Chapter Text
‘Are you absolutely certain you wish to pursue this reckless –’
‘No! I’m not.’ Jacket, phone, keys. Hip flask, just in case. Mask, don’t forget the damn mask. ‘But I’m not bailing now. You’ll like me better once I’ve gotten this out of my system, promise. Honey.’
Armand wrinkles his nose at the bland endearment. He’s reclining on the couch – Daniel’s couch, Daniel’s apartment, in which he’s been making himself at home with all the assurance of a cat moving itself in. He’s feigning boredom, face lit by the iPad as he scrolls, rehashing the argument like it’s a mildly annoying chore. Daniel can tell he’s seething.
‘Will I? Or will you then invoke some new reason that we must be at odds?’
Daniel groans. ‘Well, if you’d like to add to the list, you’re making me late while I’m trying to make things right.’
‘I don’t believe you are,’ says Armand flatly. ‘I think you just want to absolve yourself. Heap the blame on me –’
‘Oh, no, there’s plenty to blame me for. Just not the shit that was you.’ This gets Armand to look up at him, at last. Lighthouse eyes beaming a last-ditch attempt at warning, supplication and come-on all at once.
Daniel lets out a little snort, shapes the fingers of both hands into a heart, and heads out the door.
✣
On the subway, he watches a pair of girls on the seats opposite – a couple, he thinks, but doesn’t check. Feels profane even by his standards to read people in the interstitial space-time of the A train. They’re thrumming with life, with the possibilities of the night. One of them adjusts her mask, and he fiddles with his own, the elastic tugging slightly uncomfortably on his ears.
He’s wearing it at Alice’s behest, mostly because the part of him that wants to be a good boy for her never really went away, and partly because the half-hour he spent googling can a cadaver transmit COVID? was disturbingly inconclusive. Seems unlikely, even if the virus can live a while in dead tissue, since cadavers don’t respire. Not much intel on the ones who do keep breathing out of habit; certainly none of it peer reviewed. And so the N95, and the swab jabbed halfway up his skull, and the single red line on the test dutifully photographed and sent over to her. All reasonable stuff; she’s always been hale, hardy, but she isn’t getting younger and it’s a pestilent world out there.
It was in the afternoon of an especially rough day’s sleep that he’d thumbed his phone open and pulled up his and Alice’s chat history. Armand absent, skin tacky in his cool sheets, blackout curtains not quite closed. Cracks of winter light mocking their way into his bedroom-turned-mausoleum. Remnants of gluey and hissing dreams: Alice’s face, Armand’s face, flickering into one and then apart again. Sudden and overwhelming clench of horror at the thought that she, like so many other errors of the mind that he’d been unpicking, wasn’t real.
Except he knew she was. Except there were their messages, safe and ordinary. Slow trickle of information in both directions over the past several years – lawyer shit, daughter shit, hospital shit. Little evidence of affection, but in that moment he couldn’t have felt warmer towards that exchange of sparse, pragmatic sentences.
He’d dozed again, mentally tracing their intersecting lives as far back as he could into the haze. And then jolted awake with another image: a four-poster bed, lights low, the Alice that had somehow held him from the front and back at the same time now splitting in two, because it was both of them. It was both of them.
That evening, he’d paced a while, then opened their conversation back up again. Tapped out: Can we meet? There’s some stuff you should know and it’d be better in person. Evenings preferred.
That shouldn’t come across as anything too odd, right? As far as she knew, he was terminally ill with a reasonably complex estate to manage, and they hadn’t spoken about all that in a while. Was the bit about evenings a bit cloak-and-dagger? Maybe, yeah. Delete that. They could discuss calendars later. If she even agreed to meet.
Then he added it back in, because what the hell. You’re building up to telling her you’re a creature of the night, Danny boy. Indulge in a little intrigue, why not?
Shit, maybe theatre kid was a communicable disease.
✣
He finds her leaning on the railing in Brooklyn Bridge Park, looking out across the water, lit softly from behind by the glittering carousel in its glass pavilion. She’s wrapped up, dark raspberry coat and oversized wool scarf. It’s a mildish night for February, remnants of a moody yellow sunset streaking the sky and the river.
‘Hey Al,’ he says, draping his arms over the rail next to her, and she startles slightly. Gives him the once-over, taking in the skinny jeans, the Bauhaus t-shirt and leather jacket. The tinted glasses.
‘Hi,’ she replies. Trying for neutral. Hint of a mental eye-roll, while her pulse does something funny. ‘You look interesting.’
She, of course, looks great. Her hair cut shortish, silver flecked with black, a touch of dark green shimmer on her eyes. Sets off the blue shadows of her blood enticingly, and he can’t be thinking like that, and he can’t be in her head either but her thoughts are kind of loud, and there’s a lot of them. Her heart’s loud, too.
It’s easy enough not to peek at passing strangers, harder like this. Harder with her. He tries to focus on external details, on the resin in her perfume, the oil in her plum lipstick. On the sparkle of Manhattan across the waves, the swish of of the eels underneath. The squeak of a cleaner’s shoes behind the carousel glass, tang of disinfectant being wiped over the painted ponies’ saddles.
‘So?’ Alice prompts, and he realises he probably looks like he’s stuck for words, when really he’s just trying to give her a kind of space she doesn’t even know she can ask for. ‘What’s up?’
He’s thought about how, where to start, and none of it sounds good. But he’s not here to sound good. So, the facts. ‘I’m writing a new book,’ he says.
‘Okay…’
‘And it’s going to make me look crazy, or maybe like I’m doing an extended bit.’
‘Daniel, I hope you brought me out here for something more pressing than to tell me you’re about to, what, start espousing some kind of new psychedelics movement.’
‘Hey man, big science is finally catching up on that one. But no. This book, it’s an interview of sorts. The subject… well, he’s a lot of things. A guy who’s witnessed some capital-H history. Who’s been through it in ways most of us can’t really fathom. The uh, USP, though? He’s a hundred-and-forty-five year old vampire.’
‘Huh.’ She grins at him. ‘Another go at a novel, after all?’
‘Oh, no. That ship’s long sailed. I’m too much the reporter. So. My agent thinks I’ve lost the plot, but I think I’ll get my way. We’re pitching it as nonfiction.’
‘Huh,’ she repeats.
‘Yeah, yeah, I know. And it sounds like he’s right, right? But what a hook. This guy, Louis – honestly, I think you’d like him. He’s like this, this faceted lens on the past century and then some. I’m talking about New Orleans in 1910, post-World-War-Two Paris, gay lib in San Francisco, turn of the millennium; Black history, queer history. Moral philosophy and modernism. The murky depths of property, of the fine art market. And then there’s – well. Others he knew, knows. Older. Guys who walked the streets of eighteenth century Paris, sixteenth century Venice. And, sure, they drink blood and read thoughts and, yeah, some of them fly, but it’s what living that long – what being untethered from human timelines – does to a person that’s really fucking fascinating. And then there’s me, taking it all down, and–’
‘So you’ve got, what, all these strands of real history, fantastical narrative framing?’ Oh, it’s like old times. And she’s nearly getting it. ‘Sounds ambitious.’
‘Real history, real framing. And obviously, I know how it’s gonna look, I haven’t really lost it. I’m gonna get fucking roasted. If it goes the way it’s supposed to, I’ll be touring this thing and insisting it’s all true.’
‘And, okay, I’ll bite – why will you be doing that, exactly?’
He shrugs. Oh, she still finds him infuriating. It’s probably bad that he loves that. ‘Because it is. All true.’
Alice looks to the overcast heavens, sticks her hands in her pockets and steps away from the railing to face him front-on.
Here it comes. Her heart’s picked up again and it’s way too distracting. He pulls out the flask and takes a quick swig of blood. Armand-sourced. He’d asked for something with a bit of a kick, and sure enough, there’s a smack of navy-strength gin to it.
‘You’re not serious,’ Alice says, eyeing the flask.
‘It’s not what it looks like –’
‘Jesus, Daniel. You made me come out to tell me you’re planning some kind of is-it-dementia-or-isn’t-it stunt to promote a book. I thought this was going to be about something important, I don’t know, like how you’re sick and –’
‘Hey, hey. Al. Look at me. Hey, look at me.’
‘Did you know that I’m sick too?’
‘What?’ he says, dumbly.
‘Yeah. Of course you didn’t. Didn’t even ask how I’ve been. Because then I could have told you how I had a pretty mild case of COVID last year. Seemed to clear up fine. Except now I’m fucked up.’
‘Shit. Alice, hey, man, I’m so sorry.’ I’m sure, he can’t help hearing her think. And he hears it in her heart too now, the strain of her pulse. ‘I mean it. I’m such an asshole.’
‘No kidding.’ She deflates a bit.
‘Do. Uh. Do you wanna talk about it?’
‘Not really.’
She’s pissed, which he was expecting, and hurt, which he wasn’t, which he hates. Her ire, that’s almost warm in its familiarity. The flash of vulnerability, the words I’m sick too, well, those suck ass.
‘Come on,’ she says, ‘let’s walk.’ He remembers this move. The giving you a chance to explain yourself against my better judgment walk. He falls into step beside her on the boardwalk. Sorry, grateful.
‘Yours is the sane and sober response, of course,’ he says, as they pass the dry billows of ornamental grass. ‘I was off my tits when I found out. Probably helped.’
‘Dan…’ And oh no no no. He can’t have her looking at him like she really is concerned about his mental wellbeing. Well, YOLO, as the kids say. YODO?
‘Yeah, when I said to look at me.’ He stops and waits for her to face him, takes off his glasses and tucks them away. ‘I meant really. Take a good look. Tell me if I look like I’m dying.’
Something in his voice must have snagged her curiosity. He meets her eyes with his. Opens his mouth, a little lopsided, a little smirky, ah, sue him. Lets out a quiet hiss and shows his fangs.
‘I’m not dying,’ he tells her. ‘I’m dead. And I’m doing fucking great.’
‘Hah,’ she says. Then: ‘You’re a still a real piece of work, you know that?’
Don’t read her. Don’t. ‘Okay. Okay, you need more than the fang drop. Not even the eye thing, though? Really?’
‘I’d say Occam’s Razor in the year 2023 A.D. is in favour of colour-changing contact lenses.’
‘Tough crowd. Shouldn’t have expected any less.’ She’s walking on, he trots back to her side. ‘How about a trick? I can jump real good now.’
She scoffs. ‘These vampires of yours,’ she says. ‘You say they’re psychic? Or telepathic, whatever?’
‘Oh, the old what am I thinking test? Sure, but I want you to know I’ve been staying out of your head. I just want you to know that, after. Because I know what it’s like when these fuckers don’t.’ Still thinking of them as a class apart from himself, but then he’s been 70 years in the flesh and less than one in the blood. Louis had trouble letting go at only 33. ‘But if you’re inviting me in…’
He goes in.
Oh my god. And isn’t that nice, that the thought floating at the forefront of all the other buzzing things is that old familiar refrain. Oh my god, and what the fuck is wrong with you. Some new flavour to it, though. It’s embarrassing, is what it is and Couldn’t you have a slightly more normal end of life crisis? What am I thinking. Of course you couldn’t.
‘Eh, well,’ he says, with a sheepish spread of his hands. ‘Is there a way to actually be normal about the end of your life?’
She’s unconvinced, and he sees it on her face before he hears her think he’s still too damn good at reading me.
Well, in for a penny.
‘You want to keep up the hostilities, but you’re tired. And you’re relieved to see me in good shape, in spite of yourself. You sorta do want to talk about it, but not if I’m gonna be like this.’ He smiles grimly, almost apologetically. Digs in. ‘You have good days and bad days. And bad weeks and bad months. The heart palpitations have been freaking you out but the blood tests show nothing. At one point you thought you’d never be able to pick up a pencil or read a book again. Then you read Piranesi. It made you cry. You still don’t know if you’ll ever feel safe seeing a play or an art show. You want to know what the fuck I’ve done to my nails. You’re remembering how quietly I slid up, and how your body didn’t register my presence until your eyes did. Something at the base of your skull, something you’ve been ignoring this whole time, is telling you to get out of here. There’s a bench just ahead. I think you’d better sit down.’
She’s keeping a lid on the fear. Looking at him now with something that still looks like disbelief, the lines of her face draw into something like revulsion. And yeah, he deserves that one. ‘What do you want me to do with this?’
‘I know. I am sorry. For that just now. I need you to know it’s real, though.’
She walks on, past the bench, under the echoing span of the bridge, doesn’t speak for a while.
‘If it makes you feel any better,’ he offers, ‘Piranesi was pretty high on my to-read pile, and my prying’s gone and spoiled the big reveal for me.’ Evidently, it does not make her feel better.
‘You’re dead,’ she says eventually. ‘Okay. You’re dead but you’re not, and you’re here. You’re, what, immortal? Unless someone puts a stake through your heart? And you want to tell me that, you… Jesus. Do you want some kind of blessing? Go forth, live forever while I curl up, lose my ability to enjoy any of it, die in fits and starts, or maybe my heart gives out before my next birthday? You here to say so long and leave me to it?’
He lets out a long and unneeded breath. ‘No. God, no. I’m here because I owe you some information. About back then, about us.’ He can’t help himself though, follows up: ‘The stake thing, that’s, nah. It’s not Buffy. Fire and sunlight, yeah. So you know. If you’re really mad at me and really determined. There’s your method.’
Alice looks at him, expression schooled back to flat. She really does remind him of Armand, he thinks. No wonder this memory encryption shit was so hard to scrape off. ‘What do you mean, back then?’
‘Okay, this is gonna be a little bit… circular? I have no right to ask you to trust me, but can you try to, I don’t know. Humour me.’
‘We’ll see,’ she says, and that’s fair enough.
‘I still don’t have it all lined up right, in my head. Years, events, shit’s scrambled. I mean, I know some things for certain, things I always knew, despite the rest: I loved you, you married me. I fucked it, you divorced me. How I fucked it? I know some; some’s a blur. And I didn’t know why that was. And now I do.’
A pause, a drawing inwards of herself – he’s keeping out again, but can sense the internal steeling of herself just as well as he can read it on her. Trying to be patient with him, because it’s too soon for her to have dislodged the idea of him as a sick and dying man. ‘You’re telling me you owe me information, but also that you don’t even remember all of what you did.’
‘Hey look, I’m not here to bullshit you. Really exactly the opposite. So, honesty hour, I don’t remember half of what I did to piss you off because I don’t… Jesus. I don’t fully know which bits of it were you.’
‘What?’
‘I was a closet case, right? That’s what you understood.’
Small, incredulous sound. ‘Yeah.’
‘Yeah. You’ll be pleased – I mean, I really hope you’ll be pleased to know I’ve cleared that one up with my psyche. Hey man, I’m bi, who’d have guessed it. You did, obviously. Thing is, I did too. And then I didn’t.’
‘You’re losing me.’ She’s trying to be patient again. That’s worse than the disdain, somehow.
‘There was a time when I figured it out, is what I mean. That haunting the Castro nightly wasn’t just the quickest route to a fix. A time I actually managed to get sort of cool with it. But the guy I figured it out with was, get this, a vampire. And he made me forget.’
Her own memory supplies her with something. ‘Your scar…’
‘Right,’ he says. ‘That. You asked about it, I’m pretty sure, and I said I didn’t know, that I’d been out of it at the time, week-long bender yadda yadda. Yeah? Funnily enough, that was a lie.’ Her look tells him it’s not funny at all. ‘I never once forgot that part.’
That’s drawn her interest, the thought of getting this story at last. He remembers how unsatisfied she’d been with his evasive answers. And so now she leads them through the little garden near the café, with its strings of fairy lights under the bare spreading branches. Sits herself down, looks up at him, expectant. Sing, O muse.
‘Okay. Let’s start here,’ he says, folding himself down next to her on the bench. ‘I was a twenty year old idiot when I became aware of the existence of vampires.’ God, he hopes she’ll read Interview. Hopes she’ll still have some level of charitable feeling towards him by the time it’s all done and published.
‘So, what, you fucked one? It went badly?’
‘I thought I was gonna fuck a guy who thought he was one. I went back to his place and honest to god interviewed him instead. With my little tape recorder, remember that? And then. Well, then his boyfriend showed up.’
‘Oh my god.’ There it is. If anything’s going to sell her on this, it’s that this is all exactly the kind of shit that the boy she used to know would have gotten into.
‘Said boyfriend was, ah, displeased, to put it mildly? I nearly died twice that week. They both had a bite. Neither of them did what I actually wished they would.’
‘…Which is fuck you.’
‘Eh, well. You should’ve seen these guys. And there was me – high a fucking kite, I think I mentioned earlier – thinking that vamp number one was just an extra interesting kind of fetishist, when he pulls the fang thing on me and I realise, shit, this is an actual vampire.’
‘I’m guessing you don’t do the smart thing and get out of there.’
He gives her a who do you think I am kind of look. ‘That’s Louis, I mentioned him before. He gets me high, turns down a blowjob, says he wants to tell his life story, really just wants to bitch about his ex. We talk all night. I maybe fall in love a little bit. I ask him to make me a vampire – I’m convinced there’s nothing a person could want more, if they knew it was on the table. He gets into a rage and tries to eat me, and that’s when his boyfriend – vamp number two – shows up in high dudgeon, pulls us apart, and then physically and mentally tortures me for a week.’
Alice doesn’t have an immediate response to that.
‘And, well, I don’t fall in love with that one. Not right away.’
‘Jesus, Daniel.’
‘Right? Please remember, I did say idiot. Now this guy’s got the really impressive mind powers. He smudges out the torture, removes himself from my memory entirely. Later, though… later he stalks me. A beautiful monster is stalking me, and I don’t remember – or he doesn’t let me remember it – except in the moments I manage to catch sight of him. And then I’m adrift again, only conscious that something very terrifying has happened, is perhaps still happening, but I put the feeling down to what I do remember from that first encounter. I think I know that I met a vampire and that he gave me the best story I’d ever heard and then tried to kill me. Then I doubt it all. Then I see the other one again and I know I’m not crazy. He moves out of my sight and I’m back to stumbling through my confusion. I see him again. So on, so forth. Eventually he lets me corner him. And then, yeah. Then I fuck a vampire.’
She’s quiet again for a spell. There’s a little water feature nearby, chirping in the quiet between them. Then she says: ‘Okay. And the part where this becomes relevant to me?’
A memory, and this one’s as clear as the night is to him nowadays. Meeting her in a run-down Irish pub off Guerrero. Pints of the black stuff, a bartender who doesn’t wholly hate his ass, leathered elbows sticking to the table. Daniel Molloy, salt of the earth, waving one hand and explaining that the trick, the real art of it, is to let the other person think they’re leading the dance. She’s nodding and going ‘uh-huh’ in all the right places. Golden bangles on her wrist tinkling and refracting as she moves to rest her chin in her hand.
He’d wonder if there’s something special about vampiric recall that paints the scene so freshly, except he’s had the VIP tour of how their ability to reconstruct events is as messy as any mortal’s. Maybe he’s just caught some especially deranged strain of the romanticism it seems they’re all fucking riddled with. Direct delivery from the sixteenth century. It’s vivid as fuck, anyway, the Guinness he wouldn’t be able to taste any more creamy-bitter on his tongue. In the memory he’s telling her that sometimes when you want to get the real story out of someone, you gotta act like you’re trying to move them on from the subject at hand, see what that shakes loose. She’s nodding seriously.
‘You interviewing me, Al?’ he asks in the present.
She holds her hands up, mea culpa. ‘You never used to catch on,’ she says.
He tries a self-effacing chuckle and it comes out a bit too sharp, nervous. The kind of sound a dumb 20-year-old fumbling over his tape recorder might let out. ‘Sure, okay. It’s all gonna line up in a minute. Things happen, and it’s incredible for a while. A demented kind of bliss; the vampire and his boy. At some point down the line, you come in. You meet the boy, you like him, for some fucking reason.’
‘Hah,’ says Alice. He suddenly wants, more than anything, to get a real laugh out of her.
‘You’re aware of his history, sans vampires. Aware he’s hooked on something, but not that it’s a vampire’s blood. Suspicious about where it is he vanishes off to, but not… and so on. It gets better, for a while, I think? And worse again. It’s all so goddamn hazy.’ He pauses, shakes his head as if that’ll do anything, re-catches the thread. ‘The boy’s back to begging for eternal life. Crazed with the taste of immortal blood. So the vampire cuts him off, reshapes his memories again – years and years of them. To you it looks like the worst crash I ever had, and then like recovery, which I guess it was. I don’t remember him at all, but he keeps tabs, shows up from time to time. Of course, when he does, neither of us has any clue who he is. But what he’s done to my head – it’s not as straightforward as deleting words from a manuscript. Memory’s a moving thing, a living thing. Cut it, it bleeds, it regrows. You uh, you ever read The Internet’s Gavel?’
Again that hovering concern, like the apparent non-sequitur says something about his cognitive state, vampiric evidence or no. ‘No, Daniel, why the hell would I have done that?’
And, okay, ouch. But he did ask. Onwards. ‘So, there’s this technique called onion routing. It’s how you preserve anonymity on the dark web. Messages relayed through multiple layers of encryption to mask identity. There’s a bit in the book I wasn’t super sure about, but my early readers liked it enough that I kept it in – about how when I’m first being shown this onion thing, how it works, I get this vertiginous kind of feeling. Like I’m seeing how human secrets have always worked. I write about how I’ve done this to my own life, encapsulating experiences inside each other until I can’t find the start. Thread it back into some bigger statement on the impossibility of control.’
‘And?’
‘Of course, what I now realise is that it’s not what I did, it’s what he did. My memory wanted to repair itself, but he’s hidden in you.’
‘Oh,’ she says. He can guess without looking what she’s thinking. ‘Whenever you used to bring up shit that made no sense. I used to think you were on something again…’
‘Only sometimes.’
‘You once accused me of being a psychopath because I, quote, loved to microwave rats. Kind of thing that sticks with you’
‘That was him.’
She makes the kind of face you’d expect most people to make at that. ‘And when you said you’d already asked me to marry you, and I’d said no…’
‘Him. Rejecting my heartfelt plea for immortality.’
‘That why you were so half-assed when you finally proposed for real?’
‘I guess so.’
‘You guess so?’
‘I told you, I still don’t have all of it. The vampire blood, it helps, but you gotta work at it too, hunt through yourself for discrepancies and start pulling at them. There’s another one I really have to tell you about, though. And I mean it, I am sorry, because this part’s the worst.’
‘I don’t know if I can take much more.’ Please stop sounding so worn out, he wants to say. Impossible and unreasonable request.
‘You remember Austria? When our train had to stop because of the snow, and we got the suite in that old hotel? How well do you remember that night?’
‘Not very…’ she says, and he can hear the dread in it.
‘Do you want to remember?’
Her heart is pounding. She’s holding onto the edge of the bench with both hands. I don’t know.
He nips his own finger and lets a drop of blood well up, offers it to her. ‘If you want it, this will help.’
She stares at him, and he feels her trying to quiet her mind. He still hasn’t really given her a reason to trust him. But she brings herself forward, still looking him dead in the eye as she seals her lips around the tiny wound.
Daniel shudders at the contact, her soft living lips that used to kiss his flesh when it was warm and young and perishable. Feels her shiver too, to suck at his cool dead skin. Just a drop. When he pulls his hand away he sees the shine of spit and a smudge of plum on the pad of his finger.
It works fast, as he suspected it would, and he props her up as calmly and steadily as he can manage. Keeps holding onto her as he steps inside, leads her through the pine-smell and flame-flicker of the memory. The foyer of the hotel, the sharp cold of the opening door, the sound of boots stamping off the snow. Up the stairs and into the suite, cards on the table – look at them, look again, dealt into three piles, not two. And through to the bed, into the flesh. Her fingers at his lips this time, but then there were more fingers than just hers, more hands and shoulders and thighs, and she was speaking with someone, and it wasn’t Daniel because Daniel had his mouth stuffed full.
✣
When he pulls back, her eyes are bright with tears. He sits hard on his need to say something, lets her be with it. Lets the water fill the quiet again, and the dry leaves of the quaking aspen.
‘I don’t think that is the worst part,’ she says.
‘What?’ Of all the responses, he didn’t expect that.
‘Your vampire ex stalking us into our bed. It’s fucked, but it was fucked for both of us. I think the worst part is that you’ve taken him back.’
‘What?’
‘Come on, Daniel. You’re telling me all about then, but everything to do with now starts and ends at describing this book. You’ve avoided anything about how you ended up a vampire. You say the blood helps with recall, and then you give me yours, take me to Eternal Sunshine town, so I’m guessing that means blood from someone who shares the memories. You tell me how this fucker haunted our whole history together, and how you think you owe me that knowledge, but you don’t want to tell me he’s back in your life.’
This time, Daniel’s the one who doesn’t speak for a moment. ‘Got me,’ he says in the end.
‘And you’re fucking.’
‘Well, yeah.’
‘Unbelievable’ she says, every syllable an imaginary kick in the shin.
‘Is it?’
‘No.’
He fishes in his coat for the flask and empties the remainder of its contents into his throat.
‘That’s blood, I take it?’
‘Sure is. You might as well know, I brought it because of how I’m a blood-crazed monster now and, man, I didn’t think I’d do anything irredeemable but you probably can’t be too careful.’
And that, somehow, is what does it. She laughs until the tears break, until her whole body’s loose with it.
‘You asshole,’ she says when she comes down, wiping her cheeks, as he offers her a tissue – still useful, those things, once you switch to the pulsating kind of liquid diet.
They sit side by side, hearing the river and the city run by. After a while Alice pulls out her phone, so Daniel does the same.
Think that went pretty well, he texts Armand. Adds the relieved face emoji, and then a couple more – zany face, smiling face with sunglasses – for good measure.
He gets a middle finger back for his trouble.