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New York City, in a July heatwave. It's been a long time since Daniel's been home.
Daniel's brownstone's in Brooklyn Heights. He's probably not going to be able to keep it. He needs to get in touch with Louis, or rather, Louis's lawyers. Sell it and put the money in the accounts for the girls with the rest of it, probably. But maybe there's a way- some kind of trust, the house where bright young reporter with a point of view Daniel James Molloy wrote his books-well, the third, fourth, fifth and then his last great banger.
Once upon a time, he'd be wiped out after a book tour. Eighteen or twenty cities, coming home at whatever hour of the day or night, straight or twisted depending on the year. Collapse face first into bed, and, depending on the year and the mood, would have had either Alice or Shauna come in and wake him, but in later years, he'd had neither. Lisa or Jen sometimes, when they were really small, because Alice had left him when Jen was three and Lisa was seventeen months, which absolutely speaks to the quality of a husband and father he'd been back then. In the last decade, it's only been Scully- his primordial-pouch swinging, placid tabby, who has absolutely no predatory instincts whatsoever and who sleeps twenty-three hours per day whether Daniel's there or not. Daniel pays sixty dollars a day on Rover to some energetic NYU undergrad with the screenname ilu_toebeans, but it's not clear whether Scully's moved since he left.
Scully, as it happens, doesn't even seem to notice the vampire thing. Daniel would have taken it personally if Scully had ever appeared to notice anything, ever.
At any rate, his brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. He's paid it off, partly on his own hustle, and partly by being born in the lucky century for home ownership. He'd moved here from San Francisco with Alice, two years after they'd been married. This is his space, where he wrote most of his books, lived with his wife and then his second wife, two weeks every summer with the girls- all of this he did mostly badly, admittedly, but still. It's his space. He's been here through AIDS and Rudy fucking Guliani, 9/11 and the 2008 recession, a lot of dead friends and the drugs getting less and less fun.
It's 11:09 PM. It's still ninety-five degrees and the air conditioner hasn't kicked on. He's been up for two hours and he's hungry because the travel's catching up with him. Someone is knocking on his door.
It's 11:10 PM and Daniel is standing in the entryway, hand opening the bolt and the electronic lock, his overnight bag still lying where he'd dropped it. Daniel doesn't know why he's opening the door, Daniel doesn't open his door, ever, he's even literally thinking I shouldn't be opening the door, and then he's blinking past the porch light, new eyes still sensitive. The words form in his head, a thought that's not his. Bonsoir, mon cher ami.
Daniel says, "You've got to be fucking kidding me."
Lestat smiles at him, winsomely. He's wearing jeans ripped ragged in eight places and a bomber jacket made of eye-searing green satin. He's unfortunately maybe even better-looking in person than Louis ever described him.
Ten seconds later, something smashes through his front window. Daniel would like to believe this is a coincidence.
****
There's a kind of fucked up morality operating here, maybe.
He was never a good guy. Daniel couldn't ever lie to himself about it, too attuned to seeing through other people's bullshit to ever buy into his own. He was a bad husband, bad father. Between his career and the drugs, he's lucky he's made it to civil terms with either of his ex-wives. He's got a better relationship with his daughters than he deserves.
He got his lawyer to set up a trust for both of them, three point five million each. Therapy money, he posted in the Dad group chat. There was a lot of Dad what the fuck messages that followed that he hasn't answered yet.
He's not a good guy currently either, on account of the eating people.
Daniel has spent the last month of the book tour working his way through the drug scenes of multiple American cities. Boston, Atlanta, Miami, LA - San Francisco, in a nice little callback, and finally back to New York. He's being careful. He's discriminating about it. He goes to the kind of neighborhoods where he used to go to score, and then he goes after whoever's already on the edge of the group. The assholes, the idiots, the ones who don't have a finely-tuned sense of danger yet.
He killed four people, before he got the hang of it. That doesn't feel great, but so far it hasn't kept him awake at night. And since then, he's been really, really careful, and it's wild that all those years working his way through every illicit substance known to mankind, have really been so weirdly helpful. Riding the line between so good and crashing hard, where he ends up with a dead body in his arms instead of a half-dead idiot who can be gently propped against a dumpster and who's still got even odds of living through the night.
There may not be any ethical consumption under capitalism, but Daniel is trying to make good choices anyway.
He's going to eat some billionaire hearts raw, though, if he ever gets the chance. It's going to be so good.
***
However, the fucked-up morality of the world being what it is, sometimes there are other people who eat people, and now they're here to kill you.
***
Daniel has had what you'd charitably call a lot of fun in his life, and as a consequence worked his way through a lot of the West Coast drug scenes. This is not the first time he's had to run for his life. But the problem with this whole vampire thing is that Daniel doesn't feel reborn. Daniel feels like he's seventy-two goddamn years old and he's being chased by fucking children. It's embarrassing.
A local coven, he'll later find out, has been staking out at his brownstone, waiting for him to get back. Daniel's address is on the fucking internet. In retrospect, it's very obvious, and it makes Daniel feel god damn stupid, which only makes him more pissed.
"They want to kill us," Lestat, at his shoulder, six inches closer than anyone else would stand, is a master of the fucking obvious. He's also smiling? He is fucking shutting his eyes to enjoy this moment and Daniel is going to kill him.
The first second he sees cover, he hauls Lestat into the shelter of an alleyway. He thinks about his phone, dead in the pocket of his bag back at the brownstone and then catches himself. Louis, he says on the vampire telepathic groupchat, because this is Daniel's life now. Louis, did you give Frenchy my address?
There's a tellingly long pause. I'm sorry, says Louis. He almost sounds regretful, the motherfucker. He wanted to meet you. There's a long pause, and Daniel knows he's about to ask, he knows it- Is he looking all right?
He looks great, Louis, he's having a great time, there's a pack of teenage shitheads trying to kill us, Louis. I need you to focus.
I'm sorry about that too, says Louis. Of course, he's also been getting constant threats on vampire Twitter. I'm in LA. I can't get to you right now. A long pause. Lestat can help you, though. Credit to Louis, he only sounds a little dubious about this.
Perfect, says Daniel. "You," he says out loud, "hands to yourself," because Lestat has reached out and is touching his hair, which he hasn't washed since San Francisco, which now feels like a century ago.
"The colour," says Lestat. He's grinning, the absolute fuckhead, when one of the teenage vampires rounds the corner and shrieks like a tornado siren, and they have to run again.
***
Daniel knows he's selfish. But he's selfish for a reason. The thing is, Daniel had known everything was only ever going to get worse.
It's a bad way to live, waking up every morning feeling like you're clocking in for your shift at the Suck Factory. Like the worst of the years when he was on pills, when he'd fucked things up enough to lose both his wives, his daughters.
Daniel was going to kill himself, when it got bad enough. He's got a Glock 19 that he's had since 1992. He's kept it in a lock box in the house that no one ever knew about. Every morning, before, he'd make sure he could still get the key in and turn it, lift it out of the foam packing. The first day he got that gut jolt of fear, that real fear, when his hands weren't steady enough, he was going to put the gun in his mouth and blow the back of his head out. The last and the greatest of the traumatic brain injuries, the one you don't come back from.
He's so fucking relieved, that he didn't have to.
Three days out of Dubai, after Real-Rashid had held a blood bag to his mouth and half-carried him down to a car, to a private jet, capital-hopping from the UAE to Europe. He'd sat down hard on the slate tile floor of the bathroom, in that upscale travel hotel in Zurich, and he'd sobbed into his hands until he was bloody and wrung out, the vampire equivalent of a dehydration headache. So, so fucking relieved. Parkinson's was a long slope and it only went down, and there was nothing down there but the dark.
Daniel's seen enough of it already. He is so, so terribly grateful, not to have to face it now.
Daniel's hungry for life, in a way he'd never have understood at twenty. He wants to see how the world changes. He wants to be in it.
And the truth of it is, Daniel had never wanted to die, never, not even once, not even back in Armand's arms in 1973, and whenever he'd held that gun, all he ever felt was sorry that it was all going to be over.
It's a power trip, of course it's always been a power trip for him. Fuck you, fuck you, yes I want to live forever. Give me whatever it takes.
***
Lestat is here to help. Allegedly.
He's lounging on the fire escape where Daniel has shoved him, mostly to keep him out of the way. The problem is that Lestat has opinions. He has opinions about the book and all the myriad ways it is wrong, which Daniel is absolutely coming back to later, because Daniel is a professional but then Lestat switches tack to complaining about Armand. Lestat says, with a prim aspersion that's honestly funny, says, "You are being threatened by a foreign coven, and your maker would be here, and should be here, but clearly it's more important right now that he should be flagellating himself bloody on his knees, someplace unsavory."
"Okay, now you're projecting your own weird Catholic hangups," says Daniel, who absolutely didn't need that description. Like Lestat isn't right here getting threatened alongside him, which Lestat is clearly failing to register. "You and your fucking boyfriend, jesus." Lestat beams at him, but then it rolls back to that pinched, cross expression.
"He shouldn't have left you alone," says Lestat. Daniel would like to point out that in the summer of '85 he got rolled for his wallet and shoes and had to figure out how to get home from the Golden Eagle with a head full of bad acid and without Alice finding out because she'd divorce him for real this time. Comparatively, getting out of Dubai was easy.
Well. After those first few hours, at least. "Yeah," says Daniel. "He shouldn't have." Fucking asshole, he thinks, because it's true.
"Well," says Lestat. "At least he did one thing right. He made you. But you are Louis's friend, so of course you are an unparalleled lens through which to view the world. You are bright, and modern, and remarkable. Louis always had an eye for people."
He says it casually, like it's factual, verifiable, and Lestat has sources ready to cite. And okay, just occasionally, Lestat will say something that hooks you in the gut. Daniel is starting to understand why Louis stuck it out for those few decades.
And then one of the teenagers chasing them comes over the edge of the roof and Daniel manages to move fast enough to smash him into the brick wall, hard enough that he doesn't get up.
Lestat, perched on the fire escape without even skipping a beat, says, "Remarkable. Well, in five hundred years, Armand had to do at least one thing right."
***
You're a bright young reporter with a point of view has honestly gotten Daniel through a lot in life, when he thinks back on it.
Daniel's had a long and storied career but at the back of his mind, there's always been that memory. Remember that time in September, 1973, when you interviewed the vampire? Daniel's always been brave, when it comes to getting the story. What could have fucking scared him, after that?
Daniel also doesn't feel as guilty as he should, torpedoing his respectable career because he rereads parts of the book, the same way he did when he was writing it, and he's got the reaction buried down so deep, a twenty-something idiot laughing irresistibly at Louis when he does the fang thing. This is so fucking cool. And he's right, god damn it.
***
They've gone underground, which was Daniel's idea, ripping up a manhole cover like it was a Pez cap. He's regretting it now.
They're splashing along through the New York City sewer system, which absolutely fucking stinks, and would have done a number on Daniel even before he had vampire senses, which is just making this an entire world of shit. To add to this absolute bitch of a scenario, this entire time, Lestat has just. Not. Shut up. He's talking about Louis now, which is not an improvement. After Dubai, Louis tracked him down in New Orleans in a hurricane, apparently, because this is what happens when Daniel isn't available to talk his friends out of bad decisions. "We slept in a flooded basement. It felt like a featherbed, because we were in each other's arms."
Daniel would say something, but that fucking screaming has started again. Ahead, there's a shaft of streetlight, and a horde of teenage vampires come scrambling down the ladder in front of them.
Trapped going forward, trapped going back. Now it's a fight or die situation. If they get out of this, Daniel is going to drown Lestat in this sewer. He thinks this very clearly, just so Lestat definitely hears it.
Lestat fucking beams at him, and then neatly rips out all their throats.
It happens so fast Daniel barely tracks it. It's wildly graphic. A dozen gouts of arterial spray hit Daniel hard across the face from all directions.
Lestat rounds on him. His eyes are blown black, and he's grinning. He did that so fast and clean, and this motherfucker could have done that at literally any point, and then Daniel shoves Lestat into the wall.
It's not his fault. It comes from somewhere deep down. Lestat just brings it out in him. Daniel would bet every dollar currently in his bank account that Lestat has spent the better part of two centuries getting shoved into walls.
"Daniel," says Lestat, wounded. "I thought we were having fun." And then the motherfucker kisses him.
And then there's that old fucking crackle of electricity that runs between them, the way the air between gets charged, and Daniel, between the prescriptions and the depression and the sheer soul-sucking awfulness of the last few years, hadn't ever been expecting to feel that again. Christ, it's been a long time since he did this. Lestat kisses like the precursor to every bad decision Daniel's ever made. Daniel shoves him off and says, "No," in a tone that's less drawing a hard psychosexual boundary and unfortunately a lot more like do that again but harder this time. Fuck these vampires, he thinks, distantly, as another wave of teenagers comes down through the grate above, screaming.
***
Daniel never in his life wrote a book about something he didn't care about. He can lie to himself, a little, that the book with Louis was for the money, but of course it wasn't. He likes Louis. He kind of likes Claudia too, honestly. She'd have eaten him alive. He respects that in a woman.
Lestat, he's not sure about. One day he and Lestat could probably have a pretty traumatizing conversation about all the ways they fucked up as fathers, but it's probably not today.
Speaking of vampire fatherhood, Daniel had thought, once or twice, that the mind-reading thing would be the chance to find out what his daughters actually think about him. He never really thinks about it seriously though. He's got some sense of self-preservation, that bedrock level of don't do it. It kept him off the needle drugs in the 80s, and it kept him from doing that.
Lestat, if he'd known Daniel was thinking about it, would have just stolen their phones from them. Luckily he never picks up that thought up from Daniel, so Daniel gets spared the chat thread that reads be so fr right now is dad legit in a manic phase, and Lestat wouldn't have understood any of that anyway.
***
Lestat has decided that a rebound fling would be good for both of them.
"Your divorce was so cataclysmic, it had a body count." Daniel is not thinking about this. "So no, I'm not going to be fucking you."
Lestat, who's spent the last fifteen minutes laying out all the reasons that Daniel should sleep with him, says, "Daniel, it's important to root yourself to the world. For years, all I had was the music I could hear. The car radios, the neighbors. That wasn't enough."
And if it wasn't already abundantly clear from two weeks with the Dubai Murder Couple, Daniel is looking at a cautionary tale about what's going to happen to him if he doesn't come to terms with his new existence, really quickly, and effectively as he can. He thinks, Five decades of catatonia, in the dark with bad memories, nothing but snippets of radio music for company, and it doesn't sound like a way to stay alive.
"You should have woken up in the '80s," Daniel tells him bluntly. "The cocaine was better." But he's sympathetic, in a way, and he has a vested interest in how this turns out.
He wants to see if Lestat can stay alive, whether you really can start to shake off a lifetime of fucking up.
Shocker. Daniel wants to stay alive. Daniel has always wanted to stay alive. There's so much he wants to do. Most of the time, maybe that was the cocaine talking. But still. He's having fun.
***
The sun is coming up when they make it back to Daniel's neighborhood, because of course it is.
Daniel has just resigned himself to spending the next thirteen hours in the fucking sewer, when Lestat says, "I'll take us to your house. The sun can't kill me." He sounds very fucking confident for a man as stupid as he is.
And then Lestat grabs him, hauls him tight against his body and they're moving, fast, so fast, that Daniel barely feels the sting, let alone the burn. And then they're standing in his living room, just out of range of the slanting dawn light. Scully pauses where she's licking her own asshole, takes them in, and then keeps going.
Lestat hasn't let him go. Daniel tells himself that it's the adrenaline because he hasn't let Lestat go either, but he is unfortunately not that good at lying.
Because this is how Daniel's life works now, he has a mindfuck of a telepathic group chat with his benefactor? Co-author? Friend?
Friend, says Louis, like he's a step behind Daniel, and simultaneously on the other side of the world.
There's not really a great way to ask hey can I fuck your problematic ex slash soulmate? But by god, Daniel was a born communicator and trained for five decades to get even better and he is going to use his fucking words.
Go ahead, says Louis. He sounds really amused, the absolute motherfucker. It'll probably be really good for him, actually.
Lestat's been shifting from foot to foot, almost imperceptible if you're not looking for it, and his expression is getting hungrier.
"Louis says to have at it," says Daniel and Lestat startles, vulnerable for a moment, suddenly.
"You would not lie to me? Not about Louis, please." Like it's an actual concern. That's fucking sad, Daniel thinks and then Lestat's grabbed him by the jaw to stare into his eyes and whatever Lestat sees must satisfy him, because he suddenly grins, wide mouth and all teeth and says, "oh, yes," and Daniel kisses him again.
***
Lestat, as it turns out, loves Scully.
He's holding her in his arms, tucked in against his chest. Scully is hanging limp and placid, and Lestat says, "You are a wonderful cat, you show no fear. You are a predator made in my own image." It sounds too exhausting to explain to him that Scully has never shown evidence of having a single thought in her life, so Daniel herds him along to the basement.
He's been sleeping in the walk-in wine cooler. It came with the brownstone, and this used to be an upscale feature, once upon a time, until they built one in every McMansion that got abandoned in the recession. Wine's never been his thing, Daniel likes his vices harder, so there was nothing but some junk in storage that was easy enough to drag out. Drag in the double guest bed mattress, all his electronics. The sheets and the pillows, the goosedown duvet. It's a coffin, it's the 500-thread count cotton sheets his last wife bought him, and his eight-year old self's dream fort, all rolled into one.
Lestat pauses. He says, "I lived in the basement of a rotting house for seventy years. Daniel, this is very sad."
Daniel lunges at him. Lestat, moving faster, puts Scully down gently before Daniel even gets to him.
Daniel hasn't had sex in a decade, and this evening has been a lot, and the adrenaline- if he even has hormones anymore, there's really a sad lack of fact-checking here- is really winding him tight enough to be dangerous. His libido came out of the Great Neck Bite Debacle of 2022 ready to fuck like a jackrabbit. That's why he pins Lestat to the mattress instead of kicking his ass out. Lestat obligingly opens his legs, the absolute fucking slut, and presses his hard-on up against Daniel's.
There's lube down here in the bedside clutter and Daniel does not want to talk about it, but he grabs the bottle and applies himself to Lestat's skinny jeans. Lestat isn't wearing underwear, which seems about par for the course. Lestat doesn't stop kissing him, and somehow also still does not shut up.
"I've got three fingers in your ass, will you fucking stop," says Daniel eventually, which comes out a lot hoarser than he'd planned, and Lestat throws his head back and laughs. And then he moves, very fast, and then somehow Daniel is flat on his back, balls deep and sucking air like a gutpunch, and Lestat rides him like a fucking rodeo bull.
Lestat is grinning, mouth opening up on little punched-out gasps. Daniel digs his heels in, and his hips kick up, reflexively, in a way he hasn't been able to move in years. Before he knows what he's doing, his hands are in Lestat's hair, hauling him down and then he's just burying his teeth in the meat of Lestat's shoulder, right on the tight-muscled cord where it meets his throat, hard enough that, for a shocked half-second, he's positive that he's done serious damage. And then the hot blood hits the back of his throat, like tequila and salt and wet-hot-heaven and Lestat howls and clenches down on Daniel's dick, and then everything gets really wild, really fast.
It goes on forever. It's life-shatteringly good. God fucking damn it, Daniel thinks distantly, as he blacks out.
***
Daniel wakes up flat on his back. There's blood spatter six feet up the walls, and Lestat is chewing on him like a large, overstimulated housecat.
It's absolutely more painful than good, now. Daniel's shivering, skin slick with blood-tinged sweat, sensitive all over. He'd shove him off, but Lestat is also laughing, quietly. Daniel's blood all over his mouth and jaw, fucked-out little postcoital chuckles as he kisses Daniel back along the same path he'd bitten, licking up Daniel's blood and sweat and come. The smell of both their blood mixing together is frankly making Daniel a little insane.
Lestat's sex hair is a nightmare. Daniel, in a gesture completely out of his control, is somehow stroking it back behind his ear.
Lestat settles down against him. Throws a proprietary arm and leg over Daniel, and kisses him, long and bloody-mouthed and dirty. "I like you," Lestat says, when he finally pulls back. Unfortunately for Daniel, this sounds like a lifelong vow. "You should write a book with me. We would sell ten million copies."
The worst thing is, he's probably not wrong.
***
The sun's been down an hour the next night, when he finally kicks Lestat out. Lestat goes out whistling into the night, freshly showered except for the drop of Daniel's blood he'd dabbed behind one ear like cologne, because he has so many things wrong with him. Hands in the pockets of Daniel's leather jacket, jeans even more ripped because Daniel wasn't careful getting them off, long legs eating up the distance until he vanishes around the corner of the block and out of Daniel's sightline. The clear pure tone of his whistle hangs in the warm night air for longer than it should.
Daniel's blood smelled great on him, god damn it. Personally dickmatized by Frenchy. Louis is going to hold this over him forever. And Daniel's out one beloved jacket and staring at the neon green satin bomber that Lestat left behind.
Well, it's a New York City heat wave. He doesn't have to worry about this yet.
Daniel goes up to the roof, and stands by the railing. This used to be a roof garden space, when someone was looking after it. Now it mostly has pots of wild pollution-sucking weeds, stacks of rusting outdoor furniture, and a very dark, shadowed space by the wall.
"Lestat already told me he heard you up here," he says, to the empty view of the post-midnight neighborhood.
Armand materializes at the very edge of the shadow.
He's wearing a Dolce and Gabanna trenchcoat and a really sculptural, extremely stupid wide-brimmed hat. He looks very small, and he's standing a very careful distance back from Daniel.
Like he's staying out of range. Like he's the one who's got something to be afraid of. And then he starts talking, like they somehow left off mid-conversation.
"You had always fascinated me," says Armand, very softly. "The life in you. The passion, the fear. The way you wanted to live so badly. And I could hear your thoughts and it was unbearable. But killing you was also unbearable. So I did this thing to you. And then I was- afraid. So I left." He's looking at Daniel with those big owl eyes and set, expressionless mouth, like this is a completely rational sequence of decisions. He looks like he's trying to be ready for whatever happens next.
"When I came back to myself. I knew it had been- monstrous. And I knew that I wanted to come back to you. But it didn't seem a fair thing to ask of you. So I didn't."
This fucking asshole, Daniel thinks, in actual admiration. This actual fucking guy. Daniel wants to take his brain apart to see how he works.
Daniel pointedly turns away. He remembers, vividly, that the last time he turned his back on Armand, some pretty violent things happened, but. Daniel is going to offer him a modicum of grace. On probation.
Okay, conditions. "No more fucking with me," says Daniel looking out over the city lights. He can see for miles, now, from up here. He might even be able to see the future. "You want something, you ask me for it. I tell you when you're pissing me off, and the same goes both ways."
"You ever pull any of that memory shit with me again, and I will find out exactly what kind of bullet kills you." Okay, that last part came out pretty unsteady, but fuck it. Daniel isn't losing any more of himself.
No one says anything then, for a long moment. And then behind him, Armand's sharp chin comes to rest, very carefully, on his shoulder. His graceful hand finds Daniel's, one finger tracing lingeringly across his knuckles.
This is just such a truly catastrophically fucking bad idea, in a day already full of them. But Daniel's already fucked up two marriages. Maybe the third time's the charm.
"Fuck you, fucker," says Daniel, really eloquently. "You're stuck with me now."