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"It can't be annoying if it's a legitimate question," Daniel said, and even as the words came out of his mouth he knew they meant he'd spent a lot of money over the years on couple's therapy sessions that he really had not been taking seriously.
Which maybe wasn't great—but on the other hand he was right, so it probably all balanced out.
Judging by the look on Armand's face, he didn't agree.
"Okay," Daniel said, giving it another go, "for you it's annoying, but for me it's a totally legitimate question. How's that for fair and balanced?"
They were leaning against the hood of the rental car, somewhere in the wilds of northwestern Nevada. Daniel was never going to work for a state tourism board, for multiple reasons, but if you asked him this part of the world had more things going for it than you might expect. Reno maybe didn't have all the glitz of Vegas, but for a vampire it provided its own appealing spin on dinner and a show. You found some glum gambler stumbling unnoticed out of a casino, pockets empty and credit cards maxed out, and a couple of hours later you were disposing of a corpse underneath the vastness of the desert night sky—a celestial light show that was impressive to any human and fucking astounding when seen through vampire eyes.
Gazing up at it made Daniel feel like he was tripping with a purity he hadn't experienced since the mid-to-late '70s. Armand didn't seem quite as impressed as Daniel was by the sheer existence of the Milky Way, but Daniel figured that was maybe par for the course when you'd been around for several centuries before the invention of modern street lighting. It was like Daniel listening to his sister's grandkid talk about the warm sonic qualities of vinyl.
Anyway.
Daniel poked Armand in the side. "Still haven't answered my question."
"I was considering it," Armand said, folding his arms, "from many angles. The nuances. The subtleties. The ethical concerns."
"So werewolves are real?"
"You may be American," Armand said, "but I'm quite certain you are capable of understanding sarcasm."
"And you might predate the concept of the modern nation state," Daniel shot back, "but are you certain you're capable of answering a direct fucking question?"
Armand turned to look at him, the starlight silvering his curls and carving out hollows beneath his cheekbones. It was like he'd been made for places like this, all silver-gilt shadows and a thin, insistent wind. "Yes."
There was a long moment of silence.
"You're fucking with me," Daniel said.
Armand snickered.
"This still doesn't answer my question," Daniel continued, craning his head back to follow the progress of a shooting star as it blazed a path through the atmosphere.
"Werewolves are mere stories to scare children with," Armand said.
"We're stories to scare children with."
Armand's fangs flashed briefly. "We are stories to scare everyone with. But... No. I have never heard tell of any of our kind encountering a werewolf. Witches, yes."
Daniel huffed. Witches. He knew all about witches. Or at least, he knew about that coven in Indianapolis that had hexed his hair off so thoroughly that it had taken five nights for it to grow back properly, and in the meanwhile made him look like a mutt that had picked up some kind of unusual mange. Daniel knew everything about witches that he wanted to know.
But that aside, witches were basically just regular humans who got freaky with demons in a different way to how the first vampires had gotten freaky with demons, at least according to the fragments of vampiric lore that Daniel had picked up so far—and Daniel didn't really like grounding his understanding of something in lore.
Lore wasn't the kind of thing you fact checked. If he ever started relying on lore, he might as well just give up and start his own "independent journalism" TikTok channel, or even worse, a podcast. See if he would be the person who finally provoked the Pulitzer Board into revoking an award.
"Okay, so yes to witches, absence of evidence to werewolves," Daniel said, ticking them off on his fingers. "What else?"
Armand stared.
"Don't give me that look," Daniel said, sticking his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket. "I know you know what I mean. What else is out there? Banshees? Chupacabras? Fairies? Oh, are there mermaids? Or mermen, whatever, I'm not picky."
Armand shrugged. "Not to my certain knowledge." His tone hadn't shifted from its usual smooth casualness, but Daniel had been around him too long—had been a journalist for too long—not to pick up on that careful phrasing.
"But to your uncertain knowledge?"
"There were some who swore that they had seen a shoal of merpeople in the Seine, back in my first decades in Paris. That they had circled the Île de la Cité, singing a siren's song to seduce unwitting men to fling themselves into the river where they could be coupled with, their semen roughly milked from them before they were eaten in an orgiastic frenzy that stained the very waters red."
"Christ." Daniel blinked. "Jesus."
"Of course," Armand went on, as tranquil as if he was making small talk about mild spring weather, "I did not witness any of this myself. And several of the coven members were convinced that Jacques had made it all up as a distraction because he was merely embarrassed to have tripped and fallen from the Pont Neuf and needed an excuse for why his clothes were so wet. If you had known Jacques, you would know that such a thing was not beyond the bounds of possibility for him."
"Oh, well sure," Daniel said snidely. "I mean, Jacques."
"That's all I can tell you," Armand said, standing up from the hood of the car. He'd shrugged off his coat before they'd buried the corpse, and the line of his shoulders underneath the finely tailored cotton of his shirt was doing things for Daniel. Then again, there were few things about Armand that didn't do it for Daniel these days. "These are not issues that the coven tended to talk about much. Apologies that I can't supply more information to you about the likelihood of one day having an erotic encounter with a centaur."
Daniel snorted. "Centaurs aren't real."
Armand's eyebrows lifted. "How swiftly you've acquired expertise on matters supernatural."
"Look, even if you set everything else aside, centaurs make absolutely no sense on a spinal level," Daniel said. "Horses can walk within a couple of hours of being born. Humans need six months, give or take, to develop the muscle strength just to be able to hold their heads up. So what, you're going to have centaur babies galloping around for ages with their whole upper bodies just flopping around every which way? Please."
Armand tilted his head. "Vivid."
"Floppy horse babies with spinal injuries," Daniel said, waggling a hand back and forth. "No one wants to think about that but it's true."
"You are occasionally correct in some surprising ways," Armand said.
"Aww baby, you say the sweetest things," Daniel said.
"Untrue," Armand replied, as if he hadn't been the one to wrap his long legs around Daniel's hips and murmur Be my companion, mine, into Daniel's ear in a voice like sun-warmed honey.
"Wanna bet?" Daniel said, and grinned with all his teeth.