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Claudia had been told stories of what it had been like—the old folks with scars on their backs and faces and with their permanently stooped posture, had talked about it sometimes—very rarely though, because of course, they didn’t like to think about these things. They told stories of their own (well, mostly others’) failed attempts at getting free before the Emancipation really took effect. The mean glints in the slave catchers' eyes, the triumphant coldness and gut-roiling anger coming off the master when his prodigal slave was returned. The punishments that would inevitably occur if they didn’t butcher you first.
Claudia’s old auntie and the great-grandad in the children’s home usually told these stories to make the kids feel grateful they weren’t being cut with whips or torn to pieces by dogs when they got beaten by the adults for misbehaving or for wandering too close to the white folks’ side of town without supervision or for being careless with their clothes or any of the hard-earned possessions in the house. The kids had to be grateful that they even had these wizened grown-folks teaching them how to act, so they didn’t end up in a tree with a broken neck and no way down. It accounted for many abuses, these stories—not like things weren’t bad enough between colored folks and whites now. Similar stories happened plenty, nowadays, even though no one legally belonged to anyone anymore. Some things never changed, but it sure justified a lot of at-home beatings because they were “not as bad.” Even though she would wonder grimly how bad it was supposed to get, she took it all back then, because she knew she would grow up soon, and not one more person would ever get to touch her again. She would make sure of it.
Claudia was reminded of these stories and of this small but unrealized dream as she heard her undead father decapitate the porter and leap into the luggage car with a jaunty skip and a cruel, triumphant smile on his face. Her heart pounded recklessly as she ducked behind a suitcase, delaying the inevitable.
And then he was looming over her, malice in his eyes.
After he made his vilest threats, and she had cried enough from the horror of it to dampen the terror she felt, she was able to come out of her protective shell, and when she reluctantly looked up again, it was to find Lestat’s red right hand outstretched. “Come now,” he commanded.
She got to her feet without his help and tried not to look at the dog in the cage with its now gory muzzle.
Lestat sighed and grabbed her wrist, tightening his grip when she tried to yank away.
“Let go of me!” she struggled. “I’m not a child for you to grab and bully around like this! And I’m not your fucking dog!”
“Then stop behaving like a child and being as much of a liability as someone’s dumb pet!”
She finally jerked free of him (or maybe he let her go), falling against a tower of suitcases and watching him with hatred and fear in her eyes. Lestat’s lips were tight against his teeth, and his nostrils flared now. She knew he was on the last dregs of his patience.
“Fine,” he said with a forced lightness to his voice. “But if I turn around, Claudia, and you are not behind me or you have run off again, there will be immense unpleasantness waiting for you when I find you.”
“You don’t have to make more threats, Lestat, you’ve already killed half the train.”
“Just giving you fair warning, ma petite. Allons. ” He grabbed her trunks, gave her one more warning look, and walked back through the doors in between the train cars and jumped off before speeding by foot in the direction of Rue Royale.
Claudia hesitated only three seconds before following him, not one part of her doubting his threat.
Once arrived beyond the gates of their house, Lestat opened the door and gestured brusquely for her to enter. Snatching back her luggage, for she did not like Lestat touching her things, she stiffly walked inside.
“Living room,” he directed her before she could walk beyond the foyer.
“I’m going to bed.”
“No, sister-daughter, you will listen to me for once, and sit in the living room. I want Louis to see you’re home safe and sound the second he walks through the door. And then we are going to have yet another family discussion.”
“Why pull Louis into this?”
“Because you both must understand a few things. Now, écoutez!” he thundered, snapping his fingers and pointing. “Sit!”
She turned her burning eyes on him, hackles raised in indignation, but began calmly, “I have to put my things—”
“No,” he cut her off, face red with rage and eyes blackening. “Do as I tell you, fledgling.” She shrank resentfully under his gaze, and after a moment, she turned on her heel and went to sit.
From the foyer, Lestat took a calming breath and tugged on his tie, loosening it. He cleared his throat and attempted to break the ice in a more casual tone and volume. “He will be here any minute now. Or he should be. Who knows? Your father has been rather suicidal lately. I thought you knew.”
Claudia pursed her lips and bit the inside of her cheek, piercing it and suckling on the blood for some kind of sensory diversion as she set down her bags and sat, smoothing her red dress.
Satisfied that she would obey, Lestat walked beyond her to the disused kitchen, ran the tap briefly, then returned with his own handkerchief, dampened. He moved to wipe her cheeks of the salty, blood tears dried on her face, but she avoided his touch with distaste. Sighing, he dropped the cloth into her lap. “Clean your face.”
“I ought not to even call you my brother.”
“You can call me what you like. I’m sure you have many choice names for me, secretly communicated between you and Louis.”
“You’re a slave master, but I ain’t calling you that.”
“Mon Dieu, that jibe again! I needn’t even defend myself because anyone can see that you are so spoiled! Relentlessly resentful and unkind, bitterly resistant to any mild discipline or reprimand—rotten apple child! What would you have me do? Let you run amok? Lead our entire family into destruction?!”
“I can take care of myself!”
“But I did not make you for yourself, I made you for Louis!” There it is, Claudia thought, folding over her knees and covering her ears with her hands so she wouldn’t have to feel the gut-wrenching ugliness of his words, but it was no use against his loudness. “And the least that you can do, since we saved you from being a burnt little apple tart—dead!—or worse, alive with no prospects and not a chance of real happiness in this cruel world we inhabit, is to behave as though you have a scrap of loyalty, even when it doesn’t serve you!”
At this, she lifted her head, suppressing the hysterical laugh bubbling up within her, lest she be proven to truly be her devil-father’s daughter, someone she felt she couldn’t help but to become over the years. Lestat seemed to know exactly what she was going to say before she said it, and he looked down with shame and annoyance.
“Loyalty? You wanna talk about loyalty? You dropped the love of your wretched life from the sky and then left! Not a word! Didn’t even try to help! Barely even bothered to check on him, didn’t try to heal him with any blood, just left! I was practically scraping him off the ground! I basically brought him back to life after you tried to kill him! Months and months trapping rodents and pigeons for him to eat! Would you have done any of that? No.
“You blow up when things don’t go your way or you run off when you’re confronted with your own reflection with your tail tucked between your legs! And I kept wondering—why didn’t you just abandon Louis all those years I was gone? Is it because you loved him selflessly? No. It’s because you can’t be alone! You’re a coward where I have been unfazed. Talking about how I can’t handle myself when I’m alone—that’s just you you’re talking to! Talking about loyalty, when I, the one you two brought into this mess, have loved him with all I’ve got in me, and he still chose you?
“Ha! It’s almost funny. But you know what? I feel no shame for what I could have done or should have done because I know I put my life down for him. Sure, I’m sorry to Louis that I left him with you when I was a kid, but I needed it, and I’d do it again! Don’t tell me what I should know about loyalty, when you haven’t been loyal to that precious, foolish man since you met him!”
“Claudia!” Lestat interrupted, for he suspected she might go on forever, with as much anger that she held for him in her prepubescent body. Lestat looked around the room and cleared his throat unnecessarily. “I…. I was very wrong for… for doing that. I never—” He stopped himself, looking to the ceiling as if it could help him to regain control of his emotions and of this conversation. “I never would have… I never should have… I have many things objectionable about me. I would be the first to admit it if you weren’t so punctual at pointing out all my faults. I have been…unfaithful to your father, but that is our own private… and I know I have a temper. I have worked on it. I am still working on it.
“But you cannot understand the torture we subjected the other to for the entire seven years of your absence. When you experience feelings as magnanimous as I have for your father, you may understand, but only he can hurt me the way he does. My infidelity started as a way to get him to… to notice me. To want me. You don’t understand how hard it is to feel unwanted—unneeded.” Claudia scoffed. “By the person you have only the most intense, ardent, and amorous feelings for,” he clarified. “So that night you came back, it all came out in an ugly, ugly explosion. I am sorry for it. I am sorry I was so cowardly and ashamed as to leave you to clean up the aftermath and to nurse Louis back to health. I never thanked you for your excellent caretaking. But Claudia, I am trying to—”
“I don’t care about yours and his romance. All I care about is that you hurt him. You hurt each other. No matter what you feel, you’re not good for each other, and you bring each other down. You bring him so low. Do you know what it did to me to see him like that? What the memory still does to me?”
Lestat’s lips parted but he seemed at a loss, and she thought his eyes looked red and guilty, but she pushed on.
“As if you even care. You never cared about me or my feelings. Me, your daughter. If you ever loved me as your daughter. You just try and keep me happy enough with your gifts. Your money? It’s trash to me! Trash! I can get my own money! I can survive on my own! It’s you who infantilizes me! It’s you who makes Louis think he can’t do nothing for himself anymore! He is the smartest, most capable man you could ever meet, but he feels like he’s gotta be half himself so you can feel like you’re taking up enough space! I hate what you do to him! But I didn’t tell him he couldn’t have you back, because I love him so much, and I know he’s gotta learn these things himself.”
Lestat was shaking his head. “You never knew Louis before the fires, Claudia, so you don’t know what he is capable of. He is capable of everything you think, and more. He is a fire. Cleansing and landscape altering—leaving behind a richness of nutrients for the ground. And like a fire he is also destructive. He has turned his fires inward on himself since saving you, calmed by your presence and content to pour himself into another life, but even before he rescued you, he was starving himself, working himself to madness, staying up mornings, devising plan after plan to prove himself to the world, to redeem himself; more than that, trying to purge his body of some disease he believes he has—all that Catholic shame.
“I swear I would burn all the churches in New Orleans if it would free him, but it wouldn’t. I’ve had to accept that he’s just like this. It is not me who makes him small—in fact I spend a great deal of time trying to persuade him to be more himself. But does he listen? No. Everything that comes out of Lestat’s mouth is wickedness and deception. Hm?”
Agitatedly, he took out a cigarette and put it between his lips, about to light it, then at the scathing look from Claudia, rolled his eyes and put it away. They weren’t supposed to smoke in the house. It left a smell and ruined fabrics and furniture, and Claudia detested it.
“But I do love him. And it is as you said…he must learn these things himself.”
“Then what’s the point of keeping me here if he must learn? I’m only holding him back. Both of you.”
“No, ma chérie, you are quite necessary to his happiness. And I, for one, like to keep my family within reach. I doubt you would so much as send me a postcard, with the current state of our relationship.”
“So now you’re pretending it’s for our benefit, yours and mine? Our relationship is in shambles because you’re a tyrant, and I will not be your subject. You have to let me go someday, Lestat, and I will never come to love you again if you don’t give me my freedom.”
Lestat groaned, “Assez! Do you think I like keeping you here? You take after me, you know, I understand your frustration. But I wish I had someone who cared about me remotely as much when I was your age.”
Claudia folded her arms. “I don’t want to hear your anecdotes of a vampiric childhood abandoned, Lestat. I want you to let me go.”
“With as much as you have to learn, it is out of the question,” Lestat said, waving his hand and finally sitting on the couch across the room.
“You are the worst, most despicable person I have ever had the displeasure of knowing.”
“Ah, really?” Lestat inquired caustically. “Worse than Bruce?”
Claudia grimaced at the name but tried to compartmentalize as she insisted, “Yes. Because we have a history. We used to get along—you used to like me. You never loved me like you love Louis, or how Louis loves me, I always knew that, but you did care. A lot, maybe.” Lestat’s face was a hard mask, and she knew she had hit a nerve—some soft, unguarded spot. “When did it stop, huh? Soon as I started thinking for myself—wanting things for myself? When I grew into my nature, just as you taught me? Ironic, isn’t it?”
“I do care for you, fledgling. Very much. More than I can express to you in words, not that you would believe me. If I didn’t care so much, I would not find it worthwhile to continue teaching you as I do, and so would have long since stopped trying.”
“I don’t want any more of your teaching. The more I learn, the more I want, and the more I want, the more you hate me. Besides, I can teach myself.”
“You are impossible. You may understand if you ever had a child of your own…which you never will, I suppose, ach, I don’t know why I said it.”
Claudia’s arms fell limply into her lap, and she stared down at the floor, willing the sting of his words to hurt less. “Why do you have to be so cruel to me?”
“I didn’t mean to say it, it’s something parents say all the time—it slipped out. I wasn’t trying to mock you.”
“I don’t believe you. You use Bruce’s name like a weapon against me, and you threatened to kill me tonight, so why not mock me for being too small and weak to make a vampire of my own? To make anyone who can love me? I bet it makes you real happy.”
Lestat looked genuinely confounded by this. “Why would that make me happy? In truth it’s exhausting how much it pains me you have to live like this because of me. For you, the only truly hideous thing I feel is pity.”
“Save your exhausting pity.”
“I don’t mean that meanly. I just wish I could take it all back…that I might never have made you or that you were older when we did. You really are a very powerful and impressive fledgling.”
Claudia rolled her eyes. Lestat probably only took pride in this because he considered her his own creation.
Not appreciating her disdain, Lestat continued with a hardened voice, “While Louis has tried to raise a child he can fawn over, I have been trying to raise you into a vampire who can survive. While you may not like it, it’s what you need. Prodigious though you are, you cannot think to survive in Europe on your own. I know this for a fact. It’s laughably stupid for you to even try. We won’t be in New Orleans forever, rest assured, but before you get so overconfident, I think you should sharpen your abilities at home and for the family's good, hm? Instead of being exploited by whomever is out there preying on your shelteredness.”
“Maybe I would if you ever taught me anything that you know how to do.”
“For the last time, the Cloud Gift is not something that can be taught to someone willy-nilly, if you don’t have it, then you don’t have it, end of discussion, brat!” She glowered at the floor, staunchly unconvinced.
In one ear, out the other, Lestat fumed. He tossed his hair back and took a deep breath.
“Like I said, Louis needs you more than ever, and I am not one to let Louis suffer when it is in my power to help him.”
“Wrong—it’s in my power. And it’s doing him no good, you keeping me here as the family dog.”
Lestat sighed harshly through his nose, what little patience he had rationed evaporating rapidly. “Maybe not. But maybe if you learned your role and did your part in this precarious game of compromise, you could be more autonomous within our family dynamic.”
“I don’t need you to tell me how I can earn autonomy in our family dynamic, Lestat, thank you though,” she answered coldly. Patronizing motherfucking asshole, she seethed.
Lestat glared into the empty fireplace. “Only you can make me so furious, ma petite.”
This made Claudia feel a little smug. After a moment, she finally took up Lestat’s cold, damp handkerchief and cleaned her eyelashes of the clumping, caked blood and her cheeks too—her temples from where her tears flew as they dashed home. She really was looking a mess. Lestat watched her clean her face out of the corner of his eye. Claudia noticed but didn’t demand who the hell he was looking at. She felt tired.
Lestat got up and turned on the radio before sitting down again. The news was dismal.
“Hmph. Good thing I collected you before all of this began, hm, chérie?”
I’d rather the bombs than this covert war at home, she thought to herself.
She stiffened in her chair when she heard Louis lumbering home, his melancholy thoughts audible as ever. His loudest thoughts: What am I doing? What do I endure for if not for her? He doesn’t deserve… I don’t deserve….
The sound of his foot scraping away the salt circle. Lestat perked up with relief when he heard him do it, too. It was so close to sunrise. It had been hours. Lestat gave Claudia a smug, victorious look that cheered in the knowledge that soon he would have his fledglings under his knowledgeable and benevolent control and on the path to familial wholeness.
“Louis, listen,” he said, raising a finger before she could say a word of warning. Louis’ full attention was on him. She wanted to disappear. She didn’t want him to know what had happened tonight.
But when he caught sight of her and she heard his heart skip several beats and saw his throat nervously clench around a dry swallow, she felt a new fire stoking her rage, that Lestat could make him afraid for her—could make her sweet, naive old dad feel this helpless.