Chapter Text
1791
Afternoons had always been a sort of vex for Louis, the urge to slither away from the hottest and longest part of the day to languish nearly overwhelming to his self-discipline. He’d been reprimanded for it plenty as a boy, but the allure was all the more with no one to answer to. Just when Louis had settled into a proper work rhythm that allowed him to resist the siren’s call of smoking on the daybed until the reprieve of evening, there was a light knock at the frame of the open entrance to his study.
He didn’t look up from his papers, exhaling in a near-silent sigh. Everyone seemed to take pleasure in invading his private rooms. He might as well work in the parlor or office proper. “Come in.”
“Louis.” Paul’s golden head bobbed uncertainly in the threshold, the gleaming threads of his hair and flush on the apples of his white cheeks luminous against the dark wallpaper of the bedroom.
Louis stood immediately at the sound of his brother’s voice, feeling his body relax from its professional posturing. The visit was as unexpected as it was welcome. Even his greatest moments of resentment seemed inconsequential when he finally saw Paul’s face again, affection and guilt over any unkind word he might have thought against the boy eclipsing all else in his mind.
It was rare to see Paul in the afternoon at all since the oratory had been completed, but the turn of events pleased Louis immensely. He often felt that darkness surrounded him a great deal, but very little could encroach on him in the presence of his brother’s radiance.
“Oh, I’m glad you’re here. I was just thinking of you,” he said, walking to meet Paul halfway and hugging the boy’s head against his chest. Louis would mourn this a bit when the final growth spurt took this particular pleasure away.
No response was forthcoming, and he parted them, noticing his brother’s wild expression for the first time. “What troubles you?”
Paul took a deep breath, arms straight at his sides and fists balled tightly in a way Louis recognized in himself. It was rare that he saw any similarity between them at all, in spite of Annette’s insistence.
“I need to tell you something of great importance and you must listen to me.”
It was an odd statement, and Louis found himself unable to imagine what could be coming that such a request would even need to be spoken.
“Of course, chiot.” Paul didn’t care for his pet names these days, but made no comment on it, rushing forward with the conversation.
“The Virgin Mary has come to me, as has Saint Dominic. I saw them as clearly as I see you here. They had a message for me. For us! A greater purpose.”
Louis felt his heart sink into his stomach with every word. So it was true then, the degeneration of Paul’s condition, and in much the way he’d feared in the most secret parts of his mind.
“This is a dream you had?” Louis asked, hoping he had misunderstood, at least in part. A dream could be managed. Something else though…
“Not a dream, a vision! I was witness.” He sounded breathless already, as if he’d exerted himself greatly. “I was in the oratory praying for guidance, for purpose, and they came to me! The light in the window above the altar grew bright, so bright that I thought I would go blind, and then they appeared as if walking out of the sun itself.”
Louis closed his eyes, rubbing his forehead. A huff of dark laughter left his lips without his consent. “This has gone too far. The oratory was a mistake.”
Paul shook his head, grabbing Louis by the arm.
“Listen! They spoke to me, they told me what we must do! The plantation, your properties, all we own must be sold as soon as possible.” Louis turned away, shaking his brother off and walking back to his chair to sit. He couldn't do this without the barrier of the desk. Paul never slowed down. “We will travel to France, and with all the money I will carry out God’s works. He will speak to me, He will tell me what must be done with it once we arrive.” Paul was smiling in the midst of the whirlwind, beaming like Louis had never seen him. It felt grotesque in the current state, something he wished to be seeing in any other place, in any other context but this one. “All this time, I thought I was called to the priesthood, but my purpose is far greater. All of our purposes! How quickly can it be done?”
Louis put his face in his hands, laughing again, but bitterly now that the disbelief had faded. “Paul, I…”
There was no stopping him, the barrage of words starting again.
“Revolution and disbelief have forced our father’s country to its knees. Its fate can be changed though, I can change it! Your money will make it so!”
None of the thoughtfulness, none of the quiet, dutiful respect Paul usually directed at him was anywhere to be seen. He found himself surprisingly irate.
“You must know I cannot do as you ask. You are being foolish.” In a way, that was what upset him so greatly. Of all that he expected from Paul, foolishness was the last.
The swirling glee came to a halt at once, fanatical joy swinging to the other extreme, equally unfamiliar. “I know you are a man of God. You would not disobey His will!”
There was cold settling in Louis’ bones, not an altogether unfamiliar one, but more consuming than ever in its intensity. He wondered distantly if this was what his father had once felt looking at him. Maybe the old man had been right to feel it.
“I was wrong to allow your tutelage with Father Thomas, I should have sent you away to school as is proper. You were too young and your mind is weak.”
Paul’s eyes were welling visibly, his voice raising as much as Louis had ever heard it. “I know what I saw!”
“You spend such long hours in prayer,” he bit out. “You must have fallen asleep.”
Paul shook his head vigorously, blonde curls whipping and reddening his cheeks even further. “I was not asleep! I have never been more awake than I was in that moment, than I am now! The first time it happened, I thought as you did, the second even. But this time was not like the others, there was no mistaking it!”
“This is not the first time you have seen such things?” He had barely acknowledged the possibility before, refusing to entertain such a morbid thought in his mind when it dared to question.
“Call for mother and Annette, I must tell them what I have seen! And your attorney, he will know how best to go about the sales.”
Louis stood quickly, knocking the chair back and towering over Paul in a manner he recognized distantly as being very like their father too.
“Paul, I cannot. And I will not be so indulgent with you any longer, I see now that it has been to your detriment.” The thought hurt him greatly, nearly as much as Paul did with every word he spoke. He had wanted something different for his brother than he remembered for himself, but they would both pay the price for his gentle hand.
“You must!” Paul shouted, voice breaking. “It is the will of God!”
“You do not know what you ask of me. You don’t know poverty.”
The look on his brother's face was disturbingly close to hatred. “Neither do you!”
“You would condemn our mother to destitution? Our sister?” Before today, he could never have imagined selfishness of that sort from Paul. It was like seeing antlers on a dog.
Paul’s mouth was set in a defiant frown, eyes glazed and emptier than they ought to be. “If God sees fit.”
Louis took a deep breath, sitting down again to avoid taking the boy by his lapels and casting him from the room entirely. “I am the master of this house. You will abide by what I see fit.”
He had to avert his eyes from the unguarded horror in Paul’s face, shock and pain as prominent as the rage. Like he had expected better from Louis.
Paul was crying now, though his anger was not lessened. “Mother was right, perhaps you are wicked.”
Hearing it spoken from Paul’s mouth made the words strike more deeply than they had in years, piercing through the calloused part of his heart.
“If my desire for us all to live well and by the standards of decent society is wicked, then I suppose I am.”
“You said you could deny me nothing!” Paul yelled, and Louis could see the bloody crescents on his palms as he flung his arms down.
“I can deny you this because I love you.” He was tired. This had taken something from him that he didn’t know had been still intact.
“It is not me you deny, it is God! And it is because you love yourself! You love your wine and the slaves that tend to you and your pastries and linen bed sheets, that is what you would deny God for!”
A cruel part of his psyche whispered that it was the least he deserved for this lot.
Louis picked up his pen and mimed a return to his tasks, though the effort strained his baser impulses. “Go to your rooms and rest. We will not speak of this again.”
“You will burn!”
“So I’ve been told.”
With a cry of frustrated rage, Paul rushed past him, straight out to the balcony with the French doors slamming behind him. The footsteps didn’t continue though, going still and silent. Instead, Louis heard something else, a light scrape and then a dull thud, the sound of an animal felled in the woods. Like the drop of the stag he had shot whose head hung above his desk.
His back was still to the window when the screaming started.
—
1793
Louis stood before the door to Lestat’s father’s room, hesitating to make his presence known, though he couldn’t say why. It wasn’t his first visit by any means, but the past months had been wearing him down, each day with Lestat seeming to bend and fray his mind in ways that made him fear distantly for what the final result would be. He needed to speak to someone else. Anyone else really, before he lost himself completely.
“Bonsoir,” he said finally, and the old man turned towards the source of the voice, tensing immediately as if bracing for a blow. “It is only me. Louis, that is.” That relaxed him, but only marginally. “I came alone,” he added.
That had the desired effect, the man’s shoulders slumping in open relief. “What can I do for you, Monsieur de Pointe du Lac?”
“There’s no need for titles, we are equals here.” Louis sat in the chair beside the bed, the one Lestat so loved to inhabit as he toyed with his father like a cat with a mouse. “And I’m afraid I have no good reason for intruding upon you so late. I brought a bottle of wine. A trade, I was hoping, for a moment of peaceful company.”
The old man sighed. “Yes, from what I can hear, you receive no more peace than I do.”
“I wouldn’t think so, no.” He let a small, bitter smile form on his face in the knowledge it wouldn’t be seen. “He sent for a new brocade coat from my tailor in the city, so perhaps that will quiet him down a while.”
“Perhaps indeed.” A pause, and then another sigh. “I would have hoped such conveniences as he enjoys now would have finally made him happy. It’s what he always wanted.”
Louis looked down at his lap, even the simple gold rings on his fingers seeming obscene.
“Conveniences are soulless. My brother told me as much before he died, but my heart was closed to the truth.” He ran a hand over the wood of the side table, using the tip of his nail to drag a thin scratch in the varnish.
“He sounds like a fine young man. I’m sure he would’ve wished you to show yourself grace.”
Louis wasn’t so certain, but he didn’t say as much aloud, for both their sakes.
“Well, I do not wish it,” he said at last. “I would have been a better man if I had been a poor one.”
Lestat’s father sat up properly from the bed, face serious. “You are a good man now. There is no need to be a hungry one.” He shook his head, face distant. “You do not understand what you ask for.”
Louis hesitated, but couldn’t leave his questions unspoken. Perhaps it was a bad quality, but never one he could kick. “Did your family struggle so greatly?” he asked carefully.
The old man sat, mouth parted for a long beat before speaking. “You can ask my son. He has no shortage of words for my failures.”
The reminder of Lestat’s cruelty sat uncomfortably, as did the weight of all Louis did not know and never would.
“You did the best you could. A father of character such as yours is a blessing he is blind to.”
If the old man could sense the wound in those words, it wasn’t mentioned, but his expression was pained in the low light, the lines on his face looking deeper than normal. Even the few similarities between his features and Lestat’s gave the honesty an uncanny quality. “He cannot forgive me my lot in life. Nor can I forgive myself if he does not.”
Louis pitied the man immensely, enough to broach the topic with Lestat at least, in vain though it would be. “I’ll speak to him again.”
“I fear it would do little. He is not…” The man trailed off, staring into space in a way that had nothing to do with blindness. “I am too late. You would not have had to ask the boy I knew twice.”
There was nothing Louis could say to comfort him, instead uncorking the wine bottle and pouring a measure into the crystal glass he’d brought. He envied it greatly, almost enough to put his vampire constitution to the test with a swig.
“Have your wine,” he said instead. “It’s a Málaga from Spain. It was—is one of my favorites. My grandmother’s as well, so I’m told. It is produced on the coast near her homeland.”
The gift was accepted with a noise of gratitude. “Your family is Spanish?”
“On my mother’s side. She was raised in France, but her family was from Granada. They left when the political unrest was too great. And then after all that, now we are here instead for much the same reason. I suppose it’s in our bloodline to be unlucky.”
The old man took a deep drink from his glass, savoring it a while before turning back to Louis. “What a privilege it must be to flee.”
The words took him aback, discomfort flooding his body. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be insensitive.” There was no response, but his companion didn’t seem angry at the faux pas. “Did you lose someone?” Louis hesitated. “Other children?”
“I’ve lost a great deal in my time on Earth.”
That seemed enough of an answer as any, and likely as much of one as he was going to get. He watched another mouthful leave the cup, allowing for a conversational pivot towards something less awkward.
“I hope you approve. It’s sweeter than Madeira but not cloying like a Port.”
A laugh left the man’s lips, self deprecating more than it was amused. “I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. This life is foreign to me. I lived a poor man and I will die one.”
“I find it commendable,” Louis said, leaning forward in conviction. “Noble even. Many fine men of the Bible were burdened similarly. It is in hardship that we best emulate the example of Christ.”
After a moment of quiet, the old man leaned back into the pillows, the energy leaving him but face warm with unexpected affection. “You are much like me, Louis.” He smiled faintly, reaching out sightlessly and patting the offered hand. “You would have made a fine son of mine.”
Something tight and heavy clogged Louis’ throat and chest, the dark grandeur of the room suffocating. “It’s a pity the Lord did not see fit.” There was a small nod of assent, then the smile drifted. The reason why was obvious enough. “He was not always this way?” Louis asked softly, already regretting the pain he knew the subject would bring in the name of his curiosity.
The old man shook his head, the loose flesh of his face wobbling. “He was a good boy. A good boy…”
“And now?” The only response he received was a paranoid glance in the direction of the door, every whisper of wind outside seeming for a moment as though it could be a portend of Lestat’s arrival. Nothing emerged from the gloom of the hallway. “Tell me.”
“Surely you understand why I cannot speak of such things.”
“I would not allow him to harm you.”
“I fear you could not prevent it.” As much as the idea rankled him, Louis couldn’t find it in himself to disagree. “The…the nature of your relationship with my son?” the man continued, tone suddenly much more uncertain.
“Yes?” Louis’ heart sped up in a very human way, youthful fear gripping him as if it mattered in any real sense what a dying, mortal man knew of his proclivities.
“Is such generosity customary of business partnerships in Louisiana?”
The fear lessened when no confrontation came, but didn’t cease entirely. “Hospitality is in our culture.”
“That’s admirable,” Lestat’s father said, but he was distracted, brow furrowed in a way that made Louis uneasy.
“The hour is late. I should leave you to your rest.” He stood, but the old man reached for him again, grabbing at his sleeve. “Come see me any time. I would always be glad for the company of such a fine gentleman as yourself,” he said, rustic accent even heavier as the hour grew later.
With a deep breath in and out, Louis forced the uncomfortable tangle of emotions back into the depths of his being. “And I you, monsieur.” He bowed slightly, then made for his own chambers.
He was almost successful, but his sister was waiting for him in the hall before his door. He’d been avoiding her, but she was not the sort to be evaded long.
“Good evening,” he said, at once on edge at the seriousness in her face. She looked anxious. Many people had such a look when he approached them these days, but not her. His stomach flipped in a very mortal way, like a child about to be scolded.
“I overheard the younger Monsieur de Lioncourt say he will be staying with us through the winter.”
“He will be, yes.”
Her unhappiness was clear, but she would never know just how far out of his control their situation was. He ached to tell her, even the smallest admission to make her understand.
“Why is he here, Louis? Really.”
She was looking hard at him, studying him as if he were a stranger whose face she thought she recognized.
“I don’t know what you’re suggesting. I’ve already told you that Lestat is an important business liaison for our international prospects. The crops are dying. We must expand or lose everything, even if it necessitates the company of one such as him.”
“I see.” She bit her lip, seeming to mull her words over before speaking more so than usual. “He is very handsome.”
Her words made him feel as sick as they had ten years ago, the weight of her stare even heavier than he remembered it. “I cannot recommend him as a marriage prospect.”
He wondered, not for the first time in his life, how much she really knew of him.
“Even if I were interested, I do not believe it is me who has drawn his eye.” She paused, then reached up, stroking her thumb over his brow and cheekbone, staring at him like she was weighing his heart. “I love you, Louis. Take care of yourself.”
For once, there seemed to be no expectation of a reply, and she continued around the corner out of sight.
—
1791
This wasn’t the first time Louis had stood like this, a single oak door between himself and the brutal dissection of his soul by judge and jury. It made him feel like a child again, too small in a too-big house with too many feelings that drained out of him until everyone he knew was drowning.
“—and the moment they were alone together?” he heard his mother say, her voice already more ragged than he’d ever heard it before Paul’s death. For all he’d wished to see true emotion from her as a child, he hoped to never hear it again after the past few days.
“They were not alone.” His sister’s voice. “Two slaves saw it happen!”
“And you would trust their word? Would they speak against him if they had seen otherwise?”
“It is the only word we have.” There was an empty silence. “Paul’s peculiarities were plain enough to see. He was in a state and had been for some time, no matter what we all wished to believe. That has nothing to do with Louis.”
The sound of his mother’s footsteps crossed the wood floors, stuttering and stopping before starting again in couplets. “If it had nothing to do with Louis, he would tell us what they spoke of in the moments before. But he will not.”
“Say it,” he heard his sister hiss, sounding nearly feverish. “Speak aloud that you believe Louis pushed him. That he killed him.”
“I don’t claim to know his methods.” The familiar freeze was back. “There are many ways to push a person. Mind and body.”
“That is a horrible thing to say after all that Louis did for him. No boy in Louisiana lived quite so well as Paul in his short life. Louis spoiled him beyond any of us.” His mother said something low and curt that he couldn’t make out, but he heard Annette’s sniff, her voice coming wetter this time. “He sits vigil at Paul’s side in the parlor even now. Watching over him. Praying over him tirelessly. Father Thomas says he acts as a man compelled!”
“Yes, his guilt compels him,” his mother snapped. “Not love.”
In truth, both compelled him equally to maintain his guard, but so did the dreams, themselves worse than the guilt or the love lost, though that made the guilt worse in its own way. Still, it was better to pray than to doze, even the shortest lapses into sleep awakening the revenant of his brother. Paul praying in the oratory, neck snapped and skull caved in, going through the motions with cloudy eyes and greening fingers. Paul coming into his rooms, needing to tell him something important, nothing leaving his mouth but maggots and congealed rot. The sound of his own rifle. A thump on the forest floor and Paul dead on the leaf-littered ground, the back of his skull exploded from the buckshot. Kneeling on the bed masturbating furiously, some unseen force in control of his motions and Paul watching silently from the corner of the room, stricken and decaying in front of his eyes, flesh falling from his face until the expression was unreadable. Stooping over his brother at the foot of the stairs, his own hand the force dashing his head against the bricks.
After two days, he didn’t need to be asleep to see Paul’s dead eyes blink and lips move in silent homilies. Now, on the third day, even his guilt was not enough to keep him in state, driving him through the house and grounds and anywhere that was not the parlor or the gallery.
“You have always disliked him.” Annette was near-shouting now. “You have always assumed the worst, ever since we were children.”
“He has given me no choice! No reason to do otherwise! Do you believe I wanted a son I would think such things of? Did Eve wish to bear both Cain and Abel?”
His sister’s shaking breath was loud enough to carry through the door. “A little child cannot do evil. If he were Cain—and he is not—it would be you and father who made him as much. A child can tell when they are not loved. It changes them.” Her voice grew colder than he remembered ever hearing it. It was their mother’s voice coming from her lips now. “He needed you.”
Louis felt nauseous, regret filling his gut like phlegm and bile, though he couldn’t say if the regret was on his own behalf or that of his parents. He felt six years old and sixteen and every young age he’d ever been at once.
“Look within your heart, Annette. Tell me you are certain, beyond a shadow of doubt, that he had nothing to do with this. Search the deepest reaches of your soul, then look me in my eyes and tell me you believe him entirely incapable of such an act.”
The void of vacant silence opened around Louis like a grave, yet another part of him he did not know still held life withering to dust.
“I would not speak against him,” Annette said finally. She sounded broken.
The nausea receded, droning nothingness taking its place as the gravedigger’s soil rained over his head.
Another stretch of silence, but his mother was the first to break it, her voice low and cruel. “You are a stupid girl and your brother is a snake in the grass. I pray you never err in the placement of your foot.”
The door swung open, only luck allowing him to remain concealed in the space between it and the recess of the wall as his sister rushed out, skirts flowing wildly and face buried in her handkerchief.
For once in his life, Louis didn’t hesitate in approaching his mother. He didn’t care if she knew he’d heard. The past few days had already worn him dull and lifeless like an eroded river stone.
She herself did not seem quite so apathetic, turning to point at him the moment he made his presence known. “You are a wretched boy. You always were. And now your brother is dead.”
“I had no hand in it.” There was no emotion left to keep hidden.
“But you did!” she hissed, sounding half-hysterical and entirely unlike the stony, silent woman who raised him. Paul’s loss had broken something in them all. “If you wish to prove me wrong, tell me what the two of you spoke of in your rooms. What passed between you that would cause him to do such a thing of his own volition?”
Louis didn’t move from his frozen posture, gaze ahead at the wall moulding and hands folded in front of him like they’d fused there.
“What good would it be to tell you? Nothing I could say would change your mind.” If God asked at Judgement, he would say this was the least he could do for his brother now, that he would have Paul buried with the women who loved him remembering him as he was, not what he had become in the final moments of his life. He hoped Paul’s spirit was high enough in Heaven that he couldn’t make out the pure, selfish shame that rested behind that curtain of rationale, the worst Louis thought he’d felt in a quarter-century of nothing but.
In the corner of his vision, he saw his mother’s arms twitch uselessly at her sides before she wrapped them tightly to her body, as if the anger had suddenly wounded her. “I did not wish to bear another child after your sister, certainly not ten years later, but I had no choice when faced with your weakness. With your wickedness!” Days ago, such a statement would have garnered a reaction like the twisting of an exposed nerve, but this hurt was a press on a bruise, the mere memory of pain where the injury had been. “Even in the womb you sapped me of my vitality like a poison, like a parasite! You nearly took my life in childbirth in exchange for your own, and for what? I was told it would all be worth it, that a healthy baby boy was the greatest gift a woman could receive, but it was not. You were not worth what I endured.” He felt the hardening in him, like the encroaching repose of death. Maybe they could bury him too come Saturday. “You would bring ruin on us all.”
He turned his head, breaking free from the stony posture he had assumed, the last of his dignity making itself known before he collapsed in on himself entirely.
“Even if his mind had been well, Paul could not have provided for you as I do. He did not have the constitution for it.” He was weary of justifying himself this way, as if his greatest sin was doing his duty where others would not.
“How dare you speak ill of your brother.”
That managed to spark the anger back to his breast, nearly a relief after the suffocating, stagnant grief. “I do not speak ill of him. His strengths were far greater than my own, but they were not the sort that would keep this family fed and clothed and housed.” He stepped closer to her, unsure of how to feel about her stumbled step back. “Father left his estate to me, only to me. Not out of any great love or paternal affection, but because he knew I could handle the responsibility. And I have.”
She held his gaze from beginning to end, but this time he didn’t look away first.
“Paul thought he could save you,” she said, loathing on her face as he had seen it on Paul’s. “He told me the things he spoke to you of. How he believed in the goodness in you, believed that you were only misguided. That any day now you would see the truth.” She refused to meet his eyes again. “He was as foolish as your sister.”
The idea that their conversations had been known to their mother hurt him in a way he didn’t expect. Although less and less permissive of his vices, Paul had been growing into a fine young man and an equally fine companion and confidante, kindness like Annette’s combining with the sort of moral conviction that a career clergyman would envy. He would have made a good preacher, as good as he made a brother. By the time Louis had finished petting Paul’s hair and speaking his troubles, the cares of the Earthly realm seemed to vanish, his mind more malleable and suggestible to true goodness than at any other time. Any congregation would have been the most fortunate in existence to be tended to by such a hand.
“You may loathe me,” Louis said, staring into her forehead when she refused to look at him. “I loathe myself. But don’t think I did not love Paul as much as you did.”
“Then why did you do it? Whatever it is you did or whatever it is you said! Was it for the same reason the wet nurse found you in his nursery all those years ago ripping the hair from his toy horses? The same reason you sat by and watched each time he cried without a word to anyone until the two of you were discovered?”
There was nothing he could say to that, nor anything he would. At the very least, Paul was owed this penance. There was no apology enough for the rotten fruits born of his childhood envy, especially in the knowledge that it had never truly left, maturity and love only withholding it from view until summoned forward by some meaningless slight that made him twelve years old again.
“I hurt no one,” he said, for that was truly all he could say.
“What of your classmate whose face you beat to disfigurement then? What of him? Would you claim such a thing to his wife when she asks the reason for her husband’s blind eye and false teeth?” She sounded on the verge of tears, angry, righteous ones that would surely count against him if Saint Peter even allowed him an audience when the end came.
“He was cruel to me. I only wanted it to stop.”
The memory of the taunts were still sharp in his mind, every word preserved and tucked in the recesses of his memory. Even now, he remembered every comment on his clumsiness as his limbs grew faster than he could keep track of, on every missed ball catch and irrepressible bout of tears after a scolding, on the way he walked and ran and held his hands, on the softness of his voice and his baby face that lasted longer than it did for the other boys, each one watering and galvanizing whatever seed of violence he’d been born with. He remembered the final invocation of the boy’s own fate as well, how the insults shifted from weakling and sissy to molly and madge until the next memory Louis had was the sensation of his knuckles on tender flesh and the feeling of bone giving and giving under pressure.
It was a completely unique feeling in his life, the thing he remembered somehow the most vividly from the whole ordeal. He still didn’t know if he’d enjoyed it or not. At the very least, he’d felt satisfied.
“You nearly killed him,” she bit out, each individual word its own accusation. She hadn’t reacted so strongly even at the time, greeting him at the door after his expulsion with her face as blank as a corpse’s. There had been no punishment, only silence that he thought would never end.
“I’m sorry.” And he was, for that and for a lifetime.
There was no acknowledgement, as he knew there wouldn’t be. Sorry had never been enough for her.
“You will never know peace, it is not in your nature.” She approached him then, standing closer than she had yet. He almost expected a touch that didn’t come. “It ought to have been you,” she said finally. “And not him.”
“In that we agree.”
—
1795
Louis knew Lestat would come, it was only a matter of time. Eventually the smell of blood would reach whatever corner of the house he was prowling and lure him to the edge of the field. Even if it didn’t, Louis’ misery seemed to call to him in some silent summons. He wondered if Lestat had followed it all the way from France to Louisiana without even knowing.
He knew the sight he made acutely, a small flock of mutilated sheep piled around him and the cold, sticky sensation of old blood soaking him from mouth to knee, some of it fresh and some regurgitated. There was no limit to the number of animals it would take to reach satisfaction, but there certainly was to the quantity of blood his body could hold. He knew the definition of insanity, but each expulsion of blood from his stomach rekindled the possibility of satiation, as if the next time would be different and one more gory draught, one more overfilled glass, one more ejaculation would finally be enough.
The last sheep was gone. It hadn’t been enough any more than the final cognac bottle in the case. Even as overfull as he was, the hunger burned in his mind independent of the physical, the kind that animal blood never touched and never would. He had hoped it would get easier, that his mind and body would adjust and the ecstasy of human blood would fade from his memory with time, but nothing faded for him anymore. There was no memory in him now that time could touch.
His pride had dissolved to nothing several sheep ago, and Louis drove his fangs into his own wrist before whatever mindless monster that lived in his head had him crawling back to the drained sheep to lick at the bloodied wool. The blood wasn’t as hot as it should be, the gamey taste of animal still lingering, but it was something, his body having returned some faint shadow of what he remembered Lestat’s blood to have tasted like. He dug his teeth in deeper, gnawing at the ropes of veins until his teeth scraped bone, chasing the barest hint of relief that it offered. He could feel himself rocking, feel the despair wailing in his head as he sucked, more and more energy leaving him the more he drank, hindbrain angry and confused and roaring. No swoon came, only pain as his veins tightened against the growing emptiness.
There was no audible approach, but his predator senses felt the disturbance in his surroundings, some shape blocking the breeze just so and blotting out a hint of the starlight from behind him. He turned his head slowly, meeting Lestat’s gaze with no attempt to hide his exhaustion. The stare was appraising, disappointed even as he stared at the ragged wound on Louis’ arm, but lacking the expected coldness. It was as close to resignation as Louis had ever seen from him.
“You said I was free of this,” Louis said, cringing at the hoarseness of his voice. “You promised me.” The guilt was supposed to be gone. He was supposed to be happy. The evil was supposed to feel good. Lestat had said it would feel good. He was supposed to be at peace.
“Accept your nature,” Lestat demanded, kicking a dead sheep away from Louis as he reached for it mindlessly. “You will never feel again as you do now.”
Louis shook his head, defiant and desperate to quiet the cacophony of Hell that drowned out every fiber of untainted self he contained.
“That’s not true. It will never be enough. You knew that when you made me.” That was the root of it, the putrid source from which every evil thought he spared to Lestat had emerged. Lestat had seen it all, every inch of filth and misery and wretchedness, and condemned him to it for eternity in exchange for plantation wealth and semi-regular orgasms. As soon as the thought crossed his mind, a traitorous voice whispered that he had condemned Paul for much the same.
“It will be enough because there is no limit but that which you impose upon yourself!” Lestat snarled, but Louis only stared at him. Lestat had a defense for all but silence and Louis had learned that early on. “It is time for you to feed. My patience has worn thin.”
“I will not.”
Lestat growled in frustration, grabbing him by the arms and yanking him from the ground. The jerking motion unsettled his stomach again, a coagulated spew of blood staining Lestat’s clothing.
“The state you’re in is pitiful! Your own stupidity will ruin you. It is pathetic and it is embarrassing that you would lower yourself to such a state just to avoid asking my help!”
If Lestat had hoped to make an impression, he should have chosen a less familiar insult. And of what he was offering—if he was truly offering at all—Louis was uncertain. A freshly snared human victim? Some more suitable animal? Lestat’s own blood?
“Why should I think you would in the first place? You did nothing to help me even the first night!”
“I did everything for you!” Lestat yelled again, wiping crudely at the clotted fluids on Louis’ mouth and neck with his sleeve as if to prove the point. “I led you to the woods like a dog and cleaned up after your mistakes before feeding you a victim on a silver platter, then wiped the blood and sweat and semen from your body when you finished with him, all while you wept of your hatred for me.”
Louis stared at him sullenly. A true fight required strength he didn’t possess the past few months. “It would make sense that servitude comes naturally to someone of your intellect.”
Lestat was more than able to make up for Louis’ lack of enthusiasm. At times, it seemed that arguing fueled Lestat’s vigor as much as it sapped Louis’, as if the expended energy was something for his maker to feed upon as much as blood.
“You are a horrid and ungrateful child. Perhaps I should leave you to die by your own ignorance since you desire it so greatly!”
What little strength he did have reared its head at the threat, empty as he knew it to be. In spite of it all, the mammalian survival instinct had never entirely relinquished its hold on him, driving him closer to Lestat just as it had stayed his hand from every cocked rifle and forced him back from every balcony in the house in the course of his human life.
“Who would you go to then? You have no other but me! If you’re to be believed, even your own father has no real love for you and I can blame him little.”
Mentions of his father never failed to get the intended rise, and it seemed almost curious that such a mundane, mortal concern crippled Lestat so entirely. Louis wondered how old Lestat had been when he left home, how old he’d been when he died. The awkward lankiness of his limbs seemed more prominent somehow when Louis watched him fight with his father, eyes a bit too large and mouth a bit too full on the sharpness of his face, like a layer of baby fat was simply missing rather than having time to dissolve naturally with age. When anger came upon him, it sat heavily on the avian protrusions of his bones.
“You speak as if you are some grand reward,” Lestat snapped, and all Louis could think was that he looked like a child. “When I found you, you were unwashed and bloated and your eyes were yellow and you reeked of sweat and your own urine! That is what you truly are!” He could tell Lestat was waiting for a retort, but somewhere between a cold sheep and a fresh one, he’d given up on disagreeing with that sentiment. “You are undeserving of the perfection I’ve restored to you and it’s a pity no one will again see the truth of your nature as I do.”
“I am the one you chose among all others, and that reflects more poorly upon you than it does me.” Funny, Louis thought he’d said something similar to his own father once upon a time, hungover at the man’s deathbed and holding the will with his name on it. “I would have been happy to die in the gutter without your intervention.”
“Not happy enough to do the deed yourself.” The sentence was punctuated with a firm stomp on one of the sheep’s heads, splintering it to pieces with a wet crunch.
He felt the anger rage against the cotton in his brain and weakness in his limbs. “You would tell me you aren’t afraid to die? You chose eternal life, the same as I did!”
“I chose nothing!” Lestat shouted, kicking brutally at the dead sheep, scattering the brain matter. If they got any louder, someone might come looking. Of course, Lestat would handle that the same as the sheep. “Choice is yet another privilege you possess in a list so long you can’t imagine anything else!” He punctuated every few words with more kicks, mangling the bloodless body further.
“You speak as if you are the only person alive to have suffered.”
Lestat shoved his shoulder, just hard enough that Louis had to curb the impulse to rip the offending arm off from the elbow.
“Of course, how could I forget the agony of having enough sugar to consume to the point of retching and being so sick from drink that slaves have to dress you in the morning like a child! You have had so little hardship that you took to starving recreationally! Even now you do not know the face of real hunger.”
Even in a sea of loathing glances and irritated scowls over the past years, the disgust on Lestat’s face was something Louis hadn’t seen before, and he was angered by how much it bothered him.
“Yes, it’s clear by your manner of speech that your situation was quite different from mine.” He started his shaky trek back towards the house, letting his shoulder knock Lestat on the way past. “I have my old school books on grammar. Don’t worry, I could get one of the educated slaves to read it to you.”
Lestat bounded after him immediately. “My father who you so love could use it more than I.”
The tantrum—and that is what it was—would have had less of an effect on Louis at most other times, but his nerves were as shot as they had ever been, body hurting down to the marrow. What would have normally been a pesky fly buzzing around his face was now a dog snapping at his heels that he couldn’t resist the urge to kick.
“You aren’t half the man your father is and without a penny more to your name.”
“You’re right, I am no more my father than you are a man of God.”
Louis stopped, letting Lestat bounce off of him. “An imperfect man of God is a man of God nonetheless, and that is what I am.”
“You are a drunk and a whore,” Lestat said, jabbing Louis’ chest with a sharp nail.
“The Lord will look more kindly on that than he will your sins. You are the devil himself.”
“And you are a brother-killer.” Lestat’s face was close enough to his own that Louis could smell the human blood on his breath.
Louis knocked him back, crowding him towards the treeline. “If you can see my soul so well, then you know that’s a lie.” It didn’t feel like a lie, no matter how he prayed for it to be otherwise.
“What of the times you imagined it then, while you held him in your arms as a father? Imagined cracking his head open on the hearth and glutting yourself on the love he received that you feel you were owed? But you are owed nothing!”
Maybe this wasn’t Hell enough for what Louis deserved. He’d thought the dreams would stop when Paul was gone and buried, but that had yet to be true. The hungrier he got, the more they came, his teeth driving into Paul’s neck and shredding the lacework of capillaries like fruit pulp over and over in a never ending loop as soon as sleep took him.
“I would have been killed myself before harming him.”
Lestat laughed at that, cackling shrilly for a moment before getting hold of himself. “You wouldn’t even part with your money for him. You would die for no one. Not even yourself.” The laughter stopped, the cold mask returning. “Your selfishness killed him just as much as a push.”
In the darkness, Paul’s face peered at him through Lestat, and he felt the nearly overwhelming urge to cross himself.
“I am the only life my selfishness has ended. There will be no others.”
“There already have been!” Lestat roared, gesturing at anything, everything. “You were formed a predator in the womb. It’s best you accept it. It is unchangeable, it has always been your nature as much as it is now to be a vampire.”
Louis wrapped his arms around himself, shaking his head as he stared into the woods. “I will not allow it to be.”
Lestat didn’t say anything for much longer than was typical for him, sizing Louis up and down before forcing their eyes to meet with the sudden intensity of the gaze.
“Did you like when the bird screamed?”
The night felt too quiet, like even the crickets were waiting for an answer.
“What bird?”
“You know which one.”
Louis felt his jaw shake, invisible walls closing in from the empty space. “I was a child.”
“You were old enough to touch yourself.” Lestat smiled, and it was almost serene, like he already knew he’d won. “Were you thinking of Paul yet or did that only come later?”
Louis felt his mind fall finally, unexpectedly quiet, silence like he’d never heard it before. The sounds of the creek nearby crystalized in his ear, reverberating like the peals of bells, the world coming into unnaturally sharp focus.
Lestat lifted his hand, sliding the sharp tip of his ring across his own throat, releasing the smell of fresh blood into the open air.
It felt like a force not within was moving his body forward, lunging and ripping at Lestat’s throat like a beast as they both tumbled to the ground. Even his first feed hadn’t been like this. He hadn’t been deprived long enough then, Lestat’s first blood offering still loosening his veins and warm in his belly. As a mortal, he never had made it that forty days, but surely four years was penance enough, a generous indulgence paid for one proper meal.
It was easier than he remembered to drain Lestat’s blood, deep violent gulps that wracked his body flowing freely as if there was no resistance at all. The primal part of his mind relished it, conquests over barn rats and stray dogs failing to satisfy the vampire brain as much as it failed to restore the physical. The barrage of images that came with the blood overwhelmed his senses, exploding like fireworks behind his eyes, each one dissolving into sparks before he could garner a proper look through his own ecstasy. Bitter snow and dog fur and stone walls and sharp teeth and blonde hair and looming figures in a dozen different rooms. Face paint and violin music and angry dark eyes that looked almost familiar and beautiful dead boys in piles like the sheep.
The tissues in his body swelled rapidly, almost painfully with the force of the influx. Some of the blood spilled from his mouth and he latched deeper to the bite, wrenching Lestat’s head to the side for a better angle. The newly loosed arterial blood came in thick gushes and Louis found himself rocking with the rhythm of the heartbeat drumming into his body. He could hear himself moaning as if it were someone else entirely, a separate being utterly out of his control. If anyone came looking, he could end them too.
Nestled inside the haze of delirium, the peace Lestat had promised was there in excess, even more than he could drink in. Any notions that he had managed to cling to that the blood was something less than he remembered were erased from his conscious mind as if they had never existed. It tasted like a hundred things at once, a hug from his mother bleeding into a warm blanket and comfortable fullness, then Annette as an old woman, still at his side by the glow of the fireplace, the touch of a schoolmate in velvet darkness, a little robin that could fly, and Paul’s sweet countenance grinning up at him, small and sunny and staring like he was looking into the face of God.
And then it ended. He was shoved back suddenly, an agonized growl leaving his throat as his mouth ripped free from the flesh. Panic overtook the shock at once, and he scrambled at the ground in a frenzy, biting and licking at the soaked earth, sucking the blood from the dirt in clumps. He was clawing at the grass, digging after whatever remained when a boot shoved him back, knocking him away from the sodden dregs.
He staggered to his feet, knees almost buckling before he locked them, stance wide and fawn-like as his senses crashed in and out of each other, newly sharpened and reoriented but shimmering and doubling as they settled. He heard every sound as if it were a symphony, total awareness and perfect harmony the same as the moment of his turning. The invigoration was markedly monstrous, a sense of relief too complete to be natural. Quiet, satiation, peace, focus, power, a hurricane of different, elusive emotions coalescing, for once, into something singular and tangible to be grasped and held onto. It was stronger than it had been bent over the handsome runaway in the swamps, stronger than any human lapse and any fleeting absolution that followed it, stronger than the satisfaction of a lifetime of sins combined to be experienced in a single, golden moment. Better than he imagined it would feel even to be good.
Lestat was sitting up, neck flayed and bent at a painful angle, blood covering his face and matted in his hair, felled sheep bracketing him in the distance. He made a sound of surprise, pressing on the bulging side of his neck and forcing the bones back into place as they began to heal. The moon was glowing behind him, eclipsed by the gleam of his white face and illuminating the golden frizz of his curls like a halo. With a grunt, he pushed himself up to sit properly, breathing heavily in a rare and distinctly human display.
Louis gaped at him, quiet blanketing his mind like a swaddle. The creek was still babbling in the same silvery melody, the smell of flowers and greenery fragrant enough to make his head swim, the living pulse of blood in the swamps, in the house, even sitting in the bloody soil in front of him synchronized with his own as if none of it had a beginning or an end.
The tears finally came, but when their eyes met, Lestat was smiling.