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Sometime between the Haight and Alice, Daniel gets a two-week job reporting from Lisbon. He rides buses, sweating through his too-thick button-down, jotting notes in his spiral notebooks; records interviews with Carnation Revolution resistance fighters, both soldiers and workers, on his little black Dictaphone, has to strain to decipher them later over the crackle of the speaker, the background noise of chatter and traffic; gazes unseeingly out the window at the glimmering ocean as he tries to slot a vaguely correct-sounding verb into another insipid, inadequate sentence.
At the moment, he's conducting an experiment. The experiment is not doing blow. He has noticed in himself the emergence of a series of superstitions and odd beliefs that he knows aren't true: that without drugs, he's stupider, slower. Deficient, a misfit who doesn't know how to talk to people. That he has no great gift as a writer or journalist, that he cheated his way into all of these opportunities and grants because people believe that he is the person he is when he's high. Part of Daniel's job is having a critical ear for cliche. He knows what the whingeing self-pity of an addict sounds like. Hence the experiment.
The only problem is that so far, those beliefs seem to be bearing out. He does feel dumber. In the morning, he rises bleary-eyed with the sun, flips the notebook open and begins the long struggle of deciphering his own shorthand scrawl, and it all looks like crap. He supposes being constantly hungover doesn't help either; but without a nightcap, how is anyone supposed to sleep?
The first couple of times Daniel sees him in the hotel lobby—the figure of a tall, slim man with eyes unearthly large and piercing—he thinks he's hallucinating. For one thing, he's certain he's seen him before in dreams. For another, there's something not-quite-right about his appearance, though it's hard to pin down exactly what. Shirt tucked into his flared pants, belt buckle gleaming, sleeves rolled to his elbows, he's fastidiously dressed, handsome, maybe gay, but nothing so far out of the range of the ordinary. The uncanniness is in his face, in the watchful stillness of his expression. The way his eyes track Daniel around the room, while the rest of him never moves, even a twitch.
He's there each night when Daniel drags himself in, bone-weary, for a glass of whisky at last call, and he stays until the bar closes. Daniel's never managed to see where he goes after that. When Daniel gets in the elevator, he peers out of the closing doors, and makes eye contact with the man, who is still sitting in the very same place. In the morning, he's gone.
"That guy who hangs around the lobby at night," Daniel says to the hotel porter. "Is he a guest? What floor is he staying on?"
The porter gives him an owlish blink. "I'm afraid I don't know who you mean. In any case, staff are not permitted to share information about the hotel guests. My apologies."
"You know the guy I mean. This tall? Long hair?"
The porter shakes his head primly.
Daniel's got a thundering migraine on the fourth day and spends the ride home on the bus laying against the headrest, eyes closed, the wet paper towel pressed against his forehead doing absolutely nothing to cool him, nor to prevent the churn of his stomach. There's a baby on the bus, thankfully not crying, but the sound of its bright tinny hiccuping laughter makes him feel like his brain is receiving electric shocks over and over.
He's nearly staggering across the hotel lobby, low screech of tinnitus in his ear, and the man is there, sitting in the leather loveseat, legs stretched out and crossed neatly at the ankles. His gaze, to Daniel's befuddled mind, looks like an accusation.
"Do you have a problem with me?" he demands.
The man does not say a word. His expression doesn't move. If it weren't for the way his eyes were tracking him, Daniel wouldn't think that he'd heard at all.
Daniel swears, and stomps off into the elevator.
He passes out face-down in bed with all of his clothes on, and doesn't dream. When he wakes up an indeterminate length of time later, he's warm all over and the pain has left. His body feels light, buoyant. He feels rested—suspiciously rested—so flips over to check the time on the bedside clock.
The man is there, watching silently.
Daniel jolts upright—but in the next split second, the man's hand is on his shoulder.
"Rest," he murmurs, and Daniel collapses back on the mattress.
And then he remembers, memories snapping back like an elastic band.
He twists his head to stare at the man again, wide eyed.
"It's you."
The vampire—Armand, Daniel's brain unearths the name from somewhere—smiles gently, without showing his teeth.
"Why did I forget?" Daniel whispers. "Why do I remember now?"
"You're still dreaming," Armand tells him. "Your brain makes connections more quickly when you're asleep. That's why you remember."
"I'm still dreaming," Daniel echoes. "So you're not really here?"
Armand's smile turns suddenly cruel. "I’m here," he says, and Daniel is lifted into the air. He kicks his legs, flailing and scrabbling, but just as before, it has no effect against the powerful invisible force.
Armand pulls him upright and shakes him until his teeth rattle. He pins both wrists behind Daniel's back, binding them with invisible rope.
Then, slowly, Armand releases the rest of Daniel's body from his hold, until he's suspended from only his wrists. Daniel cries out at the feeling of his shoulders wrenching nearly out of their sockets.
The pain doesn't abate as he dangles there. In fact, it intensifies.
"Okay, you're here," Daniel says. His eyes are blurry with tears, the shape of Armand swimming before him. "You're here and you're real and you're very scary. I get it. Can you put me down?"
Armand hums thoughtfully. "You can take it a little longer. Can't you, Daniel?"
It's hard to think, his consciousness consumed by his body's screaming, make it stop, make it stop, make it stop.
"Why are you doing this," he says weakly. "Did you come here to kill me?"
"Kill you?" Armand pauses. "I suppose that is one consideration."
He levitates Daniel until he's hovering about a metre in front of his face, then lets him crash to the floor, legs crumpling beneath him. He thinks one of them twists in a bad way when he lands, that it might be broken, but he can't feel it yet. The pain is smothered by shock, a dull throb. His ears are ringing.
Armand has begun to pace the floor, muttering under his breath. Daniel remembers this too, from San Francisco. The frenzied edge to him. Where the vampire Louis had been all acid rage, Armand had been nervy, neurotic, every now and then teetering over into pitch-dark melancholy.
"Had another fight with your boyfriend?" Daniel guesses.
By way of reply, Armand gives his injured shoulder a firm jostle, and Daniel lets out an involuntary scream.
"It is not your place to ask questions," says Armand.
Daniel's panting, shivering. "I'm right, though. What is it this time? He's fucking around on you with other vampires? Did he go back to find Lestat?"
Armand halts his pacing, turns to face Daniel, and kneels down to his level on the floor. His eyes, glowing bronze, are the clearest thing in Daniel's vision, headlights in a storm.
Daniel doesn't let it deter him. "So is this going to be a thing now? Every time you guys have a bust-up, you come around to take it out on me? I'm just asking so I know whether to add human pinata to my resume—"
"How about you, boy?" Armand interrupts. "How have you been recently?"
Daniel feels it physically, Armand flipping through his memories like vinyls in the record store. He tries not to wince.
"Oh, dear."
Armand is lingering over a day a few months prior, when Daniel had accidentally smoked crystal meth the night before a deadline.
"'Accidentally'?" Armand asks, softly, sceptically.
Well, not totally by accident. He'd already been up for days; he was tired and sluggish and blocked; he'd lost the thread of the piece he was writing, couldn't remember the original point of his pitch—an opinion piece about the young antiwar protestors—or why he'd thought it so important in the first place; wished desperately that he could take it back, tell his boss sorry, fucked that one up, let me crank out some garbage filler instead, but by now it was too late, the deadline was morning, and he had to hand in something. He'd thought he'd have a smoke and then grind it out for three or four hours in front of the typewriter, but he'd misjudged. Now his heart was racing, his leg jiggling convulsively. He rested his fingers on the keys, and waited for words to come, but they did not. For five hours, they did not; and then it was morning, and he was sweating, ants crawling on his skin, and thoughts were blaring loudly in his head, none of them related to his pitch, all of them about how he was a stinking piece of shit who shouldn't bother opening his mouth, let alone setting pen to paper.
He'd missed the deadline. He’d nearly been fired.
Armand clicks his tongue. His voice, when he speaks, is reproving, laden with disappointment. "So this is what you do with the gift of life that Louis and I gave you."
Daniel snorts. "Some gift," he says. It takes some effort to keep his voice from shaking. "I don't know if you forgot this since becoming a vampire, but you can't show up to a birthday party, threaten to chop someone's fucking head off, and then say your birthday gift is not doing that after all. It's considered pretty poor etiquette among humans."
"You don't understand the value of what you have. The sanctity of human life. The fact of its ending is what gives it meaning." Armand's face is troubled, a tiny crease appearing in his forehead. "Almost any vampire, if you gave them the chance, would choose to go back and live out an ordinary mortal life until its end."
Daniel lets that sit for a moment, waiting for him to walk it back, hedge it, say psych! When Armand doesn't, he can't stop himself. "Come on now," he says, incredulous.
Armand blinks, as if offended.
"Almost any vampire? Like what percentage exactly? Have you conducted a survey?"
"Incredible though it may seem," Armand says testily, "I, a vampire, have greater knowledge than you of vampire affairs."
"If every vampire wants to be a mortal, how come there are still a whole bunch of you? Wouldn't they all just throw themselves into the sun?"
"In fact," Armand says, "there are vanishingly few of us left, for the exact reason you name."
Daniel considers this hazily, over the pain in his shoulders and leg still vying for his attention.
"Then vampires are fucking pussies," he says. "Or maybe just dumb. Incurious. Self-absorbed. You get the opportunity to be a witness to the history of the world. You get to see how it all unspools. As much time as you want to learn any language or skill. To research until your heart's content. Find out anything about everything. And you'd give all that up—why? Because you're scared of the pain, or the boredom?" He shakes his head. "You guys don't fucking deserve it."
He's expecting Armand to respond by whacking him again, maybe snapping his other leg this time, but instead, Armand looks thoughtful.
"You still desire it," he says.
"Of course I do. Who wouldn't?" He looks right in Armand's eyes, challenging. "You gonna give it to me?"
Something flickers in Armand's face—something like want. At the sight of it, Daniel's stomach flips.
"Yeah," Daniel breathes. With difficulty, hissing through his teeth at the pain, he brings a hand up to open the top button of his shirt, and then he tilts his head back, exposing the line of his throat. "C'mon."
Before he knows it, he’s being lifted up again, set on the edge of the bed. Armand rises onto his knees, shuffles closer, between Daniel’s legs. Daniel inhales the scent of his musky, fragrant cologne, and underneath it, the rusty smell of blood. His hair brushes Daniel’s neck first, makes him shudder. It feels... very intimate.
Armand's lips lower to Daniel's neck, hover there, teasing.
Daniel's abdomen is tightening in anticipation. He's tense all over, his heart thumping loud enough to hear it. Armand, with his vampiric hearing, certainly must hear it.
"Please," Daniel whispers.
Open-mouthed against Daniel's neck, Armand murmurs, "Beg me again."
"I'm begging," Daniel says without hesitation or the slightest hint of embarrassment. He's breaking out in goosebumps where Armand is touching him, keenly aware that it's not only the abstract concept of eternal life that he's asking for, but the physical act. The world has narrowed to Armand and himself, Armand's mouth on his skin. He wants Armand to pierce him. He wants Armand inside of him, to drink from his body, for the same blood to flow in both of their veins. "Please. Please, take me. I want it. Please."
He feels the sharp tips of Armand's fangs lengthen until they're grazing him. Just touching, not yet puncturing. He's gratified to feel Armand's breath coming faster. He wants it, too.
"Yeah," Daniel says blurrily. "You're hungry, right? Do you remember what I taste like?"
Armand's breath hitches. His hand rises, encircling Daniel's arm, holding on for support, as though he thinks he might fly apart, too. He grips bone-crushingly tight, the sharp pain enough to make Daniel grunt; and then the fangs sink in like two fine needles.
That part doesn't hurt, at least not more than a routine blood draw; but then Armand makes a tiny, dissatisfied sound in his throat, digs his teeth deeper, and begins to suck. The sounds are loud in Daniel's ears, the thirsty slurps and great greedy gulps as Armand swallows. Daniel's rapidly going lightheaded. The pain of his limbs and shoulders melts away like snow in the rain.
Fuck, he hears himself thinking stupidly, I'm really fucking high. His vision has turned into a pointillist painting, the cream and beige of the hotel room broken into vague splotches. His face warm, whole body tingling, electric. His heart is racing, breaths coming out in helpless little huffs. Every time he thinks he's peaking, that his body can't possibly contain any more sensation, the intensity climbs higher, beyond what he can bear, until he's crying out.
Then, for several long minutes, he's drifting, floating on a pleasurable daze, close to the edge of unconsciousness; and then he feels Armand's teeth retracting. There's a last, tiny burst of a sweet sting when Armand fang-tips catch briefly on the edges of the puncture wound, and then he's pulling away.
Daniel blinks, but his vision doesn't clear, still spotty and strange. When he speaks, his voice sounds thin and distorted, like one of his Dictaphone recordings. "Why'd you stop?"
Armand is breathing heavily, too, hand still clutching Daniel's shirt. There's a smear of blood at the side of his mouth. Daniel wants—all of a sudden, an unfamiliar burst of desire—to taste it.
"I cannot," Armand's saying. For a moment, Daniel can't parse the words.
Then Armand lifts his gaze up to Daniel's. His eyes, Daniel thinks, have a little red in them, now.
"I took a vow."
"A vow." Daniel tries to think clearly. "What vow? To whom?"
"A vow to my old coven. Never to bequeath the dark gift. Never to make another vampire."
Frustration boils up inside Daniel. "And are your coven here now? Who gives a shit?"
"The vow was my own choice," he says, and the bloodstained side of his mouth lifts up, amused. Daniel wants to punch him in the fucking face, except that he's currently limp and boneless, with barely enough strength to hold himself up. "I told you. The dark gift is no gift at all."
"Yeah," Daniel grouses. "God forbid you'd ever give someone a gift they'd actually fucking want."
The amusement playing on Armand's mouth deepens.
"Do you know," he says, "I don't think I've ever met a mortal who wanted it quite so badly as you." Pointedly, he drops his gaze to the front of Daniel's pants, where he's soaked and straining, the jutting line of his dick obvious even in the low light.
Daniel feels a gut-punch of humiliation at that, for the first time all night, his face awash with heat. He knows Armand can feel it, too, but covers it up anyway, lifting his chin in defiance. "So?"
The next time Armand speaks, it's in Daniel's voice, with his accent. A sentence he must have said some years ago, though he's not sure exactly when. "Do whatever makes you happy, man, love is love, but I'm not fucking gay, you know what I'm saying?"
Daniel's heart seizes. There's a sick pit in his stomach.
"And?" he manages. "I like women. I fuck women. Pretty sure that precludes me from being gay.”
Armand smiles wider, exposing his sharp, blood-crimson canines. "But you desire me," he says. "You desire me more than any woman you've ever seen or made love to. You desire me so much you feel you'll drown in it, that it will consume you until your heart gives out. You've seen me in your dreams even before tonight." He shakes his head slowly in mock disapproval. "Some of the things you imagine, Mr Molloy," he says, "surpass my own reckoning."
Daniel's neck is hot. All that is left of the high from before is dizziness and the rapid fluttering of his heartbeat. "I don't—" he starts, but it's useless: at Armand's words, a series of images from his recurring dream flash in his mind, betraying him.
Armand laughs softly.
"Yeah, congratulations," Daniel says. "You tortured me and my dick liked it, and I have to live with that forever. Are you proud?"
"A little," Armand acknowledges.
Daniel closes his eyes, unable to look at him any longer.
"It's quite all right," says Armand, and Daniel hears the rustle as he crawls closer. He feels Armand's fingers brush against his abdomen, and jumps.
Armand's unbuttoning the waistband of his jeans, unzipping him, pulling his dick out. Daniel feels himself throb at the touch, an intense thrill sweeping through him. He squeezes his eyes shut even tighter, tries to curl in on himself protectively.
"You needn't be embarrassed," Armand says, voice velvety and crooning. "I've lived a very long life. You might think that what you long for is aberrant—immoral—foul—disgusting—"
"Shut up," Daniel moans, distressed. Armand's grasp on his dick is loose, but it's already twitching by itself, his balls drawing up tight like he might come any second.
He hears the sound of Armand sucking between his teeth, and moments later, feels hot spit landing on his cockhead. The next stroke is slippery-slick, and makes his toes curl. He bites the inside of his cheek, hard.
"In fact," Armand says conversationally, "it's nothing so—fascinating—as that. Your particular grab bag of psychological traits are so common as to be found in a textbook. The boy who carries shame wherever he goes for a decade or more. Agonising in bed for night after night about his pathetically insignificant mortal transgressions.”
He swipes his thumb over Daniel’s slit, and Daniel has to suppress a whine.
“His schoolboy bullying, his petty teenage cruelty, his college arrogance,” Armand hisses. “When you get older, you discover that drugs can help. That when you're intoxicated enough, you can forget about all of that. But you quickly need more and more to achieve the same effect, until finally, it stops working at all. You return to that old shame, but then one day, an interesting phenomenon occurs. Something knocks loose in your head. Wires get crossed. Suddenly, shame gets you off. Isn't that right, Mr Molloy?"
Daniel barely hears the words. The sound of Armand's voice, gentle and melodic, is rumbling through him. He can feel it rolling down his neck, his spine.
"So you liked it," Armand goes on, "when I made you cry. And you liked it when I put you on your knees. And you liked it even more when your pathetic little cock got an erection, and I was able to see it. Nothing particularly surprising about that."
Daniel doesn't mean to, but he's lifting his hips, tiny abortive thrusts into Armand's fist, which he's keeping loose and open, like he wants Daniel on edge. Like he wants him to work for it. Daniel thinks he's making noise, his ragged little gasps catching in his throat.
"Nothing particularly fascinating, either," says Armand. "In fact, I'd call it predictable."
"Ah," Daniel says, helpless, "I'm—'
"I'd call it boring," says Armand.
Daniel comes, hips bucking, squirting onto the bottom of his shirt. And he keeps coming. He comes so much his muscles spasm and lock up, his back soaked with sweat. When he thinks he's finally done, Armand says, dryly disbelieving, "Wow," and the ensuing wave of humiliation wrings another aftershock out of him.
Then he's shivering, teeth chattering like a nasty comedown, and Armand is levitating him onto his back, pulling the bedsheets up to his neck, murmuring, "Rest. Rest."
Daniel's eyes fall half-lidded automatically under Armand's enchantment, but he fights it as hard as he can. He still has more to say.
"You know he's still in love with that fucking French idiot," he slurs.
For one fraction of second, Armand's hands stutter. Then he seems to regain his composure, smooths the comforter out over Daniel's chest.
"It was a pleasant evening, Mr Molloy," he says, in a voice like a warning siren. "Let's keep it that way, shall we?"
"Whatever," says Daniel, and then his eyes fall the rest of the way closed, and he's under.
—
Daniel wakes up to sunlight streaming through the cracks of the venetian blinds and lays there for several minutes, trying to remember the daily duties he has to attend to. He doesn't recall his dream, but it must have been a vivid one, because he has to struggle for several long minutes to come fully back to life. Ah—the interviews. His first at nine-thirty. Panic seizing him, he whips around to check the time on the clock, but it's only seven-fifteen. He's got time. He's got time.
Only when he gets up to go to the bathroom does he notice the hem of his shirt is damp, his abdomen beneath sticky with half-dried cum. He stops, plucks at the material, curious. He hasn't had a wet dream since he was a teenager. What a kind of dream it must have been. Try as he might, though, he can't remember a single detail.
He needs a coffee; he's still got sleep crusting his eyes. Strangely, that doesn't feel so bad. He's used to jolting awake violently, heart thumping, hungover or on a comedown, after just a couple hours of restless slumber. He's been an insomniac since his teens, always needed something—a drink, a joint, a valium stolen from his mother's vanity—just to get him over into sleep. He didn't know it could be like this, that he could sleep and wake up naturally. He yawns and stretches, enjoying the satisfying click when he cracks his back.
Maybe the experiment is working after all, he decides. Maybe he should cut down on drinking, too. In the mirror, his eyes look bright, alert, less bloodshot. The last paragraph of his article—he needs to rewrite it. It requires a little more honesty, a little more hopefulness. He'd been writing about how inflation is decimating the lives of working people, how there is no cause for optimism in Europe, America, or anywhere; how the fight is not yet over, how perhaps it will never be—which seems obvious, but is lazy, defeatist, doesn't bear mentioning, and is not even necessarily true, when Daniel really thinks about it. There is reason for hope. He's seen it in the elders' laughter lines, in the light in their eyes, the exuberant voices of children outside the petiscos bars.
He smokes a cigarette while waiting for the bus in the blazing mid-morning sun. He's forgotten all about the man in the hotel lobby. He's working out his next interview's questions. He feels good.