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Ten minutes into his concert at the Enterprise Center in St. Louis, Lestat senses the presence of two vampires in the crowd.
He would have noticed sooner, were he not distracted by some ridiculous last minute red tape surrounding the pyrotechnics. Christine does not take kindly to his suggestion he light the Fire Marshal’s bushy moustache aflame with a snap of his fingers, and then ask him if he has the proper permits for that, so the whole debacle takes infinitely longer than necessary and puts Lestat quite out of sorts.
A moment in front of his adoring fans improves his mood dramatically. He begins each show with “Long Fangs”, even though his musical and lyrical styles have become much more sophisticated since he wrote that months ago on the back of a hotel room service menu in Syracuse, shortly after eating the bellboy who had served as a very satisfying room service meal. It is still a crowd favourite. Lestat's beloved audience sings along, and when he ends the song with a burst of fireworks–no thanks to the Fire Marshal–and the unfurling of a gigantic rainbow flag from the rafters of the stadium, they go completely mad. The mayhem is so loud he can’t immediately continue with the next song. As he waits for it to die down, he hears them: two vampiric hearts, beating in an upper level suite.
One is Louis, of course. He is Lestat’s companion heart, whether or not Louis feels the same way, and Lestat would know him anywhere. He would feel him anywhere, his heart and his breathing synced perfectly with Lestat’s.
The other is a stranger. This presence sends a spike of terror through Lestat so cold and unexpected that he stumbles a little. Cookie catches his eye. “You drunk?” She mouths, casually hiding her face behind her hand. Lestat shakes his head. It’s much worse than that.
It was massively foolish of Louis to invite every vampire on Earth to attack him at his home. Lestat hates that he did it. At the same time, he understands why Louis felt it was necessary. Every part of Lestat’s body and what’s left of his blackened soul wanted to go to Louis as soon as he heard, to offer his protection from the hordes of degenerates who were about to inflict themselves upon St. Louis. He needed to care for Louis the way he always did. The way he always tried to. But Lestat restrained himself, and he thought he was now being rewarded for it.
Louis has been a little warmer towards him lately. He has started to linger a little longer after their infrequent meetings–what Larry terms their “booty calls”, as crass as that is–and he has taken to engaging in more fulsome conversation while they’re together. The last time they met, Louis even kissed Lestat first, and, wonder of wonders, said, “Missed you, baby.” Lestat nearly orgasmed on the spot.
But now one of these vampires has followed Louis here, into what should be his sacred time with Lestat. Either it is someone who wishes Louis harm, in which case Louis would have surely killed the creature already, or it is someone who accompanied Louis with permission. In which case, why?
Who the fuck are you? Lestat demands in silence, as the noise of the crowd finally dies down and Cookie strums the introduction to their next song. I command you to tell me at once!
Yeah, a voice replies in Lestat’s mind, laid-back and lackadaisical. The accent is a little like what Louis’s used to be, and to which it’s slowly returning, now he is away from the snobbish influence of fucking Armand. Louis told me you were gonna be like that.
You know nothing of Louis. How you dare even speak–
He says, “get on with the show, and we’ll talk about it later.” An infinitesimal pause. The voice is smiling when it adds, “Baby”, but Lestat doesn’t care. Hearing the word from Louis, even second-hand, puts joy in his heart and a renewed spring in his step that carries him through the best concert of his life.
One of the best, anyway. Where Lestat normally has to be dragged off stage after three, four, five encores, tonight he goes after one, leaving his band surprised and his audience wanting more. He will not admit to being nervous, not even to himself. Instead, he names the pervasive uneasiness in his stomach, the tightness in his chest, as excitement, and why wouldn't he be excited? Nearly three months have passed since he was last graced with Louis’s presence. Nothing, really. The blink of a gnat’s eye in the scheme of things, but the more time he spends with Louis, the more he mourns his absence when they’re apart.
Lestat doesn’t take off his makeup. Just the reverse: he retouches it, to make sure he looks perfect when Louis and this other vampire finally make their way to him. When he hears them approaching through the bowels of the stadium, Lestat hurriedly grabs the nearest bottle of nail polish so he can be found painting his nails, utterly unconcerned by anything else. When the dressing room door opens, he forces himself to stay focused on his right index finger for a long count of five before looking up and saying, with utmost casualness, “Oh, hello, Louis. I’d almost forgotten you were here.”
Louis sees right through him, of course. He always did. He rolls his eyes and steps aside, allowing his —friend?—to come in.
“Wow!" Their guest sounds thrilled. "That was fucking great! I mean, Louis told me you were a star. Said you used to play jazz better than any cracker he ever knew. But that out there was something else.” The words are rewarding, but they don’t soothe Lestat for long.
The man is handsome. Too handsome. While Louis is dressed as always, like a billionaire given to occasional bouts of colour-blindness, the stranger’s style is more what Lestat would call “urban”, if he didn’t think Cookie would slap him for saying it. Ripped jeans, bright white sneakers, a puffy black coat even though it’s Missouri in June, sunglasses even though they're indoors well after dark.
Who are you? Lestat asks, staring at Louis’s friend. Before the man replies, Louis says, “Nuh-uh. None of that. We all talk out loud. That’s just good manners.”
Oh, does it hurt to be excluded, mon amour? Lestat thinks, but he keeps his mouth shut. He has been getting better at doing that lately. “Of course,” he says instead. “My apologies. I merely asked the gentleman his name.”
“Elias Moore. Friends call me Stack.” Lestat doesn’t intend to become one of said friends, but he shakes Elias’s hand anyway. He’s got a number of gold rings Lestat has to admit are quite appealing.
“We met forty years ago in New York,” Louis explains. “For a while, Stack and his wife were the only vampires in Manhattan apart from Armand and I.”
“Fucking hipsters, am I right?” Elias grins. That is not the part of Louis’s sentence to which Lestat clutches.
“Your wife? Where is she now?” Lestat wants to hear Elias say she doesn’t like this kind of music. He wants to hear she’s off getting herself a bite to eat at a nightclub or a retirement home or an orphanage but will be back soon. He emphatically does not want to hear:
“We’re taking a short break. Eternity’s a long fucking time. I guess I don’t need to tell you guys that.” Elias laughs like he’s making a joke.
“No. You do not.” Lestat has had enough of talking to this man. He turns to Louis. “I wish you had told me you were bringing someone with you. I would have told Christine to pull out all the stops.”
“The usual box was fine,” Louis replies. He seems slightly chagrined, but that might just be Lestat’s wishful thinking. “It was great. You always put on an amazing show.”
“Mary and me saw Bowie in ‘72, and that shit you did, that was beyond Bowie,” Elias continues, inexplicably, to speak.
Lestat’s impeccable manners slip. “Tell me, why were you turned? Was it by somebody who thought it might, for a single moment, shut you up?”
A frown crosses Elias’s face. “Hey, now, I…”
“Lestat!” Louis is scowling. Oh no, Lestat thinks, caustic in an attempt to quell the sudden rise of regret within him. The victim of Louis’s scorn once more. How will I survive? “I brought Stack because I thought you might want to meet one of my friends. Like that might be something we did.”
Louis is right. Shame floods Lestat. “I’m sorry, Louis. I’m sorry, Mr…” Lestat realises too late he can’t remember the man’s last name. “Elias.”
Louis lets out a heavy sigh, the sort that can wither everything in a room. He got it from his mother. Lestat knows better than to remind him of that. “Forget it, Lestat. I’ll see you around.”
“No, wait. I—” Too late. Louis is gone. After shooting him a look Lestat fears is meant to be sympathetic, Elias follows.
Lestat trashes the dressing room, something he hasn’t done since his early days in the business. It costs him ten thousand dollars and a lengthy lecture from Christine to make up for it, but it’s worth every moment.
***
The next night, Elias returns, alone, for Lestat's second St. Louis concert. Is he here at Louis's behest? Lestat wonders. He doesn't say it out loud. He forgets he doesn't have to.
Sorry, this is all me. Louis fucked off fuck knows where, Elias replies. He's not in a box this time; he's seated towards the back of the floor section. He loves to just fucking disappear without telling me shit.
I can't imagine what that must be like, Lestat replies dryly. Elias laughs, like he really gets it. On a whim, Lestat asks, Would you like to upgrade your seat?
Fuck yeah, Elias says, without hesitation. The next time Lestat has an opportunity to slip into the wings, he asks Christine to bring Elias backstage.
Given that last night’s dressing room remains in a sorry state, Lestat is changing in a smaller, sparser room tonight. It is to this near-broom closet that Christine shows Elias after the show.
“Your friend,” she says, looking at him far too shrewdly for Lestat’s liking.
“The gentleman is Louis’s friend,” he tells her, unflinching. “I am merely being polite.”
“Whatever. Don’t wreck another room, or you’ll be permanently banned from here. Got it?” Humiliatingly, she waits for him to nod his understanding, like a misbehaving child, before she disappears, leaving Lestat and Elias alone.
“You came back.” Lestat sits in front of the mirror, which is covered in scratches and faded lipstick prints, and begins to wipe off his faceful of powder and pink sweat.
“Yeah. I wasn’t blowing smoke up your ass yesterday, I really enjoyed the show.” Elias comes over to stand beside Lestat, leaning casually against the dressing table. Lestat has killed men for less, but this is Louis’s friend. He resists. “Louis told me you played with Jelly Roll Morton back in the day.”
“I did. To help Louis, of course.”
A grin splits Elias’s still too-handsome face. “Man, my little cousin would have liked to hear that story.”
“Your cousin?”
“He was a blues musician. A great one.”
“He is no longer living?” Lestat lets the obvious remain unsaid.
Clearly, Elias hears it anyway. “I offered. He didn’t want it.” So he is a man who would not turn another, even a loved one, against his will. Lestat’s respect for him increases a little.
“Who is your maker?” Lestat doesn’t know every vampire that walks the Earth, clearly. He didn’t know Elias and his wife existed, but if his maker came from the Old World, then perhaps he has heard of him.
“He was a musician, too,” Elias replies. Lestat doesn’t miss the use of the past tense. “Irish.” Competing images of Bono and Michael Flatley appear in Lestat’s mind. Before he can ask which more closely resembled his maker, Elias goes on, “Real Irish. From before the British took over.”
Michael Flatley it is, then. “He must have been very old.” Likely older than Armand. Perhaps even as old as Marius.
“Yeah, I guess. I gotta say, we didn’t really get much of a chance to know him. He died the same night he turned us.” That strikes a painfully familiar chord in Lestat. He pauses in his task, setting down his makeup cloth. “Don’t get me wrong,” Elias continues, “he gave us a gift. We appreciate it. It just would have been nice if the gift had come with a few more instructions, you know?”
Lestat caught his eye in the mirror. “Yes. I do know.” He wonders if Louis has told him anything about Magnus. He can’t tell. “Louis will have mentioned his friend Daniel,” Lestat says, in lieu of revealing anything personal about himself. “He is suffering a similar abandonment.”
“He’s lucky he’s got Louis to help him out.”
“Very lucky.”
“Louis sure is special, huh?”
Lestat returns to removing his makeup, swiping the cloth roughly over his skin. He doesn’t want to ask; he can’t bear to speak the words aloud. He can’t even bear to think them. Elias replies anyway. “Hey, no! We ain’t done anything since the two of you got back together, I swear it.” He holds up his hands.
Again, Lestat doesn’t overlook the phrasing. “And before that?”
Elias’s smile becomes a rakish leer. “Well, let’s just say that man’s got some needs Armand wasn’t filling, if you know what I mean.”
Lestat laughs out loud. He likes this man, he decides.
“I like you, too,” Elias says. Lestat really does have to get used to being around people who can read his mind. “Louis said we would get along. But you know how he can get sometimes.”
“Intimately.”
“He’s always talking about you. Even when he was still with Armand, he told me all about his maker that he still loved even though he thought you killed your daughter. Then when he found out you didn’t…” Elias lets out a breath. “It’s been nothing but Lestat Lestat Lestat every time I see him.”
Hearing it should gladden Lestat’s heart. It doesn’t. What does it matter, really, if Louis is extolling his praises to his friend when he still saw fit to publish that book of lies? When he still avoids Lestat? Lestat is in favour of Louis exploring his independence, he honestly is. He understands why Louis feels they can’t live together full-time. But what he doesn’t understand, what really hurts, is months of silence between “booty calls”, never knowing when–or even if–he’s going to see his love again.
“Listen,” Elias says, and Lestat steels himself for “advice.” “It's hard on him, too. I know what it’s like to think you’re pushing someone away for your own good and theirs. And Louis has got a fuckton of guilt to work through on top of that.”
“He has nothing for which to feel–”
“He told me how you guys used to be with one another.”
Lestat tries not to remember it: the coldness, the sniping, the lies, the cheating. The violence. “Nothing he did to me could ever justify me hurting him the way I did.” Not even slitting Lestat's throat. At the end, when it mattered, Louis had put Lestat in his coffin to recover. He’d shown compassion. Lestat had shown nothing but rage when he brought Louis into the sky and watched him fall. He’d felt nothing but rage.
Elias looks puzzled. “He never said anything about that. He told me how there were so many good times, but Armand brainwashed him or some crazy shit and he lost a lot of those memories. He's worried he won't never get them back.” Elias shakes his head. “Fucking Armand. Mary told me he gave her the willies.”
Tears prick at the back of Lestat’s eyes. Darling Louis. It’s just like him to take on such emotions. “He should not feel badly for what that gremlin did to him.”
“Maybe not. But guilt ain’t any kind of logical feeling, right? I still feel like shit that I couldn't convince my brother to join us. Don't make sense, but I do.”
A lost brother. No wonder he and Louis have a rapport. “Thank you,” Lestat says, as he tosses his makeup-streaked cloth to the floor for some mortal to deal with. “For being there for him. Louis needs a friend.” There was a time Lestat would have seethed with jealousy at the thought of Louis even speaking to another vampire, let alone sharing confidences, but he had grown. He was trying to grow more.
“Like I said, eternity is a fucking long time. I get it. You’ll figure it out. Me and Mary did.”
As irritating as it is to be condescended to by a vampire who seems younger than Louis, who is currently on “a break” from his wife, Lestat can't rouse himself to be annoyed. Perhaps that is also a sign of growth.
“Would you care to join me for a meal?” Louis would surely be happy to learn Lestat was getting along with his friend. He might even, Lestat thinks with just a soupçon of glee, be a little jealous. Stack is a very charming man, after all.
Maybe I haven't grown that much, Lestat thinks. Peu importe. It is a marathon, not a sprint, as he once heard Cookie say to somebody about a quite different topic.
His overture is met by a wide, white smile. “Yeah! And after, you can tell me what it was like playing with old Jelly Roll. Would I have loved to see that!”
“Of course…Stack.” Lestat tries to let the nickname roll off his tongue. It sounds less than natural, but it makes the man beam even harder. “Allow me to get changed, and I’ll be with you at once.”
Before Stack steps out of the dressing room, Lestat catches a glimpse of him in the mirror, flicking a casual gaze up and down Lestat’s extraordinarily stare-worthy body. Lestat winks, almost automatically. Stack, to his immense amusement, winks back.
Once he’s gone, Lestat pries down his zipper and works his way out of his figure-hugging leather pants. A small part of him, the part that’s always put him in trouble, wonders if maybe Louis might be up for a threesome one day.
No harm in asking him, a silent voice replies from the other side of the door. Lestat manages to both flush and smirk at the same time. It's a feat even he can’t remember ever having accomplished before. .