Necrophage

If only it were over. But Daniel can't wake up.

Stillness. The air is full of smoke. Nothing stands where these people have lived for centuries. The mud bricks are scattered, clay pots are broken, all that will burn has burned. Infants with their throats slit lie naked on the ground as the flies come. No one will roast these bodies, no one will consume this flesh.

— The Queen of the Damned

 

Daniel Molloy hasn’t talked to either of his daughters in years, not unless you count Hallmark cards with a ‘Love, Dad’ scribbled on the inside two weeks late on birthdays and Christmas, an ‘Eid Mubarak’ card to Kate when he saw one in the pharmacy and remembered to look up the dates, more out of displaced amusement at the face his mother would’ve made at Daniel ‘encouraging’ her than anything. He raised his girls godlessly and permissive, so of course they rebelled with religion, Kate and her husband out in Dearborn, pissing on her great-grandparents’ mass grave, Lenore—not to be outdone—getting her masters in social work at BY-fucking-U. Lenny called him in 2020 to ask questions he couldn’t answer about family medical history, hung up after fourteen minutes with a “Love you, Dad. God bless you,” with a tone like she might’ve been saying it at gunpoint.

He gets it. He fucked them up pretty bad—not as bad as his parents fucked him up, thanks, he kept slurs and hellfire out of it, but he’s not delusional. He knows he was a shit parent, and much as he’d love if the girls feel like shit too when they clear out his apartment after he’s gone and find the boxes full of their old toys, their framed crayon drawings, he knows more realistically they’ll scoff at the obvious guilt-trip, united for once in their mutual hatred of dear old dad. The apple didn’t fall that far from the tree.

(And they’re not even wrong, is the thing. He got that shit out of the storage unit after his diagnosis, on some grandiose, drunken spiral about how this will show them after he thinks about how long it’ll be before anyone thinks to look for his rotting corpse. It was more than a little embarrassing afterwards in the cold light of day, heaving into the toilet bowl, his head pounding.)

Lucky for Kate and Lenny, they’re not going to be the ones to find his body. He’s gonna be ripped to pieces in a Palm Jumeirah penthouse, probably dismembered and stuffed in a blender piece by piece, or whatever Armand does to dispose of the bodies absent an industrial-grade furnace. They’re probably rich enough to have people for that, these days.

It’s dead silent, after Louis leaves. Acrid smoke hangs heavy in the air from Daniel’s laptop; the blaze had smothered itself the second Louis walked out the door, and Daniel isn't sure if that was Louis' sense of drama now his point had been made in disfigured plastic and lithium, or if Armand—if Arun, more like, Louis' perfect, passive slave—had been waiting to flex his ancient power until his master would not see it.

Either way, all that's left of the fire now is smoke Daniel definitely shouldn't be breathing in, and the concrete dust is beginning to settle, and there’s no trace of human life. The servants, Real Rashid, they got the hell out like Daniel should have. Now he’s the only thing in the penthouse with a heartbeat, and it’s hammering a mile a minute. He’s alone with a monster he can’t fight and can’t outrun, and he must be crazy, is the thing, because he finally understands the appeal of those survival horror games Kate doesn’t need to know he sometimes watches Adhan, his eldest grandson, stream on his twitch channel: Alien: Isolation and Amnesia: The Dark Descent and a dozen different indie games about some place called the Backrooms. Daniel Molloy is going to die today, and for the first time in years, decades—he feels alive.

“Hey, Armand,” he calls into the living room, “anything you want on the record before I start working on this thing? I’m in a good mood, so I’ll give you one last shot to play poor little me, how about that?” He comes closer and closer while he speaks, until he’s in the doorway again, then past it, looking down at Armand’s crumpled form.

Armand has other things on his mind. “Tell me, is everything nice and clear now?” he mumbles, Alexander to Daniel, the other Daniel. “Am I the villain?”

“Uhh,” says Daniel. “Yeah, pretty cut-and-dry case.”

Armand can’t help himself. He begins to laugh, knowing he sounds half mad. “It is a line,” he says, “from one of your grandson’s computer games.”

A moment of stillness like the eye of a hurricane, and then: “Oh no you fucking don’t. You don’t get to talk about my family, after the shit you put Louis’ through.” Daniel is incandescent with rage, with a sense of proprietary fury.

“But he isn’t yours,” Armand says. “Kate would be furious if she discovered your habits.” He makes it sound dirty, Daniel thinks. “Is it not? You are not welcome in their home; you have not been for years. You only have their mailing address because Alice did not know she should not tell you. Your daughter does not want you around your grandchildren because she cannot trust you, so you stalk them on the internet because you believe yourself entitled to the flesh of your flesh.”

“Just because your daddy bad-touched you,” Daniel starts, then stops. The rest of the sentence is, Armand supposes, implied. “And get out of my fucking head!”

He is so very close now. Heaving, spittle on his teeth. So very human. Daniel looms overhead and Armand looks up at him, unblinking. There is a fly climbing his cheekbone; they always make their way inside the penthouse from the balcony, summoned by the sickly-sweet beginnings of decay that cling to undead bodies. “I’m not in your head,” he says. The fly rubs its backmost legs together in the corner of his eye. “You think very loudly.”

“You know,” says Daniel, lifting his voice in that ‘I’m going to ignore that’ way, “I’m starting to see the appeal.” It’s only about half to piss Armand off. Big, dark eyes blinking up at him. Armand isn’t quite at dick height, slumped against the wall, but the association is there all the same. Daniel’s second wife on her elbows in bed, big dark eyes blinking up at him. You thinking about joining me any time soon? Deepta loved sucking cock. She’s doing it now, in the back of Daniel’s mind, and not just her.

Armand’s gaze flicks down to Daniel’s crotch, hardening cock beginning to tent his trousers. Looks up again, and says, “Remarkably responsive for your age,” with a withering condescension. “Or did you ‘pop a pill’?”

Christ, Daniel thinks, almost as loud as he speaks; the harsh exhale through his nose reflects a peal of laughter just this side of hysterical. Fuckin’ pod person. “You’d love that, wouldn’t you? Everybody wants the vampire Armand! Louis, Lestat, Santiago and every other vamp in Paris... Every painter in Renaissance Italy.” Daniel crouches down, elbows propped on his knees. His back issues a cease and desist. “Is that why you killed Claudia? You got in her head and it hurt your feelings she didn’t wanna climb on your dick?”

“I didn’t kill her,” Armand says sharply. Daniel’s eyes reflect the gleam of his own back at him, the blaze of a freshly-lit match. “I wanted nothing to do with the trial.”

“Sure.”

“I didn’t. Why should I have wanted Claudia dead? She had already run off with her little lover; she was no threat to me. Louis was happy! ‘Imagine me without the burden of her,’ he says, when in truth it is he who longs to be unburdened. Trapped by Claudia’s desires, her expectations... Louis hates more than almost anything the claustrophobic sensation of being beholden to another. It is why he refused to join the coven, why he refused to claim me as his Companion—”

“Ohhh, so if Louis had just bent you over the stage and fucked you in front of the whole coven, none of this would have happened, huh? You get ‘claimed’...” He says the word with a sort of gleeful mockery. Armand remembers being a young man, still mortal perhaps, and accompanying his master to Rome and seeing in the menagerie of the Medicis caged savages, yes, that was the word Marius used. People who looked like Amadeo and like Riccardo; people who looked like neither and still nothing like the men who traded coin and paper for them. The shape Daniel’s entertainment takes in the bright cacophony of his mind, it reminds Armand of the menagerie’s gawking visitors. You get claimed, Daniel says, “and you lose the coven, but you didn’t want it anyway. No trial, obviously, because that was punishing Louis for turning you down.”

Armand does not dignify him with a response.

Daniel crows, triumphant. He used to do this with his wives, too, take the moment they refuse to engage with his needling as a victory. “That’s all you want, isn’t it? Biggest, baddest monster in the room and all you’ve ever wanted is to be put on your back.” From his crouch, he lowers himself to his knees. He’s taller than Armand like this, Armand slumped on the floor half against the wall with legs he can’t feel. Daniel looms, crowding him in. He puts his hand on the wall for balance, but he doesn’t mind the tension it puts in Armand’s shoulders. He doesn’t mind it at all. “Well, you win.”

Armand turns his face away.

“You want to guess what Louis said to me before he left?”

“Not particularly,” Armand drawls. His shoulders are still damnably stiff. Foolish, to let a mortal man upset him. To let anyone, when Armand is perhaps the oldest vampire still living, a member of a generation otherwise represented by a handful of sharks in the Arctic ocean and some untold number of trees. What could pose a threat to such a monster as he?

“He said, ‘Enjoy him’.”

Armand cannot hold back his flinch. He didn’t say that. He wouldn’t. He—but why would you even bother to lie to the fig wasp that’s burrowed its way into your skull? Armand presses deeper, searching for the memory, surely Louis wouldn’t, but the memories of the last few hours are all brand new, unprocessed—they need sleep for that, mortals—and Daniel’s recollection is flooded in a rush of adrenaline and terror and vicious, spiteful glee that drowns out all the words.

The same arousal floods Daniel’s system now, the musk and sweat of a human body, a living body. It’s been a long time since Armand was last pinned beneath a mortal like this, on the floor. Half a millennium and the body remembers. As a rule, Armand doesn’t breathe when he doesn’t need the air in his lungs to speak, but the sharp inhale he takes now catches in his throat, and the next two, three, four, they keep coming, unnecessary yet inexorable, and too fast.

“Aww,” Daniel says, cloying and sarcastic. “You scared, baby? After all the trouble you went to to catch my attention, you’re not going to play hard to get, are you, Rashid?” One of his hands goes down, somewhere Armand cannot feel.

Louis didn’t say that. “He didn’t,” Armand murmurs. Every whistling breath seems to taste of the stale air of Magnus’ tower, the floral perfume Lestat dabbed under his jaw. Enjoy him. “He didn’t. No’l ga.”

Stupid. Stupid. Daniel’s gaze sharpens. His smirk. Blunt canines are no less threatening than fangs in the mouth of a white man when he’s on top of you. Daniel is thinking in images: Adoration of the Shepherds with a Donor, his ex-wives’ thighs, Deep Throat. Armand kneeling in the rocks for Louis, an image so vivid that despite the fact Louis’ cock is incongruously cut and Armand’s naked body is perfect the way only kouroi can be, Armand for a dizzy moment thinks, did the Talamasca—

But no. This is a fantasy, Armand crying and choking on his lover’s cock. Armand in a belted woolen tunic, no, a peasant blouse, more Pirates of the Caribbean than ren faire, it’s gotta be. Armand in a peasant blouse bent over a table in front of you—him—in a shifting scene with a background taken from every period drama Daniel’s watched in the last fifty some-odd years, wet, red hole spreading open for Daniel’s pale, wrinkly thumbs. He doesn’t imagine Amadeo’s face much different from Armand’s—same age, same chin-length curls—so perhaps that means the Talamasca did not give him access to their digital archives when they gave him the script. No doubt they have a great many of Marius’ paintings, Amadeo as Sebastian, Amadeo as David, Amadeo as Bacchus.

Daniel’s hand is moving between their bodies, a fact Armand knows because of the way his upper arm shifts. Not palming himself, unless his mind is silent in pleasure and absolutely nothing else. Working at Armand’s clothes then, he supposes. Or palming Armand through his trousers, just because he can. Louis touched Armand like that; Marius touched him like that. Once, Armand had liked it. The reminder of who owned him, whose right it was to take him in hand.

“Slut,” Daniel says, or maybe he only thinks it. It’s hard to tell them apart, when it’s all so loud. “You know,” he says, “you keep flirting with a guy, you’re gonna give him ideas. Going around with your shirts unbuttoned, batting your eyelashes at me. ‘I serve a god, Mr. Molloy.’ ‘Let me know if there’s anything I can do to make your stay more comfortable, Mr. Molloy.’” He’s tugging Armand’s trousers down his hips, or trying to. Armand’s body slides further down the wall. Daniel’s winded already, red-faced. “‘I’m just a hole, Mr. Molloy.’”

In Daniel’s mind, Armand sees himself in the sickly yellow light of the Divisadero apartment, feels his own hand cupping his cheek. Cold, dead flesh feels wrong in the memory, and Armand looks every inch the monster, his eyes glowing like a furnace and everything about him, his face, his movements, uncanny. “What is this, then?” he asks, already tired. “Revenge?”

He will hardly be the first, et que celui d'entre vous qui est sans péché lui jette la première pierre. When Armand was still Amadeo—or really barely even—another of Marius’ boys, a pale, pink-faced youth like a mamluk, took him because he was angry Amadeo had replaced him in their master’s eyes. A month later, Amadeo pinned that boy to the floor beside his bed and fucked his mouth with his fingers. Armand stole a bloody kiss from a fledgling Lestat and was repaid in more than kind. Louis spent years of their life together punishing Armand for what he had done to him, and Armand even learned to love him not in spite of that but for the very sake of it. Armand was made, he sometimes thinks, to waste away to nothing in a lover’s grasp, perfectly symbiotic: a wasp, a martyr.

Daniel Molloy is nothing to Armand, less than nothing, but Armand is nothing without Louis. Armand is a corpse crumpled against a wall. The fly is on the tip of his nose now. It rubs its legs together, having a taste. Daniel Molloy, alive because of him—four women’s lives made worse because of him—may as well have one too. Louis did offer, after all.

Finally, Daniel wrestles Armand out of his trousers and briefs, leaving Armand’s body sprawled almost entirely on the floor, his head and neck propped up by the wall. When Louis threw him, Armand’s spinal cord was severed at one of the lower thoracic vertebrae, so although he cannot feel anything from the abdomen down, he can still move his upper body. What he cannot do is summon the energy to do so. He watches listlessly as Daniel spreads his legs, froglike.

Daniel lets out a cruel scoff of a laugh at the pale keloid scar beneath Armand’s penis, the beginning of half a dozen jokes gathering on his tongue, not a one of them clever. I knew you didn’t have any balls, but… Et cetera, et cetera. This man, Armand reminds himself, has won the most prestigious award in his field not once but twice.

He holds out his hand before Armand’s face. Armand stares. “Do you want it dry, then?” Daniel says after a moment. With a false bravado and a shrug of his shoulders, “Fine then.” He’s thinking about how unpleasant it felt to fuck Alice when she wasn’t really into it, which was more often than not; it chafes, when you do it dry. He’s thinking, figures he’d get off on that. Freak.

“Wait,” Armand manages. To his own ear, he sounds—desperate, almost afraid. It makes no sense. He doesn’t feel that way. He doesn’t feel anything, really. What does he care, what Daniel does to a body Armand cannot feel and was never his to begin with? Enjoy him.

Daniel meets his eyes with a rush of awed arousal that hits Armand like an open palm. Red and hungry. Disbelieving. “Beg for it,” he says, throat suddenly dry. What can he get away with? “Beg me for the privilege of sucking on my fingers before I shove them up your tight hole.”

Is he even tight, Daniel wonders, or did daddy fuck him open before turning him into the world’s most literal exquisite corpse, passed around and transformed in each new artist’s hands? Is that how it works? Are there vampires with eternally gaping holes? Permanent henna tattoos? What happens if a vampire takes out their earrings before the sun rises? If Armand had ever had the good will to answer questions like that, Daniel figures he’s definitely squandered it by now.

Armand hums dispassionate agreement and Daniel backhands him. His mortal strength is sufficient only to do himself harm. He hisses in pain. Armand blinks up at him.

“Fucking beg for it,” Daniel snarls.

His thoughts have turned foul, intentionally so; he enjoys the mental image of Louis pinching Armand’s jaw open for Daniel to fuck his face, another of Armand kneeling in the Divisadero apartment, tears streaming down his face, Maître, I’m sorry, but these fantasies are interspersed between all manner of atrocity that turns the man’s own stomach. Mass graves, dismembered corpses, a little girl on fire: photojournalism at its most viciously pornographic. Scenes from horror films that have wormed their way into his nightmares over the years: Salò, Martyrs, Hereditary, A Serbian Film. A vibrant imagination puts incongruously amber eyes in the face of a child young enough his stomach is distended from malnutrition. An adult man’s hand wraps effortlessly around his upper thigh. He—

Armand tears his attention away, retching. “Please,” he manages.

“Please what?”

There is a high-pitched whine in Armand’s ears, and he cannot be sure if it comes from him or his imagining. The whinny of a horse, the cold air, those must be false. A shiver wracks his frame. “Please let me suck on your fingers,” he says, “before you fuck me with them. Sir.”

The white man doesn’t move.

“Please, sir. I won’t bite, I swear. I…”

Three fingers press past his lips. Armand draws them into his mouth at once, laving at the pads of his fingers, tipping his head forward to take them to the root, hocking up more saliva from the back of his throat to coat the fingers as well as possible.

“Fucking whore,” the man says, expression rapt. Armand isn’t looking at his thoughts, he doesn’t want to see, but the air is permeated with a mess of glee and arousal and something bitter. Disappointment, or anger. “You really like this shit, don’t you? You want it. Otherwise you’d be tossing me off the balcony with your mind.

“Well, fine,” he decides, extracting his wet fingers. “I don’t mind indulging your little rape fantasy. I’m not stupid enough to think I can really do anything to you you aren’t letting me do.” His hand is between Armand’s legs. From the angle, Armand can’t see if he’s touching him or if his fingertips are poised just shy of brushing the rim of his hole. The man glances up. “I’m not a bad person.”

Armand says nothing. Does nothing. What is there? The white man’s fingers force their way inside of him, but he cannot feel it.

“Shit, you’re tight,” the man says. Armand can smell blood, copper-bright. Scar tissue is inelastic, and so he tears easily, though by the kindness of his maker not unavoidably. One of Armand’s earliest memories of his maker is being laid out upon silk satin and a mountain of pillows, his skin faintly damp and utterly bare, and between his legs there is a head of light hair, his master’s head, lowered as if in worship. Inside him there is a cold, wet pressure that takes away the stinging pain that has been his companion as long as he knows. Mortal blood is pain, and the blood-drinker transforms it. Amadeo came to Marius ruined; Marius could not unruin him, but he did not allow him to become ruined further—not by Marius’ love, nor other men’s hands, or even Amadeo’s own recklessness.

He sought out abuse. He wanted it. He is the same creature he ever was.

He misses his master’s bitten tongue.

“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this since I remembered what you did to me in ‘73,” the man—the boy, Daniel Molloy, Louis’ fascinating boy—says as he adds another finger, a rough jab towards Armand’s belly like he’s hoping for a flinch. “You knew that already, though. You’ve probably been jerking yourself off to it even more than I have. If you even do that. I don’t know how you get your rocks off.” A motion, half visible: Daniel digging his thumb into the ropy scar below Armand’s penis.

Dryly: “A knife is traditional, I suppose.” Armand refocuses his attention to the fly still perched upon his nose, the left flank of it now. Memory, or something like it, threatens to close in. Catacombs beneath Paris, dust and darkness, soot-covered hands. Sunlight crawling over bodies laid out shoulder to shoulder beneath the thatched roof of an open structure, hot and damp. The smell of a corpse. The smell of his own corpse, subtle but undeniable. The fly recognizes it. The food chain is an ouroboros and the vampire links top to bottom, killer and carrion. “I don’t… actually recall. It was a long time ago.”

This unsettles Daniel, a moment where he hesitates—a moment where he remembers the monster laid out before him as a feast was once a mortal child, a handful of coins. The moment passes. “Is that why you like this shit? You don’t remember how it feels to actually be helpless, so pretending you are is exciting?” Disgust colors his words, and Armand reaches back into his mind.

The lights flicker, warm and yellow. Sickly, with the paint on the walls, the papered-over windows, the chipped corners of the laminate card table. A screaming charley horse in both calves and he can’t stop shaking, but he can’t move. The thing looms over him, touches him. Its face keeps changing: a dead body, a monster with a mouthful of needle teeth like a deep-sea fish, the guy who gave him dope for the first time, cooked it and filled the syringe and tied off his arm with a mud-streaked shoelace. Fucked his mouth afterwards, and the nice thing about the drugs was it was hard to find the urge to care too much about that. But he cares now, miserably, horrifically sober, and with the thing looming over him, hand knotted in his hair, all he can think about is choking on a cock, its cock, dead and rotting, slimy on his tongue. Please, please, please, no.

Daniel pulls out his blood-streaked fingers and examines them. ‘Rashid’ fluttering his lashes as Louis drinks him down. Would you like a taste? He opens his mouth.

The hit is incomparable. Like shooting up for the first time, the high you’ll ruin your life looking for and never find again. Like heroin and ecstasy and cocaine all rolled into one. The colors are brighter, the world louder. He can hear the whirr of electricity. The aches and pains of an old, sick body fall away—no sore knees, no tired lungs. His cock throbs, desire a ravenous parasite in his belly, a living thing using his body to its own ends. Armand remembers the feeling, the taste. Remembers begging his master for more. It made everything easier, and when it was gone it made the yawning emptiness inside him feel all the more desolate. Hollowed out, a vessel to be filled.

Daniel fills him up. Belly and the unzipped fly of barely-undone trousers press insistently against the undersides of his thighs, where his master’s marks rest almost perfectly alone, only a faint discoloration of the skin betraying where the old lashes of a forced march across half the world were excised with sharp claws and a kiss. “Fuck,” Daniel murmurs, his neurons alight. Armand cannot feel Daniel moving in him in his own flesh, but he can feel it in Daniel’s, his own violation as a victory, second-hand.

Daniel’s senses cry out in pleasure and pain and hunger, all the same thing in the end. Armand’s hole is sticky with blood and clinging tight even in his paralysis, so he has to force his way deeper inch by wrenching inch. Surprise glimmers like the sapphires Amadeo once wore on his fingers, like light playing upon the domes of a gilded roof from the life of a boy twice-over dead, thrice—it’s better than Daniel expected, a lot better, even with Armand playing dead fish like a dutiful housewife. “‘S like fucking a fleshlight,” he says, trying to be cruel, but what he’s really thinking is, it’s like fucking a dead body, and he might be more turned on than he’s ever been before. Armand perfectly still and limp beneath him, unresisting; Armand’s hands and mouth and ruined hole all 78°, temperature controlled by the smart home app on his iPad; Armand unnaturally stiff, vampiric hardness and anal strictures contributing to what he imagines it would be like to fuck someone in rigor mortis, a fantasy that he’d always thought would remain a fantasy. I’m not a bad person, he said, and sometimes he even believes it.

He digs blunt fingernails around the jut of Armand’s hip with one hand, the other on the floor just below Armand’s armpit to hold himself upright. He ekes out another half inch like this, balls slapping Armand’s ass cheeks, breath heaving. In the silence of the room, the sounds of sex are vulgar and unappealing. He’s hyper-aware of the sweat beading in the small of his back, of the creaking complaints of his old knees, of the way the only noise Armand makes is the sound of his head and shoulders rocking with the force of Daniel’s use, hair scraping against the concrete. He’s not even breathing anymore.

Suddenly, Daniel’s furious again. Eyes of trapped-insect amber, a floor that slants to the north. Honey on his tongue, honey and pineapple. The television flickers in his memory; the first fifty callers will get a second carving knife, a ten dollar value, absolutely free! “Stop fucking playing dead,” he snaps. “You want to be the victim so bad, don’t just lay there! Fight me! Stop me! You can throw me off the balcony with your mind! You can freeze every muscle in my body! The least you can fucking do if you’re going to pretend you don’t want this is tell me no.”

The fly stands on one slow-drying eye, a blurry darkness taking up most of Armand’s field of vision. It would move if he blinked, but he finds he doesn’t mind the company.

“Can you say that for me, Armand? Can you say ‘no’?” His thrusts are coming ragged now, like his breath. He’s close, for all that anger. Maybe because of it. “It’s a really short word.”

Armand says nothing. Does nothing. Feels nothing, but for kinship with the flesh fly awaiting rot that will never come. His body is jostled by Daniel’s thrusts. The Basquiat, he can see out the corner of his eye.

“Did you ever tell Marius and his buddies no,” Daniel is asking him, voice sounding somehow far away, “or did you like that too?”

If he ever said no to a man who wanted to have him, Armand, Amadeo, Arun or the child who died beneath a thatched roof among dozens of others and left Arun his ruined corpse for an inheritance—if he ever told someone ‘no’ without them ordering the very word to his tongue, he cannot remember it now. What would be the point? What has ever been the point?

He misses his master. Marius. Any of them. His vision blurs, turns pink. Sunset, except sunset was two and a half hours ago. Daniel laughs, but Armand has wandered away from his thoughts and he does not know at what.

Then it’s over, Daniel pulling out, spent, and tucking his blood-slick cock back into his white briefs. Armand is still splayed out on the floor, a broken toy. Perhaps he should collect himself, use the Cloud Gift to drag along his useless lower half like an anxious manananggal, but he cannot summon the will to move. He hopes Daniel will leave. He hopes the fly will stay. He hopes more will come.

Daniel is still there, a shadow above him with fly undone. Crouching over him, looking at him in that way that artists have of looking at him, that critical sort of enchantment that wants him cut open and used for an anatomical study, wants his flesh dried and ground to use for paint. Awe comes off him in waves.

He’s thinking of paintings. Penitent Magdalene, Leda and the Swan. He reaches out to catch an errant curl on his finger, perfectly gentle, and Armand—

Armand lunges forward, momentum borne of a hard shove against the floor, and he bowls them both over in a tangle of limbs. He isn’t thinking. He wants Daniel Molloy dead. He wants all of them dead, everyone who ever thought to possess him—even, in the moment, the ones whose hands he flourished in, whose ownership he jealously clung to. There is something wrong with him. Ah, astaghfirullah. Astaghfirullah.

His teeth are in Daniel’s neck, overlapping Louis’ old bite like an indirect kiss. He is not gentle.

Daniel succeeds in tangling a hand in Armand’s hair, but he doesn’t try to pull him off. He just holds him there at his throat, and with his dying breath grits out, “There you are.”