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“God, I dreamed there was an angel who could hear me through the wall [. . .] She said, ‘Just give it time, kid. I come to one and all.’”
– “Moritz” in Spring Awakening
When the last vampire of the Paris coven has abandoned him via dramatic self-immolation, Armand decides to cut back on drinking his own blood. He darts into Jardin du Luxembourg to seek out a cruising sodomite and wrestles the first man to the ground who touches him. Experimentally, he rips open the man’s shirt, digs into his chest, and twists his hand to pull up a chunk of viscera. He doesn’t reach the heart, but as the blood spills over the man’s chest, he realizes that he could if he truly applied himself. It’s been a long time since Armand applied himself to anything.
He licks his hand greedily and abandons the body behind a tree. Tomorrow, the Police Prefecture will find and ignore the body of this lonely man. It is tough for a drained bachelor to make the news in the time of revolutions. Armand has rejected deep knowledge of the politics of late 18th century France, but he can feel times of unrest humming in the earth, listen to the bustling city to see who is mourned and who is not. A man named Robespierre is in everyone’s mouths, along with a daily list of his freshly-massacred followers. Sometimes, the Children of Satan are mortal.
The rare satiety has called to attention the general state of his body. He feels greasy, a creature of caked-on ash and decay. Paris is a city of fountains, and yet in his exile he has remained filthy. In earlier years, the Medici Fountain would have been available for a proper bath, but its state of disrepair signals the need for alternate plans. He listens to the wind for the sound of pumping water and finds a smaller communal fountain a few fathoms away. Perfect.
By the time he gets to the fountain, its mortal user has disappeared. He tugs at the handle and watches a low-pressure stream of water spill into a decorative bucket attached to the base. Then, he sticks his head under the spigot as though he is a mindless beggar and lets the water drip down. The mermaid carved into the side of the bucket doesn't look up to question him. His shame remains unseen.
Armand scrubs his scalp and then wrings his hair onto the street. He wiggles the bucket and finds that the nails holding it to the stone wall lack integrity. So, he plugs up the drain with a flat rock, fills the bucket to the top, and liberates it from the wall. Armand wanders for quite a while with the sloshing, leaking bucket until he finds an alleyway without side-facing windows and a plethora of overhanging laundry in the front. He strips off all of (what could charitably be called) his clothes and washes as best he can with the water and a nearby pile of ash. The summer wind dries his naked body. He doesn't need warmth to survive, but it's nice.
The hung laundry is only a few stories up, so it doesn’t take long to scale the building. As he flips through his options on the clothesline, he realizes how poor the people in the building must be. It's tenement laundry, patched and repaired many times over. Industrialization has brought poor-quality fabric to the masses, who use what little time they have to make poorer-quality clothes. Armand selects a relatively sturdy pair of pants, some underwear, and a button-up shirt with a large collar. He pockets some socks and makes a mental note to steal some shoes another day.
Old clothes in hand, Armand looks past the tangle of tenements towards apartments inhabited by the children of the former gentry. He leaps from roof to roof until he lands atop the only familiar building in the neighborhood – the building that houses Lestat’s apartment. Armand yanks open the window of the neighboring unit and quietly steps inside. The inhabitant of the apartment doesn’t even wake up before he is dead.
He hangs his old clothes over the window to keep out the coming light. Then, he sits on the floor and presses his ear to the wall. Lestat and his male companion are arguing about nothing with hushed voices –
“If you would just listen to me –”
“I am tired of listening, all I do is listen, all I do is watch you –”
“This again.”
“Yes, again!”
In the other room, Lestat's female companion – his strange mother – has taken home a lover. He sounds like he is dying; probably he is.
For the first time in two centuries, Armand recognizes a stirring between his legs. Arousal. He pulls down his pants and begins stroking – to the argument, to the intercourse, to the thrill of life become death. To his own life, free. When he comes, he spurts blood onto the wall to avoid getting any of it on his new clothes. The occupants next door do not hear the little splat.
In the corner of the room, the murdered man becomes stiff with death. Armand rolls him onto his back and cradles his head in his lap. He aims the man’s unseeing eyes at the come-stain on the wall. And they sit together like that, watching it drip and then dry, for a very, very long time.
Over the course of the next several months, Armand listens to Lestat’s relationships degrade through the walls. His inability to go outside in the daytime has led to him being replaced by a younger, human Lélio. He is cooped up with his male companion, Nicky, who apparently can no longer play violin in the street when every bout of social unrest triggers an ascent to mania. Lestat’s mother, Gabriella, frequently remarks that she has grown bored of both of them. It’s surprising that she hasn’t already left, considering her irritated responses to Lestat’s desperate cries of abandonment. The only thing that seems to keep her around is Lestat working her to climax with his hand. He wonders if Lestat always touched his mother in that way or if the maker/fledgling bond transformed their relationship beyond his comprehension. He wouldn’t know, having never sired one himself.
Lestat knows he’s there – has known, since the first night Armand arrived. They have only interacted once since Armand moved in, late in 1795. In one of Lestat's rare, independent excursions, he and Armand set their sights on a similar target, a former Jacobin who, rumor had it, was going to be murdered anyway. Upon spotting Armand, Lestat stepped onto his back foot, extended his hand towards the prey, and gave Armand a tight smile as though to say, no, please, after you. Armand dispatched the man as Lestat watched, hungrily.
“We can share,” Armand said, intoxicated from the blood.
Lestat scoffed. “No thank you. I can get my own.”
And within a minute, he had seduced and sunken his teeth into a poor, sobbing girl no older than seventeen.
The ferocity of Lestat’s hunt astonished him, then and now. His angelic beauty masked something crude and fearsome, parasitic to the core. Completely magnetized by Lestat’s presence, Armand abandoned his prey and took a bite of the girl’s wrist while Lestat was still draining her. He could feel Lestat’s disturbance in the girl’s blood, which made Armand suck harder. Lestat unhooked his fangs and stumbled away. As in the plaza, he looked afraid.
“What do you want?”
And Armand realized that he didn’t know. So, he ran.
Since then, Armand has been trying to figure out the actual answer to that question. Freedom is better than compelled leadership and certainly better than slavery, but it doesn't exactly provide one with hundreds of years of purpose. The apartment he has been inhabiting contains many philosophical books from its former inhabitant, but they haven’t been helping much. Take Descartes – Je pense, donc je suis. It is all well and good for René to connect the mind and body when he has always had full ownership over his own persistently and consistently human body. But what of a slave, who is nothing? What of the beloved, ever-traded servant? What of the vampire ascetic?
He finds at the center of himself a hole that cannot be filled by the hunt or by thieving luxurious goods from the unsuspecting bourgeoise. The only thing that fills it, just a little, is listening to the wall. Armand often imagines himself murdering Lestat’s companions, who seem to appreciate neither Lestat’s beauty nor his generosity. He would appreciate Lestat, if given the opportunity. Love Lestat, even. Sometimes, when he sleeps, he presses his hand to the wall as though Lestat might feel his desperate yearning. As though he might one day desire Armand in return.
In early 1796, when Armand has almost given up hope, Lestat knocks on his door. He offers his body with a kiss, and Armand enthusiastically accepts.
It’s been eons since Armand had intercourse, so it’s difficult to know how, exactly, it’s supposed to be. Certainly Lestat is an incredibly competent lover. He seems to know all of the places that Armand likes to be kissed, and intuit all of the ways-of-fucking that remind him of The Bad Years. He’s gentle in entering Armand and gentler in sodomizing him until Armand tells him not to be. Then, Lestat flips him over and drives him into the mattress, using Armand’s hair as leverage to thrust deeper. He comes inside like that, with a deep, gravelly groan. After, he flips Armand over again, and manually stimulates him to completion. The whole sequence of events takes far less than the time between two church bells. And Lestat isn’t smiling, after. Not in a way that seems true.
“Do you keep snuff in the house?”
Armand gets up and wobbles over to the nightstand.
“Yes. The man who lived here liked it, I think.”
“Ah. The one from whom you stole this apartment.”
“Yes.”
He pulls out the tin and hands it to Lestat. Lestat pinches some and inhales, then hands it back to Armand.
“Can you feel that?”
Lestat rests his hands on his chest and shakes his head.
“Not really. But I still crave it after sex.” He sighs. “His name was Gabriel, you know. The man who lived here.”
Armand hesitantly inhales some of the snuff himself. It tastes like dirt and it feels like absolutely nothing. He puts the tin back in the drawer and sits on the side of the bed.
“You never harmed him. Did you love him?”
“Hm. Must one love someone to care about their absence?”
“You and I create absences every day.”
Lestat looks at him thoughtfully.
“I suppose we do. Perhaps, then, I did love him a little. Inasmuch as one can love our former kind. Marginally, carnally.”
He waves his hand, banishing the love into nothing. Armand presses forward, drawing out all of the things he's craved to know. Everything that is Lestat, he wants.
“Did you ever have sex?”
Lestat laughs.
“Once. Nicky hasn’t forgiven me.”
“Will he forgive this?”
Lestat looks uncomfortable. He turns his head away.
“I don’t know.”
Armand imagines Lestat and Gabriel making love in the bed where he now lies. Perhaps laughing and taking a long time to explore each other’s bodies. And his little heart, shriveled from disuse, is crushed even smaller with new knowledge. This desire is not why Lestat is here. Lestat did not, does not want to have intercourse with him. He does not want to be his companion.
“Why are you here, Lestat?”
Lestat eyes Armand’s wrist. Armand holds it up to his mouth. For the first time in over 200 years, someone takes from him le petit coup. The piercing of Armand’s flesh feels like meeting God.
“Teach me your ways,” says Lestat, after licking over the puncture wounds to lap up the last drops. “Teach me your powers. Your gifts. Be my mentor, and I will keep fucking you.”
Armand is familiar with this – the trade of bodies. This for that, beloved Amadeo. But what use has Lestat for commerce so crude, having lived in luxury for his entire life? Armand has investigated his history in his abundant free time, flipped through his memories like a deck of cards while Lestat slept. Few violations have been committed against his person, save for familial rejection and the aggression of his turning. Perhaps it is not so bad to add another.
He surprises himself with how smoothly he slips on the mask of his former Maitré.
“I can protect you and your companions. Nicky and your mother. Power is shifting in Paris. There is a vacuum without the old coven.”
Lestat kisses Armand's palm performatively. He looks up at him through his fine, blonde lashes. Armand has been this boy, and now, he isn't.
“We should open a theater,” Lestat says. “I want to be an actor again.”
In later years, the spring of 1796 will come to be known in Armand’s mind as his most generative period. He fills notebook after notebook full of scripts for the theatre he and Lestat are planning, tentatively named the Theatre des Vampires. Lestat leaves his companions for hours at a time to review Armand’s scripts, read them out loud, and stimulate him with his mouth, slow and sloppy between tasks. It feels good to be the one who gives commands to a man on his knees. He could get used to this being freedom.
In exchange for the sex and companionship, Armand teaches Lestat a few party tricks. The fire gift is a natural first, as it is both easy and basically useless. Lestat is astonished by his ability to generate fire from nothing and fucks Armand with atypical enthusiasm the day he masters it. Through the wall, Armand can hear him discuss his new power with his fledglings.
“Fire whenever we want. Eternal protection. All of this from drinking his blood.”
He is less successful with the mind gift, because fledglings tend to plateau between mind-reading and telekinesis. Still, the ability to read minds makes Lestat a formidable hunter. Armand luxuriates in Lestat's willingness to bring home prey to share. He teaches Lestat how to prolong a kill and leave someone at the very brink of death. This, too, he hears passed on through the wall. Nicky is unable to grasp the concept, but Lestat’s mother is transfixed.
“We will be most fearsome with this gift.”
Armand listens to them kissing in bed that night as Nicky talks to himself in the living room. Lestat brings his mother to climax with his fingers, but rebuffs her own wandering hands. Through their murmured conversation afterwards, Armand confirms that this behavior precedes his mother’s transformation. This is the origin point of his tendency towards prostitution. Gabriella does not have to offer up his body to Armand; she trusts that Lestat will do it on his own.
Armand walks the quiet streets of Paris at night, watching the revolutionary violence trickle into nothing. This produces an environment less suited to careless killing, and Parisian vampires are growing restless. As the earth warms, he feels their hunger and rage intensify. They are realizing it was never possible to survive in the open by themselves. The loneliness is setting in.
In the last week of July in 1796, Armand calls to the voices using the mind gift.
“Children of Satan, I hear your cries. I have found a home for us inside the city. You do not have to live a half-life in the shadows. Return to your Maitré. Come to me.”
And the next night, in an abandoned building refurbished into a theater by hypnotized mortal laborers, the Theatre des Vampires is born.
Two years after the first time Lestat offered his body, Armand realizes that Lestat has begun to desire him. They make love for one and one half church bells on a frigid evening in January, and Lestat asks for neither blood nor instruction afterwards. Instead, he tentatively holds out his own arm for the very first time.
“Drink from me, Maitré.”
Armand traces the blue veins of his arm, wrist to elbow, with his thumb. He bites dead-center, in the meat of his arm. As he drinks, Lestat releases some of his troubles through the blood. Gabriella slapping him in the face, for refusing. Nicky stumbling in front of an open window just before dusk. Lestat forgetting his lines onstage due to exhaustion. He exhales and allows Armand deeper, past these recent slights and into a familiar empty room. It looks a little like the one that Armand first showed him in September 1797, when the news of anti-French riots in Rome briefly tore Armand in two. That day, he showed Lestat the destruction of the Palazzo and the look on Marius’ face as he ran. The apprentices burned alive in front of him, his subsequent indoctrination. And deeper, deeper, into the room without walls, the endless nothing stretching to eternity.
There are differences in Lestat’s empty room, of course. Free from the half-life of slavery, Lestat has constructed a cut-out box inside of himself. He has a ceiling, floor, and three visible walls on which to lean. Only one side reaches out interminably to nothing. The vampire’s burden — the loneliness. Except the barren nature of this room suggests that, prior to his turning, Lestat was well-versed in the nature of this beast. What could cause an aristocrat to build inside himself this empty room?
”I don’t know,” Lestat answers out loud. “I only know that it is mine.”
Armand removes his teeth and closes the puncture wounds with his fingers.
“Is it like this inside your fledglings?”
“No. Only inside of yourself. Nicky’s world is. . .jumbled. A wrecked house, but still, a house. Mother is. . . colorful. Ferocious. Like one of those Jean Fouquet prints. Have you made your way to the Louvre at night yet? They have a new exhibit showing off The Crossing of the Rubicon. That print is a window into her mind.”
”Yes,” Armand says. Perhaps the little drink has made him feel particularly willing to be vulnerable, because he continues with the full truth. “Not for the prints exhibition. The terms of the Treaty of Tolentino ‘liberated’ works from the Vatican. I thought I might find the work of my maker on the walls.”
”Oh. Did you?”
”Yes.”
Lestat turns onto his side and props his head up on his hand. His eyebrows are raised in genuine intrigue.
”What paintings did the Vatican commission from Marius? Were you in —”
”Not in any of these,” says Armand. “Or, perhaps I sat for an initial sketch. To get the hands right. I was good at sitting still. Better than Marius’s younger muses. But this occurred so frequently that I can’t recall in which paintings my hands are featured and in which they are not.”
Armand looks at his hands, formerly the steadiest in Rome. Still steady, after all these years. Lestat surprises him by sliding his hand under one and lining up his own fingers with Armand’s. His hands are larger, just like everything else about him. How strange it is to have affixed a pin to Lestat’s wings. Stranger, for him to now desire it.
“I saw several 16th century Ganymedes at the Louvre. One of them was particularly lovely. Dark-haired with a pointed nose and wide, brown eyes. Paler than you. Younger than you. Not by your maker.”
He laces his fingers with Armand’s.
“I was painted as Ganymede many times. Eros, Cupid, David. Saint Sebastian close to my retirement-as-muse. My popularity waned when I failed to grow the facial hair necessary for maturation into the role of Christ. By 1530 I became a layer in paintings of someone else.”
“Are you the Ganymede I saw at the Louvre?”
“No. My Ganymede portraiture remains in Rome where it belongs.”
Lestat cups Armand’s face with a tenderness so genuine that it feels almost like dreaming. He traces over Armand’s cheek and his chin and runs his index finger over his nose.
“I wish I could see it. My lovely Ganymede.”
It is only then, caught up in the throes of 16th century longing, that Armand bares his neck for the blood.
Throughout 1798, Lestat and Armand conduct their affair more or less in public. The two of them become figureheads for the Theatre de Vampires, Lélio and Maitré often addressed as a unit. Lestat’s silver tongue smooths over Armand’s more authoritarian decisions. Armand’s ancient power gives teeth to Lestat’s soft leadership. Still, the coven and the company are not totally collapsible entities. Lestat may be a beloved figurehead, but it is Armand’s responsibility to keep him on a short leash just as much as any of the others in the coven. The company eats out of Lestat’s hand, but the coven belongs to Armand. And Lestat, who has always resisted the legitimacy of the Great Laws, has neither rank nor status in coven-related affairs.
A fledgling player hangs a portrait of Lestat in the dressing room, which seems to inspire in him some great emotion. He ‘sucks off’ Armand in front of it one evening, looking into his eyes, and then up at himself. Lestat comes all over himself with Armand down his throat, mid-gag during his climax. After, he heaves on all fours with a clouded look in his eye. Armand stimulates himself feverishly until he comes on Lestat’s bare back. When he feels the come hit him, Lestat winces, groans out a little oh!, and spits blood onto the floor. To keep him from getting too cocksure, Armand leaves Lestat to clean up the mess on his own.
Beyond the sex, the directorial life is fulfilling. Theatre des Vampires is well-reviewed by every gullible theater critic in Paris that has survived the revolution. Mortal audiences flock to see the company perform the plays that Armand both writes and directs. The large crowds ensure that there is plenty of prey for the coven to eat, which means that Armand has started to feel consistently full for the first time in two centuries. His scripts improve alongside his satiety, which keeps the troupe in good spirits. They provide for each other; in a way, they are a family.
Really, the only problem with the entire situation is the growing dissatisfaction of Lestat’s companions. Three years post-transformation, Nicky and Gabriella continue to be poorly-adjusted to life under the rule of a coven. Gabriella, at least, disappears for long periods of time rather than incessantly badgering him for information about older vampires or the meaning of the Great Laws. Nicky, however, frequently requires supervision in order to prevent harm to himself or other vampires. He thrives with a violin in his hands but rants and raves much of the rest of the time. Few in the coven are eager to assist Lestat with nursing Nicky outside of the theater, so he is often forced to do it alone. In Nicky’s darkest moods, he has violent visions of the Children of Satan, which means that Armand cannot offer any assistance that would improve the situation. He listens to their bond disintegrate through the wall and winces at every accusation of cheating. Unfortunately, they are all accurate.
One night, when Nicky is sleeping off one of his manias, Lestat wanders into Armand’s apartment. He sits on a chair in the kitchen and slumps over on himself. Then, he buries his face in his hands, and starts crying.
”Three days,” he says through sobs. “Seventy-two hours ranting and raving about nothing. Running around the apartment with knives and axes. Shattering the fine china. Trying to open the curtains in the daytime. Three fucking days.”
It’s uncomfortable to see Lestat like this — ugly in his sadness and resentment. This is not the role of the beloved into which Lestat has stepped so gracefully. The expected response to his predicament is wholly unscripted in Armand’s mind. He decides to respond with mild curiosity.
”Has he always been like this?”
“In shades. There was talk of the tailor’s son in Auvergne having flights of florid madness. But prior to his transformation, most of his pain was turned inward. Perhaps it still is, but the pain is so great that it cannot help but spill over.”
Lestat dries his face on his shirt, leaving little dots of eyeliner behind.
“Ah, merde. It is my fault. Note that I am here in your kitchen instead of curled up in coffin beside him. I have failed him again.”
“I have listened to his thoughts,” Armand admits. “Death is calling him every night. He is angry that you keep preventing it.”
“I know. But how can I allow Nicolas to die? Who else, besides mother, do I have?”
Armand surprises himself by saying, “You have me.”
Lestat barks out a great laugh, loud enough to make it through the walls. Armand hears Nicky stir, but he does not wake.
“You? Mon diablotin, I am hardly better than your prostitute. A kept boy. It is impossible for you to love me.”
“I see no contradiction.”
“Well. Of course you wouldn't.”
It comes out so quickly that the thought must be reflexive. He realizes with horror that all of their interaction has been colored by this – the judgement of Armand as an abnormal, pitiable thing. All of this, from a man who –
“You speak as though you are a stranger to contradictions in love. You, who for three long years have been licentiously groping your own mother, her wicked passions audible to every man and woman in Paris! You, who offers his turgid sex and open mouth to anyone in the company who will have you. You, who –”
Lestat lunges towards him and slaps him in the face. Armand does not think before slamming him into the opposing wall. The paint and plaster behind him cracks. He walks toward Lestat, seething, and feels some satisfaction in the way that he cowers in fear. In his arrogance, he has forgotten Armand’s power.
“I am imbued by the power of my maker. I took the gift eagerly, and trained in his ways as his beloved Amadeo. No one has loved as he loved me. For three years, I have acted as substitute maker for Magnus’ inferior bloodline. Magnus, who ravished and abandoned you. What does that make of my offering?”
Lestat is shaking now. He covers his head with his arms, as though he is a mortal experiencing his last moments in the Savage Garden.
“It is love,” he says quietly.
He crawls over to Armand on his hands and knees and hugs him around his calves. Armand takes deep breaths to calm himself, and rests his hand in Lestat's pretty blonde hair. Lestat covers Armand’s hand with his own and intertwines their fingers.
They make love for two church bells that night, and it is good.
Seasons pass. Lestat and Armand cling to each other through winter 1798 as though their bodies can provide transferable heat. They hunt a young caroler together on Christmas Eve, draining her and shoving her under the ice overlaying the Seine. As her body floats away under the glassy surface, Lestat sits down by the riverbank. He wraps his arms around his knees like a child.
“How have you lived like this? Every Christmas since 1535, in the periphery.”
Armand sits down, mirrors his pose.
“I have never celebrated Christmas. The Children of Satan do not celebrate Christian holidays. Before that, my God was Marius. And before Marius, I was nothing.”
“You were a slave. You were not nothing.”
Armand lets the statement hang in the air. He listens to the rustling trees, the heartbeats of the rats that scurry by the shore. Life, in itself.
“Personal religion has little meaning to the slave, save for his efforts towards emancipation. Perhaps in my childhood, in Delhi, my parents raised me in a regional sect of Hinduism. But they sold me at twelve out of lack of love or money, so what meaning do their gods have to me? Marius was my emancipator. My true life began with the Dark Gift.”
Lestat exhales, slow and long. The air crystallizes and then disperses.
“Perhaps I am as my father always said. Weak of spirit.”
A mile away, girls begin screaming. They have seen the body under the ice. Lestat smiles wickedly.
”You talk of your dislike of the periphery, and yet your eyes fill with mirth over a body found in the river.”
Lestat leans back on his hands and looks up at the stars.
”I have been tasked with spreading fear and superstition by my maker, and I do it gladly. One must make the best of a gift given through force.”
Armand reaches out to touch Lestat’s hand. Lestat laces their fingers together, interweaving them with the wet grass.
“My maker told me that the Dark Gift won’t take if it finds you unworthy. You would have died during your ravishing. Perhaps Magnus knew things about you that you did not know about yourself.”
”Magnus as liberator, Magnus as emancipator.” Lestat over-enunciates the words sardonically. “Where do you get these ideas? What did you know of my maker?”
”Very little. He joined the coven during a trip to Paris in 1623. He rarely let anyone drink from him, and had mastered the mind gift enough to prevent us from learning much of his origins. In 1793, he chafed at my leadership and broke from the coven. A year later, he had self-immolated, and created yourself.”
“He never mentioned a penchant for blonde-haired, blue-eyed mortals?”
“No.”
“Hm. It seems the true inner workings of his deranged mind are as elusive to you as they are to myself.”
Lestat pulls a delicate briar pipe out of his coat pocket and packs it with a small sleeve of cheap tobacco. After putting the pipe in his mouth, he conjures a small flame on his index finger, and uses it to light the pipe. Smoke rises from his mouth in great O’s towards the heavens.
”Do you want some?” he asks.
”Sure,” says Armand. Lestat hands him the pipe, still wet on the mouthpiece. He savors the intimacy as he smokes and feels nothing.
”I do not know why I think so often and so resentfully of my turning. The Savage Garden, as you note, remains filled with wonders, particularly in its capacity for its cruelties. After draining, dismembering, torturing, and feasting on hundreds of mortals, am I to still be disturbed by the hanging corpses that looked like me? Am I so unique, for being penetrated against my will? But I remember the mortal terror, and I feel it, still.”
Armand exhales a great cloud of smoke and hands the pipe back to Lestat.
”We do not choose what follows us through the Savage Garden. Should I love the enslaver who I could now crush in my fist? Think fondly upon the men and women who eagerly raped a young slave for their own self-gratification? I am now a monster and I hate them, still.”
Lestat blows out the pipe and rests it down on the grass. He tucks a strand of hair behind Armand’s ear and strokes his cheek.
“I am sorry, Armand. I hate them too.”
He kisses Armand gently on the mouth. Armand chases it with his tongue, deepens the kiss. Lestat rolls him onto his back and entangles their legs. The grass crunches under them as they fall together and apart, making love by the frozen stinking river that channels all of the waste of Paris, which is to say, all of the stuff of life.
Gabriella returns to Paris on New Year’s Day, 1799. Armand hears it through the walls, the night of her return. Lestat chokes out a pathetic sob the moment she opens the door.
“Mother! Fledgling! Mon cherie, mon amour, mon coeur, where have you been?”
”Here and there,” she says, cryptically. “Mostly, the south of France. Marseille, Toulon. And I took a fishing boat to Algiers. I stayed there for a while, eating infidels. But look, you called for me, and I came. So what does it matter, anyway?”
”You did not invite me to come with you. You left me here, with Nicky. Hear him in his madness, locked in his room.”
”And I am supposed to bring you and your manic lover wherever I go? If he were human, he would be in the mad-house like Aristide. You have brought upon him this suffering, and now you suffer yourself. I am expected to suffer for eternity as well?”
He answers her question with silence.
”Do you plan to stay here in Paris for eternity, nursing Nicky and sodomizing the Oriental gremlin? Do you lack such discernment for your immortal life?”
”I did not choose the Dark Gift, mother. I am a kite in the winds of eternity.”
“Now we are feeling sorry for ourselves.”
Another silence, and then —
“Come to me. Touch me. Yes, there. Yes.”
He moans as Gabriella breaks the sexual boundary of which he has kept for so long. She breathes heavily, stimulating him to climax. Then, he returns the favor.
“I love you,” she says.
The next morning, Lestat coldly tells Armand that he doesn't want to act anymore.
Times are bad once Lestat moves from stage to box. Their lovemaking becomes mechanical, and Lestat often will not look him in the eyes. Armand cannot bring himself to ask if Lestat wants to stop, so he doesn’t. He takes from Lestat’s dispassionate mouth and his unyielding hole. When Lestat seems hesitant to continue to penetrate him, he pulls Lestat in with his legs and forces him to stay there as Armand stimulates himself. The longer this goes on, the rougher the sex becomes. This is a two-handed affair, he thinks. It is easy to convince himself that they both want it this way.
Gabriella’s return has accelerated Nicky’s madness. After years of tolerating the perversion, Nicky finally expresses disgust over Lestat’s relations with his mother. He rants endlessly about incest and cheating. There is no love left between them. His suicide attempts increase, leaving Lestat too exhausted for basic conversation. All the while, Gabriella feeds Lestat thoughts of a better life elsewhere. She brings him tales of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt that she heard while in Algiers, and imparts in him ideas of Armand’s weakness and inferiority as though Armand himself were a modern Egyptian. The doubts she seeds in his legitimacy of power cause him to increase his authoritarian grip on the coven, which produces an attitude of fear within the company not conducive to quality theatrical performances. As attendance trends downward, he and his people have less and less to eat.
Things come to a head one evening when Lestat and his mother are seated in a box with Armand high above the theater. Nicky watches them furiously as he plays louder than the rest of the orchestra, making Lestat look extremely uncomfortable. Lestat and Armand insult each other as the volume of the music increases. Gabriella taunts them about her abandonment and their relationship. And Armand, who already knows the answer, asks,
“Does Nicolas know about us?”
Which only inspires more performative mockery from the both of them. This is where Armand’s extreme permissiveness of Gabriella’s behavior has gotten him. Because Lestat loves her, Armand has not tossed her into a box with rocks as he would any other coven member who undermined his authority. He has allowed Nicky to live, despite his persistent destabilizing madness. Lestat’s performance of the seductive kept boy has turned him into a spineless king.
“I love you, Lestat,” he reminds him.
Gabriella laughs and leaves the box. Lestat performatively rolls his eyes and then follows her behind in a huff.
In the box the following night, Armand gives Lestat an ultimatum.
“Nicky cannot go on tomorrow night. He is too disruptive. We are on the verge of losing everything we have.”
Lestat’s face crumples. He rests his face in his palm and winces as Nicky’s playing gets louder and louder. Several patrons walk out in frustration.
“Okay. We’ll tell him tonight in my apartment after the performance. I ordered some Peruvian lilies there this evening and it put him in a good mood for a little while.”
Armand pretends to accept the premise, even as he knows it is based on falsehood. Nicky had loudly accused Lestat of buying the flowers for Armand and refused to accept any of Lestat's protestations.
The moment they all go into the apartment together, Nicky suspects something is wrong. It's rare for Armand to come into the apartment, and rarer still for him to do it while Gabriella is around. He refuses to sit down, instead pacing the room and swinging his hands wildly. Armand’s rational suggestions are overridden by a desperate search for a letter opener – and its replacement with an axe for firewood. After five long years of madness, the inevitable happens. Nicolas chops off his own hand and throws it into the fire. He has managed to irreparably harm himself. He has finally justified his own annihilation.
Lestat is sobbing uncontrollably, gripping onto Nicky’s free arm as the other splashes him with blood. Gabriella laughs and goes to coffin, and then the three of them are alone. With a growing sense of dread, Armand realizes that Lestat is never going to kill Nicky on his own. His parasitic love would keep Nicky around past the point of bodily integrity and through eternal misery. Nicky could lose every limb and all of his teeth, cry constantly for the end, and Lestat would insist that his life was still worth living. Not for Nicky’s sake, but his own. Armand is here to take control of the situation. He is here to be the angel of death.
“Let go of him, Lestat.”
He shakes his head, refusing to look at Armand. Lestat raises Nicky’s hand to his mouth and begins babbling into it all of the sweet nothings that Nicky stopped believing a long time ago. Armand picks up a poker and presses the pointy end into Lestat’s chest.
“Let him go.”
Lestat steps back, wiping the tears dripping down his face with his bloody sleeve. It leaves his face messier than it was to begin with, but he doesn’t continue trying to fix it. The drama sours Armand’s stomach. All of this, for a boy so mediocre that he could not even earn Lestat’s faithfulness.
Armand presses the poker to Nicky’s stomach and walks him backwards towards the fireplace. Nicky smiles eerily as he does it, lucid enough to understand his end is near. He gleefully chants thankyouthankyouthankyou as he walks, which causes Lestat to start sobbing again. Placing him into the fire requires guidance rather than force. Armand does not have to press the poker to his stomach once Nicky has eagerly curled up in the flames. As Nicky spectacularly immolates, Armand wonders if he simply could have asked him to jump into the fire.
For three weeks, Lestat does not leave his coffin. Gabriella abandons him after he refuses her advances the first night, and then, he is alone. Armand busies himself with the theater, glad for the return to order within the coven. He cannot bring himself to knock on Lestat’s door. His unwillingness to offer Nicky mercy and the outsourcing of his annihilation has disturbed Armand far more than extinguishing his life. Has anyone Lestat has loved ever been more than a tool for him to use? Somehow, he has found sympathy for Gabriella. In turning her, he has tied her to his parasitic nature for eternity. How terrible, to be at Lestat’s eternal beck and call!
Finally, Lestat stumbles to Armand’s door. When Armand answers, Lestat slumps over the doorway, pale and weak from starvation. Without saying a word, he shows Armand his fangs. His naked hunger causes hate to blossom in Armand’s heart. Lestat takes and takes, and still, he wants more.
“There is nothing for you here,” he says. “Go drain a sodomite in the Luxembourg and leave me alone.”
Lestat scoffs.
“You have been ravishing me for three years and I have never offered a moment of resistance. Now that I ask you to show Nicky to a merciful end, which you have desired to do since the day you met him, you no longer wish to share your blood with me?”
“Yes,” says Armand. But the statement lacks confidence. Already, Lestat's sexuality is overwhelming his senses. Lestat slowly unbuttons the shirt of his pajamas, allowing saliva to pool in his open mouth. He places Armand’s hand on his stomach and gently pulls it up to his neck. Lestat's heartbeat is weak under his thumb. Armand squeezes his neck experimentally, and Lestat dramatically gasps.
“Please, Maitré. Take me back. Please.”
Armand’s breath catches, drinking in Lestat’s desire. His belly is hot with arousal.
“Not without conditions. You do not respect me like your Maitré. Your mother degrades me without restraint and you do nothing.”
“Maitré, I can control the vampiress Gabriella no more than I can control the wind.”
Armand bites his own arm and scents the air with his blood. Lestat’s fangs grow larger with hunger.
“She is not welcome in Paris any longer. If she returns, I will kill her. And if she reveals in the course of her arrival that you called to her, for so gravely disobeying your Maitré, I will entomb you forever in the catacombs under the Theatre des Vampires."
Lestat smiles in a way that does not reach his eyes. A smile that precedes one’s untimely end.
“Mon amour, it is as you wish. I give you alone my body and blood. Only you will have intimate access to my immortal soul.”
Armand bares his neck to Lestat so that he can take a bite. He savors the prelude to his betrayal as a new form of erotic rapture, le coup fatal, and comes untouched with the door still open.
No other period of time in Lestat and Armand's relationship compares erotically to the spring of 1799. With Nicky and Gabriella gone, their sexual geography significantly expands. They have intercourse in every room and on every surface of Lestat’s apartment, and in the Theatre des Vampires as well. Lestat finds as-yet uncharted ways to sodomize and be sodomized. Armand erupts mysterious fluids from unknown anatomies, and finds pleasure on every inch of skin, every limb, organ, and entrance. It's a vast departure from the reluctant intercourse of early 1799, when Lestat approached his body with dead eyes and low spirits. In his planned disobedience, Lestat has come to desire him again.
Armand uses the mind gift to track Gabriella’s movements across the Mediterranean. She stays tight to the coasts, travelling down the boot of Italy as far as Sienna before hopping to Corsica, Sardinia, and into Africa again. She spends several weeks in Tunis gorging herself on Algerian soldiers, then feasts on French soldiers as she travels back up the boot of Italy towards France. It’s hard to read her intentions in her imminent return. Perhaps it is innate in the maker-fledgling bond to desire closeness in the years following transformation. As she draws closer, Lestat fucks him harder. Her approach makes him feel more alive.
When Gabriella reaches Naples by carriage, Lestat begins sleeping in Armand’s coffin. He curls himself around Armand every morning, intertwining their bodies so closely that Armand wakes up with red pools of saliva on his chest. Sometimes he uses the mind gift to visit Lestat’s dreams, but there’s rarely anything of interest. A jumble of strange sexual encounters, bizarre scenarios, and faces swimming in and out. Often, he dreams of Gabriella, but that’s unsurprising. After all, her very existence is calling to him.
Perhaps the most surprising development in Lestat’s subconscious is the growing presence of himself in Lestat’s dreams. Armand receiving flowers. Armand kissing me. Armand calling me ‘beloved.’ Armand, Armand, Armand. So pervasive do these images become by May 1799 that Armand reduces the amount of time he spends rifling around in Lestat’s mind. They seem almost custom-designed to make Armand lose his nerve when the inevitable happens. He is not supposed to be falling in love with Lestat, again. And yet, it’s hard to deny what is happening to their relationship. Lestat is falling back in love with him too.
One morning in June 1799, Lestat murmurs in Armand’s ear, “Gabriella is travelling upstream on the Seine. I can feel her. She is close to Paris.”
His honesty is disarming. Armand pushes a lock of hair out of Lestat’s face to get a better look at his eyes. In the dim light of Armand's coffin, they hold no deception.
“Did you call to her?”
”I don’t know,” Lestat admits. “I only know that my body cries out in her absence and sings when she is near. I see the world as if we are the only two people in the Savage Garden, when she is close after a long separation.” He intertwines his fingers with Armand’s, frowning. “She has always had disdain for such attachments. This bond angers her. I did not know of it when I gave her the Gift. I only wanted her to live.”
Armand sighs.
”She will not be alive for very much longer if she enters Paris. She is too disruptive to the coven. I will have to tell her to leave.”
Lestat’s eyes are shining now, threatening tears. He blinks hard and looks away.
”I know. I have already left a large donation with Francois covering the costs of five years of productions at the Theatre des Vampires in anticipation of her arrival. I will be leaving Paris to travel with her on the Devil’s Road.”
Hot anger flashes in Armand’s chest. He had prepared to kill Lestat for his betrayal; there is no contingency plan for this horrible honesty.
“Lestat, she does not enjoy your company,” he pleads.
A thin, red tear trickles down Lestat’s face. He scrunches up his face and wipes it away with his palm.
“I know.”
”She will demand your submission to perverted acts daily.”
“I know.”
”She will abandon you in some far-off place to fend for yourself. Somewhere with no shade, long days, no easily obtainable prey.”
”I know.”
”I don’t understand. Why would you trade away your life in Paris to spend your eternity with her?”
Lestat can no longer wipe tears away fast enough. He lets them fall, hard, into the black silk of Armand’s coffin.
”She is my fledgling, and she is my maker. We are connected by blood. I cannot abandon her when she is calling to me.”
He tucks his face into Armand’s neck like a child. The tears stream down Armand’s neck, sticky and hot.
”And what of my abandonment?” he says, as Lestat sniffles pathetically. “I am to run both the company and the coven on my own?”
”Santiago will take my place,” says Lestat into Armand’s neck. “He cares for the company.”
”Santiago is power-hungry. He cannot have a position of prominence. He will try to usurp me.”
”He is the successor I have chosen.”
Lestat raises Armand’s hands to his mouth. He presses a scarlet kiss onto them.
”Maitré. . .you will be fine.”
Armand wrests his hands from Lestat. He rolls onto his side to stare at the wall of his coffin. Lestat’s leftover tears stain the silk and wood as Armand shifts his position. Typical mess for Lestat to leave for someone else to clean up.
“I do not need or desire your reassurance. I have always been able to be fine. It is you who must cope with your own spineless mediocrity. Get out.”
Lestat shrinks away from him, detangling their legs.
“The sun is out. I am not a daywalker like you. I cannot leave.”
Armand grunts with frustration and kicks him a blanket from the foot of the coffin.
“Put this over your head and run to your own coffin. You are not welcome in my coffin anymore.”
Armand opens the shell and shoves Lestat until he gets out. Lestat shrieks on his way back to his apartment, the sun burning him through the blanket Armand provided. He screams and heaves with pain until he reaches his own coffin and shuts himself inside. Armand smiles to himself, imagining his burns. Lestat will greet Gabriella as a disfigured thing. He will see the limits of her affection when she cannot bring herself to request he perform the perversions to which she is so inclined. And what do they have between them, beyond those perversions?
Nothing, Armand thinks. Nothing. NOTHING. nothing. Nothing. NOTHING. NOTHING. nothing nothing NOTHINGnothing NothingNOTHING
Lestat has barely recovered from his injuries by the time Gabriella reaches the outskirts of Paris. Armand follows Lestat to the clearing where he has decided to wait for her. His face and hands are waxy with new skin. He carries a neatly wrapped present in his hand. An illustrated travel book about Northern Europe.
Armand uses the mind gift to hide in plain sight in front of a tree. The color of his clothing and complexion allow him to blur himself with nature like a smeared painting, producing the effect that he is not there at all. He listens to the clearing for a woman’s footsteps, and is surprised that the only encroaching sound is a horse and carriage. Gabriella must surely be inside it.
The horses that arrive bearing Gabriella’s carriage are pretty and white. Gabriella steps out of the carriage wearing a simple brown empire dress and lace-up boots. Her hair is cut severely to her chin. Lestat greets her with a kiss on the mouth.
”My Gabriella. How I missed you.”
Gabriella smiles and hums insincerely into the kiss. She grabs the present from Lestat’s hands.
”What is this? A book?”
She tears the package open and inspects it.
”This is the old edition. I saw the new one in Bologna a few weeks ago.”
Lestat smiles insincerely back at her.
“Now it is top of mind. Perhaps we will find the new ones on our travels up north. You were just in the Mediterranean, yes?”
”Mmm. Did the gremlin Armand tell you this? At times, I felt him tracking my location on my travels. He is a very strange man.”
”No. I have not spoken with him since you left. He said that he would kill you if you returned to Paris, so I broke with the coven and waited alone for your return. I merely sensed your presence on the Mediterranean.”
“Liar. I smell him on your clothes.”
”Fine. I had a few dalliances and asked where you were. Is that a crime?”
Gabriella smiles, genuinely now. She gets back into the carriage and beckons to him.
”Let’s talk about it on the Devil’s Road. I want to take you to Florence before we travel to Northern Europe.”
He grabs her hands and gets in the carriage. And then, they’re off. Armand stands in the clearing for a few minutes and realizes that he created no other plans. Gabriella has accepted Lestat’s poorly-healed face and the terrible book Armand suggested. Lestat is really and truly gone.
So, Armand starts running.
He chases the carriage deep into the forest, keeping his steps light so as to not alert the horses. Derailing the carriage in random directions is not what he’s aiming for, though what he is aiming for is still a mystery. He has no weapons on his person nor excuses for why he is following behind. If he wanted to, he could use the mind gift to stop the horses’ movements. But stopping the horses would require knowing what to say, and the only thing driving Armand is an unnameable ache.
Eventually the carriage slows, because, after all, the horses are mortal. When the carriage driver leaves the carriage to care for them, Armand acts without thinking. He slashes the carriage driver’s throat with his fingers, drains him, and decapitates him. Then, he drinks from one of the horses until it falls to its knees. Lestat scrambles out of the carriage and looks on the scene in horror.
”Armand? What the fuck are you doing?”
Instead of answering, Armand uses the mind gift to slam Lestat into the ground. He jumps onto his chest and shakes his lapels, clawing at the buttons on his shirt until his bare chest is exposed. Lestat tries to push him off, but Armand keeps him down with the mind gift. He bites Lestat right over his heart and begins draining him as Lestat cries out helplessly. Behind him, Gabriella runs out of the carriage and begins yelling. He tosses her aside with the mind gift like a rag doll.
It’s not until Lestat’s pulse slows that Armand realizes what he is doing. He breaks away from Lestat’s chest and stares into his tear-filled mirror-eyes. Armand succumbs to another base urge and licks the tears away as Lestat moans under him. No — that’s his own voice, too, groaning like a broken thing. He bites Lestat’s lip and licks into his mouth. But it’s not enough. He needs more.
Armand digs his nails into the divot of his massive scars and removes a small chunk of muscle, fat, and skin. He pockets it and finally, finally feels calm. So, he dismounts Lestat, and releases him from the mind gift. Lestat stumbles to his feet, paler than usual and shaking. Blood spills from his wound onto the ground. Armand bows his head with shame. In his fury, he has gone a little too far.
”Your turn, now,” he says, in a small voice. He braces for Lestat to hit him. Instead, Lestat laughs hysterically. He heals the small wound with his fingers and buttons up his shirt.
”My turn now? Oh my God. Oh my God.”
To Armand’s surprise, Lestat turns around and walks away. Every so often, he laughs again with increasing, genuine humor. He helps his dazed mother out of the brambles and releases the sicker horse from the carriage. Lestat whispers something into Gabriella’s ear that makes her break out into peals of laughter. He gets into the driver’s seat of the carriage and urges the horse onwards.
”Fuck off, Armand!” he shouts. “And goodbye!”
Armand sits down in the clearing, and pulls the chunk of Lestat out of his pocket. He presses his lips to it, and sits like that until the Greenfinches and Robins begin to sing, and the squirrels and rabbits scurry out of their dens, seeking something, anything to eat. Then, he pockets the memory, and sets out on his long, slow walk back to Paris.