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That first night he spent outdoors, wandering. Later he couldn’t remember where he went or what he did. All he could think about was the root canal that had been done to him without anesthetic; kept probing the excavated socket with his tongue over and over, the place in his soul where Louis had for so long been securely and unquestionably affixed. Night in Dubai was hardly night at all and it came to him slowly as he wandered the wide clean sidewalks downtown that he hated this city, found it vulgar and unspeakably vile, but its most loathsome aspect was its hypocrisy, its despicable pretending to be something it was not. He was not lucid enough to recognize the projection for what it was and so he spent all that first night hating the city instead of himself, hating this place where he had lost everything, hating the people who lived here with an all-consuming, indiscriminating loathing as he walked circles in the opulence of garish wealth that two hours ago he had considered his own. All the while telling himself: I can make him love me again. I did it before. It was possible then and I can make it possible again. Imagining himself genuflected before Louis, making obeisance, weeping real tears of blood, licking his shoes and begging for mercy—promising to do anything he wanted whenever he wanted it, to never again ask whether Louis was asking him or making him: to accept the unspoken threat of force without question, which he had never truly done even though he’d pretended that he had; to mean it this time, to submit entirely, to never ask why or what for. He would empty himself completely of authority. He would amputate whatever hateful vestigial limb of his self granted him freedom of choice. I will do nothing but as you say it. I will be for you what I was for him without stipulation this time, without any treacherous hints of doubt, without resentment and my mean private rebellions. The imaginings soothed him, poured ice water into the bloody socket where security had been. I will love you and only you, and this time it will be enough. Watching men in white kanduras and gutras weave e-scooters around pedestrians. Listening to the distant sound of women laughing. They were to him like mayflies, these people, breeding and dying and breeding and dying and breeding and dying in the span of intervals so short and yet so stultifyingly unchanging that they snapped all internal threads of patience and continuity. He circled the skyscraper where they had lived these last twenty years. I will go up and wait for you on hands and knees until you tell me to stand, unless you don’t, and if you don’t I will not mind, I will accept what I am due. But he couldn’t enter the building. He could not make himself pass over the threshold. Louis had told him to go and he must do as he was told because he had been told it. He will call me, Armand thought, sick and lightheaded, making repeat circuits on the pavement. He will call for me and then I will come, when it is permitted: only when I have been told. He tried to keep his mind clear and open, ever sensitive and receptive to that inevitable telepathic summons, which if it did not come tonight would come tomorrow, and if it did not come tomorrow would come the next day, and if it did not come the next day would come the day after that. Or the day after that. It would come within the week. Within the week he would be back where he belonged, which was on his knees; doing what he was supposed to, which was whatever Louis wanted of him. A week was nothing. He spent weeks the way people spent hours. The agony of waiting only felt interminable during the feeling of it but in truth it would be short, it would be nothing, it would be like a single point in time, a breath.
He kept waiting for it to pass but it did not pass. He did not sleep or eat. Every moment he must spend alert, he must be poised to respond at the precise instant Louis called for him. He went nowhere and did nothing. He waited. He waited. Three days crawled by with sullen despondency and on that third day he realized only when he was halfway through doing it that he was making lacerations on his scalp with his hands, trying to dig through his skull to find the empty leaking socket inside and fill it with tissue, with gore, with gravel and dirt if that was all he had at hand. He went down to water because water had calmed him in the past but it did not calm him now. Looking at the water taxis made him sick, caused time to collapse in on itself, sent him back to a place and a person which both were gone now, dead, and yet still thrust colonizing tendrils into his mind and heart, dead settlement of an undead place. The Gulf made dull domesticated noises, not sea noises, and beat itself against the piers and the waterways with a housebroken and tamed listlessness.
I’ll follow you, thought Armand on the fourth day. It came to him for the first time like divine revelation, piercing him from the crown of his head all the way to the sole of his left foot. You did not say I could not follow you. But the command was implicit and implied and he was powerless to resist its covert instruction. Only perfect obedience would be rewarded. He saw that now. There was no room for opposition or for contrast in their life. Because Louis had hesitated to entirely step into his role, Armand had hesitated to entirely step into his. We allowed ourselves too much freedom and too much ambiguity, but there can be no ambiguity. This time we will get it right. This time I will be worthy. This time because I am worthy you will finally be happy.
He stopped haunting this unhauntable infant city and got a hotel room. Temporary, he reassured himself; it’s temporary. But the idea only terrified him, offered no consolation whatsoever. Everything was temporary: nothing was permanent. The only permanence he had ever known was himself and it was a permanence that he could not stand. Show me something, just one other thing—one thing that is not myself and that is permanent. There had to be something or he would not be able to stand it. Let there be just one other thing and let it be him. Let it be Louis, and let him let me have him.
The fifth day he slept fitfully. He woke sweating from dreams recalling cobalt blue happiness, or if not happiness then surely satisfaction; but were we ever really satisfied? You could make me stop dreaming, he thought, feverish, bargaining now with Louis’s shadow. You could make it part of the punishment. Would that be enough? For her dreams you wept. Would you accept the surrendering of mine? What else would you have me excise? I’d eat rats or nothing at all, nothing if that’s what you wanted—and suddenly he could imagine Louis wanting it. It thrilled him, made him run hot and then cold and tingling, the idea of Louis wanting anything from him and wanting it so seriously, so nonnegotiably. Forbid the fulfillment of all my hungers, I would gladly give you that. I need nothing, not satisfaction, not pleasure, only yours, only yours.
Liar. Even as he courted the fantasy of Louis depriving him he could feel his desperate hungry wanting stir, an ache so sweet he could hardly stand it. I would touch myself only if you let me and if you never let me then all the better. Yet he was touching himself now, desperate, chasing pleasure that did not fulfill him, that did not do as it should. This for you I would give up. This for you I would do without. He came silently without satisfaction, penitent and dismayed. All you have to do is tell me to stop. Only send me a sign, any sign, and I will do as you have told me.
There was no sign.
Leave this place, he thought again. Follow him. But he couldn’t do it. Instead of west he went east, leaving Dubai and glad for it, hopping entirely over India and glad for it, skipping Bangladesh too for good measure, coming down in Myanmar and then going east still into Thailand where for a day he stopped. It wasn’t far enough and it was the wrong direction, but it made a start. He went south towards the Gulf of Thailand and at the water he stopped again in Pattaya. It was monsoon season, the low season, but he preferred that, liked how all day long it rained in hot, sprinkling gasps that depleted themselves nearly as soon as they had begun. The humidity was familiar and intimate even though he had spent centuries in drier climes. He’d thought he had forgotten the way the wet warm air could embrace you, suffocate you, leave the sweat on you uncooling and unrelenting. The straightforwardness of the sex clubs and go-go bars on Walking Street amused something cold and scornful in him but he never went inside. See how thoroughly I can ignore the pleasures of the flesh. See how easily I can abstain. See too how easily I could make myself like this for you, if you’d only say you want it.
Two weeks, then. What was two weeks compared to one, two weeks was nothing, still it was nothing. But Armand began to struggle now with a competing thought, which was that if two weeks was nothing then it was also not long enough for Louis to have changed his mind, to decide to tell him to come home and they would make this work. He had no conception of the time or effort it took to process and then dispense with difficult emotions, no idea what logistics were involved or that it might not be a linear thing—that it might happen in stops and starts, going round and round repeatedly before finally, heroically, jerkily, in fits, pulling itself an agonizing heave forward towards catharsis. The world of the inner life was something entirely veiled to him and he had only the vaguest inkling of that veiling. If someone had asked him two weeks ago whether he was happy, he would have said yes and believed it. If someone had asked him twenty years ago—fifty, one hundred, three—he would have said yes then, too. To be alive it was important that one be happy, that one be satisfied. To be unhappy or unsatisfied was to be half dead, and as he was already mostly dead then surely all that was left separating him from hell was the belief that he was not already there. It was a belief weakly mustered but mustered all the same, in spite of his wordless foreknowledge of a clearer and a deeper truth: which was that of course he already was. He began to sleepwalk whenever he tried to sleep and so he dispensed almost entirely with that leashed need. I do not even need you to love me, he thought. I will accept mere tolerance, I will accept disinterest, I will accept even your indifference and your unconcern so long as there is still a place for me somewhere in your life; so long as you can find somewhere to put me, something for me to do. Anything.
He began in these days of restlessness to understand some things that had long eluded him. He began to understand he had been striving for the impossible. What was reciprocal love but a figment of human imagination, a story human beings told themselves to pretend they weren’t so intolerably and existentially alone? He had tried for so many years to chase this fantasy of myopic human desperation and never once had he stopped to consider that it was a fundamental impossibility, an emotional state elementally at odds with the logic of life. It was like wanting ice to freeze at ten degrees instead of zero. It was like expecting gravity to stop its constant work. It was here then where he had gone wrong, a fundamental error; but now that it had been discovered it could be resolved and corrected for. It is enough if I love you and nothing more, I see that now. I see now that that’s enough. But he should have known it sooner. It was disturbing that he had not, that for so long he had clung to this false idol like a child with a broken toy.
He spent all day walking. He walked every street and every corner and every alley in Pattaya that he could find, even when the streets flooded with the rain, even when the bar girls began to recognize him among the ebbing and waxing crowds of men window-shopping for flesh and laughed at him for never doing the same. If he walked enough, if he bore enough discomfort, if he experienced enough suffering, then he could undo the consequences of the errors he had made. The penance demanded of him would be great, it would chew up his days and nights. It would devour him from the inside out but he would feed himself to this bottomless penance piecemeal until he had been emptied of wrongdoing and could be filled with whatever someone else saw fit to fill him with.
He woke on the eleventh day, in the middle of that second week—that endless, frozen, crawling week—in a paroxysm of hysteria. Two weeks! he thought—two weeks, you make me wait two whole weeks, my God, I will die, I will die before you call for me! Retching up the nothing in his stomach, rolling out of bed onto the floor damp already with the day’s wet heat. His nails bored divots into the wood. This, he thought wildly, carelessly—this all because of you. He was unaware at first that he was no longer directing the wounded patter of his thoughts toward Louis. A second person was taking shape in his mind, a darker and a richer shadow. How could it have taken him so long to turn his attentions here? He burned up that whole day and then the next with the inferno of his fury directed towards this other, who had destroyed him merely because he wanted to, because he could, because it had been possible to do it. Where his desperate beseeching of Louis unraveled him, kept him witless and volitionless, his wounded loathing of Daniel was fecund and stabilizing. It brought clarity to these unclear days. Instead of craving Louis’s forgiveness Armand could imagine the cooling balm of Daniel’s future suffering. He could remind himself that Daniel would soon die, loveless and unloved, without even his children to weep over him. He spent hours relishing the thought, envisioning it, noticing every fine and pristine detail. He found studies online on the mechanisms of Parkinson’s neurodegeneration and read them with great pleasure. Daniel would suffer physically before the end as the disease only just beginning to ravage him rooted itself deeper in his flesh and his mind. He would lose slowly or not so slowly, over the course of years or maybe merely weeks, the ability to stand upright, to speak without slurring beyond legibility, to walk without stumbling or fainting, to think clear thoughts in a mind that had once been and would never again be sharp, incisive, discerning. A progressive, mutilating dwindling as the sickness devoured the neurons in his brain. When Daniel died—because he would die—it would not be quietly. He would go into death mangled beyond recognition.
More days. More nights. As bereavement continued to unmake him Armand found even the prospect of a slow and painful death by Parkinson’s lost all of its delectability, its tender bite. Not enough, it is not enough; you’ve earned yourself more than that and it’s not right that you won’t get it. It’s not right that you can give it but that you won’t receive and so I will kill your daughters. The prospect soothed and tempered him. First one, then the other; Kate, then Lenora. Maybe you will even be the one to find their corpses, for I will put them in your home and watch you discover their disassembly. Who else, he wondered, who else?—Daniel had almost no family, few close friends, made himself difficult to like. One of the daughters was getting married for the first time in her forties this year. Armand would slaughter everyone at the ceremony and cover the altar in her blood. Daniel would only be spared because he had not been invited, had learned this in Dubai and Armand had intercepted the information as it travelled from screen to eyes to brain. You thought that non-invitation would be the hardest thing you had left to bear in this life? I will make you forget what solace is. Feeling a strange and unfamiliar feeling and touching his own face, realizing he was smiling.
On the nineteenth day in total agony he left Thailand and went east again, this time going east to go west. He flew to Tokyo and then New York at JFK. The planes packed full of sweating stinking human beings nauseated him, made his ears ring. This too is your doing, he thought. Because of you I have been reduced to this public profanity. Over the course of twenty-two hours in the air he imagined with exacting, emotionless precision how he would disembowel and then rip out the gasping throats of every man, woman, and child onboard: starting from the back and working his way to the front, until the air was rank and thick with gore, until blood ran down the aisle and lapped at the trembling feet of those still yet to become his victims. Tendons and veins caught between his teeth. Ribbons of flesh trailing viscera. And blood, blood, blood sweet and blood savory, blood coating the membranes of his flesh from lips to gullet. Blood not enough to satisfy but blood enough to whet his thirst. Blood enough to get started on.
He would go to Brooklyn first. From there he would pick out of Daniel’s mind the details of his daughters’ movements in the coming days. If Daniel did not know that, which as their estranged father he surely wouldn’t, then Armand would pick out the information he could that would lead him to the information he lacked. I will do it without your noticing—from a distance, slipping in and out of you like a ghost. So he’d thought at first. Now with his feet on the ground he saw clearly how much sweeter it would be if Daniel knew exactly what was being taken from him, and who was taking it and why. I will sit you down, Armand thought. I will bind you in place, I will make you powerless to move. You should get familiar with how that feels since it is coming for you without me but this time it will be me who does it and not your sickness. You will know that I have done it by design. You will know that I have a higher purpose. It was not necessary to be gentle with the thoughts of human beings when one invaded them, to be artful with the psyches of vermin. He would eschew all finesse and subtlety of craft. It was what he should have done in Dubai, but he had thought a remote and gentle monitoring would be enough after all this time, and look where that got me. This time he would use a sledgehammer. This time he would brutalize Daniel as he had for so long wanted to. For that was what I really wanted—not to preserve you but to destroy you—and to keep myself from doing it I stayed out of your mind and so you destroyed me instead.
But Daniel was not home. Armand knew that as soon as he let himself in to his place, which was dark and a little dusty, had not been disturbed for weeks. Daniel was still elsewhere. He had not yet landed after the fallout of Dubai. The prospect of waiting until he returned was intolerable. No more. Armand found Daniel’s desktop computer and turned it on. Same password as his laptop; Daniel’s judgment could be so shockingly poor. He read through the conversations he could find between Daniel and his benefactors. In Daniel’s email was a message from an unknown source confirming his flight details for one day’s time: Los Angeles to Newark, and the car service that would take him the rest of the way home.
Armed with what he needed Armand let himself out of the building. He looked up at the sky, starless and hot, smoky with exhaust, that was pressing down on him like a smothering hand. He took out the cigarettes he had stolen from Daniel’s desk where he had found them shoved in the back of a drawer for those once a year occasions that Daniel, sober, gave himself permission to indulge. He lit one and smoked it down to the filter, thinking, trying not to think; thinking, trying not to. Remembering Louis and turning suddenly sick with dismay. This was against the spirit of his instructions if not the specific letter of them. I need this one to live, said Louis. You harm him in any way, I will kill you. Then kill me, Armand thought, giddy, flush. Kill me, kill me until you are satisfied, maybe that will be enough, that will certainly be better than this empty silence. Only perfect obedience would be rewarded but he would not be rewarded; he saw that now. The most he could hope for was discipline.
Yet nonetheless he was not permitted to harm Daniel. Despairing Armand did nothing for a long time. The lit end of the cigarette burnt past the filter and singed his fingertips. When the pain became urgent and unignorable he dropped it, put it out with the heel of his shoe, lit another. He smoked the rest, seventeen cigarettes in total, one after another on the sidewalk of that dark Brooklyn street in the witching hours of the early morning, staring at nothing, unmoving, impassive, unable to make himself disobey Louis who had left him but who must be made again to love him; unable to surrender to obedience the future promise of retribution against Daniel who had destroyed him.
What do you care, anyway, thought Armand, imagining Louis’s face and then regretting it, not liking the look Louis gave him even in the privacy of his own thoughts. What is he to you? You and he shared San Francisco, shared Dubai, shared a story you told each other, yes. But what of the years in between? What of all the times I knew him and you weren’t there, all the times I possessed him and you were not part of it? You were separate, you were divided; you gave him to me and I know you knew that you did it. You have no right to dictate his preservation. I am the one who knows him best and I know what he is owed. Is he not my shadow, my possession, my loved object, my undoing? I will obey you in all respects but this. I am yours and of course you must do with me as you see fit, but he is mine and I must give him what he has earned.
He set out walking when the cigarettes were done. He tried to order his thoughts with neat repetition, corralling them with the certainty of thoroughly examined and re-examined logic. He had not fed since that hunt in Dubai when Daniel had begun his work on Louis to unmake him. The hunger made his mind sharp and fierce, honed it to an edge. The wind over the pedestrian path of the Manhattan Bridge was hot and sweaty, promising thunder though it did not rain, lifting his hair and bringing the dingy smell of the East River up and over him. He walked and he planned. He did not notice the human beings around him, hardly even smelled them. It was as if he were alone in Manhattan in total silence and sensationlessness despite that he knew logically, on an altogether different and barely accessible level of his mind, that he was surrounded by a cacophony of sound and stench and sunlight. He walked through Chinatown and Soho, up through Greenwich Village and Chelsea. In Midtown at West 39th he got on the ferry to Weehawken and stood still as it slid the the gray and miserable Hudson beneath him. It was not actually possible to walk from there to Newark but he did it anyway, through the flat brackish wetlands and across the eight lane highways that lay alongside them. Drivers honked at him, cursed, flipped him the bird, which was what Daniel called it, no?—but when their eyes met his they shut their mouths tight and pressed on the accelerators until they left him safely in their rearviews. By the time he reached the airport he was filthy. He stole clothes he could have paid for from one of the shops and let himself in to one of the lounges. It was 6:57 p.m. Daniel would land at 8:20. Having showered and dressed Armand slipped out of the terminal onto the tarmac and walked to the designated gate. No one was looking at him now; he made them all look elsewhere. It was still threatening to rain after a long claustrophobic day of stifling expectancy. If it storms they may not be able to land here, he thought. If it storms he may not come.
It didn’t storm. He knew which plane was the one he sought even before it started its descent. Sleek private jet, impossibly small next to the commercial jetliners. For the first time in the twenty-two days since the disaster everything was calm and still and within his reach. Three weeks of turbulence had at last staunched that empty socket’s weak and languished bleeding. It was time to close the wound. He stared up at the sky filled with artificial moving lights. Time at last to sanitize and to suture it.
Less than ten miles away oil refineries were belching smoke. The stink of fuel all around. Armand could feel Daniel’s nearness like an intense and relentless heat, the nuclear core of a too-close star. He had forgotten now all about Daniel’s daughters. He had forgotten about Louis. The plane turned in its course and seemed to hang motionless, in silent suspension, frozen against the sequined sky, before Armand realized that was because it had been momentarily headed directly towards him and this orientation had obliterated all sense of momentum. The plane’s turn continued and it dipped itself down to the runway. From a distance of more than one kilometer Armand heard its wheels grind against the pavement. Come to me. He sent out the thought, not masking it—not loud, not quiet, wondering whether Daniel would recognize the intrusion for what it was, or if he would cling instead to the denial of onrushing death while he still could. Two men in hi-vis vests came out of the terminal to prepare the area for disembarking and then went away unresisting when Armand commanded them to go. The plane was taxiing, cooling down, wending its wayward path towards its gate. Come to me. He could feel his heart beating in his ears, his face. It was beating in his mouth. Come and take what you have earned.
The plane crawled to a hesitant stop. The pilots were wondering where the ground crew was. With his mind Armand reached into the cockpit and pinched out the hot little lights of their thoughts. Their bodies fell limp and lifeless against the seatbelts they had not yet removed. Was anyone else onboard? An attendant, he sensed, in the back of the plane; he put out her candle too and then rose in the air to the small door behind the cockpit. With no great effort he pulled the door off its hinges and let it and the unnecessary folded up stairs drop to the pavement eight feet below. He could hear the yammering of Daniel’s fear. You will know what I have come for and you will know that it was me. He stepped onto the plane, and when he did he stepped into another dimension: leaving the past twenty-two days of agony behind, reforming himself elsewhere, made new.
He let himself in to the cabin. The stale smell of recycled air. A built-in leather couch sat before a 75-inch tv. Four big reclining seats faced the front, and a small table held a half-drunk martini. At the other end, pressed against the rear wall, was Daniel. His chest rose and fell. Not rapidly; but to the fullness of either extreme as he sucked in breath and forced it out in an attempt to manage his fear. Without looking, keeping his eyes on Armand, he half-heartedly tried the door behind him. He couldn’t get it to open because the attendant’s corpse was now slumped against the other side. He looked grim, even outwardly calm, but Armand could tell that within he was far from it, could smell it in him: a familiar and characteristic sweetness he had come after so many long years to particularly cherish.
The last time, he thought. This will be the last time I ever have you in my hands. Because he was going to kill Daniel, after all. That it was forbidden to him to do so had ceased to exist as an existential fact the moment he changed dimensions. In this dimension there was himself, permanent—and Daniel, who was not. There was nothing else. The singular rigidity of his psyche admitted nothing else. “Hello, Daniel.”
Daniel gave up on the door. “Go to hell.” He deliberated whether what he said next was more or less likely to end in his death and finally decided it didn’t matter. “You’re not allowed to do this.”
But that was only true of a different dimension, a different Daniel. This Daniel, here, was his; this Daniel here would finally experience what he had for so long insisted that he wanted, which was that Armand consume him, and do it entirely. Daniel had reached the clearing at the end of the path that every human being must cross. That clearing was death, that clearing was annihilation, that clearing was the place where Armand—himself forever forbidden to pass beyond its border—existed in totality, pressed up against its glassy face; permitted never to have it, only to deal it out to others. “Then I am not permitted.”
He stepped inside the cabin. Daniel cringed away from him. His right hand was shaking badly. He could not have opened the door behind him now even if the attendant weren’t lying dead across it. His fear was filling up the room, pushing out all the air. His thoughts went rapid-fire in every direction but always ended up in the same place, which was that he had nowhere to go: there would be no escape. He said nothing. He looked back at Armand with flat and total contempt, despising him, and that despising was sweet. For the first time in three weeks and a day Armand’s mind was clear and blissful. “These are the last remaining moments of this life that you have left,” he said. “Surely you can do better than this.”
“I'm not gonna beg.”
“Then I will make you do so. But it would be better for you if I did not have to.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Why?” Suddenly Armand needed to know the answer, to fully apprehend the complexion of Daniel’s peculiar intuition. He sifted through through Daniel’s thoughts and feelings for the truth in case Daniel decided not to say it, which he might, out of spite; that would be just like him. “Do you really think there is no capacity for mercy left in me?”
“No, I don’t,” said Daniel, to Armand’s great disappointment; and then he added, to his pleasure: “I know it.”
And he did. The frantic scramblings of his thoughts repeated this knowledge over and over. Likely he was right. But Armand, unlike Daniel, knew nothing for certain. “I suppose we will find out together.”
Daniel’s legs gave out. He slid unevenly to the floor. “Oh, Jesus.” He grabbed his shaking right hand with his left to try and still it. “He’ll never forgive you if you kill me.” It was the only card he had left to play, the desperate invocation of Louis’s benevolent aegis.
Armand crossed the length of the cabin and knelt before Daniel. He looked closely and carefully into his face. It would be the last time and for that he would have to savor it. He would have to preserve every perfect detail for the rest of his unmortal life. “He won’t forgive me.” The truth came to him fully formed and independent, entirely self-contained, the truth which he had for three weeks not allowed himself to know even though it was undeniable, both self-evident and inviolate. “Even were I to let you live, he will never forgive me.”
Daniel struggled against himself in silence. He was fighting between the instinct for survival and the instinct for truth, the instinct that told him there was no escaping what was coming so he might as well stand on what he knew and take the only chance he’d ever get to rub salt in the wound he had made. “No.” His voice was shaky but otherwise clear. “You’re right about that. He never will.”
And he smiled: a sly, vindictive little thing, vengeful satisfaction at having administered a lasting wound. So this is the only other permanence. The comfort the realization brought Armand was immense, undefinable, depthless. This injury you have done to me I will bear for all my ceaseless life.
The satisfaction dropped from Daniel’s face. “What are you going to do with me afterwards?”
Armand hadn’t thought about it. “Is there a particular body of water you’d like to be interred within, or will the filth of the Hudson River do?”
“Fuck.” Daniel had started shivering. “My kids....”
“Will never know what happened to you.” Armand laced his voice with tender sympathy. “Do you think they will believe you relapsed, somewhere wretched and alone? I think it likely, myself.”
“Fuck you.” It came out of Daniel fierce and loathing. “Let someone find my body, at least. I’ll do anything—anything—”
From across a vast and impossible distance a smile touched its glacial fingers to Armand’s face. “But what is there left to do for me, Daniel, that you have not already done?”
It was a low blow, and it felt good to make it. Daniel stared at him uncomprehending because he could not comprehend, had been forced over and over again to surrender comprehension to Armand’s grasping psychic hands. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded, pissed; yet deep down, buried beneath all those superficial layers of rationality and logic, beneath what he knew should make sense but which did not feel like sense at all, was a voiceless, formless dread—dread at what came next, because Daniel’s body remembered what his mind did not. His body had been through this countless times before, and it could feel exactly what was coming.
Armand gave it back to him in pieces. He parceled out spare and disturbing glimpses of the last forty-nine years, contextless, unsoftened by gentleness or leniency. He took care to withhold the majority of it, the most important moments, all of the times he had let himself get too close and Daniel had seen the hidden parts of him too clearly, without concealment. He gave back only flashes of disjointed memory without reference, lacking all the orienting touchstones of the whys or hows and only ever maintaining the hopeless absurdities of the whens and whats. Fractured snapshots of frantic nights of breathless urgency interspersed among decades of anemia. Forty-nine years could not be given back in a single moment, it was not possible; and indeed Armand felt selfish, was unwilling to return the entirety of these years to Daniel at all. They are mine alone and they will stay with me. I will safeguard them when you are gone. Motel rooms up and down the length of California. Overdoses Daniel had almost not woken up from—would not have, had Armand not been there; but nor would he have almost died so many times if Armand had not been stalking him with such fastidious devotion. Because Armand had loved to see Daniel’s desperation, his longing, his unfulfillable because impossible to know, once Armand took them all away from him, desires and his dreams. See now how deeply I have known you. See now how at your life’s every lowest point—when you considered killing yourself and could not do it, when you wondered whether you must be some heretofore unknown and unspeakable evil somehow manifested in a human being, when you felt that you were indescribably, absolutely, totally alone, as no one alive or dead has ever been alone before—see now instead that there was someone there, and the someone there was me.
Daniel had gone deathly white. He looked like his own near-future corpse. “No.” Spoken low, a whisper, until he rallied more conviction. “False memories—some bullshit parlor trick to make me wet myself before you kill me, but it won’t work....”
Armand touched Daniel’s face as he had done a hundred times before, a thousand. Daniel flinched. “All real.” Blood was rushing to the place on Daniel’s cheek where Armand had touched him, blotchy, hectic. “And you know it.”
The dismay in Daniel’s eyes said that yes, he did. “Oh, God.” He covered his face with his hands.
Armand allowed him a moment. Then, taking hold of his wrists, he made Daniel reveal himself so he could look hard and long into his eyes. Daniel looked as if he would vomit if Armand didn’t stop touching him. Remembering, violently now, other times when Armand had touched him.
Armand said quietly, “Do you see?”
Daniel’s voice came hoarse and uneven. “Yeah.” He swallowed with extreme difficulty. “Yeah, I see.” He was still trying to pull back, was being repulsed away from Armand as the wrong ends of magnets force each other apart. It was that fundamental, that spontaneous. “You fucking animal.”
Armand’s mouth twitched. “Which part?”
“All of it. Jesus!” Daniel laughed, a cut off and awful sound. “Fuck, and I really thought I won. I didn’t even know what fucking game we were playing.”
“You have won.” Three weeks of silence, three weeks of nothing; three weeks and Armand knew now beyond all shadow and doubt that Louis would never, ever call for him: there would be no going back. “You’ve destroyed me.”
“Ha.” Daniel’s lip twisted itself into a small sneer. “At least I’ll have that to cling to while you’re pulling my intestines out through my mouth.”
“Perhaps I will make it easeful,” Armand suggested lightly, though he would not. “Perhaps I will not make it hurt.”
Daniel had attained an almost saintlike composure now that the tattered memories intended to unravel him had been exposed. “You won’t.”
Armand said nothing. He didn’t need to. Daniel shut his eyes again briefly, as if, were he a praying man, he might have been sending up one last Hail Mary before the end. But really he was thinking: fuck you and I’ll see you in hell. “I’ve always hated you.” He said it without looking at Armand, still trying uselessly to turn his face away. “I want you to know that.”
Armand did know it. When he touched Daniel’s face again he was astonished at the intensity of longing the gesture generated in him, even here at the end, after everything Daniel had done. Like turning on a faucet. It had always been like that with Daniel. The last time, he told himself. This is the last time. “For my part, I think I will remember you fondly; and even miss you terribly when you are gone.”
“Oh, sure,” said Daniel bitterly, “I bet you fucking will. Which part will you miss the most, d’you think? The decade of my twenties I spent crawling like a dog, sick to death because I couldn’t ever get enough of you and nothing I took would turn off that sickness in me? When I was two hours late for Lenora’s college graduation because I was too busy fucking you and later I couldn’t even remember why, had no idea why I hadn’t shown up when I was supposed to, because you conveniently erased it on your way out?” He had remembered more than Armand had intended, was grasping as he always did at truths half-hidden and wrestling them into the uneasy shifting light. “The hole in my life I had to live with without even knowing it was there? Well, I’m sure I know my favorite part. It was the look on your face when you realized Louis was leaving you. At least I finally got to make you feel what that was like. I got to take that from you.”
“I could remove that memory before I kill you,” Armand said. “You will die without even that meager comfort.”
Daniel was smiling still, that vindictive half a sneer. “I’ll know.”
Armand leaned close. “Is that why you did it?” Suddenly he was starving for the answer. “Did you know, though you couldn’t possibly?”
Yes!, thought Daniel fiercely, in a bright flashing sear across the front of his mind—yes, I knew it, I fucking knew it all. But Armand could see the truth behind this thought, which was that it was not true. Daniel had not known any of it; he only wanted to say that he had.
Daniel’s chin went up. “No. I just knew I could ruin you. And after two weeks in your intermittent and unfuckingbearable company I guess I’d already decided that mattered more to me than anything else in the world.”
More than life itself, the look in his eyes said. More even than avoiding whatever hell you have waiting for me here.
Armand let his hands graze Daniel’s throat, the curve of his shoulder. Daniel stiffened. His body was still trying to escape even though escape was impossible. “Good.” Armand gazed unblinking into Daniel’s eyes, trying to pick apart and chronicle every fiber of the irregular texture of his loathing. “That is good.” He slipped the tips of his fingers beneath the collar of Daniel’s shirt, felt hot scared skin and the looping movement of blood underneath. Daniel held his breath. He had turned his face away but could not tear his eyes from Armand’s gaze: Armand was commanding him to maintain the excruciating connection against every screaming desire of his frightened flesh and heart. “Is there one last thing you want from me, Daniel, before I kill you?”
Daniel had gone so pale even his lips were graying. He tried to shake his head, tried to say no. His breathing had approached and crossed over the threshold of hyperventilation. “Don’t.”
Slowly, carefully, Armand unbuttoned Daniel’s collar. He slid his fingertips beneath the fabric. With his nails he drew pinpricks of blood that welled and were drunk up thirstily by the navy cotton of Daniel’s shirt. “Why not?” Bending his face to Daniel’s fragrant throat and breathing deep.
“Because I don’t....” Daniel had to gather himself again. “I don’t want you. I never....”
“Never?” Armand lifted his hand to his mouth. From his fingertips he deposited perfect round drops of blood onto his tongue. He could taste Daniel’s adrenaline, the terror in his cortisol. “You are sure? Because that is not how I remember it.”
“I’m fucking sure,” said Daniel.
Armand licked his upper lip. With his tongue he smeared Daniel’s blood across his own face. “Then prove it to me.” He clamped his jaws hard onto Daniel’s collarbone, biting deep and then deeper, until his teeth met bone. Daniel writhed underneath him, pinned, skewered. The muscles of his neck worked and hardened. He was gasping, had fully turned his face away now that Armand had psychically released him, but Armand’s physical strength still held him helpless as Armand drank hot mouthfuls of that blood which had for so long made him stupid, made him careless, made him drunk with obsession and fascination. What Daniel had never known was that his blood had been to Armand as heroin had been to him; Armand who so hated all forms of disorder: emotional, mental, physical, spiritual—who had been terrified of and yet bewitched by the addictive content of Daniel’s blood, which turned out had nothing to do with the blood at all but because it was Daniel’s it had enslaved him; and only now after nearly fifty years would he finally be freed from this intolerable bondage.
Daniel fought against him. He was flinging his head from side to side, trying to unseat Armand’s fangs. Armand ignored his efforts. He kept Daniel fixed in place with his left hand pressed hard and firm against his shoulder, pinning him to the wall. His right hand he slipped between Daniel’s flexing and straining legs and found there the evidence of his untruthfulness hard and insistent against his palm. Daniel made a ragged noise. “Animal,” he gasped, “fucking animal,” but there he was wrong; cruelty was the domain of human beings and vampires alone, and Daniel knew it. He had doled out many of his own cruelties in his time, knew well that they required intent, they required deliberate choosing. He had made that deliberate choice often and well, whenever it had suited him to do so. You can blame me all you like but I did not make you disavow your daughters. I did not make you choose your own satisfaction over theirs until they could no longer bear to know you. Never did I ever make you come to another human being with sexual malintent and yet I found you there in that place time and time again—with strangers, with your wife, when you offered up men and women for me to slaughter before I fucked you because it turned you on and when you kept young pretty students late after your university guest lectures so you could defile them in your car. Never did I ever demand that you make apologies for this to me. Never did I ever tell you that I hated you for your cruelties the way you have said you do me for mine. Your hypocrisy is your own, and it is time at last that you understood this. He had wrested open the button of Daniel’s pants, was pulling down the zipper. Daniel was pushing his hands against both of Armand’s shoulders, cursing him venomously, breathless and vituperative even as his hips jerked up into Armand’s hand and he hissed his desire between his clenched teeth. “Fuck you—” tossing back his head and lifting his crotch to Armand’s touch “—fuck you—I don’t—”
Armand removed his teeth from Daniel’s torso. “No?” He pushed his hand beneath Daniel’s boxers, wrapped his fingers around his cock. “You don’t?” But he could read in Daniel’s mind that Daniel did. And he knew that Daniel knew it.
“Fuck you, you’re making me...almost ten years I haven’t been able to get it up without a little blue pill first and you want me to think you aren’t forcing my blood to do whatever you want it to—”
“That would be a lovely trick,” said Armand, “and I would have done it had I needed to, but it seems that I did not.” He squeezed the base of Daniel’s cock with inhuman strength until Daniel choked and gasped. “Forty-nine years and you think I still do not know the way you like to be treated?”
“Oh, God....” Denial and hopeless certainty were both splaying themselves across Daniel’s face. “I don’t believe you. I don’t....”
So Armand gave him another piece of it, slipped the forgotten memory of his final visit to Daniel’s home four years prior into his muddled mind in its entirety. Daniel squeezed his eyes shut. One of his hands had begun to pull now at Armand’s shoulder even as the other continued pushing him away. He moaned in helpless rage when Armand rubbed his thumb over the tip of his cock, pressing into the hot slit. They’d had sex in Daniel’s bed with Armand pressed up against the headboard and Daniel hadn’t needed pharmaceutical assistance then, either, had torn Armand apart and then himself apart and had awoken the next morning alone and exhausted with no memory of who had been there, who had drawn from him poison, poison, poison.
Furious and humiliated tears sprang to Daniel’s eyes. He banished them with force of will alone. And then, recognizing his defeat, he took Armand’s face between his hands and pulled him down and kissed him, hard and artlessly, with loathing and longing in equal force. “Come on, then,” he said— “come on, go on and fuck me to death already if that’s what you intend to do.”
Armand was sliding Daniel’s unbuttoned shirt off his shoulders. He let Daniel with shaking hands attempt to undo his trousers. “Perhaps if you can outlast me, I might be convinced to let you go.”
“Bullshit.” Daniel was trying to shove Armand’s pants down. “Bull fucking shit—”
Armand pushed him away so he could dispense with his own clothing. Ghosts were running elated beneath his skin. The last three weeks of desperation and despair had fallen entirely away. Here he was only calm; here he was cradled firmly and safely in the warm hands of the familiar. He pulled Daniel out of his boxers and climbed naked on top of him, putting his knees on either side of Daniel’s hips. Longing to be filled with him, wanting that more than anything. It was right that he should kill Daniel like this. It was right and it was just, and the rightness and the justness of it would sustain him for many long years, even when he had nothing else left.
“On the floor, Jesus,” said Daniel. “I guess it doesn’t matter if it makes my back kill me tomorrow.” He had grown too bold, was running his hands up Armand’s bare thighs, grabbing and then squeezing at his hips. But even now he did not dare slide his hand between Armand’s legs as he was so feverishly fantasizing about doing in vivid technicolor behind his eyes. Armand took his hand and did it for him. “Fuck.” Daniel curled his fingers into Armand’s wetness. “I don’t know why, but I thought you wouldn’t....”
“When,” said Armand, contemptuous, “have I ever, in all your life, come to you dry and passionless?”
“Well, I don’t know, since you took a black out marker to my fucking brain,” Daniel said irritably. But the look in his eye said that he did know, that he remembered: that he suspected further still a truth that went so deep it perhaps could not be, and never had been, entirely erased.
Armand positioned himself above him. With two fingers he held Daniel’s cock where it needed to be. “Is this what you want from me before, I kill you?” He lowered himself slowly, felt Daniel twitch as he restrained himself from thrusting up into him. “Is this what you need before you die?” The idea pleased him, true or not: that someone should want this from him so badly that even in the face of death they would still want it, helplessly, rapturously. Having taken Daniel fully he bent his head towards his. “How exactly would you like to die, now that I have you here? Slowly over time, as I lick up your lifeblood? Or all at once in the moment of your climax, when I’m draining you both ways and you can think of nothing else but me? Tell me.”
Daniel’s breathing had roughened as Armand took him. Slowly he regained composure. “Neither. I want to live.”
Armand made a soft tsking noise. “That is not your decision to make, little human.”
“I guess not.” Daniel’s hands were moving slowly, curling around the curve of Armand’s ass. “Reaper’s choice, then.”
Armand considered. He shifted back and forth with as much slow deliberation as he could manage, which was a considerable amount. A wounded noise fled from Daniel involuntarily. He caught his lower lip between his teeth as he kneaded his fingers into Armand’s flesh. His fear had faded in intensity but was not gone, lingered still beneath the staticky electric surface of his desire. “I can’t believe this isn’t the first time,” he said. “It still feels like it—even though I know....” Blood was running from the bite mark on his collarbone down his chest, his stomach, pooling and then overflowing in his navel.
“With me,” Armand asked, “or ever?”
Ever!, Daniel thought, even as he said, with scorn: “Obviously with you.”
With his right hand Armand smeared a bloody handprint on Daniel’s chest, right over his heart. Then he licked the blood from his palm and fingers meticulously. He watched Daniel watch his tongue at work, felt him throb and pulse inside of him. His left hand he curled around Daniel’s throat. He forced Daniel’s head back against the wall, squeezed the fat veins in the sides of his neck with his fingers and his thumb. Squeezing, releasing, squeezing, releasing; until Daniel was visibly dizzy.
“Keep that up and I’m pretty sure my dick stops working,” Daniel said when he was allowed to speak. His face was ruddy. Little capillaries had broken in his neck. “If you care about that sort of thing.”
Armand did, a little. He was enjoying himself. It would be a shame to kill Daniel prematurely because he was overeager for the end. He let go of Daniel’s throat and began to fuck him slightly faster. “Then keep up with me, if you can; because as soon as you come, you die.”
The ruddiness drained again from Daniel’s face. “What’s my win condition? Making you come first?”
“I intend to come as often as I’d like,” said Armand, “and you will have very little to do with it, I’m afraid.”
Daniel’s nostrils flared reflexively. Even that he liked. Armand curled forward over him and put his arms around him, lowering his mouth to his ear. “I should have cultivated you better,” he said quietly. “I see that now. Too light a hand—too lenient....”
Daniel laughed at him, with unconcealed derision. “Yeah, that sounds like you.” Then, startled, he gasped and bit his tongue as Armand came. Armand, who was not finished with him, allowed Daniel to hold him still with his hands held firmly on his hips, keeping him in place to diminish the sensation that was about to push Daniel over his own edge. He tightened himself helpfully around Daniel’s cock and was otherwise motionless.
Daniel swallowed shakily. He licked his lips. His face was pale again and frightened. Sweat had gathered at his temples and in his hair. “Fuck,” he whispered.
Armand licked the salty sweat from his forehead. “Careful. That was very close, I think.”
Daniel seemed stunned by his own desperation to live. He was thinking, this is the end of my life. This is the end and I have nothing to show for it and I can’t even say it’s because of you because it’s because of me.
“Two children are nothing?” Armand mused over this. “I suppose if they don’t love you, yes. And your career, all those pretty awards—but after all, you cannot take them with you where you’re going.” He brought his face to Daniel’s collarbone again, mouthed at the clotting blood. He dug his hand in Daniel’s hair. “Your dignity, then? Your self-respect? Or have you finally accepted that those are mine?”
Daniel shivered. “Don’t bite me again. Not like before, when you—ah, fuck....” Armand was sliding his teeth back into the earlier wound, again until he scraped bone. “Like that,” Daniel said, resigned, even as his mind raced, oh God fuck yes like that—
Armand allowed himself a few mouthfuls of blood. Just enough to make Daniel lightheaded again; not enough to start his cock softening. Then he dislodged his teeth, ungently, from Daniel’s collarbone one after the other. Daniel choked down a pained whine. “Jesus,” he said faintly.
“How many marks shall I leave?” Armand was tracing his fingers over Daniel’s throat, following the downward sprawling pattern of the aborescent veins. “No one will ever find your body, so I don’t need to be discreet.” He bit the meat of Daniel’s shoulder and then the curving slope of his neck. Behind Daniel’s ear, where the old scar lay, he forced all four of his fangs into his body. Daniel cried out as teeth broke the old scar tissue; which always hurt more, Armand had discovered, than the piercing of unmarred skin. Pain or something else brought tears to Daniel’s eyes that he did not bother to fight off this time. The one that fell Armand caught on his bloody tongue. In the muscle over Daniel’s heart Armand bit as hard as he could without taking an actual chunk out of his body, and then he released him. Blood sweet and blood savory.
Daniel’s breathing had become erratic and fast. He was no longer quite there, had been brought elsewhere by the pain. A haze fell between them, the separating veil which moved between life and death. It infuriated Armand beyond expression. Why do you get to have what I do not? Why do you get to experience transience? Before he realized what he was doing he had put his mouth over Daniel’s and begun to kiss him, giving him the taste of his own blood, dissolving the haze. Daniel went still in compulsive revulsion. Armand placed his hands gently at the nape of Daniel’s neck and kissed him very tenderly, attentively, pulling him back to him, dragging him up and out of the muck. For a long time Daniel did not respond. Then he surged upwards, grabbing roughly at Armand’s shoulders and his hair, kissing him furiously. He was biting Armand’s lip and chasing the taste of himself in Armand’s mouth. It was something he had done so many times before that it knocked them both together out of time. Armand rocked slightly in Daniel’s lap, fucking him in earnest now that his dangerous close call had passed. Daniel’s hands slid down Armand’s torso, his waist. Then he began assisting Armand in his movement, adding force, grinding their bodies together. He was so deep inside Armand that Armand could barely even feel the other distant sensation of his clit rubbing against Daniel’s abdomen. He braced against the wall above Daniel’s head and dipped the fingertips of his other hand into the ragged open gash on Daniel’s chest. They had stopped kissing, were both breathing too hard to do so—Armand looking down at Daniel looking down at the places where their bodies joined, Armand’s fingers going in and out of Daniel’s bloody wound, Daniel’s cock going in and out of Armand’s cunt. “Fffffuck,” Daniel breathed, and he tried again to stop Armand. But this time Armand would not let him and so Daniel had to resist his building orgasm alone, watching powerlessly while Armand brought his bloody fingers between his legs and pulled himself relentlessly through his own second orgasm.
But Daniel didn’t come. He survived Armand’s initial spasming, weathered all the quivering aftershocks. When Armand rode him slowly again to stillness Daniel looked vaguely horrified with himself, stupefied by his own temerity, his flat unwillingness to die. “Ha.” His voice was weak. “Who knew these old pipes not working like they used to would keep me alive.”
Armand tongued the bloody scar on Daniel’s neck until he shuddered. “For now.”
“Does it have to be here?” Daniel asked. “I mean—fucking Newark airport? Why don’t you take me home and kill me in my bed, and I can just lie there rotting until a neighbor calls for a wellness check on me....”
“No.” Armand curled his nails into the wound on Daniel’s chest again. “I have bitten you too much.”
“You could fix me,” said Daniel grumpily.
“Bites like this would take hours to heal completely. You will be dead first. No one is ever going to find you, Daniel.”
Daniel’s eyes went foggy. It took a moment for them to clear. “Maybe the coroner would think it was just some weird violent sex subculture I was into.” He said it with a vaguely hopeful lilt. “And I had a heart attack or something afterwards.”
“I told you it will not be easeful.”
“A heart attack is not easeful.” Daniel sounded offended. “That’s how my fucking mother died, and it was agony.”
“I remember.”
“Stop saying shit like that.” Now angry and disturbed. “I don’t want to know any more than what you’ve already hammered into my skull.”
Armand began to touch himself again. He watched with satisfaction the horrified lust that flashed itself across Daniel’s face. “Not even when I hammer you like this?”
“I hate that you think you’re funny,” said Daniel. “I don’t know why, but that genuinely makes this worse.”
Armand kissed him. “You could end this at any time.”
“Because that’s so easy to do with the fucking spawn of Satan biting pieces off of me.” Daniel flinched when Armand swiveled his hips. “Maybe I’ll tire you out first until you fall asleep on top of me and I’ll sneak out and escape.” That hopeful wistfulness again.
“You will not.”
“No?” Daniel’s erection, which had flagged as they discussed Newark airport, came back to its full arousal. “How many times could you come like this, d’you think? Just forever?”
“We never discovered a limit.”
“Jesus.” Red spots stood out on Daniel’s cheeks. “How hard did we try?”
“Very.”
A tiny, resentful moan slipped from Daniel’s mouth. “Christ alive.” One of his hands was creeping towards the v between Armand’s legs. He seemed oblivious to this rogue initiative. “Why? Why follow me all that time? Years and years—what did you even get out of it?”
It would be impossible to explain it to him without giving back every single intertwined moment of their lives, which Armand still refused to do. “A diversion,” he said instead. One of many small private rebellions, the channeling of his unspoken resentments elsewhere, so they could be purged and discharged where they could not harm the fragile armistice he and Louis had struck out of their constrained companionship.
“Fine.” Daniel was clearly not without his own resentments. “Then why let Louis bring me into your home? Why let him tell me any of it? You just sitting there knowing everything, when I didn’t even know anything....”
“It was what Louis wanted,” said Armand; “and I do what Louis wants.”
Daniel’s hand had found the place where it wanted to be between Armand’s legs. “It’s absolutely insane that you believe that. You know that, right?”
Armand forced his forearm across Daniel’s throat. Daniel coughed and wheezed. “And what do you know about it?” Armand demanded. “Because you broke it you think that means you understand it? If you are trying to anger me to hasten your death then you do not know me as well as you think.”
Daniel shoved Armand off of his neck roughly. “I don’t know you at all.” He stilled when Armand slid his hand up and around his throat again to cradle him. No, Armand thought. But I think you have before. Which I should have known meant you could again. Which meant I should have treated you with suspicion, I should have known you could ruin everything and you would if you had the chance. Because of you the loneliness will last forever. Despair welled again inside him, formless, washing over everything. I was safe and he was almost happy. I would have finally gotten it right, I would at last have known how to make him happy and I would have done it if not for you. Hopelessness sickened and wounded him anew. He had never hated anyone as much as he hated Daniel now.
Daniel seemed to sense it, too; seemed to know that the timbre of this moment had changed, become darker, fuller, deeper. And now I’ve let you distract me, thought Armand—let you divert me from my purpose, which was to make you suffer as you died. Enough, then. Enough. They had reached the clearing; now Armand would walk Daniel over it. Daniel was touching Armand distractedly, rough and erratic, only partially aware of what his hand was doing. Armand kissed him deeply, with singular intent. When he pulled away Daniel’s eyes had to uncross themselves to look at him. He looked on the verge of disassembly. “Just get it over with,” he said gravely. There was only so much that anyone could take. And from Armand Daniel had in his life taken quite a lot.
“Then look at me,” said Armand; unnecessarily, for already Daniel was. “It will hurt but you will bear it. Do you understand me?” Daniel made a halting nod. His heart started going faster, faster. “There is no such thing as painless death.” Armand had shielded countless human beings from the physical pain whenever he had felt moved to do so, but there was no diminishing the existential agony of the final step they had to take alone across the border while he remained behind the glass. Nor would you want it lessened: life’s last gift to you and sweeter therefore than all the rest. The departing color of this feeling Armand had sometimes been able to sense when he was left behind by those going beyond. A velvety, indigo nightness, coming down over everything. Exquisite endless longing satisfied at last. So close it must be possible to touch; but it never was. Armand had tried before to tell the dying what was coming to them but had never been able to convince; and in the end it did not matter, it was futile, because they were the ones who learned something that he did not. Something that he never could. He was saying this to Daniel now, saying it aloud. He nuzzled against Daniel’s neck. “Would you tell me, Daniel, were it possible for you to do so? Would you give me that which I can never have?” Rising and falling over Daniel, fucking him again, this the last time, this the end. He was determined to have Daniel come and determined to kill him in that same moment, to marry the two deaths, to combine the literal and the poetic. He kissed the terrified tears off Daniel’s face. These I’ll keep with me. True to his word Daniel did not beg, though he thought about it. He was falling backwards into the annals of his life. “Look at me,” Armand said. “That is all behind you now and there is nothing left for you there.” He kissed him. “Look at me.” Somehow Daniel did. “You’re right here with me.” His fangs had been extended since he first set foot onto the plane but it seemed now that they pushed farther into his mouth, elongating, growing themselves sharper points. “I think you would tell me,” he murmured. “I think you would tell me, if you could.”
“Like hell I would,” said Daniel; even as he was thinking: yes.
Armand slid his fangs into the scar behind Daniel’s ear. He found the right carotid and the internal jugular where they lay pulsing side by side, pierced first one and then the other. Daniel exhaled long and slow. He was still sliding his fingers over Armand’s clitoris. He was hard and he was close, Armand could tell, and he would need despite his circumstances only the lightest touch of guidance. See now the velvet tongue of night. Daniel’s other hand was crawling up Armand’s back and shoulders, clutching at him. Buried in the muscle of Daniel’s neck Armand could feel every breath that Daniel took. Kneeling he tightened his thighs around Daniel’s hips and waist, and with the enzymes in his mouth he intensified instead of reduced the pain that Daniel felt. For even pain could be a gift. Pain was vitalizing, pain was life. It was enduring and omnipresent but never permanent, because it changed; which made it beautiful, made it strange. With his left hand he was cradling the back of Daniel’s head and digging his claws into his scalp. Hot blood ran down his fingers into the hollows in between. Daniel was rubbing furiously between Armand’s legs, single-minded in his purpose. He was thinking, if you come again I’m not going to be able to stop myself this time. If you come again I'm not going to make it and I guess that’s as good an end as any. Armand held him closer, drawing him into himself, filling himself up with all the parts of Daniel that he could. His taste, his smell, his thoughts, his cock. I used to wonder if you had been made for me. Now I think instead maybe I was made for you, but someone made a mistake, I was mismade; I missed you by too many years and by the time you found me it was too late for me to be any different than I already was. Which meant I could not have you; although God knows we tried. What he still kept from Daniel, and intended to keep forever, was how desperately they had tried. When Louis had not wanted him there had been Daniel to mollify him. When Daniel did not want him either there had been Louis to crawl back to. What Louis never realized was that it was you, Daniel, who stood in the way of my obedience. He gave you to me but we did not understand you were a test. All along Louis has been waiting for me to kill you, to be resolute enough in my love for him to disobey what he said he wanted. It took too long for me know it and now it’s much too late but at least I can say at last that I have understood it. Blood oozing into his open mouth. See now how deeply I have known you, and never known myself. Climax was cresting behind his navel, behind his bladder. He could fit his tongue in the hole he’d made in Daniel’s neck. Daniel panting underneath him. Daniel still playing with Armand’s clit even though he knew it was going to lead directly and imminently to his death. The fingers of his right hand Armand forced into Daniel’s open gasping mouth and pressed down onto his tongue until he gagged. Everything was running together, becoming impossible to distinguish. Armand had forgotten where they were and almost forgotten what they were doing. He came that third and final time entirely unprepared, moaning into the tear in Daniel’s throat; remembering only at the final moment to drag Daniel over the edge after him into the arena of his death.
But Daniel didn’t need any guidance. He followed Armand there of his own accord. One hand he grasped now at Armand’s shoulder and the other he had curled around his ass, pulling Armand against him, burying himself in Armand’s body until he came. When Armand felt the rushing inside he affixed his teeth to Daniel’s neck and drank so deeply that for two seconds Daniel blacked out, lost touch entirely with consciousness. When the hot light of his mind flared up again, shining incandescence, Armand yielded at last to the starving impulse he’d held in check for nearly fifty years. He drank Daniel’s lifeblood in huge wet gulps, sucking down his human essence which could not be distilled any further than blood, blood elemental and ineffable. He had chewed so violently into Daniel’s neck that he cut by accident several of his vocal cords and Daniel could no longer have spoken even if he’d had the remaining vitality left to do so. Daniel tasted as he ever had, singular and distinct. He tasted like himself.
The flood of hot iron and salt, of Daniel’s terror and lust and longing over Armand’s tongue and down his throat brought bloody tears to his eyes. Daniel, spent, and having lost more than a third of his blood in the last fifteen seconds, had gone soft inside of him at last; but that didn’t matter anymore, had nothing to do with what was happening between them now. Daniel’s throat worked silently. He was digging his nails hard into the muscles of Armand’s ass and back, clawing at him; and then he wasn’t anymore. The strength was leaking out of him, the liveliness and the internal flame. His heart rate had been pumping faster, trying to compensate for the blood he was losing; now it plummeted unevenly, like falling down a set of stairs. He was trying to think but struggling to do it, finding it impossible to order or to project his thoughts. You would tell me if you could, Armand thought, grieved. You would tell me if it was possible to tell me, but it’s not and I can forgive you that. Suddenly Daniel’s thoughts cohered. They attained both sensibility and intent. He cried out silently, one last brilliant technicolor thought, Armand—!
Then nothing else. Then silence.
With painstaking deliberateness Armand carefully withdrew. Daniel’s face and neck were gray. His lips were nearly white. His eyes were open, still filled with that final crying out of emotion, a gleaming intensity that looked like ardor but must be fervor, must be vehemence, must be because it did not bear thinking about otherwise. Armand waited for the relief but it did not come. Instead parts of himself were turning themselves off and on haphazardly, buzzingly, making the tips of his fingers and his lips and the base of his spine and the place where Daniel was still inside him tingle with an urgent, fiery discomfort, so intense and so consuming that Armand, full of Daniel’s blood, his hormones, his adrenaline and his cortisol, his come, plunged from cold certainty into something he could not describe or name. He slapped Daniel across the face. He shook his shoulders violently until his head made dull thudding sounds against the wall. Never had the death of a human being filled him with any feelings other than resignation and forbearance. But he felt now as he could not remember ever feeling in all his life—though he had felt it, when he was alive: horrified by death’s aftermath, by the empty vessel left over now that the spark had gone; the soul having fled elsewhere, its absence revealing the mean animal nature of the body and the appalling disorder of decay. He slapped Daniel again, harder this time. He felt with the tips of his fingers at the silent unbeating hollow of Daniel’s neck. Just meat, he thought, amazed. Just meat.
The idea was so terrible that he nearly vomited. But he didn’t, managed not to; had remembered, dimly, through the pandemonium of his panic that he must not. He must be mindful; he must not waste another crucial second on sentimental delirium. He bit his tongue with all four of his fangs and his mouth welled to overflowing with his own blood, that dull lifeless taste he had for so long despised. Daniel was not drawing breath and had not done so for what must be almost a minute. Anoxia would begin killing the tissues in his body soon, would cause irreparable damage to his brain. Armand kissed Daniel’s cold and lifeless mouth. He forced his punctured tongue between Daniel’s lips against the barrier of his teeth and then beyond them. His right hand massaged Daniel’s torn open throat, trying to coax compliance from the exhausted little muscles there. “Daniel,” he said, whispering. “Daniel!” Daniel’s mouth was bloody but it was impossible to tell whose blood was whose, whether his mouth was more full of Armand’s blood or of his own. More, Armand thought, dazed: more. He slit open his wrist with his teeth and held the dripping wound over Daniel’s lips, drenching them with blood. He forced Daniel’s mouth open with his other hand and coated his tongue and throat. He kissed Daniel again desperately, tasted himself flat and hopeless in Daniel’s mouth. It would not be enough. He had never done it before and so he had never discovered that there was something dreadfully wrong with his blood, something fundamental that was missing, that made it insufficient for the task.
Armand filled Daniel’s mouth with blood and then covered his lips with his hand, massaging his throat. “Daniel.” He kissed his forehead. His own face was wet and hot, soaked with something. When he kissed Daniel’s lips he tasted his own blood trying to seep into his mouth. He refused its entry and sent it back again into Daniel. He was trembling, pulling at Daniel’s shirt, his hair. He is going to go cold inside of me, he thought. He kept kissing Daniel, biting at his bottom lip. I’ll do anything, just stay with me. Stay right here with me. Still trying to get Daniel to drink, too frightened to take his mouth away in case all that precious blood spilled out of Daniel’s mouth onto his stomach. Instead of speaking it he thought, in a single ringing burst, projected with all of the mental force that he could muster after five hundred years of experience in psychic tampering, DRINK—a piercing, shrieked imperative, impossible to resist, more powerful than any other command he had ever given to any being, alive or undead, human or vampire, in all his life.
Beneath his fingers pressed against Daniel’s savaged throat, he felt those little muscles move.
He kissed Daniel again furiously and found his mouth empty of the main volume of the blood. It had not spilled out of him and not coated his chest and so it must have gone inside him, must be inside. Armand let his bloody tongue fill Daniel’s mouth again and felt the muscles of Daniel’s neck strain to swallow what he had been given. With the third swallow there was strength to the movement, an intentionality beyond mere impulse. Shaking Armand stopped kissing him and brought his wrist to Daniel’s lips, waiting, waiting, in an agony of disintegration; until Daniel closed his eyes and began to drink.
The color returned to him slowly. At one point he coughed and choked as if he had finally realized what exactly he was drinking. Armand pressed his wrist hard against his face, silently begging him not to stop, not to make the other choice. Daniel’s unsteady hands crept slowly upwards and held Armand’s forearm against his lips. He drank. He drained Armand almost entirely of blood. Armand would have let him drink forever if he wanted to but something at last made Daniel stop, made him turn his face away. His eyes were still closed and the bite marks on his body were gently weeping blood again now that he had blood to spare. He was stuck in the half-dream between life and unlife, that place where everyone must discover whether they will live or die. Shakily Armand mended Daniel’s injuries enough to stop their active bleeding, first the bite on his chest, then his shoulder, then his collarbone; at last the place behind his ear where Armand had taken from him his life.
There was nothing else he could do but wait. He climbed carefully out of Daniel’s lap. He buttoned Daniel’s pants and blood-stained shirt. He cleaned the blood from Daniel’s face and felt with his fingertips his skin, his cheeks, which were rosy but not lively, rosy but somehow changed. Daniel’s eyes flickered erratically behind their lids. Armand considered laying him on the couch but feared any disturbance to Daniel now might harm him. He settled for cautiously rearranging Daniel flat on the floor. He knelt naked beside him and pulled Daniel’s head in his lap, petting at his bloody hair, watching intently every tiny spasm in his face. There will be a moment, he thought. He remembered that there had been a moment, when the unlife set out before you must be selected. It was not a conscious choice, not made of the will or of the spirit or of the heart but of the body, of the flesh, a choice you could not make but which your blood made for you. Would he recognize that moment when it came? He probed at Daniel’s thoughts and was filled with unspeaking horror when he realized there were none. It had not worked. Daniel was dead, he had gone silent; until Armand remembered what that might mean and felt something desperate inside him flare.
When the moment came he did feel it. The creation of a new and alien sense. He had been given another set of eyes, a second pair of hands with which to hold the strange and awful tether dangling now between the two of them, rapidly gaining mass and depth. The restless flickering of Daniel’s eyes stilled. The tension in his mouth faded and relaxed. With a trembling hand Armand pulled Daniel’s lip up to expose his teeth. They no longer fitted neatly inside his mouth. They had grown points. Armand cradled Daniel close, speechless and thoughtless, unable to recognize what he had done or whom he had done it to. All he could hold with any reliability in his mind was the slow and steady beating of Daniel’s heart inside his chest as it moved the blood of two people throughout his body. After an indiscernible length of time he realized he was rocking slowly back and forth and had to force himself to stop. He rested his fingertips over the hollow of Daniel’s throat to feel the blood looping underneath, then couldn’t take his hand away in case that stopped the loop. More, he thought. You will need more. The attendants and the pilots were too long dead and so their blood would not do. Divided against himself Armand hesitated, unable to make the decision, unwilling to leave even for the few minutes it would take to subdue and deliver prey. Finally he thought, he will die if I do not do it. He could starve. He lay Daniel gently on the floor and dressed quickly, discovering as he did that the shakiness of his hands had not abated. Then he fled the cabin, fled the jet, fled across the tarmac to a nearby gate and found a worker there. Armand fell on him like a leopard leaping onto its prey and dragged the stunned and unresisting man back to where Daniel lay. Armand had turned the man’s mind off but kept his body alive, and now he opened up a vein in his neck and brought it to Daniel’s mouth. Daniel coughed and choked and sputtered. But he drank until the man was dead. Armand moved the corpse out of the way and knelt again, poised above Daniel, attentive and still not thinking, not thinking; not thinking about anything, because he couldn’t bear to do it.
Daniel began weakly to sit up. He wouldn’t look at Armand, pushed him away when he tried to help. When he was upright he leaned again against the wall in the position he had died and been reborn in. “You....” The word came as a breath unvoiced and almost soundless. Daniel winced, felt at his damaged throat. Armand bent his face to his neck and slipped his teeth painlessly and quickly into his body before Daniel could push him away, traded blood with him again, compelled his damaged vocal cords to resew themselves together and to heal. Then he retreated as quickly as he had descended. He was unable still to speak, able only to watch, hungrily drinking up the appearance of Daniel with his eyes.
Daniel still would not look at him. He was rubbing his neck with his hand and wincing. Armand longed to crawl on top of him again, to pull their bodies close, to smell his hair and skin and feel the familiar shape of his body made unfamiliar now by the change. He started forward to do it, made a small and hopeful gesture towards Daniel’s face with his hands; and this action provoked Daniel at last into lifting the awful amber of his stoplight eyes to Armand’s for the very first time.
Armand shrank away. His pulse leapt racing into his mouth. This time it was Daniel who held Armand transfixed and compelled. There was something, some difficult emotion, in Daniel’s gaze, but Armand did not know what it was. He could not understand it; nor could he dip into the cool river of Daniel’s thoughts to extract that knowledge. Daniel’s mind was silent, incommunicable. Silent as it had never been before; silent and totally withheld. Armand had never known how much comfort it brought him to step in and out of Daniel’s thoughts whenever he wished, to see his true feelings and emotions written there no matter what his voice and body said. Now he had only what Daniel would give him and Daniel would not give him anything. Armand had retreated so far that his back struck one of the chairs, preventing his further escape. He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand and he was afraid.
Then suddenly understanding arrived complete and ruthless, carried on that mirrored gaze. He saw at last what he had done. He saw exactly what it meant. I have made you and we shall neither of us ever now be free of that. He stood trembling, still backing away, so torn between his own self-hatred and despair that he could not discern the angry disbelief that came down over Daniel’s face. “Don’t you dare.” Daniel’s voice was rasping and stricken, hoarse from damage and something else, another feeling Armand could no longer recognize. Daniel struggled to get to his feet and found it too difficult. He pulled himself forward on his hands and knees, accusing Armand with his eyes.
But Armand was faster. Even in panic Armand was composed enough to run: the only new trick he had ever learned in the years since he had been made. He could hear the night sounds of the airport outside. Daniel was using one of the chairs to pull himself upright. He was spattered with dried blood, bore purple bite marks on his chest and neck. His fangs were so long that they clipped his lower lip and drew more blood. He felt them with his hands, astonished. But Armand could not look at anything but his eyes. Some intense emotion was burning there, vivid but illegible, trying to imprison Armand, to restrain him. Never, Armand thought—not again, never. Daniel staggered towards him, gaining strength and balance. Something flashed across his face when Armand turned his back on him; distorting his features, making his mouth fall open in what looked like agony. “Don’t you fucking dare,” he said again, whispered and remonstrative; then howling Armand’s name after him as Armand fled mindless into the dark.