Hunted

(Louis’s POV)

Saturday, August 10, 2024   9:57 PM

French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana

New Orleans wears a red you can taste. It stains the tongue with heat and beer and powdered sugar; it runs off balconies in silk ribbons and sweat. The night hummed with life and everywhere there are dresses—sequins and satin and thrift-store lace—the whole city pretending it is light enough to dance in August.

Lestat glides beside me like he’s the one who invented color. Crimson devours him shoulder to ankle, a train whispering like a conspirator over the flagstones, the bodice cut in a way that flatters his pale, impossible strength. The dress makes him beautiful the way a blade is beautiful; a beauty that threatens more than it invites. He catches himself in dark glass and smiles, and the smile is a door he leaves open for the world.

Lestat and his ruby brooch and extravagant gown was a contrast to my simple but stylish 1940s-styled black zoot suit, matched with black fedora. The only concession I made to the holiday was the crimson tie and cardinal feather in my hat. If Lestat was going to force me to go be social, I had to look good. Some habits never die.

“Adoration,” he says, airily, “is a vitamin, mon cœur. And I am so very devoted to my health.”

“After the year you had, Lestat. You’ll never starve on compliments,” I tell him.

“Never,” he says, and lets a drunk couple fold him into a photo, arm slung rude and affectionate across a stranger’s shoulders.

Lestat, like me, had stepped in the public eye with his rock band The Vampire Lestat. Self-absorbed, sure, but it fit a new wave of vampire mania triggered by my book. And though The Vampire Lestat was mostly a regional act.

We are close—that is undeniable. The way a scar is close, etched in memory and misery. He still brushes my sleeve when the crowd thickens; I still take the inside of the curb, and we tell ourselves that’s care. We haven’t been lovers in some time. That is undeniable also. Love remains, a ghost at our elbows. I wonder—more than is good for me—how he names us when I am not there to argue.

My book lives in the world now like a creature. I told the truth until I bled and let a man bind the blood in paper. It was supposed to free me. I did not consider what else it would free. Vampires who collect scandal the way others collect art. Things older, not quite vampires, with an interest in anything that shakes the dark. I feel them in the gaze that sometimes fixes on me. I pretend I do not.

Sensing my morose mood, Lestat tries to lighten my spirits. “Stay in the light, Louis,” Lestat says, and taps my chin with a gloved finger, a stage gesture. “It suits you.”

“Something feels off, I guess I’m not in the celebratory mood.”

“A day that ends in ‘y’.” Lestat would not allow my mood to bring him down. Since we are no longer romantically linked, he seemed less interested in cheering me up. However, tonight was special, his band had just released their single “Cold” and Lestat needed to be visible. So Lestat felt it critical to be visible in public and social media. Tonight was about him, I was the plus one.

“Toujours la mine d’enterrement, mon amour,” Lestat’s voice was like silk, swelled with bliss. “We’re surrounded by wine, women, music—and you brood as if the world is ending.”

“Perhaps it already has,” flat, and disinterested.

Undeterred, Lestat replies smoothly, “Then let it end with a waltz, not a funeral dirge. Dance, Louis, or at least pretend to be alive.”

The band behind me trips and recovers; the smell of fryer grease cedes to river damp, then returns on a gust with the powder of sugared beignets. It is too loud to hear yourself think and that is perhaps the charity of the day. Then, very softly, beneath the band and the catcalls and the shouted toasts, I hear a voice that is not in the air. He could sense my distraction, that Lestat was not the center of my attention. And he would tolerate none of that.

“Don’t go dim,” Lestat says. “Can’t you see that I’m working.”

“On what?” I ask, because I need him talking so I don’t have to listen to the dead.

“On being adored,” he says, and proves it by accepting another photograph, striking a little quarter-turn that shows the line of his neck and the satin over muscle. The crowd answers like surf. He looks brighter, somehow—swollen with delight, his vanity polished from without. He doesn’t look back when he lets my arm slip free.

This was Lestat, soaking in all the beauty and hedonism of the night. And what better night for Lestat to come out, the color of blood everywhere and on everyone. The paradigms of gender almost but ignored as men who call themselves heterosexual strut their stuff in their grandmother’s garnet gowns.

We pass Armstrong Park; we pass a brass band that has decided; we pass the shuttered door of a bar that smells like every story it has ever heard. But in the shadows, I can hear the chattering of something else, something not exactly human. My eyes scan my surroundings but it’s hard to locate specifically who is out there, but I know someone is. Moreover, they are trying to reach me, specifically. A white noise screeching out in the roar of the crowd.

“There you go again, drifting away like a cloud, Louis,” Lestat said, jovial but annoyed by my distance. A distance that I have sustained with Lestat. My heart may still long for Lestat, but my brain will never trust him again.

Lestat, the showman, always mingles with the crowd, maybe an attempt to trigger my jealousy. It did not. If anything it served as a useful distraction, I was more interested in this presence I sensed than stroking Lestat’s already girthy ego.

“Tu es tellement jolie.” to blonde wearing a form fitting scarlet dress. Her hair was freshly dyed green. Still in performance mode Lestat sang a few bars of Tommy James and the Shondells’ "Crimson and Clover". I was charmed, Lestat has the effect on anyone, me especially. But the brief reprieve was broken by her voice.

It feels normal. It feels like Lestat. I let him float toward the loudest praise. The street opens at my side the way a curtain opens—just enough for me, just then—and I step into the slit of shade because it is there.

“I love you, Louis. I don’t say it often enough anymore.”

Claudia.

I go still. It is not memory. Thoughts of Claudia aren’t uncommon for me, but this sensation– these thoughts are not organic. Not triggered by nostalgia or my guilt. They come off more of beacon, a siren. Claudia’s voice doesn’t come to me as a memory. She arrives complete, I feel her essence, her unnaturalness. And I felt the weight of her words.

“I love you, Louis. I don’t say it often enough anymore.”

Only I can hear her voice, Lestat is too knee deep in sea of admiration he barely noticed me searching for her voice. The August night’s humidity has reduced the runners and walkers. Lestat and I begin to separate. Him by his fans, me by voices of phantoms. I know it’s her, I could always sense when she is close. And it has been almost 100 years since she left this world, but I still remember. A man in a red tutu drags his heels and grins and bumps into me as I blankly search for Claudia. I keep moving because stopping could mean I lose her trail.

“Come back this way,” Lestat calls from somewhere gilded with laughter.

“I’m here,” I lie. Not even looking in his direction, further disconnecting from him.

I don’t notice how far I’ve gone until the music frays to a rumor, and the crowd thins to gaps you can fall through. “I am done enduring. I’m going to kill him.”

I tell myself: it is heat, it is memory, it is the book’s long tail stirring shadows. I tell myself: Lestat will finish his little performance and catch up with me. I tell myself: nothing is happening.

Then I notice what is not happening. No footfalls behind me, no breath nearer or farther. And still—kept pace. The hairs at the nape confess before pride will: I am being watched. Not us. Me.

I have not been hunted since the Théâtre des Vampires set its jaws around my neck and called it art. A perverse form of justice. The body remembers bad news. Mine tightens, bones haunted by failures of the past, resurrected by what?

As I walk, hunting down Claudia’s voice, the city changes its voice as I walk. Brass drops to a mutter. The white noise of thousands becomes the intimate clink of a single glass, then the hush of a courtyard where a fountain has died of neglect. I cut across Esplanade; I cut again, because the shade suggests it; I take a side street because it is empty and I am a fool when I am led.

Only once I am alone do the other senses rise: the oil of a firearm, cleaned recently; the ghost of gunpowder in old air; cold metal’s taste at the back of the throat. No perfume of festival here. This is work.

The place breathed of ruin—bare brick, exposed pipes. I thought of every whispered secret, every transaction etched into the walls. New Orleans hid its sins well. So did I. Why here? Claudia and I never visited this place, not to my recollection. I closed my eyes and tapped deeper into my primordial abilities, and I could still feel Claudia. My boot disturbs the air as I enter. Dust lifts in a slow applause, then settles again. There is almost no light except a few tap lights that appeared new and strategically placed. I step further inside and let the door fall with a gentle kiss, as if I’m a guest.

I am not alone. He is already in the second room, but I only understand that he’s there when he decides to be seen. He separates from the shadow as if the shadow belonged to him. No red anywhere. Matte black jacket trimmed close; dark trousers that swallow light; boots that don’t tell the boards they’ve landed.

Tall—just past my height by two inches or more, all of it carried like he knew exactly what it could do. Shoulders full, frame cut from the kind of work that leaves the muscles round and hard without softness. The light caught the wave in his cropped hair, dark curls that would spring if they were longer. His skin held that deep, living warmth that made his eyes—a narrow, knowing brown—familiar but somehow forgotten. Handsome wasn’t enough. He was the kind of beautiful you looked at twice even when you didn’t want to.

At his hips, the blunt shine of metal waited, heavy and sure, strapped to their holsters. His face told me nothing—no hate, no joy, not even the respect you give an equal. Just the blank calm of someone here to do what they came to do. I waited for him to speak because I knew he would. He somehow set up this entire elaborate stage, surely, he had something to say. Something that would undo me. And he did.

Behind his left hand hid a long blade, usually used for hunting. I noticed, but a mortal with a knife is as lethal to a vampire as a child with water balloons. What could he do to me? Quite a lot, as I would soon learn. But it started with one short but loaded sentence.

‘Hello, Uncle Louis,’ he said at last—then hurled the knife at my face.