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It took days for the swelling to subside, for Louis' face to lose the bloated look that made it hard for Claudia to cast her gaze upon him. She scarcely left the coffin room that first week, too anxious to let him out of her sight despite knowing there was no danger of losing him. She had to remind herself that he was immortal; no matter how bad the injuries seemed, he would mend and someday be whole again.
To be near him on the dawn of the catastrophe she had settled into Lestat’s coffin, pushing down the mixture of revulsion and fear triggered by the strong scent of him wafting from its lining. The alternative was to either rest in her old room (unthinkable) or go without cover, which should have been safe enough relative to her risky sleeping arrangements of the past seven years. Yet stubbornly she shut herself in, wishing to prove that she wasn't afraid, willing her body to unstiffen, her mind clear of the violent images flashing through it, until the exhaustion won out and took her under.
At the first given chance she dragged her white coffin into the room next to Louis', pushing the third away down by their feet.
A perforated lung made Louis' chest wheeze with every breath – a sound Claudia swore she could hear long after that lung had patched up. She'd fall asleep to it and rouse each time the rattle grew erratic, sensing when Louis jerked awake even before his cry resounded, whether from present pain or the imagined drop or both she could not tell. Rushing to his side, she would wipe the mist of sweat from his forehead and neck, arranging him afterwards in the most painless possible recline. He seemed to calm down sooner when she held his hand, the touch drawing his skittering eye to her face, the sight of which drained his panic by degrees.
Poor Louis. Reduced to bone shards suspended in a limp flesh-sack. Claudia positioned his arms and legs to make them resemble a natural shape and hopefully expedite the healing. His initial lucid moments were few, and far in between. Most the time he just slept, a deep coma-like sleep.
Lying footsteps apart, his and Claudia's nightmares bled into one another, both featuring a yellow-haired terror. When Louis re-lived the fall, Claudia experienced its phantom agony as well as that of her own snapped leg where the bone had recently fused back together. And sometimes Lestat's raging face morphed into that of Killer, his nostrils exaggerated by her vantage from underneath him as he pinned her body down and took sick pleasure from it, a prominent vein throbbing on his pale, clammy forehead.
Overwhelmed, Claudia blocked Louis then was instantly so wracked with guilt she let the mental walls back down again. What was her suffering compared with his? What could she do but share his burden? But as soon as Louis regained a modicum of strength he expended it towards keeping the nightmares contained. It was palpable how he strained to brick up that unpleasantness, the deep shame he repressed that seeped from its outskirts.
She should have told him not to bother: he ought to avoid exertion, conserve his energy for recovery. She didn't say it though, and reproached herself for the relief she felt, to be spared that pain.
Feeding Louis was easy when he was unconscious. The hunting itself was fraught because Claudia hated leaving him vulnerable, always racing against some imagined peril to bring home human prey, but the rest was simple: once she propped him against the edge of the coffin, all she had to do was smear some blood on his lips, and out came his tongue to lap it up. His instinct took over, his fangs sharpening for the kill. And when Claudia bent the victims' necks to his mouth he suckled them like a baby, so greedy he was loath to let go even when their pulse had stopped.
She experimented with means of administering pain relief, doping them with various cocktails of pilfered sedatives and painkillers, watching obsessively for the effects. The damage done to Louis was unsurvivable for a mortal. The drugs required to numb that level of agony were sufficient to shock their systems into shutting down before they were of any use; so she held back with the dosages and spent stretches of time coffinside, noting which combinations worked best to soothe the tension that Louis retained even in slumber.
When he became lucid, however, she had to honor his preferred "vegetarian" diet. To make up for the meager quality and quantity of blood that followed, she got him as many larger animals as possible, supplementing the usual affair of rats and pigeons. Claudia became adept at intercepting livestock deliveries to the nearest slaughterhouse, done surreptitiously enough to puzzle the workers without causing a sensation. Gone were such reckless days.
It did not occur to her that she might feed Louis her own blood for a good while. The last time she'd done it, she was trying to fashion an immortal companion of her own, watching with mounting urgency as a string of candidates picked at random wilted before her eyes. Back then it seemed as if the sereness of her soul extended to her lifesblood, making it deficient, unwholesome, lacking the ability to nourish or heal. Perhaps that was why the thought failed to cross her mind sooner.
By now Louis' swollen eye had opened, but it was sightless; he could sit up on his own, but remained paralyzed from the waist down.
"You can drink from me!" she exclaimed when at last the thought struck her – "That'd be better for you than the animals."
Louis shook his head.
"Why not?"
"No."
"Why not?" she insisted, holding out her arm.
"Claudia," he hissed, turning aside, scandalized, as if her reasonable suggestion was wholly out of line.
His disproportionate reaction made her self-conscious. She was beset, to her alarm, by several uncomfortable impressions: Louis' tongue darting to lick blood off his lips (soft, when she had touched them); the delicate flutter of his lashes as he drained the kills she brought him; the wet rhythmic sucking of blood, those unconscious noises he had made – so deeply hungry. Sounded rather like the noise that would carry through the walls some nights, years back, when she knew Uncle Les was on him, and they tried and failed to be quiet.
Claudia clammed up. Didn't bring it up again.
The townhouse was a den of misery suffocated by refuse, to say nothing of the destruction that had stormed across the rooms, leaving splinters of wrecked furniture everywhere. Clouds of dust rose at the merest touch. It stank of stale cigarette smoke and rodent corpses left to mummify in odd corners, not a recent development but the accumulation of years. How did it get so bad, she wondered? How long had they lived this way, tolerating this dump?
She used to think of them nightly when she first left home. Bitterly. She cursed Lestat and calcified her heart against Louis' pitiful appeal to stay. In dire moments, strained by hardship, she found herself missing the luxuries of the life she had fled, the ease she'd taken for granted. Claudia had come to them a pauper, then took to excess all too well. She had forgotten all about destitution.
Nevertheless she scraped by and gradually a point came when weeks and even months elapsed without a single thought spared to the couple at Rue Royale. The demands of survival usurped bitter reflection; keenness for any knowledge concerning their kind became all-encompassing. Claudia was forward-looking, always. She'd been caught off guard when Bruce mentioned Louis calling out to her, after all these years.
Still? All that time? She had shut him out and moved on as best as she could. Surrounded now by the palpable degradation wrought by her absence, an oppressive sensation settled square on her chest, a horror-pity-remorse mixture, stubborn, refusing to grant her the paltry relief of tears.
Her bedroom was preserved in the exact state she had abandoned it —a mausoleum of artificially sustained girlhood.
How elated she had been back when the room was under works, so total her excitement, it robbed her of sleep, made Lestat positively cross with the scratch of her anticipatory pen. Encased in her coffin, she listened to the sounds of the hired workmen, getting glimpses of its progress through their eyes. Come evening she skipped across the house for sheer delight just picturing it (No skipping!), a room of her own, Claudia’s own bed with fluffy pillows, her own desk and vanity, a closet full of the prettiest clothes a girl could ever dream of!
Along came Charlie to awaken her from that saccharine stupor, and the nectar turned to ash between her lips. She wanted to claw along the walls then, rip up the rich wallpaper, sink her teeth into the pillows and wag her head like a mad dog. There had been no reprieve from the anguish, none. Attempting to expunge the noxious sludge, she scribbled into her diaries with compulsion that verged on mania.
Claudia spent as many hours of the night as possible outside, roaming the city. She idled by train tracks and wharfs, finding boys and men to fuck and eat. The ones that pleased her she tried to turn, letting her blood drip into their gasping mouths to no avail. Each time she had frantically thought, Are you the One? Will you be my special someone, who belongs to me? Will you make this hell more bearable? but none of them made it. They went cold and lifeless just like Charlie did. Her arm became mottled with bite marks, new wounds replacing barely healed indents.
The more of them she lost the more intense became her bloodlust, if it could even be termed that. It wasn't the blood she thirsted after, but some other indeterminate thing. A purely destructive urge came over her to rend and maim, but it wasn't personal; she'd been crazed with rage. At times the throbs of anger cooled to detached fascination and she noted with morbid curiosity how frail and malleable human bodies were, the work of them, peeling skin back to reveal muscle and tendon, tearing into the cavity to expose the reeking viscera.
She hadn't been discriminating and took anyone that caught her eye. The old, the young, vagrants, drunken men, couples often, whole families. Full figured women arrested her attention, their breasts becoming a point of fixation. She glutted herself on their blood, collected their last words, kept parts of their bodies. Her own body was changeless but something about the fetid breakdown of cellular matter corresponded to the festering rot within Claudia, the little girl she used to be, trapped inside forever.
Back in her begrimed gilded cage, Claudia had to suspend all dreams of old world cities teeming with ancient secrets. She was, for the foreseeable future, beholden. Aside from nursing Louis and outsourcing his meals, there were mountains of trash to clear out.
Towering stacks of newspapers told a bleak tale if she were to trace them by date, following the spiral of Louis' depression, how they propagated through the rooms like an infestation of weeds. It wasn't lost on her when certain issues —set apart from the rest—seemed worn with touch; particular headlines—clanging bells of recognition—smudged by yearning fingertips.
(Claudia, I'm sorry, Bruce had mimicked his desolate plea, Claudia, come back.)
She fell into the motions of cleaning – picking up empty liquor bottles, sweeping floors, dusting. As she scrubbed a crust of blood off the courtyard, she suppressed the looping image of Louis' battered body dragged across the tile by the mandible.
Despite how well Louis bore his incapacitation, she saw through the humble, stoic front he presented. His dependence mortified him, especially when assisted with intimate tasks. Changing him out of sweaty clothes, carefully bathing him, Claudia felt the knobs of his spine as she passed the washcloth over his back, skirting the worst of the bruising. Splotches of purple here, sickly swamp green there. Tenderness welled in her throat.
Conversation remained sparse, split between generalities and the specifics of his convalescence. They were reticent, both, and wary of agitating the other's open wounds. Conscious of the negative space left by their Maker, whose name never passed her lips.
She moved her coffin back to her bedroom to give him the semblance of personal space. Telepathically, they were conjoined. She could anticipate his every need from down the parlor, across the hall; when she left the house to hunt she checked with him by the minute. In twilight hours she jolted awake and groped for his mind from the other room as though feeling for a sleeping baby's crib.
But with gradual, painful progress, Louis' body healed. One evening, she walked into the coffin room and found him unusually animated. "Look," he said, pointing to his wiggling toes. Kneeling by him, Claudia ran her fingertips up the sole of his foot. "You feel that?"
"Yeah, tickles."
"Does it, now?" flittering feather-light touches on his skin until he let out a delightful peal of laughter—followed by a wince, hunched over his aching ribs.
Despite regaining sensation, he was incapable of taking more than a few wobbling steps with the aid of his walking stick. If only he drank from humans, surely, it would speed things along.
"Don't you want to get better?" Claudia would argue, fighting the urge to shake sense into him.
"'Course I do."
"Then why won't you help yourself?"
She might have been talking to a wall. Dead set, righteous, Louis scowled, refused to engage, grit his teeth – she couldn't stand it.
Claudia was on the prowl for a victim. A man, that was obvious, in his prime, big and hearty – pumping vital blood. She glid along the edges of the night, assessing its shuffling denizens, skimming their minds for amenable prey, a delectable scoundrel she could seduce back home.
Two men would have done well enough but were promptly dismissed. It wasn't until she'd cast another aside that Claudia realized she'd been trying, unconsciously, to handpick someone particularly attractive to Louis.
Before, when the three of them were out as a family, it hadn't been uncommon for a lecherous pair of blue eyes to linger on strangers they encountered of both sexes. When her fathers entertained—those house parties attracting artists and eccentrics that Claudia was only allowed to attend for half an hour before getting herded upstairs (Isn't it past your bedtime missy?)—the flirtatious liberty Lestat could assume with guests had been inarticulately vexing. By contrast, she had no inkling whatsoever of Louis' tastes. In truth he had eyes for nobody else.
What returns did Daddy Lou ever receive for his fidelity?
There, across the street, a mean-looking lout, roused by drink, raring for a fight or a fuck. She made eyes at him and reeled him in. From his loping gait, his self-conception placed him at the top of the food chain. Claudia let him bask in his presumptive confidence.
"What's a little girl like you doing out here so late?" he leered, jagged teeth a-gleaming. Too easy.
Knocked out cold, she had him gagged and trussed up, buttons undone to expose his neck and the top of his barrel chest, biceps straining against the sleeves of his shirt. A sight not without its crude allure – though any hope of appealing to Louis' subterranean lust was quelled by his stupefied reception, the novel he'd been thumbing sliding out of his hand as he gawked at Claudia's offering.
"What the fuck is this?"
"That's your dinner."
His face hardened. "Not funny."
"It's not a joke. Drain him."
"I told you a hundred times—"
"Louis," she interrupted, severe voice wiped of inflection so that he understood she meant every word: "If you refuse to drink this man's blood, I will drag him to my room and do terrible things to him."
She allowed the words to sink in, an intractable monotone. "I will snap his fingers one by one....put out his eyes. I'll carve him open and pluck his pulsing entrails. I'll make sport of him until I've had my fill, Louis, and I've already fed tonight, so all that blood will go to waste. It'll be murder, plain and simple. And you have the power to stop it right now. So what's it gonna be?"
Louis stared wide-eyed as though he couldn't believe what his ears were hearing. "Well?" she demanded?
His lips parted but words failed to materialize. Claudia yanked the man by the collar and made for the door. "Wait!" he cried. Claudia didn't slow down. "Claudia, stop—stop!"
She threw a cold look over her shoulder.
"...Bring 'im here."
The man, reviving, emitted a low groan as she hauled him up to Louis' coffin, baring his throat with a fistful of hair to tug his head back. Louis breathed rapidly, snared in a futile struggle that made him hold out even as his fangs protruded, pupils dilating from a whiff of blood trickling down his meal-to-be's temple where he'd been thwacked. Louis squeezed his eyes shut. With an expression of deep disgust, he latched his teeth to flesh, severing an artery.
Claudia could hear the gush of blood hitting the roof of his mouth. How shocking the sensation must have been to his ascetic palate. An involuntary moan reverberated across the coffin room as he lost himself to the swoon, drawing ravenous gulps that drained the man to the very brink of death, devouring his feeble consciousness (an initial spasm the only resistance) wringing every possible drop until the heartbeat faltered.
When Louis was done, he angled away from Claudia, scooted down his coffin, and brought the lid down—BANG.
Fine. Claudia lugged the carcass out to the courtyard past the parched fountain and stuffed it into the incinerator. She stood there a good while watching the flames engulf its mass, the crackle of burning fat, the features melting, getting charred. The smoke made her eyes sting.
Louis could sulk all he wanted. He needed to get well and if this was the only way to make him feed, she would endure his resentment. She'd force the blood down his throat if she had to, and let his conscience rest easy.
His coffin was shut the next day when Claudia brought in his usual breakfast. When she pried it open, braced for his flinty mood—empty. She cried out in panic.
"Down here," Louis answered, sending an impression of the parlor.
Claudia flew down the staircase. She found him resting on the chaise, cane leaned against his knee. At her entrance, he gripped its handle and rose up, taking careful but steady steps in her direction. Before he could walk any further Claudia rushed into his arms.
Louis enveloped her in the crushing, all-encompassing embrace he'd been too restrained to give the moment of her return, she comprehend, not wishing to overwhelm with the wretched magnitude of his relief though he ached to cradle her tight and never, ever, ever let go.
"I know I'd been a burden to you," he mumbled.
"I don't care about that! I just want to see you on your feet again!"
"I know," he said, stroking down her back, "You're looking out for me."
Still holding onto him, she guided him back to the chaise. "I feel better... stronger," he said.
"So you'll drink the blood?"
Claudia had no qualms deploying her most entreating countenance to persuade him, earning a put-upon sigh. “...Just until I’m better.”
Her mouth stretched wide in a grin. Seemed like ages since the mere ghost of a smile suggested itself on her face that the sensation was foreign, the muscles of her cheeks twinging from disuse. Seeing her so pleased, Louis smiled too, and drew her closer. The waves of his affection crashed on the shores of Claudia's heart. In all her memory she'd never been held this way, simply held in love.
She thought of the night she was reborn into darkness when he carried her on his back after her first kill. How unnecessary the gesture, ridiculous, really, at her age. Yet it touched a guarded place within, and she leaned into it fully, soaking up his indulgence, allowing him to spoil her – something no adult in her life had done before, least of all her mean old aunt.
Her immortal guardians, she soon discovered, had diverging notions on how to bring up a young lady such as herself. In certain matters Lestat had been more permissive of the two: there was more excitement with him, and relish in her new powers; besides, he humored most of her adolescent whims. But she sensed from him, perhaps not coldness, at the time…rather a limited reserve of patience. The line separating endearment and irritability was fine indeed, and she toed it frequently to aggravate him for her amusement without overstepping.
Not so with Louis, who was warm and giving to a smothering degree. He worried and fussed, regarded her as treasure. Auntie used to look at her with long-suffering disdain. At best, resigned tolerance. What did Louis see when he looked at her, she wondered, how did she earn his regard? And what if it were a matter of time before the stock ran out?
Something fell into place at the cemetery when she spied his farewell with his sister –a confirmation of her instinct. It wasn’t she, Claudia, that he saw, which well might have, but failed to disprit. Because if Louis’ love was independent of who she was, or what she did, it meant that no action could alter or detract from it; it was given; it endured because it was larger than, and beyond herself.
Strange solace.