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His laptop is toast so all Daniel needs is wallet, passport, and meds and it’s straight to DXB. Phone optional. He’s in the bathroom, sweeping everything beside the sink – toothbrush, mouthwash, razor, pills, pills, pills – into his backpack when it happens.
Daniel’s left hand goes slack and the backpack hits the floor just before he does. His skull cracks against the tiles and he sees stars, and then keeps seeing them. He always figured he’d die in this place, the whatever-it’s-called, but the one in his own apartment. If he didn’t contact the Final Exit Network and go out on his own terms first.
They’ll have to redo – restore – get his body back home. Daniel knows he knows where he is, but not the name of the country. His head feels like it’s about to explode and the humming sound in his ears is at least partially himself moaning against the mirrorlike black tile. Fuck, he’s dying but not nearly fast enough. Just his luck.
Daniel is vaguely aware he should stand up. He gets his right palm against the floor and tries to push, but his left side is dead weight. He’s reaching for the whatever, white-tall-sit-on-it, to try and pull himself up when a man whose name he should know lurches into the doorway. Name-he-should-know is a mess, blood running from his eyes and nose. He’s holding himself up on some kind of pole, one leg dragging behind him. He’s as bad as Daniel is and Daniel tries to tell him that as he crashes down beside him, but all that comes out of his slack mouth is a gush of spit.
No-name-now-guy cradles Daniel’s face in his hands, breathing out something that sounds like “No-no-no-no,” which doesn’t make any sense. But then, words are pretty abstract concepts for Daniel right now. He feels agreement more than he can articulate it. He wants this to be over already too. No. No.. The front of Daniel’s pants is wet and hot. No-name’s face looks like a mask, like the human features are something tied on to hide the real face that’s looking out from behind the eye holes.
No-name bends over Daniel, staring at him upside down, hair falling like a curtain. You want to die here with me too? Daniel would ask but he’s coughing, choking on his own spittle. Guy bends further down and now Daniel’s neck hurts as well as his head. His vision blacks over, and Daniel falls into the stars.
They had a plan. When Louis proposed it Armand thought it would be the beginning of an era of renewal and healing for them. Love refreshed from another source. Now, Armand tenses his right leg against the floor, but something’s still wrong. No matter. He can lie here for another few hours and let it mend. Daniel is fleeing, his mind a whirl of time tables, flight numbers. How strange that someone so intelligent would be concerned with increments so trivial – a ten minute wait for a car, an extra five hours in the airport, a thirty minute traffic delay. Armand wants to tell Daniel that the fourteen hour flight he is dreading could be pleasant, a long night’s diversion. That they could watch the desert illuminated by the incandescence of the gas burning on the oil derricks, and moonlight on the Tell Atlas, and one another’s eyes over the silent Atlantic, and the glittering tapestry of New York City unfolding as they landed before turning around and outrunning the dawn to where they began. Dubai and Louis their home to always return to.
Slumped against the wall, Armand feels tears coming as he remembers the future they had dreamt together. He and Louis would have danced their beautiful dance into the first century of their companionship, made stronger. The same way Louis had begged him to spare Daniel once as a testament to their love, bringing him into their dance would have been a proof that they had so much more now – change, endurance, understanding, forgiveness. Jealousy and longing would have faded – would have been made smooth by Daniel in their lives. Not a coven, ruled by tradition and decree; not the unstable family Louis had tried to make with Lestat. They would both have possessed Armand utterly in their own ways, and he would have given himself to them without reserve. He would make the penthouse a home where both his beautiful boys could be kept safe, forever.
But the life that was before them was gone now. Louis was gone, after Armand had sworn to spend his whole life devoted to him. Louis had cherished him, had fed from him, had flogged and switched him, had called Armand the love of his life and he had still left him. The only one Armand had ever called Maître. And worst of all he had left Daniel un-turned. What should Armand do now, if no one would have him? Follow Daniel to New York, watch his life gutter out even as Armand’s sweet memories of being wanted, useful and used, recede into the eternal distance?
In the guest bedroom, something is wrong. Daniel’s thoughts, usually sharp and vivid, are incomprehensible to him. A stained glass window smashed on the ground, reduced to piece and jagged piece. Blinding pain alternating with deathly silence.
Armand grabs for one of the standing lamps and wrenches the pole off the base. It’s ungainly and undignified, but his body is still knitting itself back together inside and using the cloud gift will only delay that. Using the pole as a cane, he hauls himself up and sets off for the guest room. All he can think of is endings and never. Louis I did not harm him, I did not, I could not. But Louis’ mind is closed to him, an absence after decades that he feels in the center of his chest. And even if they were still together Armand could sob, he could plead, he could offer his body for any abasement Louis desired and Louis still wouldn’t believe him.
Daniel is sprawled on the bathroom floor face down, legs splayed and arms twisted, looking like something crumpled and discarded. Armand goes down just as inelegantly, legs out to the side, and takes his face in his hands. Daniel is dying. He should be laid out on their dining room table, held down by Armand while Louis ushers him into the Dark Gift. He’s so young, and he is going to slip away under Armand’s hands and nobody will ever know how much Armand had wanted to give him everything, except perhaps Louis, who will never believe him again. Whatever is going wrong in Daniel’s brain, in the meat-parts of him, Armand can’t mend it.
Daniel’s blood in his mouth is hotter and sweeter for being the taste Armand never had all those years ago. He tumbles into the river of Daniel’s life.
Daniel colliding shoulder-to-shoulder with what feels like half the Bay, one hand in the air, laughing – it’s easy to feel free when Rick Nielsen is playing like this –
Daniel pacing the length of a narrow apartment kitchen in the gray early morning light, carrying on a soft conversation with the baby cradled in his arms. “I know sweetie,” he told her as she burbled, “I don’t think they will either. But our president is still a braindead movie star with access to the nuclear codes.” He pushed one dark curl off her forehead and wondered how he had been involved in making something so perfect.
“This isn’t my first time at this podium,” Daniel said, getting comfortable, “And unfortunately for many of you it won’t be the last.” The collar of his rental monkey suit itched and the lights were making him sweat, but Morgan from the Times looked like he was sucking a lemon. It was a good look on him. Why had Daniel ever bothered to stop doing cocaine? No Pulitzer ceremony was complete without it.
“–Such a liar, I got a call from the US State Department, Daniel. In my kitchen, in my slippers, trying to get breakfast on the table for the girls when I find out that you are getting held for ransom in a country I didn’t even know you were in–“
“Honey, if I wanted to just take dictation and collect my check, my name would be Bob Woodward.”
“And your fucking problem,” yelled Lisa, who could apparently point directly at Daniel even while sobbing in rage, God she was talented, “Is that you don’t know when to stop! Not with anything!”
Daniel out on the sidewalk, letting his legs eat up the pavement, the mask he’d made out of a bandana and two rubber bands clinging to his face. The sky between the buildings was incredibly clear and blue and the sunlight picked out the texture on every brick, the lines of every lintel arch over every window or doorway. Maybe he’ll do one more turn around the block. He hasn’t been outside since March and there’s no one else on the street right now. A siren howled in the distance.
Daniel’s mouth is slack when Armand holds his wrist to it. He did it wrong – drained him too far, came too late. Armand sucks on his own wrist and spits a mouthful of blood into Daniel’s mouth. Mortals have a way of breathing mouth-to-mouth when someone is dying. They call it the kiss of life.
He starts to do it again, but Daniel bites at his lip hard, so that Armand can barely pull away. He nicks at his jugular and lets Daniel drink.
At first Armand wonders if making a vampire could really feel this easy, and then it crashes over him, as terrifying as the moment the priest in Venice poured water over his head, as transcendent as the division and flow of a polyphonic choir. A feeling that makes him feel split apart, dragged to the depths of tenderness and the heights of ecstasy at the same time.
Daniel is sucking at his jugular like he intends to drain him dry and the only thing Armand is afraid of is that he won’t have enough blood in him to satisfy. Perhaps they will flow into each other. His hand spasms on Daniel’s urine-soaked thigh even as Daniel grabs the front of his shirt and hauls them closer together. What the dark gift offers is not a promise of eternal life but the possibility that, perhaps, one or both of them may never die. But what Armand knows is that once this is done, as long as both of them are on the earth they will never truly be parted.
Armand drags them both across the floor into the shower, using his good leg and the arm that’s not clenched around Daniel’s chest. His other foot gets stuck on the track of the shower door and he pulls the shoe off getting free. He turns the dial with his mind and the rain panel in the ceiling turns on over both of them. Daniel unlatches from his neck and stares up at Armand, then grabs his shoulder, stronger and firmer already, and drags him down so Armand’s ear is next to his mouth.
“So no choice for me, huh. And now it’s what, 70 years of being the new trophy wife? Seems like a–“
But Armand doesn’t get to hear what he thinks it seems like, because Daniel’s body starts to revolt against mortality at that moment.
Armand helps him strip off his sopping, filthy clothes. He turns the water warmer and focuses on just holding Daniel. He barely remembers this part of his own turning. He had been so sick already he hardly knew the difference. Amadeo had been writhing in bed, clutching the sheet over himself and begging his master not to see him so. Then there was a moment of pure elation. It was so beautiful he assumed it must be the opening of the gardens of Paradise. Nobody had spoken of them to him in years. And then he was shaking and vomiting in his sickbed once more. Amadeo had thought that glimpse of Paradise was just a fever dream. He didn’t realize until hours later that his master had tenderly, mercifully opened the door and ushered him into Hell.
Daniel says something about going down to Detox Mansion again. He moans the names of his daughters. He buries his face in the damp, soiled fabric at the crease of Armand’s hip and digs his nails, growing sharper and sharper, into Armand’s leg as Armand strokes him through the shakes.
Time washes away. Armand waits for Daniel’s body to finish its death throes, for himself to feel the revulsion he always assumed would follow when he finally stepped over this threshold. It doesn’t come. Instead he feels a sort of resignation and something else, less like the clear thought and memory of the mind gift and more like the humming of a tuning fork. A resonance between himself and another creature.
Daniel is the one who untangles them, rolling over onto his hands and knees with a groan. When he starts to stand Armand offers a hand for him to lean on but Daniel snaps, “I’m fine on my own,” then stops and repeats it in wonder. He pauses, looking back at Armand, who stares at him in turn. Not just because of the light and shadow on his skin or the way the water droplets stand out on it but by the sag of his belly, the folds of his neck, the play of muscle and wrinkled skin on his torso. Fifty years ago in San Francisco Armand had stripped him, rinsed him down with a bucket, and not given Daniel’s body much thought. One more young, beautiful, shortly to be dead boy in the thousands Armand had seen. But now, sharper, wilier, and transformed twice over he truly is fascinating.
A little shaky, Daniel takes the bathrobe from its hook on the wall and puts it on slowly, staring down at the mess on the floor. Backpack, pill bottles, personal care accoutrements. All just detritus now. The world in which he would need them is behind him now. Armand longs to know that Daniel knows that, but that path is closed to him now. The stained glass window of Daniel’s mind just another one of the many beautiful things Armand had once seen that are now gone forever.
Daniel turns to him and demands, “Are you going to make my shower your new home or what?”
The bathrooms in the penthouse are open-plan wet rooms; low sinks, in-set lighting, and large open showers separated from the rest of the room only by their stone walls and flooring. It was the most elegant and practical layout for a home where two vampires would play and sometimes even feed. It also means that Armand is leaning against the stone wall with nothing to hold onto to help himself up. Daniel seems to notice the pole in the shadow of the vanity for the first time. He toes it and looks between them before picking it up and slowly, cautiously offering it to Armand.
Once he’s upright Armand doesn’t let go of Daniel’s hand. What he wants to do is slide his hand up Daniel’s arm and feel his shoulder, the cords of his neck, the side of his face. The place where Armand tore open his jugular is healed with only a ring of bruising and trails of dried blood left to show what happened.
“The sun will have risen by now and your room has a floor to ceiling window. This is the safest room in the house for you right now.”
“Not counting the dining room,” Daniel says immediately, as if this is a debate. “Library, probably kitchen, front hallway–”
“Take this as your first lesson,” Armand tells him. “Your time as a pupil has begun again.” You think you are released, he doesn’t say, from the ever-tightening trap of your crumbling years. You are wrong. I brought you out of that inexorable grip and into something without mercy or end. Eventually, Daniel will understand. His predator instincts are too strong to let the truth escape him.
Armand leaves his sodden clothes on the bedroom floor and helps himself to the contents of Daniel’s half-empty suitcase, a pair of dungaree trousers, a belt, and a gray ribbed sweater that sits as widely on his shoulders as the costumes he had worn last week.
Daniel will already be feeling the fledgling hunger. In Paris he would have taken an unfortunate off the late-night streets or from under one of the bridges. Here they have extra supplies from the farm, brought in hastily after he and Louis had agreed on the plan. Without the usual three months’ lead time, the additional donors had been compensated more highly and told they were donating to a medical research project. The servants have fled sometime during the night, Armand cannot be sure exactly when but he knows they won’t be back. Was it a pre-planned betrayal, he wonders, or spontaneous. The only time Armand had been in the kitchen was several very diverting nights spent putting the equipment through its paces. He’s as likely to scald or boil the blood as he is to successfully heat it up.
It’s almost dawn outside. There is a Talabat rider pulling up on the street. Armand reaches out with the mind gift to remind the concierge that this resident specifically requested the rider come up to make the delivery and steers the man to the correct elevator.
He tries to remember what this point in his own turning was like but mostly all Armand can remember is being held in his master’s strong arms in the dark of his sarcophagus. He had alternately struggled and clung to his master’s broad, familiar chest. Occasionally his master had torn off the lid and left him alone to bring him sustenance. A boy who ran errands for the household sometimes. A kitchen girl. The time when Amadeo would work or laugh or share a piece of honeycomb from the kitchens with them was done now.
He’s waiting at the elevator when it hits their floor. Armand mesmerizes the rider, leaves his thermal delivery bag and cellular phone lying on the elevator floor, and grabs the back of his jacket to steer him.
The first thing he says when he sees Daniel in the living room is, “You were supposed to stay where it was safe.”
“Why?” Daniel is holding onto the back of the couch with both hands and he may be speaking to Armand but his eyes are fixed on the Talabat rider. Strong instincts, Armand thinks, something rising in his chest that he recognizes as pride. “Do the windows have sun-proofing or don’t they? Sorry, it’s so hard to keep track of what’s real and what’s part of the farce around here. And speaking of farces,” Daniel’s hands rolled as if they were trying to tear the couch covering off, “Why have you just walked in with a delivery guy?”
“You need to eat.” Armand shakes the man to emphasize his point. “Soon. Put it off longer and your body will start to weaken.”
“So you have a whole blood farm – unless maybe that’s fake too – and a bodybuilder in a kennel for special occasions, and you’re telling me the only thing to eat is some schmuck whose only crime was pulling up to the wrong address? The fuck I will.” His eyes flick up to Armand and his voice takes on an anxious, coaxing tone. “Why can’t I just have more of yours?”
“You will.” The swell of pride inside Armand is slowly turning to one of anger. Were he well he might have launched himself across the room, taken Daniel by the scruff of the neck like the brat he was, and put his face where he wanted it. But his leg is still unsteady and the lamp pole makes him ungainly, so instead he collapses into a chair. The Talabat rider tips over, yanked backwards, and lands in an ungainly sitting position at his feet.
Armand finds himself screwing his eyes shut in fury. “Daniel Molloy,” My undoing, my fledgling, my own, “Impudent as a man and insolent as a child. You are one of us now. Mankind’s morals and laws are behind you. If you insist on behaving this way God won’t forgive you, Paradise won’t open for you, morals won’t praise you for your restraint. Did twenty years of abstinence–” Armand hopes this is right, it’s what he remembers but he can’t check, can’t look into Daniel’s mind anymore – “feel like a long time? Do you really want decades of denial when you know you have all around you a fix sweeter than any kiss of a needle tip? Will you spend your second life living off of,” Armand stumbles. It was all foreign to him now, what one might eat and luxuriate in, what one might subsist on. Long ago he had feasted on cockles cooked with orange peel and delicate fritters in honey, drunk spiced wines, and sat on a guest’s knee to take a pipe and feel the peaceful drunkenness of tobacco. The other intoxicants – laudanum and cocaine, hashish and absinthe and angel dust – he had only tasted through the blood veil. “Off of gruel and milk when you are surrounded by champagne and sweetbreads? Will you crawl on your belly when we have a place outside of–”
There is a sudden scuffle at Armand’s feet. When he opens his eyes and blinks away the blood-tears that have leaked through, Daniel is crouched over the Talabat rider’s body, hands braced on his shoulders as he feeds. It’s messy and embarrassing, as fledglings often are. When Armand met one that hadn’t learned well enough to have good habits yet, he disposed of it. He reaches down and fists a hand in Daniel’s curls, guiding him so he drinks straight from the artery and lets less blood flow out onto the penthouse’s concrete floor.
Finally, Daniel sits back and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, which mostly smears blood across his cheek. The front of the bathrobe is stained with it, a dark peony blooming on the gray and white background.
“Fuck it,” he says softly, looking down at the man he had just drained. “Neither of us were doing anything with our lives anyway.”
Cold blood isn’t that bad, or maybe Daniel’s standards are lowered, given that he once snorted a mix of spilled coke and assorted schmutz off the floor of a motel bathroom at 5 AM. He rips open pack after pack until the hunger abates and he can just enjoy the rush, wave after wave, a joint laced with heroin when you’re already crossfaded. What really grates is that Armand was right – it’s nice out of the blood bag but magical out of the vein. But to get more he’d have to put on clothes and start worrying about surveillance cameras and body disposal. So this is how Daniel ends up in the kitchen of the penthouse of the Al Sharaf Tower, showing the vampire Armand how to use a microwave.
“You want to turn down the setting and then heat it up most of the way, but not all the way. Then you give it a stir. Distributes the warmth.”
Armand has pulled a stool up to the counter and settled on it with the same poise that he used on that living room couch that probably cost as much as a car. He lets his right leg dangle and doesn’t cross them. Whatever happened to his right leg when he hit the wall must still hurt. All things considered Louis had been pretty restrained to confine himself to one really good throw. Daniel had half expected to find out what happens when one vampire strangles another. Armand stares at the bowl of blood rotating in the microwave like he’s staring at the sun setting over the Pacific ocean. Or maybe he’s just dissociating.
I nearly died tonight – I did die tonight.. Daniel had once checked into a rehab that had a sign saying This Is the First Day Of the Rest Of Your Life in the glorified prison cell where you filled out your intake forms. Daniel had cracked and thrown one of those useless single-serve plastic water bottles at it when they left him alone for too long. It deserved it for that capitalization alone. But here he is on the first night of, well, something. He feels better than he has in years. He feels terrible. He has a flight back to New York in the morning that he’ll miss, and he just killed some guy named Eyad whose only consolations in life were watching soccer on his phone and Facetiming his little sister from the comfort of a steel framed bunk bed in an overcrowded migrant dormitory. Daniel has a best-seller to write, a reputation to burn, and now he has to actually figure out his finances for a term of longer than three years. What’s ten million divided by two hundred and fifty?
The timer ends, and Daniel finds out that the truly wealthy have special microwaves that make a tone like a zen gong instead of a ding. Ageless vampire multi-millionaires: they’re not just like us!
Armand reaches out to pop the door without taking his eyes off of the bowl of blood, then once it’s open looks up at Daniel like he’s waiting for something.
“No, you go,” Daniel tells him, feeling suddenly awkward. As if that’s a new aspect to this situation. “You stopped me from dying tonight, the least I can do is give you the first helping.”
Armand takes the bowl and doesn’t stir it. Was he not listening to Daniel earlier, or is he making a point now? Instead, he lifts the bowl like a cup of soup and drinks without breaking eye contact. His eyes are soft and incredibly dark. Daniel wants to close the foot or so of space between them. He wants to reach out and brush the dried blood-tears away from the skin under Armand’s eyes. It makes the hairs on the back of Daniel’s neck stand up. Armand is wounded in both senses of the term, desperate, and he can still rip Daniel’s spine out if he feels like it, vampire or not. In fact getting his spine ripped out might be the best case scenario. They are standing in a custom combo tomb-terrarium-boudoir after all. But there’s Daniel’s out and maybe his saving grace.
“Hey,” he says, turning so his hip is leaned against the counter. “You know you can’t stay here.”
Armand startles, then collects himself. “Where do you want to go? Louis managed most of our properties, but I managed to save a little from the household expenses. I have an apartment in Zamalek, a modest home in Rimini that you might find charming,” he leans forward and lowers his voice seductively, “A modern villa by Kekova, very secluded but we can take a boat out at the full moon and swim down to the sunken city...”
Daniel feels it. A twinge in his chest that reminds him of the times he would sit down to work and find a scribbled drawing from one of his girls left on the desk for him. Every time someone did something for him that he didn’t deserve because he’d been such a piece of shit. The feeling he always wanted to soak up right until he walked away. He knew going with Armand wouldn’t be all moonlight swims and long walks along the Nile, but Daniel wasn’t exactly the world’s most considerate partner himself. He could put up with some dismembered corpses in the living room.
But he can also feel Armand through their bond, fledgling to maker. An invisible cord isn’t the term Daniel would use – it’s more like a hum in the background that Daniel is suddenly attuned to. He can choose to listen or try to ignore it, but he can’t totally shut it out. And what comes to him is a desperation so intense it sets Daniel’s teeth on edge. Armand hasn’t been on his own for so much as a day in the last 500 years. He wasn’t just ready to sign himself up for an immortal life of quiet desperation with Louis but willing to use his powers to smooth things over whether Louis wanted him to or not. Daniel Molloy didn’t get a second life to spend it as a doll in someone else’s dollhouse.
“I should clarify,” he says, unable to pretend he doesn’t enjoy this, the freedom of needling someone more powerful than him, the rush of not knowing what might happen next. “I can stay here. You, on the other hand, are... What’s Arabic for ‘persona non grata’?”
Armand’s smile is mirthless. His fangs are out, the promise of a threat over the edge of his lip. “Louis won’t be your guide. He was too deep in his own guilt and dejection to raise the fledglings he wanted, let alone one he didn’t.”
“Lucky for me I’ve always been better at learning myself than being taught,” Daniel snaps, even as it does sting because yeah, he had been hoping for something like that. “See my kindergarten report card, Does not listen when instructed or play well with others.”
“There’s no time for learning where you’re going. A city of eight million at the crossroads of the world, do you really think no vampires have claimed it as their territory?”
“I think the only Satanic cult likely to be operating out of Green-Wood Cemetery is a bunch of poser goths. I’ve taken on worse freelancing for the Times style section.”
“There are more of us now than when I was young. The Great Convergence is coming. You’d be a tiger cub stumbling into a den of grown and hungry jackals. But with a little time…” Armand is doing the thing with his eyelashes again. Did they teach that in courtesan school? No, bad Daniel! “The island villa would be best,” Armand contines, switching to the voice he’d used to announce what was on the breakfast buffet when he was playing the part of fake Rashid. Your choice, Mr. Molloy, as long as you never get to decide what’s on the table. “Hunting is easier by open water. Easy disposal, easy answers when a boater or swimmer goes missing.” He flashes Daniel a conspiratorial look, which is demented. What’s even more demented is that Daniel almost wants to go with it. “There’s a study that opens onto the balcony and catches the moonrise directly at this time of year. I can have anything you need to finish the book shipped from New York–”
“You mean the book you said you don’t want me to write because it will make every vampire from here to LA come and kill Louis?”
“Oh, I may have my opinions, but Louis is free to make his own decisions,” Armand says airily. Daniel’s laugh of disbelief is what finally stops him cold. “That’s why I didn’t try to keep him here,” Armand starts in the same tone, then falters and adds, more softly, “He always wanted me to chase him, before.”
“In the last week I’ve watched you lie about everything from deathbed confessions to photographs, treat other people’s memories – my memory – like an Etch-a-Sketch, and settle into some kind of ghastly Real Housewives of Dubai roleplay that I’m not sure you could even tell wasn’t real. You were down to commit filicide by proxy out of what was at worst selfishness and at best inertia, and you probably don’t know the difference between those either,” Daniel continues, steamrolling past whatever objection Armand tried to get in there. “You built this place like a terrarium for Louis after you were ready to watch him die, after you were ready to let him keep hitting bottom so you could be the one to pull him up every time, after you spent sixty years crawling after him whether he wanted it or not. The only reason I don’t know how long you’ve been divorced is–” Daniel mimes checking his wrist and finding nothing, he’s such a piece of shit but once he gets going he can’t resist it, “I’m not wearing a watch. And now that you’ve been single for more than ninety whole minutes you start looking around and hey, here comes the next best thing! I don’t know, Armand, why wouldn’t I want to go to an undisclosed location to be completely dependent on you?”
Armand’s voice takes on the softer, inviting tone from earlier but this time it sounds like a threat. “I can keep you safe, Daniel. You’re still young. When I think of what could happen to someone so tender, naive, beautiful...”
“I don’t want to come live in your Barbie Dream House! What are you gonna do, drag me there?” It’s a rhetorical question, but just in case Daniel had any doubt Armand’s faux-indignant expression settles it. Daniel’s left hand rests on the control panel of the stove. Either Armand hasn’t noticed or he doesn’t know what this means. Daniel spins the dial of the center burner and the gas flame springs up between them in all its high heat on a commercial grade stove glory. “Do you really want to try it? Which one of us do you think is gonna go up first?”
It would have been a good plan if Armand tried to grab him. Daniel would crumple like a Starbucks cup in a trash compactor against an ancient vampire, but the chance of one or both of them going up was still pretty high. Instead Armand simply snaps his hand out as quickly as a snake, clamps it over Daniel's on the stove dial and slowly, irresistibly twists it backwards until the flame shuts off. He keeps twisting, gaze fixed on Daniel’s face, until Daniel’s wrist is bent so far back he thinks it’s actually going to snap.
Daniel can’t pretend he held out long before crumpling against the stove with a gasp of pain. Armand slides off the stool and steps forward, crowding Daniel against the stove in what feels like a sadomasochistic slow-dance position. The places where their bodies are pressed together feel warm, which is ridiculous since neither of them give off body heat anymore. All Armand has to do is move his left hand, hovering over Daniel’s hip, and his new life is over as quickly as it began.
Daniel had read an article once about how humans were persistence hunters. Before the bow and the spear and the Sig Sauer long-range hunting rifle, early man hunted the mammoth by just being too stubborn to give up. It only occurs to him now, with Armand's relentless grip on his wrist and ancient eyes boring into his own, that vampires might be the same. “You’re gonna break my wrist,” he chokes out.
Armand reaches up and caresses the side of his face. “Louis was right,” he breathes. He has that staring-at-the-sunset look that he had at the microwave again. “You will wear the dark gift well.”
And with that, Armand is out the kitchen door.
Daniel turns to follow him, then stops himself. Armand has had Daniel chasing after him for half the night. He’s probably getting off on this, either literally or in a more esoteric way, and Daniel has let him control their interactions the whole time. He let himself get rattled and probably let himself get played. In Daniel’s defense, he did die and un-die earlier tonight. Something else Armand was in control of. Daniel might even have said yes – probably would have said yes, if for very different reasons than when he’d begged Louis for it fifty years ago. But not asking is Armand’s whole shtick.
Daniel turns back to the fridge, drinks another pack of blood, and goes exploring.
He finds the linen closet and the garbage chute and the place where the staff keep their cleaning supplies and extra uniforms. He finds a library that actually has some books published this century but nowhere to sit, an art showroom disguised as an office, and what Daniel assumes is some kind of server farm but he’s about fifteen years too old to really understand. There’s a room, probably large, with a combination lock and tastefully concealed but serious ductwork must be the archives. Given that BDSM seemed to be the one thread holding Louis and Armand’s shotgun marriage together he’s surprised these freaks don’t have a playroom, but that stuff might be in the last place he’s going to check.
Daniel announces himself by rapping loudly on the bedroom door.
“Armand, you, uh.” Good start. Daniel clears his throat. This is reminding him uncomfortably of the time in 1994 when Lisa had enough of his shit and deadbolted all the doors when he was working late again. “Look, I’m not going anywhere until it’s dark out,” he starts again, going nowhere. Another very long, very quiet pause. Even with his newly-sharp hearing, this place really is silent as the tomb. “I’ll be around whenever you come out.” He’s just digging himself deeper into banalities, and for all Daniel knows Armand’s getting off on it.
It’s the first time Daniel has been in the penthouse without anyone else to watch out for or fight against. He could go back to the library. If Louis was around Daniel could ask him what he thought of Paul Beatty. He could crack the joke he wants to make, about how he doesn’t see any of his own books here but that must be because they’re on the bedside table. Maybe he can save that one for whenever they meet again. He and Louis both have time now.
Eyad’s body lying in the living room. Now that he’s not half-crazed with hunger and bloodlust, without Armand’s voice taunting him about how good it could be, Daniel feels a lot worse about that. Sure, the guy was probably going to end up as a bloody smear on one of Dubai’s highways sooner or later, but that didn’t mean Daniel was the person who got to decide when and how he died. Louis and Lestat used to lug their victims to the incinerator out back. When Daniel thinks about doing that, not just to a person but to someone whose memories he’s seen in 4D, he feels unsettled. He straightens Eyad out to give him a little dignity and covers him with a sheet from the linen closet. Pretending to pray feels like an insult to both of them, so Daniel sits there and keeps his first victim company until sleep finally takes him.
He wakes up to the night sky outside, a woven blanket over him, and the realization that for the first time in years his back hasn’t gotten sore overnight. There is no body in the living room, no blood smear on the floor.
Time for another dialogue with the door. “Come on, let’s go. I’m guessing you fly private, but we’re probably going the same way. We can, uh, split a car.” This is foolish. It’s humiliating. Why can’t he just walk away and be done with it? “I’m booking myself one of those first-class cabins with the floor-to-ceiling walls and the full bed. Good thing they invented a new way to squeeze money from the status-anxious rich right before I became sun challenged, huh? Oh for–” Daniel doesn’t swear out loud. He tries the door on a hunch and isn’t sure if he feels vindicated or alarmed when it opens.
The bedroom is less desolate than the rest of the penthouse. In the creased leather chair, the stack of books by the bed there are hints that someone actually lived here. Daniel doesn’t need to search the suite to know Armand isn’t here anymore.
Daniel sits down on the edge of the bed, then lets himself lie back on a comforter. Until yesterday two people slept under here and the bedding has no body scent at all. He squints against the ceiling lights on instinct, then realizes they don’t actually hurt his eyes. This room might be warmer and brighter than the rest of the penthouse, but it’s still either a cozy cage for a couple of large predators or a jail cell with globally-inspired Japandi decor, hard to tell which. But Daniel needs to stop pretending their lives are so far removed from his own, now. And with that comes the restless, empty feeling somewhere deep inside him – what had Lestat called it? A cord you cannot see, but it is real. It didn’t ease when he walked in the bedroom door, and it won’t when he kills his next victim, or when he gets on the plane back to New York. Wherever Armand has fucked off to, Paris or Cairo or some bespoke hunting ground in Italy, he won’t be free of it either. The silence eats up Daniel’s thoughts, and eventually time itself.