it's a telenovela

Armand’s phone rings. He scoots away from his station and picks it up: Lestat, on a video call. They do this now. Sometimes Armand props Lestat up on his desk while he writes code and Lestat composes, and they say nothing to each other for hours, touching the edges of their minds like you lean against someone’s shoulder. And sometimes their calls are a bit more, well, active.

Lestat squints into his phone. “Where are you?”

“A kitchen,” says Armand, and turns the camera around to briefly show the scene: a large kitchen in a worker’s housing complex nearly in Sharjah, hot enough that he’s the only one not drenched in sweat. Someone has immediately stepped into his place chopping mutton. He switches to French to explain, “Je suis enchaîné à l'enfer.”

“A kitchen?” says Lestat. “Louis said you’re fasting. Does that mean you’re eating food? I know you two like to get kinky, but personally his food habit is one perversion that I simply cannot bring myself to—”

“No,” Armand protests, ducking out of the kitchen and making his way to the open air. Privately, he’s inclined to agree with Lestat; he’s started eating sometimes, when it’s polite, a downside of having human friends who think you’re too skinny, but it always comes back up looking exactly the same as it did going down, and he certainly wouldn’t do it for his own edification.

“Sois pas enchaîné, mon doux petit diablotin, you must follow your nature, your beautiful nature…” Lestat loves to talk. He and Louis have that in common, actually, so it’s good that Armand likes listening to them. He lets Lestat keep going until he finds a quiet corner on the outside of the building. It’s almost noon, hot and bright, the sunlight prickling Armand’s skin slightly. Lestat stares at him, a vampire standing outside in the middle of the day, and finishes his monologue with “…you are such a little freak.”

Armand slumps back into a small patch of shade under an awning. “I am following my nature,” he says. “When the month of Ramadan starts, the gates of the heaven are opened and the gates of Hell are closed and the shayatin are chained.”

Lestat considers this. “L’enfer, c’est les autres,” he says.

“Something like that,” Armand laughs.

“So I suppose you will not send me pictures of you wearing your chains,” sighs Lestat dramatically, as if being temporarily deprived of Armand sexually is the greatest hardship anyone has ever endured, and not their default state of affairs for several centuries. “Ça va. It is not why I called, anyway.”

Lestat, calling to talk about something other than sex. Armand focuses in, pushes against his mind, and hits— nothing. Smooth glass. Lestat has a strong mind gift, it would be easy for him to bury something deep enough that Armand would have to know how to search for it to dig it out, but this isn’t a buried secret. They all have those. This is an active refusal, no admittence into even the upper layers of consciousness. Whatever it is that Armand isn’t supposed to see, it is right at the surface, occupying Lestat’s thoughts so completely that he cannot risk allowing Armand in at all.

Armand blinks. Tries to shake himself out of the slight wooziness that being out in the sun always brings on. “Is everything all right?” he asks. Louis, he means, just as Lestat had when Armand called him for the first time. And, perhaps, Daniel. He has no right to enquire about Daniel, but against every odd that Armand had come to understand in his centuries as a coven leader, Daniel had survived his first night, and then his first week, and month, few years. Having made it this far, his chances are a bit better. Not much, but enough that Armand cannot stop himself from hoping.

Louis, Lestat, Daniel. They are not quite everything, but they are everything that Armand can reasonably expect to endure. Everything whose loss might be worthwhile to take steps to prevent.

Lestat understands, of course. “Everything is fine,” he says. “Things are exactly as they have been.”

An odd phrase. Everything changes, nothing is ever exactly as it has been, no matter how hard you try to keep things as they are— Lestat and Armand both know that intimately. And yet, things as they have been have been… good. Different, yes, from anything Armand has ever known before. No master, no coven, no requirements as to how to fill the hours of his days and nights besides the ones that he chooses. And yet, good. So now he is here, on the first day of the holy month, chained in Hell, a reversal: feeding the creatures who feed him.

“Then what is it?” Armand asks. It would be ridiculous, to pretend that they’re not both aware of the locked gate of Lestat’s mind standing between them imposingly.

Lestat nibbles the tip of his finger, looking like he’d like to bite right through and suck on it. Armand’s hand is already at his right ear, worrying at the earring Louis had put there. He’d like to think spit it out! at Lestat, but he can’t even do that.

“I am calling,” Lestat says finally, “under minor duress.” A small, nervous smile, as if to emphasize, only minor. “A topic has come up during my conversations with your fledgling which he thinks I ought to share with you. De ma part, I promise you, I have never kept from you anything which I thought it would benefit you to know. If there is anything that I have shared with him that I have not spoken of to you, it is only because I judged it to be cruel.”

“Oh,” says Armand. Something to do with Louis, or with Daniel? What could Lestat possibly tell him about Louis that he doesn’t already know? And what could come up about Daniel that would be Lestat’s responsibility to tell him?

But then, Armand has made it fairly clear by now that he doesn’t want to talk to Daniel. Or rather— can’t. What could Armand possibly offer him, besides what he has already given? He was a surgeon, nothing more. He did something to Daniel’s body that Daniel wanted, and now Daniel must deal with the rest. It’s not like Armand hadn’t warned him. Of every vampire who has ever existed, perhaps Daniel Molloy is the closest they’ve ever gotten to informed consent.

“Armand. Sweetheart, darling,” says Lestat, pet names in English, not his habit, like he’s afraid Armand might shatter if addressed in a less than beloved language. “I will tell you, if you wish. But of course, I recognize that you are now in an impossible position. You cannot freely choose whether or not you wish to know something that you do not know.”

Odd, that he knows Lestat’s position exactly: taking a burden of knowledge on himself, leaving another free. And Louis had even asked for it, once. But it had been a mistake; Louis trusted Armand enough to do that for him, but not enough to believe that he had trusted him so far.

And so the question is, does he trust Lestat. Lestat, who pulled him out of the ground and into the world and then abandoned him there. Armand cannot imagine trusting him and he equally cannot imagine doubting him. Louis trusts Lestat, more and more, it seems; but Louis had also trusted Armand, and look where that got him.

Daniel. Daniel thinks Lestat should tell him, but Daniel also thinks that Lestat is worthy enough to be trusted with the telling. Daniel may only trust Lestat a tiny bit. But it’s enough for Armand.

“Please keep it for me,” says Armand. And then something shifts, maybe just a cloud in front of the sun, or a change in the wind, the smell of kanjhi wafting out from the kitchen, and he adds, “for now, at least.”

“Of course,” says Lestat. His relief is obvious. Relief for himself, or for Armand? And does it really matter? Everything is exactly as it was. How it was is a room of his own, the lights of the harbours outside his window at night gesturing to the qibla, humans who look at him and see nothing but sweetness and light, Louis in his bed, Lestat in his phone and his mind, just six hours until seven thousand mortals will be fed in the alleyways of his neighbourhood.

“I need to get back,” Armand says.

“Ah. L’enfer des autres t’appelle.” A silly thing for Lestat to say, who loves others; humans, vampires, he seems to harbour a special appreciation for all of them. Armand is not quite there, but he doesn’t mind being among these mortals. He doesn’t understand Tamil, and not understanding is a peace in itself. But when men do speak to him, in Urdu or English or Arabic, they say things like, you have been working a long time with no break, and you should rest, you must be tired. Armand is not tired, but nobody has ever said these things to him before. He lets them soak into him, into his skin and blood and hair and eyes, all the space he occupies. A world ago, space was considered to be a different thing from time, but now the physicists know that the two are inseperable. Who’s to say that the words cannot soak through time, too, find the empty stretches of him and fill them?

He returns to the kitchen, to chopping mutton, and then to packaging kanjhi into servings, the servings into bags with the rest of the meal, dates, samosas, laban, fruit. And then tarps down in the streets, and then the people, the people, everywhere, so many of them, and he is not thinking about what Lestat said at all.

He doesn't think about it, and doesn't think about it, and doesn't, until the tarps are packed up and the streets empty and he has been sent off with extra helpings of food he cannot eat, which will live in his refrigerator like a reassuring spectre in case a human happens to be in his apartment and look in it. These things happen sometimes.

He goes home to do the same thing as everyone else, which is watching TV dramas, a whole new slate of them with one episode each day of the month, and Armand does like watching television, he has learned, now that he can put it on without feeling like he is lowering the chance that Louis might look up from his book and say something. He is watching the comical adventures of an Egyptian pickpocket, and not thinking about it, and not thinking about it, and—

—of course he is thinking about it. He is thinking about Lestat and Daniel, sitting down together and talking about Armand. It’s not like they could really avoid the subject, could they? Lestat must be telling him… the bits Armand left out. Nicki. Gabrielle. The coven. And perhaps Daniel is judging him even more harshly than he had from Louis’ story— but what does that have to do with Armand? He knows what he has done better than Daniel ever could. Lestat would not bother calling him just to convey Daniel’s judgement, and if he did, he wouldn’t bother asking Armand’s permission for it.

No, something else, something Daniel thinks Armand ought to know. Louis, surely, does not know it, or Armand would have seen it immediately. Or perhaps he does know it, and so does Armand, and it’s only Lestat who is out of the loop. And Daniel, but of course he is; he’s a fledgling, an infant, toddling around in a room of breakable antiques with his arms swinging. And Lestat had given him permission to break his antiques, sure, but what right does Daniel have to drag Armand into it? To make him a part of something that Lestat had decided to protect him from? To ruin such a kindness?

He isn’t watching TV any more, he realizes; he’s outside, his legs having carried him down the stairs of the building and onto the street but then failed to choose a destination. His forearms have deep red divots cut into them. His nails have pieces of flesh underneath the tips. His mouth is flooded with blood but his fangs are tucked away in his gums, the gashes from blunt human teeth, but his phone is in his pocket, it always is, it folds up small, it’s a comfort to him now, this thing that carries everyone he knows in it, and months ago Lestat had sent him a contact out of nowhere, unasked-for, and Armand wanted to throttle him, but now he pulls it out with fingers streaked with blood and that is how the first words that he says to Daniel Molloy in nearly three years are “And what do you think gives you the right, fledgling?”

If he’s expecting anything he’s expecting a tirade back. In the arena of words, Armand is fighting with a rusty dagger to Daniel’s machine gun. And he wants it, wants the fight, wants to justify the rage and terror that is all the more terrifying because he has no idea where it came from. Wants Daniel to hit him back like he deserves.

Instead, there is silence on the line, then a soft rustling, and then Daniel’s voice, faint and confused. “Armand?”

Of course it’s me, simpleton, who else would be calling you fledgling? But for all Armand knows Lestat does, or Louis, who had come back to his penthouse with Daniel barely surviving in it.

In the time it takes for Armand to not say that, Daniel says, “Jesus. Can I get dressed?”

“It’s a phone call,” says Armand. “I can’t see you.”

“I know. But it’s the middle of the day here, and I’m naked in a box under my bed, and I want a coffee.”

“A coffee?”

“Yes, a coffee. It’s a liquid containing a psychoactive substance that promotes wakefulness and convinces you you’re not asleep and dreaming that this is actually happening. You can stay on the line.”

He doesn’t seem to have much choice, since Armand hears the blunt thud of the phone being set down somewhere, and then the whirr of an electric coffee grinder. It is the middle of the day for Daniel, he realizes; the fact that something as insignificant as a phone ringing had been able to wake up a sleeping fledgling is surprising. Numbly, he walks back up the stairs to his apartment. The tips of his fingers and toes are cold. The TV, a new acquisition hidden in a tasteful antique cabinet, is still playing the pickpocket drama. Or perhaps the station has moved on to another one. He turns it off. “You shouldn’t sleep with a smartphone in your coffin,” he says, hypocritically.

More clanging, perhaps doors opening and closing. Finally, Daniel comes back on the line and says, “I’m going to pretend that I did not just hear the guy who left me bleeding out and shitting myself in his ex’s bathtub and then disappeared for three years presuming to lecture me on sleep hygiene.”

Armand almost sits down on the couch, then something about it repulses him, and he slides his back down the wall in the corner of the room instead. He had been ready, for just a moment, for Daniel to rage at him. But his own rage and attendent readiness had evaporated so quickly, like a solvent in this new age’s paints, and now he is left with something else thick and sticky that he must speak through, and no defense against anything. '“I suppose that would be best,” he says, and he can hear his voice shaking. A terrible betrayal, that it can sound so different on the outside of his body than he had intended it.

Another long pause. Armand can hear Daniel drinking his coffee. It’s a very different sound from that of drinking from a vein. “Okay,” Daniel says. “So… I guess Lestat called you. Are you…” His voice is oddly gentle. “How are you doing?”

How is he doing. Because Daniel thinks that Lestat has just told him something that has destroyed him. Because Daniel wanted Lestat to do that.

“I am—” fine would be overstating the case. “as I was before.” Still a lie, but closer. “Lestat asked me if I wished to know what he had been keeping from me in my own interest. He has no wish to be vindictive towards me.”

Even as he says it, the enormity of it starts to seem slightly unreal. What reason would Lestat have to act in Armand’s interest? Some sexy photographs, a few drunken nights out? Armand has made good attempts at taking from Lestat everyone that he has ever loved. Why shouldn’t he be vindictive? Perhaps the secret being in Armand’s interest is a cover. Perhaps he should know, perhaps he should have Daniel tell him.

“And… you said no?”

“He said that it would hurt me, to be told,” says Armand. “Do you disagree?”

“I mean,” says Daniel, “Yeah. No, I don’t disagree. But he’s been keeping a massive secret from you for centuries. You don’t think that matters?”

Daniel could have just told him, of course, and then the argument would have been over. But he hasn’t. And he agrees with Lestat, as far as it goes. “I exist as I am, without it,” says Armand. “Much of the time, I exist quite comfortably. How much can it possibly matter?”

Silence on the phone with Daniel is somewhat eerie. It is worse than with a human; usually, even over a distance, the linkage of a conversation or an image lets him feel them, at least, to have a sense like that of another body in space. With Daniel, there is nothing.

“You really believe that,” says Daniel. It’s a statement, not a question. Which is good; how many times should Armand be expected to say that he is, sometimes, capable of removing himself from the path of deliberate harm?

“You believe that,” says Daniel, “and you really believe that mindwiping Louis was for his benefit, too.” A sigh.

He asked me. He asked me he askedme heaskedmeheasked… Armand doesn’t say it. The time Daniel knows about, Louis had. But the fact that he’s telling the truth won’t make Daniel believe him. It will only make Daniel think less of him than he already does. It forces its way out of him anyway, not in words but in blood pooling in his eyes, blurring his vision. A gasp of air punched out of his lungs, he holds the phone away from his mouth to hide it.

“Okay,” says Daniel. “This is idiotic. But if that’s what you want, it’s your… shit. Fine.”

Armand brings the phone back to his mouth, forcing himself to breathe, and to do it slowly and calmly. He had been bracing for it, he realizes. Maybe he still should be. Daniel wanted to hurt him. Daniel has every reason to want to hurt him. He still can. He could say it at any moment. Perhaps such things lose their charm when you can’t see the results in person. Daniel keeps not saying it and not saying it, until it seems like he isn’t going to.

“Thank you,” Armand manages. “I’m aware that I have done nothing to earn such consideration from you.”

“You sure as fuck haven’t. I’m just not sure it’s consideration, is all.”

He’d meant it, about not having earned it, but something about the way Daniel says it back is— well, Daniel has always had a particular talent for provocation, hasn’t he? He could never take anything graciously. Alone in a room he’d created for himself, Armand pulls his knees in to his chest and lets the anger slip back in. “And what should I apologize for first?” he snaps. “For giving you the gift you begged for? For betraying a five hundred year old oath for the sake of your misguided little mortality crisis? For allowing you to dig your dirty little fingers into every private aspect of my life? For—”

“You should apologize for not fucking calling me for three years,” says Daniel.

Silence. Absolute stillness on the line. Movement, in Armand’s apartment: the whirr of a computer fan, the blinking light of a smoke detector, the invisible dance of patterns.

And then Daniel laughs, and says, “God, I just scared myself with how much I sounded like my mother.”

And Armand had known, had known because Louis and Lestat had both told him, that this was the crux of Daniel’s anger. it just didn’t matter, because Daniel is young. It is his privilege to have only this to know to be angry about. “You will find other apologies,” he says, “to demand of me. Once you are old enough.”

“Probably,” says Daniel. “This is the one I’m asking for now, though.”

An apology, of course, is not just an apology. it used to be, for a while, with Louis; an apology just a game, something to be toyed with until it lost its novelty and then discarded. But now it’s something else, it’s the promise of doing differently.

He shouldn’t apologize to Daniel. If he were strong, if he were brave enough, he would do what he had planned, what he had known should be done: let Daniel hate him from afar. Carry Daniel’s hate for him like Daniel has reluctantly agreed to carry his secret.

He is content, sometimes. That doesn’t mean he is strong.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “What would you have me do to show it?”

Daniel clears his throat a few times, stalling. Like he hadn’t quite expected this outcome. “I want to see you,” he says finally. “I want to— shit, Armand, we’re supposed to be— I don’t know what we’re supposed to be. All I know is I can feel you, and it hurts.”

“It will go away,” says Armand, “eventually. If you give it time.”

“I want you to come visit me. Soon. Now.”

Relief, at such an easy objection to that. “Not now,” he says. “I don’t wish to leave during Ramadan.” Daniel will come to his senses long before Eid al-Fitr, and cancel the whole thing, and they can both remain as they were.

“Then I’ll come to you,” says Daniel.

He had asked Louis not to speak of him to Daniel; had Lestat kept his whereabouts a secret, as well? “I’m in Dubai,” Armand says.

“You’re in Dubai?”

Nobody had told Daniel. Not Louis, because he had promised not to. Not Lestat, because… Lestat keeps his secrets, too. He didn’t even have to be asked. “Yes,” he says. “I didn’t want to leave. There was no reason to. I have an apartment in Deira.”

“And Louis is okay with that?”

“Louis doesn’t own Dubai,” says Armand, peevish, which in a vampiric sense is not strictly true. If a foreign coven demanded to know whose city this is, there is an obvious answer. Still. “But yes. He… you could say that.”

Daniel thinks on that for a moment, then starts to laugh. He laughs for so long that Armand isn’t sure what to do, ends up giggling a little himself, nervously, nothing to do but listen to the sound of Daniel’s mirth. “Of course,” Daniel gasps finally. “Fuck, of course. How long did it take before you two were fucking again?”

“A few months,” Armand admits.

“Months!” and he’s laughing again, at Armand, which should not be okay, but he’s also laughing at Louis, so perhaps that does make it okay. Or at himself, for thinking so long that Louis and Armand weren’t fucking, which is… nice. Armand likes it.

“Okay,” says Daniel. “So, I’m going to charter a flight, and Louis is going to send one of those weird window-shaded cars to pick me up, and— I’m not a complete monster, I’ll get an airbnb near you.”

“No,” says Armand, his voice suddenly the opposite of before, words coming out sounding strong that were small and shaky inside. “You are my fledgling. You will stay with me.”

“Oh,” says Daniel. “Okay.” Like there was never anything else to say. Like he is Armand’s.

Armand has had one memory erased from his mind, that he is aware of. Many of the rest are gone. But that is merely time. This one was intentional. And time, who does love a little joke, returned it to him.

At the moment his master removed it, chipped it off like old paint and smoothed it over, it was the most wonderful thing he had ever felt. And he had felt many wonderful things, at Marius’ hands; but this, a self-inflicted humiliation melting away into nothing, was the best.

The memory, as he remembers it now, is not as he remembered it then, and neither can possibly be as it truly happened. He is near al-Ghuriya, a very ancient monument. It is a very new monument, only a few years old, so many other things destroyed to make way. In the memory, the oldest one, he cannot possibly be there, the slave market, nowhere near the river. Perhaps he is being taken somewhere, to be inspected, they can take you away for that and make you sing so long as there is no risk of a child in you if your singing falls flat, if they send you back. So he must have been sent back, or it was on the occasion of his purchase for a public-house, because no, no, he would never have done it had it been the time he was saved, the answered prayer, he would not have stepped anywhere unsafe, unstable, the edge of a dock or a boat, an accident maybe, who can say for sure? Not Arun, not his broker, not his God. The Nile tastes sour compared to the Yamuna. It is easy to not fight it when you are so very tired. But strong swimmers fish him out, and he says thank you to them with the kind words they teach you at the market.

But his God remembered, or Amadeo did, the voice in his head saying it is time, do it now, the scant moment, before the rush of water into his lungs, before the hands pulling him back towards life, that he thought he had won. He remembered and remembered and remembered and in the last moment before his master could never do anything of the sort again, he asked for one more kindness. He forgot, and Marius took his soiled, dead little body and threw him in the Adriatic, and he swam to shore laughing and free.

A memory locked away in a pile of ash— what should be safer? But ash disperses, doesn’t it, and who knows what had happened to the little bits of Marius, they clung to Amadeo’s clothes, he breathed them into his lungs, they seeped into his blood through the scratches as he fought to get away. So perhaps that’s why it stayed in him, ready, waiting, until Louis said Let’s go see Egypt, and he could no more say no than he could have the first time, for what would be the alternative, what now was the world other than Louis? So there he was, a regular city street in Cairo, this place looks no more likely than the street three blocks down to have once had human flesh for sale but there it was again, the memory that was supposed to be taken from him.

Water hadn’t worked. In 1949, for the first time, he tried sunlight. He hadn’t even considered that it, too, could reject his death and spit him back up onto the riverbanks. Fire, then, like he ought to have died with his master, like he ought to have died with his coven. Closer. But not quite.

A few weeks later, when he was smooth-skinned and pretty again and they were settled in their next destination, Armand tried removing a memory for the first time. First he tried it on himself, and it did not work. Then he tried it on Louis, and it did.

It was the first, last, and only time, he decided. It would not be necessary; what could demand such a thing, besides an attempt to die? And his moment of weakness would not recur.

Louis, Armand has to admit, has done an excellent job of choosing the place in the world that he and Armand are least likely to accidentally have sex. Which he appreciates in the abstract, and somewhat less so now that he is actually here, perched on the edge of a yellow velvet couch in the living room of Louis’ penthouse.

He doesn’t like the couch. It’s overstuffed and the tufting buttons make it uncomfortable to sit on, requiring that one somehow carefully position one’s rear to be either on as many or as few buttons as possible. It would be all right to lie down on, which is how Louis likes to read. The painting on the far wall is rather garish, full of gold leaf, like the inside of a cathedral, except the gold is located entirely outside of the two figures. It is new, not from the collection they had held together. He keeps looking, trying to fully see the positions of the figure or perhaps two figures outlined in the negative space of the gold.

“You can say if you hate it.”

“I don’t hate it,” says Armand. “Only the couch.”

Louis laughs and sits down on it. He sits a little sideways, with his arms draped around one of the strange protruding knobs of backrest. It looks a bit better that way. Armand tries it. It’s not bad, having something to hold on to. “The old couch was unsalvageable,” Louis says.

Armand had laid Daniel down on it, for the first little bit. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“Not at all. It was for a good cause.”

The truth is, if Armand had truly believed that Daniel was going to take to the Gift, he probably would have done the whole thing in the bathroom. It’s a nice bathroom that he and Louis had shared: a bathtub large enough to lie down in very comfortably, a shower that pours down from above like rain, a wudu sink that must now see even less use than the toilet. Louis has, somehow, figured out how to get human food to pass through him in more or less the conventional way, a feat neither Armand nor any other vampire he’s aware of has ever managed, possibly for lack of effort. Armand had brought Daniel to the bathroom eventually, laid him in the tub, and— well, and panicked. Daniel had asked for this, Armand had asked and he’d answered, in his mind and with his words. And for all his bluster while the interview was still taking place, once it was over, his final task as a human performed, he was sure. Armand had never met anyone surer. Even the ones brought into the coven, the ones who were pleased with their new station and suited to it, they didn’t really know. Couldn’t. Daniel did.

And Louis loved Daniel. And Daniel was something of Armand that Louis could have. And Armand’s head ached. And Armand was thirsty. And, and—

Armand is not very good at making decisions. The few he has made, he botched rather badly. So it would have been par for the course, wouldn’t it, if he had botched this one too. But Louis thinks he didn’t.

Louis would feel differently, of course, if Daniel had died. He could so easily have slipped away from life on the couch that used to be here, and never come back. But he didn’t.

“I’ve invited him to Dubai,” Armand says. “He’s staying with me. I thought you should know.”

Louis’ face breaks into a huge smile. Armand is not sure that he’s ever seen this many of Louis’ teeth when his mouth isn’t covered in blood. “Yeah, he told me,” he says. “That’s great. What changed?”

Armand stares out the window. It’s strange, now, to see from such a remove the city he lives on the street level of. His hands still smell of spices from the morning’s cooking, dust under his nails from packing up the tarps. “I am not sure that this is truly the reason,” he admits. “But Lestat called me. Something had come up in his conversations with Daniel that Daniel thinks I ought to know, and Lestat thinks I would be happier without. Do you know what it is they’re speaking of?”

Louis shrugs. “No.” Which is what Armand expected, but it’s still a bit of a relief, how easily he answers. “What is it?”

“I have chosen not to know,” says Armand.

Louis nods, slowly. “And Daniel…”

“Cannot understand why. But I spoke to him, and he… he asked to come. And I…”

Armand’s hand is at his chest, tapping. Like it will speak for him. And he’s in me. Somewhere I can’t get out. Louis knows. Louis had a fledgling, once. And he had a daughter. Which hurt worse, to lose? Armand had never asked. He isn’t going to ask now. If there is some greater vulnerability, some other kind of hole that a person can leave inside of you that Armand has not already experienced, he’d rather not know about it.

“Hey,” says Louis softly and stretches his legs out, pats his thighs. “C’mere. Lie down. You won’t suck my cock by accident, I have faith in you.”

“Unearned,” says Armand, but he lies down with his head in Louis’ lap, closes his eyes as Louis runs gentle fingers through his hair. He had slept a little around noon, after the meals were sent out from the kitchen and before his shift began laying out the streets. And again a little bit after sunset, before coming to see Louis. It’s more than he used to sleep, for months at a time, back when he lived in this penthouse. But now he’s become used to a full day’s sleep, and he feels tired.

“I’m proud of you,” Louis says. “I’m glad Daniel is coming. He ever gets too much for you, I’m happy to take him for a few days. Hell, even if he doesn’t.”

Armand smiles. “It takes a village to raise a child?” he says.

“Doesn’t it?” says Louis. “Isn’t that what a coven’s supposed to be, when it goes right?”

Yes. Yes, it is. A sudden lump of emotion in his throat: he’d thought Louis didn’t understand. That he’d just looked down on the whole thing, never wanted it, laughing all the while at these vampires who needed each other so badly they’d actually put up with each other.

He nods. Doesn’t open his eyes. “I’d like that,” he says.

The first time Daniel Molloy’s airplane landed in Dubai he had been picked up by a motorcade of professional drivers, and Armand had been passing the time sitting in the floor of his and Louis’ bathroom, arms curled around his knees, staring beseechingly up into his own brown eyes in the full-length mirror on the wall. He was trying to imagine looking down into his own face, a little younger, a little gaunter, but those eyes, and thinking this one, I must have him.

This time, Louis still sends a car, but it’s just one. And Armand spends the time waiting for Daniel to be delivered to his door lying in the open coffin that he has procured for him, on the phone with Pritha.

“It just seems like a bit of a dick move,” she is saying. “Like, this family friend knows you’re fasting, and he isn’t, and he just has to come visit you right now?”

“Well,” says Armand, “I don’t have that many family friends.” Family friends. An odd, ambiguous construction. If one were forced to say it in Latin— and has one ever said anything in Latin unforced?— it would have to be amicus gentis, the genitive leaving no doubt that the friend belongs to the family. But in English it is merely two nouns, abandoned, contextless. Is he being visited by family, a friend, both, neither?

“Well, don’t let him walk all over you,” she says. “Do you want me to take him grocery shopping? In case he hasn’t gotten the message?”

Armand giggles. “I don’t think that would be—”

Marius had gotten a good look at him, in the brothel. Even better looks after. And an earful, a mindful, everything there was inside of him pouring out for inspection. Armand doesn’t notice Daniel coming until there’s a knock on his door, three sharp raps, startling him into movement. "I need to go,” he says, and hangs up the phone, stands up, opens the door.

Visually, The Vampire Daniel bears a strong resemblance to Daniel Molloy. He is still wearing sunglasses. His nails have been clipped down to human scale; they’ve grown a point on them already, so he must have done it before getting on the plane. Fangs. He has fangs, which drop from slightly but not excessively nicotine-stained gums. His fangs are long, sharp. They would feel— well, anyway. It’s a blessing, to have fangs like that for a young vampire, makes learning to feed easy, makes it—

“Motht people woul’ invite a guy in befuh getting tah this thtage ah things,” Daniel says.

Oh. Armand is standing in the hallway, two fingers in his fledgling’s mouth, thumbs holding his lips open. He pulls away like he’s been bitten. Though he hasn’t been; Daniel just let him. He hadn’t mean to, it’s just that— that I made this. He made this, and he hadn’t even looked at it afterwards, and he had never truly made anything before. Had been the muse, the assistant, the shepherd, the manager, but never the creator. Daniel was the first time.

Well. Pritha would be happy to know he is not, so far, letting Daniel walk all over him. He steps back, holds the door open. “Come in, fledgling,” he says.

Daniel steps in and looks around. “This is beautiful,” he says simply.

“It was the third thing I ever made,” Armand tells him.

“What was the second?”

“An app. A prayer time calculator for night-walkers.”

Daniel looks at Armand the way Daniel looks when he’s carefully considering his next question. it makes him look younger, somehow, or maybe it’s just that the first time he’d seen that look, Daniel had been young. It’s one of his most practiced expressions. “How about the fourth?” He says finally.

Armand realizes he actually isn’t sure. He’d lost track, after three. “Well, I’ve made rather a lot of mutton stew this month so far,” he says. “Can I see your eyes?”

“‘Course,” says Daniel. He sits down on the couch, takes of his glasses, and flicks his eyes up to meet Armand’s.

They shift, Daniel’s irises. From green to orange a little bit back again, flickering. Armand freezes, and they’re staring right at each other, know, faces close, Armand’s hand on Daniel’s cheek, holding him still.

“Are they changing?” Daniel asks. “I can’t do it on command. Louis said he’d never seen it before but hey, they work fine, I’m not complaining.”

Louis wouldn’t have, no. Armand has. Daniel may have been the first one he’d made, but Armand was, in all likelihood, the world’s longest-serving vampire coven leader, and he has witnessed more vampire births and deaths than he could possibly remember. The eyes always take a while to settle, at first. With some, the ones with strong ties to their maker, the ones most likely to adjust and survive, it happens quickly. Armand has seen eyes like this before, yes: in the ones who hate their maker even before they’re made, or understand their transformation well enough to hate right away, or lose their maker too soon, or are simply too fragile. They last a few weeks, usually. Nicki had been one, of course.

The last time he’d seen it, it had been Santiago, after Armand carried out the sentence on his maker. For a few days, it had seemed that Santiago would die too. But he’d gotten over it, settling into his new life— too comfortably, as it turned out— and his eyes settled to a bland green.

Daniel’s irises swirl in front of him. Three years. He’s been like this for three years.

He lets go of Daniel. His hand is shaking. “Well,” he says,“that’s good, that they… work fine.” His voice is shaking, too.

Daniel is looking mildly alarmed. “Hey, what?” he says. “I don’t have some kind of vampire eye disease, do I?”

“No,” Armand forces out. He sits down on the couch beside him, manages to plaster a small smile over his lips. “It’s nothing.”

Armand doesn’t need to have had so many previous examples of Daniel not believing him to know Daniel doesn’t believe him this time. “Okay,” Daniel says after a while. “You’re not going to tell me,” are you.”

“I don’t know,” Armand says, small. “I could be wrong.” Louis thinks he was wrong about Claudia. That she would have survived, given the chance. The thought does nothing to loosen the knot of panic in his chest.

Daniel actually seems mollified by that. “That’s a new level of self-awareness,” he says. “Congratulations, I suppose.”

His tone isn’t entirely kind, but the words are, and better than kind, they’re true. Armand lets the forced smile go, but relaxes a little into the couch. “Thank you,” he says. “Are you hungry?”

“Yeah,” says Daniel. “Figured I’d go out on my own and find some— what the hell is vampire Ramadan, anyway? Isn’t a holiday where you only eat at night a bit redundant?”

“It would be, yes,” says Armand, “to fast as humans do. We vampires are made to be the scourge of man, as is pestilence; verily Satan circulates in the body like blood. And for the month of Ramadan, the shayatin are chained. So, those are the terms of my fast.”

Daniel blinks. “Okay, I might need a bibliography for that statement, but more importantly, you’re not eating for the entire month?”

His horror is a little bit funny. It is easier to smile, now. “In order of appearance: The Vampire Santino, Sahih Muslim 2174, Sahih al-Bukhari 1899. And to fast for a month constitutes merely two or three missed meals, compared to my regular schedule. You will not always be as ravenous as you are now, Daniel. If you were worried, fasting is not obligatory for children. Louis has contributed towards your upkeep from his sources, so the contents of the refrigerator are yours. And I have prepared a list of suitable hot meals, who can be called on when you want them.”

Daniel narrows his eyes. “You want me to hunt like you do. Arms dealers and kid diddlers.”

Armand had spent a lot of time on the list. A lot of it, admittedly, was just messing around: he’d started out wondering if a scraper bot of social media posts and a neural network could identify potential meals, set up the entire backend of a system in TensorFlow that identified preliminary candidates for retaliation in cases of murder, then lost interest in it partly on the grounds that it introduced doubt to the imposition of hudud punishment, and mostly because finding them is half the fun. Point is, he has a list for Daniel, and— well, yes, of course he’s hoping that he’ll use it.

If this were a fledgling being raised in the old ways, Armand could simply tell him what he was going to eat. But if this were a fledgling being raised in the old ways, he wouldn’t have spent three years on his own. Armand has no right to make demands, now. "I would like you to, yes,” he admits. “And I would like to— to provide for you. Though I know you would have preferred that I do it when you truly needed it.”

Daniel stares at him. The silence is deafening. He can feel himself slipping around the edges of Daniel’s mind, so used to entrance being an option that he is thrown back without even being aware he had tried to enter. “All right,” says Daniel. “That’s— it’s not that I object, to the way you do it. To tell you the truth, it’s been harder than I thought it would be. Choosing them.”

“The slaying of the innocent will drive you mad,” Armand says. “Even if not for the sake of retribution you must feed on the evil, you must learn to love them in all their filth and degeneracy, and you must thrive on the visions of their evil that will inevitably fill your heart and soul during the kill.”

Daniel just raises his eyebrows, waiting for his bibliography. Armand’s tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth, but Daniel says nothing.

“Marius de Romanus,” he manages finally.

Armand’s attention is drawn suddenly to Daniel’s hand; it still shakes. Not all the time, but when he’s— well, Armand doesn’t know any more. When he’s whatever he is right now. “Wisdom from grandpa,” Daniel says, and Armand is not entirely sure how to respond. Kill the evildoer. It is the one thing that everyone, every authority, every piece of wisdom, every consolation of his life, have seemed to agree on.

He goes to the kitchen, pours blood from a carton into a mug, microwaves it for a few seconds. When he gets back with it Daniel looks like— well, like a hungry kid. He leaves a trace of red mug imprint around his lips, he drinks it so fast. It’s charming. It feels nice to see him fed.

“Can I ask you something?” says Daniel, wiping at his mouth, and then doesn’t wait for permission to ask before continuing, “When we— when you turned me. I remember the couch, and the bathtub, and my heart slowing, and then this. There was a moment in between, I think, when you said something. What was it?”

“Inna lillahi,” says Armand. “Indeed, we belong to Allah. The second half of the phrase would usually be, and to Him we will return.”

“Guess I’m not doing that.”

“No.”

“Why did you leave?” Daniel doesn’t ask permission to ask it. Doesn't even pretend.

Armand should have known, of course, that they would come to this point so soon. Of course Daniel wouldn’t leave it, wouldn’t allow them even a little bit of time to get used to this. There isn’t any this, no way a maker and fledgling can live with each other. Nobody has ever done it in the long term. Not even Louis, not really.

“Did you hear what you just said?” Armand says. “You are damned. I damned you.”

“Okay,” says Daniel, “except I don’t actually believe in any of that shit, so I’m not all that upset about it.”

How nice for you. But also, not quite true. Armand cannot read Daniel’s thoughts, but he hardly needs to. He’s been around this ride, he wore the clothes Marius gave him on his body and tried to cloak his mind in the thoughts his master loved best, in the hopes that they could keep him warm in his absence. And perhaps, if Marius hadn’t given him the Gift, Amadeo would have accepted his philosophy instead. “You’re a vampire,” Armand says gently. “A creature of myth, a body unknown to the workings of science. You have dominion over the night. Can you truly believe no being has dominion over the world?”

“First of all, I don’t get the impression science has had the opportunity to try all that hard. But even if that were true— hell, what’s a human being? Cells, sure, but life? What makes me writing a book any different from thirty thousand Nvidia chips spitting out an autogenerated email reply? Fuck if I know, but I wouldn’t bother if I didn’t think there was a difference. I know it’s been a while since you were a human, but take it from me, it’s mysterious as shit. Being a vampire is just mysterious in a different way.”

It’s not at all what he’d thought was coming. It startles a laugh out of him. “Your argument in favour of an atheism enduring even incontrovertible proof of the paranormal is the existence of the soul?”

Daniel laughs, too. “I guess,” he says. “it’s not even really an argument, I can’t say it hasn’t crossed my mind, but— I just don’t feel it. Never have. I don’t feel any more damned now than I did before. I feel…” he shrugs. “I feel good. I feel blessed. So, thank you.”

Daniel’s irises flicker, green to orange, muddy brown in between. But he says they work fine. And he has said thank you.

“You’re welcome,” says Armand.

Daniel is in his coffin well before vampire Isha. He is safe. Their shared heartbeat is in the walls. It is in the foundations of the building. It soaks into the soil. Armand does not listen to it because he does not need to; it’s there whether he listens or not. He falls asleep imagining the apartment building going up in flames, paint melting, Armand’s flesh turning to scattered ash, but Daniel living on. The heartbeat with Armand until the end, the last thing he knows. For the first time, he considers that his maker may have died at peace.

“Cooking shift in the morning, cleanup shift in the evening, somehow he sleeps and prays and works in between, and he doesn’t even look tired.” The head of the cooking crew puts an arm around Armand’s shoulders. Suresh’s Arabic is worse than Armand’s by a fair bit but he speaks it supremely confidently, as if anyone who fails to understand is the problem, not him. An actor’s talent, that kind of confidence. Armand had never wanted it for himself, but he was good at picking out those with aptitude.

Armand ducks his head, trying to hide his smile. It gives him too much pleasure, probably, to be fussed over like this, when in reality every man in this kitchen is more tired than him. Still. It feels as though he ought to say something back, some excuse, explanation.

“I am happy,” he says, haltingly, “because I am reunited with my son. So I do not seem tired.”

“Your son!” Suresh booms, and a few other men smile at him or pat his arm as they pass by. The feeling of having told a lie evaporates almost instantly; nobody here would think to doubt him. Everyone is waiting to be reunited with someone. And anyway, it’s true. He thinks he is even true that he is happy. “How old?” Suresh asks.

“Three.”

Suresh nods. “So young. He will forget your absence, and remember you as a good father.”

Armand turns away, takes his place in front of a cutting board. “I hope so.”

Daniel sleeps late; he’s still in the coffin when Armand gets home.

Things tend to get done faster when Armand does them himself, which is not a thought that any of his human colleagues have on a conscious level, but on a subconscious one it is beginning to sink in. Leave this pile of tarps here, whoever has time will put them away. Pile the garbage bags in the corner. Someone will have to re-organize the storeroom someday. All those little tasks that pile up at the end of an endeavour, when everyone is tired and beginning to value each of their seconds more highly. It is always Armand, who has time. He has nothing but time, and they have everything but it. It seems like a fair trade.

So it’s well into a state of complete darkness outside, and he doesn’t feel too guilty about watching TV in the living room right beside the coffin. The woman forced into dancing against her will is digging for information she can use to her advantage. Sure enough, Daniel pokes his head out a few minutes later, at the noise, squinting. “Do vampires get jet lag?” he says.

Armand mutes the TV. “By the time forms of travel were invented that allow such an effect, I was already too old to feel much impact from a disturbance in my sleep schedule. So, I don’t know. My master disliked flying long distances, and the only occasion on which he did so in my company, I was mortal. I don’t believe his reluctance was due to jet lag, though.”

Daniel has his arms folded on the side of the coffin, his head resting on them. It looks a little like he is taking a bath. It’s been a while since Armand has been around coffins as a primary resting place; Louis always disliked them, and Armand has little need to worry about stray sunbeams in his own apartment.

“You avoided saying his name as yourself the entire interview,” he points out, “And now you just happened to have casually brought him up twice?”

The first time hadn’t exactly been casual. But yes, he can see Daniel’s point. His stomach cramps like he’s been eating human food, though he hasn’t. “As you so charmingly put it,” he says, “Wisdom from grandpa. I’m afraid I have little to offer you philosophically or psychologically on your new state that you can accept. You would have been better served by him.”

“No,” says Daniel simply. “I wouldn’t.”

They just stare at each other for a moment, a strange kind of stalemate. There isn’t much Armand can say to that. Yes, he would have. It’s a childish argument to have. He pats the couch next to him instead. “Come,” he says. “Children are exempt from fasting, but nobody is exempt from Ramadan TV. Are you hungry? I’ll order you a meal.”

“A meal sounds great,” Daniel says. Armand sends a message to one of the men he’d picked out, a little jolt to his mind to motivate him to come. It will be easy to lure him in, once he’s a few blocks away, and perhaps— perhaps Daniel will interest himself in the process. Daniel is climbing out of his coffin. He does it like an old man, slowly, hands pushing on his knees, a little grimace and a sigh. Is it just habit? His hand shook, too. The Great Laws forbid the turning of the elderly and infirm for a reason. Three years is nothing.

“Are you in pain?” he asks.

“Sometimes,” says Daniel. “Same as I was the last year of my life, which is to say, intermittently. Good days and bad days. But the good days stay good and the bad days haven’t gotten any worse or more frequent. How about you?”

Armand freezes with his hand halfway to the volume button on the remote to turn it back up. “Me?”

“You were sick when you were turned, right? Did it leave you with anything?”

Sick. Yes, he had been. Had been for years, probably. It is what he remembers most, more than the effect on his body. Lying in the dark and wondering where the sickness, the rot inside of him had come from, when it had entered his body. Trying to remember men that he had worked very hard to forget because surely, surely, it must have been one of them, a faceless lout in a filthy brothel, not a gentleman, not an artist, not, not—

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t perceive myself to be in pain, but I don’t have a clear enough memory of any other state to compare it to.”

Daniel settles next to him. This close, his heart is like a tide. Their heartbeats synchronize so easily that it’s hardly even noticeable. Perhaps they have been this whole time, over oceans. His eyes flicker. “Well,” he says. “Guess when I’m five hundred I won’t know that I’m in pain, either. Something to look forward to.”

A man Armand has never spoken to before hands him a plastic container. “Sweets,” he says, “Thaen mittai, for your son. To reward him when he is good.”

Armand stares at it. The container is full of sticky-looking, unevenly shaped red balls. “He can’t eat that,” he says, but the man pushes it back into his hands.

“It’s good for children to have sweets,” he says. “My daughter is fifteen and my son is ten. So I know.”

“Okay,” says Armand. “Thank you.”

“This can’t seem that drastic to you,” Daniel says. “I mean, he was only out twenty years? Come on.”

Daniel, it turns out, is incapable of watching TV without a running commentary. It’s stopped bothering Armand, because he doesn’t seem to expect much in the way of participation and is happy to just keep his mouth motoring while Armand tunes him out. He’s half-listening now. On the TV, a scheming lawyer who is re-entering the world after a twenty-year coma. “Mohamed Henedy is in his sixties,” Armand points out. “Assuming the character is a similar age, he cannot expect to live much longer than the amount of time he has just lost. There must be a certain urgency to it.”

Daniel shrugs, loose against Armand’s shoulder. “Yeah, but you don’t really feel it,” he says. “You wake up one day sixty and think, shit, I’m getting old, soon I’ll be dead. And then you get on with whatever you were doing before. And then you get diagnosed with a terminal illness and think, shit, this is really it, but when you get home from the doctor’s office you still need to pay the rent and take out the trash. I guess it must start feeling urgent at some point. I don’t know.”

“You could never write a musalsal about vampires,” Armand says. “Vampires don’t do things with the same kind of eager energy that people do. Or when they do, it takes them decades to get around to it, and the outcome never really matters anyway.”

Daniel snorts. “It might not exactly be telenovela-paced, but you are talking to someone who’s written a book about vampires. You’re not that bad, trust me. And real people aren’t usually up to as much as TV characters.”

“You’ll see,” says Armand, but he’s distracted, can’t muster up much heat for it.

“Uh-huh. Getting cranky?”

Armand decides not to dignify that with an answer, and they lapse into silence, and that’s almost the end of it, and then Daniel says—

“You know you can tell me to fuck off whenever you want, right? Louis said I should go over to his place when you need some space. And I haven’t booked flights yet, because part of me wan’t sure this was real until I walked in your door and thought I might be turning around right away, or chasing you around the world, or something, but— I believe it, now. Tell me how long you want me here.”

Armand keeps looking at the screen, but it’s just white noise now, less real than the blood pouring through the body beside him. “I don’t think I’ve—”

No. That’s not true. He’s told people to fuck off before, he’s certain, that sentiment anyway, not that it—

“—told anyone to fuck off for several centuries.”

“Okay. Well, give it a try, maybe you’ll like it.”

“Stay for the month.”

“Will do, boss.”

The water laps over their feet; it feels good. It doesn’t make sense, really, that Armand should be capable of holding still for indefinite periods of time, being both trained for it and not even properly alive, and yet discover only after days in motion among humans that his feet can still ache from his labours. They accumulate dust between the toes of his sandals, just like human feet.

“For some reason,” says Daniel, “I thought it was going to be birds.”

It’s late, and there are no kites at Kite Beach. Armand wouldn’t mind being home watching dramas, but Daniel has the energy and appetite of a fledgling. And, to be fair, spent the day asleep. So here they are.

“Birds?” says Armand.

“Yeah. When Louis’ guy said it— the first one he brought in, I don’t know, to scare me.”

Ah. Armand has to smother a laugh, because, well, yes. Louis had brought Damek to scare Daniel, and it had worked rather well. “Well,” he says, “it’s not like he was working alone.”

“How you feeling? Hungry?”

“Not particularly.” It’s not hunger yet. Only the sore feet, and— “My head hurts?” he says. “And sometimes— my hand shakes. Like yours.” He tries to make it sound light, but it had frightened him a little, holding a wooden spoon in his hand over the pot this morning and watching the tip of it shake.

“What were you drinking, before the fast?” Daniel asks.

Armand shrugs. “Some of the usual. Some little drinks, annoying open-source contributors mainly.”

Daniel nods sagely. “Caffeine withdrawal,” he pronounces.

'“Oh.” That makes sense, actually. Arms dealers tend to favour stimulants with a shorter half-life, easily avoided.

Daniel scuffs his feet in the surf. “So,” he says, “Am I allowed to ask you about Rashid, now?”

“You asked me about Rashid before.”

“I deliberately irritated you about Rashid. That’s not the same thing.”

Somehow, more than any other period of his life with Louis, the weeks occupied by Daniel’s interview with Louis feel like a fever dream, like they happened much longer ago than they really did, to someone else. Unworthy in San Francisco, unworthy in Dubai? What was that even supposed to mean? He just remembers panic, a feeling like his ribs were too small for his heart and getting smaller, smaller, as the inevitable end approached.

The beginning, though— well, that wasn’t so bad. “Very well,” he says. “Ask.”

“Whose idea was it?” says Daniel immediately.

Whose idea. It reminds Armand that they must begin some sort of formal mind training. He has been putting it off. But for Daniel to even ask such a thing— well, he has never been intimate with another vampire, it’s hardly his fault. But even if he were more practiced in entering humans’ minds, he would know how impossible it can be, to separate one thought from another, to pinpoint the moment when the vague becomes real and the real becomes specific. He and Louis weren’t inside each other’s minds all the time. Not even most of the time. But when they were that to each other, there was nothing that needed to be closed off, nothing hidden, everything shared.

“I suppose you won’t accept ‘both’ as an answer,” he says.

“I’d accept it,” says Daniel, “if it’s the one you’re willing to give. But I wouldn’t believe it, no.”

It’s an out. But if he were going to take an out, he would never have picked up the phone and called his bright young reporter in the first place. “You should,” he says. ”It’s the closest to the truth. But if you insist on specificity: so far as I remember, Louis first vocalized it, based on a fantasy of mine. But it was only a refinement, of course, of a way of relating that we inhabited relatively often. A new name.”

Even without his mind, Armand can practically feel Daniel considering and then rejecting all of his responses that fall closest to hand. It feels careful. Daniel had never seemed to have much difficulty coming up with responses, during the interview. Now that this isn’t an interview, he’s uncertain. He’s different, this way. It makes him seem older, not quite so childish in his certainty.

“So,” he says, “if it was a game you played often, then the only new feature of that iteration of it was… me. Performing for me. Sorry, that sounds self-centred. But just following the logic, here.”

it had all been so tattered, by then. The delicate illusion of Louis being truly, ultimately in control of their relationship hanging on by a thread and they needed it, how could they act if Armand had truly been the one in charge of their little coven of two all along, how to survive it, but they saw each other too clearly and too unconditionally, too many boundaries crossed and agreements broken. But Daniel could see them anew, could be told exactly the version of Louis’ story that Louis wanted him to hear, could see exactly the Armand that Armand wanted Louis to have, they could find each other again through him. That was the plan, anyway.

“The alchemy of the theatre demands an audience,” Armand admits. “It’s not self-centered for the audience to understand that without their gaze, the play could not take place, even if the players were to speak their parts into the empty room. But you were a good listener, yes.”

Daniel is a good listener, still. He waits for the statement to settle, to sink in. Giving Armand time to dig himself into a hole, really, to run his mouth and say more than he’d meant to, but Armand is starting to recognize the trick.

“Why Rashid?” he asks, when it’s clear the answer is final. “It’s not like I knew the name of Louis’ butler in advance. Why be him?”

“I wasn’t,” says Armand. “Ar-Rashid: rightly guided. One of the ninety-nine names of God, if you didn’t get that far in your pop quiz material. An exceedingly common name. I took it because I wanted it. Why should I not, just because a mortal sent to spy on me also had it?”

“Did you know he was Talamasca?”

Oddly, Armand cannot quite remember. This, like the exact origin of Armand-Rashid, is something that matters much more to Daniel than it had ever mattered to Armand. That there were some humans collecting little scraps of detail about the lives of vampires means nothing. Who could care about such a thing? They can do no harm to vampires. They could make their findings public, certainly. But Armand had spent over a century with a theatre troupe revealing themselves onstage every night. Daniel has just published a book that he has given up insisting is nonfiction. It’s not just the magic of the theatre or the paperback in hand: it’s the magic of the tale. Vampires are more fascinating, more appealing, as creatures that one has to make an effort of faith, a suspension of disbelief, to be frightened of.

And anyway, the Talamasca doesn’t want to go public, not really, not in earnest, as the deep cuts Daniel complains about can attest. They're just children playing at secrets, at monsters. If their monsters belonged to everyone, the game wouldn’t be fun any more.

Well. There was one thing that one Talamasca agent could to to harm one vampire. If what Rashid did was, ultimately, harm. “I suppose I must have at some point,” he said. “I didn’t expect it to become relevent.”

Daniel actually does seem to understand that intuitively. Perhaps his own recent dealings have adjusted his expectations of the humans. “When did you become sunproof?” he asks, and the question has a little lilt of a child’s question, curious and a bit self-directed. What he really means is, when will I become sunproof?

Armand doesn’t know when Daniel will become sunproof.

He doesn’t want Daniel to wonder. He doesn’t want it to happen, to be an option, because in order to test one’s own tolerance, one needs to—

Cairo, 1949, should he sit out and wait for the dawn or simply walk out the door into the light—

better to wait, to endure, to have it happen slowly, to see whether Louis ever even got curious enough about when he was coming home to find him—

and to Him we will return to Him we will return, just let me leave, why can’t I be done—

he has lived so long that you can buy petrol on the street corner now—

Sweet blood pouring into his mouth like a fountain, bitter blood falling onto his cheeks in little droplets, someone is crying, more than one person is crying. He is being fed, he is being bathed, gently, the hands gentler than any he has known before, he is so small and new, skin growing back raw, so helpless and needy, so cared for and loved—

“Do you really think it’s idiotic?” he asks.

Daniel is a vampire now. Or perhaps Daniel’s mind always worked like this, making leaps, and if Armand leaps Daniel can leap with him. “Keeping yourself ignorant of something that concerns you? Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

Which Armand already knew. But he’s not asking for himself, now, not really. Daniel doesn’t know that there are things better left alone. Armand can disagree with him, but Louis had written to Daniel for a reason. Insisted on Daniel for a reason. That’s what he was there for, to dig up things Louis would in the moment have rather stayed buried, because some other part of Louis wanted them back.

“Louis did ask me,” he gasps. “The time you— he did. You don’t have any reason to believe me, but it’s true. But there was another time, that he didn’t.”

Daniel stops. Armand must have stopped too, he’s not walking on without Daniel, anyway, he’s not too sure what his feet are going but Daniel is still right here, heart beating. “What did you do,” Daniel says, quietly.

Daniel is angry at him. Of course. But he has no right to be because it wasn’t Louis’ actions he had needed to remove it was his own, just his own shame, nothing Louis needed, “I had the right,” he said. “All I took was when I tried to kill myself. That’s all, he doesn’t need it, he doesn’t—”

Daniel grabs him by the shoulders. It’s so that he can force his own eyes on Armand, his swirling unstable eyes, full of something that Armand is barred forevermore from understanding. “Hey,” he says. “Okay, I— fuck. I don’t think a relaxing walk on the beach is the right place to talk about this. You may be in withdrawal, but I think I need a cup of coffee. Okay?”

“The slave market in Cairo,” says Armand, “was one of the main places for European merchants to acquire Indian slaves.”

So much is historical fact. It is easy to say. Armand does not have a bibliography for it, because he does not need one, but he could certainly provide one easily enough.

“I’m not castrated,” he continues, “if you were wondering. It would have been usual. I’m not sure why I’m not.”

“I wasn’t wondering that.”

Daniel wants to know about the memory Armand took from Louis. He is trying to say it, but it is coming out backwards. Daniel, fledgling, child, can you still see it? Is that not what you do?

“In 1949,” he tries again, “Louis and I went to Cairo.” Another dead end.

The area near Kite Beach provides somewhat different dining options from Armand’s neighbourhood. They are in a café open until 3 AM and decorated like an instagram influencer’s living room. A palm tree infringes on Daniel’s head space. On the table in between them are two lattés with little foam hearts on them, both to be consumed by Daniel, and a reed plant in a vase that says “young” on it in gold cursive.

“How long did you stay in Egypt?” Daniel asks, gently.

A seemingly irrelevent question. Looking forwards, not back; Daniel wants to know what it is to be an unchanging thing in the midst of change. Daniel is very good at this. “Six years,” Armand says, and in the back of his mind the gentle pressure on one side of the threads begins to untangle the knots in the centre. “Louis likes to be— in the middle of things.”

“Is he hanging around Dubai waiting for a revolution?”

Even more irrelevant. Of course he isn’t. Armand doesn’t need to answer that. But he can if he wants, which is enough. He can speak it. “We left Cairo quickly, however, after I tried to kill myself,” he says, “and purchased a property in Alexandria. Which also had a significant slave market. Just not the one I was sold in.”

Daniel crosses his legs on his chair, like a child and not a septugenarian vampire. His hips aren’t quite flexible enough for it, so his knees stick up high enough for him to prop his elbow on one of them and rest his chin on his hand. He looks at Armand with a small, strange smile on his face. “You’re good at that, you know.”

“I was terrible at it. First I tried to walk into the sun, and learned that it was no longer an option. Then I tried to set myself on fire. I’m not quite flammable enough, apparently, though I believe I got close.”

Daniel shakes his head. “Not suicide. Saying the thing you’re afraid of. Once you get going, you might even be better than Louis. He needed me more than you do.”

Armand stares at the young vase. He has never considered that that could be a thing to be good at. It must be a new acquisition, this skill, surely. But he had not felt its presence until this moment, when Daniel pointed it out: so perhaps it was there all along, waiting. A gift to be claimed.

“I wanted it gone,” he says, “and I could not remove it from myself, but I could from Louis. Every time he looked at me, he saw me that way. I didn’t want to see it. So I took it.”

Daniel finishes one overpriced coffee and picks up the second. “If you could remove every painting of you from the wall of every museum they hang in,” he says, “would you do it?”

The Louvre opened in 1793. It hadn’t occurred to Armand to visit it for nearly ten years, after he had transitioned fully into his new life as a theatre director, and people started expecting him to know about art, and he remembered that he did.

“I could remove every painting of me from the wall of every museum they hang in, if I decided to,” he says. But he hadn’t considered it before, no. He’s considering it now. Being gone, knowing that there are no eyes on him that aren’t in the room with him. It feels terrifying. It feels soft and warm. But what would he do with them? Perhaps the same thing he’d done with the other Romanus: give it to Louis for safekeeping.

Everything needs to go somewhere. Even ash has form, reality. Matter can be neither created nor destroyed. He had taken one image of himself from Louis’ mind, but then instead of the image living with Louis, the act of taking it lived with Armand.

“Do you truly think that I’m good at this?” he asks, and his voice is much too small.

“Yeah,” says Daniel. “yeah, you are. You can tell him. He’d want to know. It’s okay if you don’t want to know stuff, but— Louis does. Trust me.”

Armand does trust him. On this, of course he does. Louis and Daniel are alike on this.

Armand pulls his knees in to his chest, heels on the edge of his chair, and wraps his arms around them. He doesn’t have anything else to say. He wants to do something else, think about something else.

Daniel, as if he can read it on him, pours the rest of his coffee down his throat like it’s blood. “Are you still up for what we planned, tonght?”

“Yes,” says Armand, the tension in him easing, “of course. Come along, fledgling.”

They walk back the way they came, on the beach.

“You should be glad that Kite Beach isn’t named for birds,” Armand says. “Birds of prey have a particular affinity for our kind, I’ve found.”

“We’re carrion. What, lie down under a flock of vultures and before you know if you’re picked clean?”

Armand considers it. They like flesh, yes, but surely there’s a quickening of the blood, movement in the organs, something to set him apart from a corpse. But then, he’s never actually tried it. Would they carry off organs? It’s said feeding birds earns sawab. He’s hardly using the organs for anything. How long could he stay—

“Okay, cancel,” says Daniel. “Program taking too long to respond, encountered— what is it, the thing where a computer never stops doing something?”

“Ah,” says Armand, “infinite loop?”

“Yeah. That. Whatever you’re thinking about birds picking off your skin, stop. Is here good?”

They’re sheltered from the boardwalk by a small stand of trees. The only people around are a couple strolling down the path, probably too far away to even notice, but it’s a good opportunity anyway. “Yes,” he says. “Those people. Can you feel them?”

“Sure,” says Daniel. "They’re— oh. Uh. They’re here for work, they’re colleagues, both married, but they’re both thinking about having sex with each other when they get back to the hotel.”

That’s true. Not the only thing about them to notice, but it will do. “Good,” he says. “I want you to try to turn their attention away from us. You’re not cutting out anything, that’s—” well. That’s something different. “—harder. You’re just focusing their attention elsewhere, finding the little crack of attention that could be filled by noticing what’s over here, and expanding something else to fill it.”

Daniel’s eyebrows raise. “You want me to make them hornier on purpose? Aren’t you supposed to be chained in Hell and, you know, not tempting people?”

Technically it would be Daniel doing the tempting, and two disbelievers who were already planning on it having sex well outside of fast hours is hardly doing much to tempt anyone into sin, but it’s not a bad point. “Fine,” Armand laughs, “go deeper, then. There’s something the man is guilty about. What is it?”

Daniel’s eyes solidify as he concentrates: pure gold, just a little lighter than Armand’s. Then the green diffuses back in as he says, “Something to do with a hospital?”

“Yes. His daughter is sick, and he has left his wife behind to drive back and forth to the hospital while he goes on a business trip that’s more play than work. Find that, pull on it, expand it. I’ll do the woman.” Buried deeper in her, but an easy bundle of misgivings to expand once he finds it: she’d nickle-and-dimed a roomate once, years ago, a childhood friend who had never ended up with the kind of job that she’d eventually fallen into. It is easy to set in motion a thought process that will end with it occurring to her to reach out with an apology and repayment.

He checks in on Daniel’s assignment. The man is thinking about when the daughter was born, seeing her bloody little body and thinking I would do anything for this tiny creature, I guess it’s true what they say, I’ll never be the same again after this day, and he’s wondering what the hell happened, how he lost it.

“That’s— good,” Armand says. It’s better than he would have expected; better, even, that he might have done. Going back to the source, the seed of guilt being planted by the man’s own innate sense of goodness and love— he wouldn’t have thought of that. For a moment he can’t think of anything else to say, just watches Daniel do it. His hands in front of his face like he’s holding something loosely, not trembling at all. His eyes staring into the ether, pure gold.

“Okay,” says Daniel finally, when he judges it to be complete. What have I done, what have I done, the man is thinking. The colleagues are most definitely not making adulterers of each other tonight. “Is it finished?”

Armand nods. “You sort of tie it off,” he says, slightly shakily. He can feel the man’s love, needs to pull himself back from the immensity of it, backing away from the edge of a cliff. “Like a thread. It will unwind eventually, but it gives you time to be unnoticed.”

Daniel nods, and Armand can feel him doing it. Then the humans are gone, safely disappeared into their own thoughts, and they are alone.

Armand takes a deep breath. He opens his arms a little. “It’s traditional,” he says, “for a fledgling’s first flight to be in the arms of their maker, or a suitable substitute. It gives the opportunity to get used to the sensation. Most of flight is being aware that you can do it, noticing the patterns, the relationship between your thoughts and actions, your environment, and your movements. I’ll carry us to the north side of Port Rashid from here, and we can walk back from there. Pay attention, don’t just enjoy the ride. Imagine yourself doing it.”

Daniel steps in close. Armand is very slightly taller than him, but he still seems at a little bit of a loss as to how exactly to do this. Armand has to be the one to pull him in, settle Daniel’s arms around his shoulders.

“Harsh master,” Daniel mumbles into his shoulder, “I can’t just enjoy the ride even the first time?”

Armand’s first flight, he had barely even noticed he was in the air until he was in the water. “I suppose that’s fair,” he says. “All right.”

Armand thinks, though, as they soar past the lights of the shoreline, that Daniel is paying attention, he is learning, he is here.

The fact that this device shipped with a debugging ribbon cable that the manufacturers had simply not bothered to disconnect has made this very easy so far. The main firmware from the flash and system memory is uploading, and Armand is reading a tutorial on the use of an open-source reverse-engineering suite written by, of all people, the United States National Security Agency. Well, so be it; the firmware adjusting a mortal’s blood should not be proprietary.

"I told your fledgling a lie."

Lestat has a different earbud in each ear; one is connected to his portable keyboard, the other one his video call with Armand. Neither of them has spoken for several hours. It takes Armand a moment to remember how. “Just one?” he says.

"Yes." The side of Lestat's face that's in front of the camera hovers a little closer, but he's just adjusting something. Armand doesn’t look up. The insulin pump has four main integrated circuits; one has the main firmware, one handles Bluetooth, and two he is probably going to have to permanently break the thing to get a read on. He picks at the one that is probably a microcontroller for the motor peripherals with the tip of a fingernail. "I told him," says Lestat, "that I said no. With Magnus. But I didn't. I didn't say anything. I was too frightened."

"Hm," says Armand. Perhaps the other one, the flash chip, contains the cryptographic keys.

"You should tell him," says Lestat. "That that's not how it happened. It was only what I wished, afterwards."

"No," says Armand. "The interview is about you. He should not show what the walls of the tower saw. He should show what's inside of you."

"Okay," says Lestat.

“Come on,” Daniel says, “It’s for me. I’ve been good.”

“You’re going to regret this,” Armand warns him, but Daniel is not someone who backs down from consuming something out of an abstract knowledge that he’s going to regret it. His mouth stays open, green eyes sparking with what he thinks is a very funny situation, and Armand places a ball of thaen mittai carefully on his tongue.

Daniel chews it carefully. “Gross,” he pronounces.

“Yes. You’re a vampire. I wouldn’t recommend eating human food for no reason.”

Daniel eyes him. “Okay, only answer this if the idea of answering it is actively pleasant for you: was Louis for real about the honey and pineapple thing?”

Armand ducks his head. Another memory that is almost feverish to recall: Louis feeding from him at the table. Insulting him. Offering him to Daniel. That night Armand had slashed his own wrist open and practically forced his blood into Louis’ mouth, putting as much memory into the blood as he could. You, Sir, come here, you who gave my child so many rings. Would you like a sample? Do come on, pretty one. You want to taste it? Tender-cheeked little man that you are, I would beg for one psalm from your harp, just one, were it given with your own will. Goaded him with memory until Louis did what he was supposed to and fucked it out of him, repudiated and replaced the fingerprints of everyone who had ever touched Armand.

It was nice. He misses it sometimes. Nothing under his control, or at least, arranging everything to seem that way. It was absorbing. But he also remembers the look on Louis’ face, sometimes, when Armand goaded him into it, or after, or at no time at all, with the pity of a jailer and the fear of a captive, a look too familiar to belong to Louis alone, and— it’s not like that any more.

The honey and pineapple, though— “It was, ah, an isolated incident,” he says. “I once tried to eat enough that it would affect the taste. The effects were… unpleasant. I asked that we not repeat the experiment.”

“Asked,” says Daniel.

Well, yes. If Louis had told him to do it again, he would have. He never had. But the possibility was there; that was the point of asking, to create one more possibility to be told.

“Hold that thought,” Daniel says suddenly, and pushes himself up awkwardly to lumber off to the bathroom. Armand hears him retching up sugar and fibre slop. That’s that lesson learned, hopefully.

But by the time Daniel has come back it has built inside him, the honestly, the thing Daniel manages to pull out of people just by sitting and listening. Apparently it still works if he’s busy vomiting, because Armand wants to say it: “It was an escape,” he says. “It wasn’t just about Louis. it wasn’t hiding. It just meant that I only had to be one thing at once.” A simple thing, the boundaries of care and being cared for clear. A human who could pray in the sun without anyone asking why are you doing that— well, so he thought. An innocent.

“Can I come with you?” Daniel asks. “To your thing?”

Armand blinks. To the kitchen, no, he would not make it home to coffin in time. But to iftar, at least for the cleanup— “If you think you can wake up in time,” he says.

“I’ll set an alarm clock.” Armand is not sure if he is joking. “Do you have, I don’t know, a cover story that I can fit into?”

Armand does. The story he’d told Pritha has expanded, grown details that he can slip into easily. There isn’t much option, though, for who Daniel will have to be. “You’re a friend of my father’s,” Armand says. “He died shortly after moving my family from London to Dubai. You helped get me and my mother back on our feet.” It had seemed odd at first, claiming to have a mother, but he’s gotten used to it by now.

Daniel looks at him strangely, for much longer than warranted by the relative blandness of the backstory. “All right,” he says finally.

Armand watches the sun slip down, and he thinks about Lestat.

Thinks about Lestat not as Armand knew him, or as Louis did, but Claudia’s Lestat. The permissive parent turned disciplinarian turned slave master. He thinks of how Louis had looked, telling the beginning of the end, the first tendril of discontent that shattered the fantasy of a happy family: Lestat, holding Claudia in place in front of the incinerator, forcing her to watch the flesh of her first infatuation turn to smoke. This is why we never get close to mortals.

Because Louis was angry about it, of course he was. Had been. But not about the message; not because he thinks Lestat was wrong. He objected to the method, that's all, had wanted kinder parenting in their shared home. But that the lesson needed learning, Louis never doubted. Even in Paris, out there finding himself, humanity was merely an environment for Louis. He observed it, enjoyed it, but he wasn't part of it. He'd tried being part of it, of course, while he was actually alive, and what he'd found had made perdition seem like Paradise. So Louis and Lestat were always aligned, in this: they could skim off the surface of humanity, the laughter of a theatre audience, dead boys in hastily flipped apartments, but they did not get involved. And so, for the nearly eighty years that Armand had devoted to Louis, he wasn't involved.

He is involved now. He walks along the aisles of people eating, mortals nourished by food a vampire has made. He is someone, to some mortals. He is a person. He has a life that was not the Vampire Armand's but is now. They can hurt him. If something happened to Rory or Pritha or Suresh, or Ali who had taught him how to cut an onion, or Vikram who has given him sweets for his son, or Yusuf who tells him every day he is too thin and must bring home two meals with him, or-- it would hurt him. It will hurt him, because something will happen to all of them. Small indignities first, and then larger ones, and then they will be nothing, soil, in so very little time, and Armand will be outside the incinerator held in place, unable to look away.

And so perhaps Lestat was right, Louis was right. Louis had gotten attached to one human, one boy, but he hadn't had to lose him, thanks to Armand. And he had thanked Armand, accepted Daniel like a gift. Louis couldn't have lost Daniel, but neither could he have turned him, not after Madeleine. He needed Armand, one last service from him.

So if they're right, then this is a mistake. Armand should not be here. And he should not be bringing Daniel here, his fledgling, his to care for. He should be working to detach Daniel from his human connections, not introducing him to Armand's. Daniel is already too human, painfully so, stuffed full with more years of human life than perhaps any other extant vampire. And not just his own; he collects human lives, stories, drags them after him like a heavy coat. He collects them with such enthusiasm that he'd swept up a vampire life into his pile, and thought it human enough to be worth keeping. 

Every authority of Armand's life has agreed on what he ought to eat. Marius, Santino, the laws of God’s order: that part, with which Louis has struggled mightily, is easy. But this, not so. No divine revelation recorded for the benefit of mortals addresses whether a vampire ought to have friends among them. Santino taught him to hold himself apart, to live in filth to carry out the divine will assigned to the shayatin, and for all his reforms, Lestat's version of Armand's coven was one that made use of humans, not walked among them. 

And yet. Once, he had been told to hold tight to humanity. Once he had been laid out lovingly under rank sweaty human bodies. Once he had been sent to take the other side. Yes, but not only that: once had been forced to study dead languages, and haggle for pigments, and pick out the rings he liked best on his fingers and learn where their stones were found. Once he had been dressed in the latest fashions, not for vanity but for the love of the ingenuity of beauty, where anything can be made desireable if looked at in the right way. Once he had been taken somewhere just because he asked to be. He had been of the world, then. He had loved the world. Some parts of it, at least.

"My maker would be glad that you are here," he says, when Daniel appears beside him and the first wave of people begins to trickle towards maghrib. Soon the trickle will become a rush, and there will be twenty minutes of relative calm on the streets to clean up. 

"Great," says Daniel, almost neutrally. "You glad?"

Armand is not sure. It is strange having him here; but then, Daniel has always walked between the mortal and immortal worlds, even when it was unintentional.

"Come," he says. "We need to clean these off, fold them and put them away for tomorrow." They pick up the tarps and plastic runners delineating aisles on them as they're vacated, careful not to rush anyone, but making the most of the time. The cleanup crew is smaller, but they have this routine down. There are more volunteers on this shift who aren’t Muslim than the early one: Hindus living at the work camp lending its kitchen, a couple American Christians trying to get off the beaten tourist path. There is no interpretation of the divine that does not consider feeding others to blessed. Armand tries to relax, and only realizes as he’s doing it that he is not relaxed.

“So you are Armand’s uncle!” Suresh finds them eventually, just as Daniel is pouring a bucket of water over a portion of spilled stew to sweep it into the gutter.

There is a certain tone, a flavour, to a vampire meeting a human for the first time. Armand has seen it over and over; he feels it in himself. The instincts of a predator can be set aside, but not removed.

There is none of it at all when Daniel sticks out his hand. “Yeah,” he says. “Ah, a friend of his father’s, yes.”

“An engineer, then?” Armand’s father, the one he’d made up in a panic before the first outing with a mortal of this new life. Even mortals who are not real take up space, ghosts with weight. Armand has watched youtube videos of students at IIT Delhi. He has clicked through maps of small streets in Surrey, imagining an older version of one of those students thinking, I will raise my family here. A wordly man, loving but adaptable, pragmatic, he would have to be—

“No,” says Daniel, “I was a journalist.”

“A journalist?” Suresh says, and glances at Armand, a little nervous, almost accusingly.

The sun is down. It is dark, seems darker than it ought to be, but warmer, not comforting, cloying.

Armand isn’t inside their minds, the men who live in the company housing complexes scattered around the outskirts of the city, the men spending their early mornings putting together meals before they head to work. He doesn’t need to be.

Daniel doesn’t need to be, either. Armand read his books, in the nervy weeks before the Louis’ second interview. Daniel knows about missed pay, nowhere to go. He knows about contracts in unfamiliar languages, overcrowded work camps, passports in a locked box for safekeeping. And he knows he has the power to make it much worse in search of the truth, in search of a higher good that doesn’t include the livelihood of the person in front of him. He knows why everyone around him is suddenly looking at him like he might be, well, a vampire.

“I’m retired,” says Daniel. “I have done some work recently upon the request of the subjects. And only upon request.”

A kind of journalistic whore. Armand thinks he does not say it out loud. It’s what he would have said, probably, during the interview, if Daniel hadn’t said it first himself. Everyone has a whore number. Everyone’s for sale. That's what being human means. Ten million dollars is rather a lot, but then, Daniel’s price had not always been set so high.

Daniel isn’t speaking any more.

“Are you all right?” Suresh asks in English. It’s to Armand. Suresh usually speaks Arabic with him, says they both need the practice. Yes, that’s true, Armand thinks, if he had had more practice, if he had been able to speak—

“Have you eaten?” Daniel asks, and Armand is about to snap at him and then remembers that they are humans, now, and Daniel is prompting him, like an actor, Armand has forgotten all his lines, this is why he never went on stage, just another market where the only saving you is to say all the right words and say them right—

“You have been working too hard,” says Suresh, who has been working just as hard, and with the clock in his fragile body ticking down at a breakneck pace, “You should go home to eat. Everything is fine here. Rest, Amadeo.”

That isn’t right, Suresh didn’t say that—

Armand runs. He had tried running once before. This time, he gets away.

It’s entirely legitimate, you see. It always is. There are regulations to these things, safeguards.

You will be asked your religion; if you do not understand the language of the question, you are a Christian. You are expected to be fully aware of the terms and provisions stipulated under the job offer, including your job description, title, responsibilities, salary, benefits, and detailed work conditions prior to signing a job offer. A broker can only sell slaves if he knows the seller or can produce someone who knows him: he must write the seller’s name and trade in his notebook in order to insure against the possibility that the merchandise is free or stolen. The employer will need to obtain your identification documents as to receive your residency permit, whereby such documentation shall be kept with him for the duration needed for obtaining this permit. The broker must be a trustworthy and honest man who is known for his chastity and abstinence. You may be suspended from work temporarily if you are charged with deliberate commission of a crime against life, property, honour, honesty or of carrying out a strike. If you bear your master a child, you are umm walad and shall be free upon his death. You shall not be entitled to obtain a new work permit where you have interrupted working for an illegal reason prior to the end of the contractual term.

And you can buy your freedom, of course, you may work for wages, you may always do that. If your master sends you to perform work for another, and the other gives you a gift, you may keep it. If you are skilled and intelligent, you may learn what earns the most coin, and do it on purpose. You may become industrious, in your way, save up so that—

(Your price, Amadeo? Your master said, You have no price, you are an angel, I am your slave, nobody could buy you from me.)

(So that was the end of that.)

“Armand?”

There is someone here, where Armand lives, wanting something, there is always someone. The price of solitude is too high to be saved for, it runs through the fingers like water. Even here—

“Please fuck off,” Armand says.

Daniel does. The heartbeat fades, the door clicks shut, he is left to belong to himself.

Armand wakes up in darkness. It is not usually this dark, in his bedroom. It feels nice. He burrows into the blankets underneath him, which smell like how it feels to suckle on his own wrist. He is enclosed. Theoretically that should be alarming, but a strange feature of vampire biology is that it’s hard to feel alarmed about anything when you’re in a coffin. Which is where he is, he realizes, waking up somewhat. He pushes on the lid and opens it to reveal his own living room, where— yes. He must have climbed in here after Daniel left.

There’s a single message on his phone, from Louis: Let me know if you want anything.

My fledgling, please, he sends back.

You got it, boss, comes back from Louis, which it seems like maybe Louis had not personally typed.

He has slept— or more properly, been dead— for twenty-four hours. He is not certain what to do about that information. He prays vampire dhuhr, which is easy to decide since his phone is telling him to, and then cannot figure out what should come next, and ends up sitting on the couch waiting for Daniel to get back.

“Hey,” says Daniel from his doorway, some time later.

He looks very young. Uncertain. Armand is supposed to be taking care of him, not the other way around. A heavy weight in the pit of his stomach. “I’m sorry,” Armand says, “that did not go as planned.”

Daniel shrugs. “No harm done,” he says. “I assume us immortals are entitled to a panic attack every decade or so, or else I’m going to be in trouble.”

Attack. Yes, it had felt rather like being attacked. He likes the phrase.

“I went back for a bit tonight,” Daniel says, “helped clean, told your friend Suresh you were resting up. Sorry if I overstepped.”

Armand blinks. Daniel had gone back, without him, casually, and— well, nothing at all, apparently. It didn’t mean anything. “No,” he says, “that’s— thanks for doing that.”

They stare at each other for a while.

“You like hugs?” Daniel asks.

Armand does like hugs. Louis hugs him, and Rory and Pritha, and sometimes he goes to parties where people whip him first and hug him after. He nods.

He’s curled on the couch, knees to his chest, and Daniel doesn’t envelop him, just sits down facing him near enough that it’s only a little bit of a shuffle for Armand to come to him.

Armand shuffles, tucks his knees up to rest across Daniel's lap, his head leaning slightly on Daniel's shoulder. Daniel brings one arm around his back and holds his own hand with the other, locking it in place. Armand is not really tired, after sleeping in a coffin for an entire twenty-four hours, but it is easy to close his eyes and let himself be held. “You’ll be okay,” Daniel whispers, almost automatically, like it comes free with the hug. Rory had said something like that to him too, he remembers, as he wept blood onto her shirt on a night where he and Louis had left a mortal gathering-place seperately. But she had been right. Hadn’t she?

The haze of indecision has receded. He’s hungry, but he’s not tired any longer, and it starts to seem like perhaps Daniel is right, too. Armand had brought Daniel to iftar, a too-human vampire among humans, and nothing so very terrible had happened. Only that he had then wanted to be alone. But then he asked to be alone and then he was, so that was not so very terrible either. Perhaps Daniel was right about that as well: Armand does like telling people to fuck off.

He opens his eyes, raises his head a little. Gives Daniel a small smile, just to see how it feels. It feels fine, but Daniel raises his eyebrows like Armand has said something funny. “Uh-huh,” he says, skeptically.

Armand has spoken enough for now, he decides. That’s Daniel’s gift, making people talk, but now that Armand cannot see into his mind, he ought to be made to turn it around, too. Armand is in the world, with humans, and Daniel has met them. Daniel has been out there for a long time. “Will you tell me about your family?” Armand asks.

Daniel’s mouth opens, then closes, then opens again. “You want to hear about…?”

Once, Daniel had been worried that Armand would hurt his children. Or that Louis would, or the Talamasca, or something, not a specific worry but just the dreadful knowledge that he had gotten caught up in something he couldn’t control, the scrawl of his interview notes betraying his terror. “Yes,” says Armand, and waits to see if anything has changed.

Daniel shrugs. “Sure,” he says, and lifts up his hip a bit to pull his phone out of his pocket. “I might have some old pictures?”

Armand does want to see pictures. Daniel makes no effort to conceal the contents of his phone from Armand; most of his files are pictures of documents that aren’t legible in thumbnail, anyway.

"That's Alice," says Daniel. “You’re lucky I happened to have this on here, a student sent me a bunch of Barb memorabilia a few weeks ago and I wanted to send this to Kate.”

Armand knows what Alice looks like, he's seen her in Daniel's mind; but somehow the picture makes her seem more real than the more lifelike image skimmed from his memories. It looks like a photo of a page from a yearbook of some kind, a black-and-white photo of a group of kids sitting around the table at a bar. Daniel is recognizable; he's only a few years older, here, then he had been at their first meeting. He has his arm around Alice, a wiry young woman with hair cascading down to her waist. In the photo, her beer glass is partly obscuring her face.

From before, Armand knows that she was the child of Japanese immigrants, that she and Daniel had never once raised the subject of meeting each other's families before her pregnancy, and that he liked her to— well. Armand had mostly been digging for information that could be useful to him during the interview, things Daniel wouldn't want others to know. So now Armand now knows more than he really should about the sexual idiosyncrasies of Daniel's relationships, and not enough about any of their other qualities.

“This was,” Daniel says, “God. I don’t even know if we were properly together, then. Or any time. We moved in together because we needed a roommate, and we spent all our time writing at separate ends of the one table in the apartment, and if we had enough money we’d get something to keep us up to write more and then something to get us down from thinking about the shit we were writing about. If that didn’t work, sometimes we’d have sex while we were still high. It was one of the worst times of my life, objectively. But…” his finger traces over the screen, not quite touching it, brushing past her face. “I don’t know. When I remember it, I feel like it was one of the best.”

“I understand,” says Armand, because he does.

“We weren’t cut out for anything but that, probably,” says Daniel. “Either of us. But Berkley then was… I don’t know, maybe you know. I guess we probably ran in different circles, huh. Read Laurel’s Kitchen and you’ll get it. I guess today that stuff is for evangelicals who seed measles outbreaks with their homeschooled children, but back then it was real counterculture, it seemed powerful, the idea of taking care of the home, that settling down could be revolutionary and not just buying into the American Dream. So, I don’t know, eventually we decided to try it. Well, that and she was pregnant. It kind of worked, for a few years.”

“What happened?”

“More of the same, I suppose. Life changed, we didn’t. I didn’t. She tried harder than me, she had to. The last time she left, it was because I hit Kate. It wasn’t—” he stops. Doesn’t say whatever he had been going to say. “She was right to leave.”

Armand had helped to murder Louis’ daughter; Daniel had only hit Alice’s. But then, it wasn’t the act itself that had finally made Louis leave.

Daniel smiles a little, scrolls through more pictures, and finds a photo of a young woman at what seems to be a university graduation ceremony who must be Kate. She’s in a cap and gown, posing underneath some sort of statue. “Probably actually helped my relationship with Kate,” he says. “She was too young to remember the— incident. I was the fun parent, after a while. She came to live with me for a while when she was having a teenage rebellion thing. Leonore was a baby, and Helena… wasn’t thrilled about it. Eventually they got on each others’ nerves badly enough that Kate went back. She takes my calls, now, sometimes.”

“Helena,” says Armand. “How did you meet?”

Daniel ducks his head, actually looks a bit embarassed. “Okay, this was normal for a while,” he says. “I took out a personals ad. It was like tinder, but you needed to be funny instead of hot, so newspapermen had a bit of an advantage. She called me. It was… we were lonely. Pretty sure I said that in the ad. Not a great basis for a lifelong partnership, but it lasted a bit longer than the first try.”

“And the end with her?” This is actually pretty fun, Armand decides. He prompts, Daniel answers. Maybe Daniel would have said it all anyway, but it feels good to be the one asking the question.

“Nothing as dramatic as with Alice. I just… drifted away. I still couldn’t do it. I’d thought it was just the drugs, or being poor, or being young, but it wasn’t any of that. I didn’t like being married. It was convenient, and it was convenient for— hell, you already know I’m a piece of shit, but being married really made me feel it. It was convenient because I was a man and she was a woman and no matter how many noises we made about equal division of labour, it never happened and I didn’t want it to. I liked that it made life easier for me, but I didn’t like sharing a life with her. I hated coming home to the how-was-your-day-honey routine, when my day was full of other peoples’ misery. I hated being asked how I was or what I was up to or where I was going. Eventually she found someone else, and I just let it happen. She told me, I think she wanted me to fight for her, to get angry. And I was relieved. So it was over.”

“And Leonore?”

“I slipped out of their lives like I was never there. The only thing I could think of to do was send her money. I had enough, by then. Turns out money can’t buy you love and she didn’t much appreciate the assumption that it could.”

Armand cannot think of anything to say to that. Plenty of people have given him money for plenty of things, but at least none of them were under the illusion that what they were purchasing was love. That he has always given freely, if not wisely.

Daniel shakes his head. “I know it’s my fault,” he says. “I didn’t need to hurt any of them like that. Nobody made me do it. But… that day, with Louis, when we figured out what had happened in San Francisco, and I realized I was missing memories from more than just drugs… god, I felt so relieved. It was like— my whole life, there was something I was missing, something important that I should be paying attention to, something that was for me in a way Alice and Helena and Kate and Leonore never were. I had my foot half out the door the entire time, and I didn’t even know where I was going. And I know for you it was that or kill me, but I— it fucked me up, Armand, what you did.” His hand tightens a little on Armand’s shoulder. “I’m not angry at you about it. Any more. I get it. But you asked about my family. And that’s part of the story.”

"I did tell you," Armand says, "that you would find other apologies to ask of me."

"Never contradicted you on that one," says Daniel, and he said he wasn’t angry, and he doesn’t sound angry. His voice is so calm, so easy.

What can he apologize for? Every route he thinks of, every alternative path, wishes something out of existence. The vampire Daniel, Armand's time with Louis, Armand himself. This is something he cannot make amends for, and wouldn't want to even if he could. And yet—

"I'm sorry," he says. "I can't be sorry for all of it. I did the best I could. Perhaps someone else could have chosen better, or been more selfless, but I’m who you got. I can't regret it all, because without it you— I can't regret that I made you. But what I did to you, I am sorry. I feel sorry, even if I don't know what that can mean if I wouldn’t take it back."

Daniel lets out a long, slow breath, and pulls Armand in closer. "Thanks," he says. "I know it probably seems stupid, but it does mean something to hear it, even if it's not perfect."

And that's it. Strange, how easy it was. And Daniel is still holding him, rubbing little circles into the back of his neck with a thumb now. Easier, somehow, than this kind of thing is with Louis, because it takes sustained effort on both of their parts for Armand and Louis to keep their clothes on when alone together. Or even, it must be admitted, when not alone. Their bodies had always spoken for them. With Daniel, he has only words. It’s not as bad as he’d thought it would be.

"It doesn't seem stupid," says Armand. Because it felt good to say it, something releasing in his chest. It feels nice, to be here, to be held, to be forgiven so easily.

And because if he could hear those same words from his maker, if he meant them like Armand means them, he would want it. Armand buries his face in his fledgling’s neck, and wants what Daniel has.

“It wasn’t the fact of the slave market, in Cairo,” Armand says. The streets are empty. Armand did not run away, this time. Neither Suresh nor anyone else asked him about his absence. Daniel is holding three unused portions of food. Apparently Armand is not the only one with an unexplainable urge to see Daniel fed.

Daniel doesn’t stop walking, doesn’t look at him. Lets the rest come out.

“It was that I tried to kill myself before, as a human, and had it erased. Then I remembered. So I knew it was an option.”

“Knew which one was an option?”

“All of them,” Armand says. “Trying, failing, forgetting, remembering.”

Lestat is making something he calls a “moodboard.” He’s wandering around the frame of the video, gluing pictures onto a large poster on the opposite wall that have something to do with a song, or perhaps the music video for the song.

Armand is building a radio. Actually, he is building two radios, since one radio on its own is not very useful. Once he has two he will give one to the only vampire whose mind he cannot touch, to bring back to New York, and sometimes, with the right angle calculations, when the ionosphere is highly ionized, and the space weather is good, or there is a duct in the troposphere, or a meteor scatter, they may be able to speak to each other with them.

“He loves you very much, you know,” Lestat says. His hair swings in the frame of the video as he reaches for something on the desk.

To communicate via ionospheric refraction, you need to know the Earth’s changes. It turns out it is like a mortal body, this thing that cradles humans and vampires alike. It has moods, shapes, hard parts and yielding parts. “Who?” says Armand.

It is unclear what kind of mood photos of Arnold Schoenberg and Kim Seok-jin arranged as if they are kissing is intended to evoke. Lestat pastes them up on his board. “Isn’t it wonderful,” he says, “that you have to ask?”

“Is this kosher?”

Armand has his legs draped across Daniel’s lap, his temple resting against Daniel’s shoulder. He’s not really watching the TV any more, just listening to Daniel’s commentary. “I think you’re aware that’s not a well-posed problem.”

“Yeah, I’m being a dick on purpose.”

“All the better. The Prophet, peace be upon him, embraced his wives while he was fasting, because he was able to control his desires.”

“So it’s fine because saggy geriatric assholes don’t get you hot?”

“You possess one the most uniquely beautiful bodies a vampire has ever been privileged to inhabit,” Armand says, and he means it. Then he continues, “But of course, I could never think of having sex with you. You are my fledgling, my child. It would be exploitative.”

It takes Daniel a moment to process that, and then he bursts into enormous peals of laughter. Armand shakes with it my proxy. “Holy shit,” Daniel gasps. “Thats— that was a joke, right? I mean, not that I’m saying we should, specifically, just— you—” he splutters, trying to come up with some way to talk himself out of the hole he’s talked himself into. Armand turns his face towards Daniel’s chest to hide his smile. Jokes don’t work if you laugh too much at them yourself.

Daniel talks himself out, then he shuts up and holds Armand tighter.

Daniel liked his joke. But a joke is funny, of course, because it acknowledges a truth. Daniel is breathing hard against his cheek.

He wants to keep the laughter. It rests on a thin foundation; he shores it up. “'ana muslim fadhi wala tabia,” he speaks, carefully, old words.

Daniel mutes the TV. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing particularly successfully. When I was in my early twenties, an Italian cardinal commissioned a Latin translation of the Quran, with Arabic and Latin text on facing pages. Marius obtained a copy for me, as a gift.”

“That’s… nice.” Daniel sounds like it is causing him mild physical pain to say it.

“It was.” Viterbo had commissioned it, of course, to be of use primarily for those aiming to convert Muslims to Christianity. And Marius had given it to him as an oddity, an enticement to the study of languages— which it had been, in a way. “I searched through it for the Latin words I knew, constructed as best I could the Arabic sentence that I had once lacked: I am a free Muslim, it is not lawful to sell me.”

Daniel’s thumb traces over his shoulder, soothing, but he can feel it trembling beneath that. “That would have worked?”

“No. Probably not. Certainly not in the form I first attempted it, though I memorized the first attempt at the phrase and could not forget it even once I knew better. But if I spoke as well as I can today, yes, perhaps. The criterion was primarily linguistic. If I had spoken well enough.”

If I had spoken.

So much silence, pressing down on him, impossible to speak into it. It built and built until words would no longer come, until the only thing that could break through was a scream—

“Would you like to say it now?” says Daniel.

He should not show what the walls of the tower saw, he had told Lestat, and believed it.

“'ana musliman hurran watabiauni haraman.” It comes out fine, the words that would have saved him. It is forbidden to to sell me. Which means: take someone else, just not me. Hadn’t he said it, something like it, when his coven offered him a choice? And so perhaps it had been better, the first time, to stay silent.

He sighs. It is time, probably. Daniel could have told Louis about Cairo when he went to stay with him when Armand told him to fuck off, but he didn't. Everyone is holding Armand's secrets, either from him or for him. For the sake of his own ignorance, he has the right to make impositions. Not for Louis'.

"I'm going to tell Louis," he says.

"I know," says Daniel. So confidently. Like it's in Armand's nature to be honest. "Are you nervous?"

Armand nods. It is a strange kind of fear, this fear of something that he, of his own free will, is choosing to do. He has not had cause to feel it very often; usually there is at least the illusion of compulsion.

The fear from compulsion is murky and rotted. It feels clean inside, pure, the fear from freedom.

“Well,” says Daniel. “I don’t presume to know his mind better than you do, but I did spend a lot of time analyzing the psychology of one Louis de Pointe du Lac in the course of a certain literary project, and— it’s not that I don’t think he’ll be angry. But the angriest he’s ever been at anyone, maybe, was when you hit the wall of that penthouse, and you were— doing whatever it is you do— a matter of months later. And that was for the lying. Choosing to tell him the truth, that’s different. I think…”

Daniel doesn’t finish the sentence, declines to make a prediction. It’s not about Louis’ reaction, not really. If all Armand wanted was to preserve his own fragile position, he could do what he had always done. But he wants something else, now. So he must do something differently.

This is not much of a technical test. Walkie-talkie range, he can see Daniel’s head emerging onto the roof of the apartment building a few streets over.

Daniel had not said, or we could use the smartphones we already have, when Armand handed him the radio. He’d asked how it worked and how long it took to build it, then agreed to a twenty-minute time limit to trying to mind gift his way to the roof of a nearby building. He made it in eight.

In a way, Daniel always had a kind of Mind Gift. That was what was fascinating about him, all along: not something inside of him, but what he could see in everyone else. What he could make them see in themselves.

There are no unlicenced bands in the Emirates, but the 144MHz low-power amateur band is not crowded in Deira in the middle of the night, and— well, two vampires with strong minds can do as they please, can’t they?

Armand’s radio crackles to life. “Made it,” says Daniel. “The last woman, who unlocked the stairwell, her mind was… sticky? Felt like I was wading through mud, had to pull myself out.”

Armand grins into the empty space between the buildings. He could float across it so easily. He can feel the churning of the air, catch its tides and flickers. Were it any vampire but Daniel on the other side, he could reach his mind across. But for only their voices to cross, that takes ingenuity.

“Yes,” he says, “Some are like that.” It doesn’t seem to correlate to any particular personality trait. Some mortals just have minds that are easier to sink into, like some have more fat on their flesh to sink fangs into.

“You’re quiet,” says Daniel, “but here.”

“I need to spend some more time with the standing wave ratio meter and antenna tuner,” Armand says. There’s something not quite right there. Still, Daniel can hear him. He built something for Daniel to hear him, with his own hands.

“You think I could fly back to you?” Daniel says.

“Ah,” says Armand. “Do you feel you could?” Flying is mostly in the mind, after all, as most things are, but so far Daniel has not shown an aptitude for it nearly as readily as his mind gift.

“Holy shit, no, that was a joke. I’ll float a foot above the ground for a block on my way back, maybe.”

That does sound more likely. “All right,” Armand laughs. “Come back, then, and I’ll pick up the casing from the print shop tomorrow.” He should purchase a 3D printer, perhaps, if he would like to make more items of this nature. So far, every time he has thought about it, he ends up researching models and filaments for so long that he forgets to actually make a choice.

“Armand,” says Daniel. “About the thing I said Lestat should tell you.”

Armand freezes, staring at the radio. This is not how he expected this to go. If Daniel were going to tell him he would have thought it would be right away. He had imagined it with them facing each other, when Daniel could at least see his face. Or perhaps that is the point. Is it a cruelty? Or is it a test, is Daniel saying it at a time that Armand could turn off the radio on him on purpose—

“You would be okay,” says Daniel, his voice scratchy over the little speaker. “When Lestat said it, I did think it would be like… like the last day of the interview. I thought it would upend you, and maybe you needed it, or deserved it. But I don’t think that any more. I’m not saying you have to know, just, if you do. I think you’ll be upset, it will change some things for you. But there are a lot of things you have that it won’t change. You’ll be okay.”

Armand looks at the air, the waves gone silent. Daniel has the power to hurt him, still. But not too much.

“Thank you,” he says, though Daniel’s head has disappeared from his field of view, and he does not know if he hears it.

“What is it you like about this place?”

They are in Louis’ part of town, now. It’s still early. There are plenty of justifications he could give. That Bluewater Island is beautiful is an objective fact: it had been created to be beautiful, like the Palm near it which Louis lives on the outskirts of, pulled from the sea for that purpose. Or that he had always loved such places, ever since the dizzy first glance of the Piazza San Marco, so much luxury in one place that it appears excessive, laughable, the obvious surplus smothering all possibility, all memory of deprivation. There are many of them in Dubai, all the glorious excess of Louis’ young country but reborn even younger and with better taste, so beautiful that it is easy to forget for a little while how beauty is made. And the wheel, of course, Ain Dubai looming overhead, a reminder of how much humans love to fly, how much they insist on it, with their hands, despite all obstacles. Armand had built a node of the mind gift with his hands for the one vampire with whom speaking over the air is impossible. He understands the sentiment.

But truly, he had just not wished to wait, on this night. He had come over as soon as iftar was packed up, flown above a cover of low clouds and emerged slightly damp but with enough time to dry off before Louis made it out of bed and downstairs to meet him. He could not have gone home, watched TV with Daniel, like it was any other night, waiting to meet Louis later.

“Hey,” says Louis. “Armand, what’s going on?”

Louis has put up with so much from him. With so much of him. And they’d almost made it, hadn’t they, they were close, a few times, but— there has to be a limit. And the end of the interview wasn’t it, but then objectively it wasn’t that big a revelation. Louis had seen that, understood it, once he calmed down. A big lie emotionally, but a trifle practically. This is not a trifle. It had felt small, for a long time, taken out of Louis’ mind and pushed to the back of Armand’s. But now that he is about to take it out and handle it it suddenly seems huge, too heavy to hand off to Louis and expect him to take it.

“I think,” Armand says, “this will be the last time we see each other. If you don’t wish to see me again, after I tell you what I have to say, it’s— I’ll understand.”

Louis sucks in a breath, blows the air out slowly. Armand does not rifle through his head to see the possibilities he’s running through.

They keep walking, almost to the wheel, almost to the water. It feels like he is waiting for permission; Louis, too, has to give his consent before he will be told this thing that will hurt him. But Daniel was right: the consent is inevitable. Armand waits for it to come.

“All right,“ says Louis finally. “If that’s— let’s do one last nice thing together. Just in case. Okay?”

Armand stares at him. If it were truly the last time, the last chance, yes, perhaps he would break his fast for Louis, only Louis, but he doesn’t wish to, and if he didn’t the last time would be the time before this, which was wonderful, like a last time should be, good because you don’t know it’s the last—

Louis jerks his head up a little, gesturing to the enormous observation wheel above them.

“Oh,” says Armand. It is still operational, though they will perhaps be on the last ride of the night. “Yes. Yes, I’d like that.”

A private cabin on Ain Dubai costs an amount of money that would, not so very long ago, have felt like nothing. It is nothing, Louis pays it without even looking at the number. And it would not be much to Armand, either, he is not destitute; the endowment once gifted to the Théâtre de Vampires had remained in his possession, even when the spiritual direction of the coven did not. There was nobody else interested in such work, nobody else who could even add or subtract reliably, they just wanted the lights to stay on without having to think about it too hard and Armand was so very docile, in those days. So the money stayed with him and stayed even when the building and everything in it was ash, and old money is old money, old money managed well is new money, and he has enough of it to do what he likes. But he sees the number not in dirhams but in days’ labour, and thinks to purify it with the same amount.

There would ordinarily be a bartender in the spotless glass globe they are assigned to, but as Armand looks on the woman at the desk mixes up the staff room assignments, and somehow there is nobody to serve them, nobody to blame, nobody to even notice until the wheel has loaded all its passengers and crept them slowly away from the ground, that they are alone.

Which, Armand realizes a little belatedly, is a kind of a classic Louis-and-Armand-compelled-to-fuck-by-forces-beyond-their-control situation, to the point that it’s a little weird that they’re just standing here as the city slowly spreads out beneath them, looking at each other.

Louis’ lips twitch. He is not listening to the thought. It’s just that obvious. “We can come back,” he offers.

But that’s the point, isn’t it. “Maybe,” Armand says. “If you’d like to.”

Louis nods. Stares down at his shoes, then lowers himself slowly to sit cross-legged on the floor right in front of the glass. “I’d like to think,” he says quietly, “that there’s a certain level of shit I simply won’t take. But reading that book of Daniel’s, I gotta say, I can’t really find it. It felt like the me in the book was a character made up just to frustrate me. What the hell is wrong with this guy, why is he always letting this shit happen to him.”

Letting it happen. How could he have prevented it, Armand would like to know, what right course of action does Louis see for his own life that would have left him free and untouched. But he would not appreciate the question, because Louis is always looking for it, the right path, some innovation of the soul and the flesh that can make him both his own and of the world, and perhaps he will never find it, but surely he gets closer from the search than he would otherwise.

Armand sits down near him, not exactly facing him but almost, traces the grain of the polished wood of the floor with a fingernail. The empty spaces in him ring with hope and fear. The willingness of the gift cannot be counterfeited. As Ishmael bid his father to lay him down on his front to be sacrificed, he did not know that he would be ransomed; had he known, he could not have been.

“I can be it,” Armand says. “It is past enduring, what I have done to you. It can be this that you refuse to endure.”

The wheel turns slowly. In the other cabins, passengers drink, laugh, take photos of themselves. When they are at the top, everything twinkling in the darkness below, Louis finally asks, “What did you do?”

Armand has practiced this part. It is what Daniel advised him: choose the words in advance, repeat them so that you can say them even when you are unsure, or frightened, or weeping, and expect that you will be; if it turns out to be not so, so much the better. It would have been good advice to have had a great deal earlier.

“In 1949,” he says, “We travelled to Cairo. On our sixth night in the city, I was crossing the intersection of Al Azhar to Al Moez in search of a meal when I recalled that I had been there before, on the occasion of my sale, some five hundred years previously. On that occasion, I made an attempt to take my life, which I later requested that my master remove from my memory. Which request was granted, though apparently not quite robustly enough. On the occasion of its return, I made another attempt at that sin.”

He swallows. He cannot look at Louis’ face, because that was the easy part, just the preamble, and he cannot be turned aside from the important part.

“I returned back to you helpless. I had tried to use sunlight, at first, and discovered that it would not do; then I tried petrol, which was more effective. I didn’t remember what I had done or why, at first. I couldn’t think around the it, it was too large. If I had stayed outside, if I hadn’t instinctively sought you out in my suffering, I probably would have succeeded in my original aim. But I did find you, and you took care of me. You spent weeks saving my life, nursing this ruined, pathetic little body, and to the exact extent I became stronger, I could not stand the shame. That I had put you through this ordeal, become like a child to you, but worse than a child because I had no grace or gratitude, only misery. And the sin, the attempt at it, which I had lived so long without the knowledge of, and then needed to bear knowing twice over. It was my weakness, that I couldn’t stand having you think of that way. I couldn’t remove it from my own mind. I did try. But I removed it from yours, so that you would look at me the way you used to, even if it was in anger or hatred.”

He stops. That is the end of the story. It seems like it ought to have something else to it, but there isn’t anything else. Except— “I’m sorry.”

There. It is all he can say. He cannot defend himself, and no longer particularly wants to. He looks up, finally.

Louis has his eyes pressed shut. He is weeping, his tears a red track down his cheek.

“I took care of you,” he whispers.

Armand waits, and then says, “Yes,” because Louis seems to be waiting for it.

“Did I—” Louis says, “Can you— can you tell me about it? What I did, that I don’t remember?”

Armand had not prepared these words. He had not expected to have to say this part, which has nothing to do with his own wrongs. “You… hunted for me,” he says, “fed me from your wrist, and told me the sins of each mortal you were feeding me. You read to me, any books in English or French you could find, or the newspaper if nothing else. You helped me wash, once I had enough skin to be worth washing. You helped me pray. You—” his voice is too soft. He is supposed to be speaking to Louis, not himself. He puts more air behind the words: “You prayed for me.”

He startles, unable to prevent his reaction, when Louis grabs for him suddenly; but it’s just his hand, Louis holding it so tight his bones feel like they’re grinding together. Armand squeezes back, instinctively, though he doesn’t know what it means.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. “You had the right to know what I’d done.”

Then Louis shakes his head, frustrated, wiping tears away from his cheeks with the hand that isn’t in Armand’s, and says “No. You don’t get it, do you? What you took from me.”

Armand just shakes his head, mute. He had thought he did.

“You were helpless,” Louis whispers, “and I took care of you. And you had me forget it.” And he isn’t trying to see it but Louis’ mind is leaking, or perhaps he’s doing it on purpose, a flood of images: Paul, Grace, nieces and nephews he never got to know, every bruise on every girl in one of his houses, Claudia his daughter, Madeleine his fledgling, failure, failure, failure. Everyone who had ever needed his protection, getting only the part of him that was prevented from providing it.

And then Armand. Who had needed him so badly, and gotten what he needed. Whom he had prayed for, and had his prayer answered.

“I’m sorry,” he says a third time, and he means it now, properly, knows what it’s for.

“Oh my God, Armand.” Louis pulls him in. They’re on the floor, it’s awkward, he is half in Louis’ lap and being squeezed so tightly that the sharp angles of his limbs must be hurting Louis, but Louis just holds him tighter, his chin on Armand’s shoulder, saying words, saying nothing, there is nothing to be said, just Armand, sweetheart, Armand.

Perhaps it is always like this, after the willing gift is ransomed: somewhere, deep down, I believed in mercy.

Eventually, the wheel alights and lets them out. A figure can look like a circle in two dimensions, but a spiral in more: the appearance of being back where you started is sometimes misleading. They walk back to the base of Louis’ building, slowly, hand in hand, less like lovers going for a stroll and more like soldiers emerging from a battle.

At the base of the tower Louis breathes out a deep breath through pursed lips, like he’s trying to let go of it. Almost. “Why didn’t you say?” he asks. “When I— we didn’t have to go to Cairo. We could have gone anywhere.”

Armand doesn’t laugh, probably couldn’t right now, but the urge is there. “How could I have known that we should?” he asks. “I suppose I knew I’d been sold there, but I didn’t…” He shrugs. It’s odd, trying to remember what it was like to not remember, to put meaning to an absence. “Without the knowledge of what I did, the mere fact of it meant little to me.”

There’s also, of course, the fact that he wouldn’t have objected even if he had known to. Those early months with Louis felt like nothing so much as his first few months in Venice: the giddiness of being chosen, saved, special, loved in ways he could not make sense of, incapable of choosing anything because all choices seemed equally mystifying in their motivation and effect.

“I know what you mean,” says Louis, “When I think about Cairo… I have a memory, I think, that you started hurting yourself there, but when I try to think of specifics, they just drift away. I just assumed you were burning bits of yourself, or cutting yourself a bit like your— your stuff you like.”

It takes Armand a moment to even realize what he’s talking about, the stuff he likes, the stuff they like to do together and sure, Armand will do it alone if that’s the only option, but—

“It’s not the same,” he says, alarmed, trying to reconstruct Louis’ thoughts without invading them and ending up only at options that mean something unimaginable, “When I tried to die, all I wanted was to not feel anything, it’s the opposite when—”

“I know,” says Louis gently. “I’m just saying, when I try to think about it, I can’t find anything sharp enough to hold on to. Any memory of Cairo feels like it must have been just fine. Even now that I know. So I get why you didn’t say anything, Armand. That’s all I’m saying.”

Armand nods. “Thank you,” he says, hesitantly. It feels different from I’m sorry. Complimentary. And so, surely it too should be repeated three times. “Thank you,” he adds, stronger, and again, “Thank you.”

Louis looks up. Bites his lip. “Will you take me up?” he says.

For a moment Armand doesn’t understand, and then he can hardly believe he’s understood right. But they’re clear enough words. And Louis had said it once, like a joke, Not quite ready for the high-altitude trip. Unthinkable. But the unthinkable becomes thinkable with surprising rapidity, these days.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” says Louis. “I’ve been practicing, just around the house. I want to get a feel for the big stuff. And you took good care of me, last time.” He swallows. “You should know, Armand, like I do now. Lots of times, you took good care of me.”

Armand opens his arms, and Louis steps into them, and they rise towards the balcony.

Louis doesn’t collapse when Armand deposits him on the balcony of the penthouse. He leans down, his hands on his knees, gasping, but his legs hold him, only leaning a little bit against the railing for help.

It leaves Armand a little bit without a role; Louis does not require his comfort, exactly, but he says “You did very well” anyway, which sounds a little bit trite, but Louis nods at it in thanks anyway.

After a while his breathing slows, and he straightens up, stretches, leans his elbows on the balcony beside Armand. The wheel is still higher, of course, but it is still good to have something to look at, a gaze they can have in common.

“The other one,” Louis murmurs, some time later. “My suicide attempt. Did I really ask you?”

“Yes,” says Armand. Louis turns to look at him, scrutinizing, not entirely convinced, but not unwilling to be.

Armand shrugs. “There is no reason why you should believe me. I don’t want you to think me dishonest. But since I have been, I can’t exactly avoid it.”

Louis’ fingers drum on the edge of the railing. “I think I do,” he says. “Believe you. Why would you choose to tell me about Cairo, but keep lying about San Francisco?

“Perhaps,” Armand says, “I view Cairo as being within my rights, since it was my history that I wished to erase, whereas San Francisco was your own, so I still fear your reaction.”

Louis’ eyebrows raise. “Is that it?”

“No. Cairo was not within my rights, no matter the motivation. San Francisco was, because you asked. I’m just presenting the immediate objection to your logic.”

“You’ve been spending too much time with Daniel,” Louis laughs. “You don’t need to play devil’s advocate against your own interests.”

Armand can’t help his smile. Perhaps that is true. He doesn’t answer. Leaves it for Louis to believe or not believe.

"You should finish divorcing me,” he says. 

“What?” 

He hadn’t meant to say it. It was just a seed of an idea, small and delicate, but now that it’s exposed to sunlight and water it is growing, not withering. “Traditionally,” he says, “A one-sided divorce process requires three talaqs, statements of repudiation. You issued the first at the conclusion of the interview, I believe. You should issue the other two."

"Uh-huh," says Louis slowly, frowning.

"The waiting period— well, a resumption of sexual relations would ordinarily invalidate the talaq-- perhaps we ought to start from the beginning."

"Like hell I've been married to you for the last three years," says Louis, but there is laughter in his voice. They brush the edges of each others' minds sometimes, now, not buried inside each other like they used to be but just enough to observe, to add a depth to the voice and the face. Louis knows Armand when he is making himself miserable on purpose, and this isn't it.

"Is it?" says Louis. "One-sided?" 

Warm light glows from the living room behind them. The first talaq certainly was. Now— if he could be taken back, return here to the penthouse, the careful negotiations over every inch of space, the sun-soaked prayers in a quiet voice waiting for Louis to rise—

"I don't know," he says. "I like it, I think. Being slave and master only of myself."

Daniel would probably quibble about his phrasing. Louis just smiles softly. "Yeah," he says. "It suits you." He crosses his arms on the railing in front of him and leans his head on his shoulder a little, one of those effortlessly appealing Louis-poses.  "All right, I’ll do it. If we take the end of the interview as the first one, and split the remaining two between us."

Not exactly sunnah, but then, marriages are supposed to be about compromise. It's only logical that divorce be, too.  "All right," he says. "Yes."

Louis straightens up, turns to face him, as close as they can be without touching. His eyes are serious. "Go ahead," he says. "Been long enough, I think."

Armand's throat feels dry. His heart thumps, as if from the height. He wonders if, across the city, Daniel can feel Armand's nerves, his disbelief at what he's about to do, what he wants. 

"I repudiate you," he whispers, and nothing happens. Even Louis' expression stays the same, a tiny quirk of the lips. 

"You want me to do mine now?" Louis asks. "Or on my own time?"

Armand cannot answer. Cannot remember the right answer, cannot come up with his own.

Louis reaches over, tucks a curl behind Armand's ear where the earring he had put there stings lightly. He leans forward, as if there were anyone around to hear, and says into his ear: "I'll save it. For a moment when, as I say it, you know what I really mean."

The stability of a system, Armand has learned from his robotics books, is judged by its response to a disturbance. If the input is bounded, so ought to be the output, a mathematically inevitable return to normal. Metronomic, if a metronome could be trusted to be pushed away from and then regain its tempo. At which point it isn’t really a metronome any more, is it, it is something else.

Armand cooks in the early morning, naps for a while in the middle of the day, serves iftar, watches television with Daniel, works on installing a self-hosted Matrix server — he can’t talk to Daniel through the sky all the time, of course, and even his communications with the other vampires would benefit from end-to-end encryption not being forced into governmental backdoors— while nudging Lestat with his mind every so often away from arguing with fans on the internet and back to actually writing music. He still prays at night: he is what he is, chained or not.

Daniel hasn’t asked how it went with Louis. Well, he’s divorced because he hates the how-was-your-day-honey routine, of course he isn’t going to force it on Armand. Armand decides not to say anything. It is something strange and precious, to hold tight for a little while longer: that Louis was angry at him not for removing the memory of Armand’s abjection, but for removing the memory of Louis’ care.

On a call with Lestat, both of them almost ignoring each other, he does not need to practice his words before he says them. “A friend gave me a bag of hand-me down clothes today,” he says, “for my son.” He will need to find a human with an actual toddler to give the clothes to; but that should not be too difficult. There are many humans available, new toddlers being created all the time.

Lestat smirks. “You should make him try them on.”

“He was working here for three years, before he could bring his family,” Armand says, his eyes following the progress of the compiler, which seems to be missing some dependency somewhere, but he’s installed all the prerequisites, or so he thought. “He thinks— they all think— that if I did similarly, I must have had a good reason. But I didn’t. I was just afraid.”

“You loved him,” Lestat says, “the best way you could at the time. Surely something done out of love can never be entirely wrong.”

He doesn’t look sure about that at all. Lestat was never a subtle actor and he’s not subtle as himself, either; he looks stricken for a moment, then casts it off in the space of a moment. “Or perhaps I would just prefer to believe that,” he shrugs.

Everyone would prefer to believe that, probably, but intent and effect are different things. The compiler fails again. Oh. There’s a typo in the command. The nice thing about a stupid problem is that it’s usually easy to fix. Even problems that are there for good reasons, it turns out, are sometimes easier to fix than they appear.

“It can be,” says Armand. “But nothing that is wrong is eternal.”

You said I helped you pray, and that I prayed for you.

Yes.

Will you tell me about it?

I think you must have asked someone what to do. I wasn’t thinking of it, I wasn’t thinking of anything, it wouldn’t have occurred to me that I was a living thing, that I existed enough to pray. You brought me a stone for tayammum, and it was like being told that I still had a place in the world. When I couldn’t stand, you turned my head towards the qibla. When I couldn’t remember words, you tried to read them to me.

Armand puts his phone down on the couch. He stands up, walks in a tight circle around the room, picks it back up again, and continues.

I remember seeing you kneel by the window, while I was caught between wakefulness, sleep and death. Orans, the gesture of a supplication for another. I didn’t hear what you said. I had never seen you pray before. When I thought about it later, I wondered if you only did it to comfort me.

Did it?

Yes. Of the memories of that time, it is the one I am happiest to have kept.

Louis doesn’t offer an opinion on whether he had done it only for Armand’s comfort. But then, if he had the answer himself, he would not have needed to ask.

There are true memories that are lost. And then there are—

On the only occasion in which Marius flew a long distance in Armand’s company, Armand was mortal. He must have been. It doesn’t make any sense otherwise.

"Have you ever traveled so far before?” Amadeo asked his master. The most direct route would be over the sea, and it terrified him, these vast expanses of water, the ships that look so huge in the harbor but look so tiny on the horizon. But he was sick, he was going to die, could feel the seeds of death in the pit of his belly.

"In miles, in space, yes, many times," Marius said. "But in another's quest for understanding? No, never so very far."

And then what? There are true memories that are lost. Are there false memories that yet live?

Even if it was not the delirious imaginings of fever, so far back, calendars become difficult to reckon. Even if he knew the year and the season that it was in Venice, how could he be sure of the timing of Dhu al-Hijjah? What is time to a vampire? It must be nothing or else it would become everything. To have to know the difference between 1530 and 1532— one would go mad. But he must have been a human, yes. He had thrown stones, not taken them. His hair had grown back over months, not days, lengthening even as his body ailed for the last time.

He will take what Daniel wants to give him, Armand decides. But he will also keep what he already has: one more name, Al-Haj, not given to him by any man.

For why else would he have been given back the gift of sunlight, but that he had made his pilgrimage in his first life, so that he might make it again in his second?

There is no special event, no external indication. Armand is sitting at the desk in his room, carefully copying out Al-Ma’un onto a kind of electronic wax tablet. He had seen such a device in the window of a stationery shop and decided to make his own, larger version, which contains a liquid crystal material that can be in either a planar reflective state or a focal transmissive state, with the planar state induced only with the pressure of a finger or stylus and text erased by a return to the focal state induced by a small voltage pulse from a battery. His handwriting, trained only on Latin letters in Venice, is poor, and less intimidating to practice if he has the option of making all his work disappear with the press of a button.

And then at a certain moment, the time’s arrival as mysterious as all gifts, something that has been ripening inside of him falls off the vine, and he sets aside the tablet and Qur’an and walks into the living room, where Daniel is scowling at his laptop, and says, “You can tell me, I’m ready.”

Daniel closes his laptop and puts it down beside him. He had replaced the one Louis burned with another Macbook, and had listened patiently to Armand’s Linux pitch and then said okay, well, I already own this one, is the thing. But if he is going to live forever he will need to buy at least a couple more laptops, so there’s still time.

“That’s great,” says Daniel. “Personally, I’ve never been much good for hard news on an empty stomach. You sure you want it now?”

Armand sags a little against the doorframe, his knees suddenly shaky. He had been braced for it, he realizes, like for a blow, and not receiving it leaves him missing it. But then the moment is past, and perhaps Daniel is right. “No,” he says. “I’m not sure.”

“Does vampire Eid start with human Eid?” Daniel asks, and Armand nods.

“Good,” Daniel says. “After you’ve eaten, then. And we can invite Louis, if you like, for hug reinforcement. And call Lestat, for… whatever it is you two get from each other. We’ll make a night of it. A good night. One part will be shitty, but the rest will be good.”

I loved him. If there is anything that is an objective good, it is love. Ought I to hate now? What evil have even I done, to deserve such a punishment?

So they prepare to break Armand’s fast like humans. There is a lot of texting, for which everyone switches from Whatsapp to Armand’s Matrix server with no complaint. Choosing of time, and place, and food. It feels like being taken care of. It’s happening because they are preparing to hurt him, but— well. That part is familiar. The laying out of the scene, the gentleness before and after, the centerpiece of suffering. That part is beloved. Of course he can do this.

It had taken time, that’s all, like anything that nourishes does. Decisions grow like food in the earth, like blood in the veins, they cannot be seized before they are ready for harvest. He had a seedling but no soil, in Paris. And so if he is given a new seedling today, Armand thinks, he will plant it in the earth of himself first, and see what food grows of it.

And the food, oh, the food. Daniel talks to Louis about it. Tells him what it is they have to tell Armand, and Louis agrees with the plan, at least doesn’t object to anything in it, and then Daniel says, in an unassailable kind of voice, “Louis and I will eat from your list. You’'ll eat from us. Yeah?”

Armand can only nod, speechless. He would never have asked for that. It would never have occurred to him. Why not ask for anything he likes? He texts Louis will you bring a reward for me, for after? and Louis just says of course. Doesn’t ask him what he wants, which is the best kind.

Armand is offered other options but chooses his own place. After cleaning the streets for the final time, he and Daniel clean the apartment for company, for an event. Daniel says he should get a Roomba, but surely the controls for a robotic vacuum would not be difficult from any inexpensive microcontroller setup, really the actual suction mechanism would be the hardest part, so perhaps he will think on that later, when he needs something absorbing to think on.

Louis comes by to pick up Daniel, and Armand watches a livestream of an Eid prayer in Auckland, where the sun has already touched, and then spends the rest of the time mapping grid lines and contours on the complex plane through various functions by hand, which takes up his full attention and is a little like painting except that God alone, and no human or vampire master, decides the shape of the figure to be given form.

And then Louis and Daniel return, flushed with blood, a little bit overfull, voices a little too loud in the hallway but then they come in and they are quiet, settle with him on the couch and Armand sets aside his tablet and looks at them.

Louis a little more nervous than he usually is, before Armand is hurt. Daniel does not have a measure on such things yet. He had been nervous the last time he hurt Armand for different reasons. Not for Armand’s sake.

“Hi,” says Louis. His fangs are not showing, but he is smiling. “You hungry?”

“Yes,” says Armand, and “Bismillah.”

Louis almost looks like he’s going to say it back. Instead, Daniel says, “Dates?” He is holding one in front of Armand’s mouth in his left hand, trembling only very slightly. His eyes are pure gold.

“Ah,” says Armand. “No?”

“I’ll eat them,” says Louis. He opens his mouth, and Daniel feeds him. Unselfconsciously, like they’ve done this before, do it all the time. For all Armand knows, maybe they do. Daniel and Louis have an entire relationship that doesn’t involve Armand, because Armand had dropped Daniel like a thing he was frightened of, and Louis caught him like Armand had thrown him something precious on purpose.

So Louis’ peculiar eating habits are good for something after all, Armand thinks, as Louis chews and swallows, then leans back and undoes the top button of his shirt.

There is no entirely decorous way of drink from the neck of someone who is sitting down, but then, he doesn’t particularly need to do it decorously. It is, after all, nothing Daniel hasn’t seen before between Louis and Armand, albeit the other way around. He climbs overtop of Louis, knees on either side of his hips, and sinks forward until their chests are pressed together.

Louis ate for him, the dates and the blood, took it by Armand’s customs for Armand’s body. He has done that before, but he doesn’t remember it. And so, Armand thinks, or Louis thinks, one of them does as Louis’ hands come around his waist and Louis’ heart beats against his, he has been given the chance to do it again.

Armand’s fangs are not as large or sharp as Daniel’s; he usually helps it along with his mind, when he doesn’t want it to hurt. Obviously, he is not going to do that now. He runs his fingers under Louis’ jaw. “It might hurt,” he says, “for a moment.”

Louis chuckles. “I’ve been a vampire for one hundred and fourteen years, sweetheart.”

Which is true, though not exactly relevant. They had not done it like this often. And in any case, pain still hurts even if you’re expecting it.

Louis’ eyes turn serious and he cups the back of Armand’s head, drawing him in. “It’s all right,” he says. “You can hurt me a little. It’ll heal.”

Armand sets his lips to the skin and bites, as efficiently as possible. For the first little while, it’s just food. Who had said that? Claudia, he thinks, in Louis’ telling. She had enough memory of food to make the comparison. Armand does not, but he makes it anyway. Food is what your body takes for granted, what feels like it is yours even before it enters you.

But all food has meaning beyond itself, and blood is no different. Sometimes it carries its meaning in images or even words. Louis’ is nothing so definite. Their hotel room in Cairo, he knows; the place itself is a memory, not a conjecture, but it’s not the place itself that’s flowing into him, nor anything that really happened there or could have. It’s the feeling of lacing up Paul’s tap-dancing shoes in an alcove. The little flutter that had passed between them when Armand had said my dear American friend who has dominated my mind, just on the edge of laughter, too forward but taken in the spirit it was offered. Hovering over the water of the Mississippi with Lestat watching from the wharf: look what I can do now. The knowledge that once, he had known how it felt to pray for something and receive it. Louis has had to build that feeling out of its constituent parts. But he has all of the parts he needs, and so the feeling is there.

He can feel underneath him that Louis is hard, evidence that he’s enjoying it, obvious but not insistent. He didn’t always, this act in this configuration a toss-up as to whether it would leave him in ecstasy or terror; so it became easier, most of the time, for it to be Armand who gave himself like this, for whom those are the same thing.

They are past, perhaps, just taking whatever option is easiest with each other. Armand pulls back as the flow of blood loses the insistent voltage of overfulness. Louis is panting, head tipped back, making a visible effort to keep himself still and mostly succeeding. A little unsteady but not entirely from the blood loss.

Louis thumbs at Armand’s lip. Not wiping blood away from it; he was too neat for that. Smearing it outwards, instead, drawing a little bit from the soft flesh just inside his mouth and smearing it over his cheek. “Go on,” he says, “drink from your fledgling. He’s been waiting, to be able to gift it back to you.”

Armand had not thought he was giving a gift, but Daniel had taken it as one, and Louis had taken Daniel as one. Daniel is giving him one, now, letting himself be cradled and filling Armand with blood that tastes like home. Gifts are not acquisitions. To understand the nature of a gift requires taking on its nature for yourself. So he drinks, and he believes it. He had done right. If there is a place for the vampire Armand in the world, there is also a place for the vampire Daniel.

Armand generally dislikes being too full of blood. Ordinarily, he would be asking for Louis— or, more recently, Lestat— to remove the excess, at this stage of things. But neither Louis nor Daniel seem keen to take back what they’ve just given and in any case the feeling is receding, like the nourishment is soaking into him, somewhere deeper and more comfortable. Daniel’s eyes have not wavered from gold. Armand collapses back in between them. He sees, behind his eyelids, the mapping he had been working on while Louis and Daniel ate on his behalf: gridlines of the complex plane through the Joukowsky transform, everything that was constrained and parallel looping jubilantly outwards. Alhamdulillah.

It is time. Like the gift of his ripeness, the moment follows its own logic, and all three of them can feel that it is here. Armand settles himself into Louis’ lap, his back to Louis’ chest, Louis’ arms around his stomach. Daniel pushes in close, his neck still smudged with blood, and Armand grabs his right hand. Daniel lets him keep it. He runs his fingers over the magnificent texture of the skin, how much world there is inside him, the guiding gridlines of his humanity which have only just begin their transformation.

Daniel is a little clumsy with the phone, tapping to call Lestat with his left thumb, but he manages it. And then there is Lestat, mascaraed eyes and tousled hair and a warmth like a kiss pressed to the base of Armand’s skull, on the inside.

Mon Armand, Lestat says to him alone. T’es sûr? And Armand just lets him feel it, how he is right now. How loved.

"Eid Mubarak,” Lestat says out loud, sounding rather pleased with himself for this feat.

“Lestat,” says Daniel. “Armand is ready to hear about Marius.”