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The autumn evening, when Claudia crosses its threshold with Madeleine close and keen behind her, is misty and moonless, and quieter than they’ve become accustomed to. The hurrying of footsteps against the cold, yes, and heartbeats ringing out from under buttoned coats, but not in the usual numbers. And no music.
‘Everyone shut up shop early?’ she wonders. ‘Or is it Sunday again already?’
Something else, too, a soft compression of the damp air. Like weather before it makes itself known, an irritation in the head. She knows this, she thinks, it’s like –
‘Oh,’ says Madeleine, spotting a scattering of chrysanthemum petals on the pavement beneath her feet, among the damp and yellow leaves. ‘It’s La Toussaint.’
So that’s what it is. ‘The Feast of All Saints,’ she says. ‘Marked it in New Orleans, too. Well, we didn’t, so much. Little need for saints in our house, or remembrances.’
‘And I was sick of it before I turned fifteen.’ She half-smiles, the way she often does when remembering all that. ‘Everyone will be in the churches or the cemeteries. Let’s find them there.’
‘You still wanna try tonight? Gonna be a whole lot of melancholy, most likely.’
‘Yes, I want to. You know I do. Come on.’ Hunger, rolling from her in waves, but more than that, the thrill at knowing she’s about to try something new. It quickens Claudia, too. To be the teacher. She is seasoned, Madeleine barely even born.
So she takes her not-quite-fledgling by the hand with a sharp grin, leads her past the dark shops and cafés, under the fizz of street lamps and the semi-naked trees.
‘Like I told you, it won’t be like talking between our minds. They’ve got a lot of noise in them, all the workings of the body – brain’s another noisy bit of meat in amongst all that. And the blood’s gonna sound a whole lot nicer. Much more enticing to hear the blood, get up close to the blood, drain the blood.’ A little mean to be talking like this, maybe, when Madeleine’s every other thought is already blood. But that’s part of the lesson. ‘You’ve got to get past that and listen to the quieter parts.’
‘Is it a good way to hunt, do you think? To pick out the isolated?’
Claudia shrugs. ‘Sometimes. Not my way of doing it, but you’ll find your own style. Don’t forget this ain’t a hunt, though. Not yet.’
Madelene’s lips curl a little, talk of the hunt stirring all her sharp new urges. She is a sublime predator, and learning every day how to whet her instincts. Claudia watches her and smiles when Madeleine stops just short of showing her fangs.
If some secret part of her enjoys this especially – goading her student’s appetites, testing how well she can release or restrain the raw, clamorous thirst; if Madeleine looks inside her and sees the glow of pleasure that the push-pull coaxes into life – well, maybe that’s kind of fun.
‘Funny, don’t you think,’ says Madeleine, her regular soft-sardonic smile back in place. ‘That we happened to pick tonight for this? To hold back a while? When I was a child we believed ourselves safe in the dark, on the night of the saints.’
‘You might have been, a long ways back. Mutual superstition.’
‘Oh?’
‘Maître said the first coven never hunted on this night. Rarely ever talked about the old days, unless someone really ruffled his feathers about sticking to the rules. I say someone, I mean me.’ She sticks her nose up just a touch and puts on her best Armand. ‘“Callow, jejune, never known a day of discipline in your dainty little life. I dread to think how you would have comported yourself under a more exacting authority.” Kind of thing. Didn’t I know there used to be whole nights where they’d lie silent in the darkness, cause they truly believed evil shouldn’t walk? Only the anointed and the shadows of the honest dead.’
‘The honest dead,’ Madeleine laughs. ‘Does anyone think there is such a thing any more?’
‘Quiet now. There’s the gates.’ Across the street, the way into the cemetery open and bright. Murmur of light and bodies from within, scent of earth and breath and blossoms. ‘Stick close.’
They are not dressed exactly for the occasion, but their coats are dark and so is the red Madeleine had chosen for her lips. They’d hardly be the only fashionable young mortals with somebody to mourn, and once past the gates it seems that everyone is preoccupied enough with their own dead.
Paths forking out ahead of them, tall graves radiant with lamps and red-glass candles and mounds of flowers, families and lone visitors keeping vigil or walking between the mesh of shadows thrown by crosses and other stony ornaments. Here the fuzzy pressure in the air feels thicker, sticky almost. She catches Madeleine in a quiet hiss.
‘You feel it too?’
‘Yes. What is it? The holy night disagreeing with us after all?’
‘Don’t exactly know. Felt it sometimes, times and places like this. Maybe it’s their world scraping against ours. The dead, honest or otherwise.’
‘I half thought I would be able to see them,’ Madeleine says, her look a little sheepish. ‘Is that silly?’
‘Not silly, but no. If they’re anywhere at all, we don’t get to know about it. But maybe those old vampires did know some things. Or maybe it’s just all this lot thinking about it too. Wanting so badly to be able to brush aside the veil.’ She puts a hand on Madeleine’s arm to pause her, draws them to a bench under the shadowed flank of an unadorned and unlit crypt. ‘Over there,’ she says, looking ahead to where several small gatherings attend their respective ancestral resting-places. ‘You choose who. Remember you’re listening past the blood, into all the other sounds a body makes.’
Madeleine is still, only the pale flames of her eyes dancing across the crowd, coming to rest on the unaccompanied child that has been quietly slipping between one group and another. A fellow adept of the shadows, though mortal.
Smart place to start; children are often loud thinkers. Claudia stays out of the kid’s mind, but hovers in Madeleine’s, hearing what she hears, all of it heightened by her fresh and tender senses. The young, nervous pulse. The whine of hunger. Snap of adrenaline, resolving into the hum of relief, resolving finally into a morsel of thought: bread tomorrow.
‘Ah!’ Madeleine claps her hands together, childlike herself in a way that makes them both laugh. ‘I heard him!’
‘Funny,’ Claudia says. ‘I want food.’
‘What’s funny about it?’
‘The one who made me, he said there’s only three things they ever think about. That’s one of them.’
’The other two?’
‘I want sex. And I want to go home.’
‘And that’s all there is to the human mind? Do you think so?’
‘Well,’ Claudia says. ‘Lot of them about right now. So I think… you tell me.’
Madeleine sweeps her gaze across the sampling of society before them, then narrows in on the cigarette glow of another who stands back, separating himself as they are. ‘There,’ she says. A young man under the latticed shadow of a still-leafy ash.
She listens secondhand again as Madeleine sorts through the noise and gets to the thought. Just want his arms around me.
’Sex, then,’ Madeleine says with a sigh – amused but not unsympathetic – then stills her head to listen some more. Or at least to have something to bury. Or even just to know the day.
‘So,’ Claudia says, with barely concealed satisfaction. ‘My maker might’ve been a man of limited interests. Might’ve decided that his little set of desires applied to every other thinking being.’
‘And here you are, all worldly and complicated.’
‘Don’t you forget it.’
‘That last one, I want to go home. Could encompass a lot of things, no? A place, a person?’
‘Family, most often, for him. Making a shelter out of people. For me? Don’t fully know, not right now.’ She knocks her shoulder against Madeleine’s. Figures she doesn’t need to explain or excuse any of that, but feels nice to make the gesture anyway. ‘For you?’
‘A house, a garden, a family, once. A livelihood, after that? I think right now I prefer…’ she pauses, but only to lay her gloved hand over Claudia’s. ‘Whatever this is.’
It doesn’t feel like a concession – just possibility. All kinds of surprises, in this new chapter of life. She thinks of that night, placing her oldest diaries in Madeleine’s hands as gingerly as if they were a handful of warm eggs. There’s nothing she can fear to admit or ask, after that.
‘Louis was my home, once,’ she says slowly. ‘That much I’m sure of. Then it was an idea, I think. Some kind of ancestral heartland we never really found. The coven, for a bit, but that wasn’t family. Maybe I’m cured of that need for a little while. Okay. Do another one, before I make myself gag.’
Snapping back into her role as student, ambition well stoked now, Madeleine skims the little gatherings within their view and settles on a family who stand in quiet reverence before a well-kept mausoleum. Darts her attention from one to the next, picking their thoughts out with growing ease.
She was alway’s papa’s princess and now she’ll sit on the inheritance like it’s her throne.
I love you, dad, but why did you leave me holding the key to this rotten orchard?
Oh yes, let’s weep at the old man’s grave while his progeny sharpen their knives. I should have left when Joëlle did.
Stand still, I’ll stand still and be very good, and mama will let me see the elephants at the circus.
She draws her focus back to their bench, rolls her eyes. ’So, they are diverse in their banality.’ How effectively she has come to regard the living as a different species entirely. ‘But you find them interesting.’
‘Eternity’s a lot of time.’ Claudia shrugs. ‘You have to be interested in things beyond feeding and fucking. Especially beyond family.’
‘Well, seamstress was a good calling then. Fashions will always be changing.’
Claudia stands. ‘Let’s try your range. Up.’ She springs onto the sharp slant of the crypt’s roof, turning as she lands to watch with pride as Madeleine follows with ease. This must be what a leopard looks like when it leaps. So silken and so deadly. Hunter’s eyes wide and glimmering. ‘See if you can send yourself further out. Away from the busy spots will be easier if you want to single one out. Try to catch another loner.’
She listens in again as Madeleine skips her mind like a stone across the rippling dark –
– and I’ll get it. Let me get it, let them see me –
– regret the day she ever –
– at the meeting tomorrow, that it’s international, the MDRM, the Viet Minh –
– how did it go? Da-da-dah, da da da-daah-da –
– ends tonight. I just came to say goodbye. Or see you soon.
– and comes to a stop.
‘Wishing to die. Is that another way of longing for home?’
‘Suppose it depends what you believe about death.’
‘Hm. My family all was called home to God, so I was told.’ She laughs a little, otherwise as effortlessly still in her catlike perch as Claudia is. ‘If nothing else, they are creatures of the earth. And the ones they’ve lost, they have gone back to the earth. Or as the priest would say, returned to dust.’
‘The ones that think they want death, I’ve found – it’s usually something else they really want. Respite, or freedom, or for things to have turned out different.’
‘Of course, you are the connaisseuse.’
‘I haven’t had many that truly wanted a complete end. It feels funny. Like I’m intruding.’
‘What, more so than the draining of fumbling lovers in the back seats of their cars?’
‘Yes.’ She leaves it at that. ‘Final lesson?’
‘Let me have it.’
‘The basilica.’ Claudia nods her head towards the narrow glint of church tower windows, half a neighbourhood distant but visible from their vantage point. ‘Can you reach them, in there?’
Madeleine vaults her awareness across the quiet streets, Claudia following again from the confines of their mental communion. This one is challenging, not only a crowd at distance but one that’s joined together in ritual, the cries of individual hearts obscured beneath a unity of call and response. Madeleine strains into the scene, but it’s becoming apparent that she’s met her limit for the night.
Finally, Claudia slips her own way across and among the congregation. The cemetery blurs into a harmony of carved stone and flickering points of light as a mosaic of the basilica’s interior shimmers into her perception.
The creak of pews, the dance of candlelight, the drone of invocation. It’s getting late; they are praying the compline. Noctem quietam et finem perfectum concedat nobis Dominus omnipotens.
‘The Lord almighty grant us a quiet night and a perfect end,’ Claudia whispers. ‘Come back, now.’
‘Ah, so you speak Latin all of a sudden?’
‘Ah! You forget I went to college?’
Madeleine snorts at that. ‘And spent your time learning the liturgy of the hours, I’m sure.’
‘Okay, so I’m picking it out of their heads.’
‘I couldn’t quite get there. The sounds, but not the meaning.’
‘That’s plenty good. We’ve got the rest of time to practice some more. Take your gloves off now.’
Madeleine does, remaining perfectly balanced on just her haunches as she lifts her hands and bares her pretty talons to the night. How quickly she responds to Claudia’s commands. She thinks she might like to revisit that thought.
The night, still strange and bright and close, but ripe nonetheless for the taking. Claudia pockets her own gloves, lets her fangs lengthen at last and watches her singular, glorious, bloodthirsty companion follow suit.
‘Alright, then,’ she says. ‘Final question. Which one of these we gonna follow?’