t’es mon soleil
A trickle of blood had wound its way down the side of Armand’s neck, now dry and flaking: a side effect of flexing his power over a whole crowd of humans and the coven at once. Claudia hoped the headache was something awful. “Oh,” he assured her, “it is.”
“What I don’t get,” Claudia said, “is how you can be the biggest, baddest vampire in the world and still be letting other people boss you around. If I had half your power—”
“Do you want it?”
“What?”
“My power,” said Armand, with impatience he let show. He wanted this to be quick. The longer he was gone, the harder it would be to conceal their survival from the rest of the coven, the more difficult a position he would be put in. The thoughts floated on the surface of his mind, which was usually closed off, there for Claudia to read. True? Maybe. Claudia didn’t know what to make of him, really. “Your dressmaker, I will need to feed her my blood if she is to heal well enough to travel. It will strengthen her, as it strengthened Louis. It would strengthen you.”
“I’m not weak,” said Claudia. “And you put your own damn self in this position, maître.” She said it like another kind of word.
“You are not weak, no,” he agreed mildly, then slit his wrist with a claw before lowering it to Madeleine’s mouth. Soot blackened her teeth, and she had no lips. The sunlight had burned her half to ash before Armand made everything go still—before he carried the two of them away down a winding path of sewers and catacombs. “Drink,” he said. The blood poured down her throat. Her raw hand reached out for Claudia’s, and she intertwined their fingers through the bright spark of agony.
His blood did make them both stronger. Madeleine mastered the Fire Gift before the skin had grown back on her face and neck: it did something funny in a bad way in the pit of Claudia’s stomach, seeing Madeleine cup a ball of flame in her burn-scarred hands, but her companion was awestruck at her own power. “No one can ever hurt us again,” she said.
“‘Cept for other vampires,” Claudia pointed out, more for the sake of it than anything. She didn’t really feel threatened by any of them anymore. They’d survived the Paris coven, and the only reason Lestat wasn’t dead for good was Daddy Lou. Claudia wasn’t the same little stupid little girl who got stuffed under the floorboards. She was smarter, and harder, and she’d nearly drained Armand dry when he offered her his wrist (she tore into his throat instead). Now she could hear vampires’ thoughts from hundreds or even thousands of miles away if she focused, and though the sunlight still burned her, it was slow. Like you fell asleep at the beach, said pasty-faced Madeleine when Claudia first tested it out.
They ended up in Côte d’Ivoire, which after WWII had ended slavery, extended French citizenship to its Black subjects, and elected an Ivorian man, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, to the French Parliament. Apart from some mangled English, Madeleine was hopeless with languages, and Claudia was sick of being the only Black face in the room. They opened a little dress shop in Abidjan: it kept odd hours and stocked boubou and continental styles made from locally woven pagne Baoulé. They killed nightly and (apart from their business associates) indiscriminately. It wasn’t perfect, because nothing was when you looked like the two of them, but they were happy.
In 1955, Claudia du Lac heard her brother’s voice for the first time in almost five years. Armand, he was broadcasting to any and every vampire listening, the hell are you? Claudia locked down her own thoughts, the way Armand taught her to do in between telling horror stories about what covens do to little girls who break the rules, and sought out the shape of his mind, a dark oubliette. Yeah, Armand, where the hell are you? she echoed.
His reply came scattered, mind everywhere at once. Alexandria, puce, was one. Not even dead, and still she haunts us, another; Is this it? yet another, and a low thrum underneath, can’tremembercan’tremembercan’tre—
What’s wrong with you? Claudia asked, bewildered, and all at once his mind closed up. No reply, which was for the best, honestly, because judging from how the coven had talked, just about everything was wrong with him and she didn’t actually want to hear any of it.
A quarter of an hour later, she reached out again. Did you tell Louis where we are? She could sense the shadow of his tumultuous thoughts—he’d definitely heard her—but he said nothing. I want the truth, Claudia added, not whatever you think the right answer is.
Eventually, slowly: Louis believes you are dead. I have not yet disabused him of the notion. He is… fragile, still.
And whose goddamn fault is—
I will not apologize to you, he said firmly, and then, long seconds later: Do you want me to tell him?
That’s sounding an awful lot like an apology to me, Claudia said, just because she could. Don’t tell him where we are. Don’t tell him we’re alive. We’re all better off that way.
The sense of a sigh. I agree.
Was this what closure looked like? It was so… underwhelming.
“Is everything all right, my love?” asked Madeleine as they cleaned up after dinner, her face smeared in bright red arterial flow. “You seem distracted.”
Their meal had been a woman who didn’t believe Claudia had come by the fancy watch she’d wanted to pawn and buy Madeleine some nice jewelry with honestly. To be fair to the poor woman, she’d been entirely correct, but then she’d had to go looking for trouble about it. Claudia kept a finger with a prettily-varnished nail for her collection, but Madeleine was right—her heart wasn’t in it. “Louis and Armand are in Egypt,” she said. “Me ‘n Armand talked. It’s nothing to worry about, nobody’s coming after us. Louis and the coven thinks we’re dead and Armand says he’ll keep it that way. It was just… weird, talking to him. I don’t even hate him, that’s what’s so weird about it all. I’m mad at him, I’m spitting mad, but I don’t hate him.”
Maybe he got into her head and made that true, but Claudia didn’t think so. She’d just wanted so badly, back when they first met him in Paris, to find in him someone worth admiring. He was dark-skinned and effeminate and sometimes seemed… not as young as her, but still young, young enough nobody should’ve taken him seriously (you do not pass for a grown woman, puce, only because you are afraid you will not, he told her once), and there he was all the same, ordering around a coven full of whites, reveling in bloodshed and seemingly unashamed of his nature, like something out of Claudia’s wildest dreams. She’d looked up to him, and been bitterly disappointed by the reality—for all his raw power, he was weak, and a coward, and accustomed to the yoke.
That was fine. Claudia didn’t need Armand any more than she needed Louis or Lestat. She knew what she wanted and what she wanted to be, and it’d be a damn sight less pathetic than any of them. She and Madeleine hadn’t been together even a decade yet, and they’d already left every one of Claudia’s role models in the dust.
Talking to each other. About their feelings. Imagine.
“That is…healthy, probably,” said Madeleine, pressing a messy kiss to the crook of her neck. “He is not worth your passion.”
“Mm.” Claudia let her eyes flutter closed. “No. I gotta save it all for you, don’t I?”
“I do hope so.” Madeleine drank from her, long and slow, then took hold of Claudia’s chin to steal her lips. “Put them all from your mind. We are all we need.”
Claudia smiled. “You and me against the world ‘til the sun burns out.” She pushed Madeleine onto her back, licked up the inside of her thigh over the nylons Madeleine insisted she felt naked without. They were hopelessly stained.
“Longer than that, I—ah—I think! You are the only sun I need.” Madeleine’s searching fingers found Claudia’s curls and tugged her closer. “Yes, yes, like that.” Her thighs shook as Claudia sucked her clit through her nylons and soaked panties.
Claudia ripped the inseam of Madeleine’s nylons with a claw, and said it’ll be cold without the sun, pressing the thought into Madeleine’s mind in time with her fingers between the lips of her wet cunt. She was warm with fresh blood, like a living thing—warmer than Claudia having drunk from her. They’d only done this once when Madeleine was still human, and it was the heat of her that stuck with Claudia most of all. Warming her up from inside, three fingers deep.
“No it won’t,” Madeleine replied out loud.