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The Chateau was dark and frigid when the death sleep released me. Most times, Lestat had already lit a cheery fire in our rooms and there were cheery lights switched on. I sat up, feeling disoriented as the only light came from the stars visible in huge swaths through the picture window. How many stars there were. A moonless night. The light from those stars was the only thing I could see in the darkness of the room, and so I drew closer to the window. I saw lights twinkling in the little village down the hill. Rarely had I felt any desire to go into town unless Lestat dragged me, but for some reason now it appealed to me. I threw on my coat and made my way out of the Chateau and onto the icy road.
How quickly I moved without meaning to. It seemed that hardly a blink passed between when I stood in the bedroom and when I stood in the little town square. Snow blanketed everything and it was idyllic, peaceful. The shops were mostly closed except for a little cafe, and the lights from the upstairs living areas blazed golden reflections on the bed of white. The wind tousled my hair and nipped my cheeks as I moved slowly along the recently shoveled walkway. Was that an inn? I hadn’t recalled an inn in the village before.
Then, drifting to me on the breeze I heard the melancholy wail of a violin. I rarely found that instrument soothing to listen to. It reminded me of pain: of a scorned lover, of a moaning child. But the way this musician was playing, he managed to make all other melodies pale in comparison. The sound from this violin was that of anguish incarnate. The artist was pouring his soul into each note that tore through the air.
Suddenly a chill ran up my spine that had nothing to do with the winter air. Nicolas de Lenfent. The name whispered into my soul the way Lestat said it that very first time he told me about him. Bitterness, love, guilt. My breath constricted in my chest and my heart thundered against my ribs.
When I left the Chateau, I moved rapidly into the inn, and before I knew it I was standing in the very room with Nicki. He was still playing, facing the wall, and I watched the elegant curve of his back and his arms, the twist of his wrist. He wore a loose white undershirt such as he would have worn in his mortal years. Then he crescendos a note and stops.
He turns toward me and I’m alarmed by his beauty and sorrow. His eyes are crystalline yet sunken, his hair a beautiful chestnut but tangled, his lips pale but a perfect cupid’s bow. It’s then that I realize he is a vampire. This isn’t the boy Lestat loved but the man who died while Lestat was gone.
“Nicki?” I breathed.
“Louis,” he growled, placing his violin back into its case.
What was it Louis knew about that violin…? There was a reason it shouldn’t be here now.
“I never thought I’d get to see you.” Louis continued, -drawing closer, feeling his heart tugged toward this figure who reminded him so much of someone else he knew.
Nicki let out a gruff grumble and closed his case, setting it up on the dresser in the corner. Then he took a decanter down and poured amber liquid into two glasses on the table in the middle of the room. He sat roughly in one chair and motioned for Louis to sit in the other. Before Louis had taken his place, Nicki was already sipping from his glass.
Louis swirled the liquid and smelled it. Whiskey. Good whiskey. When had he last had that? He took a sip and sighed softly at the heat burning down his throat. The feel of that alcohol in his system soothed an itch he hadn’t realized he had.
“So, you live up there at the Chateau?” Nicki asked, downing his drink and pouring another.
“I do. Lestat’s done a beautiful job with it. He said it’s hardly recognizable from the shell of a place it once was.”
Nicki scoffed. “A shell is right. It was a terrible, drafty old place.” His tone shifted to be more gentle and nostalgic. “He always wanted things to be better, you know. He’s a dreamer.”
Louis smiled softly, taking another fortifying sip of his whiskey. “Yes, a dreamer.”
“You look like me,” Nicki deadpanned, tone hard again after a long swig of his drink.
I choked. Of course! I already had known he looked like me. And Antoine. Lestat had told me there was a resemblance not only in our personalities but also our bodies: posture, build, eyes. But I had just then realized the other thing I’d noticed before: he was me at my worst. Those dark days when I wouldn’t feed. When I was lonely and frightened of the very nature of myself.
Nicki chuckled grimly as though he had read my thoughts. “Just like that. Yes.” He shifted in his seat to face me more, rolling his glass between his hands. “Frightened of the very nature. We should be. We’re damned creatures, Louis. Utterly damned. Why not embrace that? There’s no good in us, no hope.”
I opened my mouth to interrupt him, but then I held my tongue. Who was I to say anything? Were these not the thoughts I’d held for my entire immortal life? When did my mind change?
“When did your mind change, Louis?” Nicki asked softly.
I swallowed hard and then remembered my drink and sipped it again. How it burned. “I suppose when…At Trinity Gate. Yes. That’s when. I started to hope again while I lived there. I had a home again for the first time in decades. A home with people I loved.”
“Vampires.”
“Yes, vampires I loved,” I corrected. “But we lived like people. Just as Lestat and…Claudia… and I had done in New Orleans.” I wouldn’t let my mind settle on Claudia. I wouldn’t let myself sink down into her again. “I enjoyed that. To hear the music of the piano wafting through the house, to have films playing in the living room. To go out on the town with Armand. Yes. I felt something akin to hope.”
Nicki past me, face blank and cold. “I never feel that. Hope.”
Louis started to reach for him then pulled his hand back and took a drink instead. “You have to let it in. You have to…It’s hard. It’s painful. But you have to let it in and allow yourself to have it.” As Louis said it, the revelation washed over him. Yes. He had to let himself feel hope. He couldn’t deny himself that feeling. It was easy to waste away, easy to fade into the background. It was hard to hope and dream.
“We don’t deserve it, do we?”
“I think we do, yes.” Louis thought back to that night years ago when he sat in the Trinity Gate garden pondering his choice to leave New York and travel to Auvergne. Leaving what he had grown to know and love to throw his lot in with Lestat again and his newest wild idea. It was an immense leap of faith, perhaps the biggest one he’d taken since he chose to follow Lestat on this Devil’s Road. And yet, it had paid off, hadn’t it?
Lestat had been right. More right about this than, maybe, anything in his immortal life. Vampires were happy here. He was happy, Lestat was happy. Everyone in the Chateau was the happiest they’d ever been.
Nicki scoffed. “Happy, happy, happy. Happy as you dance your way to hell.”
“But I don’t think so,” Louis countered. “I mean…I did think so for…centuries. But I eventually learned it’s not true. That…Hell is…it’s not for us.”
“We’re not outside creation,” Nicki insisted.
“No. We’re…I believe God wants me to be happy. He wants me to follow the path I have before me. I determined that I’m a part of his plan: the way I am now. That this isn’t all wrong, Nicki.” I looked out the window toward the Chateau.
Nicki stood in frustration. “How can you say that? We are murderers. We revel in blood and horror. We are opposed to the plan of God!”
“It’s our nature,” I countered. If only Lestat could hear me now. The very words he told me back in our early days together. “We must kill to survive. If God’s creation is perfect, if God created all things, we are in His plan.”
Nicki snarled and raked a hand through his hair. I'd seen Lestat do something similar. It was strange to now see this man Lestat had spent such a formative part of his life with, to see themselves reflected in each other. “We are demons just as surely as Satan himself. We exist to torment the holy souls who follow God’s will. We can only belong in Hell.”
“Come sit,” I asked, trying to stay calm. “Whatever the case, this is the state of things, isn’t it?” I thought about it and the revelation, the fact I was about to say this out loud astounded me: “We’ve just got to do our best.”
Nicki turned around to face me, and he didn’t look angry or sad, but he also didn’t look hopeful. He sat and poured himself another drink. “Our best.”
“Yes. I,..think that’s what I try to do now. Live the best I can with the life I have.” I was in awe of my own feelings. Never had I admitted such a thing, but here I was realizing that I felt that way.
Nicki gave a half smile as he finished another glass and set it down hard on the table. His gaze was far away, and I waited quietly. After a few moments, anger started to bubble up and his nostrils flared. “That’s what I did when I became this. I decided I would do my best. I would be the best vampire I could be. You know, I decided to call it the Theatre of the Vampires. Lestat did not approve. He wanted to keep up this human masquerade, and that’s what he’s kept doing. He’s drawn you all in. Goodness…it isn’t what we’re destined for.”
That was a revelation. I had no idea Nicki had been the one who founded that doomed place, but I had no time to say anything before he continued.
“The only way for us to be ‘good’ is to be evil,” Nicki concluded.
I furrowed my brow. How could both of us arrive at such different conclusions from such a similar mortal mindset? “A human is innately born to sin, but can embrace goodness and--”
Nicki stood and threw his glass at me. I dodged and it shattered on the wall. “We are not children of God!”
I stood too, my temper flaring suddenly. “Have you seen God? Satan? Anything?”
Nicki collapsed in on himself, withering like a dying rose. “It’s just as Lestat said…all those years ago. There’s nothing. Nothing here. No answers.”
A chill swept through me. Did I believe that already? Is that why I didn’t fear God’s retribution? No. I didn’t believe that. There was something. There had to be. “Nicki, come with me. Come to the Chateau.”
Nicki still looked so small and powerless, so different from the powerful presence he’d been when I first came into the room, when he was playing. “How can something so evil ever be or do good?” he muttered, retreating into the shadowy corner of the room.
I moved closer to him. I reached out again. “We can show you if you’ll come.”
But he was gone. He had disappeared into the shadows.
And suddenly I’d never left Lestat’s bed in the Chateau. I gasped. I sat up. The metal window coverings had already slid back for the night and the moon shone through casting white light across the room.
Early rise that he was, I knew Lestat had been awake a while, maybe even two hours, but I hoped he was still in our rooms. I listened for a moment and heard him humming softly in the living room. I heard the crackling of the fire. I smiled to myself.
What a relief to smile when I think of him, to have these uncomplicated feelings of love. That wasn’t to say there wasn’t still complexity to our relationship, or that all was peaceful, but at least we knew that: we loved each other and that wouldn’t change.
I put on my robe and moved into the living room. Lestat was laying on a couch with his boots on the arm flipping through some papers. He was dressed for the night in a black t-shirt and jeans. He always looked dashing, even in something that simple.
He gave me a smile and went back to reading. I picked up his feet, sat on the couch, then plopped them back in my lap. I tugged off his boots. “You shouldn’t wear shoes on the couch,” I chastised softly.
Lestat hmmed and poked me with his toes. A sweet ache came over me as I watched him go back to his reading. The cozyness of it. The peace.
I rubbed my hand along Lestat’s shin and picked up the novel I’d laid on the side table last night. My eyes were on the words, but I wasn’t reading. Nicki’s words were coming back to me: We are murderers. We revel in blood and horror. We are opposed to the plan of God!
And yet we sit by the fire reading. There was hope, wasn’t there?