Chapter Text
Lestat was composing on the upstairs piano when he heard Claudia take a deep breath in, then a deliberate, infuriating sigh out. He hit a foul note and bit his tongue. No cursing around the baby. Why he'd agreed to that one, he'd never-
Louis on his hands and knees. Louis's chest collapsed into the bed as he struggled to take even a single breath in, hands reaching behind him in a desperate attempt to grip Lestat's hips, nails shredding Lestat's waist as Louis failed and failed and failed to secure his grasp. That was why.
"You can come out, you know," he called out as his fingers itched to Chopin. Boléro he could play with his eyes closed, perhaps facing the opposite way.
"This coffin suits me fine," she sulked. Like mother, like daughter. "Where's Louis?"
Hm. Like father, like daughter. "Hunting."
He did try to disguise his contempt. A subtle thud emanated from her room—her nail on the wood of her coffin, providing a rhythm for him to play against.
"Rats, you think?" she muttered. "Wish he'd eat normal." Even quieter.
Louis had been looking gray around the edges recently. "Or dogs," he affirmed, ignoring the last bit. They should hand out pamphlets: So Your Spouse is Avoiding Human Blood. Ten helpful tips and tricks!
At this point, Lestat could write it himself.
Claudia in the hallway interrupted his meandering thoughts. Curls pinned neatly back, she did look a little older than fourteen, though not much. “Dogs?“ she derided, pretty brown nose wrinkled.
“You’ve no idea what I’ve seen your papa eat.” He flurried through a repetition. Cats and mice, rats and spiders.
She took her seat next to his on the bench, her fingers reaching out for The Celebrated Chop Waltz. He swept a hand out and captured hers under it. He had no interest in discord tonight.
"I thought you couldn't stand Chopin," she said as she was pressed into his rhythm.
"That is only when you mangle the notes, mon ange." He smoothed his free hand across the keys and tipped his head toward hers. "Won't we make a pretty picture for him when he returns?"
Claudia gave her silent agreement with an incline of her head. "Think he'll be back soon?"
"I don't know," he admitted, refusing the urge to bang his forehead across the keys.
"I'm hungry." Her eternal refrain.
"As am I." His, too.
"You wanna go?" Her petite fangs flashed in an aborted smile.
Lestat hesitated even as his veins sung. What if Louis came back to an empty house? Worse still, what if he didn't? He trailed off the tune and closed the keylid with a clack.
“Fine. But it is my turn.“
He watched anticipation line her little body anew, straightening her shoulders and curling her lips. As he got up from the bench, she slipped her fingers under the cover and banged out the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth: G, G-G, E♭ .
He couldn't help but chuckle. As much as he'd never asked for the enfant terrible at his side, they were a matched set. "We'll take a turn around the neighborhood."
It was a propitious accident of Lestat's nature that he'd always loved cities at night. The little squares of lit windows staring out into darkness, the suspicious chatter of alleyways, the scattered strains of a thousand pianos in a thousand speakeasies—they invigorated him like nearly nothing else. Out in the open air, his dulled senses stretching and crackling, some semblance of happiness gripped him. He turned to Claudia and found his eagerness mirrored in an conspiratory grin.
He took her arm. It would lead to looks—it always did—but silent predation was for cats and cowards. He and Claudia were wolves. Wolves howled.
They walked in time down Royal Street, Claudia taking wide steps, eyes eating the scenery. Here was a pretty, mousy girl, there was a swarthy young man, and his daughter lit on both in equal measure. In this, he did see an echo of himself, and, as proud as that made him, it equally made nerves ring in his fingertips, his elbows, his knees.
Those who walked this path must be fearless. But he saw fearlessness in her. It was in the secret little smile she carried around on a string only to tuck away when she knew he was looking.
"Would you prefer a jaunt through lovers' lane?" he tempted her.
"I thought it was your turn!" If nothing else had stopped him, Lestat might still have stayed in New Orleans. Just for the accent. "Anyways, don't Daddy Lou have the car?"
Of course he did, and Lestat felt no urge to test if Claudia would break the heels of her new shoes running, but he'd felt the strange urge to get her blood up, all the same. He reached over and straightened her already-straight hat. "Right you are, my dear."
They were off! It was only a quick turn to walk to Bourbon street, and there the getting was good; pretty girls and boys in pretty costumes lined the shops like window dressing.
"Any one you want," he told her. Indulgent, yes, but he did appreciate her sensibilities; she was, by now, nearly the artist he was.
This she proved by lighting on a hidden beauty tucked neatly in an alleyway. Red hair, willowy limbs, fashionably free of stockings, but shy, already returning home from a failed night out.
"Hello," she said in a soft lilt when Claudia stepped from the shadows. "Are you lost?"
Claudia simply shook her head and advanced, pressing the woman against brick facade. Another second, and she bit; the woman didn't even have time to scream.
"Did you see?" she asked minutes later, bouncing on her heels after they'd rifled through the woman's pocketbook and sealed up the wound on her neck.
"I could hardly have done better myself." Truly, it was near perfection; soon, the days when Claudia needed him to capture her spares would be gone. Soon, she would not need him at all. "You smell like gin." She did, as had the woman, but she was steady on her feet, so they walked on.
A full turn of their neighborhood, and nothing suited his fancy. Coming back up on the townhouse, his eyeteeth itching, he offered: "Another lap?" The pace of it—around the house, one block at a time, circling out and out and out—soothed Lestat's hindbrain. Claudia, happy, for once, if drunk, agreed. They would make a night of it.
Or they would have, if they didn’t stumble upon Louis at the garden gate. He was sprawled—half in the street, half in the tunnel, arms and legs akimbo. Jacket unbuttoned, overshirt undone. For the briefest fraction of seconds, Lestat was sure he’d been robbed, beaten and left for dead—but that was nonsense, as nonsense as his next thought, that Louis was high, or drunk, or both.
“Louis!” that was Claudia, muddying her dress as she knelt beside him. “What’s wrong with him?” accusatory when Louis did not respond, though his eyes were open and roving, eating up the sky, and his heartbeat was steady and even.
“How am I meant to know?” Lestat asked even as he took his place beside her and prodded Louis’s cheek. A drunken hand batted his away. “Come, let’s bring him inside.”
As he scooped Louis up, he gave a surreptitious sniff. If possible, he smelled less alcoholic than usual, but more of the bayou. "Go," he told the staring Claudia. Her feet hesitated for a moment before she fled, skirt fluttering behind her and shoes cracking on the pavement. She stood holding the door as Lestat hooked Louis's knees over his forearm.
Louis was so slight he felt no heavier than Claudia might. His head lolled against Lestat's shoulder as they passed the threshold. Still, his eyes were bright as Lestat deposited him on the fainting couch, and he stirred gently when Claudia pressed up on the couch beside him.
"Louis." Louis accused him occasionally of saying his name like it was a full sentence; he was certainly doing it now, as he perched on the arm of the couch on the other side of Louis and tried to turn his chin so he could see. It was just that words seemed so useless whenever Louis was within striking distance. He muddled through anyways. "Chérie, what happened to you?"
Louis's hair was mussed, but his face was unharmed, despite the way his eyes were still searching everywhere—the room, then Lestat, then Claudia, then his eyes skittered away and back to the room. Lestat tore the coat he was wearing in his urgency to see the shirt underneath, see if that was stained with blood, or-
"Stop, you're gonna hurt him!" There was panic in his daughter's voice, both of her hands around one of his wrists. It would be nothing at all to throw her against the wall, but he did need her.
"He needs blood." Lestat peeled her fingers from his wrist. "We'll be in the bedroom." She watched, dumbfounded, as he lifted Louis again in his arms. When he reached the foot of the stairs, he realized he'd have to prod her: "Well?"
"You can't expect me to leave him!" Her eyes glittering like pink rubies in the lamplight, jaw tensed.
"I can, I will, I am." Claudia was eighteen, well able to secure a victim, but Lestat knew that was not what frightened her from how she flinched in her seat and drew herself in.
She avoided his gaze for a moment as Louis seemed to collapse more fully against Lestat. This broken mess was all his fault, he knew. That didn't make it any easier to say, "Claudia." Her eyes sharpened and met his, but did not flinch away. His mother used to say she could see honesty in his eyes and the shape of his lips. Did Claudia see the same? "I do not know what is wrong with him. I've never seen anything like this before. But we both know he does not feed himself. Here is where I must be. Go."
She left in a flurry of clicking heels and rustling skirts, leaving Lestat to tend to his bundle. Up the stairs without incident, and through the doors. He laid Louis out on the bed with tender hands and did not pause. Stripping Louis clean as his daughter hopefully did not get choosy, he found nothing.
That is to say, nothing he did not already know. Louis's skin was fine and brown, though slightly diminished in glow from his anemic diet. His ribs sat disconcertingly visible beneath the surface. There was a bruise just below the collar of his undershirt, but Lestat had placed it there just this evening, worrying the spot with his lips and tongue until it sang blood-red against the sea of muted brown. He was breathing. His heart was beating. With his eyes closed as they were now, he could be sleeping. And suddenly, Lestat wanted nothing more than to curl into him, this husk of his wife, and pull the covers over their heads.
But this he could not do. Instead, he placed his thumb to the center of the bruise and let it rest there, feeling Louis's sure heartbeat, feeling his own. He could not resist the urge to press. Louis's skin went bloodless beneath his thumb, and Louis groaned, twisted against the comforter as he'd done a thousand times before.
Disconcerted, verging on dizzy, he retrieved a damp cloth, wiping dirt from Louis's fingers, dried, bloody sweat from his brow. "You will be well again." He did not quite believe it, but it felt good to speak it anyways. He leaned close and stole a kiss from Louis's lips.
As he was leaning away, Louis gasped.
A guttural inhalation, as if he could suck all the air from the room, the house, the street, even. His eyes popped open; he propped himself up on his elbows. And he said, "The sky opened up."
"The sky?"
"I was out on my balcony," said without inflection. "And, God, the stars—you can't see them in Dubai." His accent was wrong. Flat.
And he wasn't making any sense. "Chérie, you've never been to Dubai."
"No, I-" Louis seemed to take in the room anew. His eyes widened. "I suppose I haven't." There, a flicker of Louisianan drawl, and the corners of Louis's lips pulling into a tight smile. "Got me all confused, baby."
Baby? If anyone was confused, it was Lestat. While the occasional, manipulative cher might pass Louis's lips, baby was not part of his lexicon. But Lestat had no time for confusion. Already, the front door was unlocking, and two steps of footsteps—one heavy, unmistakeably human, the other light, but with the weight of the world in the empty sound between her footsteps. As Claudia assured someone no, c'mon, just up the stairs, and Lestat hurried to cover Louis in the comforter, Louis turned from haunting, but lucid, to lost, eyebrows knitted, eyes fixed on the closed bedroom door.
"Louis," Lestat prompted, but Louis only made a dull noise in response. The door swung open. Claudia had a young man hanging off her tiny shoulders; he couldn't have been more than twenty-four, and he stood there, dumbfounded by the scene before him.
Lestat understood. Louis, near nude and propped up on the pillows, appeared to be little more than an animated corpse, and Lestat some perverse jailer. "Good evening! My, we must look a fright."
"It's quite alright, sir." Lestat had to give him credit; while his voice shook, there was something firm in it. "Little Miss here explained all about the trouble."
"Did she?" Lestat asked, half listening, half watching Louis watch Claudia. There was something wrong with how he did it—an extra softness in his eyes.
Claudia shut the door and stood in front of it. If Lestat had the capacity, he might have felt pride. "Daddy's real sick," she said, each syllable a drop of dread. "But we think there might be a cure."
"I thought you said it was your mother," the boy said. His eyes were dinner plates, but he was shaking open the black case in his arms with sure fingers.
"Did I?" Claudia took a step into the room. The young man withdrew a stethoscope from the depths of his case and placed it on the bedside table with a thud.
"It's no bother," he said, pulling back the covers. His eyes lingered on the bruise for a fraction too long; Lestat's teeth ached. He cast an eye at Claudia, a grasp at humor: "Must of been all shook up."
Claudia responded only with a nod. Lestat was getting the distinct impression of a guard dog from her; shoulders tensed, arms held out to take up more space.
"You've no idea," Lestat said, taking up the space behind the boy-doctor, curving into his shadow. "Louis here took quite a fall."
Louis flinched when the stethoscope landed on his chest; the first movement he'd made since the doctor knocked on their door. "Heartbeat's steady," the young man said after a moment of tense silence; he was likely expecting relief to spread through the two, but they already knew that, and did not react. After a beat, he turned back to his patient.
He shouldn't have. As he reached to grip Louis's shoulder, Lestat captured him. Lightning-quick, he grasped the hand which held the stethoscope—the left, sinister—sliced a sharp thumb along the veins, and offered the tableau to his love.
As blood dripped across Louis's sainted lips, the man seemed to realize, belatedly, that he should not be here. "Hey, what the fuck!" he cried, thrashing in Lestat's iron grip.
He stood no chance, but Lestat was a gentleman, not a knave. "I apologize," he said, holding firm even as blood scented the air syrup-thick. Even as his fangs threatened to descend. "I would be more gracious, but, well. Needs must."
Whatever ghost had gripped his darling still lived in his starved body; like an automaton, Louis's hands rose and held firm to the young man's arm. His tongue slipped across the seam of his lips, needy, hungry, gratifying.
If they were alone, Lestat might have cooed. As it was, he simply pressed his free hand to the back of Louis's head. Louis leaned into it like a cat might a pet; discordant wrongness licked up Lestat's arm, mixing and pressing against the relief of Louis's fangs latching.
The doctor did not fade quickly; he did not even fade quietly. Transcendent pleasure slipped over his mask of terror, and he sagged into Louis, letting out a moan. Lestat turned to Claudia.
"A doctor?"
Claudia seemed caught between the question and the communion, her eyes fixed on Louis for too long for the sharp look she leveled at him to truly land. "I panicked. And anyway, he's just a student." The student moaned again; her eyes drifted to the pornographic tableau.
The boy was lain half-across Louis's chest, knees on the floor, cheek to his right breast. He began to crumple, whimpering in that horrific way that teenage boys and unmarried men did, as his heart beat double time, then triple. He died with Louis's teeth still in him. Lestat, as always, felt green envy shoot up his spine and lodge in the base of his skull as Louis released the body.
Lestat caught it before it slumped to the floor, ruining another rug. He quite liked this one, vintage Persian, and had no intentions of finding its match. This line of thinking assisted him as he carried the body downstairs and out to the incinerator, where he stayed just long enough to light the pilot and ensure the flames caught. As he turned, fingers itching for a cigarette, Claudia accosted him.
"He's awake."
Claudia wished Uncle Les hadn't left the room. Almost as soon as he'd done so, Daddy opened his eyes, and shut his mind.
He'd never done that before; Claudia wasn't even sure he knew how. His mind had always been an open book to her. Open to the point where she'd built herself barricades and bridges to shore up against it.
"Claudia," he said, and that was wrong as his head, longing and awe mixed into his breath.
Her feet wanted to run, but to what? From what? It was just her father, the man who'd just last week shown her how to apply blush. "A figure-eight," he'd said. "Avoid the round part, here, and it'll make your face look-" his voice had caught. "Longer." He'd meant older, but the advice had been sound.
"Hi, Daddy." Even closed to her, even with the odd tone of his voice, the release she felt almost had her sliding under the bloodstained covers to curl up beside him. Instead, she planted herself on the chaise, knees drawn up to her chest, uncaring of what Uncle Les might say about her shoes on the furniture, and took a better look at her father.
He looked fine; better than fine, less a fright than she'd last seen him whole and hale. The pallor that clung to him had faded, not fully, but enough that his lips did not appear bloodless and his eyes didn't skitter from blood source to blood source like searching mosquitoes.
"Claudia," he said again, like a refrain, each syllable a different note. And his face split into the wide-open smile he used to give her often. So tempered was she to his disappointment that she'd almost forgotten how it looked. "I'd say I've gone mad, but I-" he cut himself off, something like a car engine stalling behind his eyes. "It's good to see you."
It was an odd thing to say, but still, it cut her to the bone. He'd said it like he hadn't seen her in years, not just since last night at bedtime. "You, too," she offered, tightening her grip on her knees. "Do you know what happened?"
Louis licked his lips. "I think I was hunting frogs." His accent slipped into groove on hunting, no G, all Louis. It did not relieve her. "Then—" he stopped. Looked up at the ceiling. Claudia pulled a loosed thread from the hem of her skirt, wondering if he'd ever talk again. "You ever felt like you slipped outta your skin?"
"Every night." Claudia never cried, but she felt real close right now, that tight-icky feeling behind her eyes. She blinked.
Louis gave her a little hum.
"You still hungry?" What she wanted more than anything was to be out of this room, away from this grotesque symphony.
"God, you're just like him," Louis said, and that was it. She rose from the chaise and slipped out the door without another word. She expected to hear her name called after her. It didn't come.
"I'm not," she told the living room on her way out the door.
She found Lestat looking bereft with his hands in his pockets, standing next to the incinerator. "He's awake," she said to her maker, and made to leave. He'd played every note of this madness into being; of that she had no doubt. It was only fair that he be the one to tend to it.
"Claudia!" he called to her back. She didn't turn, but was it strange that it soothed her nerves? That, despite her knowledge that he was an evil, hateful thing, not a parent, barely a man, he made her feel like someone's child?
Whatever. There was an hour left until sunrise, and boys aplenty still out on the streets.
Taking Claudia's pronouncement for what it was—tag, you're it—was more difficult than it should have been. The threshold of their home twisted under his wary eye as he stubbornly lit a cigarette, one ear tuned upstairs. Not that he needed to; it was perfectly, alarmingly quiet, the only sounds crickets and the waking city. Like Louis wasn't even breathing.
Claudia was out of sight by the time he tossed the cigarette's end in with the ill-fated student and willed his feet back through the door, where he expected to be met with devastation.
When none presented itself—when it was simply his living room, laid out as always—he felt the urge to destroy it himself. Whatever had happened, it seemed the room should match.
"Lestat? That you?" Louis.
He didn't answer, just took the stairs at the same speed he knew Louis would scold Claudia for; when he turned the corner, it was Louis.
And it wasn't. Louis was smiling, and looking at him. Inexplicably, this stopped him like a brick wall couldn't; the tension of a bowstring pressed through him, crown to to toes, and all he could say was, "Louis."
Lestat's eyes went hot. "Oh, fuck," Louis said blurrily as the room tinted blood-red on a blink. "C'mere." He turned the covers down, and Lestat crawled in, boots and all.
Louis reached for him, pulling and pressing Lestat into form until he could curl up on top of him, face pressed to Lestat's chest.
"Ain't you gonna hold me?" Louis asked after a moment spent lying there; Lestat wrapped him up tight, one hand splayed right at the small of his back, pressing.
Louis groaned as he was forced to turn onto his chest. "Don't get me started, I wanna talk to you."
"So talk." With Louis in his arms, the tears that had been threatening to spill dried up. "It's never stopped me before." There was no heat in his threat, but he did press a kiss to the crown of Louis's head, rubbing his lips against the loosened curls.
"Did I scare her?"
"We found you laid out in the street, ma sainte. You scared me." He said this in a fugue, truth slipping from his lips like bile, shocking and acrid.
"I'm sorry," Louis said. "I wanna close our marriage."
If Louis had lofted a bomb into the air, the impact might have been less. Lestat started, leaning back from Louis to look at him. The eyes were serious, the lips set in a grim line.
"I know," Louis said before he could respond. "We agreed, you want variety." Snub-nosed disgust.
"No." That was not it; not at all.
And Louis steamrolled over it. "I get that," shifting in his arms until he'd hooked a leg over Lestat's hip and straddled him. "I just—when you say it." He stopped, one hand on the lowest button of Lestat's shirt. "I gotta wonder, am I not girl enough for you?"
Strange echo. Barking out a laugh and waiting for Louis to roll his eyes, Lestat tried to fit it together, but it came back jumbled, a jigsaw with a missing piece. And Louis didn't roll his eyes. He just sat, his gaze a heavy weight.
Lestat felt the urge to joke, to hide, to cry, but found he couldn't. Louis looming over him, nude but for his underwear, his little titties and the soft skin of his lower belly filled softly back out… He was beautiful, perfect, demanding. "You are… more than enough girl for me, always."
Louis shifted again, pressing closer until his face was inches away from Lestat's own. "You sure?"
"Yes, of course." He reached for Louis's shoulders, intending to seal whatever this was with a kiss, but Louis resisted and turned his head.
"Good, cause I'm real hungry, and there's still plenty of time for you to get to Algiers and back before sunrise."
Lestat froze, the bed seemingly opening up into a pit. Free fall. "Why would I go to Algiers, chérie?" He knew why.
Louis groaned, placing his hands on Lestat's chest and pushing back. "We were doing so well, and there you go, lying." Lestat wanted to protest, but he kept going; "There's a pretty little songbird all tucked up in a jewel-box nest across the Mississippi."
"You know." Lestat wondered what it would feel like to be scalped. Similar? Louis would never ask for such a thing, he was sure, no matter how much he wished for it.
"What, you think I've vacated all my senses?" Louis kissed him then, a chaste but hard press of lips to lips. "Or that I'm fucking stupid?" There was a brightness in his eyes and cheeks, a sense of gleaming purpose.
"No." Lestat thought neither. Rather, he'd thought that Louis hadn't cared.
"Are you gonna turn me down?" He squeezed his thighs against Lestat's
"No, never." He tried to kiss Louis again; Louis turned, and he missed, lips catching only the pretty spot where Louis's dimple formed.
"Then go, before it gets too light," Louis said, and dismounted; Lestat was not ashamed to admit his cock twitched after him. He got up, dizzier even than he was when Louis was lost to him. As he stepped out the door, Louis said, "And I want her alive."
By the time he reached the street, he was floating.
Louis had forgotten what it felt like to be hungry. No, that wasn't right. He was hungry every day, every moment of the day. He was so inoculated against that baseline hunger that it felt like nothing at all. This was something else, a bone-deep starvation that drew his veins tight and dry, chapped his lips and made the world swirl on the edges of his vision.
It was a miracle that he'd set that little scene off without a hitch; he'd felt wobbly, just seated on Lestat's lap. If he thought he'd make it ten feet off the bed, he might have echoed Lestat out of the house and slipped his fangs into some unfortunate, but as it was, he'd have to wait.
When he woke up in this bed with its familiar, goldenrod comforter, Lestat looming over him, his dead daughter standing guard, his first thought was, of course, I'm insane. His second, more rational thought was, I'm fucking dead. It wasn't until Claudia crawled from the chaise and marched from the room that he knew.
This was real. One minute he'd been on his balcony, taking in the world below; at the same minute, it seemed, now that he'd come to his senses, he'd been sucking down frog blood, fingers dipped in the earth. And then…
He couldn't describe it. A void, or an endless everything, seemed to overtake him, and he woke up, exactly where he was meant to be and nowhere near where he should be. He was a century and a half old and he was not quite fifty. He was the bemused party of a defamation lawsuit yet to come that was as real to him as the fact that he'd scared his dead child, dominated his indomitable spouse.
Old tricks. Or new. It was hard to tell. If this was real—and all evidence pointed to it being real—he'd need to soften his approach. Pain erupted as he sat up of his own volition, all the way down his spine and lancing through his extremities. Pain with no center. Like every bit of cartilage had been eaten from his joints, and the shocking weakness of his form—nearly human! He felt it when his feet hit the floor, the shocking lack of stones pressing into him more alarming than the pain.
"Shit," he muttered, staring down at his unblemished heels. Was it wrong to mourn their absence, when he'd traded them for a daughter? No, he decided; they'd been his companion more than Armand. But that didn't mean he had time to reflect. Lestat hadn't time to locate their car, left on the side of the road some twenty miles away, which meant he'd run, or fly, and be back in—fifteen minutes? Twenty?
And Louis had some preparing to do.
Flying to Algiers, the city pinpricks in a lampshade below him, was a cold slap in the face. Five minutes was an eternity to be alone with one's thoughts, and Lestat's thoughts were as followed:
What is happening to me? He was not an errand boy. To be sent, barreling, from his home to willingly fetch his mistress was anathema to him. And yet he could not will himself to turn around. Anticipation itched through him with every foot gained. When he touched down, soundless, outside the unlit open window, Antoinette turned onto her belly in her sheets. The thick musk of human sleep drifted over him, a tantalizing thread, as he climbed through the window and laid down next to her.
"Mm," she stirred as the bed jostled, reaching out a hand. "Lestat?"
"Hello, my love," he whispered, crawling over her and pressing a kiss to the soft skin behind her ear. Wondering how Louis would kill her. Her perfumed hair created a honey-sweet cloud as he pressed his still-hard cock to her ass.
"Thought you couldn't come tonight," she slurred, reaching for the lamp. Had he said that? He'd never been too interested in a turn of conversation with her; it was a bit like talking to a well. "He turn you down again?"
The image of Louis's teeth in her throat tore through Lestat's consciousness. It was exquisite, tantamount to nothing, and the most impossible thought he'd ever entertained—until tonight. He caught her hand before it could set the room alight. "Not quite."
"Y'all fought, then?" the languid butter in her throat almost made him sorry to kill her. She really did have a lovely voice.
But almost wasn't sorry. "No," he said, pressing his lips to her neck. Would Louis do it here, where Lestat's lips now touched? "We did not fight."
"What, then?"
"Get dressed."