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“Are you dead?”
“Yes,” said the hunter, “as you see . . . . ”
“But you’re also alive,” said the burgomaster.
“To a certain extent,” said the hunter, “to a certain extent I am also alive. My death ship lost its way—a wrong turn of the helm, a moment when the helmsman was not paying attention, a distraction from my wonderful homeland—I don’t know what it was. I only know that I remain on the earth and that since that time my ship has journeyed over earthly waters. So I—who only wanted to live in my own mountains—travel on after my death through all the countries of the earth.”
“And have you no share in the world beyond?” asked the burgomaster wrinkling his brow.
The hunter answered, “I am always on the immense staircase leading up to it. I roam around on this infinitely wide flight of steps, sometimes up, sometimes down, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left, always in motion. From being a hunter I’ve become a butterfly. Don’t laugh.”
“I’m not laughing,” answered the burgomaster.
—“The Hunter Gracchus” by Franz Kafka
The first time it happened he was was in Linz. He had never been to Linz. He felt no connection to the place or its people, and in the aftermath of his ruined life he had needed to be somewhere he had never been. He walked the streets along the Danube at dusk and at dawn, playing games with the sun. He stayed in hostels and roadside inns. Privacy meant nothing to him. What did he care that people watched him, tried to understand him with their eyes? They never would. From mid-morning to late-afternoon he slept, though he did not need to, though he was loath to follow the pattern his nature prescribed to him. He could have walked in the daylight at noon and never slept, as he had been doing for many years; he pretended not to know how many, but he did: remembered clearly the first time he had set foot into the sunlight and been rewarded with mere discomfort, a tingling sense of wrongness, and yet with permission, all the same, to step outside his restricted bounds into a new mode. But he stuck to the twilight instead.
How long had it been since Louis left? Months meant little to him, but the rhythm of seasons still left its impression. It had been a full turn of the wheel, he thought: two solstices, two equinoxes. The nights were growing longer in the northern hemisphere again. He would stay there to enjoy them, and when the next equinox came he would go south. This was the extent of his planning, if you could call it that. He did not think. It was very easy not to think. In all his years, not to think was the greatest lesson he had ever learned: the source of all resilience, the wellspring of longevity. The second most important lesson was not to act, but in this he had always struggled—in this he had failed over and over, and knew he would again. For a long time he had tried to do and to think, to act and to reason why, but this having gotten him nothing and nowhere—less than nothing—less than he’d had at the start—he fell back into that older pattern, doing without thinking, action without reason, and hoped that maybe the doing would finally, if he let it, cease too. And he could be free. Alone with his unthinking undoing self, which wanted nothing, asked for nothing, and could never therefore be disappointed. That is the trick, he thought; and I will learn to master it.
So he was in Linz, not thinking; walking the streets at dusk and dawn, which was hardly any doing; sleeping more frequently than he had in seventy years, which satisfied his desire not to act or think; sometimes feeding, when he was too weak to quell the impulse entirely; and it was in this way that Daniel found him, when Armand had least expected to be found, when he had not thought anyone should be looking for him, because what was left to look for?
Donaulände park at night. He was watching the people and the river. With electricity human beings had forgotten how to be properly frightened of the dark. The air was cool and dry, early autumn. He was sitting on a bench, listening to the sounds of beggars and pedestrians, when someone sat beside him and poured ice water over his heart.
Daniel looked well. He looked like someone who had taken uncommonly naturally to his new unlife. Armand wouldn’t know what that was like, as he had not done so, and he had not put forth any effort to observe how Daniel was coming along in the year since turning him. Daniel wore pale sunglasses even at night and was lighting a cigarette. It was impossible for him to be here. He pocketed his lighter and met Armand’s gaze coolly, with silent eyes. “Nice night,” he observed blandly.
Daniel was never bland. Often dry, and maybe mordant; but nondescript he was not. Armand did not understand him, could not understand how he was here or what he wanted. A year ago he would have run—did run. Now he did nothing.
Daniel offered him a cigarette. “Want one?”
Armand did not.
“’Kay.” Unperturbed, Daniel slowly finished his and stubbed it out on the arm of the bench. “Where’re you staying?”
Armand told him.
Daniel made a face. “Seriously?” When Armand gave him nothing, he said, “Well, you can come back to where I’m staying, then. I’m not going with you to some bedbug-ridden hostel.”
There were no bedbugs. Lack of privacy Armand could abide; filth he could not. He went with Daniel anyway, telling himself that he was doing nothing by doing it: he was only following what Daniel said, which was not the same thing as doing something, surely, which required no thought, only acquiescence. And perhaps he would find out what Daniel wanted, or Daniel would say whatever it was he had come all this way to say. In the early dawn Daniel put Armand to bed in the hotel where he was staying, stripped naked and joined him, and fucked him, and fell asleep; and when Armand woke at nightfall he was already gone. He had not said anything about what he had been doing in the last year or with whom. He had not asked Armand any questions: not about Dubai, not about his turning, not about San Francisco, not about the fifty years that had come after San Francisco. Daniel found him, Daniel fucked him, and Daniel left him: and only days later did Armand realize why he found this pattern so familiar after all.
For it did become a pattern. Armand left Linz that same day and travelled east, following the river to Bratislava. Daniel had found him to prove something—that he could, that he was no longer in Armand’s thrall, that he could find him and bed him and leave him in the same manner Armand had done to him for decades. And, having proven it, he would not be back. He clearly didn’t care what Armand did, whether he roamed the earth shambolically and never again crossed his path. If Daniel harbored any curiosity about Armand’s doings or plannings or reasonings, he would have asked: such was his nature. He was an unselfconsciously nosy person who didn’t hesitate to say what he thought when he thought it. Which meant he had not thought much of anything of putting Armand in his place. The extent of Daniel’s message, in Armand’s understanding of it, had been to close a door on something that had once bothered him but didn’t anymore—to say clearly: We are finished, so do not expect me to come for you again. I have moved beyond you and I don’t need you anymore, if I ever needed you; and I don’t think I ever did.
One month later Daniel found Armand in the old town where he was staying; found him, said, “You look like shit, man,” and put his arm around his shoulders, led him once more to his bed. This time Armand did not sleep afterwards, could not, lay there in agony and paralysis waiting for the sun to creep towards the horizon and Daniel to leave. He thought: this time I will stop him. I will ask him questions instead. When Daniel woke and packed his things and left, without noticing that Armand did not sleep, without noticing that he was watching him—or noticing, and not caring—Armand found he could say nothing, do nothing, but lie there and watch him go. I will go to ground, he thought. I will go to ground and he will not find me. I will hide in the old country, in the parts of the world that still remember how to be afraid of the dark.
He went east again, on the river again, thinking about the silly superstition about vampires and running water. He had been following water all his life: the Yamunā and the Ganges, the Danube, the Rhine and the Ural, the Hudson, the Łaguna de Venesia and the Khūr Dubayy. But his part was only to follow—not to be a part of, or be cleansed by. As an infant he had been bathed in the sacred Yamunā and purified; later he had learned enslavement on her waters, been contaminated. He sought a smaller city, a more hidden place, and crept at night into Severin just past the Danube’s Iron Gates. He walked to Trajan’s Bridge and wandered alone among the ruins. Thought: this was your people’s city, once. Perhaps you came here, long ago. Perhaps you saw the bridge being built. In his thoughts he spoke to Marius often—more often than he had in years, saying nonsense to the dead. He did not like Roman cities. That was what he had not liked, he realized, about Linz, and it was what he detested about Severin. He kept away from the ruins in Drobeta and pondered where to go next. But the decision-making paralyzed him; he spent weeks in stillness and worried. No one came. I am safe enough here, he thought, though the ruins oppressed him, weighed heavily on his mind. He has proven it to himself after all. He has moved beyond me now. He needed just one more chance to be sure. His sleep grew easier and more restful. He visited old libraries in the late afternoon dark. The winter solstice came, and the longest night brought him the same deep, wordless comfort that it always had. He slept well that short day, laughing inwardly at the weak and diminished sun: and when he woke Daniel was sitting in the corner of his dusty little room, taking him apart with his eyes. He covered Armand with his body and drank from his neck while Armand lay motionless beneath him, unable to act. So it’s the blood he wants, he thought. The blood, the power of the blood, he wants to grow stronger and more safe, he wants power for himself and he will take it from me if he has to. Daniel left early, hours before the dawn, having said nothing, asked nothing, done nothing but take from Armand that which he was unable to keep for himself. Armand lay benumbed as the darkness turned to light; then he dressed and went out into the early morning, aimless as a ghost—worse than a ghost, a specter of empty shadow in the dawn.
During the flight to Istanbul he thought: I could fight him off. I could make him leave me alone and never come back. Rationally he knew this to be true. But he wasn’t feeling very rational. Once was a fluke, twice a coincidence, but three times? He fled to Istanbul because there was something in that ancient and powerful city which had made him feel safe once, long ago. He had spent a little time here with his maker before his turning, in that period of his life he did and did not remember. He had thought to hide in a smaller city, but that had not worked; so let global Istanbul hide him instead.
Daniel came for him on the second night. It was only three nights since he had left him in Severin. He offered Armand a cigarette. This one Armand took. Say something, he told himself. Maybe that is what he has been waiting all this time in silence for. They lay naked in bed, not touching anywhere anymore, both dropping ashes onto the sheets—Daniel because he was being careless, Armand because he was shivering minutely. He said, more quietly than he'd imagined, “What is it that you want from me?”
“From you?” Daniel looked at him surprised, as if the question were ludicrous. “Nothing.”
And he left shortly afterwards, having said not another word.
I must keep moving. When I stay still he finds me. Armand went west, along the Mediterranean coast to Alexandropoulis, then across the peninsula to Vlorë. Then northwest to Dubrovnik and northwest again to Koper, like thread pulled by a needle through the world’s stitching. In all these places Daniel did not find him. The tension eased. I will lose him like this. He reached the destination he had not known he was being drawn towards, though perhaps he should have guessed, he should have known: Venice, almost exactly as he had left her but not quite, where he had not been for nearly one hundred and twenty years, where he had never once brought Louis. He had a safehouse here, a small and unobtrusive residence in Canneregio where he kept those few possessions he dared not entrust to banks although they would arguably be safer there, although this absurd secrecy was not rational.
Daniel showed up on his doorstep that very same night. Smiling grimly, saying nothing. He departed before daybreak and left behind a copy of his book, which all this time he had been writing and having published, never saying a word about it. Armand dropped the book into the canal behind the safehouse that was safe no longer. Thought: this is the hell I have earned for myself. This is a retribution I spent almost fifty years writing, without even knowing I held the pen.
On an island off the southwest coast of Newfoundland in a town named Ramea that was home to fewer than four hundred people, in mid-February when the snow was oppressive, an elderly woman named Elise rented a room to a thin, serious young man from whom, she would have been sorely disappointed to learn, the crucifix she always wore offered her no protection. He was not, she thought, a well man; he kept to his room and ate very little, and he did not offer information about himself freely. But he was respectful and quiet, and he had paid six months in full, so she left him to his solitude and hoped, as the weather thawed, that so would he. And so it seemed he would. As spring approached he grew slightly more cheery, though one would not call him cheerful. He began going into the town by day and returning at night with more color, she thought with approval, in his cheeks.
One night in April, much later than was polite for a social visit, there was a knock on her front door. Putting down her knitting and answering it, she was faced with a man only ten years younger than herself, wearing a leather jacket and terribly ugly sunglasses. He had a gold hoop earring in one ear. Dear Lord, she thought—he thinks it’s still the seventies, the silly man, and asked with more frostiness than she’d usually evince if there was something perhaps that she could do for him at this late hour.
“Yes, ma’am, there is.” He had a self-assured, confident smile which she did not much like. Americans! she thought with derision. “I’m looking for someone, and I’m told he’s lived here these past few months.” He gave the name of her quiet, polite tenant.
She said, coldly—amazed by her own haughtiness, and a little proud of it, too: “I shall see whether he is available. He may well be asleep, you know.”
The man laughed and twirled his rental car keys. “I doubt it.”
She went to her tenant’s door and hesitated. She felt very much like someone required to impart bad news to the completely unsuspecting. She knocked softly, in case he was asleep; but he opened the door at once, giving her that unpretentious, wide-eyed look which was by now so familiar. With great reluctance she told him, “You have a visitor, dear.”
—And she could have sworn, though she did not know how she knew it, for visually nothing in his face had changed—but it was as if a shadow flitted across it, and she knew he was, for some secret, strange unknown reason, very much afraid.
“I’ll tell him you’re asleep,” she said, already turning to do so. “It’s a ridiculous hour, really, he can’t possibly expect—”
“No.” The shadow, whatever it was, had gone. “Send him in.” Then giving her a unencroaching look, as if realizing he needed her permission after all. “If that’s all right.” The look and the way he said it perturbed her greatly, made her somehow ill at heart.
She returned to her front door. “He will see you,” she told the stranger crisply, and took his improbably hideous jacket.
His smile increased. “Thank you very much. You won’t even know I’m here.” He followed her to her tenant’s room, where the door had been left ajar. No light was lit within; she could not see into the room at all as the stranger disappeared inside and closed the door firmly behind him. And though she crouched outside the door at intervals late into the night, straining to hear anything, not knowing even what she wanted to hear, or feared to hear, she heard nothing; and when she finally went to bed still the strange man had not left; and when she woke early the next morning her tenant was already awake with his belongings all packed, looking wan and ill and tired and refusing her attempts to return the rest of his money. “Keep it,” he said. “I may yet come back.” But he never did; and the other man Elise never saw again, did not know when he had left—realized, a few days later, that she had never even gotten his name.
In the dark and the silence of the early morning—Armand having put forth his power to keep the sounds of what they did in the dark from reaching Elise's ears—he said, while Daniel dressed to leave: “How do you find me?”
Daniel laughed. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Yes. “Yes.”
Daniel was watching him, buttoning his jeans. “Missing your old tricks, huh?” He made a slow and unkind smile. “I have my ways.”
He left it at that.
He is doing this to punish me, Armand thought when he had gone. He will find me, he will take from me, he will use my ceaselessly open cunt because he can, because I am powerless to stop him and he likes to see me suffer. The idea made him somehow fiercely glad, because it was right of Daniel to do so: it was as it should be.
He did not know what he had expected to happen after turning Daniel. He did not remember making the decision to do it. He remembered only Daniel’s blood in his mouth and his life running out of him. Remembered thinking: die and go beyond my reach; die and be forever free. But something had gone wrong. Something always went wrong. He hadn’t been strong enough to do it; and now here they were. He could not call it a decision, really. Then was it an instinct? But how could it be, if this was the only time he had ever done such a thing, even though he’d had his teeth in some dumb prey thing’s neck thousands of times before, hundreds of thousands? An aberration could not be an instinct. He had never, ever felt the desire to make a fledgling. Other vampires acted as if he was purposely abstaining from some essential process, puritanically denying himself, but he had never felt the supernatural and not biological imperative to establish a lineage, so he was not denying himself anything at all. Even when Louis, for whom Armand would have done anything, anything—anything but this—had asked him to make a fledgling, for her, the one had gotten away, the bird who broke her cage, Armand had not even considered it. He had known he would never do it: not for loyalty, not for deference, not even for love. And in the end he had done it for nothing: for no reason at all.
When he realized what he’d done a deep and swelling wave had moved within him. He had tried to remember his own turning, how he had spent those first early days. He remembered his master holding him, feeding from him, pouring blood into his mouth, the hot iron taste turned suddenly savory. He had been ill before his turning and he was ill for a long time afterwards, and so the transition had been especially difficult. Or he remembered it to be difficult. He remembered being weak and feeble, remembered thinking: I will fail you, after all. I have not been made perfect in your likeness. You will have to put me to death, like a farmer slitting a born-wrong calf’s throat. But his master, merciful, had not abandoned him: had nursed him even though he surely had been disappointed such tender ministrations were necessary. Looking then at Daniel, caught between worlds, Armand had understood that he was not capable of such tenderness. He could not nurse Daniel, could not care for him; there was no dimension to the broken, strangled connection between them which could allow for such a thing. Could a river run from a wellspring that was hundreds of years dry? A wellspring that had been dry and dead even before he became what he was, dry and dead when he was a child, a human child, a somewhat-human child, a scrap of shadow in the shape of a child? Nonsense. Nonsense.
He left Ramea and went south. He crept into the earth’s shadow. One day he will stop, he thought. He will stop looking for me, and some time, one of these times, will be the last time he will ever find me. I need only wait long enough.
He was walking the streets in Mombasa at night. A shadow fell in step beside him, followed him silently to where he was staying, held open the door for him with deeply ironic chivalry. In a shanty town slum in Soweto at twilight he was watching a young woman bend down to help up her crying toddler, lifting the child into her arms, smiling a little, laughing, smoothing the child’s hair, speaking gently to him, while a nameless, gnawing hunger filled Armand and took him over, his fangs aching, something inside him still burning. “Leave them,” said Daniel from behind him, misunderstanding Armand’s hunger; or maybe he didn’t, maybe he understood it perfectly and it was Armand who did not— “for fuck’s sake, man, come on, leave them, are you serious right now?” He was leaning against a bar counter in Huancayo and suddenly smelling Daniel’s particular brand of cigarettes. Getting drunk off human beings in a nightclub in Rocinha, and then Daniel was putting his arms around him from behind. In Ushuaia, at the end of the world, Armand woke in bed to someone on top of him, an overwhelming presence bearing down on him and smothering him, and he threw them off with all of his strength, in a numb panic—only for Daniel to spring up again grinning and come right back. He spent two weeks in a whorehouse in Canberra before Daniel showed up, annoyed, saying, “Jesus, Armand,” and pulling him out of there; “you sure know how to show me a good time, huh?”
I do not show you anything, Armand thought. I show you only myself.
A hotel room in Surabaya. Daniel kissing him. “It’s funny,” he was saying between putting his mouth on Armand’s face. Armand did not understand kissing, did not like it, had pretended to Louis for nearly fifty years, when kissing between them had stopped, that he did. “Isn’t it?”
Armand did not know what he meant.
“Well,” said Daniel—thrown, apparently, by Armand’s not understanding him—having expected Armand to read his mind even though he couldn’t anymore, was that it? “You know.” Releasing Armand and doodling idly with his fingertips on his bare chest. This Armand liked. This closeness he enjoyed; he stole these tiny secret satisfactions from their confusing pantomime. “Us, like this.”
Us? There is no us. But his useless voice said instead, “This?”
“Yeah.” Daniel kissed him again. “Who’d have thought.” Smiling a real and fond smile that confounded Armand, made him stupid. “How do you want me tonight?” Daniel was playing with Armand’s hair, looking down into his face. “How do you want me to make you feel?”
You make me feel like a well gone dry. You make me feel like wind in the desert moving.
“How about this?” asked Daniel, putting his hand between Armand’s legs, where he had very much not gone dry, where Daniel had been making pleasure out of desolation. “This?” And he caught Armand’s mouth with his as Armand spoke, as he started to say no and then said instead yes.
The wheel moved, another half-turn. Armand crawled north. In Manila in December Daniel showed up differently, fidgeting and visibly nervous. “Listen,” he said when Armand set to work removing his t-shirt and jeans. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
“Later,” said Armand, pulling down his boxers.
Daniel’s hands stopped him. He had a funny look on his face. “I really think it has to be now.”
Everything, always on your schedule. Armand ceased his attempts to undress him, resenting the interruption of their pattern, this aberration. If this must be how things were then let them be as they should! Waiting for Daniel, who had grown suddenly shy, to speak—and wasn’t that a pleasurable sight, Daniel searching for the words and not finding them, Daniel wrong-footed for once, Daniel struggling to adapt. This is it, Armand suddenly realized. He experienced the thought as pure conviction, absolute surety. At last, at last, he has had enough: now he will leave me alone.
“Listen, I don’t know how to—I’ll just say it, I guess, since I don’t know how you’re gonna take it.” Daniel scrubbed his face with his hands. Armand watched, fascinated. “Your maker,” said Daniel at last, which was the last thing, the very last thing, maybe, Armand had expected him to say. “Marius. He’s—Jesus, I don’t know why I have to be the one to.... He’s alive.”
And he lay there waiting for Armand to react, to supply him with some sort of answer: but Armand, capable of nothing in this moment, gave him none.
“Yeah,” Daniel said, as if Armand had said anything. He had a strange helpless look on his face. “I know. I mean, I don’t know, I don’t know how or what he’s been doing—Louis is the only one who will even talk to me about any of this shit, and he just doesn’t know enough, he doesn’t know any more than I do—”
This is a test. You are testing me; that is what this is. But a test for what? Armand was slow and stupid to react, paying attention to all the wrong things: the way Daniel looked lying there before him in the half-dark, the whir of the fan above them moving the air in the room around, the small, long-dormant seed of despair inside of him, watered now by Daniel’s words, unfurling and opening itself, still opening.
“Listen,” said Daniel again. He was taking Armand’s hands in his, trying to pull him close and bring their bodies together. No, Armand thought, and did not move; no— “I’ve been keeping my nose and ear to the ground, so to speak, to see what I can dig up—I’ll keep trying, you don’t have to....”
You don’t have to, what? But he didn’t say.
Armand pulled his hands away from Daniel and crouched away from him on the other side of the bed. “Don’t.” Don’t touch me, or don’t go looking? Both. Neither. Touch me, only touch me, touch me now and keep touching me. But he was thinking of that other face, the one he had longed for in the endless dark, when his only comfort had been that it was outside of his maker’s power, that dark and prodigious power, to return to him—that if it had been within his power, he would have done so.
“I’ll do what I like,” said Daniel, annoyed. “And I’m doing it for you, so you could stand to be fucking grateful for once.”
Armand laughed. “Grateful? I should be grateful that you will not leave me alone, that you hound me to the ends of the earth, that you do whatever you like, whenever you like, and call it for my benefit? Shall I crawl on my knees to you and thank you? But what reward could ever be big enough for your magnanimity? Shall I kiss you and say yes Daniel? Shall I prostrate myself before you? What is there left of me to give that you have not already freely taken?” He saw Daniel looking at him, at his nakedness. “You’ve already had that, but yes, have it again, until you are satisfied—what will it take for you to finally be satisfied?”
Daniel looked, incredibly, hurt. “What are you talking about?”
It infuriated Armand beyond belief to hear Daniel feign ignorance of the stark and barefaced truth that lay between them. It had lain between them all this time, for fifty years: the blink of an eye, an interminable eternity. Ten times that length of time I have lived, but never—never—never have I suffered as you have made me suffer—never have I loathed anyone as I have loathed and suffered you—
He had been saying it all aloud without realizing it. The look on Daniel’s face changed to indignation. He was getting out of bed, putting on his shirt, pulling his jeans back on in jerky motions. “Fine,” he said— “fine. Fuck you, too. Always about your fucking feelings, and everyone else had better just get out of the way—he doesn’t want you,” he said sharply, watching Armand to see how the blow would land. “This whole time he knew you were alive, he just didn’t care, he had you exactly where he wanted you, which was far the fuck away from him—but if you want to go crawling back to him don’t let me stop you. Maybe he’ll be pleased that you remember how to sit and stay so well after all these years, that you’ll still heel and roll over.” Daniel moved around the room, collecting his things. “Bleed your heart out, I don’t care, I really don’t—I never have—”
He vanished into the darkness outside, and Armand was alone. Thinking: so I have outlasted him, as I always do. So I have won after all. Telling himself that the winning was sweet: that it was enough to live on.
For the first time in over two years he sought the company of other vampires. Vampires other than Daniel. Though that did not count, as Daniel had sought him, had refused to leave him alone. He went hunting. He was too familiar among vampires of his own peerage and did not want his movements to be monitored, so he tracked down young vampires first. Juveniles they seemed to him, adolescents, nurslings. They were infantile and stupid in ways that Daniel, vampire-younger than all of them, was not. They didn’t know anything, and they didn’t even know that they didn’t know it. Armand got nothing from them, preoccupied as they were with coming into their new feeble powers, obsessed with vying among each other for piddling status and prestige. When they asked Armand how old he was—how long since he’d been turned—how many years since he’d taken the blood—he always gave a different answer, pretending to be five years younger than they were, or ten, sometimes fifteen. They all believed him. That mere span of years always meant something to them, made them feel powerful and strong. They tried to counsel him, to teach him their ways, to show him their power and their ferocity. This he allowed patiently, listening to the things they did not say, trying to piece together answers from these worthless sources. But he learned nothing. All of it was futile. He was too afraid of the truth he sought to go to its actual source. He was a whipped dog cowering for scraps, too ashamed to beg for them, just as Daniel had said he was. And all this miserable time Daniel did not come for him; all this time Armand had to endure the unbearable company of halfwits and profligates, despising them, wondering who had condescended to turn these mediocrities, who had considered them worthy. He hunted higher in the fledgling hierarchy, circling closer to true power but only a shade of it, a shimmering reflection. He would be recognized soon, he was sure. But recognition never came. He ingratiated himself, debased himself, seduced those who were beneath him: cajoling them, flattering them, courting their lust and exploiting their eagerness, contorting himself into the forms they expected to see—all while listening, yearning for any sliver of information, the barest hint of insight. He gleaned nothing. After four months he began to despair. He had been right after all. Daniel did not understand enough to know that what he had claimed to be true could not be true. He had been tricked. Someone had fed him false information to give to Armand to unseat him, to sabotage him, to make him stupid and afraid, and now Armand was giving them exactly what they wanted: imperiling himself, making himself vulnerable, exposing himself to threat for the sake of nothing, for an untruth. He pivoted between hopelessness and rage. His fury he directed towards one person only: his wayward, recusant fledgling, who even by his absence was tormenting Armand still, making mincemeat of his soul.
A cheap rented room in Phnom Penh. March again. The vampire whom Armand had seduced and learned nothing from was lying back in bed after fucking him, well pleased with himself, talking at length about his prowess and all the vampires he had come into conflict with and bested. He was white, British, had been turned in his mid-forties and then had come to Cambodia afterwards for the same reason all white men in their forties come to Southeast Asia. He thought Armand was a local, newly turned, who craved guidance and authority, and he was only too happy to give him that. Armand, bored, was barely listening to him, making the appropriate noises when necessary, looking coy when he was supposed to look coy, verecund when he was supposed to look verecund. Disdaining the man and his petty rivalries, his overinflated ego, his self-satisfaction in bedding a young and beautiful vampire and making him orgasm three times, all of which Armand had dutifully faked: gasping, flushing, pretending he did not dare to meet the man’s eyes and then meeting them, turning his face away when the man—who, after his death, had swaggeringly renamed himself Raphael—tried to kiss him. Armand pretended not to notice the attempt, pretended to come again as he rode his cock. Thinking bitterly to himself: This is what you have reduced me to. Would it make you happy to know it?
Raphael slapped his ass as he dismounted. “Nice work, sweet thing,” he said and offered him a cigarette, which just made Armand angry with Daniel all over again. “Stick with me,” Raphael was saying— “just stick with me, I’ll look after you. You won’t have to worry about a thing.”
Daniel would never say something so perishingly dull. Armand wiped the man’s come on the bedspread, planning his exit, wondering how soon was too soon to disappear. But now Raphael was saying something else. Armand’s attention snapped to, came to a fine and distinct point.
“You hear about that book?” Raphael helped himself to another cigarette as well as another grope of Armand’s hip and chest. “I’d like to get a hold of the guy who wrote it—Molloy, I think? Whatever his fucking name is—I’d like to find him, show him what I think about his so-called interview.” Said with visible contempt. “Somebody will, I’m sure.” Chuckling. “He’ll be dead before the year is out, just wait.... I’m amazed he’s lasted this long. I wonder who turned him. Can you imagine? I heard he was dying anyway, sick or something—not like you and me, in our primes....” Giving Armand another appreciative once over. “What the hell were they thinking, I wonder? Whoever did it.”
“I wonder.”
“Doesn’t matter, I guess.” Raphael dismissed the topic. “Bet they regret it after that book. Maybe it was what’s-his-name, Louis-something....”
Something cold had taken Armand’s heart in its fist and squeezed. “It wasn’t.”
“No?” Raphael was amused by this bold opinion from his new dependent. “Then who d’you reckon did it?”
“I did,” said Armand.
Raphael laughed. “Daaamn,” he said; “you’re pretty and funny!” —And then he choked on the last syllable as Armand seized him by the throat telepathically, not needing to use his hands, projecting into his small and stupid mind a new command. Get up, Armand spoke to him, mind to mind, as he crouched naked over him and looked into his face at his terror and his disbelief: get up, and go outside, and die screaming in the sunlight.
Ninety seconds later Armand left, too, stepping carefully over the pile of ashes just beyond the doorway on his way out.
He spoke to Daniel now, in his thoughts. If you were here, you’d.... But Daniel wasn’t there. If you were here you’d laugh at me and kiss me, and I would let you. If you were here I would tell you to leave, and you would tell me no. He had endless sex with strangers who did not satisfy him. He masturbated in hotel rooms afterwards and couldn’t come, didn’t even get close, felt rage and not pleasure building inside him whenever he tried. He was running up a steep and hateful hill and never getting to the top. He stayed alert, listening now for different news and finding it much more forthcoming. The fledglings he had spent four months tracking had only been vaguely aware of Daniel’s violation of the proper order. But older vampires, more established vampires, had been discussing the matter at length while Armand crept around the globe and looked for dark places to hide. Louis had warned some of them off from himself and by association Daniel. Others were not to be persuaded into inaction by some American upstart. These did recognize Armand when he found them, but they had no chance to do anything with that information before he killed them. It got easier every time to break the old laws. Lestat had taught him that. And Daniel had already damned him by association. He was already culpable. He had brought this unendurable pest into being, had let him run wild. Am I my fledgling’s keeper? Yes—and more than that, besides. Chiang Mai. Nanjing. Kyoto. It got easier, got easier. They never even saw him coming. All these years he had perfected the methods of his hunt, the impenetrability of his mental fortress, the ease with which he could crack open another vampire’s mind. All these years he had nurtured these powers within himself and never truly used them—had never known, therefore, whether when put to the test they would do him any good. These powers now he found exceptional, he found them thus far unrivaled. He was not up against the most powerful, of course—remained outside of their purview, hunting among the lower ranks—but it consoled him all the same, convinced him that he had not spent centuries growing weak and stagnant, that he had amassed power enough to protect himself instead.
Daniel’s voice in his head. A little dry, maybe mordant. “Protect yourself from what, exactly?”
Armand declined to answer.
Mumbai in June. The last time he had been to India he had been alive, had been somewhat-human, had been plucked from the poverty and the despair in which he lived and brought up into another life. Centuries ago. The past was another world, but it didn’t feel like it. It felt as if he had never been away, even though he had never been to Mumbai at all. He rested there, listening, waiting, determining whether his actions had been noticed, whether he needed to lie low. He was terribly lonely. It took him a long time to realize it. It was not a new feeling; it had simply acquired a new flavor. If Marius is alive then he knows what you have done. If Marius is alive then he could have come for me all this time, and he never did. If Marius is alive then you are in danger and I cannot save you. If Marius is alive then I am nothing, worse than nothing. If Marius is alive then he will know what I have spent these last few months doing.
In the slum in Dharavi he was sick. He had debilitating dizzy spells. He was wracked with hunger but could not eat; he ached with tiredness but could not sleep. He will find me and he will name me, and I will come cringing to him like a little dog. He will put his brand on my flesh once more and I will thank him for it; I will beg for more. But what would his maker name him when he called him? Arun was dead, Amadeo contaminated, Armand a stranger. Perhaps he would name him what he was: which was emptiness.
He realized, at last, that in his thoughts he was no longer telling Daniel to leave. In his thoughts he told Daniel, stay; and in his thoughts Daniel laughed at him, told him no.
In July it rained every day, a relentless, unceasing rain that eroded his thoughts slowly, down to nothingness. When August came and the monsoon remained he spent his days not thinking about anything, his head filled only with the patter and crescendo of rainfall. He was still sick, and he rarely went hunting. When he did he left Dharavi to do it. He weathered the endless storm in a shack crowded on all sides by other rusting shacks and hutments and marveled at how like and unlike this place was to the home he had been born in. The difference was a matter of scale and not of type. A woman who lived with two other women and several children in the shack beside his sang all day while she worked mending pots. She had a clear, trilling voice that parted the gray weather all that long month. He remembered siblings, vaguely: indistinct shapes from his long-abandoned past moving at the edges of his vision, older than him, younger than him, dirty and serious-faced, rail-thin, with large dark eyes. He had never gone back to Delhi because he had feared that this would happen, that pieces of some other life would appear as apparitions in his mind and weaken him, make him ill; but it was happening to him anyway, seven hundred miles away from that place where everything had begun. He wanted to leave but was too weak to do it. When he slept he dreamed his maker had come to salvage him from deprivation a second time, had come to the whorehouse where he lived and suffered to show him how to use the only power that he had, which was sex, to gain the power that he craved, which was safety. Only this time Marius chose someone else, one of the other poor dumb things selling themselves for pennies, and left him there, saying: You have not been made perfect in my likeness. Better I should have slaughtered you in the cradle. Better I should have left you here to wither and die your useless human life as was intended. Better I should never have intervened at all.
He woke up sweating. His eyes ached, two dry hot stones catching at the fragile membranes of eyelids. He realized that was because he was close to tears, and he found the prospect so abominable, so powerfully unacceptable, that the flashfire of his disgust burned away the feeling in an instant. He got up and went to the entryway and looked out into the rain, at the water running in the broken street. I don’t need anyone to come for me. I can leave here of my own power, under my own will. All I have to do is walk out of this place and keep walking. He had been doing it ever since Louis left him. Ever since he turned Daniel and realized what he’d done, that he was living now in the eschaton.
He went back inside. He lay down again and slept. He dreamed. In his dream he was killing Daniel again. In his dream this time he finished the job.
When he woke, Daniel was there looking at him.
He was sitting on a busted up wooden crate he had dragged in from the street. He looked exhausted and annoyed. He was muddy from walking. “Morning.” That was his new favorite joke. It was already well past nightfall. “You look like hell.”
Armand sat up. The rain had lessened to a fine mist for the first time in weeks. The woman next door was still singing. Her children were laughing. “You....” Confused. He was still dreaming. In another moment he would put his teeth in Daniel’s neck and tear out his throat.
“Me.” Daniel shook a cigarette out of the box, then tipped the box towards Armand. “Want one?”
Armand hesitated for a long time. Then he held out his hand.
“You’ve been busy,” Daniel observed. They were sitting in his westernized hotel suite a mere mile and a half away from one of the biggest slums in the world. Daniel had insisted that Armand shower and change before he would talk to him. Before he will fuck me.
Armand, who had spent the last month and a half watching it rain, did not understand him at first. Then he realized Daniel must mean the vampires he had hunted in the months before. “You made that necessary.”
Daniel dismissed that. “Not really. I’ve been handling it. But I realized something must be up when I stopped getting regular death threats.”
“There will be more.” The ones Armand had killed had been a drop in the bucket.
“Yeah,” Daniel agreed. “Probably.” He studied Armand for a long time. It was so good to see him. Armand hated how much he liked seeing him, how badly he wanted Daniel to touch him and how afraid he was that he would, because as soon as he did he would leave again. It was the nature of the thing between them, this thing Armand had despised and craved for more than fifty years. But this time Armand would humiliate himself further; this time he would ask Daniel to stay, and Daniel, as everyone who had come before him had ever done, would tell him no.
“You’ve been sick,” said Daniel. Half a question. “I didn’t know vampires could get sick.”
“They don’t.”
Daniel was studying him still. He stood abruptly and turned away. “I think I’ll shower too. It was raining like hell until I found you.”
“It’s monsoon season.”
“Yeah.” Daniel looked back at him as if he might say something else. Then he went into the bathroom and shut the door.
When he reappeared, dressed, his hair damp, apparently entirely unconcerned with what Armand had been doing while he was gone—which had been nothing—Armand said, “Tell me now how you find me.”
Daniel tossed him a grim little smile. “You really don’t know?”
He really didn’t.
The smile turned raptorial. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out eventually.” Daniel stretched out on the bed and yawned. He put his hands behind his head and looked at Armand.
Armand found his despair, named it silently, rolled it in his palm like a pearl. “This time, don’t leave. Stay with me.”
Daniel made a face. “Real funny.” His expression said he didn’t think it was funny at all.
“I mean it.”
“Sure you do. Just like you meant it all those other times.”
Armand observed from within himself his own agony perfected, wrought entirely from ice. “What other times?”
“Surabaya. Ushuaia.” Daniel ticked backwards on his fingers. “Ramea. Linz.”
Armand said nothing.
“I get it, all right?” Daniel looked flushed, like maybe he was angry and trying to hide it. “I pretended to be you, so you pretend to be me. Very clever. I’m not asking you to stick around anymore. I got the picture, finally. I’m not as stupid as I used to be.” He smiled a little. “Just pretty stupid, I guess. If this is how you want me—fine. I’ll come to you in bits and pieces. But do I have to walk through the poorest places on planet earth to find you half the time? It’s fucking depressing, man. You could be on a beach in the Caribbean right now, in the sun and everything.”
“I don’t like the beach.” Partly true. He liked the water.
“You,” said Daniel pointedly, “don’t fucking like anything.”
Armand didn’t want to talk about this anymore. He wanted Daniel’s hands on him, his mouth on him, wanted Daniel to touch him everywhere. If he was going to leave, then let there at least be the pleasure first. “I like you.”
Daniel laughed. “No the fuck you don’t. You tolerate me. You fucked up and made me your fledgling so now you have to tolerate me, but that’s all. I’m good for a fuck now and then, good to screw now and then, whenever you’re bored and lonely, but that’s all.”
Dull anger reignited itself. “For the last two years you have come and used me whenever you pleased, no matter how far away I tried to go from you, and yet somehow I have been mistreating you?”
Daniel scoffed. “Used you how?”
“Sexually. Emotionally. Metaphysically. Take your pick.”
“Even if that were true,” said Daniel, “and it’s not, that’s two years to my fifty. I really don’t want to hear it.”
Scorekeeping, after all. “So I need only endure half a century of this? That is a relief.”
But something seemed to have occurred to Daniel. He sat up. “That first time—that night in Linz. Tell me exactly how you remember it.”
“Have you already forgotten?” It was confirmation of suspicions Armand had long nursed: that all of this had meant little to Daniel, that all this time he had been making a point, but that point was for Armand’s benefit and not Daniel’s own—that Daniel didn’t much care, one way or another, whether he saw Armand again.
“Just tell me,” insisted Daniel. “And don’t fucking lie to me. Lie to me and I walk.”
Armand said nothing, for a very long time; and then he said, “Fine,” and told him the truth.
You took me to your hotel room. The lights were off. You left them off. You kept looking at me from the edges of your eyes. You were angry with me—I could tell that you were angry with me. It was the first time you had been alone with me since I had killed you. You wanted to punish me, to make me understand how you felt, abandoned by your maker. It was better that I left, better that I wasn’t there, but you didn’t see that then. I suppose you still haven’t. What could I have done for you? It was for your own good. You watched me in the dark and I could see what you wanted. You had remembered—somehow, you had remembered—more than enough, maybe even everything. You didn’t say. You didn’t say anything to me, watching me, waiting for me to do what must be done next, waiting for me to offer myself to you. I couldn’t understand how you had found me. I still cannot understand.... I thought: I will give him what he wants, and he will leave. I will give him what he wants and he will leave me alone. But you couldn’t even do that. I hadn’t given enough. I had not performed the appropriate penance. Fine: so let me atone, let me tie myself to your whipping post. You undressed me, lay me down. You had your fill, laughing when—when you made me—when I couldn’t keep you from making me, because you knew, knew that I.... That in all those years, with you I had never.... You wanted me to know that you knew, knew that I would never, ever, apart from you, be satisfied: and now I must know it, too.
Armand stopped. Daniel was staring at him. He had let Armand speak uninterrupted, though he had opened and closed his mouth a few times. For his part Armand felt pleased: pleased to have this done with, for Daniel to know that he understood and that they could dispense with the charade: this deal made between them had been agreed to on either side, and there was no longer any need to continue to relitigate it. I will want you and cannot have you; you will take from me until the balance is settled and you are no longer owed, until your pride has been satisfied. I understand the terms. I have always understood.
Daniel got up from the bed. He paced a bit. “Armand, that didn’t—that didn’t happen.”
“Of course,” Armand allowed patiently. That was part of the deal, after all: that they pretend they had not made one.
“I mean it,” said Daniel. “You followed me back to my hotel. I had barely shut the door behind us when you pushed me up against the wall and started pulling off my clothes. You put my hands on you, everywhere—you said, ‘Don’t talk,’ and so I fucking didn’t.... And I didn’t remember, actually—I still don’t, not everything, just—tiny pieces...flashes.... I thought maybe we had done this before. I thought, fine, if this was what you wanted, then I could do that, I could play my part; and I thought you....” Looking straight at Armand now, angry and accusatory. “I had never seen you like that before. I know I hadn’t. You were....” He paused. “You were fucking hungry for it. When I was half-asleep, you said, ‘You will be gone,’ and I didn’t understand what you meant—and then you just said it again, ‘You will be gone by morning.’ I thought you were telling me....”
He trailed off, staring at Armand. “You mean to tell me,” he said after a moment, in a tight, controlled voice that was very unlike him, “that all this time—all this fucking time, you’ve been—just lying there and taking it, letting me just—”
“You don’t have to defend yourself to me,” Armand said calmly. “I have understood you this entire time.”
“I thought this was how you wanted me! How you preferred me—in small doses—fuck, the last time I spent two weeks with you I pissed you off so bad you killed me. I thought this was what you wanted....” Daniel looked suddenly pissed. “So that first morning when I packed my shit and left,” he said, “and you sat up, and looked at me, and said, ‘Don’t go’—”
Why did he feel the perpetual compulsion to edit facts? “I said no such thing.”
“You did,” said Daniel. “You did, and I thought it was a fucking joke—I thought you were playing with me, reminding me of all the stupid shit I used to say to you and how you’d always just ignore me—have you really been running from me this whole time?”
It was very unbecoming of Daniel to play this stupid. “Who else but you?”
“I thought maybe.... But no.” Daniel had drawn closer, was staring at him again intently, searching his face and not liking what he found there. “You’re—Jesus, man, you are fucked up. I thought I was starting to understand how much but I didn’t even understand the first layer of it, never mind the rest of Dante’s fucking inferno underneath.” He gave Armand an intense, dissecting look. “All those times, did you even want me? Me specifically, me your fuck-up fledgling, me the dumb piece of shit you’ve spent fifty years tying up in a bow for yourself?—Or was it just expedience, was it just that any dick would do and here was this idiot practically begging you to take his, so why not?”
Armand thought about Raphael and all the others—what mind-numbingly dull fucks they had been, how he hadn’t even gotten wet for them and none of them had cared. Thought about how Daniel, every time he found him in some new place, had called Armand’s body to answer to his, inexplicably, inescapably, while seemingly entirely unaware of how unprecedented such a thing was. Thought about all those times with other people when he had faked his own pleasure to end the encounter and how with Daniel he had never done so once, how Daniel had made him come when Armand had genuinely least expected it, when he had thought it would not happen because surely it could not happen, after all this time. All these long centuries of sex for pragmatism’s sake, sex to satisfy other people, sex to bind them to him, to make them rely on him and need him, to make them unwilling to let him go. Sex was not about pleasure or even desire. Sex was about power, and control; sex was about manipulating other people into being unable to live without you. “In what possible world would that matter?” said Armand with undisguised contempt. “I seem to remember you were always fully satisfied. Should I have begged you for it? Should I have put a bag over my head and wept, instead? Perhaps that would have pleased you better.”
“Wow.” Daniel was throwing stuff into his suitcase. “You got me. I am fucking stupid. Fool me once.” He laughed. “Fool me a hundred fucking times....” Zipping the suitcase shut and putting on his shoes. “I think it’s just on me, at that point.”
Armand had moved between him and the door. “Where are you going?”
Daniel reached behind him and opened it anyway. “I don’t know. I just really, really don’t want to be alone in a room with you right now, honestly,” he said, and left.
Daniel had reserved the hotel room for three nights. Did you plan to stay that long, to keep me here until you’d had enough and left me again? Armand waited those three full days without leaving the room, ignoring the housekeeping when they knocked. But Daniel did not come back.
Where next? Armand stood at the window looking out at Mumbai at night. Where shall I go next? He’d had vague ideas of traveling through Central Asia, hiding in the mountains and the steppes. But to what end? There was no end. It followed therefore that it did not matter where he went, just that he went there and kept going. He had kept still for too long.
Another knock. He knew at once, from sound alone, that this was not one of the staff. He threw the door open and looked into the dark hallway. It was empty. On the floor at his feet lay a small envelope, gilt and formal, addressed to no one. Months-old dread sat up in him and took notice. He slit open the envelope carefully, taking his time, remembering across centuries the primacy of etiquette, of propriety in all things. He recognized the handwriting from the very first stroke. Thought: I didn’t believe you. I didn’t believe you, but you were right after all. He read the short message once, twice, three times. Marius de Romanus extends his warmest invitation to his fledgling, the vampire Armand, to join him at his convenience at his maker’s estate in North America. A set of coordinates indicated the location. There was no reason given, no pretense. I am being called to heel. So he named me Armand, after all. The message went up in smoke, then fell in ashes to the floor. I have been well trained. I come when my name is called.
The last time he had been to New York had been nine years ago. He had gone to see Daniel, who did not remember him, and then he did. And then he didn’t. Armand didn’t like the city as much since its gentrification in the eighties. He loathed most of Manhattan; Brooklyn was only slightly better. It was raining when he stepped off the plane in JFK. This was a different storm system, a different hemisphere, but he felt as if he had brought the rain with him, like the planet was doing its best to wash him off its face.
They stared at each other after the door opened. For a long time neither of them spoke. “Whoa,” Daniel said at last. “Déjà vu.” Something about saying it seemed to amuse him.
“Will you let me in?”
“I’m busy.” There was a pen tucked behind his ear. “But how very novel of you to ask for once. A real treat. Is there a reason you’re here, or...?”
“I wanted to see you.” No—I needed to see you.
“Uh huh,” said Daniel. “Let me guess: you’re bored and lonely and in need of some dumb idiot to screw. Well, lucky for you there’s a whole city of idiots out there for you to choose from, because this one’s closed for business.” He started to close the door in Armand’s face.
“He called for me.” Armand had not intended to mention Marius. He had not wanted to give Daniel the satisfaction. He summoned me, and now I am going to him. We will never have this moment again.
Daniel stared at him. “And you told him to fuck off, right?”
Innocent child. “I am going to him, as soon as I leave you.”
Daniel said nothing, wrestling with his visible disgust. Yes, now you see, thought Armand. Now you see what I am at heart.
Daniel stepped aside. He pushed open the door. “Get in,” he said roughly, and threw the bolt after him.
“What did he say, exactly?” Daniel had sat down at his dining room table, strewn with books, atop which his laptop sat open. He closed it. “What was his grand message after all this time?”
Armand told him.
Daniel’s expression was unreadable. “Huh.”
“You must be pleased.”
“Me?” Daniel looked at him as if he were crazy. “What for?”
“Calling it. I do remember how to heel and roll over, after all.”
Daniel was playing with his pen, clicking it, twisting off the base. “But you haven’t,” he said slowly. Not looking at Armand now. “You didn’t go to him.” Click; click. “You came to me.”
“You were on the way.”
Click. “And are you making any other pitstops?”
“No.”
Daniel seemed to be fascinated by the disassembled pen. “So don’t go.” Frowning down at its parts. “You don’t have to go.”
“I want to go.”
“No, you don’t.”
That infuriating know-it-all streak! “You know my feelings and I do not. Is that it?”
“Sometimes, I think,” said Daniel, very seriously. “Sometimes I do.”
Which was so galling that Armand could muster no response. “He will be angry if I don’t.”
“So?” Daniel was twisting his pen back together with a kind of viciousness. “So what? Fuck that guy. I mean, seriously, what is his fucking problem—”
There was a certain unclean thrill in hearing Daniel so casually profane the proper order. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know you,” said Daniel. “Pretty well, I think. I thought I didn’t at all, but I’m starting to think maybe I know you better than you know yourself.” He paused. “You’re not—you know, just because something was done to you, that doesn’t mean...something evil, but that doesn’t make you....”
“What evil,” said Armand, disdaining the word, disdaining Daniel for speaking it, “was ever done to me that I have not repaid the world in kind?”
“I’m not talking about that,” Daniel said, even though he was. It was the same conversation. It was the only conversation. “You know you can do what you want, right? All you have to do to change your life is actually live it.”
Cold rage again. “But I am not allowed to have what I want.”
“Oh, yeah?” Daniel’s voice was tinted with too-familiar pugnacity. “And what’s that?”
“You.”
Daniel sat back in his chair. He met Armand’s gaze, coolly and steadily, for a long time. He said at last: “I don’t believe you.”
Yes; as well you shouldn’t.
Daniel looked at him for a while, saying nothing else. Then he opened his laptop. “I’ve been updating my memoirs.” He spoke lightly now. “Just for my own personal benefit. Writing down everything I think I remember about you and me.”
“And what....” But Armand hesitated, and in hesitating decided against asking questions to which he’d rather not know the answer.
Daniel heard the question anyway. “What do I remember?” He went quiet again. “Not much, honestly. I keep thinking there should be more. Like if I just keep trying, eventually I’ll stumble onto the memory that makes it all make sense. And then I think, no I won’t. Of course I won’t, there’s no fucking point, it probably didn’t even happen the way I remember it at all. I remember things the way I wish they happened, I guess. I tell myself that I’ll never know the truth—that there is no truth—and then I get mad at you all over again. I tell myself I just wish I remembered that it got harder for you, each time, to leave me.” A self-hating laugh. “That near the end you didn’t want to anymore. That near the end you wanted to stay just as badly as I wanted you to....”
Armand could not remember it ending. “The end?”
“When you turned me.”
Armand’s response came automatically. “It was better that I left.”
“Yeah.” That characteristic dry edge. “So I’ve heard.”
“You turned out well.” Trying to placate him. “Took to it well. You didn’t need me.”
“I didn’t say I needed you. I wanted you. There’s a difference, though I guess I can hardly expect you of all people to know it.”
“It was better like this.”
“Fuck you.” Daniel’s tone was still mild. “That’s what I have to say to that.”
“How could you know?” demanded Armand. It bothered him that he was becoming angry and Daniel was not. “How could you possibly know what was best for you? It was for your own good.”
“And Marius,” Daniel countered— “all of it, everything he ever did, that was for your own good, too, yeah?”
“Yes.”
Daniel made a short laughing sound. “You really believe that. Every now and then I think, maybe.... But you believe it.” Dark amusement crossed his face, like the shadow of a grasping hand. “No—you just want to believe it, I think. And I think you even know that.”
“Believe what you want.”
“I will. And so will you. You know what I think? I think there are some things no one can lie to themselves about no matter how hard they try. Not even you, and God knows you have tried. You were never running from me. You were running from yourself.”
“It sounds as if you have it all figured out,” said Armand coldly.
“Yeah.” Daniel leaned back in his chair, surveying Armand’s face. “I think I do.” He made up his mind about something. “You want to know how I found you these past couple years? You really want to know? You’re not gonna like it. You called to me. Blood to blood—through this fucking bond, the vampire bond, wordlessly, pure impulse. And I came with my tail tucked between my legs, always telling myself that this time, maybe this time, you might actually want me....”
It was not possible. It was the only possibility. “I didn’t.”
“You did.” Daniel nodded towards the door. “Better get going, don’t you think? He’s calling to you now—blood to blood.... Wouldn’t want to keep him waiting. Unless you’re here for one last pity fuck.” His expression changed. “Jesus, you are, aren’t you? Am I the pitied party, or are you?”
“Everything will be different afterwards. Everything—this thing between us—”
“There isn’t anything between us.”
“Now who is lying to himself?” snapped Armand, furious and humiliated.
Daniel said nothing, just gave him a hard and unflinching look.
“It was not enough that I could not escape you, no matter how far I went,” said Armand bitterly. “Not enough that I dreamt about you, that you made me sick and weak—not enough that when I asked you to stay, you laughed at me—no, that was never enough to satisfy you....”
“I never laughed at you,” said Daniel. “Never.”
“You said so yourself. It was a joke, a game. All this time, making a mockery of me—”
“How was I supposed to know what was and wasn’t real? I still don’t. You don’t even know. You couldn’t identify a genuine emotion if it shot you in the chest. Coming here and telling me it’s me you want, when really you’re going back to him—selling yourself to him, because you still think you’re five years old and powerless—the only way you’ll ever be happy is if someone is using you, but you don’t even realize you’re the one doing it.”
“You won’t have me,” Armand said. “That is what you are saying to me.”
“I would love to have you, Armand,” Daniel said, “but that’s not what you’re fucking offering me. You want me to participate in your self-degradation. You want me to get off on it.”
“You did it before,” said Armand: accusing him at last.
“Yeah.” Tired now. “A real feather in my cap, let me tell you.... But I’ve had enough. I know you find that hard to believe—”
“It is impossible to believe.”
“You see?” Daniel said, as if he had won. He waved his hand at Armand dismissively, looked away. “Just go already. It’s obvious I’ll never measure up. I won’t treat you the way he treats you, so you’ll never be satisfied. Just go. Do whatever you want. If you can figure out what that is.”
“I....” Armand’s voice stalled. At the crossroads of his self, he faltered.
“Well?” demanded Daniel.
“Let me stay.” Armand’s voice escaped him as a parched dead sound: wind in the desert moving. “Let me stay with you—yes—let me stay....”
“So you can leave me when you get bored, when it will hurt me and not you?” Daniel crossed his arms. “No.”
“Never—I never wanted....”
Daniel had begun to pale. “Don’t throw that back in my face. For God’s sake....”
“Never,” insisted Armand. “I have never wanted to leave you, never—never wanted you to leave me—” It shocked him to hear it, shocked him to say it; but no matter how he looked at it, from up or down, from either side, from inside and out, he found there only the plain and dismal truth: that for decades he had made himself and Daniel miserable because he had not known what it meant to want something, had not been capable of understanding the way it felt—all this time mistaking longing for parasitism, desire for exploitation, self-denial for virtuousness. “I will stay with you. Yes, I will stay with you—all that time I loved you, and I never knew it....”
“You didn’t love me,” said Daniel tightly. “Don’t fucking say that. You loved what I gave you, how I made you feel—how I just kept coming back for more—”
“I came back, not you. I came back to you, over and over again.”
“And then ran away from me, over and over again! You said it yourself—running from me this whole time, and I was too up my own ass to realize—”
Armand couldn’t make him see it. He had spent too long convincing Daniel that he meant nothing to him, that theirs was a one-sided affair. You will never believe me, and you never should; it is better for you that you never do. But now that I have stopped running from this thing and looked at it, now that I have named it to myself at last, I will never again, never, be able to put it down. You have made me rely on you. You have made it so I cannot live without you. You have beaten me at my own game, and if I am to take you at your word you did so without even knowing that you were playing it. If you called for me I would come to you crawling on my hands and knees. But you don’t call me, you don’t want me: so just let me pretend to have you one last time, before I belong again to someone else. “In all these years—two years, ten years, twenty, I do not know how many years, you were the only one who ever pleased me—the only one I ever wanted—”
“Oh, that’s good,” interrupted Daniel. “Appeal to my ego, now we’re really getting somewhere—”
“I mean it,” said Armand. “I mean it—you cannot possibly imagine how many times I have tried with someone else, only to think: so I am fully dead, after all.... When you touched me I shouldn’t have been able to feel it. Can you please the dust? Can you water desolation? But I felt it—I felt it—” He stopped. “One more time, I thought; one last time, before I must go back to emptiness....”
Daniel looked as sick as Armand felt. “What are you saying? I don’t understand what you’re saying. That for years, you haven’t—haven’t ever—?”
Desperation came to Armand from far away, a shadow feeling. “Only with you.”
It was Daniel’s turn to be speechless. He cleared his throat. “That’s....”
“Yes,” said Armand, aggrieved. “Yes.”
Daniel was giving him a wanting, wistful look, that look of which he was so uniquely capable: desire and patience in equal measure, as if he could subsist on merely looking at Armand alone, as if he didn’t even need to touch him to be satisfied. He said quietly, “Don’t go to him. It’s a request, not a command. He can’t compel you. You don’t have to do it.”
Despair held up its derision to Armand’s face. “You did.”
Daniel stood, and rounded the table. He placed his hands on either side of Armand’s face and looked straight into his eyes. “Yeah, well,” he said wryly. “I wanted to.”
Armand’s hands crept over Daniel’s slowly. “Did you?”
“Of course I did,” Daniel said. “Dumbass.” And kissed him.
Armand tipped into him, falling forward, holding tightly to his hands. His eyes and his fangs began to ache. “I called you?” he said, not believing it, not really, uncertain what to make of this disquieting information as Daniel kissed his face and Armand turned his mouth towards his, tried to interrupt him in the process of it. Kiss me, keep kissing me—I think I like it, after all—
“Yeah,” murmured Daniel. “Loudly, and often. Spent so much fucking money on plane tickets.”
“But I would’ve thought....” Armand stopped, began again. “There were other times—other times when I wanted you....”
“I ignored you when I was pissed at you. I have some dignity.”
“What did it feel like?” Armand asked, terribly curious, still not quite believing him.
“Like this—pulling. It wasn’t precise. Sometimes it would take me forever to find you. That eighty-minute ferry ride to Ramea was a real pain in the ass, let me tell you—and after two fucking flights, a miserable layover, and a long drive....”
Armand did not feel a pulling: not in any direction. His maker had sent him a note, a set of coordinates, so there could be no possible ambiguity. “I see.” But he did not see.
“It would keep me up at night.” Daniel tucked Armand’s hair behind his ear. “You just kept ringing me like a bell.” Grinning. “I’m ringing now.” Then he seemed to think better of saying that, maybe remembering how much he had just accused Armand of not understanding what he wanted, maybe realizing no matter what Armand said to him now that he could not be sure, even after all this, whether he actually believed it.
But Armand had no interest in denying anything in this moment. “You know what I want.”
Daniel gave him a tense, assessing look. “Yeah, I do,” he admitted. “And it’s what I want, too, but....”
“Don’t,” Armand said. “Don’t. Let me have this.” He felt clear-headed for the first time in a very long time. It was an exquisitely painful feeling. “Let me want you, and let me have you, with nothing getting in the way of my wanting you for once.”
“Fuck,” Daniel said faintly. Then he was kissing him again, more intensely, pulling at Armand’s shoulders with his hands. “Yeah, fuck, I can do that—come on—” But Armand was the one who led him to the bedroom. Daniel pushed him over onto the bed. “Of course you know the way. Dick. When was the last time you were here?”
“Nine years ago.”
“I thought so,” Daniel said. “That’s what I thought....” Unbuttoning his shirt. “Was there anything after that?”
“Not until you came to Dubai.”
“You’re some kind of ascetic,” marveled Daniel. “I could never understand how you could always string it out for so long between visits.”
“Nine years is not so long.” And it had only been six until Dubai, only six years until Daniel ruined Armand’s life and Armand ended his.
“It kind of is. I know you’re like a million years old or whatever, but surely the better part of a decade still feels like something to you.”
Sometimes it did. Sometimes it didn’t. This time it had, but even now Armand struggled with not wanting Daniel to know that. He was relieved of the pressure to respond when Daniel got on top of him, shirtless but still wearing his pants, Armand still fully clothed. Daniel nudged his thigh between Armand’s thighs and smiled when Armand sighed and rocked his pelvis against his leg. Armand’s hands found Daniel’s belt, started to undo the buckle. “Slow down,” said Daniel. “I’ve got plans for you.”
Armand had plans too, of getting Daniel inside him, of pulling him close, of feeling the press of their bodies together. But he relented, allowing Daniel to undress him slowly, to peel off the layers gradually, to press a kiss to his collarbone as it was revealed. “This good?” asked Daniel. “One time you said—well, I don’t know, maybe you meant it and maybe you didn’t....”
“What did I say?”
“That I spent too much time kissing you. I’m old school like that, I guess—oral fixation, et cetera—and you never used to let me do it, so I just....”
“No, it’s good—keep doing it—”
“All right,” said Daniel, delighted, and did. His hands in Armand’s hair, his hands on Armand’s neck, his hands on his body, pressing down on his hips. “Fuck, I missed you. You know that? You fucking psycho.”
Armand laughed, a high startled sound. “I missed you—every minute—it would make me angry, so angry—”
“Christ, you don’t even know the kind of sick and twisted fantasies I’ve been having about you saying shit like that. Just, like, you holding me and telling me you wanted me—real pervert stuff—”
Armand held him, pressing his mouth and tongue to the decades-old scar on Daniel’s neck. The marks from when he had turned Daniel had not lasted, had healed with newborn vampiric vigor, but this mark that Louis had made and that Armand had failed to close still remained, beautiful, silvery-white, wonderful to the touch. How many times in the years since had he wondered why he had not healed this wound after Louis had told him to let Daniel live, why he had let it scab and clot and repair itself imperfectly and messily? Because I was never going to see you again. Because you were nothing, you were no one, I didn’t care: I didn’t even think to care. What were you to me? “I want you,” he said quietly, in Daniel’s ear. “I have only wanted you.”
“God, stop that.” Kissing him again. “I thought I couldn’t possibly imagine all the other people you’ve been fucking.”
“Nobodies. Mediocrities....” Remembering Raphael and feeling a pure moment’s vengeful amusement towards the dead man. “Does it upset you?”
“I mean, not really,” said Daniel, infuriatingly. “You literally just told me none of them could make you come—which is crazy, by the way—what, like it’s hard—”
“I couldn’t either. Not even alone.”
Daniel looked taken aback. “Jesus, man, that’s....”
“Sad,” said Armand. “Yes.” He could see now that it was sad. There had been pleasure with Louis during the first half of their partnership. Not so in the latter. And for years and years before Louis, none; for the last thirty years, only so very rarely.
Daniel was trying to lighten the mood. “I’m only jealous if there’s some other poor son of a bitch out there you’ve been stalking for fifty years. Then we might have a problem.”
“Just you.”
He smiled. “Lucky me.”
“What of your others?” Armand, unlike Daniel, did feel a deep little streak of possessive jealousy at the thought.
“Ehhh,” said Daniel. “Not so much lately. Busy. Hard to trust other vampires right now, and human beings are so...you know. Although I guess you don’t seem to have that particular sexual roadblock.”
“You were different.”
“I really wasn’t,” said Daniel, “but I’m flattered, sweetheart.” Kissing him. “Gonna eat you out now, how’s that sound?”
Armand thought it sounded very good.
Daniel hiked Armand’s knees over his shoulders. “God,” he said, “you fucking maniac,” and buried his face between his legs.
Armand’s right hand flew to Daniel’s hair. He felt Daniel chuckle a little. His heart was throbbing, his fangs were throbbing, the heat between his legs was throbbing. How did I ever think you were taking from me, taking and not giving to me? He tumbled past the insurmountable barrier to his own pleasure for the first time in ten months, since Surabaya when Daniel had last touched him. “Your fangs,” he gasped, feeling himself move against Daniel’s face. All those cities, all those times with Daniel before, he had never asked him for anything: he was sure of it. “Your fangs—give me your fangs—”
Daniel laughed. He pulled his face away and looked up at him so Armand could watch as his fangs descended: lower, then lower, then lower still, long thick sharp things that made Armand throb again everywhere. Daniel said, “You are the only person I have ever met who wants more teeth when they’re getting head.”
“Yes,” said Armand; “yes—hurry—” And he made a low, wanting sound as Daniel obliged him, as Daniel understood him perfectly. When Daniel put his mouth back to work he let his fangs pierce and then sink into the soft flesh on either side of Armand’s cunt, digging deep, the sharp pain and the sharp pleasure the same singular sensation. “Yes,” said Armand— “yes—like that—” He writhed against Daniel, who held him pinned down with his hands on his abdomen. Armand came shaking, breathless, his own fangs cutting into his lower lip. He lay there shivering as Daniel made new waves of pleasure come and go, fading unbearably slowly. Then Daniel carefully removed his teeth from his pussy, a long and not painless unsheathing while Armand exhaled.
There was blood and come on Daniel’s face when Armand finally looked down. “Jesus,” Daniel said. “You want me to—?” Cutting open his thumb with his teeth so he could close Armand’s wounds.
“Leave them—unless you don’t want—”
“God damn.” Daniel climbed back up Armand’s body to kiss him again. He made a strained noise when Armand licked his own blood and taste from his lips.
Armand began to fumble with Daniel’s belt buckle again. “Take these off.”
“Yeah,” said Daniel, “no problem,” wriggling out of his jeans and kicking them away. His cock practically jumped into Armand’s hand, fully hard, so painfully familiar against his palm. Daniel’s breath snagged. “God,” he said again. Armand spread his legs underneath him and Daniel pressed himself between them, but he was holding himself back. He was going to say something, Armand could see it. But Armand couldn’t wait any longer. He reached between them and took Daniel in his hand, guiding him into his body, which had been waiting for him this whole time, which received him gladly.
Daniel sank into him. “Fuck, baby.” A sly glint in his eyes, waiting for Armand to protest the name. Armand did not protest. Daniel’s eyes smiled, pleased. He was moving his hips slowly, a gentle rolling motion without urgency or carelessness. Then he buried his face against Armand’s neck, tucked his nose into his hair. He took a deep breath. Armand could feel the points of his fangs touching his skin, just barely, a feather touch. He turned his head, offered his throat. Daniel accepted. The long slow press of those ridiculous fangs, the puncturing of flesh. “Sweet thing,” Daniel murmured with his teeth in Armand’s neck, as if he knew, somehow, that Raphael had said the same thing, and how much Armand had hated the man in that moment for who he was not. Armand’s own fangs ached dully, insistently. He had not tasted Daniel’s blood since turning him. He had not wanted to. He had thought he had not wanted to. He came again, a slow and gentle climax, bittersweet. Daniel laughed, muffled against his neck. “See?” He withdrew his teeth from Armand’s flesh and left him dizzy. His gaze dropped briefly to Armand’s mouth. “You thirsty?” He looked hopeful. Armand nodded. Daniel made an appreciative groaning sound as Armand broke skin. “Fuck,” he said. He moved a little faster inside him. “All this time, I thought maybe you wouldn’t—not again, not ever....” His smoky sweetness filling Armand’s mouth. “Thought maybe you didn’t want me like that....”
Armand finished with him slowly. Running his tongue over the incisions, then kissing them, then turning his face away. “What right had I?” I who killed you, I who savaged you, I who stole from you that greatest of all gifts, the gift I have given to so many others but denied to you: the chance to escape, to move from this world to the quiet afterwards. “What right had I to ask for such a thing—what right had I to want you after turning you, against your will....”
“More right than anybody,” said Daniel. “I'm glad you turned me. How else would you keep me with you?”
“You were so afraid.” More than anything else from that moment, Armand remembered that: Daniel’s total, cognition-obliterating terror.
“Yeah, well. I thought you were gonna kill me.”
“I did kill you.”
“Don’t be a pedant, you know what I mean. I thought you would just kill me dead and be done with me—finally rid yourself of this insufferable human nuisance—”
“I meant to,” Armand said. Remembered thinking: no more, Daniel. No more. Remembered feeling a tender moment’s loving pity, a fluttering instant’s wordless grief. It should have been easy, so easy. He had done it a hundred hundred thousand times before. It was the easiest thing in the world. It was the thing everyone had been born to do. But this time was different. He could not explain the difference, he could only feel it: a ferocious, aching wrongness, a compulsion to act otherwise that had terrified him. Daniel had been already so far gone. Armand had had to kiss his own blood into Daniel’s dying mouth. They had never kissed before. Not in all that time. I am too late, he’d thought. I waited too long. All my life I have waited and now I have left it for too long, I have destroyed you. I have won the suffering I have earned. There will never be another like you again.
“I thought so,” said Daniel. “Hence my pants-pissing terror.”
“It should have been easy. It had always been easy. Yet I couldn’t—couldn’t let you go—”
“That’s me.” Daniel kissed him with great purposefulness. “Like a bad penny. Fuck, baby.” Quickening the pace. “You gonna come again?”
Armand was. The wave climbed in him, began to crest. But Daniel kept him going, had him chasing endlessness. “That’s right,” he said in Armand’s ear. “That’s right.” Kissing that ear, then putting his tongue to the working muscles of Armand’s neck. Nibbling his skin, then biting him, then releasing him at once, mixing pleasure and pain. Then he was coming too, inside Armand, filling him up, watering his desolation, sweet rapture of release. “Gonna wring you out,” he panted, breathless. “Gonna hang you up to dry, on my washing line—the way you used to do to me....”
And he did.
They extricated themselves from each other clumsily. Daniel kissed Armand and withdrew from the bed, smiling when Armand reached for him. He came back with a washcloth and cleaned the blood and come from Armand’s thighs, between his legs. He closed the wounds on his cunt. Then he tossed the washcloth aside and wrapped Armand up in his arms. “I’m never letting you go. Not this time. You hear me?”
Armand, dazed, had to take a moment to understand him. “Big words, for a newborn. What do you know about never? There is no never. There is only change, terrible change—constant transformation, and it hurts—”
“I know,” said Daniel. “I’ve lived it.”
“Have you?” Armand was transfixed by the thought, disbelieving it. But he knew also that such disbelief was unwarranted: that there were things about being a human being which he would never know, things that others knew and he could not. “I don’t think I ever have.”
“You can learn.” Daniel sounded very serious.
Something, once damaged, could not always be mended. Accommodated, maybe; endured, by necessity. “I don’t know that I can.”
“I’m not worried about it.” Daniel said it so easily. “Anyway, I happen to like you exactly the way you are.”
He might be the only one who ever had. “That is foolish of you."
“Yeah.” Daniel’s voice a little rougher now, a little warmer. “Maybe.” But he pulled Armand close all the same, yawning sleepily. “I think I’ll keep you,” he murmured quietly, as if to himself. “Yes, I will keep you.”
Armand touched his face. “Keep me?” He looked very beautiful to Armand’s eyes, and very pleased, like someone who has just gotten everything they ever wanted after a lifetime believing that they never would. “Keep me where?”
“With me,” Daniel said, and kissed him again. “I think I’ll keep you with me.”