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Dawn. For something they never saw, it sure as hell had a way of ruling their kind's every moment. Danny had raced it before, electric and alive with the thrill of killing and blood thundering in her ears. She ran twice that speed now, down a route she'd fled away from as often as toward.
Armida's apartment wasn't her home; technically, she had none, in spite of all that money. But it was a port in a storm, and it felt like a release to let herself in. Armida would still be awake. Armida would probably ask questions, but might be dissuaded.
A figure sat up in the grey dark, languid and half-aware. "I hadn't thought you'd be back. Shielding your thoughts again?"
"I hadn't planned on it," she started before she heard the impossible question, saw the marks and remembered the taunt hurled almost casually at her earlier that night. She shouldn't care. She didn't care.
She had no room to talk, after all. Not with Louisa's blood still under her nails, mixed with the dirt of the grave she'd begun to think she would share regularly.
"Danny." Armida smiled, almost tentative as she rose from sheets that Danny could smell stinking of blood from all the way across the room. "You're here."
She looked like a crime again, utterly wrong with her wobbling steps and bloody body. Her hair was a riot, flames in the electric lighting, and Danny wanted to touch.
Danny wanted to leave, but she was dizzy on her feet now. She wouldn't get ten feet before being crisped. And Armida--
Danny had passed out so many, many times while looking into hard-soft amber. The cold hands were familiar, gentle as always, and Armida was so happy to see her.
Of course.
Danny had run away.
For once it was a gift to feel her strength sapping away, her body falling as her puppet's strings were cut. She didn't know if Armida caught her or let her fall. It didn't make a difference.
(But it did, didn't it?) It was the reason she looked around as soon as she was awake, seeing if Armida'd had the nerve to stay with her through the night. But the room was empty, the damning evidence of the night before cleaned away. Mortal hands paid too well to ask questions. Or maybe Armida had done it herself, lingering on the smell of blood she'd pined over and killed for and stolen from their most powerful kin.
Danny was weak. Danny needed to be protected . She'd heard it all, second and third hand. Still not worthy of a real conversation.
When she'd been alive, there had been only one solution to moods like this. She was finding that in death, as long as one had a bit of creativity, the answer was the same.
She should feel guilt for what she did, picking off the addicts and the drunks to fuel her erstwhile addictions. But she knew people like that were chasing death; after all, she had been.
So she told herself as she pressed a track-marked girl five drinks in against the wall of a darkened club. As she lured a homeless near-teen. As she took a Valium-addled upper class snob who could have been her mother, gasping in baffled shock at having someone like Danny so close.
Her stomach hurt by the end of her spree; overfeeding? drugs?
What did it matter?
What mattered was that she was at the gates of Lafayette Cemetery as the witching hour approached (Louisa's hour, the time for being entranced--). She knew the place well, and her stumbling feet took her over the gates and along the paths she'd walked long ago like a pilgrim to a shrine.
Louisa had been a scandal in life and death, a local legend shortly; too beautiful to believe, pale and too sickly after her attack to face the day, yet strong enough to wrest back control of her finances. She and her 'companions,' a pair of strange young twins: man and woman, yellow-haired and shocking. The man had fought duels for her.
The woman had run into the burning house after her.
Tragedy, publicly misunderstood and privately explained to Danny and Danny alone. How she'd loved it.
But it wasn't Louisa's modest tomb she sought tonight. No, it was the imposing monstrosity to its right, the Pointe du Lac name cut deep into the stone.
He rested peacefully, in all likelihood. Probably felt no fear or shame or guilt.
"You fucker," she mumbled, leaning her head against the cool stone. Her eyes narrowed to a squint, trying to keep the world steady. "You sorry piece'f shit . Why couldn't you have died sooner, huh?" She smacked the tomb, leaving a webbed crack behind. An impression of her impotent rage.
"It's your fault !" she roared, kicking out, trying to pummel her way through stone until the force of the shout turned her stomach, brought her to her knees retching blood. It gushed hot down her chin, spattered the tomb and puddled around her battered sneakers, and when she was finally empty she crouched, unable to move for the dizziness.
"Overfeeding is dangerous," came a light voice. "You'll catch your death."
"Be just f'n perfect for you, wouldn't it." She could feel her former meal soaking her socks.
"Determined to be the martyr, I see. How noble. Except that no one remembers them." Lestat stopped beside her with decidedly human steps, hands in her pockets. "They make up pretty stories to cover the gruesome deaths no one actually felt bad about at the time. What a noble legacy."
"I hate him." It was too small a thing to express what she was feeling. "I hate--I hate all of you. You jus' hurt us, all the time, and you keep us there hoping."
"Us." Lestat was unsmiling for once, head thrown back to look up into the cloudy sky. Few stars; it would rain soon. "You and Louisa are the same, are you? Caught, trapped?" She refocused on Danny, and maybe it was the cocktail working its way out of her veins, or maybe Lestat pushed at something, but either way her head spun. "What about how she trapped you?"
"That wun't her fault," Danny hastened to say, defending who knew what while Lestat's eyes rolled. The first gossamer influence that had driven her to madness; the first profound kisses that drove her to debauchery. "She'sh beautiful, it's not--"
She slid down to her knees in bloody mud, head against the tomb. A hand on her shoulder made her flinch only in vestigial fear.
"We keep you hoping. For what, pray tell?" Too gentle, their rough Prince's voice. That gentleness should be given to the one who deserved it, rather than what she'd seen--what would stay etched in her mind--
Gentle like it was a real question, and she squeezed her eyes shut before answering.
"For you to love us. I--I wanted Armida to--And Louisa needs--" she swallowed back the lump in her throat, let it battle the rising gorge.
"Ah. Of course we wouldn't know anything about that." Lestat's voice was heavy under the surface flippancy. Danny had read her book, of course, hungry to know about Louisa. About Armida, and what any of it had meant after she was left standing at the end of it.
"They love you." Hearing Lestat's admission, too soft and easily given, she broke. Ugly, drunk tears streamed down her face, underscored by thick, gulping breaths. The hand on her shoulder rubbed gentle circles on her back.
When it was quiet again, Lestat spoke. "You simply must be the whole of their world. For that, you would do anything."
Danny swiped at her nose. "So'what. We're the same, I should just, that--so that makes it okay?"
"Nothing will heal what I did." That ever performing voice was eerily steady. "It's enough that she forgives me. We all reach that point, in time."
"Why is she so--" Danny's voice faltered, thinking of the waste. The amount of pain and self-loathing Louisa felt made no sense, even with her history. "What didja do to her?"
"The first thing? I killed her." There was almost a laugh there, high and manic. Confessional, from someone who denied faith; candid, from one who declined interviews. "And her child, thank God for that."
"Claude?"
"No." Low-voiced in the dark, Lestat traced her fingers over Paul's name, his dates (1776-1791), and though it looked ginger, the monument began to shed and crumble like sandstone. "Not Claude. Not just Claude."
"What the fuck."
"There are greater things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Greater evils, anyway. No good's ever answered me." She laughed. "I did one good turn in ending that unfortunate's life. And then I took it back by making it into Louisa's sin."
Danny thought back to the night before, to the peculiar grip Lestat had placed on her--not to harm or threaten, but only to keep her in place as she'd begun to flinch. It stood out clear as daylight in the muddy river of her thoughts. "She..." it was hard to encompass all of it in one word, "remembered."
"Everything I've done and forgotten. She catalogs it in her great book of imagined sins. Our martyr. Of course, any word of comfort must be a lie or a devious trick,” she sneered. “Heavens forfend things not go on interminably as they have."
"Thas' rich," Danny snorted. "Talking bout your 'wife' like that." Armida had been right. They were all frozen in time and rotting, and already she was preparing to join them in it.
"She's not my wife." Harsh voice, harsh words, and Lestat's face was barren when Danny whipped her head around to look. "She never was, but for one night." (There was a story there; Danny could still smell them, however lost she'd become from her first calling.)
"'Cause she cheats."
"Because she's a--" Lestat cut herself off, restarted, brow furrowed with thinking. Danny expected to see smoke coming out of her ears. "She was...shocked, when I arrived on 'the wrong night.' I've treated her as a habit. And she let me." Somehow the betrayal sounded worse at that than anything else.
"Wha's the wrong night?" It was fuzzy, but clearing, the pounding in Danny's head going down.
The wide mouth on which Lestat so prided herself--sometimes cruel--pursed.
"Apparently, we had a schedule to keep to."
Never had their pasts crossed before tonight, the two of them utterly enraptured on parallel paths. "Trading shifts." She started giggling in spite of herself, verging on hysterical.
"She could've said something," Lestat sulked, suddenly a puritan in libertine's clothes. It was all fine and good to pass from one embrace to the other, it seemed, so long as it wasn't Louisa doing it.
"Yeah, sure. You'd've been just fine with that."
"What else should I do?" Lestat snapped. "Lose her? After all these years spent getting her back. After all those years..."
"Hypocrite," Danny mumbled. She met the full force of Lestat's angry gaze. Sobriety was not to be her friend in this. "You left your blood all over Armida. Marked your territory real good."
"She's a doll with no owner." Lestat wrapped her arms around herself. "Louisa's the one who needs me."
"She waited for you." Danny could still see that placid face and those hopeful eyes, and she wasn't sure if she was angrier at the intrusion or that it meant jealousy was making it hard to just be angry at her maker's last betrayal.
"God knows why, when she sees nothing but a monster when we're together."
"No. Not Louisa. Armida waited for you." Danny shifted, ending up with her back against that bastard's tomb and her arms around her knees. "She was--happy--when she thought I was you."
"Happy." Lestat turned sat heavy as a sack of bricks, and then they were shoulder-to-shoulder. "Well, that makes two. Louisa smiled with you." It sounded dire in Lestat's melodramatic voice. The arm pressed to Danny's shifted restlessly; sharp nails flicked imaginary dust from leathers.
"What are you talking about? She cried the whole time we..." Danny, so experienced, didn't know how to describe last night's escapade. "When I did what you told me," she finished instead, mind suddenly and viscerally full of the sensation of soft, bloody curls and wet flesh against her fingertips. "I should have stopped, but she said not to."
Louisa asked for pain, not in that bullshit 'body says yes' way but with her words.
"Louisa loves her guilt. It suits her, don't you think? Better than diamonds." The words were mocking, but Lestat's tone was laced with awe. "When you came in, she was happy to see you. Smiling ," she repeated
"And then I hurt her." Was any of this supposed to make Danny feel better?
"She trusted you to. She just expects it from the rest of us wicked souls. Even Armida." Especially Armida hung unspoken on the air.
No, sobriety wasn't helping at all. She wondered if there was time to fix it. "So what, we swap? Fix all the problems, nice and neat?"
"If you think that, you have a nasty surprise coming your way." Danny felt eyes on her, cool and storming grey. "You're prepared to give your maker over so easily?"
"Why not? She did it to me." Danny shuddered, the cold of Maria's hands still with her. The empty ache of those loving words still a raw wound.
"Starting a new little theater. How charming."
"I didn't say you could read my thoughts." Though in truth she was relieved. It saved the nasty involvement of actually talking about it.
"There are worse people to spend time with."
"Go for it, then." If Lestat was still broken up about being barred from Maria's bed, she was welcome to it.
"She doesn't want me that way." The dejection and the droop made Lestat look and sound like the twenty-year-old kid she'd been, centuries ago. She was almost pouting . "She never did, not really."
"And I'm sure that's never happened before. Not to a rockstar like you ." The bitterness of it all made Danny feel every one of her thirty-two hard-lived years.
"Shockingly, I still have feelings to hurt, you miserable wench."
"Good. Make us even."
"She said she would, one day, and I believed her!"
"Yeah? Well Armida said she'd always love me, and she made me--" It was too hard to say, to admit her own stupid gullibility, but she knew her mind was all ajar anyway and the memories were coming.
Not just Maria, though that was surely the capper on it all. But every woman she'd been talked into bedding, all the unfortunates more fortunate than she.
Every time she'd fucked with her clothes on just to preserve that small bit of privacy from one who had seen it all before anyway. Every man she'd allowed to kiss her, touch her, before she broke and fought and ran away at last from the wrongness .
The needles and the drink; the things she'd done to get those there at the end when going back wasn't an option and the dreams of the twins pounded inside her skull, and surely the red hair meant it was Armida's doing, surely she was being disposed of as old and wasted as she was, as useless--
And Maria inside her in every possible way, all but the blood (thank God, thank God for that, because how could she ever bleed that poison back out of her very veins --)
"Don't be ungrateful," Lestat snapped. "We'd be dead without the old ones."
"I'm ungrateful. Sure, 'Brat Prince.'" What a crock, coming from the woman who'd bought a genocide with her selfish need to be seen. Who'd put them all in danger by flouting the rules. Whose pretty face and place in their King's favor was the only reason Danny was sitting here. There but for the grace of Lestat went they. The cause and solution to every problem.
"They love us, really." Danny looked up, and saw Lestat's eyes fixed on the horizon. "In their way. That violence keeps us alive, because we're special to them. We’re all evil here, in the Garden."
Some sick, pathetic pity struck her, more sickly and devious than her anger, listening to the sad little lies Lestat must tell herself like bedtime stories.
"Just like Louisa." There was no way out of it, it seemed, each of them doomed to visit misery on those that came after, even as they yearned for tenderness.
"No." It sounded like a plea, and Lestat's speech sped up over the next sentences. "No, Louisa is different. She doesn't need protection; she's invincible. She's just--"
"She's weak, Lestat," Danny said, voice so gentle and careful that it interrupted that urgent flow. "Even I could kill her, if I wanted."
(Even Danny could force her, could hold her down and drink all she wanted, but Louisa had let her do other things, had said her name and loved it--)
"But you won't kill her," Lestat said, oblivious to that shameful predatory train of thought or ignoring it for the sake of conversation. "Neither will anyone else, even her. She is an island, and needs no one and nothing."
"If she doesn't need us, then why the fuck do you think she puts up with us?"
"She's. I think she's lonely." Lestat chewed her lip and curled down, arms braced about her head. She probably hadn’t thought this hard about someone besides herself in centuries. "I think she always has been."
"Even with you?" And Claude.
"We never talked." Her voice was muffled, low and sheltered in her arms. "We fought, and we performed for the world and our son. But we never heard each other."
"And what, it's different now that you've figured out how to fuck?" She could see no other difference.
"She won't take my blood. Not since -- not as I am now. Of course she'd choose someone like you."
'Someone like.' Someone helpless. Someone weak. "So much for lonely."
"It's worse when others are around. The certainty that darkness is all around, seeping into your very skin from the air itself..." Lestat slammed her fist back against the wall, leaving a crack that put Danny's to shame. "Why won't she fight?"
"I dunno, maybe getting the shit beat out of her has something to do with it." The Prince's blind spots were a mile wide.
"I never ,” she snarled. “I was...you said yourself, the way she asked for pain. Asked , all the while with those eyes like you've murdered her."
"You just said nobody likes a martyr, Lestat," Danny said, pressing fingers to her burning eyes. "I'm sure you must've suffered so much through those seventy years you forgot to speak to her."
"No, I suppose not. I suppose you'll never believe a word I say." Lestat's golden curls bounced when her shoulders shook, and the scent of rich, artificially heightened blood spiked sharp in the air. "Why would anyone, anyway?"
She sounded--off. High and panicked and so terribly young .
"Lestat--"
"How could you ever trust someone who can do this !?" And then a leather-clad elbow powered back like something out of a Bruce Lee film and crashed through the side of the ancient tomb. Powdered stone floated down to dust Lestat's hair, dulling and greying it, and a part of Danny wondered whether it matched her own.
"Lestat!" she grabbed the other woman's broad shoulders and turned her to meet face-to-face, and Lestat allowed it; she had to, after that show of strength there was no way Danny alone could move her--
"I could bring this place to dust in an instant! All of it! These graves and their rotting bodies, the stone meant to last eternity, you , no more than a fragile piece of porcelain expected to somehow weather the ages!" She was laughing, high and breathy, her pupils pinpricks in that great grey expanse. "All of it! And I'd be there still, even until the sun itself goes out, destroying it!" Her hands grasped Danny's shoulders, hard and merciless. "Don't you see what we are?"
Danny wondered if Louisa had ever seen this creature, still as a rabbit in a predator's sights, a lone figure in eternity's grasp. As if, were she to move, the thought might catch her.
No. Of course not. It was only confidence for Louisa. Only the best.
Lestat's grip weakened, went to her own head as a piteous moan escaped her, and Danny found herself holding a monster. Comforting a tyrant.
"You modern vampires," Lestat breathed. "The terror of the old guard. I'm beginning to understand."
"Get a grip," Danny responded, not unkindly. "I'm a bigger mess than you are. And I can't fly, either."
"True enough, weakling," Lestat said without heat. "And it's getting on towards dawn for you, isn't it?"
"Soon," Danny replied, leaning in to try and see her weird companion's face.
When it raised and those grey eyes met her own, the streaks of blood made it look like some kind of marble saint mid-miracle.
"You didn't want to go home last night." Lestat's powerful, deadly hands (deadly even in life, if the smallest fraction of her book was true) were careful on Danny's ribs, her back, the curve of her spine up into her hair. "Because of Armida, and what... happened."
"Yeah, well." Lestat had been a threat, and Danny had never, ever wanted to die forever.
Pointed tongue snaked out to wet lips in advance of a little panting breath. "And I don't imagine you fancy it tonight, before you and she have… discussed… all this."
"I'll live." Stoic, be stoic and don't relish this cool strong touch that asks nothing, these eyes that don't devour .
"Come home with me," Lestat blurted, and Danny's face must have been fucking hilarious.
"Is that a no?" Lestat's voice reached for breezy nonchalance, but the strain was too easy to see from this close.
"Has anyone ever said no to the great Lestat?" she meant it to tease, only to remember the wound too late.
"Plenty."
"No point in saying no if I can't be the first." Little Danny Molloy. Why do it at all if you can't be the first. The best. "I'm sick of looking at this fucker's grave, anyway. You think she'd be mad if we tore it down?"
"Terribly." Lestat confirmed, eyes glancing at a grave set some paces away from the crypt. "But a little hellraising keeps us young."
It was tempting. She could get swept up in that kind of impulsiveness. "Not tonight, huh? I feel kinda..." it wasn't the heaviness of death, the sleep. Just the ghost of a good old-fashioned hangover.
"Would it break all your codes to allow me to rescue you? I can't keep track of these modern women's movements."
"That'll happen when you fucking sleep through every important social advance in a century," she fired back, snippy out of habit and pain rather than any real desire to attack. "And I don't need to be rescued."
"No?" Lestat's arched brow was less condescending than it might have been. "maybe not, but I'm sure you do need a place to rest today. My home is secure."
"Will we have to share?" It was a joke, except for how it wasn't, presuming a secondhand intimacy at best. Still, Danny couldn't pretend not to know, not to remember Louisa's low, sultry voice talking about the coffin Lestat 'forgot' to buy, the feel of another woman beside her but cold against her breast. The ebbing-away of a terror, a claustrophobia lost with her humanity itself. The aloneness , even in that cramped space filled entirely by a companion turned strangely rough (God, God, and knowing what she did now--)
That had been early yet in their fatal night, but still Danny had felt an impulse to become the other woman in that box.
"I have a vault, lovely." And Lestat's voice sounded oddly sincere with the compliment. "With berths in it, plenty large enough for the entire coven if they wished it. No harm will come to you."
"Not even if I asked, I'll bet." All of them, maintaining that violence was a vampire's love--maybe she was in danger of believing it.
"That's enough of that." The argument, or maybe everything that was beyond it. And then Lestat's arms were pulling her in, and her heart was thudding in defiance of her, in deference to the moment; she found herself swept off her feet, holding tight out of instinct to a body of cool, molded marble.
"We can't have you walking home like that. This little scene is already going to cause quite the urban legend."
Danny looked at their handiwork: enough blood to fill a body, deep webbed cracks in a tomb almost as old as the city itself, not quite chipped through to the other side. She still wanted to do it. Find his bones and crush them to dust. But.
"Everything has to be a gesture," she said instead, privately savoring the little thrill of a dream every kid had harbored, the city below them and the wind in her hair. "What are you gonna do with no adoring mobs?"
"I'll have to settle for private concerts."
They traveled in silence for a while, Danny trying to remember if she'd ever really heard Lestat's voice--the real deal, not the version processed under layers of effects and distortions and blaring on MTV. There had to be something to it. She'd been an actor, after all. And to record it...
"Dreaming about me?" Lestat's voice snapped her back to the present, to the touch of solid ground beneath her feet. It was a mansion. Naturally it was.
"Thinking. I've always wanted to do another real interview."
"Greedy. I've no more tales to tell; you'll have to find your own."
The place was painfully modern: black marble floors and white walls, furniture in stainless steel and immaculate black and white leather. Fresh-cut roses, some old strain Danny had never seen before, sat incongruously in curvy vases and silver bowls, while the walls held prints by pop artists Lestat couldn't possibly have the context to appreciate.
(Well, except for the Nagels. No context at all was necessary to see why Lestat would want those images of high-contrast black-haired paperwhite beauties with their red lips and skimpy dresses, small nipples and cool demeanors.)
"C'mon," Danny said, wandering over to the outrageously fancy hi-fi stereo system and fiddling with a knob. "I could record you telling your side, and we could play it right here." She didn't know why she pushed, besides her obstinate nature, but there it was.
"Just the two of us?" Lestat's voice was too close too suddenly, just there in Danny's ear without a hint of movement or sound.
"Three. You'd want Louisa to hear, right?"
"Louisa doesn't come here."
Strange, for the minimalism seemed far better suited to Louisa than Lestat--or, at least, an image of Louisa that Lestat was trying to impress. Though there were lights everywhere, there were none of the gaudy colors Louisa had described when she spoke of the Rue Royale. Nothing of the lavishness, the desire to fill every corner with beauty and gain. It felt like a doll's house; or a stage, empty of its players.
"I take it you asked her?"
"She made her distaste clear." Lestat was close enough to embrace her, but it was the stereo she touched, a single finger running delicately along its black frame, stirring the dust.
"Giving up doesn't sound like the hero of your story." She's put on her reporter's voice, putting a wall between herself and the awareness of their nearness and their isolation.
"You should know a few things must find their way to the cutting room floor. The people love a dastardly, wicked hero. No boring parts."
Boring parts like contrition and conversation and long, aching years with the fat specter of a pile of unborn flesh sitting between them, cradled by a corpse.
"She wanted to keep it?" She worried at it, like when she was seven and got a baby tooth knocked out prematurely playing baseball and the dentist said they'd just have to wait for the replacement to grow in. Tongue plumbing the bloody hole, then the healed skin, then the slowly erupting pain all over again.
This wasn't her pain. Wasn't her business at all, except that Louisa had made it hers so many times over with words and kisses, bites and breathless sighs.
"No." Lestat's tone was measured and measuring, her focus on Danny intense. "She hated it. At least she was always that sane. But I didn't know, and I--I thought she was only dying, when the pain came."
"You didn't know about Paul?"
"That I knew. Everyone should have, or did and didn’t give a damn, but I thought she was safe. She'd killed him; she had to be fierce. And then I made her, and..."
'And.' Sweet, evil Louisa, feast or famine.
"The Dark Gift lifted the veil from her eyes to see all the beauty in the world, and gave her eternity to weep for it. Even the monster she escaped, who suddenly seemed so much more appealing than the one she went to."
"She didn't really ..."
"How should I know? I know nothing, remember? Emptyheaded Lestat, dull and witless and afraid. The only way she could possibly take me back. Only if I were cruel and petty and small, and no more. No more than that. And now she tolerates me, content to be caught for the time being. And I stay out of reach of flammable substances."
"And that's enough?" She'd told herself it was, and already she feared she had lied. But now here was one two centuries in the game, claiming contentment.
"Better than killing her again."
"Or dying."
Lestat had no answer for that. She'd moved out of Danny's vision, voice again caressing the shell of Danny's ear without touch. "If you're so fixed on gadgetry, there's a phone in the kitchen. Perhaps someone might like to hear you're still alive."
"But that would be a lie." The bad joke based on things she feared more and more to be true was worth it, just for the startled amusement on Lestat's face. A little bark of laughter, less hysterical and closer to real than the noises in the graveyard, followed Danny into the chromed and useless kitchen.
She dialed the number of Armida's room unthinkingly. She'd never been one for checking in before, neither in life or death. Alive, it had been all running and hiding; dead, she'd stayed close to her maker, the one familiar thing in an alien world.
But as she stood there and twisted the cord about her index finger, pulling out and reversing the kink through six rings, the strangeness seemed at least appropriate. After all, Armida couldn't hear her; she'd want to know, in some vague way, that Danny was safe and not ashes.
And then the answering machine picked up after the sixth ring, and left Danny feeling once again like a chump.
"Every time," she muttered to the voice telling her to leave her name and number etc. etc. "Boss, it's me. I--" she faltered. "I just wanted you to know I'm... safe. Sorry to bother you."
She should say something. Where she was. Some trite indication of affection. By the time she thought to unstick her tongue the other end of the line had clicked, leaving nothing but the dial tone in her ear. She returned the phone to its cradle, eyeing it. Some part of her was waiting for it to ring, just like the old days; for Armida to sweep in and demand she come along, for they were expected at the opera at eight.
But it was three in the morning on a Friday--Saturday, now--and Armida didn't call anymore. And Danny didn't want her to.
Oh, yeah. She'd forgotten.
"Come on," Lestat was almost tender in taking her by the shoulder, leading her out of the room and down the hall. "You can have your pick of the beds. I promise I'm a generous soul, when the mood strikes me. Something with lace, I imagine."
There were indeed coffins of every make, every varnish, jet black and sleek and powder blue and gold, some still with handles waiting for the procession to take them away.
"Waiting for them all to come flocking back any day, huh."
"I keep hoping." Lestat had always had a love for that huddled little group on Night Island, her "coven of the articulate," even when she balked at the mere idea of setting rules for their scant number. Armida had whispered something about irony when it was over, all of it, the handful of them once more scattered to the winds.
They were all so clean, though. Gleaming. Unused and without even the minimal wear and tear afforded by the slumbering dead, and Danny was filthy.
Sure, she'd ruined plenty of things before, just for spite, but this little... dormitory...was so earnest and pointless.
"You got a shower?" she asked, curling her toes in her bloody sneakers, grasping her own biceps tightly.
Don't think about it. Don't remember all the times cold little hands bathed you and held you through the sickness. Don't think about how the warm water made you imagine warmth elsewhere, in that heart .
"Of course." Lestat came near, and for a second Danny wished for the return of that warm, steering grip. But Lestat passed by without touching her, led her to a lavish tiled room filled with more roses and cream-colored candles, an enormous clawfoot bathtub at home with the would-be romantic decorations and yet comically at odds with the enormous, expansive shower built into the far wall.
She shut the door behind her and stripped, turning the heat up until it scalded, creating burns that blossomed and healed in minutes on her dead white skin. She found herself watching, mesmerized, laughing to herself. She'd thought becoming a vampire would shut out pain, or make it beautiful. But it only covered itself over, lying in wait.
When she stepped out, woozy from the heat, her clothes were gone, though her bag was untouched. Her jaw tightened, the hair on the back of her neck prickling.
"Lestat!" She felt ridiculous, wrapped in a fluffy black towel that covered nothing at all on her lean frame. Armida had stolen her clothes once, lured her into a public bathhouse in Japan and then vanished, just far enough to be out of reach as another little "what if" played out. She hadn't felt so numb then, her still-living heart pounding and her face hot with embarrassment as she and the proprietor had gestured at each other across the language barrier.
She returned to the coffin room (wonder Lestat hadn't rigged one of them into bunks), dripping on the floor as she went. "What did you do with my clothes?"
Lestat was turned away from her, seated and bent over something. "I did you a favor. They were unsalvageable long before you got blood on them."
"So what am I supposed to wear?" * Her voice was getting as high and whiny as it had been back when she was the age Lestat appeared, and Lestat's shoulders tightened in response.
"Try next door. There's clothing enough there. Surely you can borrow something for the day."
Danny stomped through the doorway into a goddamned boudoir .
Cut crystal and cream upholstery and delicate lace everywhere, and those same roses choking the air with their perfume. She averted her gaze from the three-way mirror showcasing her deficiencies (though washed clean, it wasn't so bad, purple rivulets from her hair aside) and forced herself simply to investigate the closets. And in them...
The clothes were gorgeous. Elegant, casual, but all the sort of quality that only the very best money could buy. Deep jewel tones and rich textures. She'd been showered with gifts like this, once, though this so very obviously wasn't meant for her.
Tailored for a body shorter, fuller, with round hips and a tiny waist and (she checked a label) 32DD breasts. For someone who didn't even come here, all of it.
She wanted to rage, or reject, but instead she picked a longish silk nightgown (just barely decent on her). It was too frothily lacy and feminine for either of the dead things in this dead house at the moment, but there it was.
Louisa should have some flannel pajamas, but Lestat had done the shopping, after all. And Lestat was...
Lestat was…
Young. Old. So terribly bound to habits.
So lonely, for all she said Louisa was.
"Not bad," Lestat appraised when Danny reentered, and she felt a sudden need to cover herself, more embarrassed than if she'd just been naked.
"You could've just shown me your closet," she grumbled, half taken with the idea to go tearing through until she found it, even though the way she was feeling meant she'd drop dead halfway down the hall.
"Exactly," Lestat filled in, ignoring the returning glare (what was it with this damn lack of privacy). "Your vanity is entirely misplaced. It suits you."
But it didn't. No more than that lavender dress had. At least Lestat didn't expect her to take it off. Not like that (there was some comfort in being around someone who didn't want her at all, even as some sick little part of her wondered why she wasn't good enough). "You wear one, then."
"You wouldn't be awake to see it." Lestat didn’t look at her as she pulled back the lid of a simple black coffin, making a grand sweep with her arm.
Danny let herself be tucked in like a child, the closing of the lid no longer terrifying but a reprieve from the maelstrom of emotions that was the outside world. She had an image, half-gone, of Lestat standing guard for her. Her "rival," of all things.