Luminary [Interview with the Vampire]

Don't want to lose it

His name was Elio.

Dressed in a blue, long-sleeved shirt and neatly pressed trousers, he was the very picture of a good boy. He kept his eyes on the floor when he entered the room as if hoping to disappear. But he hadn't wasted any time in getting down to business.

Sitting on the edge of Madeline's bed, he leaned back against her chest as she drank from his neck, savoring the taste and taking her time. Because she knew all too well how quickly a pint of blood could come and go with each feeding. Savoring the temporary sensation of his skin against her own, Madeline longed for the possibility of that feeling remaining. The way the blood brought her body alive, the way it made her feel things she never did any other time of the day.

But as the feeling was starting to sink in, Madeline felt a faint, tightening tug in her neck. Humming against Elio's neck, Madeline continued as the tug got more insistent. She knew it was going to start causing real pain in a minute, but she didn't care. If she could enjoy this for a moment more, Madeline was going to take the chance.

When the collar on her neck cut through, forcing her to feel the pain, she let go of Elio as she retracted her fangs.

"Are you satisfied?" he asked, as he applied pressure to the puncture wounds in his neck with the towel he'd brought.

"Mmm," she said, wiping his blood from the side of her lips as she licked it right off her fingers.

"I'll see you in eight hours," he said, rushing from the room and almost colliding into Felix who'd come in, still dressed in pajamas.

"Why do they always run out of your room like that?"

Madeline shrugged, still licking her finger, still sitting in the moment of her feeding so as not to let go.

"I was wondering," he said, falling onto the couch that was sitting against the wall by the door. "Do you hear anything from here?" he asked, pointing at Madeline's ceiling.

"Anything from where?" she asked looking up.

"They were there the whole night," Felix said. "How come we can't hear what happens in Louis's room but Lestat's room is like... normal?"

Madeline raised her eyebrows. "Why do you want to hear what's happening in Louis's room?"

"Get your mind out of the gutter," Felix chastised.

"You didn't care about this until Lestat got home so..."

"They were kissing and then Lestat went in there and didn't come out till this morning."

"Lestat's out?" Madeline asked, sitting up.

"Went down into the basement."

Madeline cringed, remembering the last time she'd been down there. The darkness. The exacerbated cold. The quiet. The loneliness. Nope, she never wanted to go down there ever again. She'd wait till Lestat came up to pester him.

"I haven't seen Louis though. Probably tired because of all the..." he clapped his hands together, multiple times as Madeline rolled her eyes.

"And you say your mind is not in the gutter."

"Is this where you are?" Antionette asked, peeping into the room as she rushed to Madeline's bed and took a dive into it, causing Madeline to get up and move to her desk chair. "What's up?"

"Felix's obsessed with grandpa and great-great-grandpa fucking," Madeline said.

"Eww," Antionette and Felix replied looking disgusted.

"Don't lie."

"I'm not obsessed with them," Felix said, lying across the couch with a forlorn expression on his face. "I just wish that were me."

"You wish you were fucking them?" Antionette asked.

"I wish I was fucking someone. I hate this." He raised his head. "Can you imagine living like this for centuries? How do vampires do it?"

"It's not that bad," Antionette said, turning on her stomach to look at Felix.

"I can barely feel my toes. Or my dick."

"Is that all you think about?" Madeline asked.

"What do you mean you can't feel anything?" Antionette asked instead.

"It's all so numb," Felix complained. "No sensation anywhere."

"Not twenty-four hours a day, there's not."

Madeline and Felix turned to Antionette in matching expressions of confusion.

"Unless you have some special kind of deal with the vampire cosmos, how the fuck does your body feel anything?" Felix asked.

"When I'm feeding," Antionette replied, looking at both of them like they were the ones who were crazy. "Don't you feel something? Doesn't blood run through your veins?"

"Yes," Madeline agreed. "But how does that help? I just finished feeding and my body's already going numb again."

"Which is why you fuck while you're feeding," Antionette stated plainly.

"Fuck who?" Felix asked. Then his eyes widened in understanding. "No," he gasped.

"Yes," Antionette said with a nod.

"Who are we talking about?" Madeline asked.

"Her feeding staff," Felix asked, sitting up. "Antionette is fucking her feeding staff."

"Wait, are we allowed to do that?" Madeline asked, touching the place where her collar sat beneath her skin and wondering if it would let her have sex.

"It's what they're paid for."

"No, no." Felix wagged a finger. "They're paid for feeding not fucking."

"It's the same thing to a vampire."

"No, it's not," Felix said. "You'll dry up if you don't feed, but I'm pretty sure you can survive without fucking."

"Says who?" Antionette asked, sounding genuinely worried. "How the fuck have you two not been fucking anyone? It's been a month."

"Don't make it sound like we're the strange ones. You're the only one who's been fucking your food."

During her first feeding, when Levi had put the collar around her neck, Lestat hadn't said anything about sex. He'd regulated her feeding and that was it. Maybe he hadn't said anything because it wasn't the same. As Felix said, sex and feeding were different. Maybe if she... she sighed and slumped against her chair. How shameful would it be to try and fuck someone only to end up screaming in pain because her collar was going haywire?

She could just ask Lestat.

There was a part of her that didn't think he would be invested in her sex life at all. She was an adult. She could do whatever she wanted. Besides, if it was that taboo, how come Antionette had been getting away with it?

"Hey," Antionette said, tossing a pillow at Madeline's head. "Why are you so quiet?"

Madeline shrugged. "I don't want to get in any trouble."

"Since when?" Antionette frowned.

"I don't know," she said, touching the collar again. She hadn't told any of her friends about it.

She'd resigned herself to feeling dry and sensationless till she got her own fairy and even then, she'd never really understood what it felt like to have one. But every time she remembered Claudia's scent, Madeline's cold heart felt even colder at the notion that she might never be granted her own. That her friends would go on to be revived by fairy blood, while she was left to lurk in the shadows, a cold husk of a woman with nothing but daily square meals of reluctant pints of human blood. Forever collared for her one mistake.

Lestat didn't feed on humans. He ate human food instead. He bled like a human. He flinched away from contact like a human would. With the blood of a fairy flowing through his veins, he was practically a human being again. It was no wonder that the chieftaincy wanted what he had.

No wonder that Madeline also wanted what he had.

It was just too unfortunate that she'd somehow managed to get the chance and lose it, in such a short time.