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“Since we should be long past the point of half-truths and bullshit,” Daniel Molloy begins, his tone brusque, caustic, sneering, “I’ve got a question for you.”
The Vampire Armand falls into step beside him without speaking. They have been locked in a slowly decaying orbit for some time now, passing close but avoiding the destructive inferno of a full collision. If Armand tries to abandon his fledgling completely, some irresistible urge draws him back. If Daniel claims to want nothing to do with his maker, some morbid streak of pathological curiosity keeps him talking. So it has been now for a while—a stalemate of mutual fixation.
It is a cold night in a dark city. The streets are wet and reflective, gleaming under sulfurous streetlamps and the red neon of window signs. This is a dangerous part of town, but they stroll idly, meandering down alleys and past overstuffed dumpsters like old friends out for a ramble in the park. Beside a run-down coin laundry and a pawn shop, Daniel finally poses his question.
“Have you ever gone home? After Marius turned you, I mean. Did you ever go back once you had the chance?”
“No,” Armand answers.
“Never? Not once?”
“I see little purpose in it.”
“You’ve never been even a little intrigued? Never wanted to know how it all turned out for your family? You don’t even wonder if you’ve got a great-great-great-grand-nephew or something running around in Delhi?”
“I would have no way to know, Mr. Molloy. I cannot recall much about my life before my maker took me from the Venetian brothels.”
Daniel huffs a sigh and then laughs wryly to himself.
“This again. Still playing it close to the chest, huh?”
“I cannot tell you what I do not know.”
Armand keeps his tone cordial, still playing the role of gentle, sophisticated, doting companion even though he knows how pointless such a gesture is. The veneer of civility hangs off of him slightly askew, rendered disconcerting by its listless, perfunctory nature. Too much of the dead thing visible beneath the mask.
But he keeps it up nevertheless. Force of habit, if nothing else, in the same way that he played the leader of the coven for many decades after he had lost the savor of it, in the same way that he had mimicked the fiery outrage of Amadeo for a time before the inevitable submission. It is easier to keep the old, tattered ways going with Daniel, rather than reinventing himself again.
“How about this—is your real name actually Arun?” Daniel demands, pausing so that he can turn and look Armand directly in the face to watch him answer.
Armand smiles, obliging him.
“To the best of my knowledge.”
“Another deeply reliable and informative conversation with The Vampire Armand. Don’t know why I even bothered. Nevermind. I’ll figure it out myself.”
“If you do, Mr. Molloy, I will be most curious to know,” Armand replies lightly, brushing past where Daniel has paused and taking them down a flight of steps into an alley where vermin scurry to the corners at the sound of their footsteps.
“You’re five hundred years old and you can read minds and control anyone you meet with a word. Louis might have bought the whole ‘convenient amnesiac’ angle, but not me,” Daniel objects, following him down at a half-jog.
His steps have grown nimble again, Armand thinks with a strange mixture of pleasure and loathing. He is both the troublesome boy and the jaded old man in one body now that the Dark Gift has transformed him. Armand has blended time together to create this perfect, terrible thing.
“I have never claimed to be an amnesiac,” he clarifies. “You yourself have admitted that memory is unreliable. My recollection of those early years is sparse on details. All relevant context to recover any further information has vanished. But I see that the truth will not satisfy you. Are my earliest years my only truth? And not the five hundred after that I have endured? Is the child always the real and the man the mask? Is the true Daniel Molloy still that boy from Modesto?”
“Cut the philosophizing. You’re dodging me again.”
“I no longer have anything left to hide from you.”
“Biggest lie you’ve told all night,” Daniel Molloy scoffs, although he sounds genuinely amused—almost enjoying the game of it. Armand feels a rush of fierce, possessive desire.
They walk through a row of huddled bodies, some wrapped in sleeping bags, others shivering under layers of dirty coats. It smells of desperation. Warm mortal blood, some of it sluggish with opiates, pumps beneath cold, chapped skin.
The two of them, hunters in the night, do not pause. They walk through this gauntlet of the vulnerable without temptation.
“Of my childhood, I remember only impressions. Only those sensations too urgent to forget. I remember being hunted through the streets by slavers. The burning of my lungs, the dirt beneath my feet. I remember the boat. The stink of it. Sores on my arms from the salt and the ropes. I remember the filth and darkness of the brothels. The pain and the bleeding and the rancid food my stomach would not hold,” Armand finally says once they have passed back into a clear, empty lane. He injects a bit of apathetic brutality into each word, but it accomplishes little. Daniel Molloy only seems more intrigued when the tale grows dark. “All that I know is this sketch of small impressions. Nothing that can be made into orderly narrative.”
“And nothing about your family?”
“Nothing even of the self. No thoughts, no feelings—only sensation. It was a thing, Daniel, not a boy, who suffered. Only a thing. And the thing had to forget the parts of itself that made it human.”
“But you were—pardon my language—you were playing child bride to an ancient vampire. He had the Mind Gift, Armand. And you are seriously claiming that he never took a peek into your repressed subconscious or whatever to figure it out?” Daniel bursts out, the source of his exasperation finally clear.
He cannot imagine, Armand thinks with that queasy combination of fondness and fear that he feels for Daniel. He cannot imagine that anyone would not share his bottomless desire to know.
But the question that he asks does sting for some reason. It digs up a little kernel of bitterness that Armand had not realized still lay buried inside of him. Marius could have found out. Perhaps he had.
Amadeo had been willing to trust that if any of what he knew was good to know, his master would have shared it. The cannier, colder, harder Vampire Armand would no longer put such faith in anyone.
“If he concealed anything, it would have been because the knowledge would have burdened me further,” Armand says woodenly, rationalizing out of nothing but automatic habit. “Marius de Romanus did not like to see his Amadeo look sad. If he knew, Daniel, then it must be that the truth you are seeking is only added horror. I see no reason to go searching for that.”
The logic adds up to only one place, Armand knows. He is not exceptional, he reminds himself. Thousands of children are still so despised by their own parents that they would part with them for a sum of coin.
If the thing that might have been called Arun had no love to return to, Marius would have seen it as his duty to relieve Amadeo of that memory. Marius would have severed the connection, rather than risking it catching, tangling, tearing.
“Or,” Daniel points out, “maybe Marius didn’t like the idea of his little favorite running off home to mama and papa as soon as he could make it onto a ship. Guess you took after him in that way. You both like to fuck with people’s heads and call it mercy.”
“Mercy,” Armand repeats softly.
They have reached a dead end. The alley terminates in a closed gate to an underground parking garage. Trying to pry the lip of the metal up from the ground is the quarry. He breathes fast, frantic, desperate—afraid. Afraid even though he wants this, Armand thinks. He needs them to remind him that he wants this.
“Stop,” Armand commands. “Be still.”
The young man slumps back against the door to the parking garage, nearly inert.
“Kinda takes the fun out of it when you do that,” Daniel remarks.
“He is ready to be done with fighting,” Armand murmurs back. “He wants to obey. Can’t you feel it? This is mercy. This is the mercy of not needing to know anymore.”
The man’s eyes blink rapidly, but his body is perfectly still. Armand goes to kneel down beside him and runs a tender hand through his sweat-damp hair.
“Emptiness can be a gift, Mr. Molloy,” he says gently, laying the victim’s body in his arms as he would a child. “Although it is a deadly one. What I took from your mind and Louis’ was an act of violence, yes, but only the violence of a surgeon.”
“And if that’s what Marius did to you? If it wasn’t just the trauma that made you forget—if he was the one who made you forget?” Daniel asks, finally revealing the theory he has been working on in the disconcerting quiet of his veiled mind.
“Then at least I am spared the suffering of remembering,” Armand replies, and he bites down into the man’s warm throat.
But the question gnaws at him. Daniel Molloy must never know that, but it is his most terrible power—his words eat away inside of you for long after he has gone.
And Armand is the one who saw fit to sharpen his teeth.
Back onto a major street, they thread their way through other hurried figures, heads down and eager to be elsewhere. The blood inside of him makes him feel warm and unhurried, a profoundly inhuman contrast to the darting figures around him.
It never bothers Armand, as it so clearly had for Louis, to feel the vast separation between himself and humanity. Armand is not sure he has ever felt anything but separation from the rest of the world.
They pass beneath the signs for drugstores and bars and all-night pizzerias, where gooey slices sit and bake into puddles beneath heated lamps. Armand stares at it all, struck by this sense of profound alienation, dazzled by the strangeness of this city, and these people and this creature that walks beside him.
“You know, I’ve got some chunks of time missing as well,” Daniel unexpectedly acknowledges. He seems… not guilty certainly. But there is a tone of concession in his voice. “Nights that I blasted out of my own brain by shooting up enough coke to kill a horse. That kinda stuff.”
“And would you wish it all back if you could?” Armand inquires. “Would you recover every moment of euphoric sickness that faulty neural connections have robbed you of?”
“Probably not,” Daniel shrugs. He sighs, the recent meal making his breath warm enough to be visible in the cold air. “But only because I’m pretty sure nothing much happened on those nights. Nothing that would change the way I think about anything, at least.”
“And you assume that to know the identity of the people who, out of desperation or inattention or malevolence, sold their child into slavery would matter to me? That I should allow it to change me—recalling the language and the God and the name granted to me by those who calculated a child’s worth in silver pieces?” Armand asks, needle sharp, aiming to lacerate.
He understands the overstep as Daniel merely raises an eyebrow and gives him a toothy grin.
“Well, when you put it like that, boss…” he shrugs. “Sounds like you’re at peace with it.”
Armand cannot quite manage to force his own smile not to burn with a sudden, incinerating anger. He has won another match, while still somehow losing the greater game. Daniel Molloy submits, but he claims another piece of Armand to know and to examine.
Daniel seems to understand this and turns to leave with something close to a theatrical bow and a grin of such pure hatred that Armand can barely restrain himself. He wants to lunge forward and—and do something. Something cruel and pleasurable and destructive and bestial. He wants to mark him. He wants Daniel to remember whose blood he is bound to in this eternity of aching, terrible, laughable nonsense.
But he holds himself back. He smiles his thin smile and waits as Daniel lopes away down the street, vanishing into the crowd. Out of sight, but never out of mind. Armand can feel him like a tapeworm buried deep in his gut, draining him slowly.
Armand walks the streets until dawn, sated but starving.
Without meaning to, he sorts through the fragments, some of them so rehearsed in his mind that he cannot tell anymore if they are real or pantomime theatre of a story he has told himself.
The running. The heat on his back. Bare feet against dusty earth. There is a name that comes unbidden into his head—Arun. Had someone shouted it? Or had he simply thought it as the hairy, sweaty, pungent embrace of the man who had caught him crushed all hope of escape? He guesses that it might have been his name, but it could easily have been the name of a father, a brother, a friend, a betrayer.
The only thing that remains certain, clear, fresh in his mind is the rich voice of his master offering him a new name, a belonging name, a name with significance in the language of learning and glory—Amadeo, beloved of God. Why is it, Armand considers, that every recollection he has of Marius de Romanus stays so pure and so uncorrupted by time, preserved as though in amber despite the efforts of the Children of Darkness? Why is it that he knows with such absolute certainty that he never so much as asked Marius to take him back home? That when his maker had offered to show him the world, Amadeo had only begged to go as far as Florence?
Sun overhead. Dust beneath his feet. A name on his lips. But the part that would have made it home is gone. Hollowed out of him and impossible now to ever recover. Better to forget that anything here is forgotten. Better to have been born empty than to have been robbed.
The light pricks at his skin, but he does not burn. Armand lets himself into the lobby of a building and renders the receptionist compliant enough to grant him a key. He takes the elevator up, finds the right door, and then lets himself silently into Daniel Molloy’s hotel room.
The curtains are drawn, but light seeps in around the edges. The bed is empty and the ever itinerant journalist cannot be burdened by traveling with a coffin. Armand finds him asleep in the bathtub, the windowless room shut tight against the daylight.
Armand sits on the edge of the tub, staring down at the doom he forged for himself. So vulnerable and so young, despite the deep lines on his skin. Mine, Armand thinks without fully comprehending what he means.
He needs to take something from Daniel, of Daniel. He needs some tangible relic of this moment, this night, this meeting that Daniel himself will never remember. He needs to be the one with the microphone, the camera, the documents that declare this little stretch of time real.
But he has no phone, no computer, no tool to render the proof that he desires. And so he goes to the bedroom, opens suitcases and backpacks, hoping to find something, but instead his eyes rest on the yellow legal pad and pen lying on the bedside table. He picks them up, twisting the pen in his fingers. But he cannot find the right words for a note. Words will not sufficiently verify this world of flesh and sensation.
Armand returns to sit beside Daniel. His eyes take in the lines beneath his eyes, the slack softness of his jaw, the rumpled fall of his curls against his forehead. He does not even realize at first what he is doing.
His eyes feast and his hand moves and he wants this moment to endure forever, to be impossible to ever forget. Unless he traps the experience somehow, Daniel will never know and Armand cannot trust himself to remember. Words will not come to him. But his hand moves regardless.
When he looks down, something unaccountable has happened. On the legal pad, his hand had rendered in strokes of ink a near-perfect drawing of Daniel Molloy lying in repose. The sketch is simple, unpolished, and yet the moment is entirely captured. Every line gives just the right sense, every stroke becomes weight and shadow and dimension.
The Vampire Armand has never attempted such a thing before. All those years in the greatest studio in Europe and he never lifted a brush himself. The child Amadeo was the subject of paintings rather than their creator. Never the beholder, always the beheld; never the lover, always the beloved.
Except that now, that is not the case.
He cannot explain it. He can hardly believe it. But the image is real. The hand remembers. The body remembers. And yes, the mind forgets, but the hand keeps something that no power can erase. Not quite gone, then. Not quite.
Armand folds the page into a square and places it inside of his coat, sliding this secret truth into the pocket that sits right above where he once, a very long time ago, had a beating heart.