Aftercare

Half of Daniel Molloy’s throat is on the floor beside him. Most of his blood is down the vampire Armand’s gullet, or smeared messily on the lower half of his face. On his fingers, where some predator’s instinct has him prying deeper into the ragged wound he’s made of his victim, fingers curling—Daniel understands in some distant, clinical way, his dying mind’s protection—around the back of his neck to pull him closer, but they’re on the wrong side of his skin. Holding his naked, bloody spine.

A nasty crack, a horrible, lightning-bright shock of pain. Daniel tries wiggling his fingers and toes and finds he still can, so he doesn’t know what it was, if not his neck breaking. He doesn’t understand the noise that follows, wet suction. Almost dirty, except it hurts, it hurts, it hurts—

The world is fading out around him, less a light at the end of the tunnel and more barrelling headlong into it. Everything begins to feel far away, the sounds, the sensations, and death, it turns out, is only like a bath if the bath is a frigid, storm-wracked ocean, and he isn’t easing into it—he’s being dragged down with weights around his ankles, kicking and splashing desperately to stay afloat. He doesn’t want to die. He knows he’s going to, that it’s inevitable, but he’s too stubborn to go easy. His fingers, knotted in Armand’s hair, tug fruitlessly trying to dislodge him. An old man’s evanescent strength has nothing on the undead monstrosity glutting itself on his final moments.

Daniel thinks a stream of invective as loud and abrasive as possible, curses and insults and things he’d get cancelled on social media for, probably, if anyone knew. If he was really saying them. But he can't say them because he doesn't have a goddamn trachea anymore, chewed up and spat out beside him by a monster. He thinks worse things, too, because that tripped Armand up earlier, didn’t it? If he can make him flinch, maybe he can flee. If he gets down the elevator, some receptionist will call an ambulance, and Armand is powerful, but he can’t walk. Fuck him up enough, he might momentarily forget he can freeze every muscle in Daniel’s body.

Daniel Molloy has been an investigative reporter since the seventies. Ten years ago, he started working on a book about the dark web, Silk Road, all that shit. He’s seen and heard some of the very worst the human race has to offer, from the AIM chat logs of card-carrying NAMBLA members to the firsthand accounts of Liberian ex-child soldiers for whom cannibalism had turned ordinary. And he has a good imagination. Too good, maybe. My first memory. I’m running from slavers in Delhi. My second…

Daniel envisions the scene, a scrawny little Arun or whatever his name actually is shaking in the grip of some blurry-faced assailant in the nonspecific and probably woefully inaccurate hull of a boat. One big hand on his shoulder, another pinching his jaw open. Another man pulling out his dick, saying, You even think about biting, and I’ll pull your teeth out one by one. Armand snarls into Daniel’s mauled throat. His claws carve out divots in the floor with the hand that isn’t curled around Daniel’s spinal column. He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t budge. Fury, not fear. Daniel needs to try another angle; here, he knows too little. He’s flying blind.

Easier to imagine in all that lurid detail—much easier—is 1951. Santiago, who Daniel’s seen photos of. Armand, ancient and powerful and in the same breath fucking pathetic, bent over the open rat box while the rest of the coven watches, ready to help overpower their former maître. Santiago must have wanted to fuck Armand, must have wanted to rape him. Must have been as disappointed as Daniel to find him unrapeable, too much of a slut not to melt for anyone sticking something in him. A cock, a hand, a blade. He fucks into Armand with brutal thrusts that stain both their thighs with blood. The rats, starving in their box, tuck into a limp arm. Louis, starving in his own, screams and screams and screams.

At once, Armand pushes himself upright as best he can, useless legs sprawled under and beside. “Louis!” Armand is gasping, looking past Daniel beneath him, the name in Armand’s mouth like something forgotten.

This is his moment. Daniel has to flee. He has the adrenaline for it, he thinks. He pushes himself upright too, closing the new gap between his chest and Armand’s, and then he brings one hand to the ruined mess of his throat—pressure, you have to apply pressure—while he’s inching back with the other and his legs. Armand is sprawled partly atop him, having bowled them both over when he pounced, so Daniel has to dislodge his weight, too. His fly is still undone, he realizes when he looks down at his lap: tighty whities blood-stained and wet from when he tucked away his cock. What a sight he’ll make for the front desk girl.

His head swims, a cold sensation down the back of his neck. Blood loss. He can push through it. He has to push through it. Survive this monster a second time.

Armand’s gaze cuts back to Daniel’s face, his eyes like neon lights. He sees the meat of Daniel’s throat slipping out of his fingers, Daniel’s breath blowing bubbles in his blood between them. He grabs Daniel’s shoulder, and they both go toppling when Daniel’s arms give out under their weight.

That’s it. His chance blown, for good this time. Daniel feels oddly calm about it.

And then Armand’s expression melts into desolation like a Dalí painting. “No,” he breathes, so he can say it, after all. “No, no, no, no, no. What have I done? What have I done? You—you can’t…”

Daniel watches, bemused, as Armand brings one wrist up between their bodies to his bloody maw, slicing the vein open with one of those little kitten fangs of his from wrist halfway to the inside of his elbow. “You can’t die,” he’s mumbling. “Louis would never forgive me.” Then he presses his bleeding wrist to Daniel’s mouth.

 

 

In 1976, Daniel totaled his brother-in-law’s Oldsmobile—went straight into one of those galvanized steel highway guard rails at eighty-something miles an hour on a steeper turn than he’d expected, his cocaine-fuelled joy ride coming to an end in a few short seconds of pure terror. He was unfathomably lucky, the EMTs told him, to be alive and only minorly injured, but after four hours trapped alone and starting to get the shakes in a hunk of metal with whiplash and a broken leg, he didn’t feel lucky. Until a few days ago, he’d remembered this as, honestly, probably the worst experience of his life: awkward when it was entirely self-inflicted, for a man who engaged in self-recrimination only when he thought it would earn him praise, a dog playing fetch. Good boy.

He’d had guns pulled on him before, been locked in a room with men with a habit of disappearing their enemies, times where for minutes or hours he had no idea if he would make it out alive, but it’s the car crash that stuck in his brain. The soaring high crashing so suddenly back down to Earth, the rat-trap feeling that set in once the drugs and adrenaline faded. Those few heartbeats before the collision, when he realized what was about to happen, and that there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Of course, now that he remembers everything that happened in that shitty apartment on Divisadero, he has a new worst to contend with, courtesy of the vampire Armand. He’d spent the better part of a week as a neurotic psychopath’s chew toy… metaphorically speaking, anyway. No matter how much he degraded himself, begged, assured him he wouldn’t fight back, he wouldn’t breathe a word of this, please, you can do whatever you want to me, just promise to let me go, and then, later, bitterly, will you just kill me already and get it over with—Armand refused to drink from him.

“I can do whatever I want to you anyway,” he said with a tight little smile absent any pleasure. Lectured him about the amount of time it took the various substances Daniel had partaken in to become truly undetectable in his blood, talking about half-lives and parts-per-million, talking about how Daniel Molloy was a waste of air, yes, but he was not so impatient as to pollute himself with his blood. Five days until Daniel died, whiling away the hours with infomercials and failed attempts at seduction and appeasement. His heart wasn’t in them; he knew, bone deep, that Armand was going to kill him, so what was the point? And he even turned out to be right, in the end. Five days, fifty years—the blink of an eye for something like Armand, a creature with a metabolism so slow it measures its meals in months.

Dying is a plunge into ice water, and Daniel comes up from the baptismal font frantic and gasping for a communion that hits ten times better than any line of coke or PCP-spiked roll-up, Armand’s ancient blood spilling onto his tongue fresh from the vein while he—Armand—is the one weeping and begging for a change, please, please, please. For a few perfect seconds Daniel is drunk on his own blood loss and high as Icarus, in that liminal state between prey and predator—and then whatever profane link binds maker and fledgling snaps like a magnet and—

Now: the crash. It’s like hitting that guard rail at eighty-five, it’s like beeswax melting and sending Icarus hurtling down to Earth, to the ocean over the Marianas fucking trench, it’s like nothing Daniel has ever felt. In the script for Louis and Claudia’s lynching, Lestat takes a human’s hand and with the Mind Gift shows him loneliness: the single worst thing a vampire can feel, Santiago was supposed to say. Only it isn’t true. Daniel is feeling vampire loneliness right now, Louis’ loss in Armand’s blood, in his heart like someone cut it right out of his chest, and it’s terrible, it’s terrible, the complete and utter assurance of a thing that knows it will claw always and forever for life, or for what for a vampire passes for it, that at the heat death of the universe it will be here, and it will be alone, and it will be unloved and unwanted by anything it is capable of comprehending. Allah is all-knowing, all-merciful, yes—and it is only by that truly infinite mercy the vampire Armand can be seen and known and not abhorred.

To Daniel, that loneliness is almost unfathomable. But it is not the worst thing he can feel in the blood. The worst thing is—

it is not your best friend who lies rotting in your cell, although he has your best friend’s face. had his face. astaghfirullah wa atubu ilaih. your best friend is dead, has been for years. you watched him take his last breath, peaceful in his bed, head turned towards the kaaba—a sight he never had the chance to see through his own eyes, although you shared it with him as soon as you learned your master’s magic that pulled thoughts out of people’s heads or put new ones inside. your best friend lived a full life, unlike you, freedom at thirty and a wife he married under his christian name and a son who inherited the texture of his hair, the shape of his nose, a smile that could light up any room. only it never will again, because his lips now are strips of meat gnawed for the traces of capillary blood. maggots now make a home in the barren landscape that once was a chest, ribs snapped for their marrow and heart unrolled like a garland for every last drop, and you, you are a monster, a parasite, you have known this boy since birth and he called you ‘uncle’ and you repaid his trust, his father’s trust with

the worst thing—

your master’s murderer holds you by the hair over the pyre of so many innocent children; some of them still scream. you gaze upon your imminent not-quite-martyrdom, feel the flames licking your cheek, and you beg. craven thing that you are—now that you know jahannam awaits you fear death as you never did before—you beg the vampire santino for mercy, anything, you’ll do anything. half your face has burned away when he pulls you off the pyre, and you sob your thanks at his feet. his cock is half-hard in his hose, and you are well-trained, warmth pooling low in your belly and saliva gathering in the back of your mouth even as conscious thought slips away where so many things go, so you reach up to undress him but he shoves you away and

the worst thing—

you arch up into his hand, impossibly hard and sobbing, master, master, and he says, it’s all right, amadeo. he says it and so it is true. he wraps his hand around your penis and makes it so it becomes a cock, that unyielding tool men use to hurt, and he says that is all right, too, that it is good, and so it must be true. you swallow down your nausea and let it be good. it is only by your master’s magic the thing stirs—bianca has tried, despite your pleading she did not have to tend to you so, and you too have tried alone in secret, each to no avail—and you cannot hurt your master, so that’s all right.

you give in helplessly to sensation, the drip of blood down your back from the whip, the strain on your shoulders and wrists from being strung up, the ice cold hand encircling the awful thing between your legs, the teeth scraping your throat. you can’t recall what you did to earn this punishment, but you hope whatever evil led you to it will be drawn out of you at last in the odd, clear fluid that your penis expels instead of semen or urine or blood, and

the worst thing—

they are furious at you for wasting their time, and nearly wasting their money. maybe they would have let a girl flee, but not many boys survived the gelding. it’s up to you to earn back their losses at the market. but samarqand is still very far away, and, well, you aren’t a girl, more valuable intact; so long as you’re undamaged, you’re worth more broken in. you spread your legs obediently for the man who dragged you back—there’s no point struggling against the inevitable.

you wish the girl who’s screaming would just be quiet. stop it, she’s crying, tamo, doro naa, amar fua doro naa. don’t touch him, don’t hurt my son. it’s hard to understand her with half her teeth broken. she must be confused: your mother was beautiful, and this girl is bloody-mouthed and black-eyed, ruined. but she cries your name, ████, u’eedhuka bi—

a hard sound, then—an impact—and she makes no more sound, masha’allah; it hurt to listen to her crying. the man inside him scoffs out a laugh. easier to sell one, anyway, he says, and

the worst thing—

you are four years old, lingering at the doorway of a mosque in delhi. someone—you can’t remember who—told you to run here, to find the first mosque you could and hide inside, to tell whoever is there you were born muslim. but now you stand on the threshold and you cannot go further, because you are junub, impure, and it is forbidden. you have to go to the river first and bathe.

The worst thing Daniel Molloy can feel in his maker’s blood, so much worse than the loneliness, worse even than the wholly unexpected terror that grips him like a drowning man, is a wave of revulsion that breaks over Daniel with so much force it would stagger him if he weren’t already pinned to Louis du Lac’s living room floor. Pure loathing and disgust, almost all of it self-directed. Armand’s self-hatred catches sight of its reflection in Daniel’s hatred of him, and like any mirror, then, it stretches immediately to infinity: loathing by way of nuclear reaction. This is an H-bomb; this is the sun.

Armand was begging, earlier: for Daniel to drink, for Daniel to live, for forgiveness—maybe Louis’, maybe Allah’s—but now he’s just making these horrible little keening sounds, too broken to be sobs. Daniel can feel his shuddering breaths against his chest, and the terrible intimacy of it, the connection between maker and fledgling that, fuck him, Louis was not exaggerating in the slightest, feels like a greater violation than anything that came before. There’s a red string of fate tying him to the vampire Armand for all eternity now, with a tin can telephone on the line through which all Daniel can hear is screaming. He didn’t fucking ask for this.

The first act of the vampire Daniel Molloy is to use his newfound strength to push his maker off of him. He rolls over and vomits up everything in his stomach: his half-digested final meal, filet mignon with a blackberry balsamic glaze he and Louis both took rare; Armand’s blood, room temperature and syrup-thick; a very wet martini that burns much, much worse coming up than it did going down. He remembers the taste of maggots and the face of a teenage girl—she couldn’t have been older than eighteen or nineteen—forced to watch her child’s rape, and that sets him off again, spitting up yellow bile.

He’d thought it was all just some fucked up game to Armand. Too kinky to torture, maybe bait for some sob story to go to Louis with later, all big doe eyes and perfectly blameless, forced the same way the coven ‘forced’ him to watch Louis’ lynching. He’d thought he was playing right into Armand’s hand, sure, but it was worth it. He’d known he wasn’t getting out of the penthouse alive. He wanted to hurt Armand, and Armand… Armand wanted to be hurt, for whatever inscrutable reason. It was all copacetic. Daniel isn’t—wasn’t—a rapist.

But if any of that were true, Daniel would know it. He’d be feeling Armand’s freaky, masochistic pleasure through their bond, or at least some kind of scheming eunuch, chessmaster satisfaction. He wouldn’t be feeling whatever this is, all-consuming misery and disgust and whatever seems to pass for a vampiric panic attack, the body’s understanding of fear equal parts psychological and somatic. Without a beating heart to hammer away in his chest, telling his body he’s afraid, the primal terror seeping into Daniel’s flesh feels stuck in his throat, almost, like when you know you need to vomit but it’s just not happening. He’s hyperventilating, but he doesn’t need to breathe, so the carbon dioxide isn’t making him light-headed, isn’t doing anything to calm him down. He’s just trapped up there on the summit, the panic an Everest, or maybe a K2. Plenty of tourists have climbed Everest, after all (for a given value of ‘climbed’)—Everest is the summit the Théâtre des Vampires played sherpa on for a century and a half, totalling some fifty-seven thousand victims dumped in the Rainbow Valley, the rat box, whatever. “Labored metaphor,” Daniel mutters to himself.

Armand hasn’t moved a muscle from where Daniel shoved him off of him. Isn’t breathing. There’s a crust of blood down his cheeks but he’s not crying anymore, even though Daniel is. Sense-memory hits him again, the only escape in indifference. I could not prevent it. Armand learned to play possum before Martin Luther had nailed his ninety-five theses to the door, and he never unlearned it. But when would he have had the chance to? When he got bought by some Renaissance gentleman who lent him out to his buddies, yet as far as Armand was concerned had still more than earned the ‘World’s Greatest Master’ mug in his cabinet? When emancipation from slavery came in the form of a Satanic cult that force-fed him his best friend’s kid? For fuck’s sake.

Five hundred something years old, probably the most powerful creature on Earth, and look at him—if ever it were in doubt that man is the measure of all things, look no further than the ancient monster ragdolling on the floor, blood and come on its thighs because it learned young there was no point fighting back. Armand had nothing to fear from a geriatric mortal; he could have ripped Daniel to shreds, could have stopped time and dragged himself away into some quiet corner like a sick pet, could have (I can do whatever I want to you)—could have done anything. And yet.

And yet.

Daniel isn’t a bad person. He’s made mistakes, sure—who hasn’t? Huge, absolutely ruinous mistakes, even, mistakes he’ll carry with him to the… well. Past the grave, now. When he was nineteen, he came home to find his roommate asleep on the futon with spoon and lighter on the upturned milk carton they used as a coffee table, and he thought, I should probably check on him. But he was simultaneously stoned and drunk and that seemed like a lot of steps; Daniel reassured himself that Isaac was fine, just sleeping it off. The coroner’s report, later, estimated he was still alive when Daniel got home. Daniel didn’t kill him, didn’t have anything to do with it—probably couldn’t have prevented it, either, not in the state he was in. Even if he had, who’s to say Isaac, who was blowing through thirty or forty bucks of smack a day, would’ve made it another week?

Still, innocence doesn’t preclude guilt. Sometimes Daniel feels grandiose enough to call himself haunted, if only in the privacy of his own thoughts. Isaac’s death set the tone for the rest of Daniel’s life, one long series of stupid mistakes and unspeakable sexual fantasies after another. But the fantasies were just fantasies, and the mistakes—he isn’t a fucking rapist. Armand could have—should have—stopped him.

Daniel gags again, but nothing comes up. A little strand of pink-tinted spit hangs from his lower lip. He’s considering jamming his fingers up there, just for the sake of completion, when his stomach churns in a wholly different way. “Fuck,” he manages, scrambling up with his half-undone trousers and unsteady legs like the blood-sucking foal he is, and stumbles his way to the nearest bathroom.

An hour later, he’s expelled everything from every possible orifice, washed his face, and had a staring contest with himself like a dog snarling at the mirror, the thing in the reflection uncanny with an unscarred throat and lamp-bright eyes. By the time he’s changed into clean clothes, he’s nearly come to terms with the fact he’s going to leave Dubai some given value of ‘alive’.

He throws out his old clothes—Louis and Armand don’t seem like the plastic bag sort—and tosses the rest of his shit in his carry-on. He’s starving, but he’s trying not to think about that.

He has no idea how to get out of Dubai now, unless he’s inherited the Sunscreen Gift, or whatever Armand’s deal is. Louis isn’t replying to messages, maybe because he’s on a plane to New Orleans, maybe because Armand has already gone crying to him telepathically and Daniel’s on his shit list for taking it too far. More than a few people blocked his number when Alice finally took the girls and left.

Maybe he can just stay here: squatter’s rights, and all that. Get a new laptop with the power of Amazon one-day delivery, see the sun for a little while longer through the treated floor-to-ceiling windows. Louis won’t be back for a while—not until he’s either fucked or fought it out with Lestat—and Armand has probably crawled to some out-of-the-way corner of the servant’s quarters to nurse his wounds by now, Daniel figures. Maybe he can find the number for Louis’ cruelty-free blood guy.

He’s so hungry.

“Fuck,” Daniel says to the empty room.

Leaving his bag half-packed on the mattress, he pads barefoot through the penthouse. It’s not silent anymore; some smart home schedule kicked in while Daniel was worshipping at the porcelain throne, issuing a desolate instrumental from hidden speakers that follows Daniel from room to room. There will come soft rains. That was set in ‘26, wasn’t it? Not too far away, now. “Guess that makes me the dog,” Daniel mutters as he lets himself into the immaculate chef’s kitchen.

He finds a well-stocked pantry, and in the fridge, neatly wrapped sandwiches and divided bowls of rice and curry, rows of sparkling water and badam milk in cans. A bowl of pineapple slices. Nothing for a vampire. No duck blood soup, no black sausage, no sterile bags of O-neg. But he can smell something that makes his stomach growl. Follows it back out of the kitchen instinctively, half-afraid he’s about to commit his first homicide.

Finds… Armand, still in the living room. He’s gotten his trousers pulled back up since Daniel left him here, dragged his broken body a few metres away from the crater it left in the wall to prop himself up in the corner of the room. He’s covered in blood, dry and flaking in some places, drying and tacky in others. Some’s his—from Louis’ claws, from his own teeth in his wrist. From Daniel’s cock, drying on his thighs under his trousers. Most of it’s Daniel’s—on his hands, on his clothes, on his face.

Daniel’s stomach growls. Armand notices him, then, flinching so minutely that Daniel would never have noticed it if it weren’t for the secondhand adrenaline spike he gets through the bond. The fear.

The revulsion and self-hatred, when it comes through the bond, feels different this time, focused not on his bloody teeth and hands but in the ghostly sensation of a big hand cupping his chin, in an ache in his hip and the strain of muscles. He doesn’t know who Daniel is, Daniel realises with a thrill. Oh, sweet thing. Broken toy. He comes closer, and Armand presses himself closer to the wall, like he can make himself invisible. Probably with the Mind Gift he could have, before he fed himself to Daniel. So whose fault is that, huh? Daniel feels a burst of affection and desire that comes entirely from within himself, part natural fondness for the pathetic, part equally-natural urge to lay claim to what’s his.

His maker, his creator, his killer. Yes, his.

Daniel kneels down over Armand’s frozen form: terror above and paralysis below. It makes him think of those six days in the apartment on Divisadero again, locked inside his own body, caked in his own filth, the monster—this monster—staring into his soul and waiting to devour him. It gets him hot, the reversal. It feels right that Armand should be afraid of him. And unlike Armand, Daniel will show mercy. He’s not a bad person.

Daniel holds Armand’s face in his hands and tastes himself, his mortal self, on Armand’s slack lips. Chases every last trace of blood from uncovered skin, the hunger still screaming for more, anything, clawing at the inside of his stomach like it can tear itself free like the xenomorph and exist outside of him, pure monstrosity. Ask him a few hours ago, and he’d have guessed that’s what happened to Armand, or whoever he was before he was this—but Daniel knows better now, can feel his soft parts flinching away from the light. Five hundred years, and Armand is still human. Daniel is still human.

The contradiction at the heart of it all: all the worst atrocities are committed by men against other men, but to see them through you must choose to forget it is a man’s blood on your hands.

Armand isn’t an insect to crush underfoot. Daniel can’t afford to forget that. Still, he finds himself fighting the impulse. It’s not his fault, really: there’s just something uncanny about him, something in the way he moves that sets off Daniel’s hindbrain, and it hasn’t gone away now he’s a member of the blood-drinking undead himself. Protect yourself, some deep-rooted evopsych impulse insists, kill it, kill it while you can.

Daniel scoops Armand up with an effortlessness he hadn’t had even when he was young. “C’mon, up you get,” he murmurs, soft-voiced and kind as he can, trying to think of when Lenora was a kid and broke her leg rollerskating. Armand is surprisingly frail in his arms. His chin comes to rest on Daniel’s shoulder, and his throat is right there at his nose, dab of vetiver and ambergris at the hinge of his jaw, copper-rich blood running beneath soft skin. Daniel’s mouth waters. His stomach cramps up.

When Daniel bites, Armand doesn’t fight it. Just the opposite—he digs his claws into Daniel’s shirt like he’s clinging for dear life, cries out high and childlike, wordless at first, then, “Ay idim, men sizge minnatdârmen, minnatdârmen.”¹ He’s weeping, blood running in rivulets down to the tip of his nose and dripping wastefully to the floor, but through their bond Daniel feels a rush of gratitude and supplication, love and love and love, and he’s dizzy with it, undeserving. He stumbles against the wall, and takes a moment, breathing hard like it will do anything but move air.

 

 

Eventually he makes it to the master bathroom, Armand limp in his arms, still murmuring. Drained of blood, he can no longer weep. “What language is that?” Daniel asks, thinking out loud more than anything. “Same one you use for the names of prayers? It’s not Arabic, doesn’t sound like something they’d be speaking in Delhi. Is it Turkish? The Ottomans were buddies with Venice for a while there, weren’t they?” He climbs over the lip of the enormous bath/shower combination, then sets Armand down and starts perfunctorily stripping him naked.

A spike of fear. Armand grabs his wrist, looking up at him with wide eyes. “Ay idim, siz munga qul qoyunguz…”²

Daniel shakes him off, easy to do when all Armand’s blood is either in Daniel’s stomach or on the living room floor. “I can’t understand you,” he reminds him. In Armand’s state, it’s probably mutual. “Wanna try that again?”

Armand closes his eyes, tips his head away, baring his neck. It’s hard to tell if that’s intentional, if he’s making an effort to look appealing or if Daniel is just that easy he’ll go for any halfway-pretty corpse. Either way, it’s working for him. Armand had been breathing to speak, but now he’s silent. His hands lay loose on either side of him, palms up: maybe he’s praying, or maybe they just fell that way. He looks dead.

But he’s still in there. Still somewhere, Constantinople or Aleppo, his very own Divisadero St apartment—wherever and whenever the vampire Armand was human, and helpless, and afraid. Daniel can feel the shape of it through their bond. Making sense of the finer details of emotions is a bit like trying to make out words underwater, but it’s not hard at all to recognise a scream.

“What’d you see in my head when you killed me?” Daniel asks, tossing Armand’s shoes onto the bathroom floor before he wrestles his trousers and underwear off. “Did you see yourself? You must have. I mean, I’ve been seeing you in my nightmares every night since I remembered. And I think… probably a lot of nights before that, too.” In his twenties and early thirties he used to have night terrors almost every night. He’d wake up sure there was a bright-eyed thing wrapped in shadow at the foot of his bed, just crouching there staring at him as he laid there, unable to move.

Armand, of course, does not answer. He does cover himself with his hands, a childlike gesture out of place on such a gangly body. He does watch Daniel, though he’s pretending not to. A flash of colour through barely-cracked eyelids.

Daniel keeps pushing, like Armand is a bruise, a loose tooth. “Is that why you’re broken now? Saw yourself through someone else’s eyes and realised no amount of daily prayers can make you anything but a monster?”

Armand makes an indescribable noise below the limits of human hearing, this awful little slip of a whine. Maybe he understands Daniel right now after all. Maybe he’s just reacting to the sight he’s pretending he’s not watching.

Daniel tosses his own clothes onto the bathroom floor, although he doesn’t really know why he bothers. His fresh, clean shirt is already covered in blood. “I’m not going to just leave you in your own filth,” Daniel points out to Armand as he turns the water on. The filth is Daniel’s, by and large, but it clings to Armand, and it becomes him and it becomes his. There is a certain allure to it. An eager black hole.

What was it he said? Even your transgressions are ordinary. To someone like Armand, someone with his history, what was this? Nothing shocking. Nothing out of the ordinary. Louis probably did worse every day, and Armand begged for it.

Daniel lathers up a sponge and starts the work of scrubbing the dried blood and concrete dust from Armand’s skin. Slowly, the water turns pink. Armand doesn’t so much as twitch, but he’s still making that fucking noise, low and piteous and kind of nauseating, honestly, in a way that the CIA could probably weaponise. When Daniel pokes at the bond it feels like turning on the television to bars and tone.

And then Daniel reaches between Armand’s legs to clean up the mess he made of his hole and Armand seizes up like electricity’s running through him, gasping with this wordless, shaky cry, eyes big and wide and scared. He thrashes, aimless and desperate, a fish on the deck.

“Hey, hey!” Daniel gets a hand around his shoulder, thumb in the divot of his throat, and holds Armand down. Already drained of blood, he’s weak, a lot weaker than he should be. He goes down easy under the soapy water, eyes still open, limbs still thrashing. Oh, fuck you, Daniel thinks, suddenly furious for no reason he can name. The pot boiling over, a dozen things to hate him for. And he wants Armand to hurt.

The fact he’s hard again he doesn’t even clock until Armand knees him in the balls. Tears in his eyes paint the world red. He throttles Armand about it a little, shaking him under the water. His hair is pretty down there, loose like a mermaid.

Once he recovers, he palms himself with a pump of overpriced soap and bullies his way inside. The fissures split again, almost entirely bloodlessly, opening him up to be used. Daniel groans into it, satisfied. Beneath the blood-tinged water, Armand’s big eyes dart anywhere and everywhere but Daniel’s face.

Armand is warmer this time, or more accurately, Daniel is colder, his newly-dead body slowly dropping down to its new, room-temperature normal. It’s not bad—obviously Daniel’s got two kids, just because he’s had a bit of a necrophiliac fantasy doesn’t mean he can’t enjoy himself with a warm body, but this is, it’s something else. Still too cold, but only a little bit. Like he’s fresh; like Daniel killed him. The predator in him feels sated. The man he’d like to be cringes away.

It’s not a matter of some newfound monstrosity—he feels that predator’s satisfaction every time he wins a fight, every time he gets an interviewee to admit the truth. It’s the perfectly human core of him. But it’s cruel, and it’s perfectly at home in the fantasy of murder, and he’s never been so afraid of himself as he is right now.

After a little while, Armand stops trying to fight. He stops doing anything at all, even—seemingly—think. Eyes open and empty, lips slightly parted.

“Fuck,” Daniel swears, pulling out without finishing and pulling Armand up, mouth and nose clear of the water by his armpits. Vampires can’t drown, can they? He looks at the bloodless wound on Armand’s throat, which hasn’t made any overtures towards healing, and thinks hysterically: well, they can starve. “Armand? Armand.” He smacks him across the face. Panic swells in him. Their bond is quiet. It feels hideously wrong.

“What do you want?” The words are tiny, miserable. Distant, like he’s just woken up. Daniel can’t place the accent, but it doesn’t sound like the Queen’s English.

Relief is a tidal wave washing over him. “I thought you were dead.”

“Oh,” says Armand. There’s a flicker of something through the bond, though his face retains a doll’s perfect impassivity. Daniel can’t read the emotion, there and gone too fast. “No. You are not a killer just yet. Are you going to finish?”

Daniel doesn’t understand what he means, at first, and then he shudders. His cock is still hard, but— “No. Murder puts me off.”

The bond must go both ways; Armand will know that’s not exactly the truth. He closes his eyes, hums softly. “You and Louis are… very alike,” he says.

One hundred and twenty-eight boys raped and murdered in San Francisco, and at the turn of the new millennium, Louis swore off killing. Daniel’s throat is dry. “Maybe we are,” he agrees.