Lestat was too eager to wait for Dana and his things. He put the younger vampire on a passenger ship headed to America, and as soon as everything was squared away, took off into the sky on his way home. He could feel Louis calling to him.
Which was absurd, of course. He hadn’t felt Louis clearly for almost two hundred years. Whenever he searched for him, which he did with heart-sickening frequency, the only thing he ever found was static darkness. He wished often that it had not been him to make Louis a vampire, even though it had felt so right.
But for better or for worse, that decision had been made long ago, and there was no reason to worry himself over it, as he was doing now.
With an eager heart, he flew to the apartment that he, Louis, and Armand shared periodically. He didn’t know what made him look here first, instead of at the old house in the Garden District. Even though he knew that David would most certainly be spending his time at the latter, half-waiting for Lestat to return to him. Lestat toyed briefly with the idea of doing so. He worried often about seeming too dependent on Louis; it would not do for anyone to find out exactly how much he needed the younger vampire.
But his desires could not be fought, and he decided that it would be Louis first, and David at...well, at some distant point in the future. They had all eternity, after all.
A sudden apprehension gripped Lestat as he reached the door and felt Armand’s presence just on the other side. He forced it down in an attempt to be sensible.
He pushed the door open with the grandeur that he was known for. “Hello,” he said merrily, “I’m home.” His eyes roved the room for Louis, but then settled on Armand. “My dear Amadeo, where might Louis be? I want to talk with him.”
Armand was strangely reticent. “I don’t know where Louis has gone, Lestat. You might try looking for him yourself.” Armand was perched on the arm of a plush red velvet couch, pretending to study a book in his lap.
Lestat’s good mood slowly dissipated. He had been happy to be home, and had hoped to find things exactly as he had left them, but something was not right here. He pressed against Armand’s mind, attempting to find out what was going on, but was met only with stony, blank silence.
He began to get angry. “Armand, what is it that you are keeping from me? Nothing has happened to Louis, has it?”
Armand looked up into his eyes, and glared. “Yes,” he said succinctly. “Something has happened to Louis. But I do not feel like sharing just yet.” With that, he got to his feet and headed for the door, as if he was done with the conversation.
Lestat was now too riled for this to be a possibility. In a fraction of a second, he had Armand by the throat and was pressing him against the door. “Tell me,” he snarled.
Armand truly looked like a teenaged boy when he smiled insolently. “No,” he said simply. It did not seem to matter to him that Lestat could tear him apart with barely a thought, could set fire to him and watch him burn and die.
Lestat was considering more drastic measures when he heard a noise from the other room. He turned to look, feeling outward with his mind. He was met with nothing, a thin sheet of transparency that he pushed through easily, barely noticing it. Louis.
He gave one last look at Armand and then let him down to go see if it truly was Louis in the other room. Armand, having been abandoned, gave Lestat one last baleful look and disappeared down the stairs and into the street.
Louis was sitting on the bed in the other room, with his knees drawn up to his chest and his head in his hands. It was very reminiscent of the old times, when Louis lived his life wracked with guilt over his blood-lust.
But Lestat knew that this could not be. He was inclined to demand what Armand had been talking about, but when Louis looked up at him and he saw those deep green eyes, the impetus melted out of him. How he had missed his beautiful one!
He was next to Louis in a flash, barely able to contain himself from touching his dark angel. But something in Louis’s manner gave him pause. Again like the old days, his eyes were upset and wracked with guilt. His entire posture claimed that something was wrong.
“Lestat!” he cried, his voice somewhat trembling. “You’re home!”
Lestat smiled. Now that was as it should be. As he leaned in to nuzzle Louis’s neck, he said, “What’s wrong, angel?”
But Louis scuttled away from his touch to the edge of the bed. “Lestat, don’t. Not right now.”
Lestat clucked his tongue. “Oh, Louis, don’t tell me you have a headache now. I won’t believe you. Just tell me what is going on.”
Lestat followed Louis, a bit apprehensively, and wrapped his arms around him again. But this time, he noticed something he had not before.
Startled, he drew back and looked into Louis’s haunted eyes. “What have you been doing with Armand, that his scent is all over you like that?” Louis’s face was all he needed to tell him the answer.
“Sex,“ he answered himself.
Rage and jealousy flew through him like a wave. He turned and violently smashed a rather large hole in the wall. Not content with this, he snapped the bedside table to kindling, and then ripped a banister from the bed and threw it against the opposite wall. Still his anger burned in him. Flaming hot rage branded him inside, filling him up with molten vitriol which he took out on anything and everything in his path. He had destroyed quite a few things before he felt an easing of the pressure.
He stood in the middle of the room, still tightly coiled, like a spring, trying to control himself. When the red cleared from his vision, Louis was gone.
***
Louis walked as if in a daze, weighed down by his immense guilt. He felt as if he had set Lestat on fire again. He was afraid to see his reflection now, terrified that it would show him for what he really was. A twisted monster, face enraptured with the suffering of others.
A little voice inside him tried to tell him that it wasn’t that bad. That he had not done anything wrong. But surely he had not done anything right. He remembered Armand’s cherub-like face clearly, the sly seduction that had taken place. It would be easy to pretend that he hadn’t known what was going on, that he had simply been curious and lustful, and that was all.
But it was no use lying to himself. He wanted to hurt Lestat. He knew the truth, he knew what would happen when Lestat found out. And he’d...oh, Lord, he’d wanted it. Craved Lestat’s suffering because it would mean that Lestat could feel jealousy. It would mean that he might fear that he was unwanted by another, as Louis did every day of his long life.
Monster. His mind whispered to him, and he knew it to be true. What terrible thing had twisted and grown inside of him, putting black roots deep into his heart? Revenge...toying with people like that... He loved Lestat, in the name of any questionable divinity.
He wanted to cry, but there were no more tears left to fall. He felt dried up inside, like an empty shell. If he could have bled out his guilt and the monster in him, he would have. He would have cried and bled and starved until he went mad, if it would do any good. Even then, he’d be better off than he was now.
But it was useless. The hateful, blackened creature was him. It was entwined deeply in his soul, and he began to suspect that maybe this was what he’d been all along. If that was so, then he owed a debt of gratitude to Lestat for revealing it. Among all the other debts accumulated over the centuries.
What if it had never been Lestat that was the monster, as he suspected, but him instead? He could never repay these debts, and though he searched and searched, among the various languages that he knew, there were no words that he could say to make things right with Lestat. Not and speak the truth.
He could not make good on his debts of gratitude and love. But if that was so, then there was nothing left for him in this world. Nothing at all.
For the first time in a very, very long time, Louis hated himself.
He wandered the streets, meandering between the old and the new, the decaying and the sturdy. They were all the same to him. Each building’s role was reversible, and he’d seen the old buildings when they were new and bright and beautiful, the baby of some faraway architect. Now they were nothing. Everything faded with time. Even him.
He began to feel like a wilted flower. Winter closed about him like a gentle bower of death. He wanted it that way. He welcomed it. He veered away from the city, at least the inhabited parts, and began to find his way through the swamps where coffins sometimes rose in the rain, brief reminders of the ugliness and corruptness of death.
The earth was soft beneath an old, gnarled tree, and his bones were so weary, and he so hungry. He sat down, resting against the tree and trying to draw strength from its steady core.
His thoughts cleared and faded into emptiness, and he gazed with hollow eyes on the lightening of the sky. Let it come, he thought to himself. Let it come, and we will see how long it takes this corpse to burn in the sun.
Twenty minutes, less, perhaps, until the sun winked full in the sky. He could smell the approaching dawn, the rising of mists from the ground like steam. Perhaps angels and spirits flying to greet the joyous sun. Perhaps soon, it would be Louis escaping with the mist into the air.
The sky lightened, and his eyes hurt. He wanted to see the sun. He truly did. But at the last moment, a little voice inside of him told him that he was being melodramatic. Weakling, it cried. You could never do it. Never go through with it. Your world will never end, because you are afraid of fire.
/almost as afraid as I am of myself/
And, then, as other vampires had done before him, even Lestat, he began to dig. He moved the soft, damp earth aside as slowly as he could, trying to keep his panic in check. His mind reverted back to survival instinct. The time was coming when it would be too late. Dig the earth, make your grave. Still, he dug inhumanly fast. The grave was a little bit shallow, but plenty deep enough.
He dragged his weak bones to rest in the coffin of earth, embracing his eventual mother, and buried himself in thick, choking soil.
He closed his eyes and let the darkness enfold him completely, letting go of his thoughts and his feelings, his sentience and his emotions, his thirst and even his sense of self.
Lestat.
***
The thought was there, dogging him always. It’s my fault. I drove him away again. He had practice driving these thoughts away, and he used his sense-memory to push it back when the sadness came on.
The rage that had animated him was gone now, replaced with only himself. Lestat. He was alone again, despite all he had done to prevent it. Would it ever matter? Would any of them ever just stay with him? It seemed that the more he loved them, the more hate they held inside for him.
He sat on the bed. Sunrise was approaching. He wondered where Louis was, if he was safe, hidden away beneath the earth somewhere, or deep in an unknown cellar. Or with Armand.
What scared him was that maybe Louis had learned the truth, at long last. Somehow seen inside him and realized that for all his bluster and his pride and his powerful blood, he was still no better than the rest of them. What scared him was that if their roles were reversed, and he had to choose between himself and Armand, he might have chosen Armand.
He reached out to the other vampires, out of habit mostly, as he laid down in his lightless coffin. All were constant and happy, or at the very least safe. He heard the dim buzz of Armand’s thoughts in the background, angry and worried. One word rang out to him over and over again in those thoughts: Louis.
It agitated him again to hear the thoughts in Armand’s head, the ones he broadcast so carelessly and blatantly. There was a gentle brush against his consciousness. It was Marius.
Be calm, Lestat. You will feel better when you wake. Lestat wanted to snarl a reply, but when he recognized his anger, it only faded. As much as he wanted to, he didn’t think he could hide behind it anymore. He could break everything in the world, and it wouldn’t make an ounce of difference. Louis was still gone, still mad at him. How many times would this happen before Louis left him for good, and never came back? What if it had already happened?
The sun had reached the horizon, and though Lestat could not see it, he could feel its potent rays burning away the last vestiges of night. As had happened every morning for a few centuries, a raw sleepiness came over him, like an undiluted shot of drug, numbing him to the world.
Still, as he was losing consciousness, he became aware of a sharp, urgent spike in the collective consciousness. He recognized it as Armand.
He didn’t know what it was, but something was very, very wrong.