anyone as strong as myself, except for Lestat. I made him, and he made me. We are kin in more ways than you can fathom.”

Armand breaks first, looking away, but Gabrielle puts a hand on his cheek, and turns his gaze back to hers. “We may part one day, my son and I, on the Devil’s road, which is so long and winding.” Her voice is slow and steady and sure. “If we do, we will find each other again, and anything that divides us can always be mended. So cease your childish games, and tell us something useful.”

She is captivating, in her strength and certainty. As the memory ends, Lestat’s whole being feels aglow with love for her.

“That worked?” Daniel asks. Watching the scene with the knowledge of how things go, he’s a little shaken by Armand’s prescience. How had he known so much about what would happen?

“He gave us what knowledge he had—scant as it turns out—about the origins of our kind. He showed us his story, not in his blood, but in his memories, mind to mind, as I have shown you mine. A monstrous intimacy.” For a few moments, Lestat broods on some thought Daniel can’t access, then he shakes himself out of it. “He offered much less detail and opportunity for discussion than I do.”

“And?” Daniel asks, curiosity sharpening to a fine point. He’s waited over fifty years for Armand’s story. A minute more seems like too much.

With a sigh, Lestat folds Daniel back once more into his mind, and plays Armand’s story out for him. There is a strange quality to the memories, as if they are a hyperrealistic painting, and Daniel wonders if this is because they come third hand from another mind, because this is how Armand perceives the world, or if one or both of his interlocutors have manipulated them.

It’s a tragic story, patchy in places, and at its most gutting when Armand tries to deny its tragedy. A childhood remembered only in distant, distorted flashes, as if through a tunnel. The betrayal of being sold into slavery. The violence that a sheltered, religious child could not understand, and the hungers of his owners and the so-called friends they introduce him to. Marius, when he comes, comes as a saviour, to whisk Armand from near catatonia to a life of luxury, status, and gentler forms of coercion.

Although the portrait Armand paints of his maker to Lestat is much more flattering than the one he gave to Louis, Marius is in many ways everything Daniel thought he would be, and the vision does little to soften Daniel’s opinion of him. There is no mention of Marius sharing him with friends, as Armand told Louis, but their years together, both mortal and immortal, pass before Lestat’s eyes in a kaleidoscope of decadence that could conceal a thousand ills. Was being pimped out to Marius’ friends something that he didn’t care to tell Lestat and Gabrielle about? Or frosting he added to the pie for Louis, to group them together as escapees from cruel and callous makers? Either theory is plausible.

What cannot be denied is the depth of Armand’s anguish when Satan’s cult storm in and burn his maker’s palace, his maker, and all the servants and other apprentices that Armand has come to love. Or how thoroughly the vampire Santino, founder of the Children of Satan, breaks Armand, with torture and isolation, until he can see nothing beyond the cult, and becomes as dedicated a servant of Satan as any of his tormentors. The centuries with the cult pass more darkly than any others, and grow darker still as the once timeless religion that Armand has dedicated himself also begins to crumble, other covens across the continent guttering out like candles at the end of their wick, falling silent. When Lestat blows in to extinguish Armand’s coven too, it is true that Armand is lost in his wake, baffled and angry at so much change so quickly.

After Armand’s whirlwind vision of his life comes a spirited philosophical discussion between Armand, Gabrielle and Lestat, but Daniel is still thinking so hard about his maker’s story that the finer details are hard to absorb. He will have to listen to the recordings, and hope that Lestat has spoken what he shared in enough detail. What he takes as important from the conversation is: that Armand is persuaded to stay in Paris, to promise not to harm Nicolas, and to accept gold and the gift of Magnus’ house, in the hopes that he can find the meaning he has lost with the destruction of his coven in this new, secular entertainment; that Lestat is fast developing something of a fixation on finding the millenia-old Marius, convinced that he could have survived the fire that Armand believes destroyed him; and the final dose of poison that Armand drips into Lestat’s mind as he leaves them to return to the city.

It will not hold.

“And naturally, you saved those words up and said them back to him when he left with Louis.” Vampires. They’re so petty that Daniel has to admire it. He’s starting to think that might be the true secret to enduring.

“It seemed fitting.” At least Lestat isn’t denying it. “Gabrielle slept that day in the raw earth outside the house, just to show she could, and over the next few nights I wrapped up a few formalities with Roget, and took my leave of the coven. I left Eleni with control of the theatre, funded in perpetuity through my lawyers, and endowed Armand with a great deal of money and Magnus’ house. As we left Paris behind I thought that the theatre had every chance of success, and that Armand and I parted, not quite friends, but something close.”

“And then it was just you and Gabrielle.”

“Oui. As both of us wished it to be.” He says it with finality, but given how things turned out, Daniel knows that is not the end of the story.

Chapter Text

As Daniel and Lestat take their seats for their ninth session, Daniel screws his courage to the sticking place. There’s a subject that he’s been avoiding, mainly out of sheer awkwardness, but a little from genuine fear. While he’s come to understand that Lestat’s bark is much more frequent than his bite, he’s also seen ample evidence that the bite can be rib-crushing and heart-sucking when it comes, and this topic has the potential to make Magnus look like polite dinner party conversation. However, poised where they are in the story, leaving Paris and all relationships but one behind, the time has come.

“You and Gabrielle,” Daniel begins, trying to ease into it. “You had an unusual relationship.”

“She was an unusual person,” replies Lestat, evenly.

“Yes, but your relationship seems particularly complex.” Internally rolling his eyes at his own uncharacteristic reluctance to get to the meat of his question, Daniel stresses the word complex, like there’s a world in which that helps.

“Relationships between makers and fledglings are often complex.”

Ain’t that the goddamn truth. It says a lot that, from a certain angle, the tangled, distinctly Freudian web between Lestat and Gabrielle has, so far, been one of the more successful maker-fledgling relationships that Daniel has heard about in more than passing detail.

“Yours seemed complicated even before you were turned,” Daniel says, resisting saying either ‘Oedipus complex’ or ‘penis envy’ out loud. Freud will only confuse things. “She said she lived vicariously through you. That you were her organ.” Whatever the hell that means. “And then on top of son and organ, you add murderer, maker.”

“Murderer?” Lestat’s voice turns sharp. “Gabrielle was on the brink of death. You know yourself that it is not the same to be turned when the cup is nearly empty as it is to be struck down in your prime.”

“But it’s fair to say that there are a lot of layers to your relationship.”

“Although as humans we were mother and son, as vampires that relationship took a step back.”

“Right. Would you say that you still thought of her as your mother?” Daniel asks.

“Non.” Lestat says, apparently willfully blind to the many times in his memories that they have referred to each other as mother and son. “‘Maman’ was always a role she took on unwillingly. She was freed from that yoke when she became a vampire, she was simply ‘she’, Gabrielle. The one I had needed all my life with all my being. The only woman I had ever loved.”

Daniel is starting to think that Lestat is fucking with him on purpose. Does he listen to the stuff that comes out of his own mouth?

“And if she was no longer your mother, did that leave your relationship free to develop in other directions?” he asks.

Finally, Lestat grows tired of Daniels’ prevaricating. “You are circling something again, like a little dog who has found a rabbithole but is too afraid to go in. Spit it out.”

“Was there a romantic aspect to your relationship?” Daniel asks, almost plain as anything.

Lestat doesn’t blow up or look disgusted, which tells Daniel something in and of itself. What, he’s not exactly sure. Lestat explodes when you get too close to his sore spots. Does that mean Daniel has missed the mark, or that the mark isn’t sore? Or perhaps it’s neither, and he’s simply reached a new level of unexamined denial.

“By romance you mean sex, no?” Lestat asks. Okay, so he’s going there himself.

“That’s certainly one aspect of romance.” There is a pause, during which Lestat watches him with light amusement. Infuriating. “So did you and Gabrielle ever have sex?” Daniel asks. Nothing makes him more bullish than irritation.

Lestat laughs, which again, could mean that he’s uncomfortable. Or nervous. Or that he genuinely thinks this is a funny question.

“No, we did not,” he says. And leaves it there.

“Did you want to?” Daniel asks. And then, with the seasoned journalist’s subconscious instinct for a weak spot, sharpened by vampirism to a needle-fine point, “Did she?”

He thinks he detects a small crack in Lestat’s laissez-faire, ‘I am simply too free from Puritanical shame to compute your questions’ composure, but he could be imagining it.

“Romance is not limited to sex, Daniel,” he says, which is not an answer. “I loved Gabrielle. She was the first person I ever loved, and the only one for many years. I admired her strength of mind, her originality, her intellect, and yes, her beauty. I felt, in that shallow human way, that it reflected well on me, as perhaps she thought my looks did on her. After I turned her she was of myself in the same way that I was of her. It is an intense bond, of the body as well as of the mind.”

“But your bodies didn’t literally bond, that’s what you’re saying,” Daniel presses.

“This small-minded focus on the physical is a relic of the human state, you would do better to move past it.”

“Right. Because you’ve certainly never thrown a squadron-sized tantrum over a blowjob or anything like that.”

Daniel can sense Lestat’s hackles desperate to rise, under the thin veneer of his composure. “It was Louis’ emotional entanglement with the soldier that I objected to.”

A claim Daniel doesn’t believe for a moment, but he lets the smaller fish swim by and keeps on reaching for the bigger one. “Emotional entanglement that you and Gabrielle had in spades. I’m interested in the extent to which that crossed over into the physical.” Across from him, Lestat is at last visibly tense and annoyed. He’s getting somewhere. “You shared blood. You kissed. With tongue. These are all things that, for vampires, are linked to-”

“Gabrielle was not interested in sex with me,” Lestat interrupts. In the instant after the outburst he looks regretful, which does more to convince Daniel there’s some truth to it than anything else he’s said so far, but quickly smooths his face back into indifference and attempts a nonchalant shrug. “Or perhaps not with any men, or not at her age, or not in her immortality, or maybe she had never had been interested in it at all.”

“I got the impression,” Daniel says, with a genuine attempt at delicacy, “that she wasn’t entirely uh, cold to your physical charms.” He is thinking, loudly enough that Lestat will be able to read behind the question in his mind if he cares to, of the avid look on Gabrielle’s face and the possessive grip of her hands when she dispatched Lestat to Paris. Of the preoccupation he had seen in her blood, when she was turned, with Lestat’s body and abilities.

Lestat’s composure cracks faster this time around. “An interpretation that says more about the bent of your mind than it does about Gabrielle,” he snaps.

“We’re going to have to go back over a lot if you think I’m projecting my emotions into your memories,” says Daniel calmly, knowing this is bullshit, and knowing that Lestat knows that he knows.

There is a long, uncomfortable silence. So uncomfortable that on any other topic Daniel might have allowed another deferral, or at least pushed harder to break the tension into either tantrum or disclosure, but this feels too important to risk. Eventually, Lestat sighs and says, “With Gabrielle, I came to understand that there was a thin line between envy and desire.”

Oblique though the sentiment is, Daniel thinks he understands the implication. I wanted to murder the man, and I wanted to be the man, Louis had said of Lestat in their first ever session, and even then Daniel had known that what lurked below it was, I wanted to be the one taking him down the hall to the Orient Room. The two desires—to have and to be—can be closely entangled.

If Gabrielle fell more on the wanting to be the man side of the equation, it fits in with everything Daniel has seen of her human and vampiric life. Lestat’s strong male version of her body came with all the freedom and autonomy Gabrielle craved, and had come into the world, like all her children, against her inclination, at the cost of her own health and strength. He was another part of the life she hated and did all she could to abstract herself from. But, he also angered their oppressors, ruining the complacent peace of their lives, and worshipped her. The potential is there for a powerfully toxic brew of envy, resentment and pride.

As the years went by and Gabrielle aged and sickened in the middle of nowhere, Lestat represented the closest thing she could experience to an escape, a part of herself she could send out into the world to experience all the things she could only read and dream about, the only form of immortality afforded to her. Or so she must have thought, until Lestat gifted her her own form of previously unimaginable independence. Had Gabrielle’s freedom eventually killed her fascination with her son and his masculinity? Daniel suspects he’ll have to get an interview with Gabrielle herself before he gets any real answers.

As fascinating a subject as Gabrielle would no doubt be, Lestat is Daniel’s actual interview subject. And he has made no mention, Daniel doesn’t fail to note, of his own feelings on the state of his and Gabrielle’s physical relationship. From what Daniel has felt from him in the memories, if Gabrielle had been keen Lestat would have seized the chance to forge another tie between them with gratitude and powered through any mortal shame that endured, if any did. What precisely is the balance of disappointment, relief, and straight-up embarrassment if, in the end, she simply wasn’t that interested?

“You shared blood though,” Daniel says, remembering the casual allusion Lestat had made to this when they discussed Armand biting him. More intimate than sex, Lestat had claimed.

“We did,” Lestat agrees, and a little tension seeps out of him with the shift in subject. Is he actually more comfortable discussing the intense, codependent weirdness between him and Gabrielle than he is with acknowledging the possibility that in the end she didn’t actually desire him? Nevermind. Of course he is. “It was a wonderful intimacy and a great comfort, sustaining for body and soul.”

“How long did it sustain you both?” Daniel asks. He knows it wasn’t forever. The glaring irregularity in everything Lestat says is that Gabrielle isn’t here.

“Years,” says Lestat, sullenly.

“And after that?”

With a glare, Lestat submits to explaining himself. “When you share blood with another vampire your souls open, and even through the veil that separates maker and fledgling, you can feel each other. For a long time, it was an affirmation of our importance to each other. But as we travelled, as Gabrielle drew further from civilisation and companionship…” Lestat trails off momentarily. “Well. She thought of the trees and the stars and the beasts in the forest. Of the piercing emotion, neither joy nor sorrow, of complete solitude and stillness. Not of me.

“Her love faded, slower than it has in others, replaced by coldness rather than anger, but gone just as surely.” Lestat’s eyes brim with tears, and he looks away, like Daniel might be shocked by them at this late date. “There were some things that Armand was right about.” He takes a deep, bracing breath. “But she will always be my first fledgling. In some ways, she has been my most equal companion.”

“Equal?” Daniel queries, sceptical.

“Yes,” replies Lestat, instantly defensive. “Some of my gifts were slightly stronger than hers, but as my first fledgling, they passed to her with little dilution, and she had a clarity of mind that allowed her to control them quickly. We were partners in the Dark Gift when we both knew nothing, we explored our new world together.” When Daniel does not appear convinced he adds angrily, “I did not take advantage of her!”

Daniel picks up his notepad and flicks back to a page that he doesn’t need to consult, then rejects his uncharacteristic urge to fidget and sets it back down. “I never said you did. I was thinking that a parent is an authority figure.”

Lestat doesn’t seem to know how to take this, too used to being on the other side of the power paradigm. As usual when things get delicate, he rallies to attack. “Most parents are, when a child is small, but that changes. Do your daughters still respect your authority, Daniel?”

“Perhaps authority is the wrong word. But as a parent, you are the one with the power, for the first couple of decades at least, and that doesn't just vanish overnight when a child turns twenty one.” Sensing a tantrum building, Daniel answers Lestat’s jab at his personal life with a little vulnerability. As he tells his so-called students in his so-called masterclass, honesty isn’t a tactic. But that doesn’t mean you can’t wield it strategically. “My relationship with my daughters is bad because I fucked it up,” he admits.

“Gabrielle was a solace to me in the wilderness of the Auvergne.” says Lestat, coldly. “I did not have the needs and expectations of today's coddled youth.”

“You said yourself that her distance when you were young was painful. You wanted her attention—you even hated the books she read!—and she only gave it to you when you were at your lowest. You needed her, and she didn't need you.”

Lestat gives a broken laugh, but to his credit, doesn’t explode. “Then it seems that things between us did not change that much after all.” He is tense, still taking this line of questioning as an attack, even though for once this isn’t Daniel’s intention.

“Look, I don’t understand exactly what fucked up thing was going on with you two. She got dealt a shit hand, and I don’t know if you became her avatar, or her rival for the life she didn’t get to live as a woman in the 18th century—maybe both—but a parent should put the needs of their child before their own, especially when they’re young, and she definitely didn’t do that.”

Warily, Lestat watches him, waiting to see where this is going. And yes, Claudia is an elephant in the room, almost impossible to ignore, but there’s a point Daniel wants to make before they get to unpacking that set of sins.

“Neither did I,” Daniel admits. “I never put them first. That’s why neither of my daughters want to see me.” It shouldn't sting, when he’s known it so long, but it does. “It doesn’t mean I didn’t love them.”

“You just didn’t love them enough,” says Lestat softly, not with malice, but with understanding, the inadequate child talking to the inadequate parent.

It hurts more than any barb he’s thrown in anger. They sit, for a moment, in mutual shame and yearning.

Eventually Daniel says, “There’s the love you have, and there’s the shit you have to deal with. The wrong one was too big with my kids, and I let them down. That’s not on them. That doesn’t mean they didn’t deserve better.”

The point that Daniel has been trying to make finally sits between them, where they can both contemplate it. Christ, he is becoming a fucking vampire therapist, like an especially irritating subsection of his fans claim on TikTok. He tells himself it’s because a little sympathy goes a long way with Lestat and he wants to him open up, and almost believes it.

“It is true that I craved her love,” Lestat whispers, “and that craving was never truly sated.” He takes a sharp breath and releases it shakily. “I wanted her to need me, to want me with her the way that I always wanted her with me.”

And in return, Daniel infers, Lestat was willing to seize on whatever form of relationship would tie Gabrielle most closely to him. He contemplates trying to drag this confession explicitly out of Lestat, but frankly, he doesn’t have the energy.

“But she wasn’t built that way,” Daniel says instead. In some—crucially not all—ways Daniel can relate. In his darker moments, he’s often thought that he never should have been a parent, and the expectations on fathers are miniscule compared to mothers. Gabrielle barely had a free choice in her life till she was in her sixties, not that much younger than Daniel is now.

“After I gave her the Gift,” Lestat says, “I thought I’d finally won her. I thought I was the exception to her rule of solitude. I was wrong. The exception was the brief time she was uncertain and reached out for reassurance. In the span of her life, it was little more than a fawn’s first wobbling steps in the world.”

Lestat looks down, concealing his expression, and then seems to come to a decision. “There is something I have treated more lightly than it deserves.”

The real twist will be if it’s just the one thing—Daniel’s ongoing list of follow-up questions is formidable—but Daniel tries to keep his expression open and accepting rather than salivating like a hungry dog offered a steak.

“When Gabrielle first came back to me,” Lestat says, “I was giddy. In all those long weeks of not knowing what had happened to any of my family, she was one whose loss I felt the most keenly. To have her come to me, alive if not well, felt like a miracle. That first night I didn’t dare to question how she had escaped the mob too closely, in case that miracle was snatched away.” He laughs, mirthless. “I worried that talking about what had happened to her children and grandchildren might be difficult for her.”

What do you know, this is a topic on Daniel’s list. How efficient of them both. “But you did ask her,” he prompts.

“The very next night,” Lestat confirms. He opens his mind, and takes Daniel back to the crypt in Magnus’ house, just before Gabrielle woke to the first full night of her new life.

Like an old fashioned safe cracker, Lestat has his ear pressed to the side of Gabrielle’s sarcophagus, listening to the slow, steady sound of her heartbeat. When the rhythm finally starts to speed up, followed by the sound of breathing, Lestat nearly cries in relief. She wakes. She is not comatose, or human again, or dead. She is the perfect immortal creature that he has made her.

Lestat’s initial inclination is to stay where he is, as close as possible, so that he is the very first thing Gabrielle sees when she wakes to the night for the very first time, and so that she can feel how he has missed her. Knowing his mother, however, she would find this level of attention oppressive rather than flattering. He steps back and sits casually on his own tomb, so that she can rise in her own time.

After a few interminable minutes—what is she doing in there?—the stone lid lifts and slides slowly back, and Gabrielle emerges.

“Maman,” Lestat says, and no matter how ridiculous she might think him, he cannot hold back his smile, or the tears that brim in his eyes at the sight of her. She is just as he remembered from last night, and from the time before her illness. And she still has a little of his blood on the collar of her shirt, from where he had woken her the morning before, afraid she had slipped, despite all his efforts, into eternal sleep.

“Lestat,” Gabrielle says, gently teasing. Then, another miracle, she initiates an embrace, and clings to him as hard as he clings to her.

“I am so happy you are with me,” Lestat whispers.

“There is nowhere I’d rather be,” she replies, and his heart sings.

Gabrielle pulls back enough to see his face and gently wipes a tear from it with her thumb, a motherly gesture that warms his heart. Then she licks Lestat’s blood from her thumb, which warms him in a whole other way and reminds him of their transcendent blood sharing the night before.

“Hungry?” he asks her.

“Thirsty,” Gabrielle corrects.

“You can drink from me again if you need to.” Lestat is tempted to leave the offer as simple as that and relive their previous communion as soon as he can. However, he’s also keen not to push past his strength Gabrielle’s very first night and make a fool of himself. “If you can wait, it might be best if we hunt first,” he admits.

Gabrielle nods in reply, never one for unnecessary words. It has always been both one of the things that Lestat has most admired about her, that she will not conform to the expectations and wishes of others and talk only to please them, and one of the things he has found most frustrating, that it is so hard to know and understand her. How he wishes he could still see inside her mind, so that they weren’t reliant on something as tenuous and fleeting as speech.

“I have much to show you,” Lestat says, anticipating her approval of the treasure and the cunning hidden tunnel to Magnus’ secret chamber. What she will make of the room of corpses he is less sure, but it will not be possible to conceal it from her. He will simply have to hope that she does not think too deeply about the condition of the many men who suffered and died to sate Magnus’ appetites. “And…” he hesitates.

The truth is, there is as much that Lestat wishes to ask Gabrielle as there is that he wishes to tell, but at the same time, he can’t imagine how much she must have been through. To be so ill, and have to flee for her life. To know that her children have been murdered, perhaps even to have seen it happen. He would do anything to have spared her such pain, but after all these months of uncertainty, he doesn’t know how he can go on if he doesn’t know for sure what happened. Not to mention that if anyone else did survive, he wants to send them assistance as soon as possible.

She tilts her head expectantly.

“You may not wish to speak of it,” Lestat begins. “If you say the word, we will never talk of it again. But just this once, if you can-”

“I have no secrets from you,” Gabrielle interrupts, pushing him towards his point.

“Édouard, Augustin, my father,” Lestat begins where he has least hope. “They are dead?”

“Yes,” confirms Gabrielle.

It is what Lestat has known and expected since he first heard the news of the uprising. Of course, if anyone is dead, it is them. They would have been the ones who brought the wrath of the populace down: the patriarchs, the merciless ones. How often had Lestat suffered at their hands, and hated them to what he thought were the depths of his soul? He drops his eyes to hide how much it still hurts—it shouldn’t, after all they've done—and takes both of Gabrielle’s hands in his own, so he can look at them instead. He concentrates on the sharpness and perfection of her new nails and her small, strong fingers as he wades into even deeper waters. She is here, she is whole. There is hope.

“What about Theodore, and Guillaume?” he asks, naming his two older nephews. They had been mere boys when he left, but Guillaume would have been near his majority by now, and Theodore had always been tall for his age, a fast grower who had as much meat to eat as he wanted as long as Lestat hunted their lands. They could be seen as men. Still, they wouldn’t have had any power yet. They can’t have done much to anger anyone personally, surely?

“Dead.”

“Oh.” It shouldn’t be a surprise. No one had ever hinted that they might have survived. “A-Alexandre?” he had been toddling still last Lestat saw him, with a head of blonde curls like his and Gabrielle’s.

“Dead,” repeats Gabrielle.

A child! How could they? Lestat is not sure he can keep asking. This litany of the dead is too much. Yet, he has promised Gabrielle that he will not make her dwell on or return to what happened to their family, and he must know. He closes his eyes to keep the tears back.

“Marie and Thérèse?” His sisters in law. They had always been distant with Lestat, their husbands’ strange, unruly brother, who roamed the woods like an escaped lunatic and came back laden with dead things, but they had not been cruel. And if the villagers spared Gabrielle, they might perhaps have spared all the women and allowed Marie and Thérèse to return to their own families.

“They are dead too,” Gabrielle replies.

Lestat’s breath catches in his chest. Since he first heard the news he has done all he can to avoid running through this list in his head. There has been no point in doing it, not when he didn’t know for sure. Not when every pain dwindled in comparison to the prospect of losing Gabrielle. Naming them one by one, it is unfathomable that so many might be gone.

“But not...” None of his nieces would have been old enough to marry. None could have carried the title or name on once the men in their family were dead, even if they married. None could have done anything, now or in the future, to deserve any wrath.

Gabrielle does not make him ask. “Catherine, Marguerite and Elisabeth are dead as well.”

Weakness overcomes Lestat, and he has to sit back on his sarcophagus, his whole body trembling. That is all of them. All of them except Gabrielle. Dead. He knows now that he never thought it was true, not until this moment. It truly is a miracle that Gabrielle was able to come back to him. He tugs on her hand and she steps closer, to stand between his knees, and allows him to rest his head on her stomach, just below her breasts, and wrap his arms around her waist. He feels a little like he might float away, but the steady beat of her heart grounds him, and she lays a tender hand on the back of his head when he begins to cry.

“Thank God you were able to escape,” Lestat chokes out.

“God had little to do with it.” Gabrielle’s voice is admirably steady. How strong she is, how strong she has always been.

“How did you manage it? How did you get away?” Lestat asks. Perhaps it was a lucky coincidence that saved her, and the attack happened on one of her rare trips beyond the castle’s walls.

“I saw it coming,” Gabrielle replies. “The letters you sent told me of what was happening in Paris, and I would send one of the children to fetch a newspaper whenever there was one to be had.”

“Surely everyone knew?” Lestat asks, confused. The Auvergne is a backwater, but it is still France.

“Yes, they knew. But you remember how uncurious and set in their ways your father and brothers were. They didn’t think that anything could truly threaten them or change the ways of centuries, despite how serious the news became.” And they wouldn’t have been able to read a newspaper if they had cared to try. “It wasn’t real to them, none of it, even the death of the king and queen. They thought it more distant politicking. They did nothing to appease the townsfolk, no matter their discontent. They got worse. Ever since you left and we no longer had your hunting to feed us, they have gouged their tenants harder than ever, and done even less upkeep on the land.”

All this time, Lestat has pictured his brothers’ finally realizing how much they relied on him with satisfaction. He has actually gloated about it to Nicolas! He never dreamed that this is what it would mean. It is agony, to think he set off this chain of events. He squeezes his eyes tightly shut, and presses his face more firmly into the softness of Gabrielle's uncorseted belly.

“This winter,” Gabrielle continues, “they were truly merciless. The frost came weeks before anyone’s worst expectations, and any fool could have told them there was nothing for anyone to give, that they were asking too much. That they should turn a blind eye and let the peasants hunt for game, if they were too incompetent to do it themselves. Yet week after week they would make their rounds and mete out the harshest punishments they could to poachers or those with no way to pay the tithes.” She snorts. “Idiotic brutes.”

And the rest of their family had to pay the price for his brothers’ and father’s stupidity, right down to little Alexandre and baby Elisabeth, born after Lestat left. It is so unjust.

“I had been saving what I could for at least two years,” Gabrielle says, “from the money that you would send, and whatever I could take from the Marquis without him or the others noticing. I intended to follow you to Paris and see you at least one last time before I died. Then there was one day, after a heavy snow, when they had a boy who was barely eleven whipped on suspicion of poaching. To deepen the injury and highlight their own pettiness, they took the acorns he had foraged for his family.”

It’s the petty slights that can burn the most, Lestat knows. How often had he stoically endured a beating from one of his older brothers, only to lose it when they tried to pretend he didn’t exist at dinner and scream and break things until they locked him away in some distant room?

“It was too much,” Gabrielle says. “I knew that there would be a reckoning. There had been rumours the boy was near death, and every light in the village was still burning come eight o’clock, despite the months of cold to come and scarcity of fuel. I gathered what little I could, I took Édouard’s horse, and I slipped away to the hills before the mob reached the castle. I watched from the shelter of the forest as they dragged everyone from their beds, regardless of age, or culpability, and made them pay in blood for the village's suffering. They executed everyone right there in the yard. Deprivation had made beasts of them, just as it had Édouard and Augustin.”

Torn between begging his mother to stop and pounding her with questions, Lestat holds his breath. He must set aside his needs and wants, and be ready to offer comfort. He cannot imagine the pain of witnessing such a thing. After a pause however, Gabrielle continues, her voice as calm as ever, an absent pat to his back the only sign that anyone might require soothing.

“I made it to the inn at Tournemire,” she says, “and I looked so ill by then that no one recognised me, even as the whole town whispered in shocked, gleeful tones of the scandal and brutality of their neighbours, who murdered a whole family of lords, right down to the babies.” She finishes her story with a ring of satisfaction in her voice that even Lestat cannot entirely ignore.

Finally, he lifts his head and looks up at his mother.

“You were not able to warn them? Or take anyone with you?” his voice wobbles on the words, but he has to ask. She must have tried, he is sure. To explain it to them, over the many seasons they went wrong. To give those who could a chance to flee, when it was too late to stop what would happen. Lestat can well believe that they wouldn’t have listened. His father hated to be told anything.

“It would have been too dangerous to tell them I was leaving, my darling.” Gabrielle combs her fingers through his hair. “And I didn’t have enough money to get anyone else to Paris. I had to hire a girl to travel with me, and I was so weak we could only cover a short distance every day.”

Catherine or Marguerite might have been able to travel with her, and would have needed no paying. One of them could have carried Elisabeth, she was still so young. Lestat almost asks. But no, he cannot bear to hear their names aloud again. They would not have wanted to leave their parents and siblings if asked. Not when none of them, Gabrielle included, would have expected that the village would be so brutal as to go beyond burning the castle or cutting down their immediate masters and tormenters, and kill everyone. It is singularly ruthless, even in these ruthless times. And Gabrielle couldn’t have travelled with a big, conspicuous group, as vulnerable as she was.

Again, Gabrielle wipes away the tears that run from Lestat’s eyes. Her eyes are dry. “Don’t waste your tears. Not one of them had improved since you left, and they were lost to you already, in all the ways that matter.”

She cannot know how much it hurts him to hear that. For his mother’s sake, Lestat forces his breath steady and pushes down his tears. The effort to comfort him is well meant, even if the sentiment itself doesn’t land, and he must rise to it. Is it surprising, if she is not able to face the enormity of what happened? He must be strong for her, and take all the more joy that she is here, as she does with him.

“I will show you around the house, and then we should go back to the city, to hunt, and to talk to Roget,” he says, closing down the subject of their dead family.

The memory ends there, on Gabrielle’s calm, imperturbable face. In context, it’s shockingly cold. So far, Daniel has admired her calm head more than judged it, and tried when judgement crept in, as the official representative of 21st century attitudes, to correct for his gender bias when it comes to interpersonal relationships. But there’s knowing intellectually that people have unfair expectations of women’s emotional intelligence, and then there’s someone recounting watching three generations of their own family being slaughtered without batting an eyelid.

“I dreamed about them the next time I slept,” Lestat says. “I dreamed that I had woken, and found the sleeping chamber as full as a cemetery, a tomb for every member of my family, except a heart was beating under every stone. One by one, as the sun set, they woke up, and we were so happy to see each other. Édouard and Augustin embraced me, and apologised with tears in their eyes for all that they had done. Marie and Thérèse shook my hands and thanked me for taking them and their children in, and told me that they would be as my sisters from that day on.

“They all woke, and the whole horrid chamber, that was always as quiet and empty as death, rang with the children’s laughter as they played and explored their new strength, and I knew that none of them would ever grow old, that they would be this young and happy forever. And finally my father was there. He smiled at me, he kissed me once on each cheek, and he said, ‘thank God you came back when you did son.’” Lestat’s voice cracks with emotion. “‘If you hadn’t, we would all be dead.’”

Daniel doesn’t know what to say in response to this, frankly, heartbreaking dream.

“When Gabrielle woke I asked her, ‘how did they kill them?’ Despite my promise that I would not make her talk of it again, the question had tormented me all the previous night. I knew something of death by then, and how many different forms it could take. I pictured different ends for my family in different orders. The villagers would not have a guillotine as they did in Paris, which could sever someone’s head so quickly it would still blink for several seconds, bewildered but not in pain. They didn’t even have trained swordsmen who knew how to kill someone in a single blow, such as they used for executions before the government mechanised death.

“Perhaps they used an axe, blunt from chopping wood, and it took several blows to kill each person. Perhaps they stoned them, like martyrs, or burned them, like the victims at the witches’ place. Was it painful? Was it slow? Would they have killed the children first, to show my father and brothers a taste of the agony they had inflicted on their subjects? Or did the young ones have to live their final minutes in fear, seeing those that should have protected them slaughtered, not knowing if they were next, and then finding that they were? I thought perhaps if I knew the answers, I could put it out of my mind. And do you know what she said?”

“What?” Daniel asks dutifully, though he knows he won’t like the answer.

“She said, ‘Who?’” Lestat’s peals of laughter fill the room. “She wasn’t thinking of them, her children and grandchildren, not for a moment. That was the last time I ever mentioned them. We never talked of our family and what had happened again. I told myself that it was too painful for both of us, but now I think I knew that if we talked about it, I would not have been able to keep up the stories I told myself, which became more and more like excuses. That Gabrielle did her best to advise them, and they didn’t listen. That if she suspected what would happen she would have tried to persuade them to leave or hide, even if she couldn’t take them with her. That she regretted her reticence, and mourned them in her own way.”

“Those things could all be true.”

“They could. But I think it more likely that she never said a word about the depths of the danger my brothers were bringing to the rest of the family, that she stayed as silent as she had through my whole childhood, enjoying the idea that she was clever and they were stupid. That she no more considered taking any of them with her than she considered throwing herself in front of the mob and begging for their lives, and that she never gave their deaths a second thought once she had escaped with her own life.”

“It’s possible,” Daniel says. “The truth is probably somewhere in between. It usually is.”

“I didn’t want to believe that she was truly unmoved by their deaths, and if she was, I wanted to believe that I was different and special. That I was the only one she loved, and her indifference to others made her love all the more precious. But for Gabrielle, the greatest wish that the Dark Gift fulfilled was to need no one and nothing, not even me. We both tried to pretend otherwise, but it was true, and the cracks between us only became more visible when we left Paris.”

“What happened when you left Paris?” Daniel asks.

“We roamed the continent for a decade or so. We can go over it another night if you wish, but much of it was meaningless.”

“Give me a few highlights,” Daniel suggests.

With exaggerated weariness, Lestat sighs. They’ve covered some tough topics already, so Daniel doesn’t tell him he sounds like a moody teenager.

“We travelled east overland. We did not know what to expect from other vampires, if we would have to guard against attacks from them wherever we went, but we found that vampires were rare—rarer than they had seemed in Paris, where the Children of Satan created and consumed them at a heedless, prodigious rate—and that they lived in a multitude of different ways.

“In several ancient places, we found revenants such as Louis and Claudia encountered in Romania, creatures that I struggle to call vampires. In Istanbul, we found a single small family of vampires living happily in a house, mingling freely with humans after dark and hunting carefully, killing only those who were already weak. In Rome, we discovered that the coven of the Children of Satan that Armand was so convinced had been destroyed had simply moved on from the toxic medieval philosophy that Armand clung to, keeping only the rituals that they enjoyed, such as hymns on the Blood Sabbath, and making new members rarely. They welcomed us as visitors and talked in hushed tones of Armand’s inflexible and antiquated ways, as if he was half legend, and half cautionary tale.

“And so it was everywhere. We met no vampire who knew of our origins as a species, very few as old as Armand, and none as powerful. Eternity, it seemed, did not stretch far beyond four centuries. Gabrielle even began to doubt that Marius was as old as Armand had thought him, and suspected that he had lied to his fledgling to make himself seem more important and powerful than he was.”

Their travels are not sounding that uneventful and meaningless to Daniel, but Lestat breaks from his speech with a sigh and flops back in his chair.

“Many cities were empty of our kind. As the years went on, Gabrielle and I would separate more often. She would vanish for days, then weeks, then months, ‘exploring’, and I would bury myself in humanity, in bars and brothels, galleries and salons, a nocturnal travelogue of shallow excess which increasingly failed to distract me from the distance growing between us. When she came back—and every time she left I feared she would not—she was more and more dissatisfied with the way I wanted to travel, among humans and civilisation. She was more withdrawn and monosyllabic, like she was trying to live the solitude she craved even when were together.”

Another parallel with Louis. Don’t get him wrong, Daniel is ready to fight anyone who judges Louis for being depressed in his toxic marriage. He doesn’t even judge Gabrielle for the fact that she apparently wants to spend her eternity in the Amazon feeding off tree lizards or whatever the hell she’s into: life is a rich tapestry and some people’s dreams don’t make sense to him, but that doesn’t make them less vital to them. Yet, there is a certain irony in how Louis’ tendency to withhold—to immerse himself in books, to subsume the feelings too strong for him to express in silence, to cut threats to his self-control down with perfectly chosen words—is perfectly calibrated to press on every single one of Lestat’s tender spots.

“Is that what happened?” Daniel asks. “One day, she didn’t come back?”

“All through our travels,” Lestat says, brushing past Daniel’s question, “I kept in touch with Roget and Eleni. They both wrote to me frequently, Roget to update me on my investments, Eleni on the theatre’s increasing success and on Nicolas. Whenever the masses grew bored or jaded with their show, they would conquer new macabre heights, largely because of Nicolas’ imagination. He remained devoted to his music and the plays, but grew increasingly sloppy outside of them. He had to be restrained from not just biting, but from turning audience members, and if he was not supervised and cajoled, he would go off script on stage, performing feats of music that could turn even the most sceptical theatre goer into a believer if left to run unchecked. It was precisely the kind of behaviour that would have seen Nicolas struck down in the old coven, and yet Eleni assured me that Armand had kept his promise to me not to harm him.”

“Big of him,” Daniel mutters.

“After a decade or so of exploring Europe and western Asia, Gabrielle and I turned to another continent. We set sail from Damascus to Cairo. The journey took several weeks, mostly confined to the boat in an enforced state of tedium and hunger, and Gabrielle had long yearned to travel to Africa, so I expected that she would vanish into the desert as soon as our feet hit the ground. Unexpectedly, she stayed.

“I took a house in Cairo, intending to live at least a few months in one place, if only so that my post could catch up with me—I had been expecting letters from Eleni before we left Damascus, but had only heard from Roget—and still, she stayed. She was more present than she had been in years, even washed and donned clean clothes without prompting. We scaled the pyramids together, and studied ancient carvings and pottery. We visited brothels to watch the dancers. Most wondrous of all, instead of following me in silence like a shadow as had become her custom, she engaged in conversation on some of her old topics—history, religion, folklore—as if the wilderness had never called her away. We shared blood, and I saw myself in her thoughts once more.”

“A last goodbye?” Daniel suggests.

“Something like that.”

The image of Gabrielle blooms into Daniel’s mind. She is dressed in the type of light, linen clothes that Daniel has come to recognise as the period’s most casual iteration of menswear. They are in a walled garden of weathered golden stone and the nighttime air is warm and dry.

“Forget this house,” Gabrielle says, apropos of nothing. Lestat’s attention snaps to her. Even in the last week, when more of Gabrielle has come back to him than he’s seen in years, she has not initiated much conversation.

“You don’t like the house?” Lestat asks. He thinks it’s rather fine, mostly for the garden that is private and filled with hardy succulents, but he’ll move if Gabrielle is willing to offer a strong opinion on anything human.

“Forget houses,” Gabrielle corrects, and Lestat’s heart plunges even before she finishes her sentence, “come deeper into Africa with me. We will go upriver, through the desert, into the jungle.”

Letat doesn’t answer. He’s been dreading this question, or one like it, for so long that it shouldn’t be a surprise to hear it, yet he feels rooted to the ground in shock. It’s like a nightmare come to life. Is the thing he has feared for so long truly happening?

Gabrielle steps in close and takes both his hands in hers. Her eyes hold his as intently as they did the night that she bade him leave their home in the Auvergne for Paris.

“I understand the life you have chosen,” she says, and Lestat has the rare sense that she is choosing her words carefully as she goes, for his sake, “and I have lived it, for you. Can you not try, just once, to move through the world as I do? Forget your hotels, your carriages, your clothes, your money. Live by your strength and speed, as I believe we are meant to.”

Still, Lestat doesn’t answer. His heart is pounding. His old malady is clawing at his throat and will burst free if he opens his mouth. If he answers, it is an end to everything.

“Instead of forcing ourselves into a facsimile of humanity, night after tedious night,” she continues, voice growing in certainty and passion, “we will do things they cannot dream of. We will fight crocodiles and lions with our bare hands, we will feast on the blood of hidden tribes, we will find the source of the Nile.”

The night, which had been so warm and still, seems to be full of howling winds. Lestat trembles. The intense light that he has seen only a handful of times in his mother illuminates her face. He wishes that that passion was for him, but he knows that it is not.

“And you will leave me forever if I don’t go?” Lestat croaks, his voice thin.

“By day, I sleep in the earth,” Gabrielle continues, not acknowledging his question. “By night, I am on the wing, faster than any beast on land or water. I need no name, I leave no footprints, I am a goddess to those I slay.”

When she talks about it, Lestat can see the beauty, the purity in what she describes. And that it is not for him. He tears his hands away from hers. “I can’t and you know it.”

The very idea of it is absurd. Lestat can no more go and live like an animal in the wilderness than he could live like a wraith in the tombs below Paris. His mind stalls when he imagines himself rising from the earth after their first day sleeping in it and just moving on, in the same filthy clothes. And move on to what? What will they talk about, if they see no new art, meet no new people? How will he stand it, when Gabrielle sinks into the wordless state that she frequently returns in and there is no other living being around for hundreds of miles? He will only lose himself, as well as her.

“So you won’t even try,” Gabrielle says.

“I cannot live that life anymore than you can stay with me.”

“How do you know?” Gabrielle demands.

“Haven’t you known all these years that you wanted to leave?” Lestat retorts. “It is not who I am, this silent, savage god you describe.”

At last, Lestat is unable to deny what he has known in his heart for years: Gabrielle is already lost to him. She cannot be what Lestat wants her to be. And worst of all, she doesn’t truly want him. He is not an essential part of the life she dreams of, as she is to him. If he believed he was it might be enough to face any depredation, but she asks him to come out of obligation and pity, because she knows that he is desperate and lonely.

“I will not stop you,” Lestat says. “You deserve to be all the beautiful things you want to be.” It’s true, she does. And her dream is to be free, even of him. “If I went with you, it would only delay our parting.”

She doesn’t deny it.

For long moments they stand there, staring at each other. The pain is acute, but nonetheless, Lestat knows that he would stretch these moments to eternity if he could. It is Gabrielle who breaks away and strides into the house.

Confused, Lestat follows her, over to the modest pair of trunks that are technically hers, though she often goes months without so much as touching them. Or so he thought. She opens the smaller case and extracts three letters, which she hands to Lestat.

Eleni’s handwriting is instantly recognisable on them all. They have been opened.

“How long have you had these?” Lestat asks.

“Two since we were in Syria. One only a few days.”

Anger that Lestat has not felt towards Gabrielle since he was a child fills him. “You kept them from me.” The first two, for many weeks. “Why?” Lestat demands.

“I wanted one chance,” Gabrielle replies, “but even not knowing, you made your choice.”

What doesn’t he know, Lestat is about to demand, but Gabrielle withdraws a package from the larger trunk, and he doesn’t have to. He knows the shape of it, and what it means. It’s a violin case.

“You could not have helped him,” she says, holding the package out to him.

Lestat takes it. The world is collapsing in on the hard, curved shape, so light in his hands.

“Get out,” he says to Gabrielle.

“Even if you could have,” Gabrielle asks, “is that truly what you want for eternity? To be shackled to a failed vampire, not even by love still, but by hate and duty? When you should have left all such duties behind?”

“Get out!” Lestat bellows, and the French doors to the garden blow open with his anger, showing her the way. She turns sharply and leaves.

“It was the first time I ever raised my voice in anger to her,” Lestat says, pulling Daniel from the memory and returning him to his living room, “and the last.” Lestat’s eyes are lined red with blood tears, poised to fall, so Daniel doesn’t tell him that sounds barely healthier than frequent shouting.

“What did the letters say?” Daniel asks.

“In the first letter, Eleni wrote that Armand had grown angrier and ‘our violinist’ had become yet more erratic. Nicki could no longer be trusted to play in the shows, and had to be contained by one of the coven if humans were in the theatre. Whenever not restrained or composing, he played music, with the wild intensity of that first night I gave him back his violin. He would play into the day even, if they did not take the violin from him and force him into coffin.

“I had offered several times over the years to come back to Paris, and Eleni had always told me that there was no need. For the first time, she suggested I return. Nicki’s feelings towards me hadn’t softened, but she thought that I could provide an anchor to reality, even if it was one wrought of hatred, and that Armand might listen to me as he would not listen to his former subordinates. The letter had been sent months ago.”

Probably just enough time for Lestat to always wonder if he could have returned. Of course.

“In the second letter, which from the postmark I could tell had arrived before we left Damascus, Eleni wrote that Armand’s patience had finally broken. He had cut off Nicki’s hands, to prevent him playing his violin, and locked him away with no sustenance.”

“His hands?” Daniel asks, aghast. He had been ready for internment or immolation, but not dismemberment.

“It is a little less bad than it sounds. Any severed vampiric body part can be reattached, it needs only to be reunited with the rest of the body.” Lestat laughs, and the tears finally spill down his face. “Eleni assured me that Armand would keep Nicki’s hands and violin safe while he was locked away, so that they could be reaffixed,” he adds, in tones of exquisite irony.

Several questions about this new removable-limb revelation spring into Daniel’s mind, but he isn’t callous enough to think it’s the right time to ask.

“When she wrote the third letter, Nicki was already dead. Eleni thought it was the isolation and the hunger, as much as having the music taken away, that broke him.” In the wake of his brief laughter, Lestat is hollow. “By the time that the rest of the vampires prevailed on Armand to release Nicki and give him back his hands, he had returned to his catatonic state. He remained that way for several weeks, and when they finally roused him, he would no longer play. He went back into their old tunnels and began to build a grand pyre for the Blood Sabbath, as they had done in the old days. They all knew what he was doing, of course, but they could not prevent it. Would not. He flung himself into the flames, like Magnus, like the mad old queen vampire. Like so many of us do. He was gone. And Eleni had sent me his violin, to remember him by.”

With a little help from others, Lestat had said of Nicolas’ suicide, during the play. Rather an understatement.

“Gabrielle was afraid that I would return to Paris and seek revenge, but in truth, I was not even that angry with Armand, not at first,” Lestat says, as if answering Daniel’s thought. “It was I who did it. I who seduced him, who subverted him from the path his life could have taken, and who left him there in the hopes that others could control him.”

“Were you angry at Gabrielle?” Daniel asks. Undeniably, she had robbed Lestat of his final opportunity to help Nicolas.

“No. I understood why she had done it. Or perhaps I simply did not have the will left to imagine revenge. In one blow, they were both lost to me. Both my loves.”

“Gabrielle left?” Daniel asks, knowing the answer, and hoping that he hadn’t seen the last words that Lestat and Gabrielle exchanged before she left.

“Later that very night,” Lestat confirms.

The memory of the garden in Egypt rises between them again and engulfs them.

“Do you need anything? Money or…” Lestat trails off, too weary and hollowed out to try and think of a second thing that Gabrielle might plausibly want that he could give. That she might want money already stretches credulity.

“Of course not,” is all she says.

“You know where to reach me. Through my banks, through Roget.” Lestat feels himself talking, as if by rote, and barely knows what he says.

“Don’t say these things,” whispers Gabrielle, and the rare fragility in her voice pierces through Lestat’s numbness, just a little. Of course these mundanities mean nothing to her. They never did, even when she had been human and needed them.

There is surely something Lestat should say. He always thought he would beg and cry when she came to leave, as he did as a child. Instead, it is like Nicki’s void is growing inside him, silent and freezing, the end of all things. Red tears brim in Gabrielle’s eyes, but his are dry. What a reversal.

It actually seems possible, for long moments, that this is how they will leave it. Then Gabrielle wraps her arms around him, and the press of her body against his cracks the ice encasing Lestat. He holds her close, burying his face in her hair one last time. She has left it long and loose for once, and that kindness too is nearly enough to break him.

As they hold each other, Lestat cannot feel how much time is passing, or if the night is hot or cold. There is only the feel of her in his arms. She draws back enough to kiss his lips, slow and tender. There is blood on both their faces, but he can’t tell if they are her tears or his. They taste the same.

How can Lestat endure it? He wants her to be gone already, because he cannot bear this. He wants to freeze this moment forever, so there is never one without her.

“All right then, my darling,” Gabrielle says eventually, taking a small step back. She keeps one hand on his face and looks searchingly into his eyes. Lestat thinks that for once, she is the one wishing she could read his mind. “Will you promise me something?” she asks.

“What?” He still cannot think of anything that she might ask of him, other than journeying into the wilderness.

“Promise me you won’t end it. Not without first seeing me again.”

It’s a surprise. Any other day, Lestat would laugh. “I won’t,” he says, without triumph or rebuke. “I won’t ever be able to end myself.”

Gabrielle’s eyes remain intense, searching his for an answer she is not equipped to read.

“What about what you’ll promise me?” Lestat asks. “Will you let me know where you go? Will you get word to me, ever, so I know that you’re alive, so I know that you’re real, and not just something I imagined?” But even as Lestat says it, he can’t imagine her doing these things. Gabrielle, emerge from the primeval earth to write a letter? To find words and paper and pen and someone to take the message? Every individual step is absurd, let alone the sequence of them. She won’t. She can’t.

“I hope you are right about yourself,” she says, ignoring his preposterous request like he never made it.

“I am.” It’s not a comforting truth, this thing he knows about himself. It’s part of his sentence.

“Then why am I so afraid?”

Because you know you leave me lonely, bitter, and evil, Lestat thinks. He cannot formulate a way to say it while also making Gabrielle understand that he will endure, no matter what, so instead he takes a leaf from her book and stays silent. Maybe if she is afraid enough she will change her mind about leaving and they will have a few more years.

“I love you,” Gabrielle says. “Keep your promise.”

As she presses one last kiss to his lips, Lestat closes his eyes, unable to watch her leave. He can do nothing to close off his other senses, which latch on to the sound of her heart beating. Its rhythm is a little faster than usual as she stands motionless before him, and then begins to fade as she turns and slowly walks out of the garden.

Panic rises as his mother gets further away. Is Lestat really going to let this happen? He can’t. He musn’t. Eternity will be meaningless without her. Every instinct tells him to chase after her, to hold her tight, to promise to do whatever will make her stay or let him follow, whether it’s subsuming himself in the wilderness, or threatening to greet his first sunrise alone outside and unprotected. He cannot endure without her. It’s impossible.

But how could he bear to hold her against her will? How could he stand it, if none of his promises were enough for her? Lestat curls his hands into fists, bracing his whole body against the urge to run after her.

“Don’t go,” he whispers. It is too much to do nothing. “Please.”

For a second or two, Lestat is sure that the inexorable fading of her presence stops, as if she is considering. But if Gabrielle does pause and reconsider, it is brief. The sound of her steps and heartbeat continue to diminish, dwindling until even Lestat’s powerful senses can catch no trace of her.

Truly alone, the grief rises around him like a tide. Or is he sinking into it? It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. He falls to the ground as the black pool of all the losses consumes him. Gabrielle is lost, a grain of sand in the desert. Nicki is dead, unable to live with the trick Lestat played on him. His brothers, his father, his nephews, his nieces, all are dead. Even Armand is lost to him, after what he did to Nicki. There is no living being on this earth with whom he can hope for communion other than the idea of Marius, who is likely as dead as Nicki.

He has a horrible sense of the futility of it all. What if they all have an inescapable destiny? Nicki’s father threatened to break his hands, to take his music away forever, and despite all they did to try and escape that fate, his hands were severed and the music was taken away from him. All Gabrielle had, trapped in her castle in the forest, was her solitude, and now she has broken every living tie and gone even more deeply into nature, to lose herself in a kind of living death. And what has dogged Lestat all his life, but loneliness? He cannot escape it. It is all there is for him.

The memory peters slowly out, but as 21st century New York reasserts itself, the heavy mood remains.

“For all my bravado, I nearly broke my promise that very night,” says Lestat. “The dawn was shorter and fiercer than in Europe, and I was so lost in mourning that I didn’t sense the sun coming until it was nearly upon me.”

Daniel cannot help but wonder how much of his endurance Lestat owes to the promise he made his mother, and how much to his own nature, but the subject of suicide feels dangerous in this moment of all moments.

“Where is Gabrielle now?” Daniel asks instead, though it barely seems a safer topic.

“I don’t know. I never saw her again.” Lestat seems drained. “I used to think that I would feel it if she died, but with time and the deaths of my other fledglings I have lost that certainty.” Lestat is absently twisting one of his rings round his finger, not the Nicki ring, but another Daniel is sure he has worn frequently, with three stones set in it. His voice is distant as he says, “I often wish I had kept something of hers. I have nothing. She didn’t have many possessions, but she cut her hair frequently. I could have kept a lock of it, if only we hadn’t always been careful to burn it.”

“Where do you think she went?” Daniel asks. “After the Nile, I mean,”

Lestat, gazing into the distance, barely seems to register the question. “I haven’t thought about our parting in a century. I had forgotten I said it.”

Not following, and disconcerted by Lestat’s affect, Daniel asks, “Said what?” as stridently as he can without being accused of shouting.

It works, in that Lestat answers, though he still doesn’t look at Daniel. “That she should write, so that I knew she was real and I didn’t imagine her.”

Not expecting this curveball, Daniel keeps quiet.

“I have wondered sometimes, over the years,” Lestat continues. “She was meant to be dead, twice over, from illness and execution. She left no mark behind. As far as I know, the only other vampire still alive who knew her was Armand, and he never mentioned her in your book.”

“He didn't mention a lot of things,” Daniel says, cautiously.

“Yes,” Lestat agrees, but he’s still staring vacantly in that way that makes Daniel see the phantom of eighty years of solitude and isolation in a dilapidated shack, not that far behind him.

“She seems real enough in your memories,” Daniel offers, which she does. He tries to do a Fight Club style review of every time Lestat has shown him Gabrielle, and he’s pretty sure her being imaginary wouldn’t fly as a movie twist. Gabrielle is either real, or this whole endeavour is multiple times more fucked than he thought. “Do you frequently hallucinate people?” he asks, intending it to be a ridiculous question. Though if the answer is yes, it brings a new, hereditary facet to Louis’ imaginary boyfriend. The question works to bring Lestat’s attention back to the here and now. Finally, he looks at Daniel.

“Non.” The answer comes a plausibly deniable hair too quickly, but he sounds more like his normal self as he adds, dismissively, “It was only a thought that tormented me on my darkest days.”

Daniel studies Lestat carefully. “Like when?” he asks.

“As I lay dreaming in the earth, for example.”

“I’m guessing you didn’t bury yourself in the outskirts of Paris?” Yet another strike against that goddamn play.

“I didn’t even have the heart to leave Egypt. Shortly after Gabrielle left, I buried myself right there, trying to escape the grief.”

“How long did you stay buried?” Daniel asks, sensing an opportunity to slip in one of the long list of unanswered questions he’d amassed writing the first book, and perhaps distract Lestat back from the edge of his sanity with a bit of needling.

“A long time,” says Lestat, nonspecifically.

“We’re around 1804, 1805 at this point, right?” Daniel consults his notebook needlessly, because he knows from experience that it irritates people and makes him seem more pedantic.

Lestat nods.

“Because in the trial—sorry, the play known as ‘Trial!’—you said you slept for a hundred years under Port de Neuilly and then went straight to America.”

“That was in the script, yes. My narrative was somewhat simplified.”

“But you also told Louis—or sorry, the tenor that you were murdering at the time—that you were there when Donizetti wrote ‘Don Pasquale’, and that was written in 1842. So, were you blowing a bit of smoke up that guy’s ass before he died, or were you there?” This question is even odds, as far as Daniel is concerned. A hundred year nap to speed the story forward is almost too convenient to be true, but he also harbours no illusions that Lestat is above a bit of stolen artistic valor if claiming it will grind a victim’s ego into a truly fine powder.

“Maybe Louis misremembered.”

Sure, that’s a third option. It doesn’t change the question.

“Did he?” Daniel asks. “Maybe it was a different opera? Tell me the name, I can correct it in the next edition.” He hovers his pen theatrically over his notebook.

Momentarily, Daniel can feel Lestat gathering his energy for another thrilling bit of repartee. By now, he’s pretty sure they both get a kick out of it, at least when it isn’t about a Category 5 tragic event. Then the energy seems to burst like a soap bubble.

“Next time,” is all Lestat says, rising from his chair.

It has been a big day, in terms of crushing life events covered, so Daniel doesn’t grumble too much. He confines himself to calling, “I’ll know if you’re just using this break as an excuse to look up alternative comic operas,” after Lestat as he leaves.

In a terrible piece of timing, given Louis is grappling with a complete collapse in his world view and the black hole at the centre of that collapse is in New York, he has to fly to New York for work. He comes close to canceling or rescheduling, but the thought of living in a world where he’ll forever know that Lestat got to him so much he endangered a deal literally years in the making to avoid just the chance of seeing him by accident is too embarrassing to endure.

It’s only a brief visit—two evenings of meetings, with a day for the lawyers to finalise the contracts in between, and therefore only one sleep in the same city as Lestat—which Louis tells himself is reason enough not to bother informing Lestat or Daniel about it. No one other than the buyers and their staff ever have to know he was there, which is almost as good as it not happening. There are meeting rooms in the building, so Louis won't even have to leave his hotel. If he does, if he so much as catches some faint scent of his maker on the wind, he’s not entirely sure what he’ll do. His gut still writhes with jealousy and anger when he thinks about Lestat, and he’s not that keen on Daniel at the moment either.

On the last night of his trip Louis swings the lid of his travel coffin open raring to wrap his business up and get the hell out of dodge, only to freeze. There are several dead bodies on the floor of his hotel room.

Then, there’s a knock on the door. The door of his en suite. Someone is inside his bathroom, knocking. Louis has a sinking feeling in his chest and one guess as to who it is.

“Louis?” Lestat calls through the door. Not waiting for a reply, he opens the door and steps into Louis’ room. Louis would call out this performative knocking—why ask if you’re not going to wait for the answer?—but apparently Lestat has already carried out several murders next to him while he slept, so the horse has bolted on respecting his space.

“Apologies for the mess and for the intrusion,” Lestat says. He doesn’t look his best, but then, he must have slept in the bathtub. “I would not normally be so rude as to partake of your hospitality without permission, but the sun was well above the horizon after I dispatched these,” he indicates the dead bodies on the floor, “and I was not able to leave.”

Feeling vulnerable lying down, Louis gets out of his coffin. He takes in the scene.

“They’re human.” Three burly human men, heavily armed, and well equipped to do something nefarious, if the number of black canvas bags they were carrying is anything to go by.

“Oui.” Lestat doesn’t fidget, but he shifts his weight and crosses his arms.

If the situation was even ten percent less intriguing, Louis would have considered not even asking—nothing gets under Lestat’s skin more than not getting a response, and Louis can see that his understated reaction is already getting to him—but he has to know.

“Why did you bring me a pile of corpses?” Louis flips one over with his foot. Lestat hasn’t even drunk him, just broken his neck. “If it’s meant to be a gift, they’re a bit past their sell by date.” The man is almost but not quite cool to the touch. He must have been dead most of the day.

“I did not bring them,” Lestat says, affronted, “they brought themselves.” When Louis stubbornly doesn't ask any follow up questions, he explains. “Before going to coffin I opened my mind to check for danger, as I do regularly in these combustible times, and I caught the thoughts of several vampires glorying in your imminent demise. Sadly, this is not unusual. As dawn was close I would have gone to sleep and chased them down when the sun began to set, before they could leave town and bring trouble to your doorstep, but these ones spoke of a plan already in motion, in this city.”

He pauses, no doubt hoping for some gasps from the crowd. Louis doesn't oblige. Lestat's body language closes down even further and he continues.

“They had delegated their villainy to a crew of human burglars: hired them to enter your east facing hotel room with the large picture window,” here a note of disapproval enters Lestat’s voice, which Louis could do without, “after the sun rose and implanted the strong compulsion to raise the blinds before they opened the ‘chest’,” he indicates Louis’ coffin, “where you keep a range of priceless antiques. If you did not burn to death in the initial assault, the vampires hoped to finish you off now, when you would be weakened by extensive burns.” Explanation given, Lestat tosses his hair back and waits. Presumably, for Louis’ gratitude.

“They have been getting more resourceful.” Louis forces his voice to stay detached. “You couldn’t have rung? Or got in touch through Daniel?”

“There were bare minutes to spare before sunrise when I heard of the plan,” Lestat replies, his own voice icing over in response to Louis’ coldness, “and unless the two of you were making an effort to stay awake, it was past your usual bedtimes.”

This reasonable defence only hardens Louis' irritation. He’s sure he could have handled a couple of humans, even in daylight, but he’ll seem petty if he tries to insist on it.

“Well, thanks.” Louis keeps his tone off-hand and dismissive. “I can take it from here.” He doesn’t actually have a plan in place for disposing of bodies in New York City, but Daniel can probably help.

They’ve reached the point when at most periods in their life together, Lestat would have blown up with demands about why Louis was being so reckless and ungrateful, but 21st century Lestat is slightly harder to set off.

“Bon,” Lestat says, in a stiff, technically calm voice that riles Louis up more than him shouting would have. He makes it all the way to the door of the hotel room, one hand on the handle, before he cracks. He turns around. “You did not mention that you would be in New York.”

Louis shrugs. “It seemed easier that way. I had a few meetings, that’s all.”

“Easier? Is it so hard, to say a few words? ‘Hello Lestat, I will be in New York on Tuesday’ would suffice. We could perhaps have taken a walk in the park, for old times’ sake.”

Old times. The gall of this man. “See, that’s exactly why I didn’t tell you.”

“To save yourself the strain of basic courtesy?”

“To save myself from your neediness,” Louis spits, losing his grip on his calm facade. He watches his words hit Lestat, and feels obscurely satisfied. However needy and wounded Louis might be, Lestat is worse. “You always do this: demand, demand, demand. You get an inch, and you need a mile. We talk on the phone a few times, and you're waxing nostalgic about ‘old times’, like they weren’t a horror show for me. I can’t even spend one day in the same city as you without you showing up in my damn bedroom.”

“I never ask you to stay.” Lestat’s voice, his whole body, trembles with the effort it takes to keep from screaming, and something in Louis sings to see the difficulty he has restraining himself, proof that he still knows Lestat’s buttons. Proof that he still has his own power, to counter Lestat’s ability to make Louis want and crave. To make Louis crave even Lestat’s anger, when he can’t have his love. “Not once this century have I asked more of you than you offered.”

“You don’t need to say it. I feel it. It’s in your eyes when you look at me. It’s in everything you don’t say.”

“Perhaps it is your own repressed desires you feel. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Louis’ mind returns to Lestat, claiming that it was Louis’ voice screaming in the darkness that drew him. The injustice of it roars in him, as hot as in 1949. He fucking hopes that’s what Lestat is talking about, so he can set him straight on who lured who.

“Did you not conjure your own version of me, when I was not there to impose my true presence on you?”

Ugh. That.

“A representation of all my worst fears and impulses,” Louis lies, “to mock me, to hurt me. To get between me and other people, the way you always do. Do you actually think it’s good, that I was still carrying that damage with me even after I escaped? You’re sick in the head.”

“How tragic,” Lestat sneers, “that anything would come between you and Armand. Do you think if you’d made him feel more secure in your relationship, he wouldn’t have put you on trial and murdered our daughter?”

Bringing Claudia into this? Now that’s low.

“Maybe he wouldn’t have murdered our daughter if you hadn’t messed him around and abandoned him,” Louis shoots back.

“You dare defend him!” Lestat bellows at the top of his lungs, fists clenching as he steps towards Louis, his restraint finally breaking. Louis relishes it, anticipates the blow out to come, but abruptly, it’s like a wall comes down between them, and Lestat’s anger is on the other side.

For a moment, Louis is afraid, more afraid than he’s ever been when Lestat’s anger is hot and childish; Louis has always been able to meet Lestat there blow for blow. The sudden shift drops Louis back to that moment in 1931 when his taunts had gone too far. Then, Lestat had gone to a colder and more detached place beyond his usual fiery petulance and shown Louis it was only ever pretence that they were equals.

This time, Lestat only steps back and chokes out, “Don’t. Don’t defend him.”

It should be a reprieve, but instead Louis is bitterly disappointed. There’s no way that Lestat has changed this much in his fundamentals. It must be something else that’s changed, like how much he cares. “Is that all you’ve got?” Louis taunts, the memory of his stomach lurching trepidation vanishing as quickly as it arrived. “It’s funny, when I imagined you, you had more backbone. It gave me something to take my anger out on. Do you know how many times I killed you?”

Lestat is pale. “More than the one man in the park you told Daniel about?”

And even the way that Lestat says Daniel’s name, the flourish of his accented pronunciation turning it into an intimate little nickname, rubs Louis up the wrong way. All these other men in Lestat’s mouth: Daniel, Armand, Nicki. Louis wants them gone.

“Hundreds.” The worst thing is, it’s true. It would take so little, when he fed human. Long hair swept over a shoulder, blue eyes, a cocked hip, and Lestat was there before him, dying again. It had been half the reason he’d given up killing, exhaustion with that moment. “Hundreds of times I murdered you, and it was never enough.”

Lestat swallows. “Ça suffit. I understand.” His voice reverberates with emotion, his hands flex, but still, he doesn’t lash out. “You will return to your own continent, and if I have the misfortune of entering into yours, I will do you the courtesy of not informing you.” He turns again to exit, leaving Louis still unfulfilled and alone in his jealousy and anger. He needs Lestat to feel worse than him. Lestat is always worse than him.

“Don’t pretend that you respect my boundaries,” Louis sneers at his back. “What else is this interview, but another way to try and get to me? Deputizing Daniel to be your messenger, sending me your little recordings, because I won’t pay enough attention to you.”

“It is your choice to listen!” Lestat barks, wheeling back round.

“It won’t be, once it’s published. You know, you know, that once the book is out there, I will never escape you. You’ll be in every vampire’s thoughts, you’ll be in shop windows, on the television, a whole publicity tour of you rubbed in my face.”

“Did you not complain endlessly of my secrecy in your book? Now you don’t want to know.” Lestat's voice is still raised, and getting louder. “You are the one who cannot get your own wants and desires clear!”

“And you are the one who can never give me what I need! Who thinks a public spectacle is going to do anything other than piss me off.”

“You have already made a public spectacle of yourself, of us! That is why I have to do this!”

“You just can’t stand that it’s not you they’re talking about. You ignored everything I actually said, like it didn’t even matter. All you care about is making it about you again!”

Louis expects this to keep on winding Lestat up, but instead, it brings him up short. “I didn’t ignore it. It matters.”

“Then you didn’t understand it.” Desperately, Louis throws in everything he has. “An ocean between us isn’t enough. You won’t let it be, you can’t.” You can’t, Louis wants to plead, don’t let it be. Not an ocean, not a book. Instead he goes on, voice cold and hard. “As long as you’re out there, I won’t ever be free of you. You existing is like a knife at my throat.”

That shocks a laugh from Lestat, short and gasping. “Likewise.” He rips the door open—rips literally, since he doesn’t bother to turn the handle and unlock it—and walks through it without looking back.