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“She’s back.” Louis’s voice came from the doorway of his bedroom, but he paused, one slender white hand on the doorframe as he caught sight of the open expanse of the larger of his two armoires and Lestat there, digging through Louis’s clothing within. “What are you doing?”
Lestat withdrew from the hanging frock coats and starched linen, letting them all fall back in a soft thump. He shot a glance over his shoulder at Louis, but then he pinched the sleeve of a black velvet jacket between two fingers. “Why do you still have this thing?”
“Were you…smelling my coats?" Louis shook his head. "They’re clean, I promise you.”
Lestat waved a hand in the air, not about to admit that cleanliness had nothing to do with the fragrance he'd sought in the garments. He hadn't even realized Louis was home, thinking he'd be alone here for an hour more at least. Lestat flicked the offending jacket aside. “Didn’t we have this made some twelve or fifteen years ago?”
“It’s fine.” Louis came into the room finally, as if remembering it belonged to him and not about to let Lestat have his way with it any further. “Leave my clothes alone.”
Lestat would not! He snatched a handful of the coat again. “Look how wide the tails are!”
“What does it matter?”
“You can’t dress like an antique, Louis. Someone will guess what you are. Nobody wears this cut anymore.”
“Perfect for me, then.”
Lestat rolled his eyes. “Oh yes, my nobody, the walking dead, the specter at the gates. You weren’t nobody at Madame Lavoie’s salon last week. You were a regular peacock! Even in your so-called mourning. And how all those ladies did admire us so. The two grieving gentlemen.” He dissolved into soft laughter at the memory of how the women had fawned over him and Louis, so brave and so young to take on raising a little girl all on their own. But wouldn’t they shed their mourning and seek brides before the season ended? Well, they could pry Lestat’s black from his cold immortal hands!
A soft derisive sound blew past Louis’s lips as he took Lestat by the arm and pulled him firmly from the armoire, closing its doors with a solid clack. “I don’t tell you how to dress,” he muttered, though there was no venom behind the words.
“Anyway,” Lestat said, making a show of calming himself, secretly glad Louis seemed to be well put off the truth of what had actually enticed Lestat into his bedroom while Louis was out tonight. “What about Claudia?”
“Claudia?” His fingers fell from Lestat’s arm, all too soon.
“You said she’s back.”
“No, not Claudia.” Louis hesitated and glanced to the door, but he made no effort yet to get Lestat out of his bedroom. “That woman. The one we saw at Mademoiselle Belcher’s recital.”
“Oh, yes, when she attacked the harp for us.” Lestat gave a shudder at the awkward memory. “What did we ever do to her? I don’t think her mother will show her face at a ball again for a year. That boy she had accompanying her on the spinet was rather good, though. Do you know where he lives?”
“Lestat,” Louis snapped.
He couldn’t contain a little smirk at how irritated Louis seemed. He really did want Lestat’s attention right now, didn’t he? “There were a lot of women there that night, Louis,” he said. “You are going to have to be more specific.”
“She was sitting next to the chapelier. I don’t recall his name, but you know him. He designed that ridiculous hat for you. Remember, I pointed her out? I told you she was watching us.”
Least nearly rolled his eyes again. People were always watching him. But he thought he recalled the person Louis was talking about now. “That old Polish woman?”
“Actually, I think she might be Hungarian.” Louis again glanced to the door, as if afraid the woman in question would invade their flat and come bustling in at any moment.
“Well, you’d never know it.” Lestat shrugged. “If not for her name. What was it? All k’s and z’s. She speaks perfect French.”
Louis’s attention snapped back to him. “You spoke to her?”
“But of course!” Lestat loved elderly women. They had the double benefit of being always so enamored with him without any of the shame or shyness of youth, and having so much more life behind their years to make their conversation relatively interesting. He was finding lately that he could sometimes get bored so quickly with vapid young people. It was the rare intellect that could truly capture Lestat’s attention beyond anything more than a potential meal.
This particular woman had been one of those mortals with a mind nearly impossible for him to read, and that had made her brain all the more fun to pick the old fashioned way for a few minutes of gay party conversation. She had also listened, rapt, to the tragedy in three acts Lestat wove lately for all who ever expressed a little too much curiosity about himself and Louis when they went about together. The sad, sad tale of Lestat’s dearly departed sister, died so young, leaving behind a golden haired beauty of a child. How Lestat was so utterly devoted to the little girl because she was the living angelic embodiment of his beloved sister—they were twins, you know—(the story grew more interesting every time he told it)—and how he couldn’t dream of living apart from his tiny niece now. How the bereaved father, his brother-in-law, poor dear Louis was so grateful to have another set of hands in raising the child, because his heart was in the grave, far too broken to ever think of marrying again.
And of course the old woman had lavished the usual praises about what saints they both were for all they endured. “But you will marry, surely?” she had asked. “You might find a prospect at a ball this very season!”
Lestat had pressed a hand over his heart and given a sad little shake of his head. “And have my bride make our trio into a quartet and become as a mother to my niece? Tell me, madame, what bright young lady would relish such an assignment? No, let these belles find their gentlemen unattached to pursue their dreams of starting families of their own.”
“I see,” she had said and pressed the matter no further, and something about the little smile she had given Lestat before her eyes flicked to where Louis mingled so elegantly on the far side of the room made him rather like the old woman. Though not quite enough to remember her name or think at all about her again after that night.
“Why do you say she’s back?” Lestat asked Louis, unsure what to make of the tense expression marring his handsome features. Or perhaps perfecting them. “Where did she go? Why do we care?”
The bed creaked rather sensually as Louis sank onto its edge, pressing his hands between his knees. “She watches me. I see her notice me.”
“What are you talking about? Where?”
“On my way home, just now. From her balcony. She lives in the orange building on the corner, in the flat over the furniture shop.”
“Does she now?” Lestat turned toward the window, but Louis’s hand shot out and caught his wrist. He glanced down at him curiously. It wasn’t as if they could even see that building from Louis’s bedroom window. Lestat only hadn’t realized they were such near neighbors. The woman couldn’t have lived in the orange building very long, in any case. Lestat distinctly recalled a young creole couple with a baby that cried all night in that flat only last year.
“And it wasn’t the first time, Lestat. It’s late. Past one, you know.”
Lestat failed to see the issue. “She’s an elderly woman. She probably has trouble sleeping, as many old people do. Why shouldn’t she watch the night crowd from her balcony?” As Louis’s fingers pressed into Lestat’s wrist, he found himself helpless to pull away.
“There’s something about it,” Louis insisted, though his eyes were on the polished floorboards, his perfect black brows pinched. “The way she looks at me. Like she knows what I’m about.”
“That’s just your guilty conscience,” Lestat said with a soft laugh. “If you would just get rid of it, there’d be no problem.”
Louis shook his head impatiently. “And I’ve seen her on my walks as well. Blocks from here, walking with her lady’s maid. Too many times.”
“It happens.” Lestat shrugged again. He ran into neighbors all the time in this quaint city, especially in their quarter. He knew everyone, and everyone knew him. Everyone who was worth knowing, in any case. And half of them had the chapelier make hats in exact imitation of Lestat’s, thank you. “If you ever bothered to pay attention to the people around you, Louis, you’d realize she’s far from the only one!” What about this old woman had made Louis actually take notice for once? Why, Lestat could almost be jealous!
Louis’s impatient sigh was his only reply, his fingers rolling over the bones of Lestat’s wrist.
“And what does she say?” Lestat asked. “When you stop and say how do you do? You do acknowledge her, don’t you?”
Louis turned away quietly, finally letting go of Lestat.
This time, Lestat did roll his eyes. “Then I know what it is. She’s offended by your rudeness!”
“Perhaps,” Louis murmured, clearly unconvinced.
“How dare you neglect such a grande dame!” Lestat chided on the edge of laughter to hide anything else he might be tempted to feel just now. “Or whatever the wealthy Polish equivalent is. Or Hungarian, whatever. We’ll make it up to her at the star party next week. I know she's on the guestlist.” He patted Louis’s dark hair and then left him there to brood, escaping the bed chamber, thoroughly relieved that Louis had forgotten entirely about Lestat molesting his wardrobe in his absence.
—
Two nights later, Lestat had just returned to their flat with Claudia from the atelier where they had spent an hour picking out fabrics for her new summer dresses. They’d gone in planning to order five, and left with having commissioned twice that many. Ecstatic, she’d flitted off to her room to choose which of her dolls should have matching frocks made as well, and Lestat collapsed into a chair in the front parlor.
Louis did not so much as look up from his own chair by the balcony window, where he was reading a book. Poetry, it looked like. And if Lestat recognized the volume, bad poetry, at that.
“Well, it’s a good thing we don’t have to spend money on food,” Lestat joked. “Or we would be starving this year.”
When Louis only replied with a soft “Mmm” sound as he turned a page, Lestat sank back against the gold velvet cushion, and he let the matter go. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have the money for a hundred dresses if they wanted. And he was so very proud of Claudia’s growing refinement, taste and enthusiasm. It was only odd not to go through the usual song and dance of Louis complaining about his spending. In fact, Louis was doing nothing at all beyond looking rather beguilingly beautiful and easy in his chair, one leg stretched out before him, the light of the oil lamp making his green eyes as brilliant as gems as they leisurely moved back and forth across the words in his slim book.
Lestat observed him quietly for a few minutes, the only sound in the room the occasional rustle of the page. How casually elegant Louis’s hand looked where his cheek rested upon it, his long fine fingers seeming bone white beside that faint ruddy glow in his face lingering from the blood he’d taken tonight. It must be warm, too, against his bent fingers. How warm would it feel against Lestat’s?
The hand only withdrew from Louis’s cheek when it came time to turn another page. He did it from the top, leading with his long middle finger, catching the edge of the thick, creamy paper with the very tip. Then his fourth finger curled around it as well, folding the page back as reverently as if it were some lofty holy text. All four fingers then stroked down the revealed leaf, caressing the paper with the softest susurration, before languidly returning to support his cheek.
Several times, Lestat shifted in his chair, made some small noise, picked up the newspaper on the end table and then dropped it again when he realized it was yesterday’s. But nothing would make Louis look at him, no matter how long Lestat stared, the intensity of his gaze utterly powerless. He watched the ballet of fingers across the pages six more times before he couldn’t take it anymore.
“I need to go out,” he announced. Throwing himself out of his chair, Lestat went back down the hallway before he could rip that damn book out of Louis’s hands and fling it clear off the balcony.
He’d snatched his coat and hat and stick and was down the iron stairs and out the back gate before he let himself slow his steps. He just needed to kill, and then he’d be himself again. Once he had a plump, salty victim in his arms, making him full and hot, he wouldn’t be thinking anymore about the way Louis touched his books. Just one ripe throat to tear out. Maybe two. Tonight, he’d find someone uptown, perhaps.
Lestat had just cut across the Rue Royal and was about to turn onto Ursulines, when he spotted that woman, the one who had Louis in such a huff the other night. She was walking with a maid, who was carrying a large covered dish, in the direction Lestat had just come from. She didn’t seem to notice him at all, so Lestat did not bother greeting her, just as he’d admonished Louis for not doing. He was in no mood for small talk, in any case. And by the time he had his smart little fangs buried in a rather succulent throat, Lestat had already forgotten all about her.
—
When he returned home some two hours later, the first thing he noticed was the acute odor permeating the flat. How could he not? The air was positively thick with it. Louis must have heard him coming up the steps, because he appeared in the hall door, watching Lestat hang up his coat in the back parlor. His jacket was rumpled and his full black hair was mussed, as if he’d been running his hands through it, granting him a deliciously disheveled appearance.
“What is that smell?” Lestat asked him.
“It’s pungent, I’m sorry.”
Lestat took a long breath as he flipped his silk top hat onto the rack. The stenches of earth and humanity never truly bothered him as they once had in his mortal life. The detachment of his vampiric nature rendered even the foulest of odors a mere curiosity to his preternatural senses. And though this one wasn’t exactly pleasant, the fragrance caught the strings of a distinct nostalgia within him, shooting his memories back some thirty-five years to picturesque farm houses and brisk autumn afternoons. “It’s garlic, isn’t it?”
Louis sighed. “She said it was made with fifty cloves.”
“Who said? Made what?” The scent seemed to be emanating most strongly from the table by the window, which Lestat could see now had been thrown wide open. Upon the table lay a lace doily, and upon that sat a large covered dish made of blue painted earthenware.
Louis followed his gaze, then crossed the carpet to the pot, lifting its lid. The smell became immediately more potent, filling up every corner of the room. “It’s a sort of soup.”
“Did that woman bring it here?” Lestat asked, frankly surprised. When he’d seen her and her maid carrying that dish in the street, he never imagined they were coming to his very house! The thought of her stepping foot in his domain irritated him on a predatory level, though of course, she was harmless enough.
“Madame Szekely,” Louis informed him. “She told me she would send the maid for the pot tomorrow.” He was staring down into the creamy beige liquid within as if he hoped he could extract some divination from its lumps and whorls. Then he shuddered and replaced the lid. “It seems too cruel to throw it away.”
“But why would she leave soup here?” Lestat demanded. Their little family hardly gave off the aura of the needy and hungry!
Louis pushed the pot with the very tips of his fingers until it was as close to the open window as possible. “She said something about it wrenching her heart, seeing two young men living without a woman’s touch… You were right, she speaks perfect French. ‘You dine out every night, don’t you? When was the last time you had a home-cooked meal?’ she asked. ‘Here, take it. I brought my cook with me from the old country. She is the best cook in this city now, I promise you. The perfect thing on a dark night such as this. I just had to bring it to you myself. It is good for your heart.’ And then the way she smiled at me, Lestat…I might almost call it cunning. I think…” Louis trailed off, staring at the garlic soup as if it might at any moment come to life and eat him instead.
“What? What do you think?” Coming forward, Lestat took him gently by the forearm, trying to draw him away from the table. He brushed a curl of Louis’s ink black hair over his ear for him, not liking that anxious look creasing the corners of his eyes. All this over a kindly neighbor? “Perhaps she just wanted an excuse to look into our parlor? She’s old and bored and nosy. Did you let her in here? Maybe she wanted to catch a glimpse of Claudia. Did she come out of her room?”
Louis shook his head. Pulling away from Lestat’s touch, he pointed at the pot. “What do we do with it?”
“Well, don’t pour it in the garden,” Lestat answered shortly as his hands fell back to his sides. “You’ll kill the banana trees. Go dump it in the gutter. Or the river, I don’t care. Why are you asking me?”
He was wrong, killing had done nothing at all to improve his mood. Leaving Louis to solve the oh-so-important soup problem on his own, Lestat stalked off to his room.
—
The following night, the woman came back. Once again, Lestat had been out, purely by coincidence—or was it? He was starting to wonder. Louis told him about the encounter the moment he got home.
“I thought she was sending the maid for the dish this morning,” Lestat said as he took a seat at the fruitwood table to deal them a game of cards. “Didn’t you leave it just inside the gate for her?”
“You know that I did,” Louis said, his hands limp under the edge of the table, not moving to touch the cards Lestat flicked across at him. He seemed mesmerized by the movement of Lestat’s fingers as he thought back over his conversation with the curious Madame Szekely. “She wasn’t here longer than two minutes, but it was odd indeed.”
“Well, did you tell her we simply adored her soup? Best soup in the city, and all that? That it did our poor hearts a world of wonder?” Lestat frowned at the hand he’d dealt himself and considered gathering up all the cards and starting over. He doubted Louis would even notice.
“I thanked her,” Louis murmured. “But she didn’t even ask how we liked it, so I did not have to lie. She asked… She asked where we bought that mirror.”
“What mirror?” Lestat looked up from his cards to see Louis staring across the parlor now to the large gilt framed mirror hanging over the ornately carved mantle. “Ah. See! She just wanted to stick her nose in here and ogle our furniture. I hope you told her it’s not for sale! I had that one imported from Paris just after we moved in, what, twenty years ago now? Good luck to her finding another anything like it around here!”
“She wanted to look at it.” Louis slowly licked his full lower lip as his eyes followed a path from the door to the hearth. “But when I allowed her a minute to do so, she didn’t touch it or inspect it. She only stared at my reflection behind her and smiled at me again. She asked after you.”
“I’m sorry I missed her.” Lestat reached across the table and tapped Louis’s cards, hoping to draw his attention back so they could begin their game, but Louis just kept staring at the damned mirror.
“Lestat, what she said, it was, ‘There’s something about you. The two of you.’ And then she smiled. The look in her eye, Lestat, she didn’t look afraid. She looked…not cunning, no, I wasn’t right to say that. I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t like it.”
“Well.” Lestat tossed his cards down. Perhaps he’d do better at capturing Louis’s attention if he went to the spinet instead. “If you dislike it so much, why don’t you just kill her?”
Louis cringed back, shooting Lestat a reproving look. “I can’t. Not now.”
“Well, I’ll do it then.”
“No!”
“Not here, obviously. I’ll take her in her bed in her hideous orange house. They’ll think she died in her sleep.”
“Lestat, no!” Louis’s hands clenched the sides of the table as if he’d throw it out from between them and tackle Lestat at once to keep him from doing any such thing. For a moment, Lestat entertained letting him.
“Why not?” he asked instead. “Because you’ve spoken to her? Because she’s seen your face?”
“Lestat…”
“So I’ll do it for you. Or we’ll let Claudia have her! Oh, she’ll love it.”
“Please!”
Lestat sat back, folding his arms over his chest. “So why not? You’re not in love with her, are you?” He laughed, amused with himself. “Louis, she must be sixty-five, seventy, even. True, you’re nearly fifty now, though, aren’t you?”
Pushing his chair back with a rough scrape, Louis came around the table, making Lestat have to crane his head back to look up at him. “If she comes again, Lestat, I won’t answer the door. If you’re home when it happens, neither will you.” What fire in his eyes! “She’s too openly connected to us now. If she dies, people will come tell us about it at best, or ask questions about it at worst. Nobody is killing her. I won’t let you.”
Unfolding one arm, Lestat hooked his fingers between two buttons of Louis’s waistcoat, tugging him closer. “Oh? How will you stop me?” he asked, his own heartbeat quickening at the rapid succession of possibilities already playing through his mind. And when the blush rose to Louis’s cheeks, Lestat knew he’d have exactly what he wanted tonight.
—
Not the following night, nor the next, but the one after that, they saw the woman again. It was the night before the star party, early enough in the evening that they could safely be out enjoying a walk with Claudia without drawing attention to their oddly nocturnal child’s lack of appropriate bedtime.
As they were several blocks away from home, it was certainly unexpected to run into their elderly neighbor also partaking of an evening stroll, but, as Lestat insisted, not unheard of. They’d tipped their hats to her, and Claudia had made Madame Szekely and her lady’s maid a very pretty curtsy, and then they’d each gone their separate ways.
Lestat had tried to see if he could pinpoint the look in the woman’s expression that had so troubled Louis the other night, but she had seemed merely pleased to greet her neighbors—lovely little Claudia in particular—if a bit tired from her exercise and eager to get home. Like before, her mind had revealed nothing to him.
“What was that she was carrying?” Louis asked once they were well out of earshot.
Had she been carrying something? Lestat glanced over his shoulder, but she must have gone around the corner. He’d been so focused on her face and exchanging the pleasantries Louis so failed at, that he hadn’t paid much attention to what was in her hands, though after a moment of thought, he recalled what Louis was talking about. “Wasn’t it just a stick of wood? Not a walking stick.”
“No,” Louis agreed, his own stick tapping the cobbles as they crossed the street. He smoothed a hand over Claudia’s petal pink bonnet, and Lestat well knew how Louis wished he could take her hand, but she had been insisting on crossing streets without holding hands for over a year now. “No, it was too short to be a walking stick. Was it…pointed?”
Lestat blinked at him over Claudia’s head. “Why would she be carrying a short, pointed stick?”
“And she gripped it so tightly when she saw us,” Louis murmured anxiously. “Did you notice?”
Lestat had certainly not. “Well, you frightened her, with that stare of yours.”
“I did not.”
“All right, then you captivated her.”
“Lestat!”
“I know, I’ll just ask her about it at the star party tomorrow. Does my dear brother-in-law frighten you or captivate you, madame? Which is it?”
“Why must you always be so cruel?”
“Really, Louis.”
Claudia's voice ensnared their attentions at once. “I know why she has the stick.”
Lestat put a hand on the top of her back, her velvet cloak thick against his glove. “What’s that, my love?”
A dainty shrug of her shoulders made them roll delectably under his palm. Her voice came bright as a bell. “She has it because she knows what we are.”
“What are you talking about?” When Lestat realized Louis had stopped in his tracks, he stopped as well, turning to look back at him. The expression on his face seemed one of barely-contained horror.
“She knows we walk here,” Claudia was saying. “She knows she’ll see us, and she knows what we are.” Claudia looped her tiny hand around two of Lestat’s fingers to draw his focus back, though her eyes were on Louis as well. “She is Polish, isn’t she?”
Louis’s lips barely moved as he replied, “Actually, I think she’s Hungarian.”
A sparkle of pride came to Claudia’s clear blue eyes, and she nodded at some inner thought, her golden curls bouncing around her porcelain face. Eagerly, she looked back and forth between her two fathers, clearly waiting for something. When neither of them knew what to say, she tossed her head impatiently. “Haven’t you ever read anything about our kind? Well, not really our kind. Just the superstitions of what they think is our kind. What they do to the unfortunate corpses in those dismal countries in eastern Europe? They hammer a sharpened stick like that through their hearts before they bury them so that they don’t rise as the undead. Can you imagine?”
Lestat clapped a hand over his mouth, but he couldn’t stop the laughter that burst forth. Oh, it was too funny! This woman knew what they were, did she? And she would protect herself from them with a short, pointed stick! No matter how Louis hissed at him to quiet down, it was no good. Lestat laughed and laughed.
—
The star party was a grand affair of some two hundred well-heeled guests. It should have been a simple matter to avoid Madame Szekely amid the crowd, but Louis had fretted about the inevitably of facing her all evening.
“We can’t kill her,” he kept insisting, no matter how much Lestat disagreed.
“Well, we can hardly let her live!”
When Louis started going on about making plans for selling their flat and moving to Savannah or even Richmond, Lestat had thrown up his hands and tried to find better company to spend the evening with. There were enough handsome young ladies in willowy gowns strolling through the mansion’s garden and drinking punch on the terrace under the brilliantly twinkling sky that he could have his pick of tantalizing stargazing companions tonight.
But Louis didn’t trust him, and refused to leave his side, following Lestat everywhere he went, no matter who he spoke to. Lestat openly teased him more than once in front of some new acquaintance or another for taking so little part in their conversation, but Louis hardly seemed to notice, which made it far less fun. His attention was constantly sweeping over the guests, looking for the diminutive plump shape of Madame Szekely.
“She knew we were invited,” Lestat said to him confidentially when they were alone again for a moment. “If she truly knows what we are, and if she’s as sharp as she’s ever seemed, then she’s run far, far away from here already.”
Louis shook his head vehemently. “She came to our house,” he insisted. “She came inside, alone with me! She’s here, I know it. Watching us. Plotting something!”
“Would you get a hold of yourself?” Lestat snapped under his breath. Glancing around the terrace, he could tell Louis’s distress was drawing attention. Lestat sighed and hooked his arm, dragging him discreetly through the terrace doors into the deserted room beyond. Before he could say anything else, a servant appeared, asking if he could be of assistance, but Lestat waved him off. The man slipped out the open glass doors into the gay and lively crowd.
Once he had Louis alone, Lestat took him firmly by the shoulders, fixing his incomparable emerald eyes with his own. “We are not in danger, Louis,” he said in a low voice. “I promise you.” What could this woman do to them? Lestat had never feared harm at the hands of mortals! She knew where they slept, that was unfortunate. She could, in theory, try to expose them to the sun, but it would mean her own funeral. And if she meant to do that, wouldn’t she have done it already? What was she waiting for? Did she have accomplices?
Regardless of all the rest, Lestat couldn’t stand to see Louis so distressed, not in this way, so he quietly determined to kill the woman tonight. And he would enjoy taking her, too. Louis would understand the wisdom in it when it was done. Lestat would see in her blood if she’d told anyone else what she knew, and if she had, he would track them all down one by one and kill them too. It would be a night to remember, to be sure, for more than just the stars.
But right now, Louis was trembling under his hands, and Lestat brought them up to cup his face. His perfect face. How many dreams had Lestat ever had about caressing these cheekbones with his thumbs? Of perhaps pressing his lips just there, between his eyes? Oh, Lestat absolutely hated his gloves in this moment for coming between them. “We are not giving up our home. We’ll be fine, Louis. I promise. Leave it to me.”
Louis’s eyes went wide. “Lestat,” he whispered urgently between his teeth and his gaze flicked past him as his entire frame grew rigid. “She’s here.”
Lestat’s hands fell at once, and he turned on his heel to see the old woman glide through the terrace doors, approaching them with not a trace of fear or uncertainty in her countenance.
Well, at least she wasn’t carrying any sharpened sticks. On the contrary, she looked perfectly ordinary in her matronly ball gown of soft puce silk. Her gray hair was done up in an elaborate coif, but she wore no jewelry other than a gold locket pinned upon her bodice.
The clock on the mantle ticked far too many times for any of them to say an appropriate greeting, and the air, though pleasantly fragrant from the jasmine arranged in vases throughout the room, seemed far thicker now than the night the garlic soup had befouled their parlor.
Louis remained utterly still and silent at Lestat’s back, but palpable tension radiated from him in the inches of air between them. Lestat’s gloved fingertips dug into his palm, but of course he couldn’t do anything to the woman here. They were alone in this salon, but the room was lined with glass, and though dimly lit by candlelight, anyone could be watching from the terrace. There was absolutely nothing Lestat could do but smile, and he could only wonder just how sinister his sudden grin looked as the woman stopped so boldly not two feet in front of him.
“I know what you are,” she said in her perfect French with a smile of her own that couldn’t truthfully be called anything but placid. As before, her mind was utterly impenetrable to Lestat. What sort of mettle was this mortal made of?
Louis took a half step forward to Lestat’s side, and Lestat shot him a look of caution. Whatever Louis was feeling, though, he hid it behind a perfect mask.
The woman seemed utterly unperturbed to receive no other answer from them, and she spoke again. “We have a word for men like you in my country.”
She lifted a hand, and Lestat realized only too late that she did hold something after all. A long narrow object. But just as he tensed, ready to snatch it from her, she flicked it open to reveal a silk fan that matched the color of her dress.
“But it is not a kind word,” she continued as she lightly fanned herself. “And I do not repeat it.”
“I see,” said Lestat, but he wasn’t quite sure that he did at all. The motion of her fan was mesmerizing, the heady scent of the jasmine making him feel nearly dizzy with how tightly coiled he was becoming. He could only imagine how much worse Louis was suffering at his side, and he exchanged another glance with him, willing him to remain calm.
The woman was nodding, and the look upon her elegantly wrinkled face now seemed more pitying than anything. “But I know a better word for what you are.”
“Do you?” Lestat felt as if his joints had been replaced with wood. If he moved an inch, he would snap. But he managed to keep his voice cool and even, managed to keep his mouth from looking as cruel as he knew it could. “And what is that, madame?”
This was it. They would have to kill her right here somehow before she revealed them to the entire party. Only the most fragile pane of glass separated them from hundreds of witnesses. But how could they possibly do it? Lestat’s hands flexed at his sides, and he felt Louis tense in preparation.
“I do,” she said, and she was smiling at them again, first at Louis, then at Lestat, then back to Louis again. Nothing cunning in this smile, just as Louis had said. Lestat could have only called it fond, or even protective, perhaps. He didn’t understand it at all, and that was somehow worse than anything else.
Her fan slowed and finally, she spoke again. “That word is—love.” Once more, that smile. “I know what you are. You are…in love.” Her smile then took on such a look of benevolent adoration, as if she were their own mother and as proud of them as could be. “I know why you hide it, why you pretend to be brothers. But I see you. I see your love.”
With a flick of her wrist, the fan closed, and her gnarled hands rose to the locket pinned over her chest. Opening it, she revealed two portraits done in pencil in very fine detail. One was obviously a much younger version of herself, as the true beauty she had been when her hair was rich and dark. The other drawing was of a different young woman, fairer of hair and complexion, and just as beautiful. “I too kept my love secret,” she said in a hushed, smiling voice. “She was my ‘sister’ for thirty-six years.” With a muffled click, the little gold locket closed. “But I see you. I know you. And I love you too.”
And that was all she had wanted to say to them. Her smile was absolutely beatific as she left them silently, alone and utterly dumbfounded in the candlelit room. Her skirts swishing languorously, she returned to the party on the garden terrace to gaze upon the stars, vast and eternal and unchanging, no matter what passed beneath their watch.
Meanwhile, the flames beat under the skin of Lestat’s face. Oh, he didn’t dare look at Louis! He did not even have it in him to make some joke out of this moment, to dismiss the old woman’s words as laughable and spare them both some calamitous disaster. Don’t say anything, don’t do anything, that was the only way. Otherwise Louis would push him further away than ever.
“Well,” Lestat breathed, but that was about all he could manage. He should go. He had to get out of here. Go out and kill—uptown, downtown, anywhere he could. Two throats, three throats, there had to be a point where it was enough and he could be himself again. Don’t even say anything, spare Louis the embarrassment.
But just as he was about to turn and leave without another word, Louis’s hand found his. Lestat’s breath caught, and he looked down just in time to watch Louis’s gloved fingers lace through his own.
“Louis?” he whispered, his throat too dry for anything more. When he lifted his eyes, Louis’s were waiting for him, those incomparable eyes. The look in them was so soft, Lestat’s heart stuttered. His cheeks were as pink as Lestat’s felt, and the effect upon his beauty would have been breathtaking if Lestat had any breath left to take.
Softly, Louis’s fingers squeezed Lestat’s, and then with the gentlest of tugs, he drew them out of the party and led the way home to find stars of their own.