He's had so many hangovers, but this one is bad. His vision is fucked, a kaleidoscope of nauseating color, his head is pounding, he's starving. Blinking blearily, tasting iron, bruises on— on where? Daniel touches his face, and he cringes at the sticky feeling, alcohol or come or both, probably, and he sways as he is, prone, before he makes the attempt to sit up.
Not entirely successful.
Someone's with him, and he grunts a hello. Is that—
No, he wouldn't have taken her out. Not like this. Some things are his own issues, and Daniel has plenty, things he does on weekends and vacations and 'work trips', and he feels dizzy.
"Morning, man." He sounds so weird. Daniel coughs. "I'm completely in the fucking bag, do you—" augh. Pain. Pain in his stomach, his chest, twisting, demanding. "Do you have an Advil, or anything? I'll clear out in a second, don't worry."
Are his hands alright? Daniel tries again to roll onto his side, get his feet on the floor.
No tremors, no sense of disconnection, no absence of dexterity. If it wasn't for the cramping, the pounding in his head and the labour of his heart struggling in his chest, and the nausea, and the hunger—Advil would be a start, certainly—and beneath all of that, something else. Something good. Maybe whatever he took last night hasn't cleared out of his system.
A lurch. Something agreeable beneath the waters of his consciousness. Yes, just a one-night stand, an inconsequential collision that is, perhaps, not worth the hangover, but then again, Daniel doesn't remember much about the main event. Maybe he half-remembers something else that can fill in the blanks. A gentle hand is helping, stirring them up. Take your pick.
"No rush," says the man in the corner. Pretty, narrow face, big eyes, black curls. "Take your time."
There is a sound coming from the bathroom. Like a person, moaning. Not a nice sound.
It's bad, one of the worst, but he's got experience. He's done a few of these binges— a couple times on purpose, indulging in the dangerous cocktail of desperation, boredom, and the desire to show off to whoever he's with; a few times on accident. Daniel is generous about the accidents, because even if someone doses him with something, it's his own fault for being out here shoving it all up his nose or, once in a blue moon, injecting it.
Speaking of. He pats himself down, feeling the awfulness of all of it and the thread of euphoria that says he's still high, but finds no needle marks on his arms, even as he rolls up the unfamiliar and frankly ugly sweater sleeves. Is he wearing a watch?
Daniel looks up. That sound—
Fuck, but the man sitting over there is beautiful. A look of dumb shock takes over his woozy face. I pulled that?
"You're okay?"
How predictable I must seem to you.
Daniel manages to sit up, clutching the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor. He stares at the sunlight, the extremely good-looking guy veiled by it, feels the all-devouring hunger cramp his stomach. What the fuck. It's never been quite like this. His vision does something funny, tunneling like he's about to throw up before blowing out again, and his hearing becomes hyper-sensitive. Too much weed, he thinks. It always does this with bad weed. Why does he think a few joints are going to do anything on top of hard drugs but make it worse. Like beer and wine. Knock it off, just do more coke, you know that, Daniel.
Like taking a bath.
"Hey what's up with the bathroom."
It comes out too fast. Heywhatsupwiththebathroom. The noises in there. The feeling, like if he doesn't get there and see to whatever's in there he's going to die. He's so fucking hungry, but it's deeper, desperate, fiending. Must have been amphetamines in whatever he took, to be crashing this hard and weird after.
Armand wonders where they are, exactly, in Daniel's mind. What city, what year. It's getting more difficult to tell, and soon, it will be impossible, save for that ineffable, inarticulate sense of empathy that Louis has spent the past week describing, desperate and calm, a terrible and unbreaking silver thread.
The facts of it are this: they are still in Dubai. Of what Louis had commanded of him, being gone was something Armand was happy to abide by. ('Happy'.) The anti-fire measures did their work. There is still historical documentation strewn about. He had told the staff touch nothing, and they won't.
The chair creaks as he stands.
Considers the mess of a half-form fledgling, considers the street outside. He should flick aside the curtains and be done with it. He should do a lot of things.
Instead, he wanders nearer. He sits at the edge of the bed alongside Daniel, placing a hand on his back while he brings his own wrist to his mouth. He leaves Daniel to draw his own conclusions about the sight of him pressing fangs into his own forearm, because in a moment it won't matter. The smell of blood is all-consuming, and when he offers it out to Daniel (dark blood welling out from neat little puncture wounds), he won't have much of a choice as to what he does next.
"Slowly," he instructs. Uselessly.
And a voice in Daniel's head, murmuring. I will tell you this: I begged for the gift, in the end. My maker denied me many times. He believed it to be a force of corruption. I thought it was preservation.
The groaning sound in the bathroom gives way to the sound of a heartbeat. Frantic. The rasp of breathing through a blocked nose. It all sounds as perfectly clear as the rest.
Louis, a merchant of pleasure, a dozen like him in every corner of his Storyville. A streak of violence, yes, the repression of desire and rage entwined. Would I have seen it? I don't know. Armand flexes his hand. Lestat, a player in an ever-increasing demographic of mediocre artists. And Claudia, I cannot begin to fathom. But all chosen. All with some spark that someone more monstrous than they desired to carry into eternity.
His voice is fading. Daniel's consciousness will rise with each long swallow.
Upriver from real civilization, San Francisco Bay and Oakland, is the stuffy and headache inducing state capital— Sacramento is closer to Modesto than any other major city, though, and Daniel knows it well, including which downtown haunts cater to more than just suits. Not much in the way of identity politics; class issues, mostly. Hundreds of thousands of would-be politicians and lawyers and conservatives pretending to be open minded.
There is someone in the bathroom. There is someone sitting next to him on the bed, touching his back. Outside is the city with its half-dozen squat little excuses for skyscrapers, the Americn River, his wife packing boxes for the move to Los Angeles, and...
It's easy, the way he shifts from the past to now. "Now", at least, in big wobbly quotations. Daniel is not one hundred percent sure when or why now is, and for a moment he is outside of himself, and Armand - even as he is imparting his first and last true telepathic messages - will have that same view, the two of them on a motel bed, wrist to mouth, hand to back. As though they are also standing a yard away, watching themselves.
Standing there and watching themselves, Daniel turns to Armand (also standing there, watching themselves).
You don't think your maker saw a spark in you, do you. Because you asked for it.
Armand's blood is more euphoric than any drug. It is more filling than any food. Daniel hears Slowly like the chime of a hypnotist's bell, but he can't quite figure out what to do about it.
Throw-away comments about chatter happening around a scene, as Daniel picked at it to get the timeline straight before waxing poetic about the points on it. Madeleine, bright-eyed, young, not of Armand like her lover wanted, but of Louis; and through him, of Lestat, and the bloodline Armand had detailed out like a Biblical heritage. He had bigger fish to fry and couldn't waste time on pushing about why she felt compelled to clarify that Louis does, in fact, love Armand. Why it made it into the retelling.
There is something cutting to Daniel's observations. Precise and deep at the same time. He should pull the curtain back, let the sunlight in. He should wrench his wrist away and see if Daniel will ask him for more, too, if he could be able to hear a ring of truth to it beneath the hunger. It repulses him, this. He said that.
Ineffable connection, as ancient blood warms Daniel's arteries. They know at the same time that Madeleine felt nothing of the kind. She felt a ghost of something else, of someone else. How Armand knew this as he walked away.
It had been important, at the time, that Louis remember it differently.
No, Armand says. Agreeable. He can award Daniel the confirmation he scarcely needs, and then Armand leaves Daniel's mind as it closes off from him forever.
The drawing of his blood has always felt as pleasurable to him as its taking. His heart insistently beats and keeps its pace even as a powerful hunger pulls blood through his veins. It feels like silk sliding on his skin. The happy smile Daniel had caught as Louis drank from him had—been a show, yes, but sometimes true things are displayed to execute a purpose, as well as false.
The hand at Daniel's back slides up his spine, to the back of his neck, and holds fast. Removes his wrist. Daniel is stronger than he was but there is nothing he could do to shrug off Armand's grip, a rare show of strength that vanishes as soon as Armand is able to stand.
His wrist wound heals immediately.
He could chalk this up to evading Louis' command, finding a loophole, acting out of spite, but Armand can recognise when something is over. There is no satisfaction in knowing that Louis' hold over him is less than irrelevant. Louis can't kill him. Louis is no one. (His heart, battered, pumping affection out of itself and into his chest like poison.) This is something for himself.
"I'll be curious to know if the spark in you will stay," Armand says out loud, his hand lingering on Daniel's shoulder. "For what it's worth, Daniel, I hope so."
They can pretend together that this is a social experiment.
Daniel asked for it, once. He would have probably asked for it now, if it were just Louis, if he hadn't made the discoveries he'd made. A pathetic cry to be released from the degenerative disease, from the misery of human life, from his mundane emotional agonies. Does that leave him without a spark?
Armand never hears this questioning. Daniel, maybe, never even fully realizes he's thinking about it; the blood is too powerful, and by now, his experience is running out of usefulness. What was a steadying hand at the start of the staggering bloodlust is now of little value— it's too much, the loss is like a knife plunged into his gut, the center of the crippling starvation pain.
"Hope?"
He stares up at him. Glasses absent. There's barely any blood on his mouth, having devoured all that was offered to him so completely. Daniel hears people outside, far away outside, talking and thinking in languages he recognizes but doesn't really understand beyond pigin greetings and left or right. He can say 'bathroom', 'airport', 'embassy', 'hello' and 'help' in Arabic. He feels the panicking human in the bathroom. He hopes it's not Real Rashid, as he is not going to be able to control himself.
"Since when does your hope extend beyond being repulsed by a hole?"
Daniel has held still in the face of this man before, by force. He has been terrified of Armand before. He has been certain he would die, he has whispered his desire to live, he has been agreeable as any optimistic hostage pissing himself in terror. He offered to blow him. He'd have done so. He sits and waits for that answer even as his consciousness begins to spiral, hearing nothing but heartbeats. His. Armand's. The person in the bathroom's.
Despite himself, the way he feels as though he has stepped back away from the outwards operations of his physical body, staring down at Daniel as if through magnified glass—
Not a laugh, exactly. A breath, shaped as one, the corner of his mouth in a brief and subtle uptick. Daniel asking questions, circling back, offering riposte while his body is processing its death, while it grows into something else.
It's probably too much to ask for that to be accepted as a full answer, but it nearly is.
"Do you think I don't know when I've been disproven?"
It's close to a real question. He had sat passive, frozen, as eighty years worth of craft was dismantled before him, a sprung airlock, sirens blaring as everything was blown into the void. He had fled Daniel, chasing Louis, and some of the most ridiculous bullshit he can remember himself saying for some time coming out of his mouth, desperate. Childish. So it's only fair to imagine nothing has changed since 1973.
His hands close into fists. He can't touch him. He wouldn't know why he is doing it, right now.
"We can give it a hundred years," is more wry. "Catch up on old times. It would be a shame if you hadn't been able to hold onto what makes you when we do."
Nothing to Armand. Because Armand is just watching, even though—
He's so fucking hungry. It's worse than fitting, fiending, the shakes, withdrawals. It feels as though his body is devouring itself in desperation, crunching inward like some sci-fi movie and he's being sucked out a tiny hole in a spacecraft.
Pounding of a heartbeat. Rushing of blood. There behind the bathroom door. Daniel lurches but just falls to the floor, hands and knees, clumsy like a calf taking its first steps in a stable.
"Is this really the only way you could think to get me to shut up?" His voice is wretched with rasping desperation. Armand can't read his mind anymore. But, but, oh fuck, oh god,
"I can feel you."
Stranger than the hunger that is splitting him open and restitching him in some other alien image. A sense he's never had before, a phantom limb that's all over, and awareness and at the center of it, another person. It's not the person in the goddamn bathroom, it's Armand, like he can see him inside his head but it's not imaginary, it's there, he feels him like fingerprints lingering on his skin. If the door opens. If the door opens.
His hand, on the handle of the bathroom door. Pausing.
The connection between maker and fledgling isn't unknown to him, but it's been close to half a millennia since he has known it beyond the sensory absorption of the vampires around him, their little tangles, their frayed threads of connection.
"Yes," he says. "And I can feel you."
An awareness, at its most basic. He could close his eyes and identify the shape of Daniel in the room, like he is also on his hands and knees, also feeling fangs grow in his mouth like it's all new again. And in return—
Well, there is no concealing anything. What they lack in precision, telepathic whispers, clear thoughts, the divulging or discovering of secrets, this connection makes up for in the way there is no ability to block it, manipulate it, erase it, no more than you can will your blood to flow in a new direction.
And there is something in Armand that feels like a closed, shaking fist, grasping onto that tether. Frightened in a way that seems far from existential.
"Sundown is in three hours," he says, as if he could speak over it. "But you can leave the room as you like. I'll clean up, this time."
Opening the door. Inside, a spike of panicky breathing from the stranger inside, who has been commanded to lay still, a sacrificial goat.
Haha. Well. Given everything, Armand should be fucking obligated to clean up. It's his fault. So it's not that generous.
In a world where this is not happening, Daniel critiques the offer on those grounds. Instead, there is a phantom sensation of his hand laying over Armand's trembling one. Not comforting because Daniel isn't in a state of mind where he can reach such nuance (and wouldn't be doling out comfort to Armand on purpose anyway), but a raw, ragged cousin of it. Lost in a storm, he grabs at the only familiar thing he can reach. His only company in this hurricane. At least they won't drown alone.
Daniel doesn't hear him. He hears only a heart, and lungs, and something else. Liquid sunlight moving over satin. Life, life that he needs, more than water, more than cocaine, more than quaaludes that aren't decades past their expiration dates. More than fucking oxygen.
Moving into the bathroom is either too fast or too unnecessary for him to process, but he completes the action. Moving from where he is to being where he should be is much the same. One hand grabbing the stranger's hair to jerk his head back, the other clawing at his clothed chest. Daniel stares. It's a split-second but it goes on for an eternity.
Am I doing this?
Before he even completes the thought, fangs are embedded into the sacrifice's throat. Skin like the paper wrapper of the sweetest candy, a frustrating entanglement— then suddenly it's not, the bite has gone deep enough to shred both jugular and carotid, and blood flows grotesque and abundant. Daniel drinks, and drinks, and drinks.
Armand doesn't watch, and scarcely needs to. He can hear it, he can feel it, the vampire consuming the two time Pulitzer winning investigative journalist, who has made his living absorbing and producing. The man on the bathroom ground has a story in him, and he bleeds it out between demanding fangs, monstrous appetite. Yes, this is revenge. This is punishment.
It is. In time. A hundred years from now, maybe less. It hadn't been a lie when he'd said this repulsed him. He had seen it, the way he'd become repulsive in the eye of the man he'd worshiped. The men he has worshiped.
Daniel knows the rules. If he chokes himself on dead blood after all he's heard in the past week, it's his own fault.
Armand gets to clean up the sacrificial person-goat, and he gets to clean up the man in a room down the hall, who made the mistake of walking towards a snack machine the moment Daniel opened the door. A Tunisian national in Dubai for construction work, on the verge of being trafficked. Daniel has seen a documentary about the matter before, made by a peer coming up in the investigative journalism world. The piece had been dull. He wonders why. It's clearly a dire issue.
He makes it back to the apartment building, where security guards are nervous— he is on the guest list, they have seen him coming and going, he seems to have been injured. Rashid intervenes.
Louis foots the bill for his evacuation, but Louis never returns to the building before Daniel leaves. Not to New York. To London, first, through Talamasca, where they have plans for him. Debriefing and a laundry list of other things; they want him to compare notes with Sam, they want to arrange for sterile blood bags, they want him to stay with them. Daniel plays along until he can grab a hard drive, and he's out the back door.
Who can fucking write under those conditions. Please.
One hundred years, huh.
Plenty of time to get acquainted with the nerve in his head that doesn't belong to him, and how to twist it just right.
He disappears. There is no hope in scanning the minds of the world and finding him if Daniel were capable, if his allies were to try. Louis is likely to notice a neat splitting of shared finances and acknowledge the likelihood of additional funds squirreled away and now gone, but it isn't so disruptive a removal as it could be, given how deeply embedded Armand had become in their shared business. No, it's a neat surgery.
And he proves more than adept at hiding from Google.
Daniel publishes a book, appears on talk radio and local news, claims it's all real. Viral videos, hashtags, BookTok essays, a burgeoning online cult following. The Theatre des Vampires finds itself popular again despite no longer existing, a charming YouTube series of animations after someone dug up the scripts in a little private archive in Paris. Daniel becomes easy to follow, wherever he might be.
Characteristically, the human race has an excellent capacity for rationalisation, wrong conclusions. It's only relevant inasmuch as the way the thoughts and threats of vampirekind begin filling the sky in a way that Armand can not recall ever happening before in his lifetime. Perhaps, all of history. This, too, can be observed.
And just like any media circus that becomes ubiquitous enough to break containment, there come the articles, the thinkpieces, most of them finding clever thematics about vampirism and the unlife of Daniel Molloy's career in investigative journal, the state of news media as a whole in an increasingly chaotic world, and the most cutting coming out of The New Yorker, who hadn't bothered to ask for comment.
A nice hotel room. Very good security. Molloy will be used to the necessary practice of coffin-sized luggage being flown in ahead of him.
The sun goes down and his awareness will drift to the surface.
And immediately, there's the sound of a frantic heartbeat, ragged breathing, all pain. A man, a journalist of decent renown, ten years Daniel's junior, wearing nondescript clothing and a wedding ring, and lying at the bottom of the generously proportioned bathtub in the other room with a small, neat wound in the spine that has cut off from him the ability to use his legs.
There is no screaming, no crying for help. He was given one instruction, which was to be quiet, and his whole mind is occupied on this single task.
Thump, thump, rasp. Faster and faster. Daniel does not leap out of the coffin, though for a moment he's primed to do so— bursting forth like a fucking Dracula movie before he has half an idea of what's going on is less than advisable. So he waits and listens, suspecting a very confused hotel maid, or another vampire's mortal minion. What time is it?
There is no dramatic creak as he pushes up the casket lid, which is split into two parts the way all of them are these days, but there is a tragic thunk-thunk-thunk as his cell phone fumbles itself to the floor, slipping free of the decorative memorial display section where he'd had it tucked. No one's in the room, so that's good, but—
Oh, no, just kidding.
In a blink he's at the bathroom door, staring in. What he's seeing does not conform to reality at first as Daniel looks, flummoxed, at a dickhead opinion piece factory frozen like a deer caught before a semi-truck, all tucked into the oversized garden tub. He'd sat in there yesterday, in near-scalding water, marveling at the dexterity to do so without fear of killing himself by accident trying to get out, and admiring his own toes. (It's an achievement, he knows from his work chronicling harmless kinksters, to be a man and arrive at an advanced age and still have respectably cute feet.)
His critic beams terror and relief at him through silent, trembling eyes. Daniel tenses an invisible muscle to reach out, yank answers to questions from his head, but thinks better of it before he goes through with it. He will in a minute. But why not learn.
The saddest, tiniest whimper is emitted as Daniel shuts the bathroom door and turns back to the main room. Someone was here, and someone did the fucking most. But what else did they do?
Yes, a presence, formerly speaking. Louis had spoken of his own maker having a scent, which is the kind of thing Louis might just say, citationless behaviour straight from a YA novel, and if it's true, if people can be sussed out via something a little more olfactorily ineffable than a favourite cologne or hand soap, then Daniel-as-vampire certainly hasn't been around Armand long enough to pinpoint it out.
Blood, first. Likely the guy who's bled through his shirt. Then something else, earthier, and a sharper note that's like cigarettes but isn't. Burning, dry.
A touch to the shiny surface of his coffin. To the hanging curtains, which had been pulled back enough so that the light of an afternoon sun might peek through and warm the opposite wall. His laptop, idle on the shitty little desk even a nice hotel room provides.
Eventually, however, beyond these touches (nothing on the computer, although he could probably run something to show its activity in the past twelve hours, much like he can on the book critic's grey matter), nothing terribly out of place. Just the impression of his presence, ghosting through, withdrawing.
Not a scent, no, not quite. It is some other sense that Daniel has no word for; it's as though in undeath, his body has developed a new, second nervous system, and perhaps this 'scent' is yet another thing detected by that whatever-it-is.
Like a kiln. He thinks of ancient Greek pots and the gods depicted on them in gold and onyx.
Just a light creeping, he supposes. Feeling off about it, he succumbs to paranoia and checks the suitcases tucked under the bed, which is serving as a better workstation than the shitty little desk. They seem undisturbed, but he pulls one out anyway and unzips it to behold the books within. Boasting incriminatory titles and containing data that probably won't help at all, but he has to try. Doesn't he?
No sense-memory-feeling suggests his visitor has perused them. Daniel absently zips his thumb over the corner of one paperback, like he's animating a flipbook. Whether I like it or not, he thinks wryly.
Back on his feet. Back to the bathroom.
The door opens again. Daniel stares at the younger man, listens to the fraying, swimming panic of his vitals, and he pushes oh-so-gently. He wants to see what happened, he wants conformation of what he already knows: Armand was here, Armand left him this very considerate, personally and deliberately curated breakfast. Knelt beside the bath, it's an easy thing to reach out and pull this illiterate hack close enough to pierce his panic-sweaty skin with sharp teeth.
He touches the bond. You were near. Where are you now?
It's a confusing mess of memory that the victim has been left with. A little sharp glimmer of something, the smell of fridge-cold beer, a smartphone with a tinny voice chatting on the other end, flicking on the lights
a shock, a figure in the vibrant yellow light of a homey hallway, bright red eyes, and then
fragments. A soothing voice. Walking. They walk until the lactic acid built up in his legs makes him want to collapse, until he can't feel his feet. The brush of dawn light.
And a voice.
"I've been wondering how far along you've thought ahead. If, when the truth of the thing turns your airport drugstore paperback into one of the most important historical documents in human history, if credibility allows—"
A glitch. Begging, but his jaw is locked closed. His face being touched, turned, seeing nothing at all but Armand, vividly, looking through him, like he's nothing.
"The vivisections won't end with a scathing review. You're being reckless."
Then, plunging cold, and the interior of the bathroom, watching the afternoon light slowly travelling up the opposite wall. He urinates himself, he prays, he wonders—was Molloy telling the truth? What the fuck, and he could laugh. At least the haunted doll who brought him here has left.
Nice to have breakfast delivered. He could have done without the piss, but it's very convenient; he just has to figure out how to dispose of the fucking corpse, now, but he supposes that's a part of whatever Armand is doing. Teaching him to swim by dropping him head first into the deep end and observing from the high dive platform, miles away, big eyes.
Reckless. Right. Daniel thinks viciously, If you gave a shit about discretion you wouldn't have started any of this, to no one.
Which suggests, upon reflection, that Armand doesn't hate it as much as he says he does. Repulsed, repulses me. Little hitches, shifting under Daniel's boring, insignificant attention.
A response can't come right away. Even if he had a method, he'd wait. He has to think about it, and he has to time it appropriately; it's not Louis' business, it's not that any of the vampires circling him, and certainly not Lestat's, though his intermittent company has been educational. More directly educational than Armand's so far, even if he's got to pick at him and go at it sideways to get an answer which he then has to decode. They are alike, in that way. He'll tell neither. Too soon to get murdered.
Talamasca sends him numbers (too many vampires, not enough scuttling photographers to track them). He oversees a surreal, nervous, funny Zoom call in which DJ Sam catches them up on a few things. They go to Quito in Ecuador, the oldest city in the whole continent (San Francisco de Quito, the whole title, what a funny little thing that makes two of them exchange old looks and one of them fume for being out of the loop), and foil through blood and one intense sunlight therapy lamp a plot to punish Louis for his violation. Daniel gets his own room. A third wheel keeping his third eye out for the fourth. A grain of sand in the Sahara, this plot.
He makes his decision there, in the heat. He buys a plane ticket and sends somebody else on in his stead with badly forged papers, just a joke, heads elsewhere back north, and to Vancouver.
Like a fucking spy movie. He contemplates the bond in the meantime, and wonders what news of these aberrant activities has reached his maker.
An island in Greece. The mountains in southern Germany. The coasts of Turkey. It's fruitless, ultimately, and the murders that happen there are lost in the overwhelming churn of global news, if they even break containment into the local kind.
Armand is precise, using the kind of seamless anonymity his wealth can provide him, sparing no expense because there's no point otherwise. His arrangements are meticulous, every detail in its place, and becoming a ghost in the memories of any human staff he might require for this and that, of which there are few. He is very good at managing his life.
Good enough he doesn't have to think about it. Good enough that he doesn't have to think at all.
Now and then, the shiver of tension, the cord strung between himself and one other. He thinks he would know if it snapped, but then, Lestat and Louis had been so stupid about all of that, so perhaps it's an illusion. An illusion when the cord shivers. An illusion when he can, so gently that it never trembles, hold onto it.
His search is a distraction. What would he even do, if he found Marius de Romanus? Besides requesting his judgment.
Vampires dead in south America. Forged paperwork, hotel bookings, the occasional image leaking out into common social media. He knows enough to know that Daniel is not heeding him. You know I'd give two seconds of consideration and realize I'd just be Claudia, and yet, he tags along with the two lovers. Or they tag along with him. Louis is as good a follower as he is poor a joiner, and what Armand remembers of the tattered condition of Lestat's mind when last he touched it casts doubt on him being the driving force of this trio—
All the same. Annoying.
He ignores the tugging at their bond, anyway. Daniel will have to do better than that.
Like Claudia, Daniel drags Louis (and a +1) around on a mission; like Claudia, he is the youngest vampire among them. Unlike Claudia, he doesn't require an escort, and can come and go as he pleases. That he has living family still, that he is a public figure, are handy excuses. His daughters are worried after all his shit on TV. One of his exes wants money. He has agents to wrangle.
He says goodbye to Louis, he tells Lestat to think of who he'd like to play him in a movie adaptation (just to rile him up).
Stupid, he thinks, when he gets to where he's going. This is stupid, and Armand isn't even going to notice, and why would he want Armand to notice him anyway? Why is he doing any of this? But it can't go unanswered, or he'll go insane, no matter that it's been weeks.
The man is a former YouTube grifter turned TikTok grifter turned conservative streaming pundit. He calls himself a philosopher, and millions of eager, dipshit fans agree. He's written four books and they're all awful— neotrad, capitalist drivel that misses the point of Stoicism and dresses it up in a wannabe-Mormon dress shirt and tie. He does these awful weekly shows where he misunderstands a new (real) philosopher each episode and explains why their work is all lies, and he really, really hates (and really, really doesn't get) Sartre.
One among many. He doesn't seem to get anything. But Marxism is a buzzword, and the guy selects himself one day while Daniel is attempting a scheme, by announcing a partnership with a unique blockchain coin.
Sparks in people. There must have been an incredible one in Jean-Paul Sartre, for Armand to have wanted to flex his friendship with him. He even has (had, maybe) his books still. An insignificant mortal who was so important that he got a deliberate, smug-casual cameo in a story that tore Armand's heart out. That Sartre and Beauvoir were infamous for seducing young students together is something he opts not to think too hard about.
(Mostly.)
Armand likes existentialism. Armand likes French philosophy and he hates Web3 pricks. There's no way for Daniel to make the vampire see this murder and know it's for him, so he takes a while, loopy from the kill (the guy was buzzing on oxy, a predictable hypocrite), to go through his office. He finds some notes, selects a specific page, folds it up, and puts it into the corpse's pocket.
Plans to read Journey to the End of the Night, though based on these shallow scribblings, he never got around to it. The notes are mentioned in the news coverage, and the grifter has an endless parade of enemies to investigate.
Given the noise of the world, Daniel is right to imagine the chances of Armand finding his kill and attributing it as a message, or a gift, is low.
Except it isn't low. It's found like fresh rainwater collected in the leaves on a desert island, unlikely but looked for.
It justifies a return to America.
When vampires find little to live for, but don't yearn for death either, they go to the ground. They bury themselves and become as corpses until something awakens them. Armand has seen it a few times, here and there, and can't fathom it as anything but a kind of annihilation. He is not certain there would be anything now or in the future that would compel him to rise again. He's not sure how the others manage it.
But he does slip the leash of existence, some, once he lands again. Money, properties, assets dropped, discarded, to be picked up later, maybe. The sun can't hurt him and his ancient metabolism makes infrequent demands of him. He is in stasis without trying. He goes to where this grifter was killed.
And pulls something taut, as if testing distance. Daniel, not so far away. And now Daniel knows, he too isn't so far away.
Daniel has rented a car for his scenic route, and upon collecting it as the dusk darkens to night, the sound of a heartbeat from within the trunk greets him. Inside, a gift: here is a young-ish man in last night's club outfit. His hands and feet are secured in zipties, and shreds of fabric have been stuffed into his mouth, knotted in place. The MDMA in his system can't have been from a full twelve hours ago, still bright in his blood.
In a pocket, a little page fragment, an excerpt out of Journey to the End of the Night. Torn out as if along the edge of a ruler.
Again, as he feels Armand's nearness; again, as he looks down at the guy in his trunk, and reaches out with one hand to tug below his eye and observe his pupils. He smells like shitty vodka and fear and thrumming, shimmering blood, and he has two blue tablets in a tiny bag in his back pocket.
The trunk closes.
Everywhere is middle-of-nowhere on the road between South Dakota and Iowa. Daniel drives into the dark (into the night), and he thinks about how he is, in fact, actually incredibly angry at Armand, still. Not for turning him, in retrospect, that seems as sure as anything, which is a little funny. For everything else. For doing strange things to his life, for torturing him, for Claudia, who Daniel never even knew. For Louis, even though he knows Louis wasn't a perfect victim.
I must be the dumbest person on Earth.
The origin of their association, the psychic surgery on his brain, the violation every time his memories were dug into. (The hand on Louis' shoulder, stopping the way he was forcing a tremor.) Being given a drugged boy is insane. It's insane, Armand, like he can hear him. What the fuck are you doing. He doesn't know who he's asking. (Himself.) Gifts and pages like secret letters.
He drives to a rest stop with dozens of miles of nothing in either direction. He forces the remaining pills into the abducted clubber's mouth. He closes the trunk and waits, and thinks about:
Fumbling. Low lights. Thrumming music, more heartbeat than sound.
The strange sense that he (this kid, whoever he is) isn't getting anywhere. His hand is caught in Armand's shirt and his other hand is being held at the wrist, and they are pushed together, like gravity has tipped towards the wall that he has Armand against. Armand is taller (and stronger), and gazing at him with
something. Want? Pity? His eyes are crazy to stare into, fire-coal orange, twin lanterns that continue to burn in his mind's eye between each blink. He gets a hand behind his neck to try to pull him down
and can't. Unmoving. Something sharp beneath his chin, pushing his face aside.
"Human philosophy," Armand is saying, so quiet, but somehow easily heard in the riot of the establishment, "is often deeply flawed for being premised on the eventuality of death. To give meaning to life, there must be an end. And that everything a person does is in service to prepare or fend off that inevitability."
So what do you wanna do about it?
Ignored. "It's why I am fond of Sartre. His writings seemed unconcerned with this question, at least at times. To exist is to behold. To behold is to love. And love is nothing but an illusory celebration of that existence."
Let go of my arm—
"Rest."
The mind is still. They leave.
When the boy's hands are tied, he obediently has his arms held behind him. He sits into the open trunk and offers out his ankles, Armand diligently tying them too. Out here, in a pre-dawn haze, there are some more details to pick up. A kind of sharpness to Armand, a tense way of holding his face.
His makes eye contact with the kid, and seems to want to say something else. Maybe it's deliberate, showing off this glimmer of vulnerability, uncertainty, the desire nested in hesitation. Maybe Armand is only so good at curating a person's mind.
Instead, "I sometimes enjoyed our conversation," before the rest is submerged in deep blackness, which resolves into the humid interior of a car's trunk and the taste of saliva-soaked denim.
The boy shivers and shifts in his bonds, still pliant from Armand's mindwhammy even if a part of him is very, very afraid, layered drugs making him dizzy and euphoric. His heart beats erratically; if Daniel drinks from him, he'll get that transferred high, and the young man will die in a hurry. A heart attack from shock before the blood loss has a chance to do it. Daniel wants to.
He sits. On a bench away from the car, looking out at a view that wouldn't be visible to him a year ago. Now, he sees it all in a hundred shades of dark— Picasso, but real, midnight violets and deep sea blues, velvets, coals. Stars like salt spilled over a shiny black table. He smokes a cigarette, then another one, and he thinks.
Armand protected Louis' happiness even when he was unable or unwilling. Armand maintained Louis' passions, to the point of going beyond his awareness of their dealings. Armand cleaned up after over one hundred boys, until Louis snapped and Armand snapped harder. Armand can't give an answer about what he likes, but Daniel knows what he hates. And he hates this. The first was an appeal to Daniel's ego, flattering him by silencing a critic. This is appealing to his vices, even though he knows damn wall that Armand cannot fucking stand it. Why, then? What does Armand like, what does Armand want, enough that he'd do this despite his revulsion?
Fucking puzzle box. Like the one out of Hellraiser. Daniel's going to get sent to the suffering dimension again before he makes any headway. Especially if Armand takes this as a rejection.
But his decision is made. He pulls the kid out of the trunk, finds his wallet. Unties him, settles him in the back seat, and begins the seven hour drive to bring him home. Three hours in, he stops at a drive-thru and gets the poor guy a Diet Coke and a bottle of water. When they finally make it back to an apartment complex on the edge of a community college town, Daniel helps him up the stairs to his door. Tells him that things went weird, that his son's roommate picked him up, but they were both too high and too drunk. As far as I know nothing happened, he says, as the kid tries about ten times to get his keys to work before finally succeeding. You guys just got super fucked up, and I don't have the right homeowner's insurance for that. Take care of yourself, alright? It's all fun and games until somebody doesn't actually drive you home.
It doesn't take psychic powers to muddle his memory. He'll barely remember anything, just somebody's weird grandfather driving him home and making him hydrate.
The shittiest Motel 6 in the world is good enough for Daniel. It smells, but it has blackout curtains. He folds up the torn-out book page and sticks it in his wallet, next to an old corny photo of his youngest daughter she made at a photo booth kiosk in a mall, and then he drags all the bedding into the bathroom. Blackout curtains or not, he feels strange and restless and the room is too big— he bites his own wrist, he turns the lights off, he lays on his side on cold, awful tile, and really, really wants to have eaten that kid.
There will be a way to send a letter to Armand. He knows it. He's got lawyers and real estate agents. And Daniel is an excellent investigator.
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Not entirely successful.
Someone's with him, and he grunts a hello. Is that—
No, he wouldn't have taken her out. Not like this. Some things are his own issues, and Daniel has plenty, things he does on weekends and vacations and 'work trips', and he feels dizzy.
"Morning, man." He sounds so weird. Daniel coughs. "I'm completely in the fucking bag, do you—" augh. Pain. Pain in his stomach, his chest, twisting, demanding. "Do you have an Advil, or anything? I'll clear out in a second, don't worry."
Are his hands alright? Daniel tries again to roll onto his side, get his feet on the floor.
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No tremors, no sense of disconnection, no absence of dexterity. If it wasn't for the cramping, the pounding in his head and the labour of his heart struggling in his chest, and the nausea, and the hunger—Advil would be a start, certainly—and beneath all of that, something else. Something good. Maybe whatever he took last night hasn't cleared out of his system.
A lurch. Something agreeable beneath the waters of his consciousness. Yes, just a one-night stand, an inconsequential collision that is, perhaps, not worth the hangover, but then again, Daniel doesn't remember much about the main event. Maybe he half-remembers something else that can fill in the blanks. A gentle hand is helping, stirring them up. Take your pick.
"No rush," says the man in the corner. Pretty, narrow face, big eyes, black curls. "Take your time."
There is a sound coming from the bathroom. Like a person, moaning. Not a nice sound.
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Speaking of. He pats himself down, feeling the awfulness of all of it and the thread of euphoria that says he's still high, but finds no needle marks on his arms, even as he rolls up the unfamiliar and frankly ugly sweater sleeves. Is he wearing a watch?
Daniel looks up. That sound—
Fuck, but the man sitting over there is beautiful. A look of dumb shock takes over his woozy face. I pulled that?
"You're okay?"
How predictable I must seem to you.
Daniel manages to sit up, clutching the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor. He stares at the sunlight, the extremely good-looking guy veiled by it, feels the all-devouring hunger cramp his stomach. What the fuck. It's never been quite like this. His vision does something funny, tunneling like he's about to throw up before blowing out again, and his hearing becomes hyper-sensitive. Too much weed, he thinks. It always does this with bad weed. Why does he think a few joints are going to do anything on top of hard drugs but make it worse. Like beer and wine. Knock it off, just do more coke, you know that, Daniel.
Like taking a bath.
"Hey what's up with the bathroom."
It comes out too fast. Heywhatsupwiththebathroom. The noises in there. The feeling, like if he doesn't get there and see to whatever's in there he's going to die. He's so fucking hungry, but it's deeper, desperate, fiending. Must have been amphetamines in whatever he took, to be crashing this hard and weird after.
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The facts of it are this: they are still in Dubai. Of what Louis had commanded of him, being gone was something Armand was happy to abide by. ('Happy'.) The anti-fire measures did their work. There is still historical documentation strewn about. He had told the staff touch nothing, and they won't.
The chair creaks as he stands.
Considers the mess of a half-form fledgling, considers the street outside. He should flick aside the curtains and be done with it. He should do a lot of things.
Instead, he wanders nearer. He sits at the edge of the bed alongside Daniel, placing a hand on his back while he brings his own wrist to his mouth. He leaves Daniel to draw his own conclusions about the sight of him pressing fangs into his own forearm, because in a moment it won't matter. The smell of blood is all-consuming, and when he offers it out to Daniel (dark blood welling out from neat little puncture wounds), he won't have much of a choice as to what he does next.
"Slowly," he instructs. Uselessly.
And a voice in Daniel's head, murmuring. I will tell you this: I begged for the gift, in the end. My maker denied me many times. He believed it to be a force of corruption. I thought it was preservation.
The groaning sound in the bathroom gives way to the sound of a heartbeat. Frantic. The rasp of breathing through a blocked nose. It all sounds as perfectly clear as the rest.
Louis, a merchant of pleasure, a dozen like him in every corner of his Storyville. A streak of violence, yes, the repression of desire and rage entwined. Would I have seen it? I don't know. Armand flexes his hand. Lestat, a player in an ever-increasing demographic of mediocre artists. And Claudia, I cannot begin to fathom. But all chosen. All with some spark that someone more monstrous than they desired to carry into eternity.
His voice is fading. Daniel's consciousness will rise with each long swallow.
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There is someone in the bathroom. There is someone sitting next to him on the bed, touching his back. Outside is the city with its half-dozen squat little excuses for skyscrapers, the Americn River, his wife packing boxes for the move to Los Angeles, and...
It's easy, the way he shifts from the past to now. "Now", at least, in big wobbly quotations. Daniel is not one hundred percent sure when or why now is, and for a moment he is outside of himself, and Armand - even as he is imparting his first and last true telepathic messages - will have that same view, the two of them on a motel bed, wrist to mouth, hand to back. As though they are also standing a yard away, watching themselves.
Standing there and watching themselves, Daniel turns to Armand (also standing there, watching themselves).
You don't think your maker saw a spark in you, do you. Because you asked for it.
Armand's blood is more euphoric than any drug. It is more filling than any food. Daniel hears Slowly like the chime of a hypnotist's bell, but he can't quite figure out what to do about it.
Throw-away comments about chatter happening around a scene, as Daniel picked at it to get the timeline straight before waxing poetic about the points on it. Madeleine, bright-eyed, young, not of Armand like her lover wanted, but of Louis; and through him, of Lestat, and the bloodline Armand had detailed out like a Biblical heritage. He had bigger fish to fry and couldn't waste time on pushing about why she felt compelled to clarify that Louis does, in fact, love Armand. Why it made it into the retelling.
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Ineffable connection, as ancient blood warms Daniel's arteries. They know at the same time that Madeleine felt nothing of the kind. She felt a ghost of something else, of someone else. How Armand knew this as he walked away.
It had been important, at the time, that Louis remember it differently.
No, Armand says. Agreeable. He can award Daniel the confirmation he scarcely needs, and then Armand leaves Daniel's mind as it closes off from him forever.
The drawing of his blood has always felt as pleasurable to him as its taking. His heart insistently beats and keeps its pace even as a powerful hunger pulls blood through his veins. It feels like silk sliding on his skin. The happy smile Daniel had caught as Louis drank from him had—been a show, yes, but sometimes true things are displayed to execute a purpose, as well as false.
The hand at Daniel's back slides up his spine, to the back of his neck, and holds fast. Removes his wrist. Daniel is stronger than he was but there is nothing he could do to shrug off Armand's grip, a rare show of strength that vanishes as soon as Armand is able to stand.
His wrist wound heals immediately.
He could chalk this up to evading Louis' command, finding a loophole, acting out of spite, but Armand can recognise when something is over. There is no satisfaction in knowing that Louis' hold over him is less than irrelevant. Louis can't kill him. Louis is no one. (His heart, battered, pumping affection out of itself and into his chest like poison.) This is something for himself.
"I'll be curious to know if the spark in you will stay," Armand says out loud, his hand lingering on Daniel's shoulder. "For what it's worth, Daniel, I hope so."
They can pretend together that this is a social experiment.
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Armand never hears this questioning. Daniel, maybe, never even fully realizes he's thinking about it; the blood is too powerful, and by now, his experience is running out of usefulness. What was a steadying hand at the start of the staggering bloodlust is now of little value— it's too much, the loss is like a knife plunged into his gut, the center of the crippling starvation pain.
"Hope?"
He stares up at him. Glasses absent. There's barely any blood on his mouth, having devoured all that was offered to him so completely. Daniel hears people outside, far away outside, talking and thinking in languages he recognizes but doesn't really understand beyond pigin greetings and left or right. He can say 'bathroom', 'airport', 'embassy', 'hello' and 'help' in Arabic. He feels the panicking human in the bathroom. He hopes it's not Real Rashid, as he is not going to be able to control himself.
"Since when does your hope extend beyond being repulsed by a hole?"
Daniel has held still in the face of this man before, by force. He has been terrified of Armand before. He has been certain he would die, he has whispered his desire to live, he has been agreeable as any optimistic hostage pissing himself in terror. He offered to blow him. He'd have done so. He sits and waits for that answer even as his consciousness begins to spiral, hearing nothing but heartbeats. His. Armand's. The person in the bathroom's.
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Not a laugh, exactly. A breath, shaped as one, the corner of his mouth in a brief and subtle uptick. Daniel asking questions, circling back, offering riposte while his body is processing its death, while it grows into something else.
It's probably too much to ask for that to be accepted as a full answer, but it nearly is.
"Do you think I don't know when I've been disproven?"
It's close to a real question. He had sat passive, frozen, as eighty years worth of craft was dismantled before him, a sprung airlock, sirens blaring as everything was blown into the void. He had fled Daniel, chasing Louis, and some of the most ridiculous bullshit he can remember himself saying for some time coming out of his mouth, desperate. Childish. So it's only fair to imagine nothing has changed since 1973.
His hands close into fists. He can't touch him. He wouldn't know why he is doing it, right now.
"We can give it a hundred years," is more wry. "Catch up on old times. It would be a shame if you hadn't been able to hold onto what makes you when we do."
Drifting for the bathroom door.
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Nothing to Armand. Because Armand is just watching, even though—
He's so fucking hungry. It's worse than fitting, fiending, the shakes, withdrawals. It feels as though his body is devouring itself in desperation, crunching inward like some sci-fi movie and he's being sucked out a tiny hole in a spacecraft.
Pounding of a heartbeat. Rushing of blood. There behind the bathroom door. Daniel lurches but just falls to the floor, hands and knees, clumsy like a calf taking its first steps in a stable.
"Is this really the only way you could think to get me to shut up?" His voice is wretched with rasping desperation. Armand can't read his mind anymore. But, but, oh fuck, oh god,
"I can feel you."
Stranger than the hunger that is splitting him open and restitching him in some other alien image. A sense he's never had before, a phantom limb that's all over, and awareness and at the center of it, another person. It's not the person in the goddamn bathroom, it's Armand, like he can see him inside his head but it's not imaginary, it's there, he feels him like fingerprints lingering on his skin. If the door opens. If the door opens.
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The connection between maker and fledgling isn't unknown to him, but it's been close to half a millennia since he has known it beyond the sensory absorption of the vampires around him, their little tangles, their frayed threads of connection.
"Yes," he says. "And I can feel you."
An awareness, at its most basic. He could close his eyes and identify the shape of Daniel in the room, like he is also on his hands and knees, also feeling fangs grow in his mouth like it's all new again. And in return—
Well, there is no concealing anything. What they lack in precision, telepathic whispers, clear thoughts, the divulging or discovering of secrets, this connection makes up for in the way there is no ability to block it, manipulate it, erase it, no more than you can will your blood to flow in a new direction.
And there is something in Armand that feels like a closed, shaking fist, grasping onto that tether. Frightened in a way that seems far from existential.
"Sundown is in three hours," he says, as if he could speak over it. "But you can leave the room as you like. I'll clean up, this time."
Opening the door. Inside, a spike of panicky breathing from the stranger inside, who has been commanded to lay still, a sacrificial goat.
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In a world where this is not happening, Daniel critiques the offer on those grounds. Instead, there is a phantom sensation of his hand laying over Armand's trembling one. Not comforting because Daniel isn't in a state of mind where he can reach such nuance (and wouldn't be doling out comfort to Armand on purpose anyway), but a raw, ragged cousin of it. Lost in a storm, he grabs at the only familiar thing he can reach. His only company in this hurricane. At least they won't drown alone.
Daniel doesn't hear him. He hears only a heart, and lungs, and something else. Liquid sunlight moving over satin. Life, life that he needs, more than water, more than cocaine, more than quaaludes that aren't decades past their expiration dates. More than fucking oxygen.
Moving into the bathroom is either too fast or too unnecessary for him to process, but he completes the action. Moving from where he is to being where he should be is much the same. One hand grabbing the stranger's hair to jerk his head back, the other clawing at his clothed chest. Daniel stares. It's a split-second but it goes on for an eternity.
Am I doing this?
Before he even completes the thought, fangs are embedded into the sacrifice's throat. Skin like the paper wrapper of the sweetest candy, a frustrating entanglement— then suddenly it's not, the bite has gone deep enough to shred both jugular and carotid, and blood flows grotesque and abundant. Daniel drinks, and drinks, and drinks.
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Armand doesn't watch, and scarcely needs to. He can hear it, he can feel it, the vampire consuming the two time Pulitzer winning investigative journalist, who has made his living absorbing and producing. The man on the bathroom ground has a story in him, and he bleeds it out between demanding fangs, monstrous appetite. Yes, this is revenge. This is punishment.
It is. In time. A hundred years from now, maybe less. It hadn't been a lie when he'd said this repulsed him. He had seen it, the way he'd become repulsive in the eye of the man he'd worshiped. The men he has worshiped.
Daniel knows the rules. If he chokes himself on dead blood after all he's heard in the past week, it's his own fault.
Armand leaves before he stays.
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He makes it back to the apartment building, where security guards are nervous— he is on the guest list, they have seen him coming and going, he seems to have been injured. Rashid intervenes.
Louis foots the bill for his evacuation, but Louis never returns to the building before Daniel leaves. Not to New York. To London, first, through Talamasca, where they have plans for him. Debriefing and a laundry list of other things; they want him to compare notes with Sam, they want to arrange for sterile blood bags, they want him to stay with them. Daniel plays along until he can grab a hard drive, and he's out the back door.
Who can fucking write under those conditions. Please.
One hundred years, huh.
Plenty of time to get acquainted with the nerve in his head that doesn't belong to him, and how to twist it just right.
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And he proves more than adept at hiding from Google.
Daniel publishes a book, appears on talk radio and local news, claims it's all real. Viral videos, hashtags, BookTok essays, a burgeoning online cult following. The Theatre des Vampires finds itself popular again despite no longer existing, a charming YouTube series of animations after someone dug up the scripts in a little private archive in Paris. Daniel becomes easy to follow, wherever he might be.
Characteristically, the human race has an excellent capacity for rationalisation, wrong conclusions. It's only relevant inasmuch as the way the thoughts and threats of vampirekind begin filling the sky in a way that Armand can not recall ever happening before in his lifetime. Perhaps, all of history. This, too, can be observed.
And just like any media circus that becomes ubiquitous enough to break containment, there come the articles, the thinkpieces, most of them finding clever thematics about vampirism and the unlife of Daniel Molloy's career in investigative journal, the state of news media as a whole in an increasingly chaotic world, and the most cutting coming out of The New Yorker, who hadn't bothered to ask for comment.
A nice hotel room. Very good security. Molloy will be used to the necessary practice of coffin-sized luggage being flown in ahead of him.
The sun goes down and his awareness will drift to the surface.
And immediately, there's the sound of a frantic heartbeat, ragged breathing, all pain. A man, a journalist of decent renown, ten years Daniel's junior, wearing nondescript clothing and a wedding ring, and lying at the bottom of the generously proportioned bathtub in the other room with a small, neat wound in the spine that has cut off from him the ability to use his legs.
There is no screaming, no crying for help. He was given one instruction, which was to be quiet, and his whole mind is occupied on this single task.
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There is no dramatic creak as he pushes up the casket lid, which is split into two parts the way all of them are these days, but there is a tragic thunk-thunk-thunk as his cell phone fumbles itself to the floor, slipping free of the decorative memorial display section where he'd had it tucked. No one's in the room, so that's good, but—
Oh, no, just kidding.
In a blink he's at the bathroom door, staring in. What he's seeing does not conform to reality at first as Daniel looks, flummoxed, at a dickhead opinion piece factory frozen like a deer caught before a semi-truck, all tucked into the oversized garden tub. He'd sat in there yesterday, in near-scalding water, marveling at the dexterity to do so without fear of killing himself by accident trying to get out, and admiring his own toes. (It's an achievement, he knows from his work chronicling harmless kinksters, to be a man and arrive at an advanced age and still have respectably cute feet.)
His critic beams terror and relief at him through silent, trembling eyes. Daniel tenses an invisible muscle to reach out, yank answers to questions from his head, but thinks better of it before he goes through with it. He will in a minute. But why not learn.
The saddest, tiniest whimper is emitted as Daniel shuts the bathroom door and turns back to the main room. Someone was here, and someone did the fucking most. But what else did they do?
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Yes, a presence, formerly speaking. Louis had spoken of his own maker having a scent, which is the kind of thing Louis might just say, citationless behaviour straight from a YA novel, and if it's true, if people can be sussed out via something a little more olfactorily ineffable than a favourite cologne or hand soap, then Daniel-as-vampire certainly hasn't been around Armand long enough to pinpoint it out.
Blood, first. Likely the guy who's bled through his shirt. Then something else, earthier, and a sharper note that's like cigarettes but isn't. Burning, dry.
A touch to the shiny surface of his coffin. To the hanging curtains, which had been pulled back enough so that the light of an afternoon sun might peek through and warm the opposite wall. His laptop, idle on the shitty little desk even a nice hotel room provides.
Eventually, however, beyond these touches (nothing on the computer, although he could probably run something to show its activity in the past twelve hours, much like he can on the book critic's grey matter), nothing terribly out of place. Just the impression of his presence, ghosting through, withdrawing.
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Like a kiln. He thinks of ancient Greek pots and the gods depicted on them in gold and onyx.
Just a light creeping, he supposes. Feeling off about it, he succumbs to paranoia and checks the suitcases tucked under the bed, which is serving as a better workstation than the shitty little desk. They seem undisturbed, but he pulls one out anyway and unzips it to behold the books within. Boasting incriminatory titles and containing data that probably won't help at all, but he has to try. Doesn't he?
No sense-memory-feeling suggests his visitor has perused them. Daniel absently zips his thumb over the corner of one paperback, like he's animating a flipbook. Whether I like it or not, he thinks wryly.
Back on his feet. Back to the bathroom.
The door opens again. Daniel stares at the younger man, listens to the fraying, swimming panic of his vitals, and he pushes oh-so-gently. He wants to see what happened, he wants conformation of what he already knows: Armand was here, Armand left him this very considerate, personally and deliberately curated breakfast. Knelt beside the bath, it's an easy thing to reach out and pull this illiterate hack close enough to pierce his panic-sweaty skin with sharp teeth.
He touches the bond. You were near. Where are you now?
There will, of course, be no answer.
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a shock, a figure in the vibrant yellow light of a homey hallway, bright red eyes, and then
fragments. A soothing voice. Walking. They walk until the lactic acid built up in his legs makes him want to collapse, until he can't feel his feet. The brush of dawn light.
And a voice.
"I've been wondering how far along you've thought ahead. If, when the truth of the thing turns your airport drugstore paperback into one of the most important historical documents in human history, if credibility allows—"
A glitch. Begging, but his jaw is locked closed. His face being touched, turned, seeing nothing at all but Armand, vividly, looking through him, like he's nothing.
"The vivisections won't end with a scathing review. You're being reckless."
Then, plunging cold, and the interior of the bathroom, watching the afternoon light slowly travelling up the opposite wall. He urinates himself, he prays, he wonders—was Molloy telling the truth? What the fuck, and he could laugh. At least the haunted doll who brought him here has left.
No more laughing now.
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Reckless. Right. Daniel thinks viciously, If you gave a shit about discretion you wouldn't have started any of this, to no one.
Which suggests, upon reflection, that Armand doesn't hate it as much as he says he does. Repulsed, repulses me. Little hitches, shifting under Daniel's boring, insignificant attention.
A response can't come right away. Even if he had a method, he'd wait. He has to think about it, and he has to time it appropriately; it's not Louis' business, it's not that any of the vampires circling him, and certainly not Lestat's, though his intermittent company has been educational. More directly educational than Armand's so far, even if he's got to pick at him and go at it sideways to get an answer which he then has to decode. They are alike, in that way. He'll tell neither. Too soon to get murdered.
Talamasca sends him numbers (too many vampires, not enough scuttling photographers to track them). He oversees a surreal, nervous, funny Zoom call in which DJ Sam catches them up on a few things. They go to Quito in Ecuador, the oldest city in the whole continent (San Francisco de Quito, the whole title, what a funny little thing that makes two of them exchange old looks and one of them fume for being out of the loop), and foil through blood and one intense sunlight therapy lamp a plot to punish Louis for his violation. Daniel gets his own room. A third wheel keeping his third eye out for the fourth. A grain of sand in the Sahara, this plot.
He makes his decision there, in the heat. He buys a plane ticket and sends somebody else on in his stead with badly forged papers, just a joke, heads elsewhere back north, and to Vancouver.
Like a fucking spy movie. He contemplates the bond in the meantime, and wonders what news of these aberrant activities has reached his maker.
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An island in Greece. The mountains in southern Germany. The coasts of Turkey. It's fruitless, ultimately, and the murders that happen there are lost in the overwhelming churn of global news, if they even break containment into the local kind.
Armand is precise, using the kind of seamless anonymity his wealth can provide him, sparing no expense because there's no point otherwise. His arrangements are meticulous, every detail in its place, and becoming a ghost in the memories of any human staff he might require for this and that, of which there are few. He is very good at managing his life.
Good enough he doesn't have to think about it. Good enough that he doesn't have to think at all.
Now and then, the shiver of tension, the cord strung between himself and one other. He thinks he would know if it snapped, but then, Lestat and Louis had been so stupid about all of that, so perhaps it's an illusion. An illusion when the cord shivers. An illusion when he can, so gently that it never trembles, hold onto it.
His search is a distraction. What would he even do, if he found Marius de Romanus? Besides requesting his judgment.
Vampires dead in south America. Forged paperwork, hotel bookings, the occasional image leaking out into common social media. He knows enough to know that Daniel is not heeding him. You know I'd give two seconds of consideration and realize I'd just be Claudia, and yet, he tags along with the two lovers. Or they tag along with him. Louis is as good a follower as he is poor a joiner, and what Armand remembers of the tattered condition of Lestat's mind when last he touched it casts doubt on him being the driving force of this trio—
All the same. Annoying.
He ignores the tugging at their bond, anyway. Daniel will have to do better than that.
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He says goodbye to Louis, he tells Lestat to think of who he'd like to play him in a movie adaptation (just to rile him up).
Stupid, he thinks, when he gets to where he's going. This is stupid, and Armand isn't even going to notice, and why would he want Armand to notice him anyway? Why is he doing any of this? But it can't go unanswered, or he'll go insane, no matter that it's been weeks.
The man is a former YouTube grifter turned TikTok grifter turned conservative streaming pundit. He calls himself a philosopher, and millions of eager, dipshit fans agree. He's written four books and they're all awful— neotrad, capitalist drivel that misses the point of Stoicism and dresses it up in a wannabe-Mormon dress shirt and tie. He does these awful weekly shows where he misunderstands a new (real) philosopher each episode and explains why their work is all lies, and he really, really hates (and really, really doesn't get) Sartre.
One among many. He doesn't seem to get anything. But Marxism is a buzzword, and the guy selects himself one day while Daniel is attempting a scheme, by announcing a partnership with a unique blockchain coin.
Sparks in people. There must have been an incredible one in Jean-Paul Sartre, for Armand to have wanted to flex his friendship with him. He even has (had, maybe) his books still. An insignificant mortal who was so important that he got a deliberate, smug-casual cameo in a story that tore Armand's heart out. That Sartre and Beauvoir were infamous for seducing young students together is something he opts not to think too hard about.
(Mostly.)
Armand likes existentialism. Armand likes French philosophy and he hates Web3 pricks. There's no way for Daniel to make the vampire see this murder and know it's for him, so he takes a while, loopy from the kill (the guy was buzzing on oxy, a predictable hypocrite), to go through his office. He finds some notes, selects a specific page, folds it up, and puts it into the corpse's pocket.
Plans to read Journey to the End of the Night, though based on these shallow scribblings, he never got around to it. The notes are mentioned in the news coverage, and the grifter has an endless parade of enemies to investigate.
Daniel takes the scenic route to New York.
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Except it isn't low. It's found like fresh rainwater collected in the leaves on a desert island, unlikely but looked for.
It justifies a return to America.
When vampires find little to live for, but don't yearn for death either, they go to the ground. They bury themselves and become as corpses until something awakens them. Armand has seen it a few times, here and there, and can't fathom it as anything but a kind of annihilation. He is not certain there would be anything now or in the future that would compel him to rise again. He's not sure how the others manage it.
But he does slip the leash of existence, some, once he lands again. Money, properties, assets dropped, discarded, to be picked up later, maybe. The sun can't hurt him and his ancient metabolism makes infrequent demands of him. He is in stasis without trying. He goes to where this grifter was killed.
And pulls something taut, as if testing distance. Daniel, not so far away. And now Daniel knows, he too isn't so far away.
Daniel has rented a car for his scenic route, and upon collecting it as the dusk darkens to night, the sound of a heartbeat from within the trunk greets him. Inside, a gift: here is a young-ish man in last night's club outfit. His hands and feet are secured in zipties, and shreds of fabric have been stuffed into his mouth, knotted in place. The MDMA in his system can't have been from a full twelve hours ago, still bright in his blood.
In a pocket, a little page fragment, an excerpt out of Journey to the End of the Night. Torn out as if along the edge of a ruler.
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Again, as he feels Armand's nearness; again, as he looks down at the guy in his trunk, and reaches out with one hand to tug below his eye and observe his pupils. He smells like shitty vodka and fear and thrumming, shimmering blood, and he has two blue tablets in a tiny bag in his back pocket.
The trunk closes.
Everywhere is middle-of-nowhere on the road between South Dakota and Iowa. Daniel drives into the dark (into the night), and he thinks about how he is, in fact, actually incredibly angry at Armand, still. Not for turning him, in retrospect, that seems as sure as anything, which is a little funny. For everything else. For doing strange things to his life, for torturing him, for Claudia, who Daniel never even knew. For Louis, even though he knows Louis wasn't a perfect victim.
I must be the dumbest person on Earth.
The origin of their association, the psychic surgery on his brain, the violation every time his memories were dug into. (The hand on Louis' shoulder, stopping the way he was forcing a tremor.) Being given a drugged boy is insane. It's insane, Armand, like he can hear him. What the fuck are you doing. He doesn't know who he's asking. (Himself.) Gifts and pages like secret letters.
He drives to a rest stop with dozens of miles of nothing in either direction. He forces the remaining pills into the abducted clubber's mouth. He closes the trunk and waits, and thinks about:
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The strange sense that he (this kid, whoever he is) isn't getting anywhere. His hand is caught in Armand's shirt and his other hand is being held at the wrist, and they are pushed together, like gravity has tipped towards the wall that he has Armand against. Armand is taller (and stronger), and gazing at him with
something. Want? Pity? His eyes are crazy to stare into, fire-coal orange, twin lanterns that continue to burn in his mind's eye between each blink. He gets a hand behind his neck to try to pull him down
and can't. Unmoving. Something sharp beneath his chin, pushing his face aside.
"Human philosophy," Armand is saying, so quiet, but somehow easily heard in the riot of the establishment, "is often deeply flawed for being premised on the eventuality of death. To give meaning to life, there must be an end. And that everything a person does is in service to prepare or fend off that inevitability."
So what do you wanna do about it?
Ignored. "It's why I am fond of Sartre. His writings seemed unconcerned with this question, at least at times. To exist is to behold. To behold is to love. And love is nothing but an illusory celebration of that existence."
Let go of my arm—
"Rest."
The mind is still. They leave.
When the boy's hands are tied, he obediently has his arms held behind him. He sits into the open trunk and offers out his ankles, Armand diligently tying them too. Out here, in a pre-dawn haze, there are some more details to pick up. A kind of sharpness to Armand, a tense way of holding his face.
His makes eye contact with the kid, and seems to want to say something else. Maybe it's deliberate, showing off this glimmer of vulnerability, uncertainty, the desire nested in hesitation. Maybe Armand is only so good at curating a person's mind.
Instead, "I sometimes enjoyed our conversation," before the rest is submerged in deep blackness, which resolves into the humid interior of a car's trunk and the taste of saliva-soaked denim.
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The boy shivers and shifts in his bonds, still pliant from Armand's mindwhammy even if a part of him is very, very afraid, layered drugs making him dizzy and euphoric. His heart beats erratically; if Daniel drinks from him, he'll get that transferred high, and the young man will die in a hurry. A heart attack from shock before the blood loss has a chance to do it. Daniel wants to.
He sits. On a bench away from the car, looking out at a view that wouldn't be visible to him a year ago. Now, he sees it all in a hundred shades of dark— Picasso, but real, midnight violets and deep sea blues, velvets, coals. Stars like salt spilled over a shiny black table. He smokes a cigarette, then another one, and he thinks.
Armand protected Louis' happiness even when he was unable or unwilling. Armand maintained Louis' passions, to the point of going beyond his awareness of their dealings. Armand cleaned up after over one hundred boys, until Louis snapped and Armand snapped harder. Armand can't give an answer about what he likes, but Daniel knows what he hates. And he hates this. The first was an appeal to Daniel's ego, flattering him by silencing a critic. This is appealing to his vices, even though he knows damn wall that Armand cannot fucking stand it. Why, then? What does Armand like, what does Armand want, enough that he'd do this despite his revulsion?
Fucking puzzle box. Like the one out of Hellraiser. Daniel's going to get sent to the suffering dimension again before he makes any headway. Especially if Armand takes this as a rejection.
But his decision is made. He pulls the kid out of the trunk, finds his wallet. Unties him, settles him in the back seat, and begins the seven hour drive to bring him home. Three hours in, he stops at a drive-thru and gets the poor guy a Diet Coke and a bottle of water. When they finally make it back to an apartment complex on the edge of a community college town, Daniel helps him up the stairs to his door. Tells him that things went weird, that his son's roommate picked him up, but they were both too high and too drunk. As far as I know nothing happened, he says, as the kid tries about ten times to get his keys to work before finally succeeding. You guys just got super fucked up, and I don't have the right homeowner's insurance for that. Take care of yourself, alright? It's all fun and games until somebody doesn't actually drive you home.
It doesn't take psychic powers to muddle his memory. He'll barely remember anything, just somebody's weird grandfather driving him home and making him hydrate.
The shittiest Motel 6 in the world is good enough for Daniel. It smells, but it has blackout curtains. He folds up the torn-out book page and sticks it in his wallet, next to an old corny photo of his youngest daughter she made at a photo booth kiosk in a mall, and then he drags all the bedding into the bathroom. Blackout curtains or not, he feels strange and restless and the room is too big— he bites his own wrist, he turns the lights off, he lays on his side on cold, awful tile, and really, really wants to have eaten that kid.
There will be a way to send a letter to Armand. He knows it. He's got lawyers and real estate agents. And Daniel is an excellent investigator.
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