Lestat De Lioncourt

David had asked me to wait here. Only he, and a select few others, were permitted down in the lower archives. An unreasonable request? Perhaps not. But my patience had never been known for its generosity. I had asked David for very little. I merely wanted only a few of my belongings that had been gathered from Paris returned to me. What possible use could they be to the order now? I was standing right here, wasn’t I?

Study me. Place your fingers in my wounds, Peter!

Just as I began to contemplate simply blasting my way through the security doors to the archives, the clicking heels came to an abrupt halt. A girl appeared at the end of my row and deposited a large stack of books onto the table.

At first, I might have passed her without a second glance. But then she brushed a curtain of thick walnut hair behind her ear, and there was something about the gesture that caught my attention. Or perhaps it was the sheer scholarly concentration with which she did it.

Either way, I suddenly found myself wanting to interrupt it. This was practically a game now. How far could I push a Talamascan before they snap?

She was so terribly tidy in her movements. Everything had its place. Papers here. Books there. A pen aligned precisely with the edge of the table. She moved with an almost liquid efficiency, more like water than human.

Oh, this was going to be fun.

I pulled out the chair opposite her and deliberately let its legs scrape against the marble.

Heads snapped up from every corner of the room, each person searching for the source of the offending noise.

“Pardon.” I smiled widely at the man glaring at me from across the library.

“What are you studying tonight?” i snatched a book from the top of her stack and read the title aloud.

“The Ploughman’s Lunch?”, I turned the book over in my hands, staring at it as though it had personally offended me.

“You all baffle me.” I thumbed through the first few pages.

“How is this research?” Another page.

“What knowledge could you possibly gain from reading about ancient garlic grinding?” I looked up at her, genuinely fascinated now. Her large eyes peered back at me from behind her thin gold framed glasses.

“Is this what the Talamasca does now? Catalog the history of garlic and call it paranormal studies?”

It did not take someone of my intellect to know who, and more importantly what, had just plopped himself into the chair opposite me. Entire training manuals had been written about this particular creature. Updated, amended, reissued, and occasionally contradicted by later reports because apparently consistency had never been one of Lestat de Lioncourt’s defining virtues.

Why he was sitting in a Talamascan reading room was beyond me. Why he had chosen me to personally annoy was another mystery entirely. Considering I was already skating across extraordinarily thin ice with the Order, the intelligent thing would have been to play this carefully. Keep my head down. Be polite. Do absolutely nothing that might result in another note being added to my file. That was what I should have done. Unfortunately, the insolence of his behaviour made me want to throw a book at his head.

One had to treat the Vampire Lestat rather like a particularly virulent venereal disease. Plenty of caution, considerable distance, and preferably no behaviour that might encourage prolonged exposure. Unfortunately, I would come to find out, I did not to a very good job at that last point.

I gave him nothing. No startled look when he took the book. No offended huff. No nervous glance towards the nearest senior member of the Order as though someone might come rescue me from the famous blond nuisance currently occupying the other side of my table.

Instead, I sat down in the chair I had intended to sit in. I had been using this particular corner of the reading room for nearly six months, and I was not about to be driven from it because Lestat de Lioncourt had decided he was bored.

Without looking at him, I reached and began organising the remaining books and my things. Art and Psychoanalysis by Laurie Schneider Adams. Killing the Dead by John Blair. A volume on medieval funerary practice. My notebook. Laptop. Pens.

Each took its usual place with the sort of deliberate precision that came from routine rather than nerves. If he had wandered over here hoping to watch some poor Talamascan stammer beneath the weight of his attention, he had unfortunately chosen a woman who had once defended a dissertation chapter while three professors systematically attempted to dismantle it sentence by sentence. A vampire with boundary issues was hardly going to be the thing that broke me.

The book in his possession was not even work. I had picked it up because something had been systematically eating its way through my garden and, after discovering another basil plant reduced to a collection of tragic green stalks that morning, I had begun researching medieval pest control out of a mixture of scholarly curiosity and personal vengeance. Still, if he wanted to mock the garlic, then we could talk about the garlic.

I folded one leg over the other and finally looked up and answered him in that tone I saved for the special occasion of tearing down first years or seducing old professors. “Did you know garlic was considered an aphrodisiac?” There was no hesitation or embarrassment in my tone. If anything, I let the word sit between us with deliberate ease.

There were, broadly speaking, two ways to respond when someone was attempting to make you uncomfortable. You could retreat. Or you could make the conversation significantly more uncomfortable and see who blinked first. I had never been particularly gifted at retreat.

“In Greco-Roman medicine, and later under humoral theory, garlic was considered hot and dry. Heat was associated with vigour, blood, appetite.” I reached for my travel mug as casually as if we were discussing weather patterns. “Including sexual appetite.”

A small sip of coffee. “So if one were suffering from a certain lack of enthusiasm in that department, there were physicians who might recommend foods thought to heat the body.”

I set the mug back down. “Garlic. Onions. Spices. Wine.” My brows lifted slightly. “Romantic isn't it.”

There was something particularly satisfying about discussing historical impotence remedies with a vampire who had approached my table seemingly intent upon rattling me. If this was a game, I had no intention of letting him choose the rules.

“The association survived for centuries, in one form or another. Though I imagine the practical results were questionable. Nothing quite encourages seduction like leaning across the bed reeking of several cloves of raw garlic.” I paused, just long enough. “Although it remained rather popular in France.”

There it was. Small. Polite. Almost innocent. The sort of insult one could plausibly deny having made at all. “Which may explain certain historical observations concerning the French and their... pungency.”

There were insults one shouted. Then there were insults one placed delicately on the table between two people and allowed the recipient to unwrap at their leisure. I preferred the latter.

No. Emerald was wrong. Her eyes were more like summer leaves. There was a gentleness in the way her fingertips wrapped around the edges of the book when I finally placed it back into her hand. It was almost at odds with everything else about her. The practiced composure. The sharpened tongue. Those carefully constructed walls she had erected between herself and me. And yet there was something impulsive in her. Something wild. Something a bit like me.

I made a small noise of annoyance. “I bathe.” leaning back into the chair, I crossed one ankle over my knee.

“I think you were insinuating that I carry something other than the exquisite odor of cedar and oud.” I had no intention of allowing several centuries of personal hygiene to be reduced by silly rumors of the French and garlic.

I turned my head, allowing my gaze to wander instead toward the bald gentleman hunched over his own stack of books. Impenetrable. Not that I was trying particularly hard. I could have pushed, certainly. But the woman across from me was different. There was no convenient little stream of thoughts to pluck from her mind. No nervous repetition. No sudden spike of panic. No internal monologue screaming Vampire Lestat is sitting at my table. Nothing. I glanced back at her, in near surprise. Only to see her stillness, steadiness, readily peering back at me.

“Do you always insult potentially dangerous vampires while giving them lectures about sex, or have I inspired something special in you?” Dismissively I waved a hand, “No, no. You don’t have to answer that. It would ruin this entire-” I vaguely gestured at the sum of her, “-whatever this is. Nevermind”

It occurred to me then that I could probably sit across from her for an hour in complete silence and she would not squirm. I could stare at her until the sun rose, and she would simply turn another page. I could talk incessantly, provoke her, insult her, compliment her, perhaps even begin singing, and she might merely lift one eyebrow before returning to whatever scholarly nonsense had occupied her before I arrived. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. This was precisely the sort of puzzle that could hold my attention.

And how long had I been waiting for my belongings to be returned. Surely even the Talamasca could locate a few personal effects without requiring twenty layers of bureaucracy.

“So,” I settled into the chair more comfortably, “do you each receive a digital copy of my file upon joining the Order, or does the obsession with cataloguing my face begin somewhere earlier?”

“Actually, how about we level the playing field? You give me your name. Hm? I clearly can’t be expected to keep up with the Talamasca’s recruitment process. One moment I’m being observed, the next I’m being insulted by a woman who apparently has a personal vendetta against slugs.”

I studied her for a long moment. I wanted to appraise her. She reminded me far too much of David in a way. They both seemed like they could make every encounter an entire chess match. It also made me wonder whether there really was some sort of debriefing members were forced to endure. Some ancient lecture followed by a CIA level of desensitization. Here is the Vampire Lestat. Here are his known habits. Here are his known weaknesses. Here is what not to say to him.

If so, I suspected someone had neglected to include the most important instruction. DO NOT make yourself interesting. She had already failed spectacularly. Straightening the wrinkles from my shirt, I switched my legs. My knee struck the underside of the table and all her neat pens went rolling. They scattered across the polished wood, each of them falling to the floor with an echoing click against the marble. Was it purposeful? Who’s to say?

I opened it somewhere near the middle and settled back into the chair, giving the impression that the question of whether Lestat de Lioncourt personally smelled offensive was considerably less intellectually compelling than the psychoanalytic interpretation of visual culture. Which, to be fair, it was.

I paid very little attention to the French vampire and his impassioned defence against being considered an assault to the nostrils. Or, rather, I made a point of appearing not to. There was a distinction. Lestat struck me as someone profoundly accustomed to being observed. More than that, he expected reaction. Fear, fascination, irritation, attraction, outrage. It hardly mattered which, so long as the room bent towards him eventually.

“Cedar and oud,” I repeated thoughtfully, as though filing the information away for some future paper. “Much better than damp crypt, admittedly.” I said thumbing another page. 

I peered up at him over the edge of the book at Do you always insult potentially dangerous vampires while giving them lectures about sex…, one eyebrow lifting almost involuntarily. There was something rather satisfying about watching a creature with several centuries of cultivated theatricality apparently lose his footing over garlic and aphrodisiacs.

“You’re the one who sat down in front of me. You’re the one who decided to irritate the Talamasca, which, by the way, you are wrong on both fronts.” I closed the book around one finger to hold my place, giving him the courtesy of my full attention now. “First, I do not find you irritating. That would require a formed opinion, and considerably more energy than I have presently devoted to forming one.”

Irritation implied investment. It meant he had managed to occupy enough space in my thoughts to become inconvenient, and I was not about to hand him that particular victory simply because he had decided to install himself in the chair opposite me and make a performance of existing.

“Lastly, I am not Talamasca. Not fully, at least. I’m a contractor.” I offered him a cheeky smile, the sort that probably did very little to support the argument that I had no opinion of him whatsoever.“You seem flustered. Was it the sex or the garlic that did it?”

I found myself rather invested in studying his posture. There was an ease to the way he occupied space that felt almost too complete to be accidental. No hesitation, no visible self-consciousness, no small betrayals of uncertainty in the shoulders or hands. He seemed entirely comfortable in himself, or at least extraordinarily skilled at performing the illusion of it. Whether that confidence was learned, genuine, or simply another consequence of the vampiric condition remained to be seen. Immortality must do peculiar things to one's relationship with embarrassment. After several centuries, perhaps shame simply became inefficient.

What was it the kids said? Fake it until you make it? That seemed to be Lestat in a nutshell.

Except I suspected he had been faking it for so long that the performance and the man had become impossible to separate. There was something psychologically fascinating about that. Confidence repeated often enough became identity. Theatre performed without interruption eventually ceased to feel like theatre at all. And Lestat was nothing if not theatrical.

Still, I could not deny that it made his charm nearly impossible to resist. Not because he was attempting to be charming in any conventional sense, but because there was something magnetic in the sheer certainty with which he existed. He behaved as though every room naturally belonged to him and everyone within it had simply not yet realised.

It was obnoxious. It was also, regrettably, effective.

“You are the reason our manuals are updated annually, but no, we do not receive a complimentary copy of The Collected Misadventures of Lestat de Lioncourt upon joining.” I shifted the book slightly in my hands, allowing the faintest curl of amusement to touch my mouth. “I have not yet been lucky enough to see your actual file. I imagine it is extensive, though. Probably requires its own shelving system.”

There were centuries to account for, after all. Centuries of appearances, disappearances, catastrophes, reinventions and, judging by the man currently occupying the chair opposite me as though he had been personally commissioned for it, a truly exhausting quantity of personality.

My gaze narrowed slightly. “Why are you here, anyway?”

That was the considerably more interesting question. Lestat did not strike me as the sort of creature who wandered accidentally into Talamasca territory. Curiosity, perhaps. Boredom, almost certainly. But boredom in an immortal was rarely benign. Give a human being a free afternoon and they reorganised a cupboard. Give Lestat several hours without adequate stimulation and I suspected somebody eventually had to update an incident report.

Then he asked for my name. I was fairly certain my eyebrows climbed halfway towards my hairline. For a moment I seriously considered refusing. There was something satisfying about the asymmetry of it. I knew who he was. Everyone in this building knew who he was. His name had been recorded, cross-referenced, annotated and probably underlined several times by increasingly irritated archivists, while I remained simply the woman with the book and the apparent vendetta against terrestrial molluscs.

I considered giving him a false name instead. Something aggressively ordinary. Sarah. Jane. Perhaps Margaret, purely because I enjoyed the idea of Lestat de Lioncourt leaving this encounter believing he had been psychologically dissected by a woman named Margaret.

But then he mentioned levelling the playing field. A hint of mischief pulled at my expression. Oh. He wanted my name? Very well.

I closed the book fully and cleared my throat. But when I spoke, I did not give him the neat, Anglicised version. I abandoned the carefully moderated academic cadence I had accumulated through lecture halls, archives and too many years spent teaching people not to ask me to repeat myself. The softened vowels went with it. So did the tidy consonants of the English version of my name. What replaced them was older. Highland. The accent I had learned before I ever understood that accents could be edited for other people's convenience.

“Is mise Ruadhán Ruarach.”

I let the Gaelic settle between us without translating it, watching him with an expression that was entirely too pleased with itself. Then, because apparently I was incapable of leaving dignity well enough alone: “Agus tha gràin mhòr agam air seilcheagan. Gu mòr.”

There. He had asked for my name. I had even provided supplementary biographical information. Albeit, in a language I was sure he didn’t understand.

I watched his expression carefully, more interested in the reaction than I probably ought to have been. There was always something revealing in the fraction of a second before a person decided what face they wanted the world to see. Amusement, irritation, calculation. Whatever came first was usually more useful than whatever followed.

Then his knee struck the underside of the table. Every pen I had arranged beside my notes jumped at once. For one absurd second, I simply stared as they rolled in different directions across the polished wood, my carefully ordered little collection abandoning formation with all the discipline of frightened cavalry. One disappeared over the edge nearest me. Another spun lazily towards the centre before following it, striking the marble floor with a sharp click that carried much further through the library than something so small had any right to.

I looked back at him. There was no possible way I was giving him the satisfaction of asking whether that had been deliberate. The lower archive reading room had been quiet enough before he arrived that I had been able to hear the faint hum of the overhead LEDs and the occasional distant movement of someone several shelves away. Now the sound of my pens hitting the floor seemed almost ceremonial. Somewhere in the Talamasca’s long institutional history, there was probably an obscure regulation about maintaining scholarly decorum in restricted collections.

Still, I made no immediate move to retrieve them. Instead, I watched him straighten his shirt and rearrange himself in the chair with that infuriatingly effortless composure of his. Everything about him suggested performance, but not necessarily falseness.  Then came the grin. The canines were deliberate. Of course they were. My gaze flicked towards them for the briefest moment before returning to his eyes.

There it is.

Unfortunately for him, years spent in archives had given me an unreasonable tolerance for difficult things. I leaned back slightly in my chair, leaving the pens where they had fallen.

I could walk right out of this place, straight through all their grand doors, columned halls, past their “security” (and I hardly call an overinflated erudite, armed with a nightstick and a rudimentary level of telepathic powers, security) and pluck anyone off the cobbled streets. Any of them. Perhaps they’ve heard of me, perhaps not. But in any case, they would be charmed and entranced long before they’d catch onto the danger of me. That’s boring. Predictable. Maybe that’s why my feedings have been getting further and farther in between.

“I’m here with the Superior General.” Shrugging, I close my eyes with the smallest smirk. “He owes me. Let’s say that. He owes me my effects. And how your order, or forgive me, your contracted employers-” I gave a dismissive wave, “-could have ever collected them for their own is beyond my comprehension.”

I wanted the reaction. Of course I did. To solicit some provocation from her. A flinch, a twinge of anger, amusement, something to tell me the lights were on in the attic. But nothing. She’d not even batted an eyelash when her pens hit the marble, not even scarcely a glance at them.

“And as for me taking my place in front of you, yes, you caught my eye. What can I say? I’m a sucker for green eyes, and tonight my preference seems to be leaning toward females. Ah, nice touch.” Looking away, I intended to give her the same treatment she’d given me. Pointed disinterest. “Marking your place to look up at me with that lovely painted nail, as though you’d actually been completely enthralled in your reading and not gathering every single detail about me you possibly could. Bravo.”

A buzzing came from my breast pocket suddenly. It startled me, but I wouldn’t give her the slightest impression that it had. “Forgive me this interruption.” With measured care, I retrieved the offending object, my glass and metal cellular phone that we were all meant to carry now. Ah, David. He’d meant to tell me that everything was accounted for, and now he was simply photographing and cataloguing it for posterity.

“Seems the General’s ears were burning. I’m afraid this little-” I gave her another glance, purposefully raising an eyebrow before letting my gaze fall back to examine my glasslike nails, “-whatever this was, is coming to a close.”

Rising from the chair, I left it exactly as I had sat in it, pushed out, cocked to the side, and took a few steps around the table, allowing my hand to graze it as I passed.

“And so you have the patience of a saint, do you? But which, I wonder? Something like St. Augustine? Or St. Mary of Egypt? Now…” Shaking my finger, I nodded to myself, taking another step.

“That was a woman who knew how to treat her temple. She spent years indulging every appetite before deciding holiness suited her better. You see? Saints have always had rather interesting histories. Don’t you think?”

I could feel the eyes of everyone in the echoing room on me. Waiting for me to do something. As long as I was sitting they didn’t seem too threatened by my presence, but now the lion was on the move. It’s like they wanted me to scare them, to be the horribly dreadful monster, to be completely unpredictable.

Ah, but David would be furious. I’d likely have to pay for my inevitable damages, there’d be a memo with my picture at the top and, let’s face it, they always seem to catch me at the least flattering angle. Pushing the impulsive urge to show off exactly what sort of spawn of Gehenna I could be down, I tapped the top of her books.

“Now, Ruadhan, lovely, by the way, if not an incredibly complicated way to say an otherwise simple name. I find it increasingly interesting that you haven’t formed the slightest opinion of me, and yet you keep staring at my mouth.” I stood over her now. She was so effortlessly elegant. Her dress fell over the tops of her knees without a single crease, the edge of her glasses sat on her delicate nose, but her brown hair had slipped loose around her face, several strands falling carelessly across her cheek. I knelt slightly before her, moving my hand to pause just before her face.

“May I?” But I didn’t let her answer before slowly tucking it back securely behind her ear, letting my fingers trace lightly along her angled jaw as I stood back upright. For just a moment, I remained there. Close enough to see the smallest details of her expression. Close enough to wonder whether that composure of hers was quite as effortless as she wanted me to believe. My fingers lingered in the air for half a heartbeat before I withdrew them.

“There, much better. Hm?” My eyes met hers again. “And now I wonder…” Falling silent, I pressed the same fingers to my lip as I studied her.

“What would you say if I gave you the opportunity to form one?” I smiled. “An opinion, that is.” Glancing down at the book still held so carefully in her hands, I let out a small amused laugh.

My head rested in someone’s lap, and through the fog came the unmistakable sensation of fingers moving slowly through my hair, gently worrying at the knots in the gold. A vampire, i thought. Yes. A vampire. He hummed softly to himself as though nothing in the world were amiss, his fingers patiently working through each tangle. The pain in my left eye still throbbed somewhere deep within my skull, a dull, persistent reminder that it was there. How long would this eye feel foreign to me?

Slowly, reluctantly, I blinked my way out of whatever world, whatever realm I had been roaming and back into the living one.

“Armand.” Ah… those stubborn auburn curls fell loose around his face. My cherub. Always my cherub. I lifted a hand, though the effort seemed extraordinary, and traced the line of his cheek with my fingertips. It was instinctive. I needed the concrete evidence of him beneath my hand. Proof that he was real. Proof that I was real. That I was no longer trapped in Memnoch’s limbo, suspended somewhere between space and time, heaven and hell, life and whatever came after it. How strange it always was. Whenver the world fractured around me, whenever reality itself seemed to split apart at the seams, those same deceptively innocent, doe like eyes were waiting for me on the other side.

My body refused to move. I was glued to the convent floor as though someone had poured concrete over me, every muscle useless beneath the weight of exhaustion. I could do nothing but stare up at him. Then a single red tear slipped from my eye, traced a crimson path down my cheek, and fell onto the denim stretched across his knee, disappearing into the fabric.

“How long have I been lying here, Armand?”

Armand sat in silent reverie, his fingers combing through Lestat’s hair. Carefully, as if he were dusting off some long-forgotten saint. Cleaning the matted hair to keep him presentable to those who came to worship him. Once again he wondered what he was experiencing. What he saw. How many times had he tried to partake in his visions by stealing but a drop of blood. And how often had he found himself flung into one of the many pillars without Lestat as much as moving a finger. Weeks had turned to months, months to years.

The entire time he had cared for him, stood silent vigil as he lay there unmoving and silenced. He hated to admit it, but he had missed the sound of his voice. His words drove him up the wall constantly, and yet throughout this time of complete silence he wished nothing more than to hear him mock him again.

He had turned his eyes towards the cross hanging above the altar. So much had happened. Armand had seen and touched the Veil of Veronica. He had walked into the sun, but instead of meeting the gates of heaven, he found himself on a snowy rooftop. But that was over now; he had recovered and gained a new family. He left Benji and Sybelle with Marius while he picked up his duties watching over Lestat again.

Then the impossible happened. The slightest twitch of a muscle. The flutter of eyelids and then his iridescent blues looked straight up to him. Armand froze mid-movement. And then he spoke, as if he had merely awoken from a short nap. His voice was coarse still but way more coherent than he had expected.

A smile curled the corners of his mouth. „Lestat, you always ask the wrong questions. What does time matter to us truly?“ He wondered why he woke up now. Did he hear or see what had happened to Louis? If something could wake him from his coma, surely the attempted suicide of his tragic former companion. Not his...never his. He had not moved when he tried to end it all. And now that Louis lay burnt and bruised, that iridescent blue stared at him.

Sometimes he wondered if Lestat would have done a little tap dance on his ashes. The old anger rose up in him. The same questions about why he would never be anyone’s first choice. But it didn’t matter now; he had his children. He caught Lestat’s single red tear with the tip of his finger. He didn’t lap at the blood. He didn’t need proof for Gods existance anymore. He had his answers.

„Maybe you should be asking what happened in the meantime. To the world...to us.“ He closed his eyes for a moment and sighed. „Louis needs you.“ It hurt to say it out loud, but if anyone could help Louis’ fragile soul, share the hurt over Claudia’s enraged ghost pouring venom out over him, it was Lestat. „It is time you return to us and fix all our problems. Or add to them… I know you can’t help it.“ His words dripped with sarcasm, but his voice didn’t lack warmth.

It was rather like the first moment of waking into the dark gift. I had forgotten what it felt like to be overwhelmed by the world. My nerves flared at every sensation. His voice struck through me, sharp as a ringing bell, and the smallest flex of my muscles sent a shudder down my spine. Everything was too clear. Too bright. Too immediate. And then I wondered…When had I last seen him?

The sight of Armand should have been natural. Familiar. As though no time at all had passed between one moment and the next. Instead, memory came for me all at once. Fire. Armand blazing against the snow before St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Witness! This sinner dies for HIM!

David shoving me backward through the crowd as the sun steadily climbed the sky. Ash scattered from my finger as I reached for him and my voice broke as I cried his name over and over and over.

Armand. My Armand.

I was grateful for his support as I stood, though I imagined we must have looked rather absurd. A cherub of a boy pulling a fully grown man to his feet. I heard his words, understood the urgency beneath them. There was another immortal nearby, one I did not know, and she was screaming Louis’ name. That was where I needed to be. I knew it. But my feet didn’t seem to agree.

“Fix? You’re right…” I lifted my hand, brushing the tips of my fingers along his jaw. Nothing but silken, impossible skin beneath them, cold and achingly tender for all the terrible strength he possessed.

“What have I ever fixed?” I asked with a small amused laugh. My thumb traced the line of his cheek.

“I’ve certainly added coal to every fire I’ve ever passed.” Our voices echoed through the vast sanctuary. Around us, every icon, every statue of Mary seemed to watch from the shadows, their solemn faces turned toward us as though their veneration belonged not to the hallowed man hanging at the center of the chancel, but to us, to our intimate reunion. My hand remained against his cheek, cupping his ear, his perfect burgundy locks spilling softly against my wrist. Armand didn’t rush me. Perhaps there was urgency in his voice. Perhaps I simply did not want to hear it. Louis needed me.

But immortality was so much more than endless nights. It was knowing that at any moment, the next could become an agony neither of us had anticipated. That eternity did not mean permanence. It meant there was always another separation waiting somewhere beyond the horizon. A century. Two. More.

It could drag us to opposite ends of the earth and leave us there, wandering through the darkness without one another. And I was not ready to let him go. Not yet.

“Did we ever really hate each other, Armand?” I leaned closer. “Weren’t you always… just this?” I pressed my lips to his forehead, lingering there. I breathed him in, his cologne, his essence, the faint scent of everywhere he had ever been. Every place that had touched him had become part of him.

“Weren’t you and I always meant to float in each other’s orbit…” My other hand rose to cradle his opposing cheek.

“…collecting stardust on our lashes?” He remained perfectly still beneath my touch, watching me with that unreadable gaze of his as it moved over every feature of my face. So I kissed him. First one cheek. Then the other. Then his eyes. And finally, his lips. There was no hunger in it. No cruelty. No history demanding to be settled between us. Only everything we had never said. Every tenderness I had carried and burned. Every ounce of love I had refused to speak. For one brief moment, I let myself give it all to him. Then I drew back, my lips still close enough that my breath ghosted over his skin.

A nut? A name?

Danny… is that what the kids are calling it these days? Peepaw you might need to sit down, you’ve taken too much viagra. All the blood got sucked away from your skull!

You’re so old you need two more vampires to help prop your old ass up. What makes you think you could handle this stallion? I’d break both your hips!

Wait…

You might like that.

David had asked me to wait here. Only he, and a select few others, were permitted down in the lower archives. An unreasonable request? Perhaps not. But my patience had never been known for its generosity. I had asked David for very little. I merely wanted only a few of my belongings that had been gathered from Paris returned to me. What possible use could they be to the order now? I was standing right here, wasn’t I?

Study me. Place your fingers in my wounds, Peter!

Just as I began to contemplate simply blasting my way through the security doors to the archives, the clicking heels came to an abrupt halt. A girl appeared at the end of my row and deposited a large stack of books onto the table.

At first, I might have passed her without a second glance. But then she brushed a curtain of thick walnut hair behind her ear, and there was something about the gesture that caught my attention. Or perhaps it was the sheer scholarly concentration with which she did it.

Either way, I suddenly found myself wanting to interrupt it. This was practically a game now. How far could I push a Talamascan before they snap?

She was so terribly tidy in her movements. Everything had its place. Papers here. Books there. A pen aligned precisely with the edge of the table. She moved with an almost liquid efficiency, more like water than human.

Oh, this was going to be fun.

I pulled out the chair opposite her and deliberately let its legs scrape against the marble.

Heads snapped up from every corner of the room, each person searching for the source of the offending noise.

“Pardon.” I smiled widely at the man glaring at me from across the library.

“What are you studying tonight?” i snatched a book from the top of her stack and read the title aloud.

“The Ploughman’s Lunch?”, I turned the book over in my hands, staring at it as though it had personally offended me.

“You all baffle me.” I thumbed through the first few pages.

“How is this research?” Another page.

“What knowledge could you possibly gain from reading about ancient garlic grinding?” I looked up at her, genuinely fascinated now. Her large eyes peered back at me from behind her thin gold framed glasses.

“Is this what the Talamasca does now? Catalog the history of garlic and call it paranormal studies?”

It did not take someone of my intellect to know who, and more importantly what, had just plopped himself into the chair opposite me. Entire training manuals had been written about this particular creature. Updated, amended, reissued, and occasionally contradicted by later reports because apparently consistency had never been one of Lestat de Lioncourt’s defining virtues.

Why he was sitting in a Talamascan reading room was beyond me. Why he had chosen me to personally annoy was another mystery entirely. Considering I was already skating across extraordinarily thin ice with the Order, the intelligent thing would have been to play this carefully. Keep my head down. Be polite. Do absolutely nothing that might result in another note being added to my file. That was what I should have done. Unfortunately, the insolence of his behaviour made me want to throw a book at his head.

One had to treat the Vampire Lestat rather like a particularly virulent venereal disease. Plenty of caution, considerable distance, and preferably no behaviour that might encourage prolonged exposure. Unfortunately, I would come to find out, I did not to a very good job at that last point.

I gave him nothing. No startled look when he took the book. No offended huff. No nervous glance towards the nearest senior member of the Order as though someone might come rescue me from the famous blond nuisance currently occupying the other side of my table.

Instead, I sat down in the chair I had intended to sit in. I had been using this particular corner of the reading room for nearly six months, and I was not about to be driven from it because Lestat de Lioncourt had decided he was bored.

Without looking at him, I reached and began organising the remaining books and my things. Art and Psychoanalysis by Laurie Schneider Adams. Killing the Dead by John Blair. A volume on medieval funerary practice. My notebook. Laptop. Pens.

Each took its usual place with the sort of deliberate precision that came from routine rather than nerves. If he had wandered over here hoping to watch some poor Talamascan stammer beneath the weight of his attention, he had unfortunately chosen a woman who had once defended a dissertation chapter while three professors systematically attempted to dismantle it sentence by sentence. A vampire with boundary issues was hardly going to be the thing that broke me.

The book in his possession was not even work. I had picked it up because something had been systematically eating its way through my garden and, after discovering another basil plant reduced to a collection of tragic green stalks that morning, I had begun researching medieval pest control out of a mixture of scholarly curiosity and personal vengeance. Still, if he wanted to mock the garlic, then we could talk about the garlic.

I folded one leg over the other and finally looked up and answered him in that tone I saved for the special occasion of tearing down first years or seducing old professors. “Did you know garlic was considered an aphrodisiac?” There was no hesitation or embarrassment in my tone. If anything, I let the word sit between us with deliberate ease.

There were, broadly speaking, two ways to respond when someone was attempting to make you uncomfortable. You could retreat. Or you could make the conversation significantly more uncomfortable and see who blinked first. I had never been particularly gifted at retreat.

“In Greco-Roman medicine, and later under humoral theory, garlic was considered hot and dry. Heat was associated with vigour, blood, appetite.” I reached for my travel mug as casually as if we were discussing weather patterns. “Including sexual appetite.”

A small sip of coffee. “So if one were suffering from a certain lack of enthusiasm in that department, there were physicians who might recommend foods thought to heat the body.”

I set the mug back down. “Garlic. Onions. Spices. Wine.” My brows lifted slightly. “Romantic isn't it.”

There was something particularly satisfying about discussing historical impotence remedies with a vampire who had approached my table seemingly intent upon rattling me. If this was a game, I had no intention of letting him choose the rules.

“The association survived for centuries, in one form or another. Though I imagine the practical results were questionable. Nothing quite encourages seduction like leaning across the bed reeking of several cloves of raw garlic.” I paused, just long enough. “Although it remained rather popular in France.”

There it was. Small. Polite. Almost innocent. The sort of insult one could plausibly deny having made at all. “Which may explain certain historical observations concerning the French and their... pungency.”

There were insults one shouted. Then there were insults one placed delicately on the table between two people and allowed the recipient to unwrap at their leisure. I preferred the latter.

No. Emerald was wrong. Her eyes were more like summer leaves. There was a gentleness in the way her fingertips wrapped around the edges of the book when I finally placed it back into her hand. It was almost at odds with everything else about her. The practiced composure. The sharpened tongue. Those carefully constructed walls she had erected between herself and me. And yet there was something impulsive in her. Something wild. Something a bit like me.

I made a small noise of annoyance. “I bathe.” leaning back into the chair, I crossed one ankle over my knee.

“I think you were insinuating that I carry something other than the exquisite odor of cedar and oud.” I had no intention of allowing several centuries of personal hygiene to be reduced by silly rumors of the French and garlic.

I turned my head, allowing my gaze to wander instead toward the bald gentleman hunched over his own stack of books. Impenetrable. Not that I was trying particularly hard. I could have pushed, certainly. But the woman across from me was different. There was no convenient little stream of thoughts to pluck from her mind. No nervous repetition. No sudden spike of panic. No internal monologue screaming Vampire Lestat is sitting at my table. Nothing. I glanced back at her, in near surprise. Only to see her stillness, steadiness, readily peering back at me.

“Do you always insult potentially dangerous vampires while giving them lectures about sex, or have I inspired something special in you?” Dismissively I waved a hand, “No, no. You don’t have to answer that. It would ruin this entire-” I vaguely gestured at the sum of her, “-whatever this is. Nevermind”

It occurred to me then that I could probably sit across from her for an hour in complete silence and she would not squirm. I could stare at her until the sun rose, and she would simply turn another page. I could talk incessantly, provoke her, insult her, compliment her, perhaps even begin singing, and she might merely lift one eyebrow before returning to whatever scholarly nonsense had occupied her before I arrived. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. This was precisely the sort of puzzle that could hold my attention.

And how long had I been waiting for my belongings to be returned. Surely even the Talamasca could locate a few personal effects without requiring twenty layers of bureaucracy.

“So,” I settled into the chair more comfortably, “do you each receive a digital copy of my file upon joining the Order, or does the obsession with cataloguing my face begin somewhere earlier?”

“Actually, how about we level the playing field? You give me your name. Hm? I clearly can’t be expected to keep up with the Talamasca’s recruitment process. One moment I’m being observed, the next I’m being insulted by a woman who apparently has a personal vendetta against slugs.”

I studied her for a long moment. I wanted to appraise her. She reminded me far too much of David in a way. They both seemed like they could make every encounter an entire chess match. It also made me wonder whether there really was some sort of debriefing members were forced to endure. Some ancient lecture followed by a CIA level of desensitization. Here is the Vampire Lestat. Here are his known habits. Here are his known weaknesses. Here is what not to say to him.

If so, I suspected someone had neglected to include the most important instruction. DO NOT make yourself interesting. She had already failed spectacularly. Straightening the wrinkles from my shirt, I switched my legs. My knee struck the underside of the table and all her neat pens went rolling. They scattered across the polished wood, each of them falling to the floor with an echoing click against the marble. Was it purposeful? Who’s to say?