oneiros

by cyranonic

Summary:

In the years after his strange encounter in 1973, Daniel Molloy is plagued by frequent episodes of insomnia. He wakes up in the middle of the night, heart racing, certain that something in the dark is watching him.

And maybe something, or someone, is. But in the morning, Daniel Molloy never remembers a thing.

 

 

There is no more certain way to ensure that you feel like absolute shit, Daniel Molloy is well aware, than to mess up your sleep schedule. 

In the year of 1973, Daniel has done plenty to cause his own insomniac suffering every night. It’s been, in his defense, a rough year. He’s had a shot at a steady gig with three different papers and blown it every time. He finds good leads, but then he manages to piss off editors to the point where they won’t assign him to anything more exciting than traffic congestion and retail openings. He gets evicted, then ends up in a dingy shithole with three roommates who keep trying to recruit him for ‘psychical wellness seminars’ that will almost certainly lead to getting abducted by a cult. 

Even so, the part where he randomly wakes up hyperventilating for at least an hour every night for no discernible reason is… new. 

It started after the bad weekend, the one he doesn’t really remember, but it keeps going for months after. Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe he finally got close enough to permanently melting his brain and this is the consequence. 

Maybe that is why—as much as he tries to convince himself that the alleged vampire he’d interviewed was just some psycho with filed down teeth—he can’t entirely shake the feeling that it isn’t safe to rest until dawn breaks over the horizon. 

For weeks, he wakes up at the same time every night, gripped by the strange, panic-inducing sensation that someone is in the room with him. After thrashing around for a few seconds, he manages to turn on the lamp and inevitably finds the room empty. 

Even after he has searched every corner, checked the locks on every door and every window, he can’t get back to sleep for hours. He just lies in the dark, his heart racing like a rabbit. No one is in the room with him. But it feels like there is. 

Eventually, something has to give, and so he ends another brief attempt at cleaning up, shoots up, and knocks himself out for a long and blissful night of much-needed rest. 

Until he wakes up. 

The room is pitch black and strangely cold. He instinctively draws the blanket tight around himself and then swats frantically for the light, unable to shake the feeling that someone else is there, standing right beside him in the dark. 

His fingers blindly find the switch and the room floods with weak, yellowish light. Daniel takes a gasping breath of relief. 

And then he chokes. 

Someone is in the room. 

“Hush,” a soft voice commands. It has a gentle timbre, but Daniel senses something dangerous in its flat, dispassionate tone. 

Daniel opens his mouth to scream regardless, but finds that he cannot. He tries to sweep the room for something to use as a weapon, something to throw or strike with as he runs for the door, but he finds his gaze entirely fixed on the man who stands at the foot of his bed. 

The intruder is not obviously threatening. Daniel judges him to be a man in his late twenties, well-dressed and neat. His build is tall and lightly muscled, but he appears unarmed and nothing in his posture suggests any attempt to lunge or strike out at Daniel. From India, Daniel decides, or somewhere nearby, based on the color of his skin. 

Daniel can almost rationalize the experience as just some drunken acquaintance of one of his cult-addled roommates blundering accidentally into the wrong bedroom, but the eyes tell another story. 

The man who has been watching him in the dark has golden eyes, and his piercing regard makes Daniel’s skin crawl. 

“Still nothing of note,” the man muses, pondering Daniel. He tilts his head and only then does Daniel realize that the rest of the man’s body has been so perfectly still before that it cannot be natural. 

“What?” His own voice breaks free as a whisper. 

“You were provided with a rare opportunity. As I expected, you seem determined to squander it,” the man continues, an expression of disgust flickering across his face. 

“Who the fuck are you? If you don’t get the hell out of here, I’ll—!” 

“You’ll what?” the man interrupts with chilling disinterest. “Telephone the police? Fight me off with the unsmoked cigarettes on your nightstand? Your bloodstream is still so flooded with opiates, you won’t make it a step from your bed should you try to stand.” 

Daniel tries to push himself upright to bolt, and finds that the intruder is correct about that. How is he this high and awake at all? Some evolutionary instinct? The lizard brain forcing him to wake up because a tiger just came prowling into the hut? 

“What do you want, man? I’m broke. You can take the TV downstairs if you want; that’s the only thing worth anything in this place,” Daniel manages to force out through his rapidly accelerating panic. 

“How generous,” the intruder remarks with faint amusement. 

“Holy shit, are you the Zodiac Killer?” Daniel suddenly realizes. 

The man does not respond to that. He merely observes, standing completely still at the edge of the bed, studying Daniel as though he is a piece of old gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe. 

“So utterly unremarkable,” the man finally concludes. “A frightened boy, full of dull, predictable impulses. You’ll burn out in another year, I suspect. The fracture lines are already spreading through the foundation.” 

Daniel feels himself to be exactly that. Frightened, unremarkable, burning out at a remarkable rate towards nothing. All of his big ideas, the grand dreams he conjures up for himself, seem to deflate and wither away. 

And yet, even then, there is still something. Whatever he is right now, a screw-up junkie loser playing at being a journalist, he’s still got his fucking eyes and ears. 

“You’re… you’re jealous of me,” he stammers, even though in retrospect, provoking the murderous psycho who just broke into your house is probably not the wisest move. “I don’t even know you, man. I’ve never even see you before—” 

“Hush,” the man repeats, his voice darker this time. Daniel feels his throat close and he chokes. 

The intruder walks a few steps closer. Daniel cannot breath. He flails beneath the covers, trying to escape, but his body freezes. The intruder reaches down and pushes a single finger into his chest, pinning him to the bed. 

“I’ll be back,” the intruder warns him, or maybe promises him, a gleam in his yellow eyes. “If you manage to survive another year.”  

Then he switches off the lamp. 

Daniel Molloy wakes the next morning with a splitting headache. 

“Still not sleeping?” one roommate asks him as he staggers to the kitchen and begins desperately ladling instant coffee into the filter. 

“Dunno,” Daniel shrugs. “I was out the whole night this time, but I still feel like I got hit by a truck.” 

 

—

 

On New Year's Eve, Daniel Molloy falls asleep on a couch. 

He’s at a party, but he doesn’t know whose anymore. Some friend of a cousin of the delivery guy for the Chinese restaurant who goes to work every day dressed as a sexy nun. 

Daniel had interviewed the Irreverend Mother a few weeks ago, and the experience had made him feel like exactly the kind of pretentious, ‘shock-jock-posing-as-a-serious-journalist’ kind of asshole he has always hated. First vampires, now Catholic kinksters. Who is he kidding? 

When 1974 arrives, Daniel is deep down in the warm, senseless place that he has been trying harder and harder to get to. It’s better to get high at a party. No one asks as many questions when you only get high at parties. 

When he wakes up, he thinks at first that it must be midnight. 

It isn’t. A radio is still blaring from another room, but the end of the year has long come and gone. Daniel lies curled up on a stained brown sofa with dark yellow foam spilling out of one cushion. Vaguely, he thinks he can hear someone upstairs throwing up. Or maybe having sex. It could go either way. 

Given the state of the house, it takes him almost a full minute to realize that there is someone else in the room with him. 

A man sits in a nearby chair, perfectly upright, one leg crossed elegantly over the other. Despite the sweltering heat of the nearby radiator, he is wearing a long coat. 

There is nothing inherently shocking about the man being there, Daniel thinks blearily, and yet there is something jarring about him. His eyes, Daniel realizes slowly. His eyes are strangely light for his complexion and they are fixed on Daniel with an intensity that he cannot explain. Even when he notices Daniel waking and looking back, the man does not turn his gaze away. 

“What time is it?” Daniel croaks, mostly because he wants to break the unnerving silence. 

“It is seven past three in the morning,” his observer replies, although Daniel notices that he does not check a watch. His accent sounds English, sophisticated, entirely at odds with this dump of a room in the Upper Haight. 

Daniel waits for the man to move. He does not move.

“Happy New Year, I guess,” Daniel says and then yawns pointedly, hoping that the guy takes the hint and clears out. 

“Another year,” his observer muses. “It has amounted to very little. Puff pieces in local broadsheets. Paid by the word to write ad copy so that you can afford to feed yourself along with your drug habit. And yet you persist. Why?” 

Daniel goes still. He feels his pulse begin to accelerate. 

“I’m not sure we know each other, man,” he replies with a tight smile, putting on a show of annoyance to mask the ever-mounting urge to try to bolt from the room. Why does he want to run? “Always nice to meet a fan, I guess.” 

“Cheap sarcasm as a mask. Not an uncommon tactic, but not a particularly effective one either,” the observer notes with a derisive smirk. 

“Seriously, when did we meet? Did I screw your girlfriend? Steal your hash? Spill a beer on your shoes?” 

“You are an obligation, Daniel,” the observer informs him calmly, lip curling back just enough to expose a row of very white teeth. “That is all. You are a finicky houseplant, in need of constant tending. Until you make up your mind as to whether you intend to live, to die, to waste your time or to conclude it swiftly, I am compelled to observe.” 

“Ah, I get it. Condescending Berkeley grad student? You’re a voyeur at a peep show, flashing your academic credentials so that no one mistakes you for one of the perverts.” 

“Wielding your so-called authenticity like a cudgel. Tell me, Daniel, do you tell the people that you interview about your parents back in Modesto? A two-car garage. Plastic covers on the sofa. Your father’s golf clubs sitting by the door…” the observer trails off as he seems to notice how Daniel’s heart has gone from racing to feeling as though it is bursting inside of his chest. “Ah, there it is. The fear that, for now, will keep you alive.” 

“Who the hell—?” 

“You’ll see me again when the fear isn’t enough,” the observer interrupts, rising to his feet. Although the motion is entirely normal, Daniel has an urge to scream in horror. The image of the man with golden eyes rising up, his dark coat rippling around him, those white teeth gleaming in the dark—it is too much to bear. 

Daniel squeezes his eyes shut as the observer steps forward, bracing and trembling. But there is no pain. Instead, he feels a cool hand on his forehead, pushing him back down onto the couch. 

“You’re… are you one of the…?” he tries to ask, but the question gets lost in a whimper of fear that involuntarily breaks forth from his mouth. The scar on his neck twinges with a prickle like a dozen tiny needles. 

The observer seems to understand regardless. 

“A vampire,” he agrees silkily. “Louis did tell you as much. A journalist ought to be more diligent in his follow-up. Now, rest.” 

Daniel falls asleep. 

In the morning, it is 1974. He peels himself off of the couch, simultaneously freezing cold and soaked in his own sweat. Outside, it is raining steadily. 

He stops at a corner market on his way home. The cashier raises an eyebrow at the general state of him. 

“Fun time ringing in the new year?” she asks as he digs change out of his pockets to pay. 

“I hope so,” he shrugs. “Can’t remember a damn bit of it.” 

 

—

 

It begins with a sore throat that develops into a cough that then becomes a wet lump of pain in the middle of his chest. 

Daniel Molloy does not go to see a doctor because he can’t afford it, and besides, it’s February in San Francisco. Everybody gets a cold during the winters here. He spends what little cash he has left over at the end of the month to get his fix, so that he can work, so that he can make enough for next month, so that he can get his fix. 

He still doesn’t sleep well because he wakes himself up coughing every ten minutes. It’s annoying, but better than the months-long insomnia that plagued him after the bad weekend. 

He thinks again about Louis, who said he was a vampire, who got Daniel higher than he’d ever gotten before and somehow left him with a permanent scar on his neck. He can’t even remember if they’d fooled around, and yet for some reason his mind supplies with perfect clarity the question he’d asked that had made the whole thing go wrong: make me one of you. Make me immortal. I know I could be happy if I knew I’d live forever. 

It was all bullshit, he tells himself for the hundredth time. He doesn’t have the tapes anymore. Nobody really lives forever. He feels his very mortal lungs rotting inside of him and he puts Louis du Lac out of his mind for good. 

Then, he goes to bed and wakes up somewhere that he does not recognize. 

As soon as he comes to consciousness, his body jerks upright. Something holds him down. A heavy blanket tucked around his legs, something cold and rubbery rubbing against his arm, a sharp tug of pain in the back of his hand—

An IV line. 

The room around him is lit with the dim blue glow of a machine. Beneath the door, a sliver of yellow light suggests a hallway outside. He is in a hospital room, it finally occurs to him. 

Well, shit, he thinks blearily, sinking back against the pillows. At least it makes sense. Someone must have brought him in, then whatever sedative they gave him for the night didn’t take his suspiciously high tolerance for painkillers into account. 

Experimentally, he tries to take a deep breath, and feels his chest burn with pain as he coughs. 

“Double pneumonia,” a voice from beside his bed remarks dryly. 

Daniel yelps. He nearly rips the IV from his hand for a second time as he twists around to see that there is a man standing by the window, flipping through his chart despite the fact that the lights in the room are all off. 

A nurse, Daniel guesses, although the man doesn’t wear scrubs or a white coat. His voice sounds foreign, maybe British. He has dark skin and dark curls, but Daniel catches a glint of his eyes as they flicker over the pages of the chart and notices that they are an unusual shade of light brown, almost amber. 

“Sorry,” Daniel stammers, struggling not to cough again as he settles back into the bed. “I didn’t see you there… uh?” 

“Armand,” the man answers tightly, still entirely fixated on Daniel’s vitals apparently. 

“Uh, right, Armand,” Daniel agrees slowly. “So, uh, you think I’ll be out by morning?” 

“No,” the man—doctor? Doctor Armand?—replies. 

Daniel squints into the dark as he tries to better make out the man’s face. It makes no sense, but he gets the feeling that for some reason the man is… angry with him? Do doctors get pissed off at patients for catching pneumonia? 

“In that case, think you could get me something a bit stronger to put me out, doc? Not sure the last dose quite did the trick,” Daniel tries with what he hopes is an innocent smile. 

Armand’s face changes in a flash. The sheer speed of it turns Daniel’s stomach to water. One moment he is poised, a look of mild annoyance in his eye as he reviews Daniel’s pretty lackluster bill of health. Then, like a lightning bolt on a clear day, his face morphs into an expression of boiling, immolating rage. 

“If it weren’t enough that you seek to destroy yourself through neglect, now you brazenly beg to feed your addiction?” Armand snarls, dropping the chart carelessly onto the tile floor. “A mortal who claims to love this life while persistently seeking to walk along the knife’s edge of death. You are a study in contradictions, Daniel, as ever.” 

Daniel’s breath catches, but that only spurs another fit of coughing. His mind is spinning. Is he dreaming? Hallucinating? This guy can’t be a doctor, his instincts are telling him, but if he isn’t, then why the hell is he here? How did he get into this room on a closed hospital ward? 

“Your existence is a testament to something greater than you can imagine,” Armand continues, waves of fury still rippling off of him. “Every hour that you live, a gift that you cannot comprehend. And yet it is only ever the most fragile vessels, the most delicate, doomed creatures that he chooses. Again and again and again. He chooses to put his faith in ill-fated creatures like you.” 

“I— I’m sorry?” Daniel attempts to wheeze. 

Armand blinks at him, oddly shocked by his words. Then, he leans close, arching down over the bed so that they can look at one another face to face. 

Daniel feels himself shudder, and yet the man’s hand is very gentle when he places it on Daniel’s cheek. Cool fingers smooth away the hair stuck to his face, providing a reprieve to his feverish skin. 

“You are sorry,” Armand repeats, brow creasing as though this has caused some great consternation within him. “Yes. You are. Everytime you harm yourself, you mourn.”

Daniel winces, but at the same time, another idea is growing in the back of his mind. This man, Armand, cannot be a doctor or a nurse. But he is here, already inside of the hospital. It stands to reason that he might, in fact, be a fellow patient. 

“Are you okay?” Daniel asks, suppressing the fear and hoping to sound as soothing as one can when lying in a bed with double pneumonia. “Can I… do you need me to find someone or get you some help?” 

Armand’s confusion deepens and suddenly there is pain in his eyes. He shakes his head, as though trying to will away Daniel’s voice.

“Why do you keep seeking death?” he asks, but his voice is quiet and strained. 

“I don’t know,” Daniel answers honestly, too out of it to come up with anything better. “I don’t know. It’s just how I am.” 

Armand considers that response for an uncomfortably long time. He stands perfectly still as he stares down at Daniel. Those orange-gold eyes are slightly luminous in the dark, glinting as though they reflect more light than any other surface in the room.

Daniel slows his breathing and the pain in his chest decreases. He feels an ache down to the marrow of his bones. A part of him does want to lay back into the bed, to close his eyes, even though instinct screams at him that there is a predator in the room just waiting for the right moment to strike. But he doesn’t do that. 

Instead, Daniel’s finger twitches towards the call button. If he can just get to the button, he thinks, then someone will come; a real, actual doctor will come. Maybe both of them can get what they are craving. 

Armand notices the attempt immediately. 

“An aptitude for endurance,” Armand murmurs. “Is that it, then?” 

Before Daniel can scream or fall out of bed or press the damned call button or ask what in the hell any of this means, a cold hand covers his mouth and he blacks out. 

He wakes up at morning rounds. A nurse takes his temperature and clucks sympathetically. 

“How did I get here?” he mumbles. 

“A young man dropped you off last night, dear, don’t you remember?” 

“I don’t remember anything,” Daniel admits. “Not since yesterday morning.” 

 

—  

 

Daniel Molloy takes up with a girl for three months over the summer, partially because she’s got fantastic breasts, and partially because she’s willing to shoot up with him. The latter is, unfortunately, becoming an increasingly important quality for his girlfriend’s to possess.

He doesn’t love her, which might mean that he’s a shitty boyfriend, but it’s 1975 and he’s pretty sure that most people who end up screwing don’t feel anything close to love. Maybe that means he’s fine. Maybe that means he’s just as bad as everyone else. 

They fall asleep together at her apartment, tangled up in the sheets, TV still blaring from the living room. When he wakes up, the bed beside him is empty. 

Slowly, Daniel pushes himself up on his elbows. The room is dark, but the distant flicker of the TV casts an irregular pattern of lights against the wall. He listens for a moment, trying to make out the sound of his girlfriend in the bathroom, for her footsteps creaking against the floor, but there is nothing. 

The romance had pretty much run its course, he reflects, but still. Odd that she would leave in the middle of the night. Odd that she would leave him asleep in her apartment. 

“They’ve just arrested Patty Hearst,” a mild, entirely unfamiliar voice remarks from the doorway of the bedroom. 

Daniel flinches violently. Right there, standing on the threshold, the dark shape of a person blocks the dim blue glimmer of light from the screen. He had missed it somehow, in the dark and the flickering strobe of the television.

The silhouette is male without being overtly masculine, tall, wearing well-fitted casual clothing and keeping one hand tucked innocently in his pocket. 

Daniel cannot make out any features of the man’s face apart from the eyes, which shine out of the dark as though they possess their own light within. They are lantern-yellow, bizarre, with wide-blown pupils that fix on where he lies still tangled in the sheets. 

“Shit,” Daniel swears. “Fuck!” 

“She was just eighty-seven pounds. Chain smoking cigarettes. Barely coherent when she tried to speak,” the soft voice goes on, apparently unmoved by Daniel’s reaction. “A revolutionary, ready to die a martyr? Or a desperate child, surviving on lies because the truth will destroy her?” 

“Back off! I—I’ve got a gun!” Daniel lies wildly, pretending to grab for something in the drawer of the bedside table. The only things in there, he knows, are needles and cottons.

“Then by all means, fire at will,” the voice replies, sounding slightly amused. “The faster you fill my chest with lead, the faster we can resume our conversation.”

“What the fuck is going on?” Daniel moans, dropping the pretense of fiddling with the drawer. 

“Patricia Hearst. She’s spent over a year being involuntarily indoctrinated into the Symbionese Liberation Army,” the voice repeats slowly, as though Daniel is somehow missing an obvious point. “I’m asking for your thoughts. Is she culpable? If she is, where does her culpability begin and her victimhood end?” 

“Look, man, uh…” Daniel’s gaze goes to the window. It’s a third story apartment, but he might be able to climb over to the neighbor’s balcony from here. What’s a few broken bones in comparison to getting himself kidnapped? “I’m all for liberation and the movement and, uh, you know, the revolutionary brother and sisterhood to come, and I’d be happy to do an article, maybe an interview, but—” 

“You are tiresome tonight, Daniel,” the voice sighs. At the same moment, one of the bare lightbulbs in the ceiling light clicks on. 

The dark shadow at the door resolves into the figure of a man perhaps a few years older than him. He has dark skin and a surprisingly lovely head of soft, curly hair. In the light, the color of his eyes becomes less startling. There is something beautiful about him, like an old painting, something delicate and alluring in his close-lipped smile. 

The terror remains, but Daniel finds himself unwilling to run. He feels almost hypnotized, a rabbit before a snake, unable to look away. 

“If you have lost your ability to hold an intelligent conversation, another channel is about to begin playing The Exorcist ,” the beautiful shadow informs him. “Innocence and monstrosity is the question on everyone’s mind. Does the devil seek to corrupt that which is most pure, or does evil exist even in the hearts of angels? Will you watch it again with me, Daniel?” 

“I—You—Alright,” Daniel agrees shakily, head still spinning with questions. Still, if he’s sitting on the couch watching TV, he’s that much closer to the door. 

The man withdraws and Daniel stumbles out of bed to follow. The floor lurches beneath him. He is, he realizes, still high as balls. When he makes it to the couch, he slumps down deeper than he intends. As much as he tries to tell himself that he will make a break for it later, a part of Daniel knows that he has no choice but to wait and hope. 

The channel on the TV changes automatically, without a remote or any need to surf through the random garbage on at this time of night. A lilting melody of a piano fills the silence, repeating and repeating as harmonies slowly layer in. His beautiful shadow watches the screen silently, apparently rapt. 

“Again?” Daniel finally murmurs. 

The music continues. A woman walks down a picturesque autumn street, but the wind whips against her face, stirring up piles of leaves. Not all is as it should be. 

“You said again,” Daniel points out with more confidence, although it might be the confidence of a fucking idiot. “I’ve never seen this movie. I’ve never met you.” 

“The music,” the beautiful shadow observes quietly. “Like a lullabye, yet it unsettles the viewer.”

Daniel swallows. He looks to the door. He’ll never make it to the door. 

“Answer my question,” Daniel says firmly. 

“You never asked a question.” 

“Why did you say ‘again’?” Daniel raises his voice slightly with exasperation. “Why can’t I remember this if it’s happened before? Why do I get high and then wake up in the morning feeling… feeling like something happened? Like I’ve been dreaming, but I can never quite recapture it?”

“You already know the answer.” 

Daniel bites his lip. He steals another glance at the man’s profile—the curve of his nose, the perfect, almost cherubic set of his lips. 

The devil hiding behind the face of innocence, Daniel thinks with an icy plunge of fear. 

“You’ve been here before, but I don’t remember it. You’re… you’re a… you’re like the guy I met back in ‘73?” He guesses. 

That delicate mouth curls into a slight smile.

“If you’ve come to that conclusion, perhaps we could return to a more interesting subject of conversation,” the vampire suggests, which does not really confirm anything, but also does not disprove it. 

“Sure,” Daniel says. “Like why? Why can’t I remember you? Why do you keep showing up and asking me these questions, but then I don't remember anything in the morning? Why don’t you, like, drink my blood or something?” 

“Because I am still making up my mind about you, Daniel.” 

“Bullshit.” 

At that, the vampire finally tears his golden eyes away from the screen. He looks strangely betrayed, as though Daniel has just violated some unspoken rule of social etiquette. 

“Study. A long and careful process,” the vampire corrects him firmly. 

“Nah,” Daniel says with a smirk of bravado he definitely does not feel. “Bullshit.” 

“You are disagreeable tonight,” the vampire sighs. 

“And you’re bored and lonely,” Daniel asserts, although he’s going off of pure instinct and not sure if being right about this is even the wisest thing to do. “How often do we do this? Is that why you…? You don’t want me to remember. How often do you wake me up just to shoot the shit and watch a damn movie?” 

The vampire’s face closes up, all of that fallen angel beauty turning to smoldering resentment. He catches a glint of white teeth shining within the open slit of his mouth. 

“I would ask you the same question,” he asks in a deadly whisper. “How often, Daniel, do you spend your nights chasing oblivion? What is it that you are so desperate to forget? As I asked you before—how can you tell the difference between the captive victim and the willing accomplice?” 

Daniel feels his nails digging in the flesh of his palm. Then, he makes up his mind. He launches himself towards the door. 

“Rest,” a tired voice commands, more fragile than he expects. Daniel’s face hits the carpet. 

The next morning, his girlfriend tells him to pack his shit and get out of her apartment. She wants to clean up, she tells him, and he’s just going to keep dragging her back down. 

“I don’t get it, babe,” Daniel protests, “what’s changed since last night?” 

“It just felt different,” she shrugs. 

Embarrassingly for a reporter, Daniel cannot recall enough about the past twelve hours to have seen it coming. 

 

—

 

The night after the best high he will ever have in his life, Daniel Molloy wakes up covered in his own vomit.

He is still in Berkeley, crashing on a friend’s couch for the night. The day before had been incredible—conversation and excitement and music and books and sucking off a guy who had shared a joint with him. He had ended the day in a haze of bliss, soaring out of his body, his mind reaching towards some incomprehensible truth and nearly making it there. 

But around four in the morning on the night after, he no longer feels anything close to fine. 

Daniel wakes up choking slightly, tasting bile in his mouth and retching more of it down his shirt when he tries to sit up. His body shakes uncontrollably and his skin feels clammy, hair plastered to his forehead. He is so cold. His stomach churns.

“Here,” a soft voice whispers. Daniel cannot identify who it is. One of the grad students maybe? He feels a cold glass against his lips and he parts them to allow the water into his mouth. 

“Now spit,” the voice whispers, removing the glass and replacing it with a plastic bowl beneath Daniel’s chin. “Good.”

With his mouth clear, he finally manages to draw a clear breath. He pants for a few seconds, and the air helps. But the longer that he sits upright, the more the shaking gets to him. He cannot stop shivering. 

“Fuck,” Daniel moans, wiping his face and feeling it coated with his own sick. His shirt is ruined as well. Everything about him smells and feels revolting.

“Can you stand? Lean your weight on me, here,” the soft voice instructs him.

Daniel obeys. He begins to understand intellectually that he has come very very close to overdosing this time. Emotionally, all that seems to matter is that the feeling is gone, the happiness is gone and he wants it back again.

He staggers upright, leaning against a firm, stable arm. Even so, his knees buckle. At that, he feels another arm beneath his knees. Someone is carrying him. Someone from this party is still sober enough to lift him in their arms and hold him. 

There is a nightlight in the bathroom that casts a dim light over the space. Daniel does not recognize the face of the man who is carrying him when he sees it.

He’s dark skinned, pretty, maybe from India? Almost certainly a graduate student, probably brilliant at something or other. He wears a nice shirt, but Daniel notices with shame that it is now stained with his vomit. 

With no apparent struggle, the student lowers him down to lie in the tub. He places a rolled up towel behind Daniel’s head to soften the hard edge, then he runs the sink for a few seconds.

“I’m going to unbutton your shirt and clean you up,” the student announces. 

“It’s cold,” Daniel protests weakly.

“Only for a moment,” the student reassures him.

He has such a gentle voice. Not American, Daniel realizes belatedly. He sounds British, or maybe he just had an education at a British school. Daniel wants to close his eyes and sink into that voice forever.

“Keep your head up, Daniel,” the student commands, a little more firmly. “You cannot fall asleep yet. Not quite yet.”

Slowly, Daniel untangles himself from his ruined shirt. The fingers that help him are nimble, but cold when they touch his skin. He shudders once his chest is bare, unable to stand the temperature.

“Please,” Daniel mumbles. “Wanna go to sleep. Just get me a blanket. Let me rest.”

He receives no response but a sharp, pained intake of breath. A moment later, a warm cloth touches his skin, delicately wiping away the mess on his chin, neck, all the way down to his belly button. 

“Shh,” the student’s tender voice soothes him. “You’ll be alright. You’ll feel better soon. The drugs are leaving your bloodstream.”

That’s the whole problem, Daniel thinks miserably. He won’t feel better soon. He won’t feel better until the next time he shoots up, which might be the last time. Every time is starting to feel close to the last time. The only cure for the disease is a stronger poison. 

“You’ll endure,” the voice reminds him, wiping a warm washcloth down his cheek. “Who else listens? Who else will hear us?” 

Daniel shivers and then relents and lets himself be taken care of. Once his face is clean, the student helps him up and out of the tub. He spits into the sink again and then dry heaves a few times over the toilet. Then he drinks a mouthful of water.

“Here,” the student tells him, wrapping a clean towel around his shoulders. “You did very well, Daniel. Stay up just a little longer.”

Daniel feels his lips tremble slightly, then buckle down. He is keenly aware of his own wretchedness, the repulsive state of him. Shame and need threaten to crack his usual apathetic cynicism. He wants to be jaded and unaffected and beyond it all. He wants to lean into this young man’s chest and bawl like a child. 

“I’ll stay with you. Come here,” the student reassures him, leading him on shaky legs back into the dark living room. 

He doesn’t take him back to the couch, which is probably covered in his vomit too. Instead, he lays Daniel down on his side on a pile of blankets and cushions on the floor. Even clean and dry and warm under the blanket, he still cannot stop shivering.

The student settles his head onto his lap. It is strange, Daniel finally realizes, that he would be doing this. They do not know each other. As far as Daniel remembers, they have never met. 

And yet now, on the worst night of his life, this young man has appeared out of nowhere to take care of him with such unexpected… tenderness. Not simple human decency or concern. Not when he has Daniel cradled in his arms like this. 

Daniel sweats and shakes for what feels like another hour. His stomach cramps and several times he nearly gags again. All the while, the student strokes his hair and holds him. His hands are cool against Daniel’s damp forehead.

“Why are you doing this?” Daniel finally mumbles as he feels the worst of it passing. “You don’t even know me.”

“I do know you,” the soft whisper replies, stroking a strand of hair behind his ear. 

“How? Why?” Daniel asks. “I’m so… so fucking sorry about this.”

“Because I am going to kill you someday,” the student who he has never met before confesses. “But until then, you are my teacher.” 

Daniel feels his heart squeeze in his chest. He tries to pull away. The young man who he has never even seen before stares down at him and his eyes seem almost yellow, like an owl or some other creature designed to hunt at night. 

“No,” Daniel begs, although he isn’t entirely sure why. 

“Louis doesn’t know. You’re all mine now, Daniel.” The young man pauses there, his hands still locked around Daniel’s neck and head.

Louis, Daniel thinks blearily, as in… the one from ‘73? The one who…

“And I think I love you,” the man he has never met admits, his tone filled with regret. The terrible yellow eyes narrow with pain. 

Then, he shakes his head, abruptly seeming to realize what he has just said aloud. 

“Rest,” his soft voice commands. “I’ll take the pain from you. This whole terrible night never happened. You needed no one to care for you. On your own, you were enough.” 

Daniel wakes the morning after the best high of his life on the floor of a Berkeley house. He’s stiff, smelling of stale sweat, and he can’t find his shirt for some time until he discovers it hanging up in the bathroom. There’s a stain by the collar, but nothing too bad. 

“How are you doing, man?” The guy he sucked off for free hash asks. “You were looking kinda rough last night.” 

“I’m fantastic,” Daniel grins. “Slept it off. I’ve always bounced back fast.”

 

—

 

Daniel Molloy stumbles into his success accidentally. It would be nice to say it was raw talent, but he knows better. It is fifty percent sheer dumb luck and fifty percent stubborn tenacity that lands him his first big break. 

It starts with an interview—the woman who owns the coin laundry and lost two sons in Vietnam. He pictures it as a human interest story, something about war and motherhood, something about triumphing over grief through the power of picking stained underpants out of the washer or some shit. 

But then one thing leads to another. Coin laundry lady happens to have a habit of saving the battered receipts and scraps of paper that fall out of pockets, and suddenly he has a story about corruption and racketeering at the local public housing authority. 

He keeps his bad habits somewhat in check while he runs down the leads. It’s easier to manage with a good distraction. Who needs to chase the high when he has evidence of racially-biased renting policies to pursue like a starving hound? He trades heroin for the occasional bump of cocaine, just to keep himself awake during the long nights. 

And then, of course, he publishes. The news breaks, he starts getting put on assignments with real meat on them, and Daniel Molloy is a bright young reporter with a point of view again. He’s more than ready to prove it. 

But until the next story gets its hook into him, he’s a ball of infinite energy with nothing in particular to do. 

Daniel wakes up one night a month later, so suddenly and with such purpose that for a moment he is sure that somebody must have just called his name. 

For a moment, he keeps his eyes closed. The apartment he has now is his own, but it’s a glorified closet. He sleeps on a fold out couch-bed in full view of his tiny kitchen. Slowly, Daniel comes to realize that this may be why he has just woken up. 

There is a low humming coming from somewhere nearby. The sound isn’t sudden or startling—just a steady background drone. It’s his microwave, Daniel realizes. It’s the middle of the night, and for some bizarre reason, his microwave has started running. 

He opens his eyes and pushes himself upright. There is indeed a dim yellow glow coming from the microwave oven and he can make out the faint crackle of something liquidy inside just on the verge of boiling. Daniel frowns and struggles to sit up, but before he can stumble over to turn it off, he feels something move in the shadow right beside his bed. 

“Do not be afraid,” a voice says, gentle but firm. “You have nothing to fear from me, Daniel.” 

Which, Daniel decides, is probably the scariest goddamn thing anyone could have possibly said to him in that moment. 

He lets out a yelp of terror and swings wildly into the dark, falling out of the sofa-bed in the process with a painful thump. Beside him, he hears something shift rapidly out of the way. Panicking, Daniel flings himself towards the desk and manages to grope at the dangling chain of his lamp until it finally flickers on. 

“Stop,” the voice commands and Daniel, for some reason, obeys. He freezes in place, muscles trembling as he strains to move. Some weird fight or flight reaction? “Sit.” 

Daniel’s knees buckle and he collapses back onto the couch-bed. A figure comes to stand over him, head blocking the light so that its beams shoot out like a halo behind his head. Squinting, Daniel perceives a man. 

“Armand,” the figure says evenly, which Daniel belatedly recognizes as an introduction a few moments later. 

Armand does not appear to fit the usual profile for a psychotic murderer. He is a young man of slender build, dressed nicely in loose trousers and a button-down shirt. There is something in the way that he carries himself that suggests he is either disinterested in or actively against the swaggering machismo of most other young men of the day. He moves delicately, precisely. 

A queer or just a European? The name and the accent confuse the matter, as does his dark complexion that suggests another potential origin entirely. And, more importantly, what the hell is he going in Daniel’s apartment, apparently running the microwave at half-past one in the morning? 

“Armand,” Daniel repeats a second later, slowly regaining some control over his limbs and managing to sit up. “Hey. Think you might have the wrong apartment, pal.” 

“Unlikely,” Armand says, dismissive, but faintly amused. Before Daniel can say anything further, he presses a plastic cup into Daniel’s hand full of a dark, slightly sludgy liquid. “Drink this.” 

Daniel sniffs and immediately regrets it. The scent is potent, vaguely herbal, and unlike any food or drink known to man. 

“I’m about five seconds away from screaming my head off and calling the cops,” Daniel warns, scooting another step back. 

Armand merely leans closer. He is still backlit by the lamp, but he sits so close that Daniel can make out more of the details of his face. 

The face itself is a study in harmless innocence. Big, long-lashed eyes. Full lips but a small mouth. Curls down to his chin like an angel in a stained glass window. The only thing that spoils the illusion is the expression—intent far beyond what is comfortable.

And those eyes. The pupils are blown wide, but the iris is an odd shade of vivid amber, like the soft flesh of a ripe apricot. Daniel instinctively does not trust those eyes. 

“Drink,” Armand repeats. “It won’t harm you. Everything in this cup is edible for humans.” 

Daniel feels the lip of the cup pressed towards his mouth. His mind is trying to make sense of the interaction, but coming up short. Murderer? Maniac? Fellow junkie, too high to figure out he’s in the wrong apartment? None of those are quite adding up with the facts. 

At the last second, Daniel is saved from the cup and the concoction when the microwave beeps. Armand is gone in a flash, moving faster than his eyes can track. 

Daniel seizes the opportunity to quickly dump the cup out into a random drawer of his desk. Which means he nearly misses the horror of what Armand withdraws from his microwave. 

“Is that a rat?” Daniel asks, his voice cracking up an octave on the last word. “What the hell, man, what the hell is wrong with you?” 

“Curiosity,” Armand answers vaguely, now entirely absorbed in examining the partially liquidated rat that has been stuffed into Daniel’s former favorite coffee mug. “We’re alike in that way, I suppose.” 

“Oh my god,” Daniel whimpers, unsure why he still isn’t running. “Man, I think you’re probably tripping on the worst fucking acid on the market right now. Like CIA-worthy bad acid.”

“They keep bursting in the middle,” Armand muses. “What do you think—start with three minutes next time?” 

Daniel watches in mute horror as Armand slides a half-melted rat corpse into the garbage disposal and flips the switch to run it. The machinery makes an unpleasantly wet sound and then Daniel hears the grinding and snapping of tiny bones. 

“I’m gonna be sick,” he mumbles. 

“Yes,” Armand agrees. “That’s why I prepared the drink this time. Have you finished it yet?” 

“This time?” Daniel repeats weakly. 

This finally seems to break Armand away from his macabre inspection of the microwave. He turns back to stare at Daniel with those orange-gold eyes of his. 

“You always catch it,” Armand observes. His tone is not accusatory, nor is it impressed. Rather, Daniel detects something… wistful. A longing for that which cannot be here. “No matter your state, no matter mine, you unravel it faster and faster every night.” 

“Are you studying me?” Daniel asks slowly. 

“I have studied you,” Armand confesses, suddenly flicking his eyes down to the floor. “I have not yet solved you.” 

The impact of that gaze suddenly being lifted is indescribable. Daniel draws a deep, unsteady breath. 

“Alright,” Daniel says, then he clears his throat so that he can speak with more authority. “Alright. You’re going to explain to me what is going on. How do you know me? What have you been doing to me? And who the hell are you, really?” 

Very quickly, Armand is somehow back at his bedside. Daniel cannot suppress his flinch. Armand’s expression softens. For a moment, it’s almost like he turns into a different person. Not literally. But Daniel still has to take a moment to check. 

But there is nothing different about his face, his height, not even his eyes. He seems to shrink, to lose perhaps five years off of what Daniel assumed his age to be. He’s barely more than a boy, Daniel is tempted to think, and his face shows all of the shy, earnest admiration of a child. 

“Would you listen if I told you?” Armand whispers, leaning down over Daniel again. “Would you hear me, Daniel, all of me?” 

Daniel feels his pulse throbbing in his chest. His teeth chatter slightly as a shiver of pure, animal terror washes over him. There is something indescribably repulsive about this man—this creature—so abruptly transforming itself. Bait, his instincts scream. This is a predator playing at weakness. 

But even then, there is still a part of him that keeps his cool. Daniel Molloy has a little bit of steel under the skin. It’s what lets him push a question past what is comfortable, chase a lead past what is sensible. It’s that ineffable quality that makes him the only thing that he can figure out how to be—the bright young reporter. 

“If you told me, would you even let me remember what I heard?” Daniel asks the monster with an angel’s face. Despite himself, he hears the slight sting of vinegar in his tone. 

Armand’s face fractures. For a moment, Daniel is staring at both the pathetic boy and the creature he just watched fervently grind up a microwaved rat in his garbage disposal. What happens next catches him completely off guard. 

Armand rocks forward and kisses him. He kisses hard and needy, that perfect little mouth parting to allow his needle-sharp teeth to graze the wet heat of Daniel’s tongue. Cool hands come up to grip Daniel’s face and he feels long fingers knotting into the curls of his hair. 

Armand kisses him like a needle plunging into a vein—shamefully, greedily, with equal parts sickness and utter bliss. 

There are a lot of ways that Daniel Molloy could try to rationalize what happens next. The trouble with training yourself to be the human bullshit detector is that you can’t turn that crap off, even when you really want to. 

Daniel kisses Armand back. He kisses him back even though his body is shaking with fear. He kisses him back even though he normally only fools around with guys if they’ve got dope to share. He kisses him back even though he still has no idea what is going on. Like kissing him back will somehow help him to dig out the truth and figure it all out. 

Armand gasps into his mouth. Daniel reaches out and hesitantly threads his fingers through the thick waves of his hair. Armand growls in response, halfway between frustration and desire. Daniel squeezes his fingers, giving his hair a slight pull. 

With a flash of pain, he feels Armand sink his teeth into his bottom lip. This isn’t some playful nip. Daniel tastes iron in his mouth, feels blood trickling down onto his chin. Armand does not back off. If anything, he surges closer, licking the blood from Daniel’s lips and tongue, then nuzzling with bloodied lips down to Daniel’s neck. 

Abruptly, the word jumps to Daniel’s mind. Vampire. Like the one he met, the one he interviewed all those years ago who left those puncture scars on his throat. It was all real. 

Armand pulls back sharply at that, as though Daniel had spoken his thoughts aloud. His mouth is a mess of blood, face suddenly blank, his eyes like an inferno. Daniel barely has a moment to think to himself: I am about to die. 

“I was never here,” Armand rasps out. “You will never think of this night again. Rest. Rest. Rest!” 

Daniel Molloy wakes in the morning with a terrible crick in his neck. He’s slept in a strange position, sprawled across the pull-out couch with one leg hanging over the edge. 

With a groan, he crawls out of bed and stumbles to start the coffee maker. His usual mug sits in the dish drainer, freshly washed, although he doesn’t recall doing dishes for a few days. He thinks nothing of it. 

When he sits down at his desk, however, he notices a strange smell coming from one of the drawers. A dark liquid stain has soaked into the papers he had stored in the bottom drawer. 

The question bothers him for a while, but his landlord has no explanation. 

“No leaks in this building,” the man assures him on the phone. “No mold.” 

Daniel rolls his eyes. Sure. Let him try to pretend there’s no leaks in a building when Daniel is positive he’s seen rats in the apartments here before. 

 

—

 

On the last leg of the book tour, Daniel Molloy accidentally passes out on a park bench in Chicago. 

It’s early November and he is only wearing the blazer he wore to the lecture at Northwestern. When he wakes, his body shivers so violently that he can barely pry open his eyes. He remembers falling asleep feeling warm and comfortable, dozing off on the bench with a smile on his face. But now that the glorious whitehot burn of heroin has cleared out of his veins, he feels wretched. 

With numb fingers, he gropes beside him for his copy of the damned book. Two years of his life spent writing and writing about how the people he lived alongside, the people he knew, even the people he cared about were dying. All to find out in the end that the problem would only get worse. They would keep dying and nobody gave a damn. 

Daniel reaches for the book. However, he finds nothing there. 

Would some hobo or late-night prowler really want to steal a book? A book about, of all things, a deadly disease primarily killing the people most God-fearing Americans wouldn’t much miss? 

Daniel sits up with a groan, every part of his body aching from the cold. It is only once he is upright that he notices something faintly jarring. 

There is a man sitting on a bench right beside him. And, curiously, that man is reading his book. 

For a few moments, Daniel watches in silence, trying to get the lay of the land before he breaks the silence. The man reading his book does not appear hostile. He is nicely dressed, wearing a grey wool overcoat and a suit like a businessman out past his usual hours. 

However, he is not perfectly fitted to the mold of corporate douchebag. For one thing, he’s not blond, not even white. For another, there is a touch of softness to him. His face is too pretty, his hair too long, his profile too elegant to be just another ambitious young marketing executive. He reads with his lips slightly parted, a tiny glint of white teeth visible in the dim glow of a distant streetlight. 

“That one any good?” Daniel asks through slightly chattering teeth. 

The reader flips a page, then very slightly inclines his head to look towards him. 

“As a piece of writing, or as a blanket?” he replies. His voice is soft, pleasant, a faint accent giving his consonants a crisp quality. 

“If it made a good blanket, I’d ask for it back,” Daniel laughs, rubbing his hands together to try to restore some sensation. “You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, would you? I’ll sign it if you let me bum one.” 

The reader gives him an evaluating look, then turns back and flips another page. 

“I’m Daniel,” Daniel clarifies, realizing that no one would probably assume that the idiot sleeping on a bench in November is the guy who wrote the book. “Daniel Molloy.” 

“Armand,” the reader replies, then he fishes a pack of cigarettes out of the inside of his coat and offers the box to Daniel. 

“Thanks, man,” Daniel groans with gratitude, icy fingers fumbling with his lighter until he finally manages to light it. He stuffs his hands under his arms and jiggles his feet to try to stomp some sensation back into his legs. 

“It’s curious,” Armand remarks after a moment of silence, flipping through another few pages of the book. “When you write, you do not hold back your vitriol. Yet in real life, I wonder if you understand the meaning of what you have put down on the page.” 

“Yeah?” Daniel asks, although his mind is more preoccupied by trying to figure out which direction he ought to start walking to find his hotel. 

“Your book testifies on behalf of the heroic struggle for survival,” Armand explains, still in the detached tone of someone reviewing an intriguing philosophical problem. “And you yourself are still half in love with death.” 

Daniel frowns. He squeezes his left arm, suddenly too aware of the tender place on the inside of his elbow where the veins are starting to harden. 

“Maybe you’ll write a blurb for the next one,” he deadpans instead. 

“There is very little of yourself in these pages,” Armand continues, fanning the book out and then cracking the spine with an audible snap. “But where he shines through, I see the same familiar void. Plenty of style, plenty to say, nothing on the inside. You disappear into the subject because you have no sense of who you are.”

“Listen, man, we don’t know each other,” Daniel interrupts with a hard smile. “So I’m gonna go and find my hotel and you can keep the book if you want. I don’t really give a damn. Thanks for the cigarette.” 

“We’ve met before, although it has been a considerable time since we last saw one another,” Armand continues, finally snapping the book closed and looking directly at him. 

His eyes are unusual, Daniel realizes. An odd color that catches the dim streetlight gleam like a seam of molten rock breaking through the earth. 

“I don’t remember you.” 

“You don’t remember many nights of your life, Daniel.” 

That’s fair. Daniel frowns, searching this strange man, this so-called Armand’s face for any recognizable feature. He comes up with nothing specific, but there is a vague, steadily growing discomfort building up in his chest. 

“Or maybe you’re just not very memorable, pal,” Daniel snipes back, standing up unsteadily. He still can’t remember where his hotel is, so he picks a direction at random and starts walking. 

He sees a flash of movement in his peripheral vision and suddenly Armand has fallen into step beside him. Daniel takes a drag of his cigarette, stumbling slightly because his toes are still pretty numb. 

“A crusader for truth, until someone confronts you with a mirror,” Armand muses, sounding almost pitying. The sympathy conceals something crueler just beneath. “If I hadn’t woken you tonight, Daniel, you might have ended your budding career in a rather inglorious manner.” 

Daniel’s face breaks into a grin at that.

“So that’s the play, huh?” he asks, spinning around so that they are standing face to face. Armand doesn’t react, but he doesn’t have to. Daniel knows plenty of other ways to get under someone’s skin. “You’re my stalker guardian angel? You’re here to save me from myself?” 

“You could not imagine the reasons I am here, even if I were willing to explain them,” Armand answers coolly. He’s infuriatingly unflappable. 

Daniel has never met a seam so smooth that he won’t pick at it. 

“Convenient way to say ‘I’m full of bullshit,’” Daniel shoots back. “I’ve met your type before, pal, sorry to say.”

“I assure you, you have not.” 

“You get off on judging anyone who comes close to shaking you out of your complacency,” Daniel shoots back. He’s throwing things out at random, hoping one of them lands. “You criticize books you haven’t even read, flipping pages in the dark. You play like you want to save my life, but you let me bum a cigarette off of you just five minutes ago. Those things are bad for you, I’ve heard.” 

“If this childish provocation is the brilliant journalistic method you employ in your work,” Armand smiles frostily, “consider me unimpressed.” 

“Then leave me the fuck alone!” 

Before he can stop himself, Daniel has one hand grabbing the lapel of the other man’s grey wool coat. He isn’t normally the type of guy to get into scraps like this. Maybe it’s just that he’s cold and tired and really, really wants to be back in his stupid hotel. Maybe it’s the creeping sensation of wrongness that just won’t go away, building every second that he’s near this weird fucking guy. 

“Do you get it, man? Leave me alone . You hate my book? Don’t read it. We had some bad run-in a few years ago? Don’t follow me,” Daniel shouts into Armand’s face, hand trembling where it is clenched in the fabric of his coat. “It’s my shitty life, my shitty choices, and if you hate it that much, if you hate me that much, then stay the hell away from me!”

Slowly, Armand reaches up and touches his hand. Daniel can’t tell if he’s trying to pry it off or just… just resting his palm over Daniel’s fist. The only thing he knows for certain is that Armand’s fingers are bizarrely cold. 

His face gives away nothing. His eyes have gone blank and he is so still. Daniel feels for a moment like he’s staring at a painting, its expression frozen hundreds of years before. 

“I don’t, Daniel,” Armand murmurs. His voice is distant, like the voice of someone speaking in a dream.“I don’t… I don’t know. For now, rest.” 

Daniel’s fingers unclasp and his knees buckle. He never hits the ground. 

Dawn breaks over Chicago, sunlight glimmering over frost. Daniel wakes up sore. He takes a blistering shower until the hot water runs out. He has no idea how he made it back to the hotel. The last thing that he can remember is shooting up in the bathroom after the lecture. 

Down at the front desk, he digs a few bills out of his wallet and leaves them with the concierge. 

“Can’t remember if I paid my cab driver last night,” he admits with an abashed smile. “Can you hang onto this in case he comes back to shake me down for it?” 

 

—

 

Falling asleep in a chair is never a sign that life is going great, Daniel Molloy is highly aware. 

He wakes up with his face stuck to a paper, drool marring what is probably a pretty important and official document. His neck aches and he moans as he untwists it, rubbing the abused muscles and the old scar right beneath his ear. 

For a few dizzy seconds, he cannot figure out exactly where he is. It comes to him gradually. He’s still at the office, slumped over his desk. The building around him is dark and quiet, completely vacated for the evening. It must be after midnight, he realizes grimly. 

Nearby, he hears footsteps slowly approaching. Daniel fumbles for his ID badge, expecting to explain to the night janitor why he is still here at this hour. However, when he turns, he finds the outline of a person standing completely silently at the door. 

“Sorry,” Daniel says, waving the ID. “I’m about to clear out. Here, let me just grab a few things…” 

He fumbles to sweep an old coffee cup and a few cigarette butts into the trash can, but stops as the dark shape remains immobile and speechless. A strange twist of fear begins in Daniel’s stomach as he regards the shadow at his door. 

“Who are you?” he finally asks, mostly to break the insufferable silence. 

“Not the night janitor,” a cool voice replies, “as you so clearly perceive.” 

Daniel reaches for his desk lamp and clicks it on. Dim, yellow light floods the room and he winces as his eyes struggle to adjust. A part of him hopes that when he blinks, the dark outline of the man will vanish, and he can chalk the whole thing up to sleep deprivation. 

Instead, the dark outline becomes the shape of a young man at his doorway. He is tall, lean, wearing black and grey that makes him nearly melt into the darkness. His hair falls in thick waves around his face, which is doe-eyed, high-cheekboned, and striking.

Daniel finds himself grotesquely fascinated by the man’s eyes. They are large, round, softened by long, dark lashes, but their color seems somehow wrong. He would expect a person of such complexion to have dark eyes, but this man iris’ are a golden-orange, like honey in a jar or a glass of whiskey on a sunny afternoon. 

“In that case, who the hell are you?” Daniel demands, wishing that he could look away, yet sensing that he should be vigilant, watch carefully for sudden movements. 

The man tilts his head slowly to the side, evaluating Daniel patiently. 

“It’s remarkable,” he says eventually, “that you seldom ever guess.” 

“Not an answer,” Daniel retorts with a tight, unfriendly smile. “Care to try again?” 

One of his hands meanders towards the phone, nonchalant so as to avoid notice. 

“I come to you in the middle of the night, Daniel, when you are entirely alone. You know that I found you here, surpassing your building’s security guard and locked entrance. Your instincts cry out to you that you ought to be afraid.” The intruder pauses there for a few seconds to allow his gaze to drift down to Daniel’s hand, now inches away from the phone. “Only ten years ago, you received proof of something most mortals are never permitted to discover. And yet you, for the most part, ignore it.” 

“You’re not actually trying to tell me that you’re some sort of—?” 

“Vampire.” 

Daniel’s objection dies on his lips. 

“I’ve never told anybody about that,” he finally murmurs, the weight of that statement and its logical conclusion settling over him. 

“You can call me Armand,” the vampire replies. 

Daniel lapses into silence. The clock on the wall ticks loudly, chipping away at the brief unreality of the moment. It’s so banal, Daniel thinks. I am in my office at night and here is a vampire. 

“Are you going to kill me?” Daniel finally asks, just to get it out of the way. 

“Do you want me to kill you?” Armand answers.

“Answering a question with another question,” Daniel notes with a raise of one eyebrow. “Which probably means the real answer is: ‘it’s on the table.’” 

“I could have killed you as you were sleeping,” Armand points out. “I could have drained you as you lay at your desk and never spilled a drop.” 

Daniel’s gut tells him that the vampire means it. 

“You didn’t though,” Daniel says. “Neither did the last one. He bit me, yeah, but he didn’t… finish the job, as it were.” 

“He and I are dissimilar in that aspect,” Armand says. “I killed the security officer of your building only twenty minutes ago.” 

He… isn’t lying. He isn’t lying. Daniel’s heart feels like it is trying to crawl up his throat. 

He tries to picture the guard, the man at the front desk who he sometimes caught coming in for his shift when he left work late. The one with the mustache, or the thin, balding guy? 

“Mustache,” Armand answers, although Daniel is fairly certain he hasn’t asked the question aloud. 

There is no trace of remorse or glee or intimidation or anything in the vampire’s expression. He speaks plainly and calmly, recounting a murder with no particular interest in it. That, of all things, is what breaks through the nauseating fear and turns Daniel’s thoughts to being righteously pissed off. 

“Well I don’t want you to kill me,” Daniel snaps. “I’m pretty sure no human wants to get hunted by a vampire.” 

“Some volunteer for it, in fact,” Armand offers. He maintains his distance, despite the way that his bizarre eyes track Daniel’s every motion. They remind him of a snake swaying before it strikes. “Others call out for relief in less specific terms. Their desperation, their purposeless suffering radiates for miles. It is not difficult to find.” 

“Is that how you live with yourself? Pretend that killing and eating people is just a mercy?” 

“You should not be so surprised, Daniel. Your building’s security guard, Mr. Allen Schafer, has worked nights for fifteen years now. He lives alone. His parents are gone and he has never married. Two years ago, he injured his left knee moving a dresser, and it never properly healed.” 

The vampire’s voice grows gentler as he speaks. Not empathetic, not true compassion, but his tone has something in it of a mother soothing a child. 

“I drank from him because I must feed myself. It was your mortal society that drove him to the point where a peaceful end was preferable to continuing on with his existence.” 

“Vampire ethics,” Daniel snorts derisively. “He was a person. You killed him. Cut the bullshit.” 

“You consume a hotdog to sustain yourself nearly every day. A living creature dies after a life spent in misery all for the sake of your appetite,” Armand points out. 

“False equivalency. A human being isn’t a cow.” 

“A vampire isn’t a human.” 

“You used to be,” Daniel objects. “So the other guy told me, at least.” 

“I was once,” Armand nods. “And my mortal existence was filled with the same violence, the same callous disregard that you show to the cow. You consider me evil, Daniel, but you spend your waking life obsessed with the evil of your own species. Perhaps it would be more true to conclude that all of life requires a certain degree of necessary evil. That our sanity depends on our ability to tolerate or ignore the cruelty required for our own survival.” 

“In that case, guess I’ll go insane,” Daniel retorts. 

His fear has entirely transformed now into cold disgust. This creature, this monster might still decide to eat him. But he won’t surrender. He’ll make the bastard fight for it, make him choke on it, show him exactly what he is. 

“I thought,” Armand says, jolting him out of his thoughts. His voice seems smaller suddenly. “I thought you might ask to interview me.” 

“I don’t really do that kind of thing anymore,” Daniel says. “Ten years of this job has taken some of the shine off of the whole ‘sympathetic, self-loathing murderer’ angle.” 

Daniel feels a sudden sense of relief as he says it. It takes him a moment to realize why, but it finally comes to him when he notices that the vampire has finally lowered his gaze. 

“Daniel,” Armand says weakly. 

Although there is no actual difference, he seems to shrink in on himself. The inhuman apparition becomes a lost child, and Daniel cannot confidently assert which one of those was the mask. The abrupt transformation is nearly as jarring as his initial appearance. 

“Daniel, I sometimes wish you could remember, but…” 

“Remember?” 

“Just rest,” the vampire begs him, stepping forward. Daniel lunges for the phone. “Rest, please, rest and forget it all. Forget what I am. Forget me entirely.” 

Daniel wakes up to a ringing phone. He is at home, sunlight streaming in through the window of his bedroom. 

“Molloy,” his editor growls as soon as he picks up. “It’s half past nine. Where the hell are you?” 

“On my way,” he lies, diving into his closet to search for the cleanest available shirt. 

“First the fucking guard, now this shit,” his editor rants into the phone. “It’ll be a miracle if we go to print on time at this rate.” 

 

—

 

Daniel Molloy jerks awake roughly, then quickly releases his grip. 

He is curled around a woman, her body soft and warm in his arms. Her hair smells like flowers and it makes his face itch. He thinks he might love her. 

Which is why he doesn’t want to wake her. He’s notorious for his restless sleep. It’s not exactly nightmares, but for nearly ten years he has had this weird habit of waking up for no reason at all, completely convinced that something is in his bedroom watching him sleep. 

Some might call it paranoia. He suspects it's just part of who he is—searching for the sinister everywhere, unwilling to accept the quiet dark for being what it seems. 

As he settles his head back down on the pillow, he hears a faint sound from the kitchen. The cat, he tells himself. Probably the cat up on the counter again. 

He waits a few more seconds, willing himself to fall back asleep. His heart rate betrays him, gradually and inevitably speeding up the longer that he lies in the dark. Nothing to worry about, he chants in his mind, but it doesn’t help. 

He hears that soft sound again, but this time it is unmistakable. It sounds like the creak of a door opening. For no obvious reason, he has a sudden, horrific thought that it might be the microwave door, which makes no goddamn sense at all. 

With a reluctant groan, he pries himself up and out of bed, careful to avoid waking his bedmate up. Until he verifies that the kitchen remains empty of all but feline presences, he won’t be able to so much as shut his eyes. His own fault for picking a woman with a pet cat. 

Slowly, he walks to the bedroom door and peers down the hall. He forces every step, willing himself to be reasonable. He wakes up like this all the time. Nothing is ever there. 

He reaches the end of the hall. As he does, he hears a sudden burst of noise. A dark blur flies towards him and he instinctively flinches back. A horrible skittering rushes towards his feet. 

The cat. Daniel could nearly weep with relief. It is just the big tabby cat racing away down the hallway. He exhales a shaky breath. 

He nearly turns around and pads back to bed, to the woman waiting for him there. But instinct holds him to the plan. He’ll just do one lap around the kitchen, just to prove to himself that everything is fine. 

The apartment’s kitchen and living room are lit at night by the blue-green glow of a neon sign across the street, advertising an all-night pharmacy. It transforms the room into a landscape of odd, looming shadows. Daniel peers out around the corner, scanning the room for any sign of motion. 

Nothing. But for some reason, he cannot let go of his breath. 

One of the shadows abruptly moves. Daniel gasps. He staggers back, wildly groping for something to swing as a weapon. 

“Wait,” a whisper splits through the dark. “Don’t scream. Be calm.” 

Daniel, to his own surprise, does not scream. This must be okay, he thinks to himself. Despite the fear crashing through his nerves, he does not shake and he does not run. 

“Who are you?” he asks instead, squinting into the dark. 

The shape of a tall, lean person steps further into the blue light streaming through the window. He is dark-skinned, his profile made clear against the neon backdrop, revealing a long, narrow face. 

“Upstairs neighbor,” he reassures Daniel. “I’ve got the spare key. Didn’t realize my friend had… company tonight.” 

“The neighbor,” Daniel repeats skeptically. He feels oddly distant from his own emotions, as though everything has flattened slightly. In a detached way, he notices that he is still afraid, but it seems irrelevant at the moment. “Thought you’d pop by for a visit in the dead of night, then?” 

“I work nights,” the neighbor explains without any apparent concern. “Just finished my shift. I’ve been keeping my insulin cold down here while the landlord takes his time repairing my refrigerator.” 

It is, Daniel considers, a reasonable story. He’s pretty sure it isn’t true, which doesn’t bode well, but at least the details kind of add up. 

“Okay, neighbor,” Daniel says, slowly advancing into the room. “You want me to lock up behind you?” 

“Thank you for understanding,” the neighbor says with a slight nod of his head. “I know it must seem unusual.”

“Just a little.” Daniel’s hard smile barely shows in the half-lit room. “Most women living in the city don’t tend to lend out their spare keys to guys looking to make nocturnal visits.” 

“I assure you, there’s nothing between us,” the neighbor laughs lightly. “She’s a kind soul. That is all.” 

“Incredibly kind.” 

“Easy to love,” the neighbor adds. “Don’t you think?” 

“She won me over with her schoolboy sense of humor and her mean game of pool. Not her penchant for hospitality,” Daniel replies. 

The neighbor smiles slightly as he turns to look towards the window. With the blue light bathing his face, Daniel notices that it makes his eyes look very strange. In the neon glow, they appear yellow-orange, almost feline. 

“Falling in love,” the neighbor says gently. “It makes everything else seem so trivial, doesn’t it?” 

“Not everything,” Daniel says pointedly, glancing at the door. 

“Then you haven’t allowed it to. Let it, Daniel. It’s the only thing. The only real thing.” 

Those yellow-orange eyes are fixed on his, pupils widening with every word. The emotional numbness steals away gradually. Daniel’s palms are starting to sweat. 

“Spoken like somebody with first-hand knowledge,” he says neutrally instead, hoping to get just a little bit more. 

The neighbor’s brows tilt, turning his face into a picture of yearning sadness. Everything is blue, black, and yellow—a surreal portrait. 

“Yes,” he admits. “Many times.” 

“Many times?” Daniel inquires, lifting an eyebrow. “Doesn’t that, I don’t know, kinda cheapen the whole experience?” 

“Not at all. I would relive it a thousand times if I could—just the fall. The moment when you feel your entire being transformed by love. The breathless step over the edge. Painful, but the sweet kind of pain.” 

The yellow-orange eyes close, transforming the neighbor’s face once more into a human visage. A young man, distinctively handsome in a way that is somehow archaic. 

“It sours eventually. Or rots. Or burns out. The more you know of one another, the harder it is to preserve.” 

“Agree to disagree, I think,” Daniel shrugs. 

“Then perhaps you haven’t yet fallen. Pointless to try to lie, Daniel.” 

“Pointless, huh?” Daniel shoots back, finally taking the opening. “In that case, mind telling me why you seem to know my name, neighbor? And, for that matter, where is that insulin you mentioned? Must be warming up fast. Funny, if you drop by often, why didn’t the cat seem to like the look of you?” 

The man who is definitely not the upstairs neighbor freezes. Daniel’s heart thunders in his chest. 

He thinks that he ought to be preparing to fight, but another part of him warns that it would be hopeless to try. It makes no rational sense. The other guy is taller than him, but Daniel is scrappy. Still, he cannot shake the feeling that if it came to blows, Daniel would go down faster than a wet piece of tissue paper. 

“You’re afraid,” the imposter finally says, no longer bothering with his pleasant, conversational tone. “You think that you ought to run. But you never run.” 

“I never run?” Daniel echoes. That turn of phrase again, like they’ve known each other for a very long time. 

“Threats, danger, risk—you fear them the same as any other,” the imposter tells him, his voice hushed, almost awed. “But you react to that fear by digging in. You seek out peril, provoke it, chase the bear back to the cave with nothing more than a loud bark.” 

“Or maybe I just don’t like the idea of being the guy who runs screaming out of here and abandons a sleeping woman to somebody like you.” 

The imposter’s lips quirk at one corner. 

“She’s never been in any danger.” 

“Have I?” Daniel shoots back. 

The imposter answers the question in a roundabout manner. He flashes forward and slams them both against the wall. Daniel bites his tongue, tastes metal, and sees white lights flashing as his skull impacts the plaster. Before he can recover enough to even consider trying to escape, the imposter leans forward and kisses him. 

“Again,” the imposter whispers against his lips. “We’ll do it again soon. I’ll be a stranger again, which will make it sweeter.” 

Daniel has to admit that the lunatic was onto something earlier. He’s never been good with serious relationships. The work, the drugs, the drug that is the work—those always eventually drove away anyone he tried to keep. And he now he finally possesses some hard evidence to suggest that there may be something seriously scrambled up in his head. 

Because Daniel is more afraid than he thinks he’s ever been in his entire life. And what he wants to do in response is kiss the motherfucker right back, throw him off, play out this twisted game until he finally figures out how to win it. 

“Rest, now.” Bloodied lips press against his forehead. 

In the morning, Daniel has a headache. The woman he thinks he might love brings him a cup of coffee while he’s still in bed. Her tabby cat has curled up on his chest, purring contentedly. 

“Did I wake you last night?” he asks. “People say I’m a bit restless.” 

“No,” she says with a small smile. “But if you’re tired, we can always sleep in. I don’t have anywhere else to be.” 

Daniel pinches the bridge of his nose. He knows what the headache means. He keeps his habit mostly under control, but at this point, he can’t just quit. 

“Don’t tempt me,” he groans, pecking her on the cheek as he rolls back to his feet and starts tugging on his shirt. “I’m supposed to be talking to a source at the County Clerk’s office by eleven.” 

 

—

 

Daniel Molloy’s eyes snap open as a door swings ajar, allowing light to come pouring into the bedroom. 

In those initial moments of consciousness, three things occur to him in rapid succession: he is still three months clean; and, there is no rule that says just because he’s not shooting up heroin anymore he can’t get totally sloshed; and, he still really shouldn’t have done this at Alice’s birthday party. 

He can still hear the muffled sound of music and conversation from down the hall. That suggests that he hasn’t been out for that long. Paired with the fact that he is definitely still a little drunk, Daniel supposes that it must be still before one or two in the morning. 

“I’m good, I’m good,” Daniel groans, raising an arm to shield his face. 

“Oh,” a surprised voice says. “I didn’t realize—I’m sorry! Were you sleeping?” 

Daniel blinks a few times until his eyes adjust and he can see the person who has just stumbled into his bedroom. He doesn’t recognize the guy. Then again, he doesn’t recognize an embarrassing number of the people at this party, which may have been part of the reason for getting very drunk. 

The guy looks a few years younger than him, probably in his mid-twenties. He looks like he might be from India or somewhere thereabouts, but his accent marks him as European. Spanish or French or maybe Italian? He wears a pale blue button-down shirt tucked into tight denim, showing off his slim legs and well-muscled chest. 

“Just resting my eyes,” Daniel mumbles, resisting the urge to say something acerbic and cutting. “Uh, do I know you?” 

“Amadeo,” the young guy says with a smile. He’s got a great smile. “I came with Marius? You might not remember.” 

“Marius, right, the one with the…” Daniel trails off, as no facts about the elusive Marius have materialized in the time it took him to introduce the sentence. “Yeah, I got nothing. No offense.” 

“None taken,” Amadeo says lightly. He pulls the door most of the way closed again, but does not leave. “Memory is a funny thing. And our mutual friend Jack Daniels likely did not help with that.” 

Daniel begins to feel awkward lying down on the bed in front of someone else standing, so he slowly pushes himself back to sitting on the edge of the bed. The ground spins a little as he raises his head. 

“Mutual friend?” Daniel grumbles. “What are you talking about? I can’t stand the guy.” 

Amadeo pauses for a moment, staring at him blankly. 

He has weird eyes, Daniel thinks. He can’t really see close enough to say why. 

Then, Amadeo throws back his head and laughs. It is a rich, delighted sound. Infectious, one might even say. Daniel feels oddly flattered, as though his fairly cursory quip had been some great achievement in the genre of humor. 

“Oh, I like you Daniel,” Amadeo declares, perching on the edge of the bed as well. “I’m so glad we came to your party tonight. You delight me.” 

“Hmm,” Daniel grunts in response. “Anyways. Can I help you find something?” 

“A moment of peace and quiet,” Amadeo replies with a slightly mischievous little smirk. 

He’s very good, Daniel thinks. Practiced and well-rehearsed in his easy charisma. Even slightly drunk and very much not thinking clearly, Daniel can’t turn off the investigator in his head. Where the hell would Alice have met this guy?

“I’m not really in the mood for company, man.” 

“Would you prefer to pout alone in your room?” Amadeo counters, defiant, but in a sweetly playful sort of way. Like he is daring Daniel to deny him. Like he might even enjoy being put in his place. 

Is he younger than he looks? Or just leaning into the part?

“I think I should probably go to sleep and face up to my shitty choices tomorrow,” Daniel grudgingly admits. “My girlfriend is… probably very right to be pissed about this.” 

“She is angry at what?” Amadeo asks, twisting his legs around so that he now sits fully on the bed. “That you enjoyed yourself? That you laughed and danced and were drunk? Is that not why we all came tonight?” 

“It’s complicated,” Daniel replies vaguely. 

“Life is simple,” Amadeo corrects him. “Our minds make it complicated. I like the way that you keep smiling even though you are trying very hard to be unhappy.” 

The room is still totally dark apart from the sliver of light through the door. Amadeo sits very close to him now. Daniel can smell something fresh and vaguely floral in the air. He wonders idly, if he were to reach out and touch his companion’s soft, wavy hair, would that be where the scent comes from? 

“I’m not trying,” Daniel says, and his voice sounds rougher than he intends. “I’m a prematurely bitter asshole.” 

“You burn hot, that’s all,” Amadeo shakes his head. “I’m the same way. Marius says I need to watch my temper. But I cannot change who I am.” 

Daniel feels a hand lightly rest on his knee. It feels… it feels like something he wouldn’t be allowing if he wasn’t still stupidly drunk. 

“Look, I’m… I’m cool, but…” Daniel gives a significant look down the hall. “It’s not even that I wouldn’t be interested. But you know I’ve got a girlfriend.” 

“I’ve got a boyfriend,” Amadeo shrugs. “He doesn’t mind.”

“I’ve heard that one before,” Daniel shakes his head. “Usually right before some jealous psycho tries to kick my ass.” 

“Marius likes to share,” Amadeo protests. “We have an agreement. He takes care of me. I serve his needs, attend to his friends when he asks, and then I do as I please. And if he does get upset, well… his anger can be its own kind of fun too.”

Amadeo’s tone is still light, playful—provocative without being irritating. And yet there is a moment when the light catches his eyes again and Daniel thinks to himself that something is not quite right here. 

“He sounds like a dick,” Daniel says. 

Amadeo’s face goes still. 

“What?” 

“I—” Daniel clears his throat. “I mean, it’s none of my business, man.” 

“No. Say what you are thinking.” 

Amadeo’s voice drops to a lower register. Daniel frowns. Had his accent just changed as well, or is he making that up in his head? 

“Marius. I don’t know what he does to take care of you, but he has no right to get pissed off if he’s the one telling you that you can do as you please.” 

“He gave me everything,” Amadeo snarls. His voice is definitely different now. “He saved me. He loved me. No one else ever did, but he loved me. And when I am dreadful, when I am drunk and violent and reckless, he sets me right again.” 

“Nothing like beating on your boyfriend to demonstrate your moral superiority,” Daniel cuts in snidely. “Confirm a hunch for me, how old is Marius?” 

He immediately regrets it. Amadeo’s face falls and then he buries it in his hands. 

Shit, he thinks to himself. Fantastic work again from Daniel Molloy. He shouldn’t be taking any of this out on the damn kid. 

“Even like this, you find me revolting,” a voice whispers through Amadeo’s fingers. 

Daniel’s brow furrows. There it is again. Wrong accent. Lower register. Like someone else entirely is talking. 

“Even when I am him again, the one everybody always found so… charming. I thought that maybe… but you are repelled by him.” 

Daniel hesitates. He isn’t sure if he should leave or say something or maybe call some sort of hotline. 

“I wish you had never seen him,” that stranger’s voice says from Amadeo’s lips. “I want you to forget him. He’s dead and buried anyways. Rest. Don’t look at him. Don’t look at me. Rest!” 

Daniel feels his eyes roll back in his head as he drops. 

On the morning after the party, Daniel wakes up with a pounding hangover. 

The house is empty. Someone else has already cleared away the dirty cups and put the empty bottles into the dumpster downstairs. Daniel eats a slice of cake for breakfast and immediately regrets it. 

Before he calls Alice to apologize, he wonders if she ever came to bed. He slept like a brick last night. The booze knocked him out. Maybe, he hopes, she had come and gone and he just hadn’t noticed. 

 

—

 

A muffled crash tears Daniel Molloy from a deep sleep.

The hotel mattress is lumpy, the carpet stained. He probably should have shelled out for something nicer, or at least somewhere with a chain to latch the door. 

Out in the hall, he hears the sound of pounding footsteps. Somebody must be running down the stairs in heavy boots. He considers pulling a pillow over his head and ignoring it, but the racket is loud enough that he probably won’t be able to get back to sleep. 

Daniel sits up and glances at the door, wondering if he should go shout at the assholes to keep it down. As his eyes adjust to the dark, however, all such thoughts are driven from his mind by one singular fact. 

There is someone else in the room with him. 

Daniel stares at the door. Another pair of eyes stare back. 

“Hello?” Daniel asks, which is probably idiotic, but it is the first thing that comes to mind. 

No one responds. 

“Who are you?” Daniel demands, heart rate rapidly accelerating. 

The eyes stare out of the dark, but there is no response. 

“I’m serious,” Daniel threatens. “Start talking. Now.” 

He gropes blindly for the telephone with one hand, unwilling to look away from the dark shape and the pair of eyes beside his hotel room door. 

This time, however, he hears a soft voice in response. It is nearly inaudibly quiet, but after a moment of listening, he realizes that part of the reason that he cannot understand is because the voice is not speaking in English. 

“ Allahumma rahmataka arju fala takilni ila nafsi tarfata ‘aynin wa aslih li sha’ni kullahu la ilaha ila anta .” 

Arabic, Daniel determines after a few seconds of listening to the whispered words. It doesn’t have the cadence of conversation. Prayer, maybe? 

“Do you speak English?” Daniel asks, trying to level his voice now that he realizes part of the reason why the person has not replied might be because they share no common language. “Can you understand me?” 

“Help me.” 

This time, the voice rises above a whispered murmur, although it is still very quiet. Daniel’s mind tries to piece together the picture. He detects a strong accent. Not a native speaker, probably not fluent. Words kept very quiet and the speaker remains curled up in the dark corner of the room. Hiding from something? 

“I—alright. It’s gonna be alright. I’m gonna get you some help,” Daniel promises. 

In the back of his thoughts, he still feels a prickle of suspicion, but he does his best to suppress it. Years working as a reporter have made him a paranoid bastard even at the best of times. 

He clicks on the lamp beside his bed. The dark shape by the door curls up on itself, like an insect retreating at the first glimpse of light. Daniel rolls out of bed and slowly approaches, trying to get a better look at who is, for some reason, hiding in his hotel room. 

The first thing he notices is that the person on the ground has blood spilling down the front of his shirt. 

He looks young, probably no older than twenty-five, Daniel guesses. By the color of his skin, combined with the Arabic prayer, Daniel guesses that he must be from somewhere in the Middle East, or maybe Pakistan. He is dressed in tattered jeans and a loose shirt that seems torn around the neck. It hangs off of his slim frame, the fresh blood stains sticking it to the young man’s chest in places. Daniel also thinks that there might be something odd about the angle of the young man’s left leg. He holds it gingerly, stretching it out so that it will not bear any weight or move. 

And most striking, perhaps all the more striking due to its combination with everything else, is the young man’s face. He looks pulled from a painting, otherworldly, beautiful in a way that makes it difficult to imagine that he is real. His lips are perfectly formed, his cheekbones high and prominent, a sharp jaw softened by waves of long, black hair. 

“Help me,” the young man whispers again and then glances at the door fearfully, trying to pull himself further back into the corner with a painful wince. 

“You’re hiding from somebody?” Daniel guesses, then points at the door. “Someone in the hall?” 

The young man seems not to entirely understand, but he shakes his head in protest when Daniel’s hand so much as approaches the door. 

“I think I should call somebody. The police? Or… I could call a hospital. Are you hurt?” Daniel blunders on, unsure what the best course of action is. 

None of his illustrious career has prepared him for this, naturally. If someone barged into his hotel room looking for a detailed explanation of environmental legal loopholes, he could rattle it off from memory, but of course when there’s a genuine emergency, he’s useless. 

“Stay here, please,” the young man abruptly pleads. He seems fixated on the door, apparently uncertain if Daniel intends to throw him back out into the hall. “Please.”

“I’m not gonna throw you out like this,” Daniel promises. “Uh, but… I feel like somebody else should really be here to help you. I don’t really know what to do. Uh. What’s your name?” 

The young man does not speak. He lapses back to his mute stare, those big golden eyes wide with fear as he looks up at Daniel. 

“I’m Daniel,” Daniel finally says, gesturing to himself. “Daniel Molloy.” 

The young man’s eyebrows draw together, as though he is suddenly having to think very hard. Finally, he opens his mouth again. 

“Arun,” he replies slowly, as though the name is not entirely comfortable in his mouth. 

“Arun,” Daniel nods, relieved to have made at least some sort of progress. “Are you hurt? Bleeding?” 

He tries to point to the bloody shirt. Arun flinches back as he moves towards him. 

“Shit,” Daniel swears, started by the reaction and unnerved by his own incompetence. “Sorry. I’m not trying to—” 

“Stay?” Arun asks again, a shaky whisper. “Can I stay?” 

“Yes, stay,” Daniel agrees, glancing back at the phone again. 

He definitely should have already called someone. The police? But what if he calls the police and it turns out that whoever is out there in the hall looking for Arun has already told their side of the story first? Are the cops really likely to listen to a scared kid who barely speaks English and is almost certainly in the country without a visa? 

Arun relaxes slightly. He still won’t take his eyes off of Daniel, but he no longer holds his body so tight that he trembles. 

“Here,” Daniel finally decides, reaching for the blanket that covers his bed. “Are you cold? You can use this.” 

He holds out the blanket. Arun regards it for a long moment. Then he finally reaches out and hesitantly accepts the gift. Daniel watches as he holds it to his chest, hiding the blood and the torn collar of his shirt. 

“Can I call somebody for you? A friend? Home?” Daniel asks after another pause. “Where is your home?” 

Arun’s eyes narrow at that. Then he merely shakes his head. 

“I could take you to a doctor,” Daniel offers. “A doctor won’t get you in trouble.” 

Again, a shake of the head. Daniel frowns. He turns back to the phone, wracking his brain for who he could possibly call. 

His thoughts are interrupted by the abrupt sensation of something cold touching his leg. He whips back around to find that it is Arun. The young man has crawled forward to curl his arm around Daniel’s leg, pressing his face into Daniel’s inner thigh. His hands are freezing. 

“Let me stay,” he begs again, voice muffled where his lips are pressed against Daniel’s skin. 

Daniel resists the urge to leap back. A flood of conflicting feelings washes over him. Disgust, but mingled with pity, with compassion. This is wrong, but poor fucking kid. 

And yet he still senses that faint background radiation of misgiving. None of this is right. 

“You can stay,” Daniel promises, inching slowly back. “Let me go. Arun, you can just let me go.” 

Arun blinks up at him. 

“What, then?” he asks hesitantly. “What do you want?” 

“It’s not a bargain. You don’t need to give me anything. I’m just gonna call a doctor and—” 

“No!” Arun begs, clinging tighter. “No, please! I want to stay!” 

Daniel reaches out to try to pull Arun’s hands off of him and the reaction is instantaneous. The young man recoils so quickly it hardly seems possible. He curls back up in the corner, breathing quick and shallow. His eyes are squeezed closed, as though he expects to be struck across the face. 

Daniel does not say anything for a long moment. He ought to call somebody. He isn’t sure Arun is going to let him call somebody. He feels guilty, dirty somehow, and confused. Nothing seems entirely real. 

Think, he commands himself. You might not be the right person for this, but you’ve still got your eyes and ears. Think about the situation for a second and make a decision. 

The facts paint a picture, but the picture is full of holes. There is a young man in his room. He doesn’t want to go back out into the hall. He’s from somewhere else. Where? Inconclusive, move on. 

He has blood on his shirt, but it might not be his own blood. Nothing about the way he moves so far suggests a puncture wound or a cut on his chest. And there isn’t any blood or swelling on his face that would imply that it dripped down. 

Someone else's blood, then. Defensive violence? He is walking with a limp after all. His right leg looked injured when he came in. No—it was his left. 

Daniel pauses. Then he furrows his brow. 

“Did you hurt your leg?” he asks in his gentlest tone of voice. “Which one? Where does it hurt? It’s okay. You can just point.” 

Arun reaches down and tenderly presses on his right ankle. His lip curls back as he does it, as though even the light touch hurts him. 

“You sure?” 

Arun tilts his head to the side slightly. 

“Can I stay, Daniel?” he whispers again. 

“I don’t know,” Daniel says slowly. He feels like he might be sick. “I’d kinda like to know which fucking ankle you rolled first.” 

Arun’s wide, wounded eyes meet his for a long moment. Golden. Such a bizarre color. 

“You tried to be so kind to him,” the man on the floor murmurs. His words are crisp now, although his tone is faintly melancholy. “You really did.” 

“Oh, what the fuck?” Daniel half-shouts, rising from the bed and taking a step back. “I don’t know what kind of sick fucking joke this is man, but you need to get the hell out of my room right now!” 

The man whose name is clearly not Arun rises gracefully. He needs no assistance to stand. The torn shirt hangs off of one shoulder, which Daniel realizes abruptly is far more muscular than he noticed before. This is no starved kid. This is a fully grown man in the prime of health. 

“I had to know, Daniel,” he says, almost apologetically. “I had to.” 

“You’re crazy. You’re completely fucking nuts. Get the hell out!” Daniel swears, brandishing a book from the nightstand in case he needs something to throw. “You’re a complete fucking psychopath, pretending to be some sort of—!” 

“Not pretending,” not-Arun interrupts. “You have no right to be upset with me. You need not carry the knowledge of this any longer.” 

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I’m going to take the memory from you,” not-Arun says calmly, as though that is a very normal and possible thing to do. 

“You can’t just—?” Daniel tries to explain, too stunned to make any kind of rational point. “That doesn’t make it better!” 

“Why not?” not-Arun says innocently, looking genuinely perplexed by this response. 

“Because you did it, you did this, you did this fucked up thing to me, you still—!” 

“Would you have told him to remember?” not-Arun demands and it takes Daniel a long moment to realize that he is talking about himself, the persona he had adopted. “Should he have been made to keep all of those unthinkable deeds in his mind forever? I do this because I am merciful, Daniel.” 

“You did this and you never gave me a fucking choice about any of it.” 

“I did not do it,” non-Arun interrupts. “You never saw me. You never met me. You won’t ever think of this again. Rest, Daniel. It never happened. I never did it. I never existed. If I did wrong, it did not happen. If it hurt, it will not anymore. You can just rest.” 

Daniel wakes up in his hotel room the next morning, sweaty and over-warm. 

He rubs his damp face with one hand and peels the blankets off from where they are tucked around his chest. Normally, he sleeps with only a sheet, but for some reason he must have wrapped the blanket around himself during the night. 

Not a bad hotel for the price, Daniel thinks as he stretches. In the morning light, he can no longer make out the stains on the carpet. 

 

—

 

A train passes by Daniel Molloy’s apartment.

Perhaps that is why he wakes up. The window glass rattles slightly, the floor vibrates. He isn’t sure.

It could also be the light. New York is brighter than San Francisco. He hadn’t pulled the blinds all the way closed and a bit of ambient yellow streams in through the gaps, striping his wall in amber bars.

It doesn’t matter. He wakes up.

When he opens his eyes, he sees someone at the foot of the bed watching him. 

It is difficult to determine much about the face. The light through the blinds makes it difficult to interpret the whole clearly. There is a mouth, a nose, eyes the same shade as the streetlamps outside, but it never quite resolves into a whole person. 

Daniel lies still. For reasons he cannot quite understand, he neither moves nor makes a sound. It seems almost like it would be dangerous to do so. Like anything he does to disturb the stillness might be fatal.

The face watches him and he watches back. As the seconds tick away, he sees a slight motion. A dark line streaks down from one of the watcher’s eyes. Then a moment later, another.

Daniel waits breathlessly. The eyes that watch him are dark yellow, but the liquid streaking down from them looks almost red. He does not understand.

In the dark, he hears a shaky intake of breath. Then, the eyes squeeze shut. More red. Labored, painful breathing. Daniel does not understand for a long while that this is the sound of the creature weeping. 

The moment stretches on and on. He lies frozen in his bed. Quiet, shuddering sobs are the only sound that breaks the quiet. Red streaks down, vertical lines criss-crossing with the horizontal pattern of the blinds. 

Finally, the train comes by again and breaks the spell. Daniel feels the rumble far below his apartment. His eyes shift away for a split second, and when he looks back, the weeping face is gone. 

Slowly, Daniel feels his eyes sagging closed. Sleep drags him back into its embrace. As he drifts off, a voice whispers into his ear, “it was a dream. Rest.” 

In the morning, Daniel struggles to wake up. His whole body feels heavy. When he sees himself in the mirror, there are dark bags under his eyes. 

Bad dreams, he tells himself. It’s nothing more than bad dreams. 

 

—

 

There have been plenty of nights when Daniel Molloy has slept alone. 

The night after he flies back from Paris without Alice, Daniel finds that he cannot get his eyes to close. The apartment feels too big without her. The cat wanders around aimlessly, meowing for a woman who will not walk through the door at any moment. On the plane, it was easier to pretend that everything was fine. 

He had asked, she had said no, and now they would continue on with their lives. It’s not like he’s ever been a particular romantic at heart. Part of why he and Alice had worked for as long as they somehow did was because she didn’t mind his somewhat lacking emotional side. They were good at being adults like that, or maybe they were right up until the moment when he was asking and she was slowly, painfully, shaking her head. 

It is after midnight when he finally slips into a doze, propped up in bed with a book open on his chest. He does not know how long he is actually out for. When his eyes flutter open again, it feels like he might have only been resting them for a few seconds. 

A weight sinks down next to him on the bed. Half-dozing, Daniel reaches an arm out. Alice, he thinks, even though it makes no sense. Still, he expects to feel Alice. 

Instead, his hand brushes against cold skin. With a jolt, he startles awake, the book falling from his chest and landing, pages askew, on the floor. Someone is lying beside him in the dark, but it is definitely not Alice. 

“Daniel,” a smooth, masculine voice addresses him. “Turn on your personal computer. I want to examine it.” 

Daniel replies by screaming as loud as he can. 

“Quiet,” the voice commands, and Daniel feels his throat constrict, cutting off the sound. “There is no need for that. You are in no danger.” 

“Who… are…?” Daniel tries to rasp out, his throat contracting painfully with each word. 

“Armand,” the voice in the dark responds. “I am a vampire. You recall. You met my companion, Louis, some years ago in San Francisco.” 

“But… what… why?” Daniel manages to choke out around the strange stranglehold that Armand apparently holds him in without so much as placing a finger on his neck. 

“As I said, there is no need to be alarmed,” Armand’s crisp, business-like voice chides him. “I have no intention of draining your blood tonight. Turn on your personal computer for me, Daniel. I wish to examine one.” 

Abruptly, the pressure in his throat releases. Daniel draws a deep, panicked breath and then chokes. He feels the weight beside him rapidly shift and then Armand is tugging him up to his feet, dragging him in the direction of his office. 

“Hey,” Daniel finally objects. “Hey ! I’m not showing you anything. You broke into my room, you claim to be a… an actual vampire—you can’t just say that!” 

A pair of very firm hands deposit him into his desk chair. Daniel waits for a response to his question.

“I am a vampire,” the voice eventually reiterates. “You may call me Armand. If you desire proof, I could put a fang into your neck to demonstrate.”

Daniel feels cool breath against his throat, the same place where his old scar remains partially concealed by the collar of his shirt. A shiver runs down his spine at the feeling. 

“And why exactly does a vampire need to break into my house and demand that I show him a computer? Aren’t you supposed to be hundreds of years old? Shouldn’t you be able to figure it out?” 

His finger finally finds the power button. 

A green glow shines out from the screen, illuminating the man-vampire-lunatic who has broken into his apartment.

He does, Daniel must concede, look the part. Armand is tall and statuesque, perfectly curled dark hair framing an elegant face. He wears a button-down shirt and expensive looking trousers. 

There is a shocking discontinuity about his face. The bones of it, the shapes, are the proportions of an angel. His deep amber eyes are nothing but predator. Angel and demon, all wrapped up in one, Daniel thinks.

“I want you to show me, Daniel,” Armand says, clearly unmoved by Daniel’s scorn. “Type into the machine. Have it run code for me.”

“A creature like you could have had your pick of technical guys,” Daniel points out instead, leveraging Armand’s curiosity as his one, highly tenuous bargaining chip. “Why go for a reporter instead? Why me?”

“Because,” Armand blinks, his voice oddly flat as he speaks, “you are my favorite.”

“Favorite?” Daniel makes a sound between a strangled cough and a laugh. “Me?” 

“I could hardly believe it myself,” Armand replies lightly. “But I have come to accept it. Now, show me your machine. I’ll put you to sleep after; don’t worry.” 

Cold, soft fingers pat Daniel’s cheek. The gesture is fond, familiar, and slightly skin-crawling.

Daniel gives the vampire a dubious glance. Everything about the situation is firstly, insane, and secondly, suspicious as all hell. The holes in this story are wide enough to be coal mines. 

Still, he cannot deny that a small part of him remains… curious. The wound of San Francisco has scabbed over with time. Can he really turn away the opportunity to pry for a little information? Does he even really have the option to disobey? He’ll live or die at the whim of this… person? Monster? Thing? Might as well play it out and find an angle to work with.

“So,” Daniel says, cautiously reaching for a floppy disk to insert. “Spreadsheets?”

Armand tilts his head to the side like a cat about to pounce.

“Maybe we should start with files, uh, generally.”

About twenty minutes later, Daniel has learned several things of doubtful journalistic significance about the vampire Armand. The most obvious is that he is obsessive and meticulous in his observations. He requires Daniel to repeat every step of the process four or five times, not because he cannot remember or comprehend it, but because he wants to watch the computer perform the operation again and again. 

What Daniel gleans inadvertently from this is a more subtle realization—he suspects that the vampire has been quietly watching him for some time. He anticipates too much. When Daniel needs to look up a code, he hands Daniel his notebook in the top left drawer without comment.

“Did you wait until she was gone for this?” Daniel finally asks, as his patience begins to grow thin with the task of reformatting his finances. 

“I didn’t know, Daniel,” Armand replies, voice softer this time. “I couldn’t have warned you that she would refuse.”

“I didn’t ask that,” Daniel snaps, a prickle of fear mingling with his irritation. 

“You thought it,” Armand shrugs. “I am not the dreadful thing that you imagine. Even evil has degrees, Daniel. I am far from the worst it has to offer.”

“I asked if you waited to come here until you knew she would be gone,” Daniel repeats stiffly, swiveling the chair around to look the vampire in the face. Both of them are lit only by the painfully bright glow of the screen, lending an eerie pallor that drives away all but the darkest of shadows.

“I took the opportunity,” Armand admits. “It’s alright, Daniel. Come here. It’s alright.”

Daniel does not realize why his shoulders are shaking until he feels the cold arms circle around him and pull him close. He gasps in a breath, struggling to regain his composure. The bare skin of the vampire’s throat smells of jasmine. 

He does not understand why he has started crying. He hadn’t in Paris. He hadn’t on the plane. He hadn’t even when he was here alone. He can’t even remember wanting to.

But Armand’s touch is gentle and his skin is very soft. A feeling of bone-deep comfort overwhelms him. Care and concern pour out from Armand and Daniel wants nothing more than to climb onto his arms and be rocked to sleep. 

“Lay your head down,” Armand’s voice murmurs, low and honey-sweet. “I’ll hold you. It’s alright.”

Daniel sinks into the embrace gratefully. It all gets so heavy sometimes. He has been tired for years now, never able to sleep the exhaustion away. 

He feels a slight sharp pinch on his throat. The pain focuses his mind, but it is quickly replaced by a sensation that comes closer to absolute euphoria than discomfort. Armand’s lips are pressed against his neck, his tongue sliding over his skin, and Daniel feels stars bursting in his veins. The best high he ever had, he thinks wildly, but better.

His body spasms and he hears his lips emit a low groan. Armand smiles against him. His lips are warm now, almost human. Almost.

Then, Armand pulls back. Daniel gasps from the simultaneous ache and relief of it. He reacts on pure instinct. Better not to psychologize it too much, because he does not expect to like what he sees.

As Armand looks down at him, smiling in wonder, triumph, innocent ardor, Daniel grabs the vampire by the front of his shirt and yanks him down into a kiss.

It is not a sweet kiss. No more comfort to be found here. Daniel licks the last traces of his own blood from the vampire’s mouth and then surges up hard enough that their teeth click together. This time, it is Armand’s turn to tremble and gasp with unexpected pleasure. 

Daniel climbs out of the chair, straddling Armand’s lap and leaning against him until they are both down on the floor. Sharp teeth nip at his lower lip until it starts bleeding. Daniel snarls in response and returns the gesture.

Instead of a kiss, he bites down on Armand’s bottom lip hard. Hard enough, he thinks, to put him on the back foot for a second. The vampire does not flinch at the pain, but as more blood bursts into Daniel’s mouth, he suddenly goes still.

Daniel pulls back, swallowing and grinning with brutalized lips. It tastes of nothing but iron at first, but as soon as the blood washes down his throat, he feels an abrupt and ravenous desire for more. 

Armand stares at him, eyes wide and bloody mouth still slightly open. For a moment, it seems as though Daniel stands triumphant.

The memories return like a riptide current. 

They drag his legs out from under him, pull him under, steal the breath from his lungs. He is Daniel Molloy and he is looking at the vampire Armand, who is that same creature who sat at the foot of his bed one night and wept for hours and hours. He is Daniel Molloy and the vampire Armand is also Arun, crouched on the floor of his hotel and gingerly accepting the edge of a blanket. He is Daniel Molloy and he is drunk and the vampire Armand is also Amadeo, whose hand rests on his knee. 

More and more. He cannot stop what he has just started, even though it hurts like a bomb going off in his head. He is Daniel Molloy and Armand is slamming him into a wall as neon light gleams through the window. He is Daniel Molloy and there is Armand fresh from a kill at the door of his office. He is Daniel Molloy and his stomach roils as Armand pulls a partially liquified rat out of his microwave. 

He is Daniel Molloy and he has just nearly frozen to death on a park bench, but Armand is there. He is Daniel Molloy and he shoots up every time he’s bored, but Armand is there. He is Daniel Molloy and he is shivering, covered in his own sick, struggling to breathe, but Armand is there. He is Daniel Molloy and he is lying in the hospital with pneumonia and no one ever did say who brought him in, but Armand is there. 

Armand is there, has been there, has been there since the beginning. Since 1973. Daniel’s heart pounds. How had he forgotten? Armand was there too, in 1973. 

“No.” 

Armand’s voice breaks the silence, finally disrupting the torrent of fractured memories. 

“No, no, no, no ,” Armand whispers, chanting the word and shaking his head back and forth as though denying it can change what he has done. “You can’t. No. Daniel. You can’t. Stop it. You can’t remember me, stop it, stop it!” 

His voice rises on the last word and then cracks. 

“How many?” Daniel forces himself to mumble, although it is currently taking all of his strength to hold his head upright. 

“You were never supposed to see, never all of it, you can’t keep it! You have to forget it,” Armand pants, still shaking back and forth. “Daniel, you have to forget it!” 

“What am I to you?” Daniel whispers. “Why did you do it?” 

“It’s nothing,” Armand hisses, flashing forward and grabbing the sides of Daniel’s head in his overwhelmingly powerful grip. “I’m nothing to you. You’ve never seen me. We’re strangers. We’re only ever strangers.” 

“Wait,” Daniel tries to say, but his vision is already going grey at the edges. “Don’t—!” 

“Take me out of you. I don’t want to be in there. Let me go! Take me out of you!” 

Daniel’s head rolls back and he is gone. 

He wakes up on the floor of his office. There are drops of blood all down the front of his shirt. Alice is still not there. He has the worst migraine of his life. 

He calls a cab to take him to the hospital. After waiting for a few hours in the ER, a doctor pronounces him healthy. 

“Somnambulism,” the doctor writes as his diagnosis. 

“What?” Daniel asks. 

“Sleepwalking,” the doctor clarifies. “It’s often associated with people like you who have a history of disordered sleep.” 

 

—

 

Sleeping in a coffin feels absurd, Daniel Molloy thinks, and yet he can’t ignore the strange appeal. 

He has a bed right there, he keeps thinking to himself as he clambers in each night and closes the lid. He could tape something over the windows and be perfectly fine when dawn came. 

Still, he never actually ties it. There is something particularly appropriate in the feeling of swinging the lid shut and being completely alone and totally secure in the muffled dark. 

Daniel has not slept so well in years. Part of him wants to chalk it up to no longer being old and dying and constantly uncomfortable. But he can’t ignore the long and troubled history of insomnia that he has only very recently realized had a very simple cause.

He wishes he could feel something uncomplicated, that he could just hate the asshole. But the sudden context that came with ten years worth of restless nights changes things. 

He doesn’t know how to feel. For over ten years, he conducted the strangest and most disjointed interview of his career, obliquely revealing a creature who wanted more than anything to never be revealed. 

His Maker is gone, but Daniel shared blood with him. His Maker is gone, but Daniel finally has him now, lodged deep in his memory, preserved like an insect caught in amber. It’s no wonder that the vampire Armand hasn’t had the courage to show his face. 

It has been three months since Dubai. Daniel’s new, unfamiliar body collapses at the first sign of dawn and he rises only after the sunset. The blood and the sun have a powerful hold over his fledgling rhythms. 

But the book is nearly done. If anything can force him awake before the light has entirely gone, it is the desire to finish the last few sentences. 

He wakes earlier than normal one evening, and swings open the coffin lid. The room around him is still a dim red hue, windows plastered with covers, curtains drawn. Despite the dark, his vision now allows him to see with perfect clarity. 

And he does see something. 

His eyes pass over the room, then catch on something and flick back. A gleam in the dark. A shadow within shadows. 

As he rouses from his sleep, Daniel Molloy spots a pair of golden-yellow eyes watching at the threshold of the room. He stares back. Their eyes are a mirror now—the same shade of inhuman amber. Instead of a predator stalking its ignorant prey, they are a matched set. 

Daniel opens his mouth to say something. Before he can, the watcher melts back into the darkness and vanishes. 

He’ll be back, Daniel tells himself, unsure if the thought inspires dread or hope. He always comes back. 

 

Notes:

I wanted to call this fic "50 First Hates" but then I talked myself out of it :(