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A crestfallen vampire lies at Daniel’s feet, and the dust is settling. Below, he and the rest of this part of the Dubai penthouse is coated with a cast of chalky drywall.
It’s settled on him, in his gaping wounds with trailing streaks of scarlet blood in a miasma. It should be startling, as Armand, Amedeo, or whoever he really is slumps against the wreckage.
Daniel’s not sure if he’s said just how orange Armand’s eyes are in his notes over the past few days he’s stayed with the vampire Armand and Louis De Pointe Du Lac.
Against the pallid, crumbling walls it's akin to a flame, and they’re staring right at him, as if straight through Daniel’s skin. They dance wildly as he does when he’s thinking and calculating. He looks hollow—like he’s about to start pinning butterflies.
He’s about to come to his senses and promptly take his leave, letting Armand ruminate in a self-imposed tragedy, but he can’t shake the query of why?
The Talamasca had access to the manuscript for some time, and even with the precision of a surgeon and his scalpel, no number of memories altered or broken with the mind gift would keep Armand’s facade crystal clear forever.
There were infinite holes in the narrative, why save Louis from the crypt? Why stay with him after the fiasco in the seventies with Molloy himself? Ever the bright young reporter, he itched to get to the pit of the story.
Not just to preserve logic in his magnus opus, but out of a selfish, innate desire to reveal the secrets of his own past.
So, instead of doing what any sensible man with as many years under his belt would do, he waits. Then a compelling force soon plants him to the ground, and he swears it's not his own curiosity this time. He feels a swell of white-hot fear bloom in his gut like a well-placed punch. Worse, he recounts familiarity at the feeling of his muscles, poised and unable to make the next tangible step of moving forward.
“If Louis had been serious in his demands, he would have taken you himself.”
The figure spoke, calm, measured. A taper of desperation and wild impulsiveness slipped into his tone, Daniel recognized it, somehow, in the softness of his vowels.
“Fake Rashid,” Daniel quips “Cut me some slack man, this shit is my job. I don’t know what you’re doing, or, I guess I do, but you’ve gotta quit it, this isn’t my shitty marriage, and frankly, not my problem at this rate–”
“With how fascinating you are, you still manage to bore me.”
Daniel found that he was unable to speak at all, and a tingling sensation ran up and down his esophagus and clavicle, like insects marching through his body, invasive.
He tried, and wanted to gag, but found he was unable to do so. The feeling warped into the same one he gets when he’s parched but can’t swallow anything down.
“Down,” The vampire says, and he’s down, perched straight up on his knees like an arrow. It hurts. He has arthritis, and it feels like his spine is being contorted.
Armand is still inert on the floor, but extends out a hand, tilting his head as he runs the edge of his nails, like crystalline talons, along Daniel’s cheek.
He feels his face go ruddy, more so out of frustration and embarrassment more than anything else.
Armand’s facade falters when a predatory, glistening smile splits on his face. He stirs and the drywall is mostly off of him, or maybe it isn't, maybe it just looks like blitzes of light and apparitions that dance in his vision from drifting dust.
“I haven’t gotten to tell you how different you’ve become, Daniel. Our boy, now a man. You wear age well, I’ve seen it grow on you,”
Daniel flinched back, moving in a moment of weakness. With a miniscule twitch in Armand’s face the force returned, except for that tickle in his throat.
“So you do want me to talk,” He coughs ”Since you—you talk like a fucking dictionary, find me a synonym for ‘asshole’ would you? My old brain isn’t as bright as yours.”
The vampire hums “Always quick to resort to retorts and petty insults.”
A hand returned, and olive palms drew across his jaw, along his larynx, deftly etching in between the grooves in wrinkled, pruned skin. Something settled deep in the pit of his stomach, his knees were burning. Another feeling, desperate and degraded, bared itself.
Daniel began to think in a monologue in his head. It was like writing dialogue, easy, faster, and something glinted in Armand’s bright eyes, unearthing. He looked vaguely proud, as Daniel pleaded
Please, just let me move, give me my body back.
There he is, came the reply, and Daniel was fully intending to run, but the curiosity and expectancy in Arun’s eyes made him pause. Very well. The pressure was gone. His posture softened and he steeled himself with an intake of breath.
“You’ve played your own games with me more than once, right? I’m not wrong for thinking that?” A quirk of the lips, Armand looked lost in a reverie as he reached out to feel the fabric of Daniel’s clothes, probably deducing and disapproving of the thread count.
Somehow, the unsolicited touch brought back flashes of himself: Younger, coy with brown curled hair, Armand the same as he is now.
“I was mildly surprised that you uncovered what you did, dear,” Daniel grimaced at the pet name, unbidden. “It was one of many memories. Entire years in San Francisco were a blur, yes? I wonder why that is,”
Daniel felt as if he was made of stone again, but it was his self-inflicted inhibition now, as Armand grew closer, looking vulnerable, being anything but so, with his mused curls and his svelte face. He vaguely resembled a fawn, if it weren’t for his eyes.
"You lost Louis, am I just the next prey of choice? Pick of the litter’s gone?"
"To the contrary. You have christened my life to ashes and danced in its ruin, Daniel. I despise and love you with every thread of my being. I would say that I hold ‘disdain’ but that word is too plain, too flaccid. I hate you, beloved. I loved you and with it I will grow to love hating you, keeping you suspended in agony with the curse you’ll bear. I have been awakened. I see no other path than to show you what you’ve forgotten."
Something darts forward, incomprehensible, too fast for human advances, and there’s a sharp pain in his neck.
It’s the worst pain he’s ever felt, surpassing all bounds of the human imagination. It's a sharp stab along his marred scar, and he feels the flesh rip and separate like torn canvas, feeling the squelch of muscle giving way to gouging fangs.
Daniel tries to yell but it's garbled by his own blood. He has the compulsion to spit, pass out, but a gentle hand caresses his face, and the pain in his neck throbs.
Warm digits tilt his chin up for opportune access, and Armand drinks, sucking at the plane of his throat like an infant nursing on the breast of life.
Everything is fading, dancing colors and light in Daniel’s retinas like the remnants of a dream, and he can vividly recall the best feelings from his best memories, long buried. Many possess brown skin and no face, maybe Alice.
Some of them are his kids, when they were still young, prancing around wearing shirts with Daddy’s little princess on them. Back when he had a chance of actually being worth something to someone, before he ruined it with his girls.
He’s disappointed to find it's not the “flashes” of memories flowery poets describe. It’s more like a rape of the senses.
When it snapped back into place it was like a freight train. A crescendo and no climax. When his eyes opened, feeble and squinting, the light was the brightest he’d ever seen it, like a beam from the sun.
A blink, then another, and then he registers the liquid dripping into his mouth, decadent and hot on his tongue. He’d never felt a drug like it, and it had him reeling instantly.
It was animalistic, how his fingers lurched out to grasp on an arm, an offering, and drink down whatever heavenly nectar woke him from the brink of death.
He could still taste himself, slipping away, a heavy and staleness in his breath.
The taste lingered in his mouth, invigorating, like pineapple mixed with a sultry undertone of something richer, but the thrill it provided was so extravagant even Daniel, a seasoned writer and Pulitzer Prize winner, failed to find words to describe the transcendence.
It comes rushing back, the memories, and Arun wipes a crimson rivulet dribbling down his neck with reverence, soft, warm eyes like mulled cider.
Armand huffs indignantly, tone touched with an air of thinly veiled disgust and awe.
“Lilac eyes,” he says, and Daniel begins to remember.
He remembers everything.