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Daniel had never thought of himself as someone who hated Christmas. No one at the pre-holiday toasts or the company Christmas parties Alice forced him to attend had ever jokingly called him a ‘Grinch.’ Flipping the calendar to December had never triggered a wave of violent melancholy, and listening to children sing didn’t make him want to lock himself inside listening AC/DC at full volume (except for the neighbor’s kids during his second marriage—if you’re that off-key, maybe you should just give up and provide a different kind of entertainment). He simply wasn’t the kind of person who paid attention to Christmas. Just another day, nothing to get worked up about.
Even all the adrenaline, the frenzied race for gifts, was always something alien to him. Alice had grown used to it; she quickly stopped expecting him to pick up on the hints she left around and resigned herself to telling him directly what she’d like. Better that than getting nothing—if only for appearances, so the girls wouldn’t think theirs was an unhappy marriage where Dad couldn’t even remember to get Mom a present. (Was it? An unhappy marriage? Probably. Not that a perfect gift would have changed anything.)
His daughters fought harder to involve him in the Christmas spirit. They didn’t give up easily, especially Lenora (stubborn like him, a fighter, with scraped knees and messy hair). In the early years, she wrote hopeful letters to Santa Claus, asking for ponies, family trips to Disneyland, wonderful experiences to share (generally excluding Kate, as older sisters often do when they’re not thrilled with their role). Then the letters became more heartbreaking. Dear Santa, please don’t let my parents fight this Christmas. Dear Santa, I’ve been so good this year, and I’ll get straight A’s—please make Daddy come home for Christmas. Then she stopped writing entirely, as if Christmas in the family had never existed. As if Daniel had never existed.
Kate adapted, more rational, more pragmatic. She had watched her sister suffer over their absent, failing father and decided it would never happen to her, that she would never let him hurt her like that. If Daniel couldn’t be the father she wanted and needed, he would be something else—something that couldn’t disappoint her. From then on, her requests shifted to Barbie houses, toys, and trips to the snow with her friends. Nothing that required his presence, nothing a secretary couldn’t purchase. Always explicit requests, never surprises, nothing that would highlight how little her father knew her.
She accepted everything from Daniel, knowing he wouldn’t give her anything. Everything except love, because every time Daniel tried to step out of the lines she had drawn for him—easier for him once she grew older, when she started seeming like a person rather than someone to take care of—every time he offered her affection, an extra word, she shrugged it off, aware of how fragile the armor she had built truly was.
Everything except love, even at Christmas.
His first December as a vampire isn’t much different from all the other Decembers. Except for the detail of immortality and feeding on people. December is a month when it’s particularly easy to be a vampire, when the night is especially alluring, and people out and about are just a bit more euphoric. Their faces are slightly flushed as they leave a pub or restaurant, blowing on their hands to warm them, laughing about a lousy gift they received, and repeating holiday greetings to friends and family. They’re a little drunker than usual, a little more careless, a little more vulnerable.
Perfect victims.
Daniel gets ready to head out; the hunger is starting to gnaw at him, as it always does at this time of night. It had been strange at first, transitioning from being an old man with little interest in food and a diminished appetite to feeling this urgency, this hunger. But Daniel had always lived with a certain kind of hunger, so it wasn’t hard to find a place for this one inside himself. Hunger for stories, for people—it wasn’t all that different, just much less destructive.
The doorbell rings just as he’s putting on his gloves (a habit, a whim, considering he doesn’t really feel the cold). He opens the door without even checking the peephole—another longstanding habit, because he’s always been reckless with life—and finds himself face-to-face with a delivery guy from some online store.
Daniel hasn’t ordered anything, isn’t expecting anything from his publisher, and even if someone had sent him a Christmas gift (hard to imagine so early in the season—who sends a gift on the first of December?), it wouldn’t have arrived at this hour. The young man stands there, seemingly in a trance, as if he’s drunk. He’s holding an envelope but says nothing, doesn’t ask for his name, doesn’t request a signature on some electronic device, nothing.
“Hey, man, do you need something?” Daniel hopes he doesn’t need to make a phone call or call for help or deal with any other complication because he really isn’t in the mood to get dragged into an evening involving emergency calls, police, or anything like that, especially now, when the pangs of hunger are growing stronger. All he wants is to move the guy out of the way and go find dinner. He’s so hungry he can almost smell the blood.
Except he can actually smell it.
The young man sways slightly, then brushes his hair back from his face and tilts his neck. And Daniel sees it: a thin trickle of blood slowly trailing down the guy’s neck, staining his shirt. It’s not much—the guy is still standing, so he must have managed at least to get into the elevator and up to Daniel’s apartment—but the blood is there, red, slightly thick (the wound is small; it isn’t gushing) and so inviting.
Daniel shouldn’t. Not here, not on his own doorstep, not when anyone could walk in and see him (though everyone is either asleep or out). But the blood is so tempting, and the guy tilts his neck even further, and Daniel is, and always will be, an addict. The drug is all that’s changed.
It’s only while he’s dealing with disposing of the body that he remembers the envelope the young man had been holding. On the outside, written in handwriting he’d recognize anywhere, is just his name. And Daniel realizes he can’t recall how it sounds when spoken by Armand. Had Armand ever said his name during those nights in Dubai, or had he always stuck to the formal—and sometimes sarcastic—Mr. Molloy? Daniel should have paid attention. He usually notices everything; he would have, had he known it would matter.
He can’t blame Parkinson’s for the trembling in his hands as he opens the envelope (Get your shit together, Molloy, damn it!). Inside is a blank sheet of paper with a single number written in the center: 1.
It’s the first of December, and this is the first contact he’s had with Armand since Armand killed him and made him rise again.
He sits with his back against the door, the note in his hand, until nearly dawn, until exhaustion finally overtakes him, and he has to retreat inside."
And fuck that bastard. Months of silence, and then he sends an Amazon delivery guy to his door? As if Daniel couldn’t procure his own meals. As if he hadn’t had to learn to procure his own dinner (yes, yes, Louis helped, but that’s not the point) while the bastard was sipping margaritas on a beach or doing whatever ancient vampires do when they’re old enough not to have problems with sunlight. Daniel is perfectly capable of being a vampire on his own and certainly doesn’t need takeout dinners and cryptic little notes. He’s a two-time Pulitzer winner and a cold-blooded killer. He’s not going to behave like some Victorian heroine and sleep with the note under his pillow. He’ll go out, fuck someone, and maybe even drain them. Fuck him.
ArmandArmandArmand.
He smells the blood before he feels the touch on his shoulder.
It’s been a lean night; he hasn’t been particularly seductive (yes, yes, he’d said he’d kill it tonight, but bad days happen to the best of them, shut the fuck up), and he’s just about ready to give up and find a homeless person or some junkie in an alley when he smells it and then sees her. He’d have known just by looking: fur coat, expensive earrings, no longer in her prime despite the annual check-ups with her surgeon. Not the kind of woman you’d meet in a dark alley. And then there’s the blood and the way she tilts her neck to show it to him. Daniel is perfectly capable of hunting on his own, but he’s tired, and it’ll be dawn soon, and there’s still a note with his name on it back in his room that he couldn’t bring himself to throw away, so fuck it.
He notices the envelope afterward. Once again, his name, the same handwriting, and inside, another white card with a single number in the middle: 2.
Daniel tears it up and throws it to the ground. Then he goes back and picks it up because he’s pathetic like that. He hopes the bastard isn’t somewhere watching him and laughing at him (he hopes he is).
It’s the second of December.
By the sixth day, he’s almost tempted to ask Louis, but he doesn’t know how. “Hey, buddy, when you two were together, did Armand ever leave people on your doorstep?” It doesn’t sound great. And it’s not like he and Armand are together. Besides, he doesn’t think Louis is particularly keen to talk about his ex right now. Daniel is only just starting to grasp how vampires perceive time, how a year is as long as a day, but it still trips him up. Armand has been absent for months, and Daniel feels like he can sense every one of those minutes in his bones, in his blood, every second without contact from his maker.
He’s also not entirely sure Louis would even understand Armand’s nuances. Not that Daniel thinks he knows Armand better—what are a few weeks compared to seventy-seven years together?—but at the same time, that’s exactly what he thinks. Maybe it’s the vampire bond; maybe it’s because the worst people always recognize each other.
So he says nothing, and the victims keep arriving. It’s like having a stray cat hanging around, leaving dead mice at his door but never letting itself be caught. Except the dead mice are Glovo couriers or bank branch managers, and the front door is sometimes a dark alley. And the cat is very, very good at not being seen. A couple of times, Daniel has stayed too long near his victim, hoping to catch a flash of orange in the darkness, to hear a step in the night, a breath on his neck. He’s stayed so long he’s risked getting caught, put his life in danger because, as we’ve already established, he’s just that pathetic. That breath never came, and the victims didn’t stop showing up at his door.
He realizes it on the tenth day. That it’s an advent calendar.
It hadn’t even crossed his mind at first, despite those ridiculous notes with numbers on them, because that’s how much he cares about Christmas. Then, during a phone call with Kate—the first in how long? Weeks? Not that he has any right to expect anything—she mentions it. The advent calendar, not the bodies outside her father’s door. Apparently, the school where she teaches has one; it was her idea so all the children could experience the joy of opening a little door, even those with parents too busy to make one at home (is she talking about him? Is that a sarcastic jab? Since when is this the father’s job?). Kate keeps talking, and the information floats in Daniel’s mind.
“We’ll be away for Christmas,” Kate says. “We’re going to Vermont for the holidays, and the days leading up to it will be really busy with school and last-minute shopping, so we won’t be able to see you.” She hesitates, and Daniel knows it’s a rehearsed line. “I’m sorry. I would’ve asked you to come with us, but with the illness, I don’t think it’s a good idea to travel.” Daniel finished a book tour a month ago, went to Dubai during the pandemic (he also died in Dubai, but his daughter doesn’t know that), and this is a string of bullshit. Bullshit he’s going to swallow because his daughter has chosen this. These are the tracks their relationship has to run on for her to stay standing.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart.” A cough on the other end, too much intimacy. “Maybe when you’re back.” Maybe not. “Send me an email with what you’d like for Christmas, okay?” Kate doesn’t need anything; he can feel it. But she’ll come up with something to ask for because that’s how she knows how to communicate with him. It’s her way of offering him something.
Kate keeps talking about school and the holidays, and Daniel wonders just how badly he must have damaged his daughters if the thought of this being their last Christmas with their father doesn’t make them want to see him. What kind of shitty father do you have to be to reach that point? Not that it’s undeserved.
When his daughter hangs up, his thoughts return to the advent calendar for the kids. The little doors to open every day with the number printed clearly on the cardboard. But it wouldn’t make sense. Who would think of something like that? He thinks of the cheap chocolate in the prepackaged calendars his daughters had when they were kids and of the relentless ads for adult advent calendars. They’re everywhere, glittery boxes filled with body products, perfumes, miniature bottles of expensive booze, even sex toys. It’s impossible not to notice.
He goes to his room, next to his bed (the coffin thing doesn’t really work for him; it feels claustrophobic, so if someone wants to come and kill him in his sleep, so be it) and looks at the notes with the numbers.
Asshole.
He starts to notice a pattern in the “gifts” from the advent calendar. Beyond the “zombie-like people showing up at his door and offering their necks”—which, in itself, has something ritualistic, something methodical.
The December 12th is a bank employee wearing a cashmere scarf draped over his shoulders (heaven forbid his neck be covered, as if Daniel would be too stupid to notice the blood otherwise). Daniel immediately recognizes the scarf because he’d noticed it three months earlier when said bank employee raised his hand during a book signing to give him a lecture about how his book embodied everything wrong with modern society and how he should return his Pulitzer. (Two of them. The asshole couldn’t even count to two. Just the kind of person you'd want managing your money.) Leslie had grabbed his arm, her expression a mix of pleading and terror. “Please don’t make a scene this time, Daniel.”
He hadn’t. Leslie was only in her third week as his assistant, and didn’t deserve to risk losing her job just because he was in a bad mood. He’d resolved to find the guy after the event and explain to him in private, in detail, just how well those two Pulitzers looked on the shelf in his bathroom. But the man had disappeared, vanished into thin air. Apparently, he’d vanished for him but not for Armand. Had Armand been there that day too? How had he not noticed? Not felt him under his skin? Or maybe he’d sent someone in his place and watched the whole thing from his iPad in the gray, sterile room where he was hiding. Either way, he’d been watching. From afar, without saying a word, like a coward. But a coward who paid attention to Daniel.
And then, months later, he’d served up on a silver platter the asshole who dared disrespect his book (had Armand read it?), his book. Daniel’s. His fledgling’s. The thought alone made Daniel’s blood sing.
Then came the themed gifts.
One guy who had evidently eaten his body weight in burgers—because apparently, Armand’s idea of Daniel is the worst American stereotype, and what Daniel must miss most about human food is a burger. (God, what he wouldn’t give for a burger. Not blood-flavored, but a real burger that doesn’t taste like chalk—for the ritual of it, combined with the flavor.) A woman passionate about piña coladas and grasshoppers.
But never a drug addict. A sort of deliberate consideration for the addict in Daniel. (Not that drugs were ever the real problem—it’s his personality that leans toward addiction. Cocaine, work, blood—if it’s not one thing, it’s the next.)
On December 21st, a particularly miserable-looking man shows up—not at his door, but behind him in a dimly lit alley. Unlike the previous victims, this one can barely stand, a huge smile plastered across his face, and Daniel can smell even before opening the door that he reeks of alcohol. The poor bastard must have really gone hard at the bar, and despite Armand’s best efforts, his mind can’t stay focused on his task; it drifts.
But that’s not the only strange thing. He’s cold. It’s not a double-wool-socks kind of night, but this guy seems borderline frozen. Daniel wonders if it’s a trap. If Armand has been pampering him with all these home-delivered meals, these attentions, just to lower his guard and then serve him up a poisoned victim or something similar to take him out. After all, he’s said it himself: the idea of making a vampire has always repulsed him. It would make sense. It would be the most obvious thing to do.
(Though Armand would have done it theatrically, Daniel thinks, and served him the poisoned victim on Christmas Eve, with church bells ringing. Once a theater kid, always a theater kid.)
But since Daniel is always Daniel: fuck it. Better to die over a great meal than burned alive or from a flower pot falling on your head while you stop to pick up a penny on the sidewalk. Fuck it.
The poor guy’s blood tastes like a martini. Daniel’s kind of martini. The kind that’s best when you drink it straight from the freezer, in a frosted coupe glass. Frosted. Like the guy he’s draining.
He shakes his head and lets out a mocking laugh. “This is your idea of a joke, asshole?” he shouts to no one in particular. Shouts to someone in particular, someone he hopes is listening, hiding somewhere. “Trying to be funny, Armand?”
No one answers. What a surprise.
Daniel sighs. “Here’s to you, maker.”
The urge to go out into the street came when he realized it was snowing. It’s the night of December 24th, and while the snow had stopped falling in the afternoon, it picked up again a few hours ago, as if to make this evening the perfect Christmas Eve.
He called Lenora a couple of hours earlier. His daughter didn’t answer, of course. Daniel, who knows her a little too well, imagines her sitting there with her phone in hand, watching his name flash on the screen without doing anything—like a man pretending to be dead at the sight of a bear. He sent her a message instead: a few kind words, a Merry Christmas, and a casual What a shame we missed each other; you must’ve been busy celebrating. Don’t worry, we’ll talk when you have time. Just to save her from the guilt of ignoring her dying father’s phone call and ruining her Christmas Eve this year too.
Kate, on the other hand, did answer. She was kind, told him about their plans for dinner, about what they’d been up to, and Daniel worked very hard—so hard—to ask the right questions, to follow the script. Then his daughter hesitated, stepping outside the lines for just a moment.
“Maybe we should’ve stayed in New York,” she said, almost awkwardly. “We could have celebrated together, maybe.”
Kate doesn’t actually want to spend Christmas with him—there’s nothing good to be had in that evening—but regret, the avalanche of things unsaid and undone that defines their relationship, makes her say such things. Perhaps there’s even some pity in it as she adds, “Are you alone tonight, Dad?”
What Daniel offers her doesn’t cost him much. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, there’s always next year. I’m not that decrepit yet. No, no, I’m not alone—I’ve got a few friends over for dinner.”
They talk for a few more minutes before hanging up, Kate’s voice carrying a slight sense of relief. Her father won’t die alone on Christmas Eve because she put herself first, because, for once, she did what he had done for so many years.
He’s still thinking about that call, about regrets, about the lights on the tree that Alice used to decorate so carefully, as he walks through the snow. There’s less than an hour until Christmas, and no zombie with a note has shown up at his door. Maybe Armand forgot. Maybe he chose a totally anticlimactic ending for their non-story, which has always been dominated by absence.
Armand chooses that moment to show up. To flip the table, to contradict everything Daniel is thinking, almost as if he could still read his mind.
Daniel senses him before he sees him. He’d like to blame the vampire bond, but he knows that’s not it. He’s always seen and felt Armand since that night in San Francisco. He’s spent his life looking for him in every person, in every voice. A memory erased but leaving a void so massive it could never be filled.
He wants to fall at his feet. He wants to punch him until his hands bleed. He wants to kill him and beg him to kill him in return. Run away and stay. He does none of these things.
“Is this your idea of courtship? What’s next? You’ll tell me you’ve taken over my family’s long-closed chocolate shop, and all the customers keep asking for my grandmother’s bourbon truffle recipe, which by sheer coincidence I also know?”
Armand is beautiful, looks at him almost in disbelief. “Your family never had a chocolate shop, and you never even met your grandmother, only your grandfather.”
Daniel sighs. “Of course, all my best lines are wasted on you.”
“Maybe if they were actually good lines, they wouldn’t be wasted.”
“Maybe if you weren’t an irony-deprived asshole with a stick up your ass, you’d recognize a good line when you heard one.”
Armand smiles faintly. “You look well, Daniel.”
Daniel.
“Oh, sure, vampirism works wonders on wrinkles. They should recommend it instead of retinol. You’d know that if you’d bothered to stick around.”
“Daniel—”
“Daniel my ass. An advent calendar, Armand? You turn me into a vampire after all your speeches about how much the idea of making vampires disgusts you, you turn me into a vampire, look at me like no one ever has before, and then, when I’m still puking my guts out on the floor of your luxurious Dubai villa, you slam the door and leave? Not only do you leave, but you vanish completely for months, only to reappear with all these bloody zombie-like humans outside my house? With a human advent calendar? Jesus, it’s like Jigsaw wrote a Hallmark movie.”
“It seemed romantic.”
Which, in Armand’s mind, is probably true. Nonsensical, but true.
“Oh my God, you’re impossible. You make me want to tear my skin off. I don’t know how things work among you psychos, but in the normal world, it doesn’t work like this. I didn’t need romance or Shakespearean declarations or crap like that. I needed you to stay.”
“I couldn’t. You’d have hated me. They always do—the ones we turn, they always end up hating us.”
“So what? You thought leaving was better? Vanishing completely? That’s definitely a great way to avoid being hated.”
Daniel thinks, but doesn’t say—because he’s still too angry—that for all the consequences he’s suffered, for all the ways he wants to kick Armand to the moon for this, there’s something in Armand’s behavior worth saving. Armand made a choice: he let go. He made a mess of it, but for once, he didn’t cling to something (a fledgling would have been easy to manipulate, especially in the beginning, so desperate for attention). He let go.
“I’m here now.” And if Daniel were ready to forgive, he’d throw his arms around him for that alone.
He’s not.
He claps. “Hooray, about time.” He sighs again. “What do you want from me, Armand? This isn’t a Christmas movie. I’m not going to look at you with teary eyes and ask you to choose me, to stay, to love me. I’m not going to hold your hands and tell you they’re no longer empty, and we’re not going to kiss under the snow while church bells ring at midnight. If you want to stay, stay. If you want to leave, fuck it, go. I can be a vampire perfectly fine on my own. Hell, the only real reason we should even be together is because we’re such terrible partners that at least we’d stop ruining other people’s lives.”
“I don’t want to…” he hesitates, “go.” And again, “And that’s not the only reason we should be together, even if our relationship track record doesn’t exactly work in our favor.”
“No shit. The vampire bond?”
Armand shakes his head, taking a few steps closer. “No, it’s something that was there even before. You see me. I don’t even know who I am, or if I’m anyone or anything, and you see me. For so long, I thought—I can’t let him do it.”
“No one will ever accept you if you don’t let them see you,” Daniel says in a voice he doesn’t recognize.
“No one will ever accept me anyway.” Armand exhales a long sigh. “But you were inevitable. I never stood a chance. That’s why I left.”
“And that’s why you came back.” He wants to laugh. “Inevitable, huh? Lucky me.” But beneath the sarcasm, he really means it.
They stand in silence for a few moments, the sounds of the city in the distance, the first bells ringing. Then Daniel realizes. It’s almost Christmas.
“You forgot the last advent note.”
Armand shakes his head, a glimmer of light, of euphoria, in his eyes. He looks so young. “Check my pocket.”
Daniel steps closer, and now they’re so close it’s an embrace without being an embrace—two people (the worst people in the world) leaning on each other.
In the pocket of Armand’s jacket, his fingers brush against a piece of paper. He pulls it out, unfolds it, and looks up at the sky. Written in red, in Armand’s handwriting, is the number 24.
They look into each other’s eyes, and Daniel wonders if he could end the world in this moment.
“You? For the grand finale? Not egocentric at all, huh?”
“Oh, come on, Daniel. I’m the best you’ve ever had.”
“Are you? I’m not so sure. Seemed pretty average to me.”
Armand shifts his hair slightly to reveal his neck. Daniel’s blood sings.
“I know perfectly well when you’re lying. I don’t even need to read your mind—you have my blood. You are my blood. My firstborn.”
It’s everything he’s always wanted to hear. My firstborn. He wants to laugh. He wants to cry.
“I’m not lying—it’s just been so long, I barely even remember.”
Armand takes his hand, and the note falls silently into the snow. A kiss pressed lightly to his knuckles. One to his lips. The first one since Dubai.
“Drink from me, Daniel. Drink from me, my fledgling.”
And Daniel does.
It’s like coming home and being reborn.
The bells ring.
It’s Christmas.
“Daniel, wake up! Beloved! I can’t believe the girl is going to choose to go back to doing PR for that multinational when she’s just spent the evening decorating the town’s Christmas tree with her elementary school crush! Daniel, listen to me! When she was in Chicago, she didn’t even have time to put up her own tree—she paid someone to do it for her! And now she’s spent an entire evening decorating it without a care in the world! Who would want to give that up? And he even gave her a handmade ornament, while her boring boyfriend gets his secretary to buy her gifts! Daniel, you’re not taking this serious we have to do something!”
“I knew I shouldn’t have let you discover Hallmark movies.”