here come loose the hounds

Lestat loved the dog. Oh, he loved the fucking dog. Scratched it behind its ears, booped it on its stupid little wet nose. His hands were covered in blood; he’d gone and chased her down not because he wanted her to stay but because how dare she try to get away from him; he was fondly ruffling the fur on the back of the thing’s neck while he threatened her with rape again, or worse, and the worst thing about it was that it was all real.

For Louis, Lestat put in the effort. He’s an actor—you couldn’t go a week without being reminded he used to be an actor, the young lover and then for a while the harlequin, and after that, oh, well, never mind after that, whatever Lestat didn’t want to admit to when playing a servant in blackface was fine—and for Louis he set the scene with props and blocking and played him like his dead white lover’s violin, the love song sung by the mistress because he knew it’d get a rise out of Louis and that’s what he wanted. It’s all bullshit, for Louis. He wanted a clear voice, like hell—he wanted Louis angry enough to throw him through a wall and fuck him bloody, and damn if that isn’t what he got.

But for Claudia? Oh, the scene’s staged to perfection: she’s on her knees at the master’s feet, sobbing, sobbing, and he can do whatever he likes to her, he will do whatever he likes to her, and then there’s the fucking dog. It’s the perfect prop, isn’t it, this innocent creature that Lestat can show kindness, take that however you like—that he’d find it within himself to treat Claudia with the same kindness if she’d only bury every shred of herself as deep as she can and play his and Louis’ happy little house pet, if you’re inclined to be charitable. Back in your cage, sweetheart. If you’re not, and you shouldn’t be, it’s a reminder: Claudia wasn’t a person to him, worthy of respect; wasn’t an animal, worthy of kindness; she was chattel, she was his property, and he was taking her back.

(“No offense, but from what I’ve heard about you, I don’t know that ‘innocent’ is really the word.”

“No? I think it is fitting. She is shameless, unwavering, and joyous in her purpose, as an animal is, or a child who has not discovered sin. The primordial soul made her testimony even before the creation of heaven and earth. ‘Am I not your Lord?’ Our Claudia writes ‘yes, I bear witness’ in the blood of her victims.”

“Vampire theology. Great.”)

If it had been scripted, it would’ve been perfect, perfectly horrible. But Lestat was entirely genuine—wasn’t making a point, wasn’t pretending to love the dog any more than he was pretending to loathe his not-quite-daughter. It was all him. “Come home and make him happy,” he said, like it would. Like anything could make Louis happy. He threatened her more, awful and pedestrian and not worth repeating, and then he grabbed her, blood and dog spit all over the palm of his hand, and it was like a switch had been flipped—one moment Claudia was frozen in terror, made mute, and the next it was like she came out the other side of the fear into a chill calm.

She stopped crying. Looked down at Lestat’s bruising grip on her forearm, then up at his too-blue eyes. “You’re gon’ get off the train at Birmingham,” she said, “and I’m going on up to New York.”

“Is that so?” Lestat asked, indulgent like a man whose child has just told him that clouds are made of candy floss. “And why is that, poppet?”

“Because,” said Claudia, and her voice was shaking, so she took a deep breath and started again: “Because you want Louis to love you. And he ain’t gonna, if you drag me back by my hair like you gon’ have to and I tell him all about how you forced yourself on me.” Lestat was silent, and he was grinding his teeth. Claudia felt braver, stood up to glare at him from only a foot below him. “And I will tell him you forced yourself on me. Even if you don’t. May as well have. So you better kill me or let me go, Lestat. Louis can forgive you for the shit you do to him, I guess, but are you willing to bet he can forgive you for whatever I decide to tell him you done to me? Which one of us,” sugar-sweet, “do you think he’s gon’ believe?”

Lestat did not wait to get off the train at Birmingham. He stared at Claudia a long time, his fangs extended and lip curled in a snarl, and then he said, “On your head. You will not like what you find.” So saying, he turned on his heel and went to the middle of the luggage car. Flung open the latches, let the steel door on its rollers tear open accompanied by the roar of the wind and the gunfire patter of wooden tracks, and stepped outside into the night.

 

 

When Claudia made it to New York thirty four hours later (and thankfully the tracks at Union Station were below ground), Germany had invaded Poland. By the time she’d smuggled herself onto the Nea Hellas, an ocean liner bound for a port city just outside Athens, Britain and France had declared war with Germany in turn. On the evening of 7 September, 1939, the vampire Claudia took her first steps in the old world. She celebrated the occasion by having a dock worker for dinner, a second for dessert, and then dived headfirst into the sea in everything but her shoes to wash the blood away.

It half worked. Now her blouse was all pink down the front and dripping on the cobblestones, and her smart coat, well, the less said about that the better. She stole a dress off someone’s line, stripped and changed in a little alleyway, and left the vestiges of her old life behind in a puddle. The shoes, she carried. Louis picked out those shoes. They could stay. And they were good shoes, anyway. Comfortable.

On the side of the road some two, two and a half miles southwest of Athens, Claudia slumped to the ground and cried until she was gagging on air, not even bile left in her dead stomach to bring up. He should’ve come with her. She should have pushed harder. Lestat was going to kill him one of these days. She was never going to see him again.

(“If he came with you, Lestat would’ve dragged you both back,” Louis’ boy who’s no longer much of a boy guesses. “He wouldn’t have taken ‘no’ for an answer, and like you said, Louis forgives him everything.” Claudia supposes he would know that even better than her.)

By the time she cried herself out, it was near dawn. She went further off the roadside and dug herself a shallow grave, tucking herself inside a stolen cotton sheet to keep off the worst of the dirt, and slept until the sun dipped down below the horizon again.

Athens was one of the oldest still-inhabited cities in the world, wasn’t it? Aleppo, Jericho, Plovdiv, Athens, Balkh. All of them some two thousand years older than the pyramids, people building upon the bones of the dead generation after generation. Get her started and Lucy would wax poetic about the uniquely humbling experience of being a vampire in a city old as time, but Claudia was only two weeks shy of thirty-six when she got to Athens, and she experienced it with a mortal awe. She wasn’t going to outlive the oldest human being until April 2026—maybe once she had, it’d feel different.

She had the strange sense she was being watched when she was in Greece, but no vampires ever approached her, despite her calling out to them with the Mind Gift. In any case, the sensation faded with time, and Claudia chalked it up to her own unease shouting into the void in her faltering Greek me léne Claudia, psáchno tous aimovórous after the last strange vampire she met. She moved on, followed the myths of their kind. Prague, Bucharest, Varna, Silistra, Ploiești.

She didn’t find much. Old bones; in Bucharest a long-abandoned catacomb lined with urns, each with a name and a range of dates etched beneath, some only twenty or thirty years, most spanning a few centuries; a madwoman in Ploiești called Daciana, centuries old, who led her fledglings in half-hummed ancient hymns to Satan and collected the teeth their fangs replaced in rows of grimy glass jars, like a human mother keeping milk teeth in a jewelry box. She taught Claudia what little she still remembered of the Great Laws of the Vampires, calling her biata fetița, poor little girl. Not find coven, little girl, not want, not you.

“A coven?” Claudia asked her. “Where?”

Daciana had fled the end of the Bucharest coven, its master ordering them all into the fire upon the advent of electric lights. “Prague,” she said. “Rome. Maybe more. Not want you, fetița.”

But Claudia had spent her whole life not being wanted; what did that matter to her?

She made her way to Prague next, or tried to. Bohemia was crawling with Nazis in those days, and though Claudia was no longer afraid of what mortal men could do to her, she wasn’t foolhardy either. She didn’t like even a vampire’s chances against a firing squad, or a bombardment. And she wasn’t the only one: some fifty miles outside the city, when Claudia decided she was close enough to start introducing herself (Czech the sixth language now in which she’d learned to say something like my name is Claudia and I’m looking for other vampires), this time she received a reply almost at once.

The Mind Gift was fickle about languages, meaning. A message to many—broadcasting over the undead airwaves—Claudia had learned was nonsense if you didn’t know the language; a direct link, though, mind to mind, soul to soul, you could get at least some sense of, even if you had no common language at all. The reply she received was in French, not Czech, all simple words so she’d be certain to understand. Claudia ‘heard’ it in French, which she knew fine, but because Claudia thought in English, and the message had been impressed upon her thoughts, it came through that way, too: an odd kind of echo. I am the vampire Gabrielle. If you seek the Prague coven, turn back. They are gone, dead. There is nothing in this city for you.

“‘This city’,” Claudia repeated, in French same as it’d came, and without the inflection of a question. “You warning me away from your territory, Gabrielle?” Tutoiement, to match.

From the Germans’ territory, the vampire Gabrielle said, a prim correction. I am a wanderer, only passing through like yourself. It is not safe here. And then: I am not seeking companionship.

“Me neither,” Claudia lied. “But my maker’s a piece of work, and he ain’t much of a teacher. In your wandering, you meet anybody who might show me the ropes? I want to know more about our kind. Our history.”

Who is your maker?

“Lestat de Lioncourt,” said Claudia, and the vampire Gabrielle laughed and laughed in her head. Claudia didn’t know, back then, what was so funny.

Go to Greece, Gabrielle said, and you will find your maker’s teacher. Go to Paris, and you will find the old coven, if Armand has not given them all over to the fire. There, you will find your history. Or wander the world, and find it yourself.

 

 

That was the first time Claudia ever heard the name ‘Armand’. Lestat had talked about him, but never by name: instead, he spoke of his ancien amant, le petit diable, and on one occasion that ended with a new hole in the sitting room wall, mon beau nègre, ah yes, who was my first taste of cinnamon or nutmeg, my introduction to the glorious diversité of beauties in this world. Lestat had never—would never, he swore—call Louis that word; Louis could be as French as Lestat, sometimes, and he was proud to be a ‘free man of color’, what they called in French gens de couleur libres, which was not the same thing as a negro, and not the same thing as a Black. Men of color, in French, were part white; Blacks—Noirs—in Lestat’s time were Africans and Indians in situ; nègres were slaves and sons of slaves. He meant no insult, Lestat said: it was an accurate description. When they first met, the gremlin was free only on a technicality of law—“this was ‘94, you see,” he added, by which he meant 1794, the year slavery was abolished in France the first time—but at heart Lestat’s ‘first taste of cinnamon’ was still a slave, and would always be so. Louis, Lestat insisted, would agree if he ever met him.

This was the point at which a paperweight went through the wall.

“What about me?” Claudia asked in the silence that followed.

“What about you?”

“You wouldn’t call Louis a nig—”

“Claudia!” the man himself snapped, like the damn coward he was; Claudia raised her voice and repeated herself, slow and even. “But I mean, sure, of course you wouldn’t. Not your St. Louis. He’s respectable. But your old beau is a slave at heart, apparently, so that’s fine. What about me?”

“That ain’t what he said, Claudia. Don’t put words in his mouth.”

“It’s what he damn well meant and you know it. So, Lestat?” Sweet, sweet smile.

“Oh, chouchou, you haven’t a slavish disposition in the least,” said Lestat, smiling right back. It was not a compliment.

 

 

Anyway. Claudia had already gone to Greece, and if there had been any vampires there they were ignoring her, so that left Paris and the old coven, which Lestat had never mentioned. And Armand, who Lestat had mentioned, but never named, so at that time was a mystery to her. Every vampire she’d met so far was either an ass or utterly mad, and Gabrielle’s offhand suggestion Armand might have executed his whole coven didn’t exactly inspire confidence he’d be the one to buck the trend. Claudia kept her expectations low.

(“And how did he measure up, this Armand?” asks Claudia’s bright-eyed lover.

“He surpassed my expectations,” Claudia says, a grin playing at her lips. “He turned out to be an ass and utterly mad.”)

It was nice to have a name. When Claudia made it to Paris, she announced herself over the vampire radio waves: “My name is Claudia. I’m looking for the vampire Armand.” As soon as she said it, it was like time slowed to a crawl. She was sitting on a park bench, watching a bee buzz from flower to flower, and suddenly she could see its wings beating, not the blur of motion it should have been but the tiny, fragile structures moving up, down, up, down, and the people walking along the path were so slow it was like they weren’t moving at all.

There was someone sitting beside her. Something. It had a presence, heavy and powerful and most of all dark, like standing in the shadow of a monument. She was in danger. She knew it in her bones, in her lizard brain that still thought it was prey. She could still see the bee’s wings, up, down, up, down, up, down.

“I will not harm you,” said the thing sitting beside her. Time suddenly began again.

Claudia was dead; she didn’t need to breathe. She was gasping for air anyway. “You’re—you’re Armand,” she managed.

“Yes,” said Armand, who was a dark-skinned boy, or maybe a young man, with shoulder-length curls tucked behind his ears and a clean-shaven chin. He was tall and scrawny and his bright, bright eyes were too big for his face. “Thank you for introducing yourself so promptly,” he said, and: “Claudia, is it?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“May I ask who made you, Claudia?”

Claudia remembered Daciana, her half-remembered laws, her children who were never, never children. Poor little girl, coven not want you. But Armand didn’t look much older than her, and there weren’t no laws, far as Claudia could tell, against being young—just making ‘em young. And fuck him, anyway, so she said, “Lestat de Lioncourt,” and Armand’s face, which had been still and expressionless as some ancient statue, suddenly crumpled.

“Lestat? Lestat made you? But he knows—” He shook his head, a quick, sharp movement, and stilled again but for the twisting of his hands in his lap. “Is… is he here?”

Claudia remembered that night in flashes, the train just past Tuscaloosa: the fear, the blood on his hands, the way she could feel the clatter of the track in her knees, kneeling at his feet, back in your cage, sweetheart, the fear, the dog whining, I won’t just defile your pocket, the fear—

And Armand said, very softly, “I see.” For a while, they said nothing at all.

 

 

The following night, Claudia went to the Théâtre des Vampires in Pigalle, where a man with a white-painted face lisped through a pair of ceramic fangs that Monsieur Marius had instructed him to direct the Madamoiselle to his private box, if she so pleased, and to reserve a front-row seat and an umbrella for her, if she did not.

“Private box, huh?” Louis’ boy says.

“It wasn’t like that.”

Claudia scoffs, not meanly. “It was a bit like that, Lulu. You weren’t exactly subtle.”

“What, is it a crime to think a woman is beautiful?” her lover teases, and then catches the tail-end of Daniel’s thought; goes cold and still again, and the air grows heavy with the power of an ancient brought to hand. “Don’t be crass. It was never like that. Claudia is not a child.”

“Just looks like one. What do you get out of that, exactly?”

“Mutual understanding?” Lucille’s eyes burn, red sky at morn. “Neither of us were meant to be made. My master was put to the fire for breaking the Great Laws of the Vampires. Traipsing about with mortals, turning the Dark Trick upon the young.”

“‘Master’,” echoes Daniel Molloy. He thinks of Lestat saying ‘a slave at heart’ so loudly he may as well just say it. Instead, he jams his shoulders up as if to protect his neck from all the gleaming eyes on him, the gleaming eyes that come with teeth, and clears his throat, and says: “So, what’s with the names? Armand? Lucy? You are Armand, right? I mean, if you’re trying to pretend you aren’t, you’re doing it incredibly badly. So is it a transgender thing? A fetish?”

Claudia’s lover of eighty years curls her lip in disdain. Her little fangs peek out. “My maker and I discussed Herr Luther’s Ninety-five theses when the pamphlets made their way to us in Venice. I am older than the faith your nation was built on. I am older than any of these words. What use are they to me? Men become women and women become men, and sometimes boys do not become men at all—they are not allowed to—so they must become women or they will remain nothing, nothing at all. I was nothing before I met Claudia. Nothing and no one.”

Daniel Molloy smiles a uncomprehending smile. It’s more than a little condescending. “Bit dramatic, isn’t it? You were the vampire Armand, master of the Paris coven. You were doing pretty well for yourself, I’d say.”

“Armand,” Lucille says, and scoffs. “Armand was the name of a child who had already been dead for centuries, a naive fool deluding himself that his sins were not sins and his submission to God, may He be praised and exalted, could be easy—as if for anyone it is easy, least of all a monster. Before Armand was another dead child, another name that cannot be said to be mine, and before that, another, and before that…? I do not know. I do not remember a life before slavery. Perhaps I did not have one.” Her fingers twist listlessly in her lap until Claudia weaves their fingers together. “I went from master to master, name to name to nothing. Until her.”

“You make it sound so simple,” says Claudia fondly.

“Wasn’t it?”

Claudia addresses Daniel: “I took Armand up on the private box. It was 1940, and Paris was crawling with Nazis. Lotta the audience was in uniform.”

“Théâtre des Vampires—that was the original theatre of the absurd, wasn’t it? Gory existentialism, Waiting for Godot?”

“‘Evil is a Nothingness which arises upon the ruins of Good’.”

“Yeah, sure. I wouldn’t think the Nazis’d be very keen on the Tee-de-Vee. ‘Degenerate art’ and all that.”

“Most atrocities are not carried out by the true believers, Mr. Molloy. The footsoldiers are, by and large, average men who are complaisant, or unbothered, or afraid.” Big, unblinking eyes find his, dawn-bright. “I led the Paris coven’s devotions to Satan in keeping with the old traditions for more than two hundred years. Even I did not truly believe it, in the end, but if I gave up the farce that as a vampire I could serve God through evil works, what then? I had nothing else. My coven, though—they said the prayers, hunted the innocent, abided the chains I put them in during the month of Ramadan, but they did not believe the teachings of the Children of Darkness. Some did not believe in God at all. They simply did what they knew their maître expected of them. It is the same everywhere.”

“Oh no,” says Claudia, “now you’ve got her started on the banality of evil. We’re supposed to be talking about the fun evil.” At a dubious look from her ancient lover, Claudia corrects course: “Well, fun for now. The banality of repertory theatre hadn’t sunk in quite yet. I loved it to bits. The violent absurdism of the one-act plays, the stupid little tricks—! They were sloshing around whole buckets of fake blood, and the leading man was in this big, clunky rope harness even though he could really fly. He floated right up to our box with the Cloud Gift and pulled Armand into a kiss in full view of the audience.”

“It was a joke to them, as titillatingly amoral as the bloodshed. Sex and death, sodomy and murder, two sides of the same taboo coin.”

“The company made a mockery of the mortals in the audience from the second the show started. Had them laughing when they really drained a man dry onstage! I’d never seen anything like it before. They were having so much fun. And Armand was whispering trivia to me the whole time, about the production process, the actors, how a victim earlier that week was so terrified he threw up on Santiago—”

“Hot,” Daniel says dryly.

“We went backstage after the show to meet everyone. I asked right then how I could join.”

“Uh-huh. And how long ‘til the two of you were…” He trails off with a meaningful gesture.

“Two years?”

“Two years, six days.”

“Really? Huh. Well, good on you for waiting on renting the UHaul.”

 

 

It wasn’t love at first sight, not even close. Claudia knew Armand thought she was pretty, and, well—she had eyes, she wasn’t going to pretend she didn’t think he was. He must have known it, too, she thought, from slipping in and out of all their heads all the time, like he’d done to see Lestat in her memory. But that was threatening. Lestat, at least, had never been in her head—couldn’t be. Bruce had. He’d dug around with an inexpert hand, plucked out the way she touched herself when she was alone in her coffin, and used it against her. “I’m not a selfish lover,” he’d say, before doing what he did, nose buried in the nape of her neck.

Armand didn’t go looking in people’s heads when he didn’t need to because he’d learned young that he wouldn’t like what he found inside. People who were perfectly polite to his face, when he was running errands for his master, looking at him and thinking of their priests’ sermons, the curse of slavery that stained skin black; thinking of monkeys; thinking of the New World’s cannibals, would he bite it off if I fucked his face? surely not, surely Marius has him well trained or he’d have pulled his teeth. Younger boys in his master’s house he’d only ever showed kindness to fantasizing about bashing his head in, replacing him in the master’s favor.

But Claudia didn’t know that, any of that. All she knew about Armand was that he was ancient, and powerful, and for some reason still half in love with Lestat, and that he had been inside her head. That when she went to him three months into her induction to the coven—which had begun, unglamorously, with scrubbing blood off the floors and scraping chewing gum off the undersides of the seats—because the playwright-in-residence had written a tragicomedy to put her in a starring role, and she was very grateful for the opportunity, maître, but she wasn’t comfortable playing a little girl for the next fifty years, Armand told her that it was a privilege to work in this theatre, that to be a member of a coven was to give up ego, and that fifteen minutes a night playing Lulu in My Baby Loves Windows was barely a sacrifice at all compared to the old ways. That she should, in fact, be grateful.

It was infuriating. She hated him half the time, and the other half she hated that she liked him. When Armand let the hardass maître act slip, he was funny, and cruel in a way Claudia was also cruel, so turning it together on some war profiteering mortal was hugely gratifying—

(“You tortured people to death together for kicks, is that what you mean?”

“Yep,” says Claudia, popping the ‘p’, at the same time her lover placidly says, “Only the deserving.”)

—and a patient teacher. Claudia learned to close her mind off from other vampires, and how to cup a flame in her palm, and, slowly, she learned what Armand knew of the history of the vampires. It was a history so deeply intertwined with his own that she ended up learning that, too, in bits and pieces. In lectures about the ‘old ways’ lurked stories about Santino and Alessandra, vague allusions to some horrible event to prove his devotion that Armand refused to speak of at all even though he seemed practically unbothered describing his initiation to the Children of Darkness by a host of groping hands and searching mouths, the threat of fire at his back. What he knew about the history of the vampires, which reached back millennia, was imparted to him by his master and maker, who was—when Armand was still human—already some fifteen hundred years old. Armand loved him and hated him and hated himself for being so ungrateful to hate him, the man who was salvation and damnation all wrapped up in one.

“I would have been a martyr,” he said one quiet morning, as sleep pulled at Claudia’s eyes. “If he’d just let me die, I would have gone to paradise. Returned to God forgiven. Instead…” he waved his hand at their surroundings, the theatre’s lobby ransacked by soldiers in the night, the coven probably only alive because Armand used all of his power to freeze them, keep them frozen, and one by one feed the men a story of a cursory execution, actors and artists pleading for their lives to no avail.

There was still a track of dried blood down his earlobe from the effort of it, hours holding two dozen people in thrall. The two of them—Armand and Claudia—were the only ones who hadn’t accepted it was over and gone to coffin; sitting there together in the wreckage, he looked so young, and so tired, in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. His fingers twisted up the fabric of his trousers.

“You should get to coffin,” he said at last. “I need to pray.”

It was a clear dismissal. “Can I stay?” Claudia asked.

Armand’s dry lips parted. He swallowed. “All right,” came so soft it could have been speech or a thought.

 

 

The first time they slept together, it was—tender.

Claudia hadn’t ever talked about Bruce, not really, and the closest Armand had ever come to opening up about whatever he’d been through before Santino, master of the long-gone coven in Rome, gave him that name was saying—of what Santino, whom he called ‘companion’, and ‘something like a father’, had done to Armand himself—it was only rape, hardly unforgivable. Claudia had been horrified and angry, what do you mean, and he did not explain himself, did not finish telling her about the ancient ritual of the Antieucharist, just left. But when the fury faded, it was just sad. He was the one to apologize, later: I should have chosen my words more carefully. Considered my audience.

They hadn’t talked about it. They didn’t need to. Claudia was the one who kissed first, the one who touched first, the one who begged for it first. “Give me your cock. Please.”

“I will,” said Armand. “I will. But let me—” He knelt at her feet, lifting the hem of her skirt over his head; Claudia took it from him, holding her skirt in a knotted up handful in front of her belly. Looked down past it to watch Armand lave at the seam of her nylon stockings. She wasn’t wearing panties underneath, having bled through all of them with arousal reading through the stack of naughty romances Estelle had pilfered from a victim the week before, and too embarrassed to put them in the wash pile until it was her turn to do the laundry.

A happy coincidence, now, because it meant her sparse hair was pricking through the nylons to tickle Armand’s nose and lips and chin, and he could lick her cunt through the barely-there fabric without the dampening of any sensation. And she loved the sight of it, too, a head of curls bobbing between her thighs and she in her fashionable nylons like a lady, not a little girl. “Yes,” she gasped, “yes, more,” and grabbed a fistful of Armand’s hair to pull him even closer, up, up—“There! Ah…”

Armand’s teeth scraped ever-so-lightly against her clit, which was swollen and hard and felt almost unbearably sensitive. She needed more, rocked her hips against his mouth. Felt herself clench around nothing, empty and wanting to be filled. Her thighs shook. Let go. Armand pressed the thought into her head. It’s all right. You can let go.

“Don’t t-tell me what to do,” Claudia said, but tipped over the edge anyway. She almost collapsed against him; preternatural strength held her effortlessly upright. He guided her down slow to sit with her shaky legs in a front row seat. The theatre had by now been closed for months.

Her thighs were blood-soaked, when she looked down, and Armand’s face was smeared with it. Claudia had a sudden impulse to taste it, and pulled him in for a messy kiss, the sharp iron tang of herself on her tongue, and then a mouthful of Armand’s blood. He’d bit his tongue to offer it to her.

“Fuck me,” she said, when they broke the kiss. “I want something in me,” but that wasn’t really it. Fingers would do, but that’s not what she wanted—what she wanted was to be pierced all at once, for the hymen that regrew pristine every damn night to tear, not stretch; to be filled up like he’d filled her up but be the one in control, this time. The one who was calling the shots. “Your cock,” Claudia said. “I want your cock in me. I want you to come in me.”

Armand’s pupils were huge and black, and his irises, that thin band she could see, were closer to brown than gold. He nodded, once, very slow. “Yes, madame,” he said, and got to peeling Claudia’s nylons down her thighs.

She unbuttoned her dress all the way down, shimmying out of the short sleeves so it was just in a puddle underneath her. Her nylons abandoned on the floor of the aisle, the only thing Claudia was still wearing was her ill-fitting padded brassiere.

“Look at you,” Armand breathed, taking her in like she was Venus, not an awkward, half-grown girl. “Beautiful.” He pressed a kiss to her sternum, right above the gape between her chest and the cups of her brassiere, kissed his way up the line of her neck to tease her throat with the feather-light touch of his little kitten fangs. He palmed one padded cup as if it were flesh, as if it were hers. “The most beautiful woman I’ve laid eyes on in years.”

A pang of heat in Claudia’s belly, at that. “In me,” she gasped. “Please.”

Armand was still mostly dressed, and stayed that way: his waistcoat had gone the way of Claudia’s nylons, his suspenders slipped off his shoulders, the fly of his trousers undone and they and his briefs shoved down only as far as his upper thighs. Utilitarian. His cock, now she could see it, was hard as it had been just from their kissing, from her groping. It was small-ish, maybe as long as the palm of her hand was wide, and cut—which she’d known from Santiago’s dirty jokes at the expense of him and Planche, who was born in Algiers, but she’d never seen it before, in her admittedly limited experience of cocks—and it curved, just slightly, to the left.

He held himself at the mouth of her cunt, naked cockhead brushing her lips, and glanced up at her. Waiting for permission. Claudia nodded, and he pressed in all at once—a burn, but not in a bad way. Not at all.

“All right?” he asked. She nodded again.

 

 

The second time they slept together, she didn’t ask for his cock at all, and he didn’t ask either. He got her off with fingers and tongue and teeth, kneeling half-dressed at the end of a grand bed in a dead man’s manor, again and again until she told him no more.

 

 

The third time, they didn’t even fuck. They talked, how they probably should have talked a long time ago. Whispers in the dark in maître’s office while the rest of the coven was out on the hunt. Armand needed to feed less than the others, due to his age; Claudia just drank from him.

They talked about Bruce, about Lestat, about a boy called Amadeo who was made into a vampire both too early and too late. “My master was—upset,” was the word Armand decided upon, at last, “when I grew old enough to, ah, finish.” He was always so prim when he talked about sex, in a way that seemed almost ludicrous to Claudia for someone with his history. He would talk about ‘the necessary part’ and ‘what was between your legs’ and how men ‘did what they did’; it was Claudia saying cock and cunt and ‘fuck me’. She wasn’t sure if it was shame or something else.

The talked about another boy, whose name might have been Arun; about how Claudia’s cherry grew back every time she went to coffin and how Armand could not remember the first time, could not guess how old he might have been. Neither of them cried, but they both came close to it. They talked about boys and girls and men and women and things that the two of them could never be. They talked about names, and none of them feeling right: Claudia with her three last names for three fathers, none of whom she wanted to give the satisfaction of having her; Armand who was not Armand and was not Amadeo and was not Arun.

 

 

The fourth time they slept together, Claudia said, “Do you trust me?” and her lover said, without delay, “Yes.”

They both undressed, and laid down together in the coffin on top of a plastic tarp, Claudia’s flat chest to the plane of her lover’s back, scars older than empires ropy to the touch of Claudia’s thighs and knobby knees. She reached around their bodies, working her lover’s sweet little cock to hardness and pretending not to hear the choked-down sob. “It’s all right,” she breathed, “you’re all right. I’ve got you.”

Her nails were sharp enough to do the job. Her lover gasped, a broken little sound, then something that might have been please. Claudia discarded the unnecessary flesh and bit into the meat of her own sticky-wet palm to draw out her blood.

Claudia slipped her hand between her lover’s thighs, making a rocking motion with her fingertips and the heel of her palm like she was touching herself. Her blood worked its way into broken skin and made it heal smooth. She pressed kisses to her lover’s spine. “Let go,” she murmured. “It’s all right. You can let go.”