Nine Years by ukashi goshi

1

He couldn’t tell his pulse apart from the roaring drums, except that the one kept stumbling and ached every time it beat against the wounds in his neck. Noisy smells of the freshly cut wood of the cage they’d shoved him into, the oil-drenched wood below, the cemetery. He could almost still feel those sharp cold lips! It was all jumbled and confused, one minute he was sound asleep and the next he was torn from his house by a horde of stark white faces, cruel laughter, and what the hell did Lestat have to do with it? Had he really heard them speaking his name, or was he dreaming again?

Then surrounding him, the stench underground, that red-haired one had given them permission to do something, he didn’t know what, a heavyset one had started for him first, but then he heard another voice, something mocking and pompous and philosophical, “Anyone can be brought down by someone greater than himself...” And they pushed forward a fine-boned woman not quite as tall as some of the strapping farm girls back home.

But the others suddenly let go of him. Last chance, damn it, who cares if it meant striking a woman, he had to make a run for it.

But before he could raise a fist or bolt past her, she was upon him, and with delicate hands that would have been at home on the keys of a harpsichord, she held him fast, and he couldn’t even knock her off balance. She’d looked up into his face curiously for a moment, and her eyes terrified him more than anything: filthy mop of matted hair, moldering rags, demonic strength in her slender arms, and yet in her quiet face and quick, intelligent eyes, he recognized a mind like his own, trapped in that fairy-tale monstrosity, how was it possible?

Languidly, she had reached up, pulled his neck down to her lips, and bitten down. He almost cried out in panic as he felt sharp teeth stabbing into him, and then a dizzying, sickening pull, over and over, and then the others were upon him, tearing into his wrists, the crook of his elbow, even ripping his breeches to cut into his thigh. When he passed out, it was a mercy.

And now this inhuman screeching and wailing, this must be how my music sounded to Papa, I’m in hell and now I am being punished for everything, get me out I swear I’ll never play again, please, anything, just one sip of cold water, I swear.

He didn’t realize who he was praying to until he heard Lestat’s voice ringing out, changed and unearthly now, and hope abandoned him completely.

***

As their tiny troupe gathered for rehearsal - barely a month of the ritual of the theater, yet already it felt so familiar - they found Nicolas tuning a new violin and

playing scales. When he set it down, Laurent asked, “But where’s the Stradivarius?”

Nicolas scowled. “It’s got his fingerprints all over it. Besides, this is even better. If you didn’t hear the difference, you’ve got shit for ears.”

They huddled close and peered down at the small label inside the violin: Joseph Guarnerius fecit Cremonae anno 1743. When they saw, at the far right, a tiny cross above the inscription IHS, they recoiled as if burned, all of them still afraid even to mentally recite the Latin words, Iesus hominum salvator.

All but Eleni. She suppressed a laugh. Still clinging to the old superstitions! She found Nicolas smirking back at her as he took up the bow and announced, “Only the best for the devil’s violinist!” and then she laughed outright, though secretly she hoped he’d outgrow all this delirious sublime-glory-of-evil nonsense sooner rather than later. Hadn’t they had enough of that kind of thing already? She wondered if the others lapped it up simply because it was so very similar to what they’d left behind, just bathed and combed and splendidly dressed. Ah well, he was young, throwing his weight around like anyone that age.

He tucked it between his chin and his shoulder and launched into improvisations on familiar melodies. Even the quietest notes, low or high, seemed to resonate directly in their ribs, and as he gathered speed, he built up shattering volumes of sound from a fragile shell of fancily curled wood and a bow that could snap like a twig.

When the last note died out, Felix shook his head in amazement. “Damn it, Nicki, is that a violin or a cannon?”

In the weeks that followed, no one dared ask to borrow the old Stradivarius, even though with their new freedom from all the old coven rules they were more than a little tempted. Locked in its case, it gathered dust in Lestat’s old dressing room, which had already become a storeroom: neither Armand nor Nicolas wanted anything to do with it, and they walked a little faster whenever they passed that door. As soon as someone carelessly stowed a few bolts of fabric for costumes in there, pots of greasepaint, bottles of ink, paper and other sundries quickly followed.

And as for the Guarneri, Nicolas made a point of fondly calling it the “del Gesu” in front of Eugenie and Felix and Laurent, just to see them flinch, until finally the joke was old enough that they stopped noticing it.

***

As the months passed, it was getting harder and harder to find Nicolas when he wandered off, and Armand constantly worried that he’d slip away and kill right in plain sight or, worse, haphazardly make another vampire. He could tell that the others wondered why he put up with it - as coven master, he’d destroyed fledglings for far less - but they didn’t dare put the idea in his head: they didn’t want to lose their violinist.

Armand remembered stepping out of the cool darkness of San Marco into the dazzling midday sun, voices echoing across the square, pigeons and gulls whirling aimlessly at his feet. It was nowhere near as blinding as being flung from the catacombs into 18th century Paris. Frightening, meaningless splendor, and even if he still had a coven, he wouldn’t have had the faintest idea how to lead.

But Nicolas, for all his vitriol, created out of nothing another world of elaborate ritual. Not the old dark rites and sabbats, of course, but an almost ecclesiastic rhythm of composition, choreography, rehearsal, and performance. Without it, Armand would almost certainly have gone into the fire himself, right on the heels of all those he’d massacred. It was another priesthood; how precisely its stupidity and shallowness compared to all the cant of the Children of Darkness was beside the point.

He hurried through the streets looking for him. Not for the first time, he considered forbidding Nicolas to venture out without one of the others by his side, and not for the first time, he vacillated, entirely unsure which would be worse, Nicki’s blunders or his inevitable fury at being watched.

But maybe it would come to that. Sometimes Nicolas’ mind was wide open, and he was easier to find than a candle flame in a dark room, but sometimes he seemed to vanish off the face of the earth, impenetrable even to Armand. And for all Armand could tell, none of it was intentional, and Nicolas didn’t even have any idea that it was happening.

Even so, Armand could usually find him through the eyes of others. But tonight, the streets were relatively empty, and there were not many eyes to look through: it was well past midnight, and a fine rain had been falling lightly for hours.

Finally, by sheer luck, Armand turned a corner and, from a distance, saw Nicolas standing motionless in the rain in the middle of an empty street. And it all happened too fast: a swift carriage came clattering down the street; the sleepy driver, squinting against the dark and the rain, didn’t see him until it was too late; the horses couldn’t stop in time, and whinnied and reared up in panic.

Nicolas seemed oblivious to all of it, even as the horses’ hooves thundered down and crushed his leg against the pavement.

Armand rushed to him as the the two couples riding in the carriage got out to see what had happened and the driver leapt down, swearing at Nicolas for scaring his horses and almost upsetting his carriage. He stuttered and gaped, though, when he saw the blood pooling on the pavement, the poor birdbrained man’s leg at a hopelessly wrong angle, and what could only be a shard of bone poking through his skin. One of the ladies screamed, and the other cried for her husband to call a doctor, but he seemed rooted to the spot.

But even as they clustered around Nicolas, those who had the stomach to

inspect the wound saw, to their horror and amazement, that it was healing itself.

This was a form of public exposure Armand hadn’t anticipated. Immediately he reached into the minds of the five mortals, distorting their vision until they saw only a young drunken fool knocked to the pavement, lucky to have escaped with only a few bruises. And you could never fail by going straight for the worst of human nature: compassion flickered out easily, and even someone far less talented than Armand could have encouraged their natural indifference to the suffering of strangers and their indignation at the injury the horses could have suffered and the disruption of their quiet ride home.

By the time the men had finished their pompous lectures on the evils of drink and the self-absorbed carelessness of young men these days, and Armand had finished shaking his head in sad agreement and apologizing for the excesses of “my cousin,” Nicolas was able to stand, albeit shakily. Even Armand was surprised at how quickly the wounds were healing themselves. Of course Nicolas had inherited Magnus’ powerful blood, but Lestat had brought him over so soon after turning Gabrielle; he wouldn’t have thought it possible. But there was no arithmetic to these things, and sometimes he thought that the Dark Gift made rules only for the sake of making exceptions.

As the sound of the hooves and wheels faded into the distance, Armand said quietly, “Come on, let’s go home,” and put an arm around Nicolas’ waist to support him. Nicolas leaned on him as they made their way slowly back to the theater, still dull and quiet, and he seemed oblivious both to his injury and to its preternaturally rapid healing.

After a while, Armand ventured the question, “Nicolas, what were you doing?”

He was silent so long that Armand thought that he hadn’t been listening, but then he said, “I was reading.”

In consternation, Armand tried to catch some vision from him of what the hell that meant, and maybe in his own way Nicki was trying to explain, because a sense of terrible pattern in the falling rain dawned on him, codes and cadences just on the verge of speaking plainly. He shook his head and with great effort shut it out.

They walked slowly, picking their way over the uneven cobblestones, but even as Nicolas’ leg healed, he kept his arm around Armand’s shoulder, not knowing why, maybe it was simply good, that closeness, maybe after everything it was inevitable, quickening heart, suddenly self-conscious, loneliness and a strong beautiful boy by your side, every touch charged, and neither of them knew who started it, but blindly, confusedly, they found each others’ lips, shy, tentative, but before long the awkwardness fell away, and they kissed deeply, everything forgotten, bodies knowing exactly what to do and drowning out the uncertainty, and without thinking, Armand shook his hair back, baring his neck, and Nicolas buried his face in that little hollow beneath the jaw, kissing ferociously, feeling Armand’s pulse beneath his tongue, and Armand wound his fingers through

Nicki’s dark curls, and as he felt Nicki’s teeth grazing his skin, that first little sting, centuries of loneliness all spiraling down to this one moment, he moaned and pulled him closer, but on the verge of ravaging his throat, Nicolas pulled back, still holding Armand in his arms, but quietly, intently studying his face.

“You only want to possess me. And only because I was his,” he decided.

“What?” Armand gasped. Maybe in some very small and partial way he was right, but couldn’t he see how inconsequential it was? “No,” he protested, and he kissed Nicolas again, finding him tortuously pliant, and silently told him, No, no, that’s not the whole story, don’t you see, without you, don’t you know, don’t you know how beautiful you are? And Nicolas was as flushed with desire as he was, both of them painfully hard, pressing against each other, surely he couldn’t keep holding out against him. And tasting Nicki’s mouth, breathing his scent, Armand couldn’t help the memory, it came of itself, of piercing his feverish, tender mortal flesh, hot blood spilling down his throat, when they held him under Les Innocents, and for a moment he couldn’t help madly wanting to possess him again, he was strong enough, Nicolas wouldn’t stand a chance.

“You see?” Nicolas said, and Armand was aghast: was it possible that Nicki had not only read his thoughts, but placed those images in his mind in the first place? He hardly dared think of the implications.

But Nicolas had already turned away, and they resumed their walk back to the theater, leaning on each other just as before, but worlds apart: Armand numb with shock, Nicolas lapsing back into staring at the fine light rain. When they reached the theater, Nicolas absently kissed Armand’s cheek, said, “Good night,” and wandered off to his room.

***

Two nights later, Nicolas passed out neat copies of a freshly written score to his musicians. As they read the music, they furrowed their brows. Felix was the first to look up. “What the hell is this?” Sergei chimed in, “This is unplayable! It’s not even music!”

Nicolas rolled his eyes. “God, if you’re this dumb now, I’m glad I didn’t know you when you were mortal. Of course it’s playable. You read the notes. And then you play them.”

Eugenie intervened. “Of course they can play it. But the audience won’t tolerate it, it’s too…unorthodox,” she said tactfully.

Nicolas laughed in scorn and disbelief. “And since when is the Theater of the Vampires worried about being unorthodox?”

Grumbling, they tuned their instruments and began picking their way through the score. Armand looked on from his box, resting his chin on his hands, and heard disjointed layers of randomness which occasionally, as if by accident, converged on seductive or beautiful or terrible harmony. As the musicians

began to understand, they played with new enthusiasm, and Armand felt chilled as he finally knew precisely what Nicki had meant when he dreamily announced that he was reading.

2

Armand never took to the stage himself, but he faithfully attended every performance. Marvelous, the things they could hide in plain sight! How easily you could trust people to see only what they expected to see. It would take something as colossal as one of Nicki’s blunders for them to suspect. Though really it was nothing new to him; even packed into cramped catacombs with dozens of followers, it had been easy enough to hide himself completely behind an angelic face and a coven master’s discipline.

In a few short years, the theater had risen from obscurity to cult adulation. Half-empty halls gave way to one sold out night after another, and with practice - unlike other theaters, they had no “season,” and performed ceaselessly year round - their skill deepened beyond facile vampiric mimicry. Already they had admitted more members to the troupe, and with greater numbers, they could perform plays and music they wouldn’t have dreamt of before. And as director, Nicolas turned out to possess not only a scathing tongue but a talent for training performers up to top of their potential, and he drove himself as relentlessly as any of the others.

Yet some evenings, the music stumbled. At first, Armand was inclined to ignore it; it was enough of a battle just to keep Nicolas from killing openly or telling any random passer-by their secrets. But it continued, and he could tell the others were annoyed, though they didn’t dare say anything.

And so one night, when the blood sweat stood out on Nicolas’ forehead and he almost dropped his bow just minutes into the second act, Armand braced himself to look in his mind.

At once, all the thoughts and heartbeats in their cramped theater thundered in his ears, deafening, crushing. Even the violin, nestled so close to his ear, was almost inaudible under the roar. And he had the sense of losing his footing on an icy slope: some nights, he managed to shut it out, but sometimes, nothing worked, and it was vertigo, freefall.

With great effort, Armand extricated himself. There were times when Nicolas turned on him, wild-eyed, and told him to stop reading his mind, but he needn’t have worried: it was unsettling enough that Armand tried to avoid it whenever possible.

Tonight, though, he hesitantly tried an experiment.

Weaving delirious visions was easier than breathing; he’d even been able to spellbind that brash monster Lestat, and all that obscenely powerful old blood hadn’t protected him in the least. But what he had in mind was something altogether different: what if it could be a process not of creation but of

subtraction? Unsure what to expect, he tried gently pulling thoughts from Nicki’s mind, siphoning off the noise and the chaos.

And gradually, Nicolas’ posture straightened, and his playing returned to its usual precision. In the weeks that followed, Armand made a ritual of it, watching from his box and easing Nicki’s burden whenever he could.

Until one night, halfway through the first act, Nicolas suddenly turned and glared at Armand with a mixture of shock and fury.

During intermission, Eleni found them backstage. Nicki had Armand pinned against the wall by the shoulders; and, more than anything, she was amazed to see Armand tolerating it, since he could easily have crushed Nicki’s wrists or thrown him to the floor; and he tolerated the flood of invective as Nicki screamed at him, “You sneaky bastard, did you think I wouldn’t notice what you’re doing? You’re taking thoughts right out of my head! You’re stealing my mind from me!”

Eleni’s shock deepened as Armand rested a hand on his face and whispered miserably, “I was only trying to help…”

“You and your illusions,” Nicki spat. “I’m the only one here who sees things as they really are, and you want to take it away from me!”

“But you’re suffering enormously, you can't really want to live like this.”

“So what? So…fucking…what? I’ll take reality over your illusions any day. Stay out of my mind. You’re not going to control me any longer.”

Armand gently but inexorably removed Nicolas’ hands from his shoulders and held them in his own. He met Nicki’s eyes and said, “Do you think you’re in control when it’s all crashing down on you like that? Reality is more of a tyrant to you than I ever could be.”

Nicolas opened his mouth but said nothing, only stared, disconcerted, finally at a loss. “Curtain in two minutes,” Armand said.

***

As Eleni was tying her hair up, she heard Nicolas yelling something, and then their newest dancer, a tall, broad-shouldered blond, rushed backstage, flushed and blinking back tears. Eleni caught his shoulder. “What is it?”

Looking down, he said, “Monsieur de Lenfent said that I dance like a pregnant milkmaid with burrs in her left stocking.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Oh, he did, did he.” She marched to the front of the stage and glared down. “Niko! Did you just call Anton a pregnant milkmaid with burrs in her left stocking?”

He sneered. “So what if I did, Helene?”

“So you just called me the exact same thing only three weeks ago, that’s what! Is that the best you can do, you fat lazy old sow? We’re going to have to tie you down so you can think of some new insults for a change!”

“Sow, is it? You must be thinking of my ex-teacher, his holiness Herr Wolfgang Amadeus pretentious blowhard ‘I write music the way a sow pisses’ Mozart.” Even as Nicki spoke, he whipped his head around to look at Armand: at the word “Amadeus,” he’d registered a spike of agitation, as sharp as a draft of cold air. But Armand was deep in conversation with Justine, and didn’t even appear to have heard.

No matter. He picked up the violin and improvised a merciless, whining caricature of Eleni’s tone and pitch and rhythm, right down to the accent that still marked her French even after so many years. She understood immediately, and began one of their marionette-dances in time with it, mocking all of his little tics and quirks of posture, the precise stiffness of his lower back when he played, the suspiciously vain and showy way he tossed his hair back out of his eyes. As he watched, he smiled, and spun out a variation on what he’d just played, and she immediately moved into a variation of the dance, until finally they broke down laughing.

Then Eleni lay down along the edge of the stage, propping herself up on her elbows, and demanded, “Felix, hand me the paper. Here’s our next play. There’s a pompous old priest who tells his congregation that they are sinners and they’re all going to hell.”

Nicolas continued, “Only even as he’s speaking, they take off their clothes - ” Christophe snorted. “Get your mind out of the gutter! You fledglings, that’s all you ever think about.”

Laurent burst out laughing. “‘You fledglings?’ Nicolas, you were made just three years ago.”

A fierce look shut him up. Nicolas continued, “They take off their clothes, and underneath they’re wearing angels’ robes. And we’ll build some grand wings for them too. Real feathers.” He started sketching.

Eleni continued, “And they sweep him up and tell him they’re carrying him to heaven, and they make all kinds of extravagant promises. And when he gets there, at first it seems like paradise – we can make some scrims, a garden of Eden, they should be almost transparent - ”

“ – but then all of a sudden, at exactly the same time, the scrims disappear, the angels vanish, and the music stops. He is alone on the stage. Nothing happens. And we wait a long, long time before dropping the curtain.” Nicolas’ voice trailed off and he stared into the distance.

“And does he try to convince himself that he’s in heaven and the only reason he can’t see it is because he’s a sinner? Or that God has abandoned him?” Eleni mused. “Or does he think it’s hell, and the angels were demons in disguise?”

“Either way,” Laurent said, “it’s not going to go over well out there,” and he gestured to the empty seats.

“So what?” Nicolas asked.

“We are trying to run a theater. People aren’t going to pay to watch that.”

“That’s what you always say.”

“No, really,” Eugenie chimed in. “This is different. It’s too…”

Eleni knew exactly the sort of “Everyone is blind to the true nature of reality except for me!” rant they were in for even without looking at Nicolas and seeing the corners of his mouth harden. “Of course they’ll pay to watch it,” she said. “And even if they don’t, who cares? We’re sold out almost every night. The lines go all the way around the corner. And,” she added with a wry smile, “it’s not like we’re going to starve.”

Sunrise was approaching; they jotted down a few more notes, and then Nicolas gathered up the papers and carried them off.

***

The next night, no one saw him leave his room, and they all assumed he was writing. But when he didn’t venture out the following night, several of them went to check on him. Armand knocked on the door, and when Nicolas didn’t answer, he let himself in.

He found him lying on the floor in the dark, facing the wall. All the notes for the new play were strewn on his desk, untouched.

Oh, not again, Armand cringed to himself, but he asked politely, “Nicolas, what’s wrong?”

No answer. Armand crouched and touched his shoulder and gently pulled his hair out of his face. “You’re cold, won’t you come out and hunt? Then we’ll come home, and we can start writing the play.”

“You mean, then I can start writing the play.”

Armand sighed. “You’ll feel better if you feed.”

In an uncanny imitation of Armand’s bell-like, Botticelli-angel-of-patience tone, Nicki said, “And you’ll feel better if someone else does all the writing for you so you don’t have to bother your pretty head about it.”

The other vampires watched, breathless. Some had come out of genuine concern, others for the sheer spectacle of seeing Armand and Nicki stand off. “If it comes to that, let me remind you that your talent is the only thing that makes us put up with your sloppy habits. You have no idea how much work you make for us, do you? All of us are getting tired of making sure you don’t strike down victims in front of the Opera or leave corpses with gaping wounds right on our doorstep.”

“Well, if it’s so much trouble for you, then why do you want me to go hunt? Leave me alone.”

“Oh, do you think that if you’re rude enough, I’ll leave you alone? We need a play. Do you want me to tie you down to the chair again?”

“If you try that trick again, I’m not going to write for you. I’m not even going to let anyone take dictation.”

Very quietly, Armand said, “In the old days, you would have been sent to the fire the night you were made.”

“Oh, yes please, tell me all about the old days! You hopeless romantic, don’t tell me you’re nostalgic for all that filth and squalor and dogma already. Or are you just jealous that someone other than you can command respect here?”

Armand stood abruptly, and the others hurriedly made way for him as he walked to the door. On his way out, he glared at Eleni, as if to say, “You deal with him.”

At a sharp look from her, the few who still lingered by the doorway left and followed Armand down the hall. Eleni let herself in, closed the door, and sat down on the floor with her back to a wall and her knees to her chest.

She sat in silence in the dark for some time, then asked, “Niko, what’s wrong?”

“It’s too loud,” he said dully.

“What’s too loud?”

He sighed in frustration, and just as Eleni was debating whether to break from her usual reluctance to listen to his mind, a wave crashed down on her: everything was unbearably intense, from the feel of the seams on his shirt to the faint smell of dust and ink in the room to the incessant pressure of thoughts both inside and outside his head. That fight she’d unwittingly eavesdropped on, uncomprehending: it dawned on her, maybe that’s what Armand meant when he talked about reality as a tyrant. No wonder Armand seemed to probe his mind less and less; who wouldn’t be frightened of that avalanche?

She paused. “When I was made… You’re new, you know what our senses are, what a shock it is in the beginning. And you never really take it for granted, either. But anyway, when I was made, it was only a matter of weeks before the old coven caught me, and then my only world was Les Innocents. You

remember what that place was like when you were mortal…” Her voice trailed off and she cast her eyes down, glad that he couldn’t see her. “So you can imagine what it was like for a new vampire. Those of us who survived – the only way we could bear it was to learn how to shut it out.”

Suddenly, she remembered the violent chaos in Nicki’s mind when he’d been trapped there as a mortal, and she cursed Lestat’s judgment (if you could call it judgment; even in a few days’ acquiantance she could tell that you could probably count on one hand the times he’d thought before acting) in burdening him with the Dark Gift, at least before he’d had the chance to grow up a bit.

“And then when it ended and we began actually living in Paris! Of course we’d always hunted the city, but to permit ourselves to be part of it, to look on everything without automatic iron self-denial! You’ve always lived like this, but it was staggering, and it was infinitely more difficult to learn to shut out than the cemetery because it was so beautiful and I didn’t want to shut it out.”

She stopped. He didn’t respond, but he’d listened patiently, without dropping any cutting remarks. “Is that why you don’t want to hunt? Because it will just be too much?”

He made some small noise of assent. “Other people’s thoughts – it’s poisoning, it’s too much, I can’t take it. And the blood, even the pleasure is unbearable.”

It struck her: what if the ending of the play they’d outlined actually had been something like his idea of heaven? Silence, darkness, undisturbed solitude, oblivion.

“But there are ways around that. Choose someone dull and not particularly intelligent. Sedate your victim. Niko, I’ve seen you do it before, you can do that.”

He whispered, “Sometimes I can and sometimes I can’t.”

“Or...” She hesitated. “It’s not really proper, but...you can also feed on animals.”

“You can?” he asked, taken aback.

“You can’t really thrive like that in the long run. And don’t you dare let any of the others catch you doing it, it’s disgusting - well, most everyone thinks it’s disgusting. Don’t start, I know you don’t care what they think, but really, Niko, don’t make your life here harder than you have to.”

He had arguments on the tip of his tongue, but he pulled himself up and and let her guide him out into the cold night air.

Wandering through the streets together after feeding, Nicolas still felt besieged, but it was true, warmed with the blood, he did actually feel a little better, and at any rate he was in no hurry to return to the theater. As they walked, he asked abruptly, “Who was Amadeus?”

She looked up at him. “What?”

“You know, why did Armand panic so much at the name Amadeus?”

She shook her head and smiled wryly. “Armand, panic? I’ve known Armand for quite a while, and he doesn’t panic.”

His face hardened. “Oh, I suppose you think I was hallucinating!”

She broke into simple, benign laughter. “Come on, Niko, everyone knows you hallucinate. Including you. But that’s not what I meant all. Really, I don’t know what you’re talking about. What happened?”

He finally stopped glaring at her suspiciously and said, “It was the other night during rehearsal. I forget what happened, but I said something about Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and as I said Amadeus, Armand, you know -” he gestured helplessly.

Puzzled, Eleni asked, “What did he do? I didn’t see him do anything.”

“Well, he didn’t, but it was right there, I could almost smell it. You can’t possibly mean to tell me that you didn’t notice.”

There was no point in telling him that she had no idea what he was talking about, so she said, “Let’s go home. We have to work on the play.”

3

For once they bothered to dress conventionally, Eleni slipping into a dress instead of the trousers she favored more and more lately, and sat among mortals to listen to a harpsichordist play the Art of the Fugue. The music was over thirty years old, but it was new to her. Not for the first time, she cursed herself for going along with all the nonsense of Les Innocents. She could have been up in the world listening to this! She could have met Bach himself; procuring invitations was never difficult for her. But, she reflected, what choice did she have? Armand would certainly have tortured and killed her if she had tried to leave the coven.

She tried to set aside what could have been and listen to the music. How had he done it? In any other hands, it would have been a set of sterile geometric exercises, but here, how could it be, they opened corridors to the sublime. She didn’t know if Nicolas had heard it before, but she could tell that he liked it too: as so often, the fingers of his left hand moved against his palm, unconsciously pressing imaginary strings to the fingerboard.

At the end, he was the first to rise to his feet and applaud, and as they sauntered through the crowds, he told Eleni, “I’m going to play that.”

“Oh? Are you going to learn the harpsichord?”

He smiled. “No.”

She shrugged. “Well, I’m sure you can get at least Sergei and Delphine to join you in an ensemble…”

His smile widened. “No. I’m going to transcribe it for solo violin.”

She stopped and stared at him. “Niko, you’re crazy. Nobody can play a four voice fugue on one violin.”

“What’s the point of being a vampire if you can’t do the impossible?” he laughed, a little too loudly.

Cringing, she caught the eyes of those who had turned to stare, and with a look and a gesture offered up her exasperation: oh, my little brother, drinking like a fish and saying the most outrageous things just to shock people! And when they moved in society, he often was mistaken for her younger brother. Though the resemblance began and ended with their dark eyes and dark curls, that was enough for people to lazily settle on the most convenient explanation; after all, a respectable man and woman out alone together could only be relatives of blood or marriage, and since she was visibly older, marriage was less likely.

The project turned out to be more than a passing whim. For months, he tried to coax four simultaneous voices out of one woefully limited instrument. Even with vampiric speed and dexterity, it was close to impossible. As it took shape, she realized that the times when she looked down to the orchestra pit mid-performance and tried to catch his panicked eye and reassure him were becoming a little less frequent, and she wondered about his obsession with simultaneity and multiplicity.

If nothing else, it kept him occupied, and they all grew used to him spending long hours with the Art of the Fugue. Armand in particular liked that severe, haunting melody, and happily listened in as he took inventory one night, after the others had all gone out.

Any of them would have jumped to relieve him of such a menial task, of course, but Armand actually enjoyed it. It was useful work, after all, something he’d sorely missed for a long time. He cataloged their supplies of ink, paper, greasepaint, cloth, lumber, paints, brushes, candles, all the sundries needed to keep the theater going, making notes of what needed to be ordered: in addition to all the usual things, a cello to replace the one Nicki smashed when Anton praised his latest play too effusively, and more hammers, picks, wheelbarrows, and chisels to open up the labyrinth they’d found below. Gustave, who had been an architect in his mortal life, had noticed a hollow sound below certain parts of the cellar, and when he began digging, they were all amazed: Renaud’s little theater sat right on top of an abandoned quarry, part of the hidden city of obsolete mine tunnels and quarries and catacombs beneath the city. They were only just beginning to explore, to find out how far those hidden corridors stretched, and to carve out living space in the subterranean dark.

As Armand rummaged through their storerooms, Nicolas’ steady work on the transcription soothed him and kept his mind busy, the process of playing, trying this out, pausing to jot down notes, crumpling paper, trying again, teaching himself to forget all the limitations he’d learned in his mortal life.

After a series of frustrated, abortive attempts at sorting out a thorny passage, Nicolas must have gotten tired: he gave up on counterpoint for a while and amused himself by improvising simple variations, moving further and further away from the theme until it was almost unrecognizable. Even the timbre of the violin seemed to change, no longer glossy, but deepening to something hoarse, whispering, the way those instruments used to sound back when the bows looked like archers’ bows. At first Armand enjoyed it, but he grew increasingly uncomfortable, and when he finally realized why, he froze.

He hadn’t heard that melody in hundreds of years. There were words that went with it, they used to sing it together as they ground pigments or filled in clouds and landscapes on canvases in the drowsy late afternoon sunlight, why couldn’t he remember the words! He used to teach it to the new boys, why couldn’t he remember?

He set down pen and paper and crossed the empty stage slowly, watching Nicolas play, torn between desperately wanting to ask him and desperately wanting the music to continue undisturbed. But Nicolas noticed him and paused.

Armand joined him in the orchestra pit, seeing that he wasn’t angry at being interrupted. “Nicolas,” he said. “What was that? Where did you hear that?”

Nicolas looked confused, far-off. “I heard it… There was a vast room, with a marble floor, and the sun was warm…” He set down the violin and bow. “There was a smell, I can’t quite place it – maybe that’s it,” he murmured. Looking down, he noticed something, and took Armand’s hands in his own.

They both saw fresh paint on his fingers.

Armand closed his eyes, but it was no use, he could smell the paint, he could almost feel it, the precise texture of the egg tempera. Not real, not real, my hands are clean, he repeated to himself, but it was crushing him, this sweet window to those golden days with the other boys, right next to this life he’d found himself thrown into, creating horrid miracles on the stage. Cold and dark, and the only thing keeping them going was the act of creation, even if they could only make monstrosities. He could smell the dust in the sunlight in the thrumming quiet of the late afternoon.

Baffled at Armand’s panic, Nicolas asked, “You were just painting scrims, weren’t you?”

He opened his eyes and still saw the paint, and even the proportions of the hall seemed to have shifted. Not real, my hands are clean. “Nicki. Tell me. Where did you hear it?”

Nicolas looked helpless, and Armand wondered for a crazy minute if he’d been thrown into a purgatory where he was paying for every illusion he’d ever cast over anyone’s mind. His heart hammered against his ribs, and he fought in vain to drive back the visions. My hands are clean, he repeated to himself, staring at the paint on his fingertips, and blinked back tears, hearing the music again even as Nicolas set down the violin. He racked Nicolas’ mind, silently demanding: Why, how? And the truth, for all he could tell, frightened him even more.

Nicolas had absolutely no idea what he was doing.

“And I was thinking of a play to go with it,” he said. “There’s a great lord with many sons, but one is his favorite, and he lavishes every imaginable luxury on him. But then in the middle of a banquet, an evil priest steals the favorite son away. The priest and his followers are marionettes, but the boy is alive. The son reaches for his father, but the father is too busy feasting and messing around with his favorite courtesan to notice.”

Armand wanted to forbid it, to threaten Nicolas with yet another imprisonment, anything to stop the play from going forward. But that would mean certain discovery. His only chance was to sustain Nicolas’ assumption that he was inventing, not discovering. Revelation, of all things, was the only place left to hide. He mused, “And what if the priest ties cords to the boy and makes him a marionette? And over time, he moves less and less like a human being.”

“Who should we get to play him?” Nicolas asked. “Maybe Laurent, he looks young…”

“Yes. Laurent. And maybe he goes on to trap other children, to make them puppets too.”

“And let’s have his father on stage the whole time, feasting and drinking and completely oblivious.” Nicolas paused, and looked at Armand in surprise. “You’re quite good at this, you know. How come you never told me you could make stories?”

Armand swallowed with a dry throat. “I thought you wouldn’t like the intrusion.”

Nicolas shrugged. “You could write sometime too, if you like.”

“Oh…” Armand demurred, with a vague self-deprecating gesture. He blinked and drew a deep breath. “Goodnight, Nicolas.” The room still wouldn’t come right, and he heard right next to his ear caressing, easy laughter and syllables of Italian. He left the inventory unfinished and rode out of the city to his villa as quickly as he could.

During the play’s short run (and nearly all runs were short, one of the attractions of the Theater of the Vampires was the breathless turnover, one dazzling spectacle after another, see it while you can, your life is short and so is the

play’s), Armand sat in his box for every performance, as usual, and applauded politely as the curtain fell.

4

Too much, too fast. In only eight years, the six of them had grown to almost twenty. Of course, in the beginning they simply needed more actors, dancers, musicians; no matter how versatile and inventive they were, there was only so much they could do with their limited resources, especially since Armand refused to take to the stage himself. They admitted a couple vampires who had traveled to see them and boldly knocked on the door begging to join the troupe, and then began accepting and turning one mortal after another, always under Armand’s direction.

What no one had foreseen was the overheated jealousy and lust and estrangement and bitterness that followed. Makers and fledglings fell out of love and sought refuge with others, who themselves nursed old wounds, and turned on each other; and if it wasn’t love and hate, it was greed for status that drove the constant waterwheel of intrigues. Eleni could barely keep up with all the machinations, and had no desire to; allegiances seemed to shift almost daily.

Sometimes she wondered: the old coven had been one of the largest in Europe, but as far as she could remember, they had lived together in something like harmony. But of course, love was deemed unsuitable for the children of Satan, and if the pleasure of bathing was forbidden, how much more so other things! And, she reflected, no matter how absurdly deluded they were, they at least had pretentions of being saints; but all these new fledglings - they were just a bunch of actors.

And as the new coven grew, with thrilled curiosity they kept working away at opening up the old, long-abandoned mine tunnels and quarries beneath the theater. Whenever they weren’t performing and rehearsing, they were exploring and carving out much-needed living space, since the theater above couldn’t contain them anymore.

Not that it helped curb all the swarming chaos in the slightest. But at least it was easier to get away from it for those who wished. Eleni had had more than enough chilly subterranean dampness to last her the rest of her immortal life, and though Nicolas never talked about his imprisonment under Les Innocents in the last days of his mortal life, he applied all his inventiveness to finding excuses to avoid going underground.

They gladly kept their snug, wood-paneled rooms upstairs, and over the years, they got used to wandering across the narrow hall to visit one another. Many nights, they spoke only a few words to each other, Nicolas hunched over his desk writing plays, Eleni lying on her stomach on top of his coffin, propped up on her elbows, reading a novel or sketching ideas for choreography, reaching down now and then to dip her pen into the bottle of ink on the floor. It had been so long since Eleni had lived anywhere other than a cemetery that even a cramped room barely big enough for a coffin, a desk, and a chair was a

heavenly retreat, but above all, it was comfortable to escape the maelstrom downstairs, to talk idly together or simply to work in silence.

And maybe it was a yearning for escape that made her notice, right in the middle of a flying leap on stage, a mortal woman in the audience gazing at her, rapt, and maybe that was why the vision of that face remained with her long after the theater had emptied and she had washed off the greasepaint and set out to hunt: a young woman, not far past twenty, with dark blond hair and dark gray eyes, fierce and lovely and unhappy.

The next night, she was there again, again on the arm of her bored and vaguely uncomfortable husband. But this time, after the play, she joined the crowds of eager mortals who pressed around them backstage - a new custom Armand and Nicolas had gleefully agreed on, accepting visitors backstage to meet the musicians and the few actors who did not pretend to be marionettes (even after all these years, they kept the public guessing and hotly debating whether the marionettes were puppets or human beings), yet another layer of splendid illusion - and she boldly walked straight to Eleni with an armful of fresh irises, and with racing heart, Eleni reached for her hand beneath the sheaf of flowers.

And so began their affair. Iseult had dedicated herself to dance in her childhood, a passion her parents humored as a harmless childish whim, because certainly no daughter of theirs would do something so inappropriate as to take to the stage in earnest. They were shocked when she was not thrilled that they had made a very coveted match for her, a bachelor ten years her senior with a rising career in finance. Against her loud protests, they reminded her that she was one of too many daughters, and she should thank God for her good fortune; and protests or not, there was no choice.

As for Reinald, he congratulated himself on his cleverness and magnanimity, and though only a newlywed, he offered sage advice to all his older married friends: if your wife has a hobby, let her keep up with it now and then - if she thinks she has a little freedom, she’ll be more content, and the whole household will run more smoothly.

With lordly benevolence, then, he had acquiesced to his wife’s demand for a second visit to the Theater of the Vampires, and looked on placidly as Iseult offered flowers to that trim dark-haired dancer, and even allowed them to strike up an acquaintance. Some of his friends were scandalized, but he only shook his head; they simply couldn’t understand a progressive modern man like himself. If Eleni only visited late at night, well, that was only to be expected, wasn’t it? Those theater people kept such odd hours. He even greeted her himself occasionally when she came to their townhouse, and was pleasantly surprised at her refined manners.

Eleni also took care to make herself popular with the servants, bringing them cognac and newspapers and sensationalistic popular stories, chatting with them, even privately arranging for an excellent doctor to look in on the housekeeper’s ailing son. And so they blithely looked the other way as Eleni and Iseult locked themselves up together.

At first, they were in love with the idea of escape as much as anything, Eleni wonderfully soothed by the polished townhouse and the tame gossip of the mortal servants, so mild compared to the theater, and Iseult fascinated at knowing a real dancer and actress. And they were both reeling in the bliss of having a lover for the first time. Iseult had known only a few stolen kisses from girls who later turned on her, coldly telling her that they were only fooling around, how could she be so daft as to take it seriously?

And Eleni had been the youngest child of a too large a family working a farm in Attica with rocky, rust-colored soil that barely yielded enough to feed them all. Her mother had died young; miraculously - she still didn’t know quite how they’d done it - they’d managed to scrape together a dowry for her only sister to marry; and so she was left playing mother and maid-of-all-work to her brothers (none of whom married, and for good reason) and her father, and there was barely enough time for sleep, let alone friendships.

And then she caught the eye of a dark-haired traveler. Handsome though he was, she was not attracted to him in the least, but she was almost thirty already, and this was probably the last chance she’d ever have to get away. Via cold calculation, she arrived at a passable impression of a pliant, encouraging, lovelorn female. She eloped without a backward glance, and had no idea whatsoever of the exact nature of his extravagant promises of a new life until his teeth were in her throat.

They traveled swiftly, constantly pushing north: he had always wanted to go to Paris. A little over forty-five minutes after they entered the city, the coven seized them. Eleni’s maker denounced them with impassioned, eloquent speeches which lasted precisely as long as it took them to build a pyre.

Eleni, however, had no intention of landing any other way than on her feet, or of giving up the exquisite immortal life she’d just begun to taste. Without hesitation, she solemnly took the Dark Vows and pledged herself as a Child of Satan. As she recited all that fancy old nonsense, the leader, that astonishingly beautiful red-haired boy, looked straight at her. Even without knowing yet what other vampires were capable of, she felt him plundering her mind, and knew he could tell that she didn’t believe a word of it. And - probably the only thing so far that night that had caught her interest - he clearly didn’t care. Suddenly intuiting that he didn’t believe it either, she tried to copy what she’d felt him doing and clumsily reached toward his mind. Perfectly locked, of course, but he smiled affably at her.

Counting back the years as best she could, she guessed that she must have joined the Paris coven around 1641. She endured it, stealing what forbidden pleasures and knowledge of the world she could under the guise of their sanctified mission of hunting and terrifying the city above. Penury, patience, biding her time: Eleni was a master of starvation. The one thing she was utterly unprepared for was abundance.

It undid her completely, lying with Iseult, each of them awestruck at finally

having a beautiful lover in her arms, exploring each others’ bodies as if in a trance, making love three or four times in a night, and after all the ecstasy, they were just two women gazing at each other and finding that, though there was one thing Eleni could never mention, they never ran out of things to say.

Nicolas couldn’t fail to notice her absences or the dreamy look on her face as her attention drifted from her book. He considered it his sacred duty to tease her about it, but she was too happy to care, and far too distracted to notice that he was getting in trouble more and more often.

5

Warm with the kill, Nicolas made his way through the narrow back corridors of the mansion and found the other musicians adjusting their wigs and double checking the tuning of their instruments for the private ball. A gray-haired flutist frowned at him. “Who the hell are you?”

Nicolas gravely told them that their first violinist had fallen ill and sent him in his place, they were old friends, surely he’s mentioned me? The persuasion worked its way into them, and they nodded absently: of course, you must be Philippe, he knew you at University, didn’t he?

Nicolas had no idea that he was manipulating their minds; all he knew was that sometimes people believed him and sometimes they didn’t. He was also unaware that he was silently leaning on them to forget any questions about his identity and instead notice his violin.

The second violinist looked closer and gasped, “That’s not an authentic del Gesu, is it?”

With his most charming smile, Nicolas said, “See for yourself,” and handed it to him. The other man handled it reverently, eyes wide as he read the label, and hardly believed his luck when Nicolas asked him, “Would you like to give it a try?”

“I couldn’t possibly…” he demurred, but Nicolas insisted, and the man sighed with pleasure as he ran up and down scales and then played the opening bars of the night’s first waltz.

The cellist pulled out his pocket watch. “The two of you - ” he smiled wryly at the second violinist and the del Gesu, still cradled under his chin “ - will have to continue your acquaintance later. We’re due out in two minutes.” He pulled out a hip flask and passed it around. Without thinking, Nicolas took several deep gulps, oblivious to how wrong it tasted, how it burned his throat. Then they opened the heavy double doors and filed out to their seats on the dais.

They struck up delicate minuets and contredanses. Much of it Nicolas hadn’t ever heard before. Of course, sight reading would have been effortless, but he found that he didn’t even need to; it was as if he had rehearsed already.

For a while he went along docilely enough, lulling the guests as they stepped across the wide polished floor. And then he began what he’d come to do: changing a note here or there, inserting a superfluous melodic line that changed everything, and with preternatural dexterity picking up some of the notes of the other instruments, playing over them only to distort them. He almost didn’t need to; some of the other musicians seemed caught up in his dream, straying from the score down the same dark path together. He stubbornly ignored the ache growing in his head and belly, chalking it up to the heat and the relentless glitter of the chandeliers and gilt moldings, pushing it away as he pursued his plan with demonic concentration. Amid the froth of silk, the faces of some of the guests began to darken as they felt the room tilt and an abyss open under their feet.

One man seemed unaffected, though. Slight and unassuming, he leaned against a wall, and while pretending to inspect his fingernails, he watched sweat - was it tinged red? - breaking out on the violinist’s forehead as his hands began to tremble, and when he set down his violin and bolted for the door, the man sauntered out after him. Unseen, he followed Nicolas as he rushed down back staircases and out the servants’ door, collapsed on the flagstones in the garden, and vomited great quantities of blood only yards away from the corpse of the ensemble’s usual violinist, lying cold and pale with his throat torn.

The man watched intently, as if memorizing, until suddenly someone grabbed him from behind and clapped a cold hand over his mouth and growled, “Talamasca.” Before he knew it, a dark hood was tied over his head, and he could hardly breathe, and he heard only a confusion of unnatural voices cursing someone who shouted back at them, and a hurried debate on how best to dispose of the body and clean up the blood. He was thrown into a carriage, and the last thing he heard before losing consciousness was a young man screaming frantically, “The del Gesu! Damn it, turn around, we can’t leave it behind!”

Armand imprisoned Nicolas in Magnus’ old tower. For three nights, he screamed for blood and for his violin. When Armand released him, starved and shaking, he neglected to mention that they had recovered the violin from the mansion until several nights later.

As for the man, he was returned, feverish and delirious, to the Talamasca, who began drastically revising their official protocols for investigating vampires.

As soon as Nicolas had recovered, Eleni took him aside. “Niko, why?”

“But it was brilliant! You should have seen the looks on their faces as the music changed, it was better than anything we do here -”

“Not that. I don’t care, go make art wherever you want, make the entire population of Paris see the darkness inherent in all things -” she rolled her eyes “- just please, be careful how you feed.”

He scowled. “Well, it turned out alright.”

“Only because Armand cleaned up after you and scared the hell out of that poor Talamasca fellow.”

“I don’t need Armand to rescue me...” he muttered.

“No, if you used common sense, you wouldn’t. Don’t you understand? This isn’t a game. If you’re caught vomiting up buckets of blood right next to an exsanguinated corpse, it won’t be long until someone follows you here. And if they do, they can destroy us all. Fire, daylight... We’re not omnipotent, you know.” He was silent. Then, suddenly curious, she asked, “And why were you sick anyway? That doesn’t happen to us.”

He looked down. “I don’t know...I might have drunk something...”

“Something?”

“I don’t know...I don’t remember...maybe some brandy they were passing around.”

“What?” she asked, incredulous. “You couldn’t have even swallowed the stuff! Niko, all of us get curious at some point - we remember a favorite drink, a dish we loved - and nobody, I mean nobody, can get past even tasting it. Once you have it, you can barely even put it in your mouth, and if you do -” she made a face.

“I didn’t notice, alright?” he snapped, and it was then that she realized just how unwell he’d been when he’d embarked on the whole fiasco, and she felt tired, too tired, maybe if she’d been around she could have prevented it, but it was just too much, she couldn’t do everything. She was spending more and more time with Iseult, and the happier it made her, the more miserable it made her.

She had always taken care to feed well before their trysts, and she was adept at passing for mortal even in her lover’s arms. The warmer summer nights helped, too, buying her a couple more hours until the heat and flush of the blood faded away. So easy to blur others’ perceptions! But as the months passed and she lived more and more for these visits, she grew weary of secrecy and dreamed of telling Iseult everything.

Which, in her constant daydreams, was only the prelude to offering to bring her over. To be together, really together, and to give Iseult the life she’d been sorely cheated of! Armand would agree to it; he trusted her judgment, and it was so seldom she asked for anything, and Iseult was a prodigiously gifted dancer.

But she was frightened at the thought of such intimacy. She hadn’t made another vampire for many decades, and even then, it was only at Armand’s orders, for the good of the coven. She’d never given the blood out of love, and enthralling as the thought was, it also frightened her; the new coven at the theater was growing too quickly as it was, and how could she be sure that the

two of them wouldn’t become yet another footnote in the melodrama of estrangement and backbiting?

Over time, though, the idea became irresistible. But just as she had almost worked up the courage to speak, something stopped her in her tracks. At first, she couldn’t be sure; it was so subtle, just a slight change in her lover’s scent. But one night, as she trailed adoring kisses from Iseult’s nipple down to her hip, eager to part her thighs and the sweet cleft beneath her golden hair, she froze.

Beneath the familiar rhythm of her lover’s heartbeat, she heard another heart, very quiet, but impossibly high and fast, a hummingbird caught under that still-smooth belly.

Iseult was too far gone to notice Eleni’s trembling, and just moaned, “Don’t stop, please don’t stop,” and Eleni recovered herself enough to obey.

After they kissed goodnight and she left Iseult sleeping, Eleni wandered numbly, and finally sat in the doorway of an abandoned building and cried wretchedly and tried to think what to do. In the end, the only idea she could come up with was to keep it a secret as long as possible. She knew that Iseult lived in terror of having a child, and now that the dark gift was forbidden, the only gift she could think of to give her was a few more weeks of happy ignorance, before the signs would be obvious even to someone so young and inexperienced.

***

When she got home, after feeding again - not that she needed it, it was just blind want - Nicolas burst through her door just as she was taking her shoes off. “Oh, Helene, I’m glad you’re back, you’ll never believe what Armand said to me, that bastard, I’m going to -”

“Mon Dieu, you and Armand,” she sighed. “Why don’t the two of you just go to bed with each other already and get it over with?”

Nicolas stopped, speechless. He would have been enraged if he hadn’t been so stunned. After all, he was an expert at ignoring the undercurrent of self-consciousness whenever they were in a room together, the little charge whenever their hands touched, the complicated semiotics of exactly how close to stand to one another; and if the two of them could ignore it, how was it possible for anyone else to notice? Finally, he recovered enough to snarl, “Because I don’t like him, that’s why. Anyway, why don’t you go ask him that?”

“Good idea. I think I will.” She turned to go.

“Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Eleni, are you drunk?”

“No.”

“I think you’re drunk. Let me guess, you fed on some lush twice your size who

was already half passed out when you took him.”

“No, I didn’t. So what if I did? I can handle it.”

“And speaking of going to bed... Where have you been, anyway?”

“Oh...nowhere.”

“‘Oh...nowhere,’” he mimicked her. “Nice try. I could smell her on you before I even walked into the room. Bet I could even tell you what kind of soap she uses.”

“Since when do you know anything about soap?” she scoffed, wrinkling her nose at his unlaundered shirt, lace at the cuffs dusty and ink-splotched, collar stained faintly brown from blood sweat. “Anyway, none of your business.”

“Come on, I know all about your pet mortal - ”

Her temper flared. “She is not my pet!”

“Well, then what do you suggest I call her? Lover? Mistress? Wi-”

“Shut up!” she screamed. “Just shut up!” And she broke down crying.

He put his arm around her shoulders. “Hey, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to - ”

She wiped her eyes, furious at her tears, struggling to regain her composure.

“At least now I know for sure: you only cry when you’re drunk.”

Don’t I wish, she thought. She sniffed and tried to smile, and let him prattle away, anything he could think of, a new novel from England, society gossip, the latest performance he’d heard about at the Comedie Francaise, and when they could tell from the leaden fatigue overtaking them that the sun was about to rise, she kissed his cheek and rumpled his hair before closing the door and shutting herself in her coffin.

***

When Iseult finally realized, Eleni found her in tears, and there was nothing she could do but hold her as she let out her rage and panic and despair. She finally stopped crying solely out of exhaustion, and she let Eleni hold her, but wouldn’t meet her eyes.

Eleni stroked her cheek and asked, “What is it you’re not telling me?”

With shaking voice, fighting down fresh tears, Iseult said, “You’re going to leave me now, aren’t you?”

Eleni protested fiercely in a rush of ardent denials and kisses, no, never, I’ll

never leave you.

But in the months that followed, simply being next to this boring, ordinary miracle of mortal life was unnerving. Eleni had never been given to grandiose inner dramas about damnation, and it bothered her not in the slightest to lose herself in soft kisses not an hour after seizing a man, drinking all the blood in his body, and throwing his corpse in the Seine. Yet as she registered acutely every subtle change in Iseult’s gait and felt flutters of movement whenever her hand strayed over her belly - growing rounder by the week - long before Iseult herself could feel them, suddenly she couldn’t think of things to say, and didn’t know whether to stand or sit or what to do with her hands. Burning with shame at her own weakness, she began wondering how to do what she had sworn even to herself that she would never do.

Of course, by the time Eleni resolved to end it, Iseult knew already. But she could never have expected what Eleni had decided, after long contemplation, to tell her: everything.

Iseult laughed in sheer incredulity. “The Theater of the Vampires?” And then, as it sank in, with a sad, awkward smile, she said, “And all this time I never guessed. You must think I’m so stupid.”

Eleni shook her head. “You must think I’m a liar and a coward. And you wouldn’t be wrong. I should have told you a long time ago.”

“And you were going to… You would have brought me into this?”

Eleni nodded, cheeks burning, eyes downcast, not bothering to hide her tears. She whispered, “And if I’d only told you a little sooner…”

Iseult reached out and wiped Eleni’s tears, marveling at the blood on her fingertips. “But is it really too late?” she asked, one hand straying unconsciously to her belly. “I mean, what would happen? Would it…?”

Eleni knew all about the herbs and poisons Iseult had tried in vain to stop the thing growing inside her. “I have no idea.” She shuddered. “I hope nobody knows. But I know that it would not be what you wish.”

“But then after the confinement! As soon as I’m rid of it!”

“I couldn’t take you away from the child.”

Iseult clenched her fists. “Are you crazy? Have you been ignoring everything for the last few months? I don’t want this thing! I’d give it away as soon as it’s born if he’d let me!”

“I know,” Eleni said gently. “But I’ve been watching mortals and I’ve been watching vampires being made for a hundred and fifty years, and believe me, no matter how much you hate the thought of this child, no matter how badly you want to be rid of it, you would hate me even more for taking you away from it.”

“A hundred and fifty years...” she whispered, momentarily distracted. Then, realizing that Eleni wouldn’t back down any more than her parents or her husband whenever they played the “I’m older and wiser” card, she looked up, clear-eyed. “Then kill me now.”

“What?” Eleni gasped.

“That’s what you do, isn’t it? It would be such a simple thing for you. Kill me now, so that I don’t have to endure this.”Eleni folded her into her arms and whispered into her hair, “Never. You know I can’t. You know I love you too much.”

Iseult ran her fingers through Eleni’s dark curls and kissed her face, marveling at the smoothness and utter difference of her skin now that she was finally permitted to notice it. “Then, will you...can you...” she asked, blushing, hesitant. “Drink from me. So that I can know. So that I can give you that before you leave me. So that I can know what it is.”

Eleni could hardly believe what she was hearing, she’d wanted it so long, for all the ecstasy of each others’ bodies there was always the terrible, parched thirst, the one pleasure that was forbidden, and Iseult couldn’t know how beautifully that blush colored her cheeks, how it sharpened her scent, the desire was tearing her to pieces, and Iseult must have seen her wavering, because she pulled her closer and said simply, “I want you to.”

Eleni kissed her slowly, heart racing, hardly daring, and then trailed a flurry of kisses down to her throat.

Iseult gasped as the fangs pierced her skin, so much more painful than she’d expected, but then it was just heavy, drowsy rapture, nothing in her life could ever have prepared her for such an intimate union, and when Eleni pulled away (too soon, she could feel the strain on Iseult’s already overburdened heart) they gazed at each other in wonder, an ocean away from everything before, and neither of them knew whether it would be easier or harder to part ways now.

Finally, Iseult said, “If you can’t take me from this life now, will you come back to me when this child is grown and doesn’t need me anymore?” And something about her calm and resignation, old for her years, broke Eleni’s heart anew. Misreading Eleni’s expression, she cast her eyes down and asked, “Will I still be beautiful to you?”

“Of course you will,” Eleni murmured. “Always. And I promise, I will come back. But you may not want me anymore.”

Iseult fervently denied it, and then Eleni could see her utter youth, and she held back from trying to tell her how much could change in only a few years, since nothing but time would convince her of that.

And she had a dizzying sense of paths opening up like spokes on a wheel, and she could easily imagine so many different directions her lover’s life could take, and many of them ended with Iseult welcoming her merely with tepid, polite amicability, exchanging pleasantries over wine that Eleni could not drink, and parting again, this time forever, with formal, hollow kisses on the cheek. And the worst part was that she would survive it, that even such staggering pain would inevitably become just a memory. 6

For the first time since the founding of the theater, Eleni was absent from rehearsal. Nicolas walked in to a drone of gossip, and though usually he lavished an extravagant verbal crucifixion on anyone who dared show up even a few minutes late, he ignored all the malicious chatter about mooning over pet mortals and quickly sent everyone to their stations.

Later that night, as he sat writing at his desk, he realized with a start that it was almost morning and he hadn’t heard anything from her all night. When he knocked on her door, there was no answer. He hastily pulled on a coat and wandered blindly through the streets, looking for her, fighting back fear as the sky lightened and a single bird woke up and began to sing.

He finally found her sitting slumped against a wall in a back alley behind an opium den, with a victim not far from her, and that alone alarmed him: usually she was obsessively fastidious about covering up the kill. “Eleni!” he called out. “Come on, it’s almost morning!”

She looked up vaguely, heavy and indifferent, and if her eyes, like his, were beginning to ache with the coming light, she didn’t show it. He pulled her up, but she wouldn’t walk fast enough. There was no choice: he picked her up and carried her. Even when he was mortal, she would hardly have been a burden; now, she felt lighter than a child as he rushed back to the theater, barely ahead of the dawn.

***

The next night, Tomasz threw a newspaper down in front of Nicki with a headline about a “vampire killing.” “Leaving the evidence lying around again, Lenfent?” he asked in disgust. Skimming the paragraphs, Astrid chimed in, “And an opium den? Really, isn’t your head addled enough as it is?”

Nicolas leaned back in his chair and put his feet up. “The news will be forgotten as soon as the paper’s thrown away. Nobody gives a shit about some starving painter from Kiev stoned out of his mind on opium. And,” he added, smirking at Astrid, “I’ll feed on anyone I damn well please, drunks and opium addicts included. At least it hasn’t affected my work, which is more than I can say for you. Or have you forgotten that you kept botching your notes for a week after you killed that poet who was so fond of absinthe?”

There was a general snickering. Eleni couldn’t let the others suspect that she

had sat outside, completely uncertain whether she was waiting for the dawn to take her or simply too tired to get up just yet, but she risked meeting his eyes briefly. That fleeting glance was an entire conversation, as he dismissed her amazement and protest with his devil-may-care grin, it’s nothing.

Armand looked up from the paper and calmly, almost affably, said to Nicolas, “You are not leaving the theater alone anymore.”

Everyone fell silent, and Nicolas gasped, “What?”

“We can’t accept any more risks to our security.” He turned to the others. “I leave it to you to decide who takes him out to hunt and when, but he is not to leave the theater unaccompanied.” And then he was gone before Nicolas could say another word.

***

In the following weeks, Eleni numbly allowed one of the newest fledglings, Solange, to seduce her. If she’d been thinking, she might have noticed the relief of wallowing in violent, blood-drenched intimacy, of not having to hide; she might have suspected that Solange was as greedy for her old, powerful blood as for her body; but the whole point of it all was to find a way of not thinking. She permitted it all in complete indifference.

Others, though, took notice. One night after she’d ended it, as she walked through the subterranean passages, a group of them stopped her. “What were you thinking?” Sebastien hissed.

“I was thinking of rounding up a few dancers to try out some choreography,” she said drily, and began to push through them.

They stopped her again, edging around, surrounding her, with a clamor of scandalized, accusing voices. “Giving old blood to such a young one! It’s simply not done!”

She raised an eyebrow. “Jealous?”

“New fledglings are not allowed such powerful blood! It is forbidden!”

Finally, she lost her composure and broke down laughing. “Forbidden? By whom?” Picking out Felix and Eugenie’s faces in the crowd, she asked, “Have you been feeding them all the old Children of Darkness claptrap, or are they just such precocious little geniuses that they invented it all by themselves? Right along with all this,” she added, gesturing disgustedly at the Bosch mural beginning to take shape along the cold, damp walls, a tableau that would have been perfectly at home under Les Innocents, had they not considered painting a worldly luxury as hateful as combing their hair and handling coins.

“Now,” she said coldly, narrowing her eyes. “Get out of my way, or I will destroy you.”

“Armand would never let you,” Francoise said, and they all looked to him hopefully. She hadn’t noticed him joining the throng, but he and Nicolas must have found the spectacle more diverting than the argument they’d been hammering away at in his study: there they stood, watching.

Armand said nothing and simply gazed back at them. Some of them quailed, others fired with indignation: surely not…? But seeing his face, they frowned and slunk off.

From Nicolas’ suppressed smile and the liveliness in his eyes, Eleni knew that he had an idea for their next play, and followed him upstairs to ask him what it was about.

***

He didn’t show this one to Armand first, merely passed copies around when they were all gathered in the theater to begin work on the production. They read in silence: a man lives in a filthy, squalid prison – they would build a tiny cage – and then is finally freed; the whole world is open to him, the stage is crowded with brilliantly dressed people in a whirl of activity; but he settles in a small house, gradually builds prison walls around himself again, and persuades his new friends to get themselves up in black and play the role of his jailers. But when he tires of the game, it’s too late; intoxicated with their power, they want to remain wardens forever and refuse to unlock the cage.

A general outcry broke out as they finished reading. Felix spoke over the din of infuriated voices: “Lenfent, you hypocrite! Everything we’ve built here, it’s your vision, all of it. I was there when you founded the theater, and I remember every word you said. Where’s your ‘magnificent evil’ now? A theater to ‘serve the forces of the devil more splendidly than he was ever served by the old coven’? Even that ridiculous stunt you pulled at that private ball - ” his face twisted in disdain “ - that almost cost us our safety here, what was that but another little pageant of ‘serving the god of the dark wood in the very center of civilization’?”

Nicolas laughed long and bitterly. “My vision? When I was a swaggering little boy with all the vast wisdom of a few days as a vampire - and that after you bled me dry again and again under that stinking cemetery - maybe. Where’s your vision? Are you -” he cast his glance over the entire troupe “ - so dumb that you can’t see I’ve outgrown it? Good and evil, ‘magnificent evil,’ fuck good and evil! There’s only – you idiot, don’t you see, even that ‘stunt,’ as you call it – it’s…”

Too furious and exasperated to find the words, he flung at them a searing imprint of what he really meant. He probably couldn’t have done it deliberately, but it happened without thinking: a shout right next to their ears, each and every one of them, a deafening sense that suffering was eternally possible and happiness was eternally difficult, that everything, with the possible exception of pain, was as fragile and temporary as mortal life, that even on the polished dance floor under crystal chandeliers the ground could disappear from under your feet at any moment.

“‘Magnificent evil,’” he sneered. “It took me a few months to outgrow that crap. And you, you’re still hanging on to it nine years later. All a misunderstanding, you brainless sheep.”

Armand had had hung back, observing. When he spoke, all the others fell silent. Casually, even amiably, he suggested, “If the theater doesn’t suit you anymore, you could always go back to Lestat.”

Eyes widened, and the others held their breath: all of them, even the ones who enjoyed provoking Nicki, knew better than even to allude to Lestat.

“Don’t you dare think about it,” Nicki growled.

“Why not?” Armand asked. “Clearly you’re not happy here.”

“Don’t you know what he did to me?”

“Yes. He gave the Dark Gift to someone too weak for it.”

“Oh, you think all this is my fault? He’s the one who did this to me!” Nicki roared. “He didn’t just turn me, he drained everything good out of me and gave me only his darkness in return. Oh, I know how besotted you were with him, begging him to take you with him, him and his glorious light! If only you could have seen him back in the Auvergne, crying and snot-nosed and blubbering about his mortality like a child who’s lost his blanket. ‘Oh, Nicki, everyone is going to die, carry me home, I am too too sad to walk.’”

Voice shaking, he continued, “And that’s what he gave me, he stole away everything good and then forced me to take all that, all the --- He poisoned me! Everything - ” he gestured vaguely, how on earth to encompass it all, the crippling visions and noise and misery? “ - it’s all from him, he did this to me!”

“But you,” he continued, lowering his voice and stepping closer to Armand, “you’ve done all this to yourself. All the rules and pomp and grotesque pictures downstairs - you don’t believe in it any more than I do. You’re just too lazy to change it.”

Languidly tearing up the manuscript, Armand said, “And you’re too lazy to do anything but whine about your suffering like a child who’s lost his blanket. Now, since we have nothing to perform, please have another play written by tomorrow at the latest.” At a look from him, the crowd dispersed, and Nicolas remained, standing in the orchestra pit, staring down at the scraps of the manuscript on the floor.

Eleni still sat in her front row seat, where she had coolly watched the whole thing. As the crowd dispersed, she asked Nicolas, “Are you hungry? I’m hungry.” He barely acknowledged her, but he let her lead him to the door.

After they had both fed well, Eleni said to him, “You know, Niko, you’re all mixed

up. It doesn’t work that way.”

“What doesn’t work what way?”

“All those things you said about him poisoning you. It’s not like that.”

“But it’s true! I know it’s true!”

She shook her head. “I’ve watched vampires being made for - ”

“ - a hundred and fifty years,” he parroted, rolling his eyes.

She smiled and punched his shoulder. “ - and let me tell you, it’s just blood. That’s all. And it doesn’t change you any more than age changes you: it only makes you more of what you are.”

He didn’t respond, but she knew that he didn’t believe a word of it. She sighed, knowing him well enough to see that nothing she could say would make any difference.

7 Armand never wavered in forbidding Nicolas to leave the theater alone. Sometimes Laurent or Eugenie would accompany him, sometimes Solange or one of the others who looked up to him with timid awe. But he was becoming ever more difficult. He would stop, stock-still, in the middle of a busy sidewalk, and it took persuasion, guile, or brute force to make him keep moving. Sometimes he refused to speak, or if he did, what seemed like normal conversation would drift off its tracks as he answered questions no one had asked.

And so, exhausted, more and more often they turned him over to Eleni. At least he listened to her - as much as he listened to anyone, anyway - and she was the one who actually enjoyed his company and had any measure of patience with him.

Even so, sometimes he exasperated her. He could never stand feeding on rats and stray dogs for more than a night or two, yet still, the onslaught of his victim’s mind and even the intense pleasure of the blood itself were too much for him sometimes, and he panicked. All these years, all the times she’d tried to teach him to tune it out or to send his victim into a dreamless sleep, and he still couldn’t reliably do it! Sometimes spiteful frustration got the better of her and she would snap, “You’re not even trying!”

Upon which he always returned to the same tirade: it’s not my fault, he did this to me, he stole from me and then poisoned me with his blood. Which only irritated her more, since he would never listen to reason, and they would walk back to the theater in sullen silence, each furious at the other’s pig-headed refusal to see the obvious.

Their fights never lasted very long, though, and for the most part, they were content to hunt and wander the city together, away from the theater. “The snake pit,” Nicolas called it. “Because you can’t even tell who’s who,” Eleni laughed. Nicolas added, “And you can’t tell heads from asses.”

But still, the absolute lack of privacy chafed at him constantly, until one night he stopped and looked at her. “Isn’t this absurd?” he asked. “Not allowing me to take a single step on my own? I’m not a child.”

Eleni looked back, contemplating, and finally agreed, “No. You’re not.” Then she sighed. “And this is all my fault anyway. If I hadn’t made such a mess that night...” She thought about it a moment longer and then said firmly, “Alright. We hunt together, because you are hopeless and you'd probably go to the University and give a public demonstration of our quaint dining customs in front of a podium if I didn’t keep an eye on you. But then - you’re on your own, provided you don’t do anything stupid. And we meet up later and return to the theater together.”

At the “hopeless” comment, he grumbled something under his breath about prissy nannies rapping little boys’ knuckles if they let a single crumb touch the tablecloth, but he was so grateful that he swept her up and kissed her cheek.

It was blissful, simply moving unwatched, unmarked, and when the din in his head overwhelmed him, he found the din in the packed coffeehouses soothing. It was another world, completely separate from the theater, and though of course it had nothing to do with him, the mounting talk of revolution fascinated him. Atheists clamored against the stranglehold of the clergy, at bishops selling their offices to move to Versailles; merchants whose staggering wealth could buy everything but power hatched convoluted plots for gaining a foothold in Parliament; some wanted to tear down the nobility precisely because they adored the nobility; and then there were the lofty dreamers crying for the triumph of the rights of man over tyranny and oppression. Nicolas loved the confusion of it all, hearts pulled so many ways at once, voices stacked on voices.

Sitting next to the same family - a textile trader, his two sons, and his daughter Marie-Anne - several nights in a row, he found himself drawn into the conversation, listening, tossing out a remark here and there. For all the man’s narrow-minded concerns about votes and taxes, he had to give him credit for accomodating his daughter’s revolutionary idealism: she couldn’t have been more than seventeen, and here she was, out late in a smoky room packed almost exclusively with men, conversing with them as an equal. And they indulged her, some of them simply charmed by her red-gold hair and clear eyes, some of them nostalgic for the fire of adolescence as she held forth on freedom and equality and the triumph of reason over all the old superstitious, arbitrary hierachies.

Nicolas was only half aware of the plan forming in his mind, but he did nothing to discourage her growing infatuation with him, and though he spoke to the general company about liberty and reason, he caught her eye with a little smile;

and perhaps - he had not had a lover since he was mortal - he had forgotten how seductive a glance could be. When he quietly invited her to go for a walk with him, she went eagerly, amazed and delighted that the others seemed not to notice as they made their way to the door.

The warm spring evening was intoxicating, and oh, the thrill of slipping out with this miraculous young man with lush curls and intense dark eyes who truly noticed her as nobody ever had before! He spoke to her in a low voice about metamorphosis, about being able to give her a new life of undreamt of power and freedom, and though the idea leapt immediately to mind, she hardly dared to believe it: could he really be hinting at an engagement after a few days’ acquaintance?

Then he veered off into dark, shabby streets and led her to an abandoned tenement, and she balked. It could only mean one thing, and oh, what a fool she’d been.

As she stammered out a refusal, he caught from her mind her notion about his supposed intentions, and he was genuinely surprised. “No, no, not that,” he laughed. “Don’t you see?” And as dim, confused, and irresistibly persuasive visions of revolution stole over her, he easily broke the rusting lock of a back door, and she let him lead her inside.

“Now,” he said casually, as if explaining, and sank his teeth into her throat. She cried out and struggled in his arms, sobbing “No,” over and over until she began to black out. And then she felt his wrist brush her face, and something warm spilled over her lips and chin, the most delicious thing she’d ever smelled, and in the dark, too sleepy to care what it was, she opened her mouth and drank.

Memories of Les Innocents exploded in his mind as she pulled and pulled on the wound he’d made for her, oh God, he hadn’t expected this, he could almost smell the rot and damp earth, could almost feel all those sharp cold mouths locked to him haphazardly wherever the blood ran close to the surface, throat, wrists, thigh, crook of his elbow. That terrifying, demanding constriction! As he silently argued himself through it, forcing himself not to pull away, for the first time he allowed himself to consciously realize the plan that he had not fully acknowledged to himself.

It was the sort of idea one both believed in absolutely and at the same time did not dare to examine, like tepid half-believers refusing even to attempt to square their paralyzing terror of death with their faith in Heaven. But now, as he fought down pain and fear, it became perfectly clear in his mind: this was the alchemy that would reverse everything Lestat had done to him. Her clarity would heal him as he drained her, and when she took the blood back from him, all the hell would be bled away, washed clean. And somehow (he hadn’t quite worked this out, but it must be true) she had the temperament to absorb it all unharmed, why not? He let her drink until the pain was unbearable, and then pulled away.

Once she stopped drinking, she no longer seemed to notice him. She slowly paced around the room, touching the rotting wood of the door frame, breaking

off bits of plaster and crumbling them between her fingers. When she suddenly doubled over, Nicolas cursed himself for his lack of foresight, and said sharply, “Your body is dying. Go take care of it, and try to keep clean - I completely forgot about a change of clothes for you.” She didn’t understand half of what he meant, but rushed out of the room.

When she came back, shaken but calm, she stared at him. “What do you mean, my body is dying? And why am I so thirsty?”

He was too exhausted to explain, and just said, “Let me show you.” Earlier, he’d noted the small sounds of a vagrant furtively making his way into the front rooms to seek shelter for the night, and silently willed the man to wander back to them. When he found them, he stuttered and gawked at the sight of a beautiful, smartly dressed boy and girl in such a wreck. Nicolas seized him immediately. Marie-Anne was disgusted, but her thirst was stronger, and as Nicolas offered the man’s wrist to her, before she knew it, she followed his example, bit down, and drank.

When they finished, she stood staring down at the corpse, and said - was it with reproach or wonder? - “You never told me.”

He shrugged and straightened his jacket. “I told you everything, didn’t I?”

She frowned and started to speak, but he continued, “You see what I’ve given you? Haven’t you always dreamed of such power and freedom? Every night you talk about your visions of the downtrodden finding their strength and rising up to conquer their oppressors.”

“Not like this,” she protested, but without conviction; even as she spoke, she forgot what she was saying, mesmerized by the play of light on the broken windows and the way even the slightest current in the air eddied over her skin like water.

He understood, of course. “Now. If you’re so in love with all this, wouldn’t you like to see the city?”

As they made their way out of the slum, she walked slowly by his side, speechless, watching, awed, and the words “power” and “freedom” slowly threaded down deeper and deeper into her mind.

And Nicolas was so lost in thought, wondering what on earth he’d do with her - in his obsession with turning her, he simply hadn’t thought that far ahead - that he didn’t notice when she stopped in front of the Opera as the opulent crowds spilled out toward their carriages, and by the time he saw her sinking her fangs into the neck of a Vicomte, with all her revolutionary hatred of the nobility and all the desperate thirst of a new fledgling, it was too late.

Even he wouldn’t have done something so rash. But as he quickly racked his brain, trying to figure out some way to cover it up, Armand calmly and

authoritatively made his way through the crowd. And, persuaded as much by his impeccable coat and stockings as by the illusions he pressed on them, they began to believe in the Vicomte’s “apoplectic fit” and the “miraculous good fortune that this simple girl happened to catch the man as he fell.” Before long they were cooing over her, praising her quick wits - “Why, he could have cracked his head on the pavement!”

Armand helped to lay the man down gently, and summoned “my good friend, the surgeon,” to examine him. And Arnaud, with all the gravitas of the middle age he’d been taken in, knelt down, and under the guise of checking the Vicomte’s pulse, healed the wounds with surreptitiously cut fingertips.

As they were making arrangements for one of the footmen to send for the Vicomte’s personal physician, Eleni finally caught up with Nicolas - she’d been looking for him for over an hour - and as she took in the entire scene, horrified, she immediately guessed everything. And nothing could have been as frightening as Armand’s unearthly calm as he gestured for Nicolas and his fledgling to step into the carriage, as he caught Eleni’s eye.

***

Before sunrise, when all the others had gone underground and Nicolas and Eleni returned to their small wooden rooms, she hissed at him, “What have you done?”

He looked at her blankly. “I’m sure it will be fine. There’s room for her here, they’ll take her in. Or she could live on her own if she wants...”

“You fucking idiot! Do you really think Armand is going to tolerate this?”

He shrugged vaguely, not meeting her eye.

“And that poor girl! She doesn’t have the faintest idea what’s happened to her or what she’s stumbled into. She still thinks that she’ll be able to go home to papa and everything will be fine. God, if you had to do this, why did you pick her?”

“It’s not my fault!” he protested. “She started it, she wanted me.”

Eleni slapped him across the face, hard enough to stun him. “Don’t you dare blame her! I spoke to her downstairs, and even if I hadn’t, I could see it all in her mind clearly enough: she was smitten with the dashing, attentive young gentleman, and you strung her along. You used her every step of the way, and you tore a naive little dreamer from her family without even giving her the faintest clue what you were going to do to her.”

“But I did, I told her, she wanted -”

“Bullshit!”

“Oh, come off it! You’ve been killing every night for a hundred and fifty years,

and now you’re the angel of compassion?”

Eleni’s face contorted with rage, but Nicolas had already locked his door behind him, and even in the windowless dark, she could feel the sunrise coming, and had no choice but to sleep.

8

The next night, Marie-Anne asked the two women who had taken her under their wing, “When can I go home? I mean, this is wonderful, but...”

Estelle and Celeste shared a look, and Estelle said, “Oh, my dear, all in good time. There’s so much for you to learn!”

Celeste said, “We really must show you how to hunt more carefully.” Marie-Anne would have protested that she’d done nothing wrong, that it was all for a glorious cause, but they were so glamorous, so sophisticated, what if they’d only think her an obstinate, backward child? Celeste smiled confidentially and put an arm around her shoulders. “Not that I blame you in the slightest. How could you have known? Of course he didn’t teach you any table manners.”

Estelle looked heavenward and sighed, “Men!” She and Celeste broke into silvery laughter, and Marie-Anne joined in, already unconcsciously imitating Estelle’s smile and the particular way Celeste tilted her head. One of you, she thought, feeling the new sharp teeth in her mouth. Sisters together, she prayed silently.

***

As soon as Nicolas left his room, the others surrounded him, shouting over each other, but all the voices essentially amounted to one question: What the hell were you thinking?

He tried and failed to push through them, then yelled back, “I was just undoing what he did to me!”

Henri rolled his eyes. “Oh God, don’t tell me you actually believe all that garbage you keep ranting about? ‘He poisoned me, he poisoned me!’”

They laughed, and Henri pressed closer. “And even if we accept that choice bit of lunacy, tell me: how, precisely, does throwing away the Dark Gift on a clumsy teenager with nothing in her head but crazy dreams of revolution ‘undo’ anything?”

“Or did you choose her because she’s as crazy as you?” Astrid sneered. Tomasz, struck by an idea, was about to speak, but slipped away instead.

Incredulous, Nicolas protested, “Are you blind? Because she was the one who could reverse it!”

“Well, at least that worked,” Justine said sarcastically. They broke out laughing again, but this time, Nicolas barely heard it: he stood, frozen, speechless, as he realized that absolutely nothing had changed. The vertigo, the noise, the abyss, the suffering, all of it remained, untouched as a still life.

Tomasz returned and smugly passed around the newspaper he’d been looking for, a standard revolutionary rag, open to an illustration of a goddess with a cockerel and a Phrygian cap, accompanied by a clumsily rhymed ode to “la Liberte, la Raison.” Nicolas had no conscious memory of ever seeing it (though such pictures were cropping up more and more lately), but even he could not deny an obvious resemblance with Marie-Anne’s straight, classical features, the set of her brow and chin.

Sebastien all but howled with laughter. “Really, Lenfent, could you possibly get any more crude?”

Only Eleni and Armand were silent. A memory kept nagging at her, she couldn’t quite place it, she was still so furious at him, but then it came to her. Nine years ago, under Les Innocents, when she’d been the first to tear Nicolas’ throat open, in the blood, she had seen herself through his eyes: under the filth and cant and monstrosity, a human being, a mind like his own; and as the delusion collapsed and the corridor of suffering without end opened before him and the noise inside and outside his head was even louder than the circle of vampires penning him in, through it all, he looked out with stubbornly intelligent eyes.

Armand took the newspaper and scanned it quickly. As soon as he spoke, everyone fell silent. Casually, offhand, he said, “Why don’t you take a rest, Nicolas? I’ll write the next play.”

9

The audience laughed at the marionettes of bishops and noblemen. Lines of black greasepaint drew wrinkles on their smooth, white faces; heavy padding strained the seams of their costumes; and - was there any limit to the puppeteers’ cunning? - their jerky movements as they leaned on their sticks were a perfect replica of arthritis and gout.

But when la Liberte, la Raison strode onto the stage, a collective sigh rushed through the hall. A real, living girl amid the marionettes! Her arms and throat were bare, as supple as the folds of her classical gown, and her red-gold hair was gathered up under a Phrygian cap.

For all her youth and vitality, though, she was no match for the old men around her: they were too many, and despite their awkward stiffness, it wasn’t long before they captured her. Once they immobilized her, they produced long golden cords identical to those that moved their own wooden limbs and began binding her.

The curtain fell. When it rose again, the cords were suspended from above, just like theirs, and they marched her to the center of the stage, where a tower

stood, draped in a long red cloth. One of the aristocrats pulled the cloth off with a grand flourish, and the audience gasped.

A few who had traveled in Munich or Berlin recognized it, what was it they called it there, the Fallbeil? But even to those who had never seen it, the tall wooden scaffold – almost as high as the proscenium! – and the stays, the basket, the rope and the heavy blade could mean only one thing. A duke took hold of the rope, and the nobles and clergy dragged Liberte in her golden cords to the bench and forced her down, opening the uprights before closing them down over her neck again.

For the benefit of the audience, Marie-Anne struggled as if terrified. She’d never acted before (at least not since reenacting folktales with her playmates as a child), and tried diligently to pretend that she didn’t know that Armand and two others were waiting in the rafters above, ready to leap down and rescue her before the blade fell, just as they’d rehearsed over and over.

Far too suddenly for her to be disillusioned, the duke released the rope and the blade flew down.

Throughout the audience, women and men screamed as her head toppled into the basket. The marionettes hobbled over to the basket to lift up her head as a trophy, but they were too slow: a trio of angels leapt down lightly from the rafters, blue silk robes floating around them like something in a painting. The two women looked vaguely familiar, but that lovely auburn-haired boy (or was it a girl?) had never appeared on the stage before.

The three of them easily drove off the aristocrats. And then, while the women propped up Liberte’s body, the curly-haired boy lifted her head and gently placed it on her neck. They held her motionless, no one knew how long, it felt like eternity, and the audience was perfectly silent, holding their breath, not rustling their programmes or crossing their legs or even shifting their weight in the old, creaky seats.

And then she stirred. Slowly, she drew herself up and stood on her own feet again. As if in a trance, she turned to kiss her divine rescuers, and tossed her cap gracefully toward the first rows.

The audience went wild. Everyone leapt to from their seats, cheering, shouting, whistling, stamping their feet. The man in the third row who had caught the Phrygian cap was hoisted up on others’ shoulders like a hero. The din drowned out the final triumphant swell from the orchestra.

In the orchestra pit, Nicolas stood with the violin and bow hanging slackly at his sides; no matter, the other musicians carried on seamlessly without him. When the action on stage departed so terribly from the script they had all rehearsed, when he watched Marie-Anne’s head toppling into the basket, he stopped playing and watched in horror, dumbstruck. Fury mounted in him as he noticed that none of his fellow musicians was in the least surprised: clearly, everyone was privy to the real script except for himself and Marie-Anne. He should have

been relieved to see her flesh knitting together, to see expression return to her face, but even that miracle was vaguely nauseating, and he frantically tried to calculate whether Armand had finished meting out punishments, or if he had only started.

For weeks afterward, salons and coffeehouses and taverns were ablaze with talk of the latest spectacle at the Theater of the Vampires: they had invented a new, fiendishly sophisticated kind of marionette so lifelike that the only proof that it was not a human being was the fact that it “lived” and moved flawlessly again after the beheading!

All the wild speculation and awe momentarily eclipsed curiosity about the strange machine with the scaffold and the blade. Only a few short years later, though, in the grip of the Terror, as that machine took a prominent place in public squares, those who had been in the audience that night thought back to the Theater of the Vampires. There were furtive, heated debates: was the Theater prophetic (after all, it wouldn’t be the first time) or had it been mere coincidence? One man even theorized about sinister conspiracies between the Theater and the government, but no one took him seriously. The public flocked to see one execution after another, men and women alike, even mothers with young children, taking care to check the slope of the pavement so that the puddles and rivulets of blood wouldn’t stain their shoes.

After all the marionettes took their last bows, the audience finally, reluctantly left the theater; the mortal ushers broke up brawls, or at least tried to delay them until everyone was out on the pavement, and then grumbled as they cleaned up shredded programmes and more forgotten hats and gloves than usual. When the theater was empty, when the mortal staff was dismissed, moods brightened by a little bonus, when the troupe had all washed off their greasepaint and changed back into their ordinary clothes, they filed back to the stage. They had to lead Marie-Anne, who was still wide-eyed and trembling, and Nicolas followed, cursing in outrage.

The two of them were forced into the center of a circle of vampires. Armand stepped forward and addressed Nicolas first, his voice placid and conversational. “You have trampled the rules underfoot for the last time. No one is to make another vampire without my consent. And above all, no one is to endanger our security. That fiasco in front of the opera could have cost us our safety here and driven us straight out of Paris.”

Nicolas laughed bitterly. “And beheading her and then bringing her back to life in front of hundreds of mortals is the epitome of discretion?”

Armand shrugged. “This is theater. They saw only a sublime illusion, an imitation of a human being. Even now they are talking about our breathtakingly clever new marionettes.”

“Oh, that makes perfect sense. Thank you so much for clearing that up,” Nicolas sneered. “Fucking hypocrite. You just did it to amuse yourself! You wanted to see what would happen, didn’t you? Did you pull the legs off of bugs when you

were a boy?”

As if Nicolas had said nothing, Armand continued, “She is a danger to us all. I can’t permit this to continue.” He turned to her and said, “My dear, this is nothing personal. I regret that your maker exercised such poor judgment, but that does not change the necessities.” Then he looked to the others and nodded. Several of them caught hold of her and led her to the guillotine. She started crying and begged them to let her go, she’d be careful, please, let me go and I’ll never do it again, you can’t. When she noticed that her tears were red, for a moment in her shock she stopped talking, and they laughed at her naivete - so young she doesn’t even know that we weep blood! They shoved her down onto the bench and trapped her neck in the stays.

Several others dragged Nicolas to the machine and forced the rope into his hands.

“Now you will undo your mistake,” Armand said.

“No! Absolutely not! Are you out of your mind?” Nicolas yelled.

“You will.”

Eleni saw the tears starting in Nicolas’ eyes as he begged, “Armand. Please. It’s not her fault, she’s young, she can learn. You can teach her. It’s my fault, it’s all my fault, kill me instead, I don’t care, just let her go. Kill me instead.”

Armand looked vaguely interested, as if he’d just suggested a new theory about a favorite painting. But he said, “This is your chance to give your fledgling a relatively swift and painless death,” and he didn’t need to elaborate further; Nicolas could read in his face what the alternative would be.

Eleni caught Marie-Anne’s gaze and used all her powers of persuasion to blanket her with calm and draw out all of her native strength and courage, and silently told her, No pain. Nicolas’ face contorted, and he closed his eyes and let go of the rope.

When he opened them, her head and body had already been snatched away. “Now,” Armand said, and the four who had forced him to take the rope caught hold of him again.

Nicolas yelled and thrashed, hopelessly outnumbered. But when they forced him onto the bench, he stopped fighting for a minute in his shock.

They were forcing his hands, not his head, into the stays.

He bit his lip and made a swift decision: he was not going to cry out and he was not going to look away. He stared straight ahead as the blade flew down through his wrists.

And he kept silent as they carried Marie-Anne’s body and head and his own

hands just ahead of him as they marched him down the corridors, as they opened the door to the airshaft and set her body against one wall, her head against another, “so that she can watch her own destruction,” and he refused to let loose a panicked question when the throng around him blocked his view and he couldn’t see whether they’d left his hands there as well, and before he knew it, they’d bolted the door, and in silence they rode out of the city to Magnus’ old tower.

They threw him into a cell, three stone walls and a door of heavy iron bars, violin resting neatly in its case on a stone bench. Celeste was about to close and lock the door when Armand quietly said, “No.”

They all looked at him expectantly.

“Drain him.”

Celeste’s mouth curled into a cold smile, but Armand said, “Not you,” and turned to Eleni.

So this, finally, was to be her punishment. She fought down a wild impulse to refuse; as he held her gaze, she had horrible intimations of the consequences that might follow. She tried desperately to keep her mind locked as an idea flickered to life: if she went along with it, maybe she could fool them all into thinking she was bleeding him dry, maybe she could take much less than they thought and ease the starvation just a little.

Suddenly, Nicolas broke his silence and snarled at Armand, “Why don’t you do it yourself? You've wanted to for years. Or are you afraid of what I can make you see?”

A few of them couldn’t hide their little gasps of shock, and many eyes darted fearfully toward Armand.

His face never lost its angelic composure. He kept looking at Eleni and repeated, “Drain him.”

They made way for her as she walked forward, trembling, burning with shame. It was like incest, and worse, the blood would inevitably be a pleasure, it could never be otherwise, no matter how appalling the forced intimacy. And if Armand was afraid of the visions he’d see, well, she was no better, and she hated herself for her petty, selfish fear. As she joined Nicolas on the stone bench, she caught his eye and silently begged, Forgive me.

She closed her eyes and moved to his throat, using all her skill as an actress to make a gentle bite look vicious, to give the appearance of pulling hard when she was really only accepting whatever his racing heart pumped to the open wound, and to hide her shock at the visions that flooded her mind.

There was a vast ocean stretching to every blank horizon, and a solitary bird flew high above, almost unable to breathe in the rarefied upper air, and then it

plummeted, faster and more dizzying than the drop of the blade of the guillotine, and pulled up just short of hitting the water, skimming the waves swiftly, wingtips almost dipping into the water, risking everything: if an unexpected swell reared up, it would drench the bird’s feathers, and, waterlogged, it would sink;

and a young man rode bareback over snowy slopes in the shortest days of winter, the snow turning rose in the light and blue in the shadows, and for a moment the bare branches were golden in the dying sunlight, and warmth bled out of the world into an antiseptic sky;

and wine and firelight and late-night conversations, Paris for the first time, boys both straining and refusing to become men, philosophy and crass jokes and grandiose plans;

and a boy climbed to dizzying heights in a vast oak tree, she could feel the rough bark under bare, callused feet, the midsummer sun was blinding, but the heart of the tree was a cool cave, coins of light tinkling down the somber dark leaves, the breeze making a sound like water rushing over stones, and he stood, precariously balanced, on a high branch, cupping a nest in his hands, twigs and grasses whipped into an elegant circle, speckled eggs inside hardly bigger than your thumbnail, and he offered it up without touching it, without disturbing a single twig

Cold hands pulled her away; someone sneered, “Do it like you mean it.” With a nod from Armand, Celeste stepped forward and lunged at Nicolas’ throat, and drank until he was haggard and shaking and forests of needles branched through his entire body. She drew one last mouthful, stepped back, and spat it out on the flagstones. Only a couple of them laughed as Nicolas flung himself to the ground and desperately tried to lick up the stain. The door clanged shut and the torches disappeared down the corridor.

10

After killing her second victim, Eleni felt almost ill, but she took a third, forcing herself to keep swallowing even when it seemed impossible to take another drop. She grimaced, then steadied herself. The man had had the misfortune of having a fast horse: Eleni mounted, light in her boyish jacket and breeches, and tore out of Paris.

The villa Armand had built at the foot of the tower was dark and silent. Eleni quickly slipped into the tower, lit a candle, and started down the winding stairs.

She found Nicolas lying inert on his side, wrists near his mouth, though the blood had long since stopped flowing. His bones stood out sharply through white, dead skin. She hadn’t seen such starvation since the days of cruel punishments under Les Innocents.

At first, he didn’t even notice her, but when he did, he cried out and flattened himself against the wall. After three days and nights in the dark, even a single candle was blinding. Eleni caught a loud image from his mind of Les Innocents,

the torches and the stench, Nicolas recoiling in horror at her, a monster looking up at him with frank curiosity, pinning him motionless with slender hands.

“Nicolas?” she called out softly, and still he crouched against the wall trembling. “Niko?” And slowly, his vision seemed to clear.

She knelt by the bars of the cell. “Your hands are safe. They only pretended to leave them for the sun. Niko, there isn’t much time…” Suddenly awkward, she couldn’t find the words, but the air was swimming with the scent of her victims, and even before she slipped her bared wrist through the bars, he knew what she meant. For a moment he panicked as he reached out to grab her arm and had nothing to grab with, but the thirst was stronger, and he bit down so desperately that his teeth struck bone. As the warm blood coursed down his parched throat, he silently rained down benedictions, oh, incomparable, ma soeur; and when she felt an icy tide dragging through her limbs, she hid the pain, and stopped him only when she felt that her heart would collapse like a wave under its own weight.

He still looked gaunt, but not starved, and though he was too dazed with the blood to speak, he was clearer and calmer. After Eleni caught her breath, she told him, “We’re trying to convince him to let you out. We all want you to come home. Even the newest ones -” she made a face, “- well, you know them. No sin worse than boredom! They want new plays. With all of us against him, he can’t hold out that much longer.” She was still too lightheaded to stand, and leaned against the bars. Just a minute, she’d just close her eyes for a minute, she dimly heard him thanking her, just a few minutes’ rest and then she’d go...

“Eleni.” His voice shook her awake. He caught her eyes, worried. “Hurry. Before he notices you’re gone.”

She nodded. Willing herself not to black out, she slowly pulled herself up and started up the stairs.

***

Nicolas started when he heard they key turn in the iron lock. He hadn’t heard footsteps. Armand let himself in, took out a small bundle of blue silk, and quietly ordered him to sit up.

He looked up dully, his eyes dark and sunken. “Sit up,” Armand repeated, and when he saw that Nicolas was too weak even to try, he put an arm under his chest and hoisted him up himself, then laid his arms out along the stone bench.

Nicolas was too far gone to notice Armand’s slight tremor as he unfolded the cloth, and in any case, the sight drove everything else from his mind: what a relief, what a horror, his hands lying there, his own hands, safe, severed, and lifeless.

Armand brought Nicolas’ hands to his wrists and held them in place, and tendons and muscles and bones began, slowly, to knit back together. Nicolas

gasped at the burning pain as myriad nerves infallibly found each other. Armand pulled a pocketknife from his coat and made a swift, precise cut in his own wrist. “To help it heal faster,” he explained, eyes downcast.

But as the blood welled up, ready to trickle down over the still half-severed flesh, something slammed him up against the wall.

Nicolas hadn’t moved, and appeared not to have noticed the invisible blow that struck Armand away, but as soon as the scent of blood had flooded the air, he had almost lunged for Armand’s wrist, the thirst was a torment, nothing in the world had ever looked as beautiful as that seam of red, he would almost have begged for it, he could see himself drinking deep at Armand’s wrist before moving up to his throat, Armand holding him, cradling his head...

And in a flash of intuitive certainty, he knew not only that Armand would not have refused him, but that the entire performance was calculated. And the way Armand looked up at him, vulnerable and stricken, confirmed it. At another time, Nicki would have unleashed a stream of invective - you really think, after all this...? But as it was, it took all his energy just to sit upright instead of collapsing back to the floor again, and he only closed his eyes and breathed, “Not then, and not now.”

***

For over a week, Nicolas spent hours writing at his desk. He ventured out only with Eleni and spoke to no one but her.

Finally, he made his way down through the labyrinth of corridors underground to Armand’s study. He entered without knocking, dropped a stack of fresh manuscripts on the desk, and said, “I’m leaving.”

Aghast, Armand said, “You can’t.”

“I can, and I will. There’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

“How do I know that you won’t burn down the theater or reveal all of us to mortals as soon as you’re gone?”

“I could do that now anyway. And that’s exactly what I will do if you even think of stopping me. Now. Here are enough plays for the next few months. And don’t worry, you’ll manage just fine after that. After all, you’re the one who was so eager to write for the stage. And the audience loved every minute. I have no doubt you’ll be a success,” he said, disgusted.

“Anyway,” he continued, “I have one more thing to finish, and then as soon as our next night off, I want a proper sendoff. You’re so fond of reviving all the old ways -” he glanced at the grotesque paintings “- indulge me. Take the whole coven - oh, shut up, it is a coven all over again, and you know it - out to the countryside and show me one of your grand old sabbats. Though really, it would

be much more interesting to do it right here on the boulevard...” He laughed. “And Eleni will write to Lestat and tell him that I made it my funeral pyre. She’s even going to send the Stradivarius back to him. I wanted to burn it, but she had a better idea: he’d never think that I’d part with such a precious possession voluntarily, so when he sees it, he’ll know that I’m dead,” he added with a bitter smile.

“And where will you go?” Armand asked.

Nicki shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe Japan...”

Armand raised an eyebrow. “Japan? That’s impossible, no foreigner can get into Japan.”

Nicki’s mouth curled a little at the word “impossible.” “Or maybe I’ll go south. There’s so much to see - I could travel in Italy - Florence, Venice, Genoa...”

Armand sighed, realizing that he had no choice, but then an idea struck him. “Very well. You’re right, I can’t stop you. But after you leave, if any harm comes to us, I will tell Lestat - and if I have to track him down to tell him in person, I will - that your supposed death was a fiction. He was content to leave you here in the beginning, when you were an inconvenience to him, but as soon as something goes wrong - as soon as Gabrielle disappoints him, as soon as he makes yet another fledgling who disappoints him, as soon as the loneliness catches up with him - he will come looking for you. And you of all people know how stubborn he is. He won’t stop until he finds you, and when he does, he will never let you go. ”

Nicki bit his lip, and after a long pause, finally said, “Alright.” He hesitated a moment longer, then drew a deep breath. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have one last performance to give.”

Armand was about to argue, but Eleni had appeared in the doorway, and after they exchanged a long, complicated glance, he nodded and let Nicolas go.

***

“What have you done with her?! What have you done with my daughter, you bastard?”

Nicolas allowed Marie-Anne’s father to grab him by the lapels and shake him. A crowd swarmed around them in the coffeehouse. He forced himself to meet the man’s eyes. “It was all my fault. I tricked her into coming out for a walk alone with me. We were crossing a bridge, and a thief came at us. He stabbed her for the locket she wore, and she fell in the river. I think she was dead before she hit the water.”

Her father collapsed in his chair, sobbing, a horrible sound, as noisy and oblivious as a small child. The older of her brothers, Andre, glared at Nicolas. “And you did nothing to protect her, university boy? Not that I believe a word of

it. That was weeks ago. Weeks! What did you do to her?” Nicolas could see in his mind a panorama of lurid, nightmarish guesses, none of which was near as sordid as the truth.

“I should kill you right here,” Andre snarled at him. “But -” he glanced at his father, “- let’s do it properly. A duel.”

“How soon?”

“As soon as you’re ready to dispatch your soul to hell, you worthless son of a bitch.”

***

Nicolas had loaded his pistol with a blank and aimed wide, but Andre’s bullet shattered his rib and tore through his heart before he could even pull the trigger. He heard the thud of his body hitting the earth without feeling it. The pain was a supernova, he’d never imagined such agony, cold and nausea and he couldn’t breathe and when he did his chest was on fire, his thoughts weren’t working right, having his hands cut off was a pleasant memory in comparison, and though he had no doubt that he would survive, he wished it would kill him, anything but this. He was vaguely aware of Eleni (serving as his second, dressed as a slim boy) exchanging words with Marie-Anne’s brothers, and then it was just an endless wait on the damp ground for them to inspect his body, be satisfied with his death, and leave the field. He hadn’t realized he’d lost consciousness until he felt Eleni’s arms under him, dragging him up into the carriage.

***

A couple nights later, when the damage was mostly healed, Celeste caught him alone in a corridor. Her mouth curled coldly and she drawled, “All hail the hero, who nobly pretended to die for his sins.”

And he thought of Marie-Anne looking at him from the bench with pleading, terrified eyes, and of the rope whipping through his hands as he released it, and of the precise noise of the blade thundering down its tracks and severing flesh, and of Marie-Anne’s father sobbing, loud as a foghorn, in front of all his friends, and of Andre’s visions of all the sickening things he imagined Nicolas doing to his sister, which he would live with forever, because how could Nicolas contradict them? And he thought of how the last couple nights it had all rushed down on him, suffocating, the minute he opened his eyes at sunset, and of the frightful certainty that he would wake this way every night for - decades? centuries? - and of how he had wished, yet again, that the bullet had killed him.

“Dying?” he said archly. “Too easy. Lazy as usual, Celeste. My, my, when I’m gone, who is going to see to it that you make enough effort to dance even half as well as a poodle drunk on the scullery maid’s sherry?”

***

On the last night before the sabbat, Nicolas and Eleni hunted together as usual. Warm with blood and with the drowsy May night, they wandered aimlessly through the city, talking a little or lapsing into comfortable silence. If Nicolas had any sense of saying farewell to favorite places, it didn’t show. “Do you like Paris?” he asked Eleni.

She thought for a moment. “Not really.”

They walked in comfortable silence for a while longer, and then Nicolas said, “Iseult had her baby.”

It was a hatchet to the ribs. Of course he would have known that; the affair had never been a secret, and in the blood, she couldn’t have hidden it anyway. Still, though, of all the nerve...! “Yes, I know,” she said curtly, quickening her pace.

“Maybe it’s a good thing you didn’t have the chance to change her.”

“Oh, don’t tell me that you of all people are going to toss out some cloying platitudes about how everything is ‘all for the best’-”

He laid a hand on her arm and shook his head. “Would it really have been a good thing to bring her into all this?”

And desperately as she missed Iseult, she tried to picture it, navigating the backbiting and cruelty and vanity of the coven together, and she knew he was right.

As they kept walking, she returned to an idea that had begun forming in her mind, the first thing that had given her any hope in months. For the present, she’d endure the theater: she had to stay in Paris to keep track of Iseult, and if she left the coven, they would never permit her to stay in the city. She would keep adding to the modest little sum she was amassing, selling jewels stolen from victims, investing carefully; in chatting with Reinald, under the guise of fawning on his expertise as a financier, she had unobtrusively drawn out an invaluable education for herself on such matters. When the time was right, she would keep her promise and go back to her and offer herself up, fully prepared for rejection. If (she hardly dared hope for it) Iseult actually wanted her, she would leave the theater and they’d strike out on their own, find some city untroubled by others of their kind, another country, maybe even the New World... And if Iseult refused her, well, then there would be nothing to stay in Paris for anyway.

How well she and Nicolas had always understood each other: it had taken him so few words to suggest those trains of thought, which, she realized, was exactly what he’d intended to do. After a while, they stopped on the Pont Neuf and stood side by side, leaning on the stone wall and gazing down into the Seine.

She could hardly believe that this was the last walk they’d take together. So little

time, the nights rapidly growing shorter and shorter as summer approached, almost all the blossoms fallen from the trees and scattered underfoot. She wanted to speak, but hesitated; after all, he hated sentimentality as much as she did. But the thought of leaving it unsaid as he disappeared into the world was too much: oblivion waited at every turn, letters got lost, hearsay meandered and died out, and once travelers got separated, they might never find their way back. She turned to him and said, “You’re my only friend.”

Even after all this time, she’d still half-feared acerbic remarks, but the lost, young look on his face was almost worse. To her surprise, he took her hand. After a long moment, his face cleared, and he said, as if solving a math problem, “But we’ll always be able to find each other,” and it was true.

***

The bonfire was dying down; dawn was a couple hours away. The dancers sat down to rest, and the musicians packed away their instruments. Nicki could hardly believe it, but behind his back they’d written a series of marvelously inventive variations on one of his own compositions, and he couldn’t help being moved. He took his leave of each of them individually, even if it was just brief word to the ones he hated. When he came to Armand, they gazed at each other in silence, then exchanged formal parting kisses on the cheek.

Last, he came to Eleni. They’d already said everything there was to say; he simply took her in his arms and pressed a kiss to her forehead. Then, as he stepped back, he placed his words clearly in her mind: You can leave him too.

She turned away from the fire and watched as Nicolas slung his violin case across his back, mounted his horse, and struck out alone into the dark. The End.

drabble dimanche by ukashi goshiprompts: payment, bounty, bankrupt, mint

Music through the open doorway of the bar stopped Louis in his tracks. He found a seat in the back, and saw with a shock that the trio playing in a hastily cleared corner consisted of two mortals led by an immortal violinist with stark white skin like his own; and even more resonant was his recognition of something in the music that seemed to say, Suffering is eternally possible and happiness is eternally difficult.

The violinist tossed his dark curls out of his face and looked directly into Louis’ eyes with a clear, easy smile, as if they were the only ones in the room, as if they had skipped stones across the water together as boys.

It was the precise opposite of the courtship-in-reverse that happened whenever other vampires’ paths crossed, the breakneck flight from suspicion to loathing to frantic clawing against the bankruptcy of losing one’s territory if neither had the sense to back down.

He felt a simple invitation: stay. The violinist passed himself off as a just another college student like his bassist and clarinetist – he looked their age – and cheerfully closed his violin case against coins and bills from the crowd, accepting payment only in drinks which he immediately passed to his friends.

When they finished and the applause died out and the mortal musicians happily downed their sixth or seventh free drink of the night, Louis made his way to them, and his heart leapt as the violinist immediately embraced him and, not caring how odd the old continental gesture would look, kissed both his cheeks, then held his shoulders and looked in his eyes. He’d felt the chill of Louis’ skin, and quietly asked, “Thirsty?”

He hunted with company for the first time since Claudia’s death; then, warm and relaxed with the blood, they talked easily about everything and nothing. Neither asked the other’s name: there was a bounty on Louis’ head for the secrets spilled in his book, and he sensed that his violinist was just as happy to live only in the moment. Even as they talked about the quirks of the decades they’d lived through, they floated on the feeling of being newly minted, creatures with no past, and nothing in the world was as easy as climbing the stairs to the garret together, hand in hand, and tumbling into rapid kisses as soon as they locked the door.

prompts: Italian, film, impure

Louis woke to strong arms around him and a deep voice murmuring sleepily, “You never told me.”

He turned around. “Never told you what?”

Smiling, Nicolas ran his fingers through Louis’ hair. “You’d cut it short last night. This is much better. You came from a good era, or your maker had the sense to wait for your hair to grow.”

Louis shrugged. “Around the Revolution,” and they both knew which revolution he meant. “And you... That Italian violin, Guarneri, 1743...?”

“Before I was born. A bit.” And they were content with such light glances over the past, not even caring to know each others’ names.

Another candle. Louis looked around: windowless room, and he vaguely remembered an oddly-shaped living room beyond the door. “Cheap rent,” Nicki chuckled. “Poor landlord tried to glorify it as an ‘exciting darkroom opportunity.’”

Louis laughed and kissed Nicki, slipping a leg between his thighs. “Sensitive and fussy as film.”

“We’re delicate flowers,” Nicolas whispered against his throat. If they were mortal, they’d be heavily bruised from the previous night, though of course

mortals wouldn’t have been able to inflict such bruises in the first place.

But suddenly, Louis realized that he hadn’t seen Nicki light either of the candles by the bedside, and he froze.Annoyed at his lover’s distraction, Nicki asked, “What?”

“The candles. How...?”

“Can’t you?”

“Can’t I what?”

He pinched one out. Then, a moment of concentration, and it flared to life again.

Louis’ eyes widened. “I’ve known much older vampires, and I never knew anyone could do that.”

“Bet you could if you wanted.” Then, divining how Louis recoiled from the idea, “There’s nothing impure about such abilities. It’s just a skill like any other.” Gently, with no recrimination, he mused, “You don’t test your limits much, do you?”

prompts: toes, maze, both

Back from hunting, they fell into each others’ arms again, flushed and laughing. But when Louis dipped down for Nicki’s throat, a shock ran through him, all the way to his toes, and he flattened himself against the wall, heart pounding.

Louis looked stung. Nicolas drew a shaky breath. “It’s not you. Before I died...a whole coven took me. And after...it was always a punishment.”

Hiding his disappointment, Louis murmured against his cheek, “Of course, if you don’t want to...”

“But I do,” Nicki said, lost and miserable. “I’m just scared shitless, as they say now.”

But Louis looked into his eyes and asked, “Do you trust me?” and he nodded and let him lay him out face down on the bed.

Louis straddled his hips and began kneading his way up his back. Nicolas could smell the thirst in him, the desire, but his hands were infinitely patient, and as those sensitive fingers unraveled mazes of tension, he could have wept: he had never felt so held.

When Louis brushed his curls aside and kissed the nape of his neck, he stiffened, but Louis murmured, “No, not yet,” and then those soft lips caressed the side of his neck, the hollow behind his ear, and trailed kisses down his arm, nuzzling his wrist, tasting the skin before kissing his throat again, tongue lazily

tracing the artery. Arousal got the better of fear, and he moaned.

“Was that a no or a yes?” Louis asked.

“Both,” Nicki whispered.

Louis slid off him so they lay face to face, and Nicolas gasped as he bit down, utterly unprepared for the pleasure of it, like coming home. When Louis paused and looked in his eyes, questioning, Nicolas moaned, “Yes,” pulled him back down, and gave himself over to the ecstasy.

prompts: later, warmth, brilliant

Nicolas’ tossing and turning woke Louis up. The sun had just set, he could hardly open his eyes, but Nicki was wide awake. “I have to get out. Will you come?”

Groggily, Louis asked, “What...why...?”

“Later.”

***

As they tore through city streets and eerie suburbs and finally out into farmland on his Velocette, Nicolas gradually relaxed: his lover’s solid warmth behind him, silence opening around him. When they turned onto dirt roads, he cut the headlight and flashed Louis a grin.

Louis hadn’t seen that daredevil smile in decades. From Lestat it was always a taunt - glorious monster, c’est moi - but this was so different, just invitation, belonging: of course they didn’t need light any more than they needed helmets.

When they finally stopped between orchards Louis asked, “Now are you going to tell me?”

Nicolas looked at him. “All the noise - everyone’s thoughts, heartbeats - sometimes I can’t shut it out. You’re lucky you can’t hear it. You know what I think?”

“What?”

“There’s something living in our blood.” Louis frowned, but Nicki continued, “After all, you’re not the sort of man who loves killing. But you do. You hate yourself for it, but you love the kill. See?” Nicki took him in his arms. “You’re suffering just thinking about it, but you love the blood. It’s like possession.”

Louis didn’t know if Nicki was brilliant or crazy, but there were no answers, and it made as much sense as anything.

“But at least -” Nicki kissed him “- when we’re together -” he moved down to Louis’ throat “- no death, no shame, no guilt -” he whispered, grazing the skin with his teeth “- is it worth it?” He bit down, and as the hot blood flowed into him, he turned his head, offering himself, and before ravaging Nicki’s throat, Louis breathed, “Yes.”

prompts: jewels, garden, radio

When Louis met up with Nicolas after practice, the clarinetist had already left, but the bassist looked him up and down. “So you’re the reason he’s missed our last two rehearsals. And with the radio broadcast next week.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Two? How irresponsible.”

She lit a cigarette and offered one to Louis, and when he declined, she smirked, “Other vices, huh?”

Nicki folded his arms. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Angie.”

She laughed. “Come on, I saw you two the night he found us at our gig at the Beggar’s Jewels! Besides, you’re wearing each others’ jeans.” They both looked down, flabbergasted. “And I thought your kind were supposed to be so fussy about clothes! Live and learn, I guess...” she said, with an odd little catch in her voice.

***

“Angie likes you,” Louis said as they walked down dark streets, past occasional lilacs obstinately thriving in dusty tenement gardens.

“Don’t remind me.”

“It’s alright, nothing to -”

Nicki stopped him. “No. Really. She’s my niece. My brother’s great-great-...”

Louis was shocked, but it made perfect sense, her stubborn dark eyes, intricate mouth poised between bitterness and childlike joy.

“Have you followed your family at all?” Nicki asked.

“No,” he said. He’d considered it; it would be simple to find them and even watch unnoticed. But it was too unnerving: he could bring nothing but contamination to their ordinary mortal lives. Lestat would have ridiculed him for such thoughts; Armand would offer incomprehension delicately tinged with disdain. Please, let’s not get started. “Is she the reason you’re here?” he asked.

“For now. Until she’d see that I don’t age.” Nicolas sighed. “Maybe you’re right to stay away. With mortals, it’s never - we’re only planting cut flowers.” He looked away, but Louis’ arm around his waist tightened.

prompts: stretch, covers, dream; covers, dream, stretch

Nicolas grimaced and set down the violin. “I’m sorry, I have to stop. I’ll play more for you later, promise.” Massaging and stretching his wrists, he said ruefully, “They say we heal from everything. Not true.”

Wide-eyed, taken aback, Louis said hesitantly, “It’s not from...?” remembering how last night he’d torn Nicki’s wrists open again and again as Nicki drove into him, blood spilling down his face with each vicious thrust, then even as he drank, Nicki started lapping up those rivulets, following them down his jaw and then burying his face in his throat, straining deeper and deeper into him.

Nicki laughed fondly. “Such a gentleman!” Then he caught Louis’ eye with a slow, heart-stopping smile and said, “Oh no, not at all, and I expect an encore.”

“Then what happened? What is it we can’t heal from?”

He sighed in mock exasperation. “Only you could be so intent on questions when I’m trying to get you under the covers again!” But his face turned serious. “Do you really want to know?”

“Tell me.”

“They cut my hands off and gave them back five days later.”

“That can’t be possible!”

“Oh, it’s possible. You didn’t know that? Hasn’t anyone ever told you anything?”

“But who did that to you?”

Nicolas paused, wanting to unburden his heart, but this floating dream they shared was too sweet, free from all those memories, just the two of them, here, now. Finally, he shook his head. “I lived with some weird people for a while.”

Louis laughed, then immediately stifled it. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t -”

“What?”

“It’s just - Story of our lives, isn’t it? I lived with some weird people for a while?”

Nicki broke down laughing too. “Oh God, that covers just about everyone I’ve ever known. I think you may have hit on the universal truth of our condition. But,” he added, mock pedantic, “This requires further research.”

He picked up the phone and dialed a number quickly, without looking. After a few rings, someone picked up. “Eleni!” he said exuberantly.

“Fine, fine, don’t worry. I was just talking to a friend -

“Well, that’s because I am happy.

“No, he’s not mortal.

“No, really. Why would I -”

Then his face both softened and hardened into a mask of patient serenity, and in a bell-like tone both voluptuous and spiritual, he asked, “Must I remind you of an old mortal acquaintance of yours...?”

Louis’ heart jumped violently, and he stared, stunned, wondering if he’d stumbled into some crazy dream. But Nicolas had turned his back as he walked with the phone, stretching the cord behind him, and didn’t see. There was a long peal of laughter on the other end. Nicolas smiled and said, “Really. He’s one of us. Anyway, I think we hit on the grand unified theory. True or false, the following applies to every vampire who ever lived: I lived with some weird people for a while.

“‘Almost’? Well, good enough.

“Alright. You too.”

He hung up, and then, almost too quickly to see, straddled Louis’ lap. “A friend,” he explained. “Older and wiser. She says we’re right. Now about that encore...” He kissed Louis, nicking his tongue on one fang, then asked innocently, “Do you swear on your gentlemanly honor not to hurt me?”

Louis had already slid a hand up under his shirt, and he pinched one nipple lightly at first, then harder, then excruciating, letting a nail cut flesh, and he tugged Nicki’s hair back and traced the curves of his ear with his tongue and breathed, “Only as much as you want.”

Passing Through by ukashi goshi

Story notes:timeline: set after recent drabbles (including stretch/dream/covers set) and before Contrapunctus fic.

When Eleni got off the plane, she immediately spotted another immortal face in the crowd thronging the gate. “Paul,” Louis introduced himself, and apologized for Nicolas’ absence: tonight was the radio broadcast he and Angie and James had been working toward for months, there was no way out of it. She feigned surprise and airily chided herself for forgetting; “But at least we’ll have a chance to talk, won’t we? You know him, there’s no getting a word in edgewise sometimes.”

Louis offered his arm to her as they walked through the terminal. She was about to laugh at him for being old-fashioned, until she realized that she had already taken his arm without thinking. Anachronism, how it catches up with us all! “Do

you ever get used to flying?” she asked. “Am I just too old for this?”

He shook his head. “It’s still strange to me. I try to drive whenever I can. And even that - I should be used to it, but it still sometimes feels odd to cover that much distance in one night.”

“And then everything changes just as you start getting used to it,” she sighed. “Oh well, no such thing as a free lunch, isn’t that the saying now? So. Let’s get my bag, and then I’ll show you around the city, shall I?”

He raised his eyebrows. “And which one of us is the visitor here?”

“Oh, I come to see Niko all the time. I can give you a splendid tour. Just in case you’ve been too busy to get out much.”

***

It was true; Eleni was an excellent guide. They rambled through the city, and she pointed out not only the usual attractions but a favorite slate roof near the university, a gargoyle just like one she’d seen in Rome, inspired graffiti, the heavenly smell of a coffeehouse roasting its own beans. She closed her eyes and breathed in. “If I could be mortal again just for a day...” All the while, she was quietly attentive to Louis, not prying, but simply open to whatever she could glean easily from his mind. Scattered images made her wonder, and when they passed a well-lit display in the window of a bookstore, she knew.

At first, it was all she could do not to laugh. Really, what were the odds? Only a year ago, she had called Nicolas and asked, “Did you write a book?”

“Well, now that you mention it, there’s something I’m working on right now, I was going to ask if you wanted to read it...”

“Of course I do, but that’s not it - I mean, have you published a book?”

“No. Why?”

And she told him about the novel she’d picked up, a vampire story, and he’d interrupted her: “And what does that have to do with me? Hey, did you know they made a vampire movie a while ago? With Bela Lugosi? Are you going to blame me for that one too?”

“This is different. I don’t know how much of the narrative is true, but all the information about us is accurate. And it’s not just a dry outline like something those Talamasca bookworms would put together - this had to be written by someone who knows.”

“Come on, when was the last time I did something like that? And if I were going to, there are at least two dozen ways of doing it that are more interesting than writing a book. Besides, any of us could have written it. Hell, Armand could have written it, that fucking hypocrite, just like he was killing mortals right on

stage at the Theater after we left, oooh, secrecy, hush hush, let me drink blood in front of hundreds of people but if you dare expose us I’ll cut off -”

“Oh, give it a rest, Niko,” she laughed. “But actually...Armand is in the book. The Theater is too. And again, it’s accurate.”

“See? There you go. Armand must have written it.”

“Well, the parts about him are absurdly flattering...sort of...” she chuckled. “But...” she hesitated, “it’s also about Lestat.” Silence. “It’s written from the perspective of a fledgling of Lestat. And...I don’t know, it seemed like the way you might write about Lestat.”

Another long silence. “You know the way I would write about Lestat? I wouldn’t. I don’t even want to think about him. No fucking way would I write a book about him, and you’d better believe I’m not going to waste my time reading that shit either.”

Eleni had been almost relieved that he’d hung up on her instead of bucketing down an acidic harangue that could easily have gone on for half an hour or more.

And now, of all people, this warm, courteous, soft-spoken man who conversed enthusiastically with her about cities, Piranesi, the latest book about Watergate, the quirks of the twentieth century! And under all that lively interest, a tide of melancholy, a familiar darkness. Of all people, this man who was the author of the elation she’d heard in Nicolas’ voice on the telephone. She kept silent, but her mind was racing. She still wasn’t sure which parts of the book were embellished or flat-out invented - and she didn’t wish to pry into his mind enough to find out - but Lestat had made him, that was true, beyond doubt. And dear God, if Nicolas found out! He’d mentioned that they had some sort of odd tacit agreement to boycott the past, well and good, but it would only take one careless image to slip his mind...

As he talked to Eleni, Louis wondered exactly how she and Nicolas knew each other. He’d looked so happy talking with her on the phone, she was delighted to be here; clearly, they’d never been lovers; could it be - ? But he would never ask such an intrusive question.

“No, I’m not his maker,” she answered.

He stopped in his tracks and and stared at her. She laughed. “I’m sorry, it was rude of me to listen. But,” she added, serious again, “you shouldn’t let things slip through like that. You really should be more careful. I know you can - you’re on guard again now, and it’s like you’re not even here. Completely locked. You’re remarkably good at that when you want to, you know - though I guess you’d have to be to survive Armand for that long.”

“What do you know about it?” he asked with quiet fury.

She laid a hand on his arm and unobtrusively guided him to a bench in the park overlooking the river. “I’m not trying to make you angry, really I’m not. But your mind was wide open: you’re the one who wrote that book. Interview With the Vampire.” He was speechless. “And there’s a bounty on your head. Oh, don’t worry, I don’t give a damn. The book is no threat to us; anyone who takes it as more than fiction will be headed straight to their analyst’s couch. And you’ve done a fine job so far of evading all those thugs who can’t think of anything better to do than chase you and yammer old covenish nonsense about the rules. Have you ever noticed how unoriginal our kind are? Don’t even get me started! Century after century, same old garbage over and over, inventing rules like a bunch of schoolgirls guarding their clique, probably just because they’re so bored with immortality that they can’t think of anything better to do... I tell you what, if there’s any rule we need, it should be not to give the Dark Gift to anyone who’s capable of being bored.” She snorted. “I’m sorry, you didn’t come here to hear me rant about this. Anyway. You need to be careful. For your own protection.” And not just your own, she thought, and he was puzzled at the sudden catch in her voice, her preoccupied frown.

He sighed. “But I don’t understand. I had no idea you could read me. And shutting people out, I can do that to a point, but I can’t possibly be that good at it.”

“You really have no idea?” He shook his head, bewildered. She regarded him for another minute. “You don’t test your limits much, do you?”

“So I’ve been told,” he said, with a wry smile.

“Well, that has to change, if you want to survive. I know this is terribly forward, but would you agree to an experiment? I’m not as good as Armand, but I’ve been around a while, and I can usually get through people’s defenses if I have to. If you’ll allow it, I’ll try, and you can block me out. Just so that you can understand what you can do. So you can know that you’re even doing it in the first place.”

“No. I’m sorry, I know you mean well, but I can’t.”

“Of course, you’re a very private man. When you’re not telling your life story to a fawning mortal boy you picked up in a bar, that is,” she added with a sidelong smile. “But this is different. I’m not even going to look at what I find - unlike all the predators who are after you. I just want to see if you can protect yourself. This is for your own safety. Unless you don’t care, unless you have nothing to live for...?”

He looked away. “I wouldn’t quite say that.”

“And you know, if they find you, they won’t spare any friends you’re with either.”

Exasperated and scowling, he sighed, “Alright, alright, you’ve made your point. Fine.”

And almost before he’d finished speaking, she assaulted him. For the next half hour, anyone strolling past them on the park bench mistook them for a couple nursing grudges after a fight, still too surly to speak to each other. Eleni was merciless, using all the tricks she’d learned in her long decades of observing Armand, attacking subtly, clumsily, with anger, insinuation, brute force, delicacy, kindness, delirious visions, anything she could think of, letting up only to lull him into false security before another onslaught. He hated every minute of it, but it worked: he started to become aware of what he was doing, and when, and how. And he could tell that even at her most ruthless, she was true to her word: she cared only about tearing down the door, not seeing what lay behind it.

Finally, she leaned back, stretched, and said, “Well, that was exhausting,” and they looked at each other and laughed.

***

As they climbed the stairs in the apartment building, a few students standing around the shared kitchen greeted Eleni enthusiastically and handed her a beer, which she gamely pretended to drink. Immediately she fell to catching up with them, chatting about girlfriends, classes, crazy drug stories, their new scheme of selling their plasma for booze money (here she tried very hard not to snicker, and she wondered if any vampires had ever tried to do an end run around their fretful consciences by paying cash-strapped college students for the little drink). None of them found it odd that this woman at least ten years older than they, sleek and poised in a cashmere sweater and a necklace of amber beads, seemed perfectly at home with them. She told Louis to go on upstairs, she’d be there in just a minute.

Half an hour later, she climbed to the top floor, and through the open door, saw Louis and Nicolas in each others’ arms, up against a wall. For good measure, she assaulted Louis’ mind again, unawares, and was satisfied to find it locked. When they noticed her, Nicki rushed to her, spun her around, and kissed her cheeks. She saw a wound on his neck, almost healed over but still visible, and she hid her shock adroitly. Finally she understood that sense of familiarity that had been nagging at her all evening: of course, Louis smelled like Nicolas. Nicki’s blood in his veins, Nicki permitting that... She could hardly believe it. But it gave her more peace of mind than anything yet: if they hadn’t seen anything, even in the blood, they’d be safe, at least for a while longer.

“Where have you been?” Nicki asked her. “I’ve been waiting forever. Here, there’s all this I have to play for you -” he nodded toward a stack of records “- and I got us tickets to the ballet tomorrow, and -”

“Excuse me, would you mind if I step out for a bit?” Louis asked.

“Oh, don’t leave on account of me,” Eleni protested, but she could tell he wasn’t just being polite; by now he was visibly pale and drawn, with a dull predatory cast to his eyes. He kissed Nicki quickly, they exchanged a glance, and he walked out.

Once he was out of the building, Nicki asked, “So how long are you in town?”

“Just passing through. I’ll stay a few nights, and then I’m meeting up with her in Barcelona.”

“Ah. So in other words, you just wanted to stop by and inspect my lover.”

“Oh, is he your lover?” she asked, mock innocent, with a fleeting glance at Nicki’s throat.

“And very clever, timing your arrival so I couldn’t meet you at the airport! You’re getting so devious in your old age. You just wanted to corner him, didn’t you? And what were you two doing all that time anyway?”

“I was just showing him the sights, since obviously you haven’t shown him anything but your -” He glared at her. “- record collection,” she finished serenely.

“I hope you weren’t interrogating him the whole time,” Nicolas sighed. “So, you nosy old gossip, does he meet with your approval?”

She steepled her fingers. “What’s this? Can it be that Nicolas de Lenfent is asking for someone’s approval?”

“Shut up, that’s not what I meant!”

“Because I distinctly remember you saying, and I quote, ‘If I ever start giving a shit what anyone thinks, you tell me, and I’ll climb up on the roof and wait for the sun.’”

“I didn’t say that.”

“June 18th, 1953.”

“You’re making that up!”

“1:54 am.”

He rolled his eyes. “And how many seconds?”

She laughed, then said quietly, “I like him.” The End.

Contrapunctus XII a 4 by ukashi goshi

Louis woke in an empty bed. As he rolled over and stretched, he felt a slip of paper under his hand. It was too dark to read, so he pulled himself up and stumbled out to the living room. If you could call it a living room: the building had been hastily chopped into as many spaces as possible, one proper apartment on the ground floor, and above, mostly single rooms for rent. The neighbors -

college students for the most part, and once in a while a grizzled, middle-aged alcoholic - loved Nicolas: he didn’t add to the mess in the shared kitchen and the two shared bathrooms, and he never complained about the loud parties still in full swing at 5 am. And though his apartment on the top floor consisted only of a windowless bedroom with a well-hung door and an oddly shaped adjoining room, it was enough, and he would happily have paid three times the rent.

By the light of the streetlights, Louis read, “Rehearsal, back later. Do you ever wake up at a reasonable hour?” The word “ever” was underlined three times. Turning it over, he saw that Nicki had scribbled it on a page torn from an old Black Mask magazine, and he laughed.

He’d planned on going out, but it was too tempting just to stay in. He never would have admitted it, but Nicolas wore him out sometimes: that burning restlessness, moving from one full cup to another, fleeing one shadow after another, everything a precipice... He lit a candle (Nicki had not only unscrewed the bulb from the overhead fixture but put several layers of duct tape over the light switch, complaining that electric light gave him a headache, and he had no choice out in the world, but damned if he was going to put up with it under his own roof) and got lost looking through the stacks of books, records, and tapes that covered every wall, floor to ceiling, except in the spaces reserved for turntable, speakers, various tape machines, a tangle of cords, even an antique phonograph.

He leafed through novels, ignored several thick bundles of letters held together with brittle rubber bands, and then a recording caught his eye: a flat cardboard box labeled “L’Art de la Fugue” in Nicolas’ writing, both sides covered with a list of the movements, some of which bore cryptic notes.

Curious, he took out the spool of tape and threaded it through the reel to reel. His curiosity deepened as he listened: he knew the work well, but he’d never heard it played by a string quartet; or was it a quartet? There was certainly no cello, nothing deeper than a viola, if that. Despite the limited range, though, the tone was dark, not shrill or brassy, and he’d never heard an interpretation quite like this.

At first he skimmed through a copy of Bleak House as he listened, but then he put it back on the shelf and lay down on the scuffed wood floor. As he followed the theme through all those obsessive manipulations, quick and slow, elongated and foreshortened, inverted and reversed, stratified and ornamented, he dozed off, and there was a grainy, rapid-fire black and white movie where the private eye dumbfounded the cops, triumphantly showing them that the ransom note, their one and only clue, yielded an entirely different message held up to a mirror, and another if read upside down, and still another if -

The slam of the door woke him up. Nicki groaned, “Oh, please tell me you’ve done something other than sleep the whole time I’ve been out. Are you sure we’re the same age? A week-old fledgling could do better than that. Or,” he added with a wicked grin, lying down next to him on the floor, “did I wear you out?”

“I died in 1791,” Louis yawned. Nicolas’ eyes widened, and his hand stopped halfway down Louis’ back, and in that sudden stillness, both of them thought of bygone centuries where every inch of a woman’s skirt was meaningful, and a glimpse of ankle could destroy a reputation; and Nicolas thought of Japanese courtesans’ long years of training in precisely how much wrist to reveal, and how, and when.

Maybe it was an accident, or maybe for a moment it was too tiring to keep the door to the past locked; but in any case, Louis hadn’t meant to startle him so badly. He kissed Nicki lightly and rubbed his back and asked, “So what is this? I’ve never heard an Art of the Fugue quite like this before.”

Nicki took a quick breath and said, “I made it,” as if nothing had happened.

“Really? That’s ingenious, splicing together different tracks -”

“No. No splicing.”

Louis didn’t trust that mischievous smile; this had to be yet another bluff. But before he could protest, Nicolas got up, stopped the tape, and said, “I’ll show you.” He took out the violin, tuned it quickly, and did the impossible.

For a while, Louis watched closely, trying to understand what was happening with the bow and Nicki’s fingers, how one violin could speak with four voices, and how preternatural speed - even to his sharp eyes, things seemed to be in two places at once - could create such heavy, pensive slowness. Then he asked, “Can I see the score?”

With a glance and a flick of the tip of the bow, Nicolas pointed him toward a shelf behind him, and Louis pulled out a heavy bundle of papers. On top were sheets torn from a spiral notebook, and below that, draft after draft after draft, going back even to yellowed parchment. He set aside the rest and pored over the earliest pages, reading the frustrated marginalia. Then he turned a page, and his heart stopped.

On the back of one sheet filled with attempts at untangling a thorny passage, he found an outline of a play, with stage directions for “Maitre,” “Fils,” and “Pretre,” mostly in Nicolas’ small, dense handwriting. But there were also suggestions and embellishments in a lazily elegant hand he recognized immediately. He’d thought he was going crazy that night when Nicolas, talking to a friend on the phone, suddenly did an uncanny, eerily accurate imitation of Armand, but he wasn’t imagining things, it was true.

Nicolas stopped playing, and Louis looked up. “You knew Armand. At the Theater.”

Nicolas put the violin in its case and sat down on the floor with him, and very quietly said, “Yes. A long time ago. Long before it burned down.”

“I know, it must have been...” Louis said absently, looking down at Armand’s writing.

Nicki’s heart hammered against his ribs. He wanted to grab Louis by the shoulders and shake him, but the only thing greater than his desire to know everything was his terror of knowing everything. Finally, not even trying to sound casual, he said, “I wonder what he’s doing now.”

Louis answered, softly and precisely, “He’s torturing a mortal named Daniel Molloy.”

Nicki turned on him, feral, and yelled, “How do you know that?”

Louis reached out to touch his shoulder, but Nicki pulled back. Finally, Louis said, “It was Armand who cut off your hands, wasn’t it?”

Still glaring and panicked, Nicki said, “Yes.”

Louis narrowed his eyes. “I’m not surprised.”

Nicolas stood abruptly and walked to the window and stood for a long time, looking down through old, warped glass that barely held in the heat in the winter, his thoughts hectic and muddy, except: yes, he’d seen the way Louis’ face darkened, and how well he knew him already, how fury registered not with shouting or histrionics but with a subtle chilled hardness at the corners of his mouth. With his back still turned, he asked, “Do you still have that room at the Colonnade?”

Louis gazed at Nicolas’ back, shoulder blades standing out through his threadbare t-shirt, so vulnerable, hair tied back with a ribbon, an anachronism he was completely unconscious of (it happened to them all at some point...), long, lean body that he couldn’t stop looking at and could never get enough of, and he wished he’d never asked to see that score, that he hadn’t turned over that page. If Nicolas knew or guessed how long he’d stayed with Armand - but he didn’t even need to guess, it was over already. Louis stood up. “Of course, I understand, I’ll go if you want me to...”

Nicolas turned around, and if Louis had only known, he would have recognized the face of the boy who stood perfectly still, staring at a pistol and the face of the man behind it, not knowing if the bullet would miss altogether, clip his shoulder, tear through his heart, or shatter his skull, and then, with racing pulse and a broken smile, Nicolas said, “You idiot, why are you throwing away money on that? Don’t you know I want you here?” The End.

If by ukashi goshi New!

The brass door of the hotel elevator dulled their reflections and warmed their pale skin, and Louis could almost imagine that they were mortal. How would it have been, himself and Nicolas, just a couple of young men together? And it sent a sharp pang through him, imagining the weight of those centuries lifted, the end of history, before history, the very idea of being together before it all. They stood in silence, Louis avoiding Nicolas’ eyes as he steeled himself to do what he’d resolved to do.

The bell chimed, the doors rolled open, and they stepped out into an impossibly long corridor stretching off to a black window at the end. Wall sconces spaced evenly between the evenly spaced doors blanketed it with soft light, and the plush carpet deadened all sound. Nicolas stood listlessly for a moment, staring, distracted, but came to himself when Louis took his hand and picked the right door out of that endless procession.

Louis hadn’t been to the room in several days, but the bedside lamp was on, the bed was made neatly, covers turned down, mint on the pillow, and the staff had evidently tried to reach some sort of compromise between cleanliness and privacy: the books and clothes that he’d left carelessly scattered over the floor and the bed had been separated into contained piles, but not disturbed otherwise.

Nicolas laughed at the scene and wandered aimlessly through the room, curling his toes in the deep shag carpet (as always, he’d kicked his shoes off as soon as he got through the door), bending down to peer at the vinyl-bound Bible in the bedside drawer, the brown tiles in the bathroom, the tiny, paper-wrapped bars of soap, the slightly dusty plastic bird-of-paradise plant in a brass pot in the corner. As he fingered the heavy orange drapes, he murmured, almost to himself, “Isn’t it strange to still be alive?”

Louis hugged him from behind and rested his head on his shoulder. “Mm. All the time. Where are we?” And it struck him for the first time that Nicolas’ apartment, for all its disrepair, had something ageless about it: wood floor, bare walls, nothing decorative whatsoever, an oasis out of time.

Nicolas came out of his reverie and turned around to face him. “Nowhere worth staying.” He touched Louis’ face and asked, “Do you still want to come to me?”

Louis met his gaze and asked, “Are you sure you want me to come?”

Nicolas looked puzzled and was about to speak, but Louis had already turned away. “Would you mind helping me pack? I’ll get the clothes, you can get the books.” As he started loosely folding shirts, he watched out the corner of his eye: sure enough, Nicolas could never pick up a book without opening it.

Nicolas rummaged freely; clearly, Louis didn’t mind. A couple novels, some essays and short stories, a collection of Piranesi prints. Carceri d’Invenzione. Imaginary prisons. He smiled at the idea. When he got to a first edition of Four Quartets, he forgot about packing altogether and stood reading. When he reached the end and flipped back to the beginning, he saw a note in lazily

elegant handwriting on the inside cover:

Caro,

It’s been so long. Won’t you come back? Who in the world can understand us as we understand each other?

A.

When he looked up, Louis was watching him, unflinching. “You were lovers,” Nicolas said.

“Yes.”

“How long did you stay with him?”

“Decades.”

Nicolas was silent for a while, then said, “When I told you what he did to me, you said you weren’t surprised. Why?”

“I couldn’t be with him that long without coming to know him...”

“Don’t pull the evasive act. Why?”

Louis drew a deep breath. “He killed someone I loved, someone who depended on me. So that I would be free to go away with him.”

“And you did, didn’t you. After all that, you went with him.”

Louis thought of all the arguments he could offer in his defense: that he had been entirely alone in the world; that Armand had tricked him into believing that the others were responsible; that Armand had tempted him with the thing he wanted most desperately, knowledge; that Armand had besieged him with all the formidably seductive illusions at his command. But though all these excuses were true, he refused to hide behind them, and, burning with shame, said, “Yes.”

Nicolas’ face had been stony, impenetrable, unreadable, but now, with a flicker of paranoia in his eyes, he asked, “Are you still involved with him? Is that why you’re carrying this around? Don’t lie to me! You still care about him, don’t you?”

Louis said flatly, “I’m carrying it around because I like the poems. If Armand were still capable of provoking any reaction from me at all, I would either be with him, or I would have burned the book. And...sometimes it’s worth having a reminder of one’s mistakes.”

Nicolas seemed to back down slightly in the face of such utter cold detachment. But his face was still hard, and Louis was well aware that he might be packing

not to move in but to leave town altogether. Nicolas stared at him darkly seemingly for hours. Then he opened the book again, looked down, and read, “Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future.”

Louis continued, “And time future contained in time past.”

“If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable,” Nicolas read. Then he looked up, and though his face was still somber, in his eyes there was the beginning of his devilish, defiant grin, and he repeated softly, “If.”

Then, deliberately, he closed the book, set it down, and crossed the room. He put his arms around Louis' waist and kissed him deeply. And then he tilted his head back slightly, looked into his eyes, and silently reminded him of that night, the first time, when he’d given himself over, the first time he’d ever given the blood to a lover, and Louis had carried him past the panic and the nightmarish memories.

Louis understood, and, eyes stinging with tears, he kissed Nicolas’ throat slowly, reverently. Nicki moaned as he felt those soft lips moving against his skin, and even the pain was good as Louis’ fangs sank deep into his flesh, and then the sweet freefall as the blood flowed, so right, just as it was meant to. He buried his hands in his black hair and pressed him close, and when Louis began to let go he gasped, “Don’t stop, I don’t care”; but he had only broken off to quickly skin off Nicki’s shirt and then his own. They kissed again, furiously, and the taste of blood was unbearably arousing, but Louis’ hands were already at his waist, unbuttoning his jeans, sliding them down, lingering over his hips; impatient, Nicki twisted out of them and pulled off Louis’ jeans in seconds.

As they ravaged each others’ mouths, suddenly he felt Louis massaging his neck, rubbing his hand in the blood that had spilled before the wound started to heal itself, and then before Nicki could even wonder, Louis’ hand closed around his cock, stroking him, slick with the blood, and oh, it was too much, he couldn’t wait any longer, he was about to shove him down and take him by any means necessary, but Louis grabbed his shoulders and forced him to sit on the edge of the bed. In one fluid movement he slipped down and impaled himself, taking that whole hard length inside him, and as they found a rhythm together, they couldn’t stop gazing into each others’ eyes, seeing each other for the first time.

It was torture at first, achingly slow, and Nicki slid his hands down to Louis hips, gripping him hard enough to leave bruises, trying to move him. With expert timing (with his last remaining bit of conscious thought Nicki thought Louis should have been a musician) Louis built up momentum, and Nicki thrust up against his weight, and oh, he wanted it to last forever, but when Louis stroked his face, he turned blindly to his wrist, a reflex, that river of blood running so close to the skin, exactly as Louis had intended him to; and still looking deep into those green eyes, he bit down, and it undid him, that hot rush of blood, his lover’s heart coursing down his throat, and he came hard, only the blood he was locked to kept him from crying out, and with his free arm Louis held him close as he shuddered in violent, blissful release.

When the gash began to heal itself, Nicolas allowed it to and let go, and, chest still heaving, pulled Louis down to the bed with him and held him close. It was some time before he was in any condition to notice anything, but then he felt Louis kissing blood sweat away from his temple - such a languid, idle gesture, even though he was painfully hard, still unsatisfied. “You’re used to not getting what you want, aren’t you?” he chided him gently.

Louis’ face darkened, but Nicki laid a finger across his lips. “Forget them. I’m not some coven master, I’m not your maker.” He kissed him and shifted his weight, pulling Louis on top of him, drawing his knees up, and even as he whispered, “I want you,” he felt Louis pushing at him, and then with a gasp he was past the threshold, and for a moment it felt like his first time, like he’d be torn in half, but it wasn’t enough, and even as they moved together he begged, “No, don’t hold back - I’m not them - forget them - if you’re gentle, only because you want to - I don’t care, give it to me, all of it, I need you,” until Louis claimed his mouth.

Nicolas sliced his tongue open along one razor sharp fang and drew his knees up further, goading him, and he loved it, feeling Louis grow heavy on top of him, letting go, restraint abandoned, still thrusting deliciously slowly, but relentless instead of gentle. Without hesitation now he tore Nicki’s throat open, pulling hard, the insatiable thirst, and Nicki let his head fall back, moaning, wanting only more, tear me open, take it all, but Louis pulled back. Looking down into Nicki’s eyes, he slit open a vein in his own neck with one sharp fingernail and let the blood drip down over his parted lips. Nicki pulled him down savagely and ripped at his throat, and with a little twist Louis bit into him again, reopened the gash he’d made before.

Locked to each other, drinking deep, they tore into each other again and again the instant the wounds started to heal, and it was heady, delirious double vision, joined in the blood, each feeling the other’s body as his own, impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. Louis drove harder and harder into him until the heart-stopping, unbearable, burning ecstasy obliterated everything. And even as they convulsed against each other, they drank, and lingered there as their hearts finally quieted and exhaustion overtook them.

They dozed off holding each other, still nestled into each others’ throats. When they woke up, the clock read 4 am. “We should leave,” Louis murmured.

“Why bother...” Nicolas yawned. “Let’s just sleep here instead.”

But Louis knew from the way he had lost himself studying the room, disturbed, as if each detail were some hideous alien insect, that waking here would be a disaster; he’d probably be withdrawn and shaken for the rest of the night, and Louis would have to coax him out, lead him to a victim, and lead him back home.

Guessing that an argument might be enough to rouse him, Louis said, “And we’ll have to do something about the sheets.”

Nicki propped himself on one elbow and surveyed the damage: a few rips and copious bloodstains. “What’s wrong with them?”

“Are you crazy?”

“Who cares? It’s not like you’re leaving a corpse or something.”

Louis had already stuffed the top sheet and one pillowcase into his suitcase. Now to get Nicki out of bed so he could strip off the other sheet... He picked up Nicki’s old Doors t-shirt from the floor and inspected the bloodstain at the collar. “And you won’t be able to wear this either.”

Nicki got up and snatched it from his hand. “Why the hell not? It’s my favorite shirt!”

Louis swiftly pulled the other sheet from the bed, then peeled a few bills from his wallet and left them on the night table, weighted down with the standard-issue Bible. “Let’s finish packing.”

Haphazardly, they began dressing and piling clothes and books into the suitcase. When Nicolas tossed in Four Quartets, Louis asked him, “Do you still want me, even though I was an idiot?” But playfully; they were still lightheaded and half drunk with the swoon.

“Of course. But you really were an idiot,” Nicolas said fondly. “Not entirely your fault, though. He can be quite seductive...”

“Oh? Is this the voice of experience? Were you - ?”

“No. Kind of. Not really. In a way...”

Louis looked at him questioningly but let it go. While Nicolas was distracted, he slipped a clean shirt, one of his own, over Nicki’s head, and noted how well it fit. Looking at their reflection in the oval mirror hung over the luggage rack - how like they were, tall, strong but lean, a swimmer’s build - he said, “I guess we’re his type.”

They both broke down laughing. Then Nicolas said, “Enough of him.” He snapped the latches of the suitcase shut, slipped his arms around Louis’ waist, and then Louis felt something sharp: Nicki had slipped a key into his pocket.

Louis kissed him and pushed his dark curls out of his face and said, “Let’s go home.” The End.

Virtuoso by ukashi goshi

“Jesus, Armand, that’s the fifth time the phone has rung in the last two hours! Will you just answer it already?”

“No.”

Daniel laughed. “Screw all the Botticelli angel crap, do you know that when you give me that ‘No’ you make a little Mona Lisa face? Do you practice that one in the mirror?”

Armand just smiled at him.

“Who is it, anyway? Do you have a girlfriend?”

The phone rang again, and Armand walked away from it, out of the room. Daniel followed him.

“Are you behind on child support? Or is it a collection agency? Do you owe somebody something, and they’re coming to fit you with cement galoshes and walk you off the bow of the yacht?” Daniel chortled to himself.

Armand ruffled his hair fondly and said, “Daniel, you’re drunk.”

“News flash!” Daniel crowed, lifting his glass high. “Maybe you should be the reporter, not me,” he said, and laughed again.

The phone started ringing again, and this time, before Daniel could say anything, Armand said, “Let’s go out. What was it you suggested earlier? That we take a limo to a pizza place?”

“Yeah! And I bet I can beat you at Space Invaders.”

Armand forced Daniel to put on a clean shirt, and they left.

***

When they got home, Daniel trudged upstairs to take a shower. The phone started ringing again. Armand stared at it, unwilling, but he realized there was no way out but to answer. He lifted the receiver and closed his eyes as his guess was confirmed.

“Armand.”

“Yes?”

“I know what you’re doing. Stop it.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t play dumb with me, as they say these days. You know exactly what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.”

The voice at the other end of the line was shaking, almost broken. “You bastard, you’re ripping my thoughts out and putting them in other people’s heads! You’re stealing my memories. There is something living in my blood, and you’re making me dream those horrible dreams, those red-haired women, over and over and over! Don’t try to deny it, we both know that you are fully capable of it!”

And he’s right, I am fully capable of it, Armand thought, with a bitter smile. What is it they say, sometimes paranoiacs have real enemies? Except that in this case, of course, Armand truly had nothing to do with it. He always kept his distance, limited their contact as much as he could, and tried to forget that he existed. “Nicolas,” he said softly. “That isn’t true. We agreed to go our separate ways, and I’ve always kept up my side of the bargain…”

“’Which is more than I can say for some people,’” Nicolas minced in a prissy voice, imitating Armand’s accent.

Armand ignored him and continued, “I wish you only the best ---“

Dark laughter. “And I know all about your ‘best wishes’! Did you know that my wrists still hurt sometimes? It isn’t supposed to be that way, we’re supposed to heal. Aren’t we supposed to heal?” His voice started shaking again, as if he were holding back tears.

“What do you want from me?”

“Exactly what I said, you worthless sack of shit! This is horrible, something’s invaded my blood! Stop stealing my thoughts and putting them in other peoples’ minds. And stop making me have those terrible dreams about the twins.”

Armand froze as an idea occurred to him: if he was having exactly the same dreams Nicolas was having, was he going mad too, were they all going mad? Was it one virus infecting them all? Severely distracted, he cast about for something to say. “I listened to your latest album. It’s brilliant. And I’m glad to see that you at least have the sense to use a pseudonym,” he added, in a miserable failed attempt at levity.

Even as the words were tumbling out of his mouth, he knew it was all wrong, and cursed his bungling. The two cardinal sins: mentioning or even alluding to Lestat, and praising Nicki’s work. More than once at the theater, after someone tossed him a compliment, Nicolas had smashed a cello or torn to shreds a scrim that had taken months to paint. And after a while, even Eleni had gotten too frightened to talk to him about Lestat.

“Unlike him, you mean.”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have ---”

“Fuck your apologies. I don’t care. Make it stop. Please, you have to make it stop.” The plunge from fury to groveling was as nauseatingly swift as one of those virtuosic caprices he’d loved to shatter their ears with, the compositions

that later found their way into the hands of his mortal namesake Paganini.

Armand drew a deep breath, trying to gather the courage to speak. “Nicolas…you are not the only one.” He paused. “I’ve had those dreams too, and so have some of the others.”

“Bullshit!” Nicki hissed scornfully. “You’ve always been a liar. You are the virtuoso of lying! That’s why you loved the theater, and that’s you did all those things to me! You used the stage to lie, and I used it to tell the truth.”

Oh, how well he remembered it: all of them knew it, that however bad Nicki’s raving was, his moments of lucidity were far worse. Trying to keep his voice calm and measured, Armand said, “This has nothing to do with me. I’m not doing anything to you.”

There was such a long pause that Armand wondered if he’d hung up, but then Nicki said, “I hear you’ve been keeping a pet mortal these days. How touching! Are you getting sentimental in your old age? He must be very interesting. Maybe I should track him down for a little chat? After all, I remember that you were very eager to invite me over when I was someone’s mortal protege…”

Enraged, Armand drew himself up, and his face settled into stony impenetrability. He was completely unaware, as he’d always been, that whenever he assumed that stance, he looked every bit as severe and implacable as Marius, curls and soft mouth notwithstanding. As coven master, he had been feared with good reason. Coldly, he said, “Nicolas, if you do not stop calling me, I will be forced to inform our mutual acquaintance that your supposed death on the pyre was a fiction.”

Nicolas snorted. “I bet you’re standing there with the old coven master look, aren’t you?”

Armand blushed, disconcerted: until that moment, he had been entirely unconscious of the mask he was putting on for what was, after all, just a phone call. But he narrowed his eyes and bluffed, “I have his number right here, shall I call him?”

He heard only silence, and then a click as Nicolas hung up.

***

Toweling off after the shower, Daniel faintly overheard Armand talking on the phone, though he didn’t catch any words. It was over by the time he was dressed. As he started down the stairs, he called out, “So who was that? Did you finally talk to that asshole who kept calling earlier? Maybe you should find out where he lives and eat him so he’ll stop calling all the time.”

He was halfway to the kitchen to fix himself a drink before he noticed, startled, that Armand was sitting motionless on the couch with his face buried in his hands. His hair was clipped short that night, and with his nape bared, he looked

suddenly boyish and defenseless.

Daniel forgot about the drink and sat down next to Armand, putting an arm around his shoulders, kissing the top of his head. “Hey,” he said softly, “What is it? What happened?”

Armand lifted his face from his hands, and it was streaked with bloody tears. He opened his mouth to speak, then stopped, shook his head. Daniel suppressed a little sigh of irritation as he saw that this was yet another question he’d never get an answer to. But Armand let Daniel hold him, trying and failing to drown it all out in his mortal warmth and the thrum of his heartbeat. The End.