fight // جاهد

They must have raped me on the boat because I don’t remember coming to Constantinople. I don’t remember being hungry, cold, outraged or afraid.

Now here for the first time, I knew the particulars of rape, the stinking grease, the squabbling, the curses over the ruin of the lamb. I felt a hideous unsupportable powerlessness.

Loathsome men, men against God and against nature. [...]

Several times I resolved to pray. But I discovered I couldn’t remember the words.

—The Vampire Armand, Anne Rice

 

 

It isn’t as devastating as Armand expected, losing Louis. Perhaps because he knew, almost from the start, the day would come. Louis would pack his bags and move on from Paris, Armand had been sure, and then he had been sure Louis would burn at Santiago’s hands when Armand could not—would not, he had chosen Louis, that first time, and would not—do a coven master’s duty, and after that, well. Every fledgling comes to hate his maker, in time. Armand may not have been the one to bring Louis into the blood, but he was Louis’ maker as surely as the vampire who murdered his master and sent him to Paris was Armand’s.

Louis was always going to leave. Armand knew that. Santino had taught him that. Everyone Amadeo loved he childishly imagined he would have forever, and everyone he lost. Bianca, sick because of him, because she loved Amadeo and let him steal into her bed. Marius, burned because of him, because he loved Amadeo enough for eternity. Riccardo, rotting on the floor of a cell because of him, because he loved Amadeo and stayed even though he was free.

Claudia ash because of him, because Armand loved Louis and in loving him damned them all.

(Claudia, eternally young and desirable. Claudia, in all that Marian blue. Claudia, tolerated in life but beloved in death. Imagine me without the burden of her, Armand remembers Louis saying. And yet. Would that Amadeo had been the one to burn, rather than his master. Would that he could have left Marius a martyr to mourn and love forever.)

Armand, crumpled on the floor with a severed spinal cord and cement dust coating hair and skin and clothes like the ashes over Pompeii, thinks nothing, feels nothing. Claudia, a phantom, stares down at him, triumph sitting strangely uneasy on her face. She leaves, and Daniel stays. Daniel, Vesuvius. You can’t really be angry with a volcano; it’s in its nature to destroy everything in its vicinity. What is Armand, Amadeo, Arun’s excuse?

“Come to me,” Armand orders, because he cannot move. Daniel’s body obeys whilst his mind recoils. Armand is sick of hearing the boy’s voice, so he stops it in his throat. “Come to me,” he says again. “Rest.”

Daniel is tired, and old, and a much greater part of him wants to die than did that boy in San Francisco. Armand takes no joy in the fact he was proven largely correct in the matter of the course Daniel’s life took. Succumbing easily to Armand’s control, Daniel kneels over Armand with unnatural ease, his features twisting with that petty, insignificant pain. Armand reaches up, catching Daniel’s chin, and turns the boy’s face towards Mecca. The beast, the butcher.

Allah, may His glory be glorified, forbids the consumption of blood, but if someone is compelled by necessity—neither driven by desire nor exceeding their immediate need—they will not have committed a sin. Surely Allah is all-forgiving, all-merciful. Over the long centuries, Armand’s precise methods have changed. There is no hadith regarding which practices are obligatory for vampires, which are forbidden, which are recommended. Until he returned to Egypt with Louis in the 1950s, Armand had never even met a Muslim coven but his own. For a very long time, he had only his own effort with which to attempt to apply divine law to their messy, halfway-mortal lives.

When he was still Amadeo, he thought himself incontrovertibly damned, a monster to whom Allah had turned His back. One day, Amadeo wept so long and hard even his master lost patience with him, dragging him out of his sarcophagus and whipping him until he had something to really cry about. If you are damned, said Marius, then I will remind you that you begged to be damned. I indulged all of this foolishness when it seemed to bring you some comfort in the night, all your little rituals and superstitions. I never forced you to paint, I let you keep your fasts, I took you on that wretched pilgrimage like some cat-worshipper going down the Nile to Boubastis, and for what? For you to weep like a child over this supposed damnation you invited? I was six hundred years old when your Prophet was latched onto his mother’s teat. You are a blood-drinker now, Amadeo. Open your eyes. We are the gods.

It was Santino, of all people, who first gave him hope. Santino, who murdered Amadeo and made Armand out of what remained. Santino had a vision where Iblis—Satan, Santino called him—came to him as he came to Mu’awiya and identified vampires as shayatin, the devils which plague the evil-doer and tempt and test the faithful, serving Allah through Iblis. Iblis told Santino that their contemptible nature was His design, for all creation is His design—truth used, Armand later came to understand, to deceive Santino to sin. But it was truth, still. Newborn Armand in his cell listened to Santino’s teachings and thought of Rumi’s Iblis saying: I am only a mirror which reflects the good and evil in the objects before it.

These words of Iblis’ are what keeps Armand from committing the only sin you cannot come to regret, but held up against some four hundred years of wanton murder for petty crimes it should have been Allah’s and His alone to judge, isn’t it the greater evil that Armand carried on alive?

For centuries, Armand believed the vampire was the mirror of man, dead where he is alive, obedient where he is the infidel, blessed in Jahannam where he is damned. He took the confused, Christian faith of the Children of Darkness and made sense of it as best he could, prescribing his coven in Paris their prayers and their rituals. They made their ablutions with dirt and stone, as their own corpses would pollute the water even if their victims did not rot there. They chose for their meals anyone tempted to sin and slaughtered them with their faces turned away from Mecca, the bleeding slow and orgiastic. Teeth in a throat, pain and pleasure combined. They drank greedily and nightly except for the month of Ramadan, when the shayatin—the devils, the vampires—are chained, and if they are so young they must drink then they drink from the wrist of their coven master. 'Abd Armand, ‘abd Iblis, ‘abd Allah, exalted is He.

Armand knows all this now for sin and self-delusion, truth twisted until it is made unrecognisable in the hands of Iblis, but unlike Amadeo he knows now too that he need not despair of Allah’s mercy—that even Iblis himself is not beyond His mercy. Whether predestined to faith or infidelity, do we not all belong to Allah? Are we not the loom with which He weaves the world?

Now Armand fasts as matter of principle, and drinks blood only rarely. It is no less forbidden for him than anyone else, made permissible only by need. He abstains, the accursed eternal thirst of the vampire ignored until it cannot be, and starvation or injury absolves the sin. Now, Armand is a dead thing crumpled on the floor with a severed spinal cord, cement dust coating his hair and skin and clothes like the ashes over Pompeii, and he must leave this place, but he cannot leave if he cannot move, and to heal himself he must drink. So he turns Daniel Molloy’s face towards Mecca, and stills the fear in his heart.

It will feel like a bath, racing heart and thrashing limbs settling into the warm, clear water. No pain, when his master’s fingers— “Hush now,” says Armand, less to Daniel, whose voice is trapped in his throat, than to a boy centuries dead. “It’s all right. It will feel like a bath.” He slides his hand from Daniel’s chin to his throat, and continues in soft-voiced Arabic, his eyes golden as honey, “In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful.”

Daniel’s Adam’s apple bobs under the brush of Armand’s thumb. His pulse pounds, pounds, pounds under his hot skin. In the hot blood that pours out when Armand’s talon of a thumbnail slits his throat all the way across, jugular, carotid, windpipe, carotid, jugular.

Some think Bismillah should be spoken before drinking the blood, the haram made permissible by circumstance; some, Armand included nowadays, prefer to distinguish the slaughter and the meal. The slaughter is rightful, Armand’s preferred victims those who wage war upon Allah, a crime whose punishment must be death. The warmonger, the slaver, the rapist. A teenage girl with a paper bag over her head, sobbing, and decades later, another teenage girl, a signed copy of Under the Burning Sky on the countertop of her shoe box New York City apartment, wait, wait, stop, that hurts, a me despiaze, mèstro—

Does that really count?

Daniel Molloy’s blood spills messily into Armand’s waiting mouth. With it, a life in bright bursts of colour, loud music and writing and drink and drugs and drink and writing and a body wrapped in cellophane and drugs and a daughter with a girl he doesn’t remember ever getting with, but Katie has his nose and his eyes and if Alice was going to baby trap any random guy she could have picked less of a fuck-up and she’s gorgeous and Daniel at twenty three is gonna clean up his act and he’s gonna get sober and he’s gonna get a job but being a parent is a fucking lot, man, and the boss is up his ass with these deadlines and the pay is shit and they won’t let him write about anything that really fucking matters and he’s all but burned out and inspiration’s at the bottom of a bottle and a handful of ‘ludes and then, finally, finally, he doesn’t hate what he’s writing and it’s drugs and writing and writing and writing and drink and Alice screaming at him when Katie finds a tab of acid in his pocket and thinks it’s candy and on and off for the next twelve years it’s drink and writing and writing and drink and begging Alice to take him back and for a while she does and Lenora’s born and Alice still won’t tie the knot—when you’re sober, she says, when I know you aren’t going to give me AIDS, how about that, and by the time he finally does manage to clean up his act she’s long, long gone but there’s drink and writing and writing and accolades, what do you fucking know, and a five month trash can fire of a marriage and writing and writing and writing and a diagnosis that comes like a punch to the gut, gonna be real with you, doc, I always figured I’d just turn up in a back alley somewhere, and his neurologist suggests he get a therapist and he keeps thinking about Alice, gorgeous, evil bitch Alice with that patch of vitiligo that turned half her left eyebrow blonde, keeps imagining that first time he still can’t remember, the party a blur of bright lights and loud music and drugs and drugs and he doesn’t want to die, oh god, he doesn’t want to go out in some cold, sterile, miserable nursing home and he doesn’t want some jumped-up cold to beat him either but what’s left for him now? he’s at the end of the fucking line and he’s too much of a coward to jump and all there’s left is writing and writing and drugs his doctor prescribed and drink his doctor made him sign a stupid piece of paper that says he knows not to have, sure, fat fucking chance, and writing and daytime TV and an unmarked box in the mail, his ticket out of here, a death that’s a hell of a lot more interesting than what’s waiting for him here, and so he goes, and it’s all writing and writing and drink and writing and getting lied to, flat out, again and again, it’s like these people don’t respect him at all, what, is it because he’s dinner? and it’s those Talamasca freaks who give him what he needs to put it all together in the end, separate the truth from the lies, and he’s barely fucking sleeping anymore and he knows he’s dead in hours or days but he feels more alive than he has in years, writing and writing and always another folder, KNOWN VICTIMS, 1952–1978 and MARIUS DE ROMANUS, LAST KNOWN WHEREABOUTS and

“What?” The question comes out so small, so pathetic, from so deep inside of him, Armand doesn’t realise, at first, it’s his own voice.

Daniel can’t answer, of course, voice trapped by Armand’s command and blood bubbling up in his slit throat and frozen, now, on the edge of death in this instant where Armand’s life finally, truly, and utterly unexpectedly falls apart.

It isn’t as devastating as Armand expected, losing Louis. He knew, almost from the start, the day would come. But Marius alive, Marius in some coastal American small town, his paintings for sale in a local gallery—it is... almost incomprehensible. Marius died, he burned, Amadeo watched him burn. He loved Amadeo to the end of eternity, he didn’t, he wouldn’t just leave.

How long he sits there, in that frozen moment, Armand couldn’t say. Minutes, hours, days? When he was a boy, the very first gift he was ever given that was just for him, not to make him more pleasant for men to look at, was a pocket watch. He had never seen one before. معايا وقت Ma’aaya wa’t, he’d said, amazed—I’m carrying time. This was one of his very first days at his master’s paƚaso, when Amadeo could still speak Arabic and hadn’t yet learned more than a handful of words of Venetan. Riccardo, who was nearly fourteen and even darker than Amadeo, was the only one of Marius’ apprentices who understood him. Praise be to Allah, he replied with a sparkling, gap-toothed grin.

Armand has always thought of this gift of his as stopping the second hand from ticking forward with the lightest press of a finger on the face of the pocket watch, holding time itself in the palm of his hand. He twitches a finger and lets it go.

Bubbles burst and form on the sharp, clean edge of Daniel Molloy’s cut windpipe. Armand watches them and prays for forgiveness—for the meal, for what he is about to do—almost by rote. “Oh Lord, we have believed, so forgive us our sins and protect us from the torment of the fire,” and, when Daniel slumps down into his lap a moment later, all but dead, “Indeed, we belong to Allah, and indeed, to Him we will return.”

Armand tears into the vein in his left wrist with his right thumbnail and presses the gash to the boy’s blue lips. In Latin he mumbles, “If any of you are thirsty, come unto me, and drink,” and laughs without humour, delirious and outside of himself. This is, he knows immediately, the worst crime he has ever committed, the worst he ever could. Armand should kill his fledgling at once, infanticide the lesser sin against letting the vampire Daniel loose upon the world. He should kill himself, accepting for good that while his kind are not beyond Allah’s mercy, he has himself finally done too much wrong to earn redemption. But Louis ordered Armand not to harm Daniel, and Armand cannot bring himself to disobey the last order Louis will likely ever give him. And he cannot die until he has seen for himself that Marius truly lives.

 

 

Armand and Louis came to Dubai by aeroplane—Louis’ favourite, a Gulfstream G650 with the interior done up as a comfortable bed and sitting room, artwork on the walls to hide the windows beneath. He had made Armand kneel for him beneath one of those windows, naked, his ankles bound meaninglessly to his thighs with ribbon and the Degas leaning up against the upholstered back of the chaise longue. In that oval patch of morning light, Armand—Arun—gave Louis the show he demanded, biting his tongue and wishing the sunlight could do him harm, for the pain of his skin burning away and healing and burning and healing might have made the pleasure of his own hand around his cock bearable. Perhaps it was not always so, but for as long as Armand can remember it has been easier to endure than to feel.

Armand leaves Dubai alone, by boat—an interior cabin on the MSC World Europa, a newly-christened cruise ship the size of a small town. The cabin is a sad little ten-square-metre space with bed and mini-fridge and shower, an uninspired modernist print on the wall. He can afford better, but that’s not the point. He doesn’t want to be able to see the sky. He hadn’t been, had he, the first time he made the journey to Venice?

The ship is half self-indulgence, half self-harm. Armand loves boats the way he loves clockwork, the way he’s come to love circuitry, these cleverly constructed things that do the seeming-impossible. Walk on water, hold the motions of the stars in the palm of your hand, make a rock think, glory be to Allah. When Amadeo was a boy he and Riccardo would go out to the harbour some days, watch the men like ants building a vessel to carry them out to the edge of the sky and disappear. Amadeo watched them with a technical fascination; Riccardo with open longing. We could go, he said once. We could go anywhere we wanted. Leave at dawn, pay a merchant ship to let us go with them. What could he do?

You take that back, said Amadeo, terrified. His heart pounded in his chest. His hands shoved at Riccardo’s, hard enough to make him fall backwards and scrape his elbows on the stone. Take that back right now and never think its like again. He would find us. He has powers, you know that. He would find us and he would send you away and I would never see you again, never, Riccardo, we can’t, we can’t, take it back—

All right! Riccardo cried. He was kneeling in front of Amadeo, his hands on Amadeo’s upper arms, stilling Amadeo’s frantic rocking. I take it back. I take it back, astaghfirullah. We don’t have to go anywhere. The master’s paƚaso is—it’s nice.

It is, Amadeo agreed, mumbling. He’s kind to us. Even though we’re bad.

What would Riccardo think of him now? Armand could go anywhere in the world and instead he’s crawling back to Venice the moment he learns his master yet lives. Marius isn’t even there, Armand just—he needs to go back, go home, see it for himself, see if he’s outgrown it. He doesn’t know what he needs. He just—he itches, under the skin, where the flames of the bonfire that devoured his brothers licked at his cheekbones, where his master’s fangs entered him, entered him, entered him, never scarring. He needs to know it was real.

Was any of it real? Armand, Amadeo, Arun, all fragments. He is a manipulative little devil, so said his master, so said Lestat, so say Louis and Daniel, and can they really all be wrong? Armand does not understand himself, and he does not think he—but it is easy to get attention, when you are pathetic and beautiful, and it would be terrible, to do what his master and Santino did, terrible to say some of the things Lestat and Louis have said to him, and they were all good to him, weren’t they? They always said so, that they were so much kinder to him than he deserved. So perhaps it never happened at all. Perhaps he confused nightmares for reality, confused thoughts for words. Perhaps he just made it up. Always gotta be the damn victim, Louis said in an argument once. Armand doesn’t even remember what they were arguing about.

The journey from Dubai to Venice will take eighteen days. Armand does not know how this compares to the voyage from Marseilles to Alexandria, after the coven burned—he remembers little of that journey but the lid of his coffin and Louis’ agony and grief, gasping down great lungfuls of it because it was better to drown in his bittersweet lover than in his own memory. What memory? It comes back now in pieces in this narrow bunk, shades of red, red wet and sticky between his thighs but it doesn’t hurt, red lips, red tongue, red teeth, red wool, scratchy on Arun’s cracked and peeling fingertips. Arun’s? No, no, not Arun, he can feel the sun-hot chain lashing him to the market bench, a man’s big hand on his chin, inspecting him, and he can hear the broker’s wheedling voice, هو كنز قارون مش كده؟ huwwa kinz ‘Arun, mish kida? Not Arun, the pagan dawn, not a name at all—he’s like Qarun’s treasure, isn’t he? Riches beyond imagining, riches that make men greedy and turn their backs on Allah, riches to die for, to be lost when you do and the world made better for the loss. He should have been the one to burn, they should have burned together. Red, red teeth, it hurts, red stains on the narrow bunk, rocking back and forth softly on the waves.

Armand had requested a cabin in the bow to better feel the ship’s movement, dizzying like the wine they all drank like water at the paƚaso. He has not touched alcohol since—

“I’ll have the same,” Armand said to the waiter when Louis placed his order, and Louis was halfway through asking Claudia how married life suited her when he realised, suddenly, that Armand was not abstaining from drink as usual, and laughed, not cruel but pleased, and said, “Look at you, loosening up for once! Never thought I’d see the day!” and Armand gave a hollow laugh of his own in return.

He has not touched alcohol since the fall of 1949, and before that, not since he was twenty-four years old, at least not willingly. In recent centuries, abstaining is half religious obligation, half hatred of his own cringing expectation of strangers’ hands; in the paƚaso, drunkenness was salvation, the wine’s warm embrace making it easier to bear what his master demanded, until what his master demanded was sobriety. Amadeo had gone to see one of his master’s friends already very wine-drunk, he is told, and whilst they had their fun together Amadeo took the open mouth of another bottle into him, drying him out, making him tighter, making him dizzier, and he would have been fine, if he were not already so drunk, but he worried his master so, oh Amadeo, what am I to do with you?

After that, wine was a glass pressed to his lips by foreign hands, a bottle forced, laughing, between his legs, an unholy communion kneeling broken at Santino’s feet, drink of the blood of Christ through me, my son, he says, and from his wrist a starving, nameless boy drinks and drinks and becomes drunk.

Armand flees his cabin, scrubbing at red eyes and cheeks with the inside of his long, black sleeves, and climbs up a dozen flights of stairs until he finds the open air, the coastline a distant scrawl on the starboard side. The sun is high in the sky, all bright and cloudless blue, and all around him are wealthy mortals lounging in deck chairs with books and cocktails and a cacophony of languages, largely but not exclusively European. He does not burn. It doesn’t even hurt, not really, not any more than warmth always hurts when you are very cold, the way a kind touch hurts when you have forgotten how kindness feels.

He lied to Daniel Molloy. Armand’s invulnerability to the sun is not the product of age. His master was fifteen hundred years old in Venice, and he was trapped in the shade in the daytime just as Louis is. Amadeo was beaten terribly, once, for shifting the curtains in Marius’ bedroom to watch the gondoliers go about their mornings and burning a line down to the bone of his sleeping master’s thigh. Armand in the long centuries that followed burned as anyone else did, burned when Santiago ordered him to sweep up the mess on the stage and he did not—he did not think about it, he had endured far more and worse than this, and he did not want to give Santiago the satisfaction, but he put his hand out to cup the sun for just a moment, pain like a scourge, like a revelation, and some of the ashes he swept up were his own.

No, he became loved of the sun all at once, as Allah willed, in 1952. He had not made a plan in advance or written Louis a note, but it would be dishonest to call it impulsive. He had been turning over the matter of his continued existence for some time by then, having long conversations with the handful of vampires who constituted the Cairo coven on those nights Louis would not leave his coffin and did not want Armand’s company. The Cairo coven had lost its first and only master, an Englishman, to the fire in 1947, and they had as little desire to replace him as they’d had to have him. Now a democracy, they argued amongst themselves about everything—politics and religion and industry and jihad, an undead microcosm of mid-century Egypt—and Armand, who loved to argue and did not know any longer what he believed and what was just convenient for keeping a Western coven from open revolt or for keeping himself from falling into despair, Armand, who had to fight his own tongue for every word of his Arabic and could not even guess at the language which had come before that, felt at home. It was a feeling he did not have with Louis, much as he loved him; it was a feeling he couldn’t remember having anywhere but with Riccardo at his side.

The night Armand decided to kill himself, they had been arguing the matter of jihad. The word means a struggle, some great endeavour, a fight for a noble cause; from the same root we have ijtihad, the struggle to interpret Shari’a, the path Allah has laid out for us, in terms of law, which is imperfect and changeable and innately human. The greatest struggle is the struggle against Iblis’ grasp upon your own heart, and for none, perhaps, is the struggle so great as for the vampires, whose very nature is, as his Louis would say, that of the Devil. But it was not themselves the vampires discussed that night. On the 26th of January, more than seven hundred British-owned or British-frequented establishments—cafés, clubs, hotels, an operahouse—were set aflame by revolutionaries, though no one quite agreed which. The Muslim Brotherhood? The socialists? Those Jewish children with their university organizations? Everyone and no one, perhaps, aligned in nothing except their hatred of the colonizer.

Flames have a way of spreading.

Only a few dozen people perished in the Cairo fire, and one of them was Armand’s doing. Two others were drained by one of the fledglings. The rest were the work of the fire, the work of the revolution. And so, the debate, because the dead were not soldiers: when are civilian deaths acceptable in the struggle? Are they ever?

The coven was divided. Some argued that the British presence in Egypt was an act of war, and so they could not be civilians; others thought them martyrs, their deaths outweighed by the lives and souls saved by casting off the yoke; still others thought all killings of men were fundamentally haram, that not only should revolution be peaceful but the vampires should drink only the blood of what animals are permitted to be consumed by men. This was not a new argument, but that day, as always, it led to shouting. Many of the vampires of Cairo were partial to the slaughter of the evildoer.

Only Allah knows what lies in a man’s heart, a boy proclaimed, largely to scoffs. He was not ten years in the blood. How can we call them evil, when it is we who kill them and claim it is right?

Armand had asked himself this question before, and had not been able to answer it. He still could not. But he sat there in the cellar of a printing-house, smoke still on the air and a cartographer's memories fresh on his tongue, and he thought, I know what lies in my heart. He was no mujahid—he was an opportunist, a coward, a slave to everything that had ever claimed him. Oh, Lestat, such a way with words. Armand—Imam Arman, the little ones called him, enamoured of him even with his stumbling, broken Arabic, آرمان arman which meant an ideal, meant hope—bid the coven farewell and walked to the old city, down the long stretch of al-Muizz until he found Madrasa as-Salihiyya, now a historical curiosity but once the first university in Cairo to teach all four of the major Sunni madhahib, the schools of jurisprudence. Once, steps away from a slave market. Everything in this part of Cairo was centuries older than Armand; the memory of it had shaken loose in 1950, Louis peering with more interest than he had shown in anything but wearing out his anger on Arun in months at ancient tilework when Armand settled on a stone bench to watch his lover fondly and the lower angle from which he saw the entrance to the madrasa and the towering minaret and dome of the Qalawun complex threw him back in time, in body, and when Louis noticed something was wrong and touched his shoulder, asking in a language Armand knew but was not present to comprehend, Armand? You all right? the boy flinched violently away, bringing his hands down to shield his private parts from groping hands, begging, يلا جوا yalla gowa—inside.

Arman could also mean grief, sorrow, regret. It was not always good to long for something. Armand returned to the square outside Madrasa as-Salihiyya and took a seat on the stone bench, waiting in silence. When he listened for Louis’ voice among the Many, he found him not quite humming along to Mary Lou Williams’ Zodiac Suite, thoughts lighting up with every trill of the piano keys, and Armand was glad. He would be well. He would move on from his losses, numerous though they were. When dawn broke, Armand unrolled his prayer rug and made the Fajr namoz-i, sunnah and farz, and knelt there facing Mecca, waiting and waiting and waiting for the sun to rise over the madrasa’s dome and consume him.

But, of course, he did not burn. He does not burn, even now, standing on the deck of a ship in broad daylight, having committed the worst crime he can imagine. “Masha’allah,” he murmurs, and: “Have You truly not forsaken me?” In what language he asks this, he does not know. He could weep. He does, hem of his sleeve soaking up blood tears, elbows on the glass-panelled safety railing. Blue in all directions, boundless sky and boundless sea, the crowing of gulls and the wind in his hair. Some Europop band playing over the loudspeaker.

“Photograph, sir?”

Armand startles at the question. “No,” he says. “Thank you.”

The boy, some twenty-something with the shadow of a beard on his chin and acne scars on his forehead, nods and moves on to the next person without another word. Armand stares after him.

He cannot remember the last time he was asked to pose for a photograph, a painting, a sketch. It is entirely possible he never has been, from his master’s studio to his maitre’s darkroom, and at the high society events he and Louis once attended together they simply point and shoot—opt-out, not opt-in. He could have stepped out of frame, he supposes now, but it had never occurred to him before.

 

 

The journey from Dubai to Venice takes eighteen days. He does not know how that compares to his first journey to Venice, from—from Alexandria? He finds he cannot recall it in any detail, nor the ship his parents sold him to in—in Delhi? Was it in Delhi? He remembers the running, bare feet on packed earth, dhoti biting at his ankles one moment and sighing the next, but little else. He remembers the running and the falling and he remembers or he imagines remembering being caught, ꠀꠝꠣꠞꠦ ꠀꠔꠣꠅ ꠘꠣ! ꠕꠣꠝꠧ! amare atao na! támo!, but then? They must have raped him on the boat, he thinks, because he does not remember leaving India—and this makes perfect sense to him for one, two, three seconds, and then Armand forgets his measured breathing entirely. What boat leaves India from the heart of Delhi? It has been a very long time since he has been to the subcontinent, it is true, but he has seen maps, and they might not have been very accurate when he was still alive but now they have cameras pointed at the Earth from space.

There is a headache pricking behind Armand’s eyes. Why had he been so certain there had been a ship from India? The more he picks at the idea the more absurd it seems. Oh, certainly, he would believe there was a river-barge at some point; he may not have gone to university like so many of the other boys—Amadeo and Riccardo were too dark to be welcome there, and besides, his master had need of him at home—but that did not mean he had never picked up a book, and he knew from Marco Polo and Barbosa and half a dozen other travelogues that boys who were cut like he was cut most all came from Bengal, cut then sent to Delhi along the course of the Yamuna and then from Delhi sent anywhere, everywhere, but that was the Silk Road, mountains and horses and bloody feet, and yet in his head there was an impossible ship in an impossible port, nothing but fragments like scraps of cotton until Venice, yes, Venice, which in its splendor erased all those earlier torments, Venice where everything was possible, where enlightenment prevailed, where—where Amadeo was a thing to own, to put on display like all the rest of your exotic baubles, where it was rape by law for a boy who looked like him, who prayed to the same God in the wrong way, to be with a Venetian girl, and to be a boy raped was a criminal offense, no matter your colour. Amadeo had tended to a child’s wounds for that crime more than once in the paƚaso, earlier washing out the bite of the whip with soap and water and a sponge, later in secret piercing the tip of his finger with a claw and closing up the wounds. At times like these, enlightenment seemed to Amadeo to make no better a world than superstition and barbarousness, and sometimes a crueler one, and he was glad his master could no longer hear his thoughts.

Armand wonders, suddenly, ungratefully, did he—? He fishes his mobile out of his pocket and opens up the voice recorder. “They must have raped me on the boat,” he says, letting instinct guide him, “because I do not remember leaving India.”

He stops the recording. Presses play. Łori i ga da me stuprà su ła barca, parvìa mi no me ricordo me partèndo ł’India.

Oh.

He has not thought in Venetan in nearly five hundred years. In truth, he is so out of practice it seems dishonest to count it among his languages. Armand sits on the carpeted floor of his cabin, the space between the bed and the door too small for his legs to straighten out, and falls apart again.

When he learned his master—when he learned Marius lived, the shock absorbed the worst of it. He did not weep. He could barely feel at all—not out of his body, that distance you find on your knees for a lover, but like he was not a body, had never been a body, that he was… was a CRT television, and his life a VHS, taped over again and again and again, and someone had walked up to him with a magnet in one hand, warping the image and magnetizing the mesh, and with the other hand pulling out the audio cables so there was that horrible momentary feedback—MARIUS DE ROMANUS, LAST KNOWN WHEREABOUTS—and then nothing, nothing, not even white noise. And still it plays on, life continuing in silence, and ruined as he was, Armand was only the television, not the VCR, so what say did he have in the matter? He went on.

Now, now the laboured metaphor falls apart, he is the one with the magnet, he is a pair of hands ripping the ribbon out of the tape, he is sobbing so hard it aches in his chest, his throat, makes him retch, but nothing comes up.

He wants to believe it was meant as a kindness, but even if it was, even if he simply does not remember Amadeo begging his master to take away the world before Venice, it is—appalling, this crude papering over of months? Years? But it could have been minutes, and still, those were his minutes, that long-dead boy’s, and Marius had no right to take them. He took everything else, his body and his name and his life, the words in his mouth, the thoughts in his head… let him have this, if nothing else, his time. Oh, Louis—Armand did not understand, before, but now he does and he is so sorry, so, so sorry, and he does not realise he has reached out across the voices of the Many in his distress until his love’s mind shuts itself to him.

Athan beeps at Armand from his lockscreen, a banner notification announcing It’s time to offer Dhuhr!, but he cannot stop crying. He makes a pointless wudu in spite of himself, hoping the ritual of it will calm him, but the blood continues to spill down his cheeks, and he is unclean again, always unclean. He is a child in a funduq, a traveller’s hostelry, hearing the azan on the wind whilst a man in red—while he—oh, he wants so desperately to pray, to give himself over to Allah, but he cannot convince himself it is really beyond him to stop his tears, that his prayer will be anything but an insult.

He makes namoz anyway, weeping, weeping, and when he is finished he begs forgiveness. He is beginning to suspect that Allah’s forgiveness and mercy really will never end, and this should be reassuring but it is almost worse, to have His love, His truly unconditional love, and absolutely no one else’s. It makes him angry, at Louis, at Lestat, at his parents who sold him, he thinks they sold him, but what if that is a lie too, what if that is something Marius put into his head like the boat? But no, they must have thrown him away, because everyone else has, even Marius.

It makes him angry at Marius.

Ya Allah, he thinks, why do You love me? What for?

If he was simply fundamentally unloveable, the one truly wretched creature in all creation, then he would have no right to be angry. But he is loved, he knows from the embrace of the sun that he is, and so it is not beyond him. Armand can be loved; Marius simply did not.

 

 

The same day Daniel Molloy arrived in Dubai, the first mosque in Venice opened its doors. The Fontago dei Turchi, after it became the Fontago dei Turchi, (being intended as a boarding-house and market for every free Muslim in Venice) got the permission of the Doge to have a small prayer room in the 1750s, but never an actual mosque. That prayer room is long gone these days, the building now housing a museum of natural history.

Strictly speaking, the new mosque—COMIV, its Facebook page names itself: Comunità islamica di Venezia—is not within the limits of the historic city of Venice proper, but in the nearby port town of Marghera. But it is an actual mosque, only 12km from the Rialto. Riccardo, you wouldn’t believe it.

Amadeo and Riccardo had prayed wherever was quiet in the paƚaso, often the master’s own rooms when he had retreated to his private office and the safety of his sarcophagus. Marius never forbid them to pray—they were obliged to attend the Mass with the other boys in the Baxéłega de San Marco, but he did not compel them to denounce what everyone in those days called the Saracen heresy, or ‘the wicked error’. Marius, himself older than Isa ibn Maryam, was no more a Christian than he was a Muslim. “To one such as I, the lot of it is wicked error,” he laughed, his fingers tracing meaningless patterns low on Amadeo’s belly, “all strange and slavish superstition.”

Of course, to Marius the Christian was at least passably Roman, and thus respectable, where the Saracen was no better than the fire-worshippers before him. The master’s tolerance could not be mistaken for the master’s approval. A great deal of the education Marius contrived to provide Amadeo was with the express intent of civilising him. ‘How will an Arab hear, let alone understand, a Latin, or a Persian a Roman, or an Ethiopian or an Egyptian a Gaul? One must beware of taking up toil in vain, and be on guard against time being wasted by taking up unnecessary work.’ This, the imagined debate opponent of Peter the Venerable, who in the year 1143 commissioned the first translation of the Qur’an into Latin to better arm Christendom in the war against Islam, which he believed would be won not by the sword but through conversion. It was that very translation Marius gave Amadeo a printing of not long after he came to the paƚaso, in the hopes it would make him a better student of Latin. “Peter thought the Oriental as capable of reason and learning as any man,” he would remind Amadeo, and: “You do not want to prove him wrong, do you?”

Despite the title it had been printed with—Lex Mahumet pseudoprophete, or, The Law of the Pseudo-Prophet Muhammad—the translation was not all that terrible. It made paraphrases and a handful of obvious mistakes, and it was of course imperfect as any human translation is imperfect, but the translator, an astronomer named Robert of Ketton, had done his work in good faith for all that he professed all Muslims should be either enslaved or put to the sword ‘so that they cannot be a further hindrance to themselves’. For a very long time it was all Amadeo, and then Armand, had.

When he first came to Venice, he did not know a word of Venetan, nor of Latin or Greek, the tongues which marked an education; at the brothel (in Egypt? it must have been Egypt, for he remembers being sold there, and he remembers on the ship, red, the old white man who took him from the hold and into his bed, he covered that nameless boy’s shivering body with a cloak of scratchy red wool, and—and he was kind, when Armand tries to call back the memory he cannot recall the man’s face or what he had used him for, he only knows, or was made to know, that he was kind), at the brothel the boy who was Qarun’s treasure was bright indeed, like a clever pet, because he could read and write in Arabic and in his mother tongue and he could even recite a handful of poems in Persian, if you wanted it of him before the other things you might want with a boy who’d been cut, for those things invariably stole his tongue and made him mute and dumb.

At the brothel he was bright and he was beautiful, and he did not want to be either of those things—he wanted to be an ugly, undesirable, unthinking thing, a rabid beast best left alone. Then he came to Venice, and he was those things, dirty and witless and beneath the consideration of all but his master, and Amadeo discovered that he did, actually, want to be bright and beautiful and beloved. If he was not those things, he was nothing. In Venice the men who wanted him wanted him almost invariably as a conquest, for they could not take Constantinople nor Jerusalem but they could take Amadeo, this dark-faced Saracen who would not fight them and would, if he were commanded, pray. Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar.

When Amadeo came to Venice, only Marius understood him perfectly, not only his words but his very heart, listening to him as did Allah, and speaking to him with images and thoughts projected wordlessly into Amadeo’s mind by his magic. None of the boys in the paƚaso understood a word Amadeo said, except for Riccardo, whose boyhood Arabic was a different dialect to Amadeo’s and terribly rusty besides—Marius had owned him since he was eight years old, and if his skin were not the colour of freshly turned soil then at fourteen you would never imagine him anything but a Venetian through and through. He had not made namoz in years (strictly, he had never made namoz at all; they called it salah in the city he came from), and he had been baptised in the Catholic church. But the two of them could make themselves understood of one another, and quickly were inseparable, carrying on in a pidgin of their own devising while Riccardo taught Amadeo the Latin letters and Amadeo in turn taught Riccardo the Arabic, while Riccardo showed Amadeo how to grind and mix the paints for their master, while Amadeo showed Riccardo how to make namoz, familiar and forgotten.

Why, wonders Armand, did they stop speaking to each other in Arabic? For they did stop, and Amadeo soon lost the language almost entirely, save for a handful of phrases. When they prayed, later on, it was in a strange amalgam of Arabic and Latin—the impulse now, standing in this unassuming little office space of a mosque situated on the Via Lazzarini between an advertising firm and a company that sells shelving units to grocery stores, to follow the Takbir with misericorde pioque Deo, universitatis creatori is so strong it makes him dizzy. The words sit on his tongue. Riccardo seems to stand beside him. He gives Aser namoz-i holding back tears.

“Brother, are you all right?” someone asks him, after some time, then asks again. He has been kneeling here, looking at the raw plywood mihrab, for almost an hour. The first time, the language is half-familiar, but he does not know it. The second time, it comes in classroom Arabic.

“Yes,” says Armand, and is shocked to find it true. “I—I grew up here, in Venice, but I haven’t been back in a long time. I never thought we’d have…” He trails off.

The man nods, understanding. “Masha’allah,” he says.

“Ameen,” Armand agrees.

He goes outside, and is—almost at once—violently sick.

 

 

“You will never learn to speak properly if you continue forcing Riccardo to play at interpreter, Amadeo.”

 

 

“Arabic is an ugly language, Amadeo, and you are ugly when you speak it.”

 

 

“You struggled with the language at first, but you resolved to become as fluent as any true Venetian.”

“I… I struggled with the language at first, but I resolved to become as fluent as any true Venetian.”

“You cast aside your Arabic.”

“I cast aside my Arabic.”

“By the end of the month, you couldn’t even remember one word.”

“By the end of the m-month, I couldn’t even remember one word.”

 

 

“Amadeo,” said Riccardo, and reached for his shoulder. Amadeo recoiled from him as if struck. “Amadeo,” Riccardo repeated, “يا أخي ما الخطب؟ ya akhi, ma al-khatb?”

Amadeo stared at him, uncomprehending and terrified.

“Amadeo?”

“Riccardo,” Amadeo managed, and threw himself at him, skinny arms around his neck and legs akimbo in his lap. “Riccardo, you help me. I… words,” he said, desperate. “I am not thinking. You help me.”

And Riccardo couldn’t help, not really, but that day he skipped all of his lessons and chores, even knowing he would be beaten for it, and held Amadeo while he wept.

 

 

Armand goes to his master’s old paƚaso. It’s been renovated three or four times since the fire, and it now houses a high-price hotel beneath its vaguely Oriental facade. He decides, somewhat distantly, to find this amusing.

He takes time in hand and walks inside past the woman at the check-in desk with its marble counter. His shoes click on the intricate mosaic floor, which the hotel’s Wikipedia page boasted was original in the two-paragraph section titled ‘Building and history’, which says of the fire only Constructed in the early 1300s as a palazzo for an obscure family, it changed ownership several times before being abandoned for more than one hundred years after a fire in the mid-16th century began the rumour the building was haunted. The hotel notably does not promote itself as haunted, but it has made it onto the radars of a good number of YouTubers and list-icle journalists despite that. The mosaic in the front hall, the Wikipedia page notes, is an Orphic scene in the Roman Imperial style, but rather than the typical mosaic depiction of Orpheus with his lute summoning all manner of beasts to his side, used in those days as a metaphorical Christ and the draw of the Holy Spirit, the Palazzo di Mario Romano depicts Orpheus and a skeletal Eurydice, the drape of her chiton over her bones depicted with great skill. They are on the bank of the river Lethe, and Orpheus’ head is halfway turned. This is the final moment—Orpheus may trust that she follows and keep looking ahead, or he may listen to his faithless heart, look back, and watch his love turn to dust.

Armand climbs the grand staircase—Marius never minded this, even in company—and lets himself into the room that was once his master’s. He doesn’t know what he hoped to feel when he came here, but whatever it was, he doesn’t. He lets himself out onto the balcony, the sun streaming down and warming his cheek as it did when he was still a boy, and it does nothing. It does not unlock some hidden memory, and it does not inspire him to gratitude, nor forgiveness, nor a new depth of fury. It just… is.

 

 

Armand’s passport reads Armand de Pointe du Lac. He supposes he should get a new one, out of respect to Louis’ wishes, but he does not know what it should say. In Paris, his papers—once he could have them—named him Armand Marius, but he is no longer his father’s son and no longer his master’s slave. He supposes neither is he Santino’s soldier. He is, and has always been, that nameless boy running, falling, pleading. That nameless boy, waiting for the sun to rise.

Now he stands on the front porch of a well-kept home in Maine, picture-perfect Americana with its whitewashed wooden siding and a steep staircase down from the side of the house to the water, and rings the doorbell. He is beginning to regret this, or if it is not regret, it is anxiety close enough to it. It is not long before sunrise, and he can see the warm glow of lamps seeping out around the blinds. Marius de Romanus lives here as Mr. Marius Romain, and he is at home and now he is going to come to the door and Armand does not think he is ready. How are you meant to prepare for something like this?

The first words Marius de Romanus says to his child in nearly five hundred years are, “Sorry it took so long for me to get the door! I was in th—” and then, amazed, “Amadeo?”

He looks so different. He looks entirely the same. Marius de Romanus is clad in paint-speckled blue jeans and a red flannel with the sleeves rolled up to just below his elbows, his long, pale hair in a messy knot behind his head. His feet are bare on the marble floor. He is not as tall as Armand remembered, but still tall enough Armand is forced to look up at him. He opens his mouth to speak—Armand does—and finds his tongue stolen out of his mouth as it was in the brothel when men parted his bruised thighs and did what they did, as it was when his master deemed that tongue too ugly, too foreign.

Marius does not notice his silence, or else he does not mind. “Amadeo,” he says again, “my beautiful Amadeo, returned to me… Come in, come in, the sun will be up soon! It isn’t safe.”

Armand lets himself be ushered inside, lets the door close behind him. The lock turns, a solid, real noise, more real than him. Armand takes off his shoes. Marius cups his cheek in a hand like stone left in the sun, unyielding and warm, well-fed. Does he have his boys here too, Armand wonders, or does he drink from bags? Surely this town is too small to sustain his master’s old habits.

There are tears in Marius’ eyes. He plays with Armand’s hair, coiling a stray ringlet about his finger. “Look at you,” he says.

“Don’t,” Armand dredges up, finally, from somewhere deep inside of him. Marius looks at him uncomprehending, so perhaps it came out in that childhood language, lost to time. Perhaps Marius simply cannot fathom his beautiful Amadeo telling him ‘no’. Armand reaches up and grasps Marius’ wrist, pulling his hand away—the curl stretches out, caught on Marius’ finger, then springs free. “You will explain yourself to me, Marius the Roman.”

This, he had prepared for: written himself a script, practiced it pacing his hotel room, and it comes out of his mouth almost steadily, and in the correct language. He can tell from the sour look on his m—on Marius’ face.

Armand had not imagined Marius touching him, or even wanting to. He had supposed that for Marius to have let Armand believe him dead for all this time, he must not desire him any longer. He does not understand. He does not understand.

“‘Marius ar-Rumi’,” Marius echoes, shaking his head in a kind of fond disbelief. It is the same expression he used to wear when Amadeo had been wrung out twice already in a night and begged for his hands again; the same expression he wore when he told his friends the story of a newly arrived, half-feral Amadeo slashing the throats of his master’s paintings, come here, come into my arms, my little iconoclast. He had been so fond only in retrospect. “And boots, in my household? You test me, boy.”

“You will explain yourself to me,” Armand repeats, steeling himself. He is five centuries old, and a monster the Many know to fear. He is not a little mortal slave boy, helpless in the arms of a devil. He will not lower his eyes and he will not offer apologies.

He wants to throw himself to the floor and beg.

Marius sighs. “Amadeo, you are being unreasonable. Will you not do me the honour of at least addressing me in a common language? Surely you have English, even if you have let your Venetan wither and your Latin remains as poor as it was when you were a boy.”

With a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach like a fear of falling, knowing that he cannot come back from this and that he will hate himself if he backs away from the ledge, Armand says in Arabic, very calmly, “I do you more honour than you deserve, sir, and I think you understand me fine. I am using very simple words.”

Marius moves forward more quickly than the human eye could have followed and strikes Armand hard with the back of his hand.

Armand swallows down the taste of his own blood. He is terrified, and something about it is freeing. He has nothing to lose and no one to mourn him. Indeed, we belong to Allah, and indeed, to Him we will return. He gives Marius a bitter, bloody smile. “Do you know how hard it is to re-learn a language someone went into your head and made you forget? Every word is a war.”

“A war you took it upon yourself to wage, Amadeo. You cannot blame me for that. I only meant to help you.”

“You meant to break me,” Armand corrects, “and make me anew. El tó anzoƚéto negro, isn’t that so?”

“You came to me already broken!” Marius snaps. “Of course I meant to make you anew. What else was I to do, leave you in pieces? How cruel you must think me! I suppose you are angry I saved you from that wretched existence, that I did not let you die a whore?”

“But you did!”

There is a grandfather clock in Marius’ living room, whose steady tick tock tick tock might be too quiet for a mortal to pick up on from the front hallway, but to a vampire’s more sensitive hearing, attuned to the rhythm of a human heart, it booms, until it does not. Armand holds time in the palm of his hand, glory be to Allah. The sudden silence, the stillness, feels dangerous. Marius watches Armand carefully, unblinking.

It is Armand’s turn to cry, now, the frustrated tears streaming down his face making him feel every bit the boy he does not want to be anymore. “What do you call my death, if not a whore’s? What do you call my life with you? What do you imagine you saved me from, Marius? Not syphilis; not your friends; not you; not S-Santino—” His voice breaks, and he hates himself for the weakness. What a pathetic creature he is. “I didn’t come here to fight. I know you won’t believe me, but I didn’t. I just wanted to understand. Why you did everything you did. Why you left. Don’t you think you owe me that much, master?”

“Oh, Amadeo,” says Marius, his voice soft and soothing. He takes Armand into his arms and holds him; lets him hide his face and weep into the crook of his shoulder, the soft red fabric soaking up Armand’s tears. “I’m so sorry, little one.”

It feels like boyhood again. How many times had Marius held Amadeo like this when he had woken from a nightmare, soft voice vanquishing the fear and the pain? Or while his cold, clever fingers wrenched more and impossibly more pleasure from Amadeo’s overstimulated flesh? One of his hands cups the back of Armand’s neck, holding him close; the other skates down his flank and finds purchase in the hollow of his hip.

He feels so small in Marius’ arms.

“I’m so sorry,” Marius is saying again, lips moving against the side of his head, kissing his hair. “I did not want to abandon you, but I was so very near death, and they had taken you, Santino and his Children of Darkness. By the time I found you again, I…” He hesitates, and shame colours his voice: “I was angry. You seemed to have reverted to the very worst sort of mysticism and savagery, and I thought my grand experiment a failure. Your mind was closed to me! I was blind to your misery, seeing only the fervor.

“By the time it became clear to me you had been damaged and led astray by the cult, that they had broken you as the brothel had broken you—that you were no more beyond correction now than you had been then—I had been away so long, Amadeo, and I had failed you so utterly and completely. I failed to save you. I failed to perfect you. I did not know how to face it. I could not find the courage.” Quietly: “Ignosce.” Forgive me.

For a long time, Armand can only weep. When he collects himself, finds his tongue, he whispers, “I don’t think I can.” He rears back to meet Marius’ gaze, hands knotted in his shirt, and tells him, “I wish I could. I wish I could forgive you. For abandoning me. For—for—”

He can’t. It’s all too much, the accusation. The putting it into words.

“It would be so much easier just to love you. So simple, like things used to be. You were the world to Amadeo. You were a god.” Armand smiles, and it is a wretched thing. “Did you imagine him Galatea? That broken child a marble blank to be fashioned into the perfect Companion? Or did you just want the conquest? Another plundered relic from the Orient? A tamed beast? I suppose it must have given you a thrill to put your cock in the savage’s mouth having given it fangs, knowing it had no idea it could bite.”

Marius shoves him, hard, an ancient’s strength brought to bear. Armand feels his skull crack against the marble.

“How dare you,” Marius hisses. “How dare you speak to me that way. I am your maker. I am your master.”

Armand scrabbles to his feet. “Go on,” he says, eyes wild and gold. “Hit me again.”

Marius raises his hand. Armand doesn’t flinch—he’s somewhere beyond fear now, somewhere untouchable. Marius falters, and his hand falls limp at his side. “Why must you make things so difficult?”

“I don’t know,” says Armand, and it’s true. The words come out very small. His head hurts. “I don’t mean to.”

“I know,” Marius sighs. “I know you don’t mean to. It isn’t your fault.”

Armand looks up at him, eyes so very, very wide. “It… it isn’t my fault,” he echoes.

“You want to be good for me.”

“I want,” Armand begins, and bites down on the words. Blood in his mouth. His head hurts. “No. No. Stop.” He claps his hands over his ears. “Auzubillah,” I seek refuge with Allah.

“You want to be good for me.”

He wants to bite off his own tongue. He wants—he surges forward before the words can be wrenched from his lips, presses them to his master’s, no, not his master’s.

Marius’ lips part at once. Of course they do. He licks the blood off Armand’s lips and teeth; lays siege to his mouth, fearless of his fangs. Armand does not bite down.

No—he reaches up, taking hold of Marius’ face in both hands, index fingers bracketing the line of his jaw, the rest finding purchase in his long blond hair. Thumbs beneath his chin, crossing each other. He holds on tight, pulls him closer, as if afraid Marius will pull away, abandon him again.

Armand sobs into Marius’ mouth and digs his claws into the tender meat of Marius’ throat, burying them as deep as they’ll go, scraping against bone. He pulls his hands apart, tearing open a ragged gash—jugular, carotid, windpipe, carotid, jugular. Old, dark blood pours from the wound, bubbles up where air escapes. Armand stumbles backwards, gasping, like he is the one with his throat slit. “I didn’t want this,” he pleads. “I didn’t.”

Marius is more than two thousand years old; a slit throat will not be the end of him. But there is no coming back from this, no way this ends except in Marius’ death or Armand’s unmaking, remaking, a death that is worse than death. Amadeo was ill-behaved, but he had never tried to do his master harm, would never have dreamed of it. And even if he had, what is a human child to a man fifteen hundred years in the blood? Amadeo was harmless. Armand is not—Armand is an ancient in his own right, with Marius’ ancient blood in his veins. Armand stands a chance to win. And Marius is incandescent with rage.

Like this, there can be no doubt he is a monster. This living stone, this unfathomably ancient being, an expression like apokalypsis on his face. The truth laid bare, a revelation, the end of all things. Marius’ blue eyes gleam like neon lights, like the lava lamp Armand bought in 1970 and used to watch for hours and hours, like the fire when the gas first catches, click click click whoosh. Louis bent him over the stove once in their house in Sausalito and fucked him like that, all six burners with their knobs turned to the maximum setting. Rapid boil. Armand’s skin blistered, then charred; the layer of fat underneath his blackened skin melted and settled into the recesses in the stovetop’s face, a yellowish wax. Maître, please, yes, use me how you cannot use your mortal boys, please, please.

Marius surges forward, grabbing Armand by the throat and slamming his head into the wall, breaking through plaster and drywall. A nail punches through bone, scrapes its way into Armand’s occipital lobe.

He gasps, lurching with the nail inside him, and all at once everything goes still. For a moment Armand thinks Marius has wrested time away from him and somehow he is conscious of it, but then he hears the ticking of the clock, then he feels Marius let him go, and still he is a statue, cold and hard and perfectly unmoving as Armand slumps to the floor. Then he is there, suddenly, looming over him, so big it cannot be real, a distortion or, or a memory. Please don’t sell me, please, he’s a monster. Teeth in his throat, and now, again, teeth in his throat, tearing into him as messily as his Louis sometimes did in the throes of passion. Armand laughs, dizzy. Fair enough, he supposes—he tore out Marius’ throat first.

Marius’ hands are moving, tearing Armand’s shirt off of him as he drinks deeper, and Armand should be able to see it, but Marius is a statue again, perfectly still even as Armand can feel claws scrape down his arm.

Gross akinetopsia, from the Greek ‘akinesia’, absence of motion. Typically caused by lesions in the middle temporal visual area or V5, and occasionally reported in traumatic brain injuries. Armand has read case studies before. Neurology is a fascinating field.

Tooth for a tooth, throat for a throat, eye for an eye. Armand’s hands are free. He reaches blindly for Marius’ face, judging it by the feeling of Marius’ nose tickling his earlobe, and digs his thumbs into his eye sockets.

His claws go in smooth. The pads of his thumbs follow messy and wet. When Marius rears up, Armand sees a snapshot: his slit throat already just a ropy scar, his mouth and bared teeth stained with a mess of blood, his empty eyes weeping vitreous fluid.

Armand does not wait. He scrambles to his feet, dizzy and stumbling, using the wall to steady himself. He has a moment, he thinks, while Marius is blind and disoriented. He might not realise what Armand is doing until it is too late.

He bolts for the front door, turning the lock with a thought as he goes.

“No!” Marius cries, hearing the deadbolt drop. “Amadeo!”

Please, thinks Armand, turning the knob with gore-slick fingers, slipping on the first attempt, as Marius must be reaching for him but he is moving and so Armand cannot know. Please, please love me enough to do this.

He opens the door and runs outside, into the early morning sun. Bare feet on wooden slats, on damp grass. He remembers the running and falling and he remembers the being caught, ꠀꠝꠣꠞꠦ ꠀꠔꠣꠅ ꠘꠣ! ꠕꠣꠝꠧ! amare atao na! támo!

Please, he thinks, tripping over his own feet, blood sticky down the back of his head, his spine. He’s so dizzy. He feels his master grab his wrist, hears his laboured breathing. A snapshot: Marius burning, slow but inexorable. Marius’ fear, not for himself but for Armand. Oh.

Armand makes himself dead weight, kicking hard as he can at Marius’ ankles, at the ground, hoping to trip him, bring him down with him, and somehow it works, by the will of Allah. Armand twists out from under him as Marius trips, climbs atop him. Boyhood again, but for the softness of his master’s cock. “You came after me this time,” he whispers through his ruined throat, amazed.

A snapshot: Marius, his skin blistering and blackening, flaking away. His fury seeming to burn away with it. Only sadness in his face now, and the bone-deep exhaustion of eternity. “Oh, Amadeo,” he sighs, his lips eaten away, distorting the words. His teeth are stained with blood. “I wish that I could believe in anything other than love at this moment, but I can’t. I love you. I have always loved you.”

“I know,” says Armand, and discovers in saying it that it’s true.

Marius loves him, and maybe it is love like love for a pet, maybe it is love like love for a painting, maybe—maybe—it is love like love for a son. But it changes nothing. Perhaps it makes it worse, to do everything Marius did to Amadeo with love in his heart. Armand doesn’t know.

“I love you too,” he whispers, tears in his eyes. “I hate you, and I love you, and I hate you for making me love you, but I always have, and I suspect a part of me always will.” He doesn’t know what language he’s speaking, but it doesn’t matter. All that’s left to hear him is ash.

Armand lets out a laugh, or a sob. “Indeed, we belong to Allah, and indeed, to Him we will return.”

He does not remember, later, how he picks himself up and stumbles down that steep flight of stairs to the water, but he knows he sits there on the little wooden dock for hours. The sun is warm on his skin, the blood long dry. “We could go anywhere we wanted,” he murmurs, watching the movement of distant boats.