One left, the guy who'd stumbled, staring after his leader with a perplexed expression at being left behind. Daniel throws a hand out, catches him in the throat, claws going in first. Skin and sinew split and blood gushes out, he makes a fist around the windpipe and pulls, yanking out the fleshy cartilage tube and strips of muscle. The vampire makes a horrendous sound and falls to the ground, wracked with spasms from a wound that, while not fatal, is not going to heal enough to make him functional anytime in the next several months.
Good enough for now. Daniel is otherwise preoccupied with Lestat, feeling the block on his brain and—
Gonna hurt. He reaches in anyway, into the psychic tangle, grabs Lestat's proverbial hand, come on, just shrug it off, you can, you can—
"I only have one emergency contact, get the fuck up."
A threat to call Armand has to work.
And then!
Daniel realizes he has more than one emergency contact, swears, and fumbles with bloody hands for his phone.
It feels like Daniel is levering open a bear trap, just as ready to snap back and crush if it slips. This is not true, probably, but the command shivers, tense, as it's drawn back.
Enough braincells align on Lestat's end of things, not not induced by the threat of an Armand summoning, and there is the sense for Daniel of clawing hands climbing up his arm as he assists in his own rescue. Up on all fours, one foot sliding out and a knee striking concrete as if operating under heavy gravity, but here, he is fine, eyes wild with rageful blood tears and fangs long enough in his mouth that it distorts his words as he says—
"I'm going," informative, as assuring as words through gritted teeth can be, and maybe as much to himself as to Daniel. The hilt of the sword is snatched at, metal scraping along as he works on getting his feet under him. No idea what's happening with the phone, who could possibly help in this moment, shoved aside as irrelevant as the last of that odd sense of gravity is shaken loose.
He had heard a revved engine, a sliding metal door. He can scent the elder vampire on the wind, and Louis, through the smells of blood and scorched vampire flesh, and it won't last. But it's a start.
The latter part isn't important. Just follow him, get him back. Daniel isn't stupid enough to try and talk to Louis directly, but he reaches out with his mind anyway, aware he'll probably run into a tangle of that woman elder's abilities but needing to try to get a sense of where he is regardless.
His Talamasca contact picks up almost as soon as Daniel has tapped the call button.
"Keep eyes on that van," he says, confident he'll be understood by the squawking answer of 'MOLLOY WHAT THE FUCK', "Don't approach it, just track it, and forward it to me, and where's your nearest fucking car? Right now?"
He stomps on the struggling vampire's ragged neck until the head comes off, and then he runs to the edge of the building. The building, the fucking Met, and looks down at the street—
'Brown sedan.'
"Got it."
Ends the call, jumps down - at least he can do this, at least he's been practicing running around like a fucking idiot - and a heartbeat later hears the squeal of tires as said sedan speeds towards him only to slam on the brakes. Daniel hurls himself into the passenger side. His double-take at least doesn't stun him for long when he sees the grim-faced driver, but Agent Real Rashid does still peel out before he's got the door properly closed.
"You're shitting me."
"They thought I might convince you to maintain open communication."
With the kind of deranged determination of some starving predator, Lestat follows that scent first, leaping up onto the bulkhead, disappearing from view, moving, looking down over the edge at the empty street. Reckless, lashing out with psychic fury to find a direction—no ability to pinpoint Louis' presence, but there, a fast moving gaggle of vampiric youths, a growling engine,
and a kind of dark spot in the midst of it, her, this elder, that he cannot look at closely, not without being drawn into that crushing gravity. It spills out into the minds of her little followers, threatens to notice him. Draws back. Feels less like fear, finally, as it does going still so as not to attract the attention of quarry.
It's quiet, too, when he ascends into the sky, high enough that the city below takes on an abstract quality of lights, lines, blotches of shadow. His heart beating heavier, pumping blood through him that all at once feels richer, thicker. Tastes it on his tongue, feelings it vibrating beneath his skin. Feels the animal he had been a moment ago, panicked and rageful, draw itself behind this other thing he is, which steps forward. The wind is cold, bracing, clarifying. It takes less effort than it did before to once again feel the presences within the vehicle, the direction of the vehicle.
Wills himself towards it, and flies like a steady, controlled plummet.
Daniel's right hand is still blood-soaked as he scrambles for the laptop in the back seat - still open from observation, whoever bailed out so that Rashid could take over hadn't had the time to so much as log out - and he gets sticky, red fingerprints on it before hurriedly pawing at his jeans and the car seat to clean enough to function.
"Do you know who she is?"
Rashid doesn't, not off the top of his head. It all happened too fast. So Daniel begins searching while they follow the van, cutting several traffic violations very close. A tense lack of conversation, but no silence, the sound of the car being pushed to its mechanical limits, honking horns from other drivers, ambient chaos, Daniel's pulse hammering anxiously in his ears.
Why take him? Why? Why not just try to kill all three of them? Either there's a plan for Louis, or it's some fucked up coven policy, like the Parisians offering a poisoned welcome to Madeleine. Louis, marked as the criminal alone. Or, she doesn't fancy getting into a brawl with more than one of them at the same time.
Daniel keeps Louis in the forefront of his focus. A hand clutching the back of his shirt in a crowd. Don't you fucking lose me.
Less several young ones, unlucky enough to be standing too close to Louis in the split second between landing on the sidewalk and being led into the truck. A trio of young vampires go shrieking down the street, eaten up in columns of flame. (Somewhere, baffled New Yorkers upload videos to Instagram, speculate as to what might be filming. Has anyone noticed permits posted?) The remainder surround Louis in a near-crushing mob, wrestling him up and into the back of the truck. They suffer for it, scorches and torn flesh, shrieks the whole way through. A minor inconvenience for his host, judging by her reaction. Veers more towards annoyance than sincere loss.
In the end, she exerts herself to expedite their departure. Drives a spike into Louis' mind, twists it viciously. Louis loses some time. Returns to himself with the cuffs already fastened, chains cinched securely across his chest, the paralytic working its way through his veins. She is crouched beside him, hand in his hair, studying him too intently for the gesture to be mistaken for even the coldest of comforts. Louis' lips peel back off his teeth, fangs still dropped, still bloody. She drags a clawed fingertip across them, soft click of contact, then vanishing as Louis' jaws snap down.
There are so many who have been waiting to meet you, She tells him, threat implicit in the words. You've been difficult to find.
"I laid out the red carpet for you to trip over," Louis reminds. "Not so good at following directions?"
The woman smiles. Her power flexes once more, a second twist of power dug in at the base of his spine, entire body spasming in agony. His vision swims gray around the edges. She digs fingers into his hair.
I'd try to recover some manners before our arrival, comes dispassionately, at odds with the eager gleam in her eyes. It might save your lovely face.
Louis snarls wordlessly back at her, and she smiles, tells him, Here. Let us practice, and digs the talons of her power deeper into his mind, plunging them both into inky darkness.
The gentle drifting around that vampires have demonstrated, as far as flight capability goes, does not promise any particular ability to keep up with a moving vehicle. The fact that this moving vehicle is in the middle of a dense city helps, but all the same, neither Armand in Dubai or Santiago in Paris demonstrated a faster pace than walking speed, maybe a light jog. Not like Superman, Louis had asserted.
Only technically flight, maybe, at this point, or a kind of precise, well-aimed falling, as Real Rashid peels around a corner to tail after the van in time to see a figure drop from the sky like a stone.
Within the van, possibly too muffled by pain and psychic torment for Louis to register, it sounds like a shotgun going off when impact is made. Splintered glass, dented metal, and a metallic shriek as this landing brings with it a sword blade piercing through the roof of the cab, down to split between shoulder and clavicle of the driver.
Doesn't kill him right away, but his hands spasm, and the van swerves violently, sends a civilian vehicle panicky swerving out of the way and crashing into a signpost. Vampires inside, rattled.
The van lurches. Goes faster. Someone in the passenger seat lunging to course correct. Above, crouching, Lestat twists the hilt. It produces some gurgling sounds from the driver.
'Her name is Eimear,' Daniel says to Lestat, not long after he lands like a volleyball being spiked from fucking outer space, paradoxically calm-sounding despite his expression and posture from the vantage point of the careening sedan. 'Three hundred and eightyish. List of fledglings is half a mile long.'
Other details are in there, like an expulsion from the British Isles region for beefing with the established coven there and a blip-on-the-radar appearance in Toronto, but Daniel can't focus on them. Feeling panic strangle him about Louis, and the way he feels so muffled. This seems like the most vital information. Potential power range, experience, how diluted her attention and her presence might be. Is that the right shit to convey?
Has to be.
Fuck.
A block ahead, a young woman plows a limousine in past an intersection and begins a tire-squealing three point turn to block as many lanes as possible, before throwing the parking brake and diving out of the vehicle. A mortal, all she can do is book it as fast as possible in the other direction, and pray. Her handlers are arguing blisteringly furious in her earpiece, and she's pretty sure one of them is Raglan, who is actually laughing.
Now-named Eimear rides Louis down into the dark. Her fingers catching him by the chin, almost a caress, as she roots through his head. Twisting, tweaking. Pain is in the mind, and she can evoke agony beyond anything Louis has experienced here, inside his head.
He can feel her glee. They are mingled so close; this is an intimate kind of torture, invasive. Delicate. Bypassing memory and touching nerves and senses, setting them aflame.
And then the whole truck jolts. Swerves erratically. A distraction, twitching Eimear's attention for a split second. Just time enough for Louis to gather all his fury and rage and use it to propel her away, expelling her, clawing out of the dark in her wake.
Her expression is dark with anger, brows drawn together as she hisses. The truck is going too fast, and the two of them are sliding, Louis' chains clanking, clattering, against the floor. He snarls at her, she twists her fingers harder in his hair. She drags him upright, spiking him to the wall of the truck just as Louis expends a last push of strength outward.
Eimear catches abruptly on fire, flame licking up her body, catching in her hair. A wild gamble in an enclosed space, but the one hand Louis has to play.
The ensuing scream carries, magnified and echoing, underscored by the grind of sword-split metal from the cab.
Outside a bodega, a cluster of college students are holding up their phones as the truck speeds by, chattering confused at the spectacle.
Swearing and hissing in the cab as the impaled driver bleeds hot and fast, and his pal is trying to steer, trying to coax his foot off the gas, considers if it would actually be more useful if the driver was simply proper dead, but here we are.
The sword is left behind. Which co-pilot can tell, because it remains there, wedged in metal, and he can hear something moving above.
Eimear, who has over a century on him, who has her own gifts, he's sure. Lestat climbs his way across the roof, hand over hand, claws digging in for stability, eyes black and hair everywhere and this will probably make a good album cover too. It is not actually useful information for Daniel in particular when Lestat replies with, 'She burns', serene in delivery despite the objective chaos he is experiencing and causing.
Reaches over the side, grasping the handle of the sliding door. Within the van, the sound of locks being psychically forced into giving way, which only benefits Lestat in that he can open it enough to get his fingers in and then heave, snapping the door off and away with more strength than expected, careening off somewhere to cause some property damage they all zoom past.
A flare of fire whips out of the open space. Lestat, moving with a vaguely arachnid agility to climb in, reaching to grasp scorched flesh and burning hair.
As if flung from an airlock, Louis will see the burning vampiress hauled backwards, and then up (up and away).
Rashid says something so vulgar that Daniel thinks he hallucinates it. Weird, honestly, which thing he's currently experiencing that he assumes is a hallucination.
Sure, he thinks, watching Lestat abduct an on-fire vampire.
'Car's gonna hit something in ten seconds,' he sends to Louis, and says it out loud at the same time, which prompts Rashid to start trying to slow down. Daniel thinks please hear me please be awake please let the fire be a sign you are awake and not dying from whatever was in there, is that a fucking chain, what the fuck—
A door handle smacks into the windshield, sending a spiderweb crack through it, but it holds. Is this a Toyota?
The van doesn't stop, and though it begins to lose speed as dead weight is finally lifted off the gas pedal, it's not soon enough. Daniel is off, it's more like twelve seconds, but the van does collide with the limo, no squeal of tires, no attempt at braking, BAM, a bomb-like noise of the hit and shattered glass everywhere. The t-boned vehicles skid further down the road for a few meters and grind to a halt, and Daniel hears sirens before Rashid will be able to, and he repeats the extremely vulgar thing.
Not for long. Up, out, to the ruined mangle of van-limo-hybrid creature.
"Louis?!"
There are still two guys in the front. The limo driver (technically, the limo thief) is still going at a dead sprint, though she's starting to feel very lightheaded.
Alert, for the moment, entire body singing with adrenaline and flayed raw by Eimear's tinkering with his nervous system, Louis has a brief glimpse of Lestat, and then he is abruptly alone in the back of the van. Dangling from the side of the box truck's interior, Louis lets himself sag, exhausted, right up until—
A voice. Daniel.
Ten seconds isn't not good information to have. Louis is only lacking much ability to act on it. The paralytic is burning out of his system, but not fast enough that Louis can meaningfully brace for impact.
The impact must coincide with whatever success Lestat is having. Louis is flung forward, cratering into the divider between the interior of the truck and the cab. Has movement enough to kick himself free of the debris. Can hear pained groans from beneath the crumpled metal, and takes some vicious satisfaction in it.
I'm okay. projected into Daniel's head, words like a hand pressing to Daniel's cheek, moments before Louis realizes he can see Daniel looking at him from the gap left by the missing door. Had banked, maybe, on a few minutes to assess how presentable he looked, but here they are, apparently.
"There's two still alive," Louis reports, from within the mangle of the truck's interior. "One only just. Where's Lestat?"
A streak of light, first, where fire trails in their wake, before this is extinguished into a smear of smoke, and they vanish into the sky, obscured by looming city buildings from anyone's position on the street.
Vicious, this fight, both of them locked together like two feral cats unwilling to break apart and cede territory or opportunity. Claws dig, jaws bite, and some maddened scramble of psychic wrestling transpiring on another plane of existence entirely. But Eimear's pain is easier to access than Lestat's, her body freshly immolated, her mind ablaze with fury, and even beyond these elements—
Muscle and bone crumbles beneath a hand at her side. Another snaps her neck. Easy in a way it should not be, not against her, even injured, even as his fangs find her neck and pulls blood from her heart, barely even drinking it where it flows past his mouth. In that moment of frantic connection, she might sense it, like seeing the larger, monstrous shadow that he should not be able to cast, and understand that victory was never possible.
He will deposit pieces of her into the water from on high, with the lazy apathy of a shark now swimming away from its own frenzy.
Daniel's expression is a clash of terror-adrenaline-relief, Louis is alright, and the force of that reveal is powerful enough to make him forget how fucking pissed off he is at him for right now. He rips a piece of metal from the car frame, a bit separating the front window from the bulk of the van cavity.
"He's—"
Up, potentially about to drop a vampire to the ground? It sticks in Daniel's throat, but only for a second.
"Fine. Come on, we have to move."
"Mr du Lac?"
Hey, Rashid is here, by the way. Daniel scrambles around to the crushed front end so he can drive his makeshift stick through the living, but dazed, vampire's head. No idea if this will cause death, but it will cause a stop for now.
"Law enforcement and fucking Tiktok! Very fucking soon, move!"
"Rashid?" echoes only slightly from the mangle of the van. Louis' tone is somewhere between amused and pleased and faintly irritated. Talamasca in his home, Louis has yet to truly measure that transgression among all the rest that he's been accounting for recently.
Now, however, is not the time.
Louis kicks his way from the interior, emerging with a tangled clanking of titanium chain. Bloody, ash-streaked, tired. Louis is all of these things, but he is upright. Briskly hooks the loop of the chain on some remaining, jagged bit of the van to use as leverage to break the loops of chain from his body.
Amid the creaking and cracking of chain link and metal, Louis questions, "Is that the car we'll be leaving in?"
Rashid doesn't even have enough shame to look sheepish. Daniel assumes he's been partially lobotomized by the spook librarians.
Are these crippled vampires dead? Daniel doesn't think so— heads kind of on, if mangled, not burned even though there's so much smoke and ash from Louis' pyrowhatever. Should he, just. Well. He does what he thinks he should, which is shove his hand into the cavity he's created in the passenger vampire's head and yank so that it detaches from his body. It thunks back into the wreckage, flopping against the barely-alive driver.
He feels far away.
"Yeah," he hears himself say, about the car with the cracked windshield. He watches himself walk back around and look at Louis.
"Are you okay?"
Daniel doesn't feel any urgency from his distant vantage point, dizzy and greyish, but Rashid must, because he ushers them towards it with all the precision he had used to delivery drinks and newspapers.
The looming threat of law enforcement and TikTok is apparently motivation enough for Rashid to risk Louis' thin patience, hustling him into the backseat. A glimpse back as Rashid accelerates the car into a three-point turn and Louis can see a clutch of agents circling the remains of the wreckage. Louis doesn't let that hold his attention. That can certainly become the Talamasca's project.
A narrowed look from the backseat at Rashid, measuring the amount of years Rashid had moved within the penthouse. Considering what he wishes to do about the invasion of privacy involved in it.
But most immediately: Daniel.
Daniel, who has been robbed of the front seat by Louis' latched grip on his wrist. A split second of recognition, seeing something in Daniel's face that Louis knows very well, and wanting to keep him close more than he wants Daniel wielding an abandoned Talamasca agent's laptop.
Daniel's Are you okay? left by the wayside as Louis looks into his face. Touches his cheek, briefly. The titanium cuffs still gleaming on his wrists, ignored for the moment.
Boxes Rashid out of the conversation entirely by touching Daniel's mind, asking Are you with me?
Daniel has been alright as separating himself as he is now from mortals, from food, even during excursions with Lestat— he has to, there's no point starving to death, and the world is overpopulated anyway, full of soulless fucks, Daniel knows better than anyone, he sees to much in people, understands too much, has no problem deleting people.
Doesn't he? He just killed two vampires in grotesquely violent ways, and he had only recently struggled to communicate to Armand the ethical facade he's put up in himself to be alright with murder. Accepting blood from his maker to repair his head the rest of the way had tripped it, because he's only ever taken blood from mortals, and following that, until tonight, had only ever been violent with mortals, and something about the veil is shredded now, forcing him into looking at how he's existing.
A startle, when Louis touches his mind.
"Yeah," out loud, in-mind. The bad yeah, the lying one. He looks at him, looks down at their hands, frowns.
'You shouldn't have done that.'
Still not-quite-present. Freaking out, but quietly. He slides fingers around Louis' wrist and beneath the cuff, hating it.
'Help me with this,' he implores. He can tell it's made to be a pain in the ass, that it'll cut into Louis if he just yanks it, but they can probably do it without any damage with three hands. C'mon.
It would make Daniel very angry if Louis offered up the first thing that came to mind: You shouldn't have come after me.
Even if it feels true. If Louis is more concerned with how Daniel might have been hurt than about the cuffs on his wrist, about Eimear plucking at his nervous system until Louis screamed, about what might have waited for them at the end of the truck's route. Maybe nothing. Maybe just a quiet place for Eimear and her fledglings to strip the flesh from Louis' bones until here was nothing more of him.
Doesn't believe Daniel's Yeah, so refrains from asking if he can touch Lestat's mind. Has to content himself with fine as a placeholder for all his fears as Daniel fidgets with the cuff.
Rashid catches Louis' eye in the rearview mirror, and Louis' lip curls back off the silent threat of a sharp fang. Eyes front.
Touches Daniel's cheek again, eyes searching. Daniel, largely unharmed. Daniel, who did a fair share of violence tonight, and should have been spared it all. Louis' thumb runs along his cheek. He breathes out. Nods.
Alright, let's try, Louis acquiesces, hooking two fingers beneath the cuff alongside Daniel. Try because he is exhausted. Try because Eimear turned his pain receptors on at full force and as adrenaline begins to ebb, the shuddery after effect of that is gaining purchase.
Pisses him off that Louis was so ready to just volunteer himself, because he doesn't see it as a kind gesture to spare him, he sees it as Louis being careless about his own life. Even now, even with Daniel and Lestat here, he was just going to go and, what? Die? He continued to fight, sure, but he was happy to walk off the fucking edge, right into it.
Hurts to see Louis in chains, but he can tell in an instant what the problem is, so he stops, covers the cuff and Louis' hand with his own.
They're driving fast, but not action movie fast. Rashid is just getting them away, and probably won't start looping them back around to anyplace familiar until he's certain they're no longer being observed. Daniel stays like that for a long moment, just holding Louis' hand, somewhere being angry and dissociative.
Instead of communicating anything else to Louis, he tries Lestat.
'Told him you're fine, so you'd better be. Can you find us?'
'I'm fine,' sounds very peaceful, as a bloodied torso is dropped into the East River.
His actual reaction should be fierce relief that Daniel's words imply that Louis is alive, perhaps even well, but this information is absorbed as something that is good and correct, as expected. There is still a head to dispose of, and he drifts out a little further. Stops.
Evaluates the very grim, gory sight in his hands, this creature rent to meat. Butchery. It takes a moment to remember why he has done this thing, and when he does, it's easy to let decapitated head slip from his hands and plummet into the water below. 'Is,' Lestat starts, reaching for Daniel once more. 'Is he alright? Where are you both?'
He needs to go back, needs to find them, needs to see for himself that Louis is well, a tide of feeling that could shock him out of the sky if he let it.
'Tell me where to go.'
He could, probably, find them, but it would take longer without a clue.
"Hey," out loud, to the stone-faced driver whose existence continues to be an anomaly for many reasons, "Pull over. Don't argue, just, as soon as you can."
Rashid's attention flickers a little before he exchanges a look with Daniel in the rear-view mirror, apparently torn between leaning on the secret rapport they had during the interview (sorry Louis) and detached fear about the journalist's nature now. But he nods, and turns to pull them over into a residential area out of any major traffic crossings.
'Here.' Shown as best he can, offering a mental beacon. 'He's shaken, I don't know how bad, but in one piece. Help me get these fucking things off of him.'
A brief, shared image of Louis' hands. It unsettles Daniel in a major way. He just wants all traces of his bullshit gone. Doesn't ask if the woman is dead. He has complete faith in Lestat in that respect.
Having been content, momentarily, to lean into Daniel and let Daniel's hand cover his own. Turn his palm up, eventually, and tangle their fingers together. Let Rashid drive. Let the passing minutes without any new opposition manifesting lower the thud of adrenaline speeding Louis' heartbeat.
"Is he coming?" Louis asks, a question with an answer so clear that Louis doesn't bother to wait for one. Moves past it, winding into Daniel's mind as the car comes to a stop. As Louis straightens, slowly, from the heavy slouch he'd fallen into as they'd sped through the streets in silence.
Were you hurt?
Louis' impression is that Eimear had stayed her hand. That Daniel was not touched by whatever violence that followed.
It's only that he needs to hear it, he thinks. Needs to hear it while they wait for Lestat to reappear, so Louis can put aside at least one set of fears.
It doesn't take long. Moments, really, after the car has stopped, and the intuitive sense of his presence (more oppressive than it usually is, some aspect of himself still being tidied back between the lines) follows the sight of a figure landing on the road in front of the car. Elegant, dramatic—
Less dignity in the jog around to the door that would lead him to Louis. He is a sight since they last saw him, absolutely drenched in blood, soaked into his nice suit, hands gloved in drying gore, crimson up to his ears, higher in spatters. Wrenches open the door and enters with the uncomfortably bullish energy of a dog that doesn't realise it's about to get mud everywhere jumping in, oblivious.
Still a little glassily black eyed, fangs present, and this backseat is not designed to comfortably house three fully grown men which is why Louis has to take a knee to the thigh as Lestat insists on an embrace.
"Why did you do that," sounds agonised, angry, despite this tangle of limbs.
This doesn't sound like some badass, delusional assertion. There's tired, frustrated logic to it. But before any conversation can manifest, a big bloody mastiff is pawing into the car, and Daniel feels incredible relief that he hasn't lied to either of them, or himself. Everyone is fine.
Daniel knows why Louis did it but he keeps his mouth shut, because hollering at him is not going to help. Instead he looks forward, seeing the statue stillness of the mortal still in the driver's seat, expression a mask of blankness but knuckles very white on the wheel.
Yeah, makes sense.
"Out," Daniel tells him, and Rashid wastes no time. Daniel follows him, leaving Lestat and Louis in the car. Hopefully it looks enough like he's mind controlling a random jerk that it doesn't draw any attention— not that he thinks there's much of a chance of pulling Lestat away from what he's doing right this minute anyway.
(A few paces out,
"You're free, Double-oh-sixty-nine, fucking get out of here." A beat, and Rashid finally looks shaken. Daniel tells him, sincerely, Thank you, and agrees to talk to Raglan, and soon. Rashid has enough self-preservation not to glance back at the laptop as he makes his escape, handing the beat up car's keys to Daniel as he does.
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Good enough for now. Daniel is otherwise preoccupied with Lestat, feeling the block on his brain and—
Gonna hurt. He reaches in anyway, into the psychic tangle, grabs Lestat's proverbial hand, come on, just shrug it off, you can, you can—
"I only have one emergency contact, get the fuck up."
A threat to call Armand has to work.
And then!
Daniel realizes he has more than one emergency contact, swears, and fumbles with bloody hands for his phone.
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Enough braincells align on Lestat's end of things, not not induced by the threat of an Armand summoning, and there is the sense for Daniel of clawing hands climbing up his arm as he assists in his own rescue. Up on all fours, one foot sliding out and a knee striking concrete as if operating under heavy gravity, but here, he is fine, eyes wild with rageful blood tears and fangs long enough in his mouth that it distorts his words as he says—
"I'm going," informative, as assuring as words through gritted teeth can be, and maybe as much to himself as to Daniel. The hilt of the sword is snatched at, metal scraping along as he works on getting his feet under him. No idea what's happening with the phone, who could possibly help in this moment, shoved aside as irrelevant as the last of that odd sense of gravity is shaken loose.
He had heard a revved engine, a sliding metal door. He can scent the elder vampire on the wind, and Louis, through the smells of blood and scorched vampire flesh, and it won't last. But it's a start.
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The latter part isn't important. Just follow him, get him back. Daniel isn't stupid enough to try and talk to Louis directly, but he reaches out with his mind anyway, aware he'll probably run into a tangle of that woman elder's abilities but needing to try to get a sense of where he is regardless.
His Talamasca contact picks up almost as soon as Daniel has tapped the call button.
"Keep eyes on that van," he says, confident he'll be understood by the squawking answer of 'MOLLOY WHAT THE FUCK', "Don't approach it, just track it, and forward it to me, and where's your nearest fucking car? Right now?"
He stomps on the struggling vampire's ragged neck until the head comes off, and then he runs to the edge of the building. The building, the fucking Met, and looks down at the street—
'Brown sedan.'
"Got it."
Ends the call, jumps down - at least he can do this, at least he's been practicing running around like a fucking idiot - and a heartbeat later hears the squeal of tires as said sedan speeds towards him only to slam on the brakes. Daniel hurls himself into the passenger side. His double-take at least doesn't stun him for long when he sees the grim-faced driver, but Agent Real Rashid does still peel out before he's got the door properly closed.
"You're shitting me."
"They thought I might convince you to maintain open communication."
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and a kind of dark spot in the midst of it, her, this elder, that he cannot look at closely, not without being drawn into that crushing gravity. It spills out into the minds of her little followers, threatens to notice him. Draws back. Feels less like fear, finally, as it does going still so as not to attract the attention of quarry.
It's quiet, too, when he ascends into the sky, high enough that the city below takes on an abstract quality of lights, lines, blotches of shadow. His heart beating heavier, pumping blood through him that all at once feels richer, thicker. Tastes it on his tongue, feelings it vibrating beneath his skin. Feels the animal he had been a moment ago, panicked and rageful, draw itself behind this other thing he is, which steps forward. The wind is cold, bracing, clarifying. It takes less effort than it did before to once again feel the presences within the vehicle, the direction of the vehicle.
Wills himself towards it, and flies like a steady, controlled plummet.
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"Do you know who she is?"
Rashid doesn't, not off the top of his head. It all happened too fast. So Daniel begins searching while they follow the van, cutting several traffic violations very close. A tense lack of conversation, but no silence, the sound of the car being pushed to its mechanical limits, honking horns from other drivers, ambient chaos, Daniel's pulse hammering anxiously in his ears.
Why take him? Why? Why not just try to kill all three of them? Either there's a plan for Louis, or it's some fucked up coven policy, like the Parisians offering a poisoned welcome to Madeleine. Louis, marked as the criminal alone. Or, she doesn't fancy getting into a brawl with more than one of them at the same time.
Daniel keeps Louis in the forefront of his focus. A hand clutching the back of his shirt in a crowd. Don't you fucking lose me.
ldpdl update.
In the end, she exerts herself to expedite their departure. Drives a spike into Louis' mind, twists it viciously. Louis loses some time. Returns to himself with the cuffs already fastened, chains cinched securely across his chest, the paralytic working its way through his veins. She is crouched beside him, hand in his hair, studying him too intently for the gesture to be mistaken for even the coldest of comforts. Louis' lips peel back off his teeth, fangs still dropped, still bloody. She drags a clawed fingertip across them, soft click of contact, then vanishing as Louis' jaws snap down.
There are so many who have been waiting to meet you, She tells him, threat implicit in the words. You've been difficult to find.
"I laid out the red carpet for you to trip over," Louis reminds. "Not so good at following directions?"
The woman smiles. Her power flexes once more, a second twist of power dug in at the base of his spine, entire body spasming in agony. His vision swims gray around the edges. She digs fingers into his hair.
I'd try to recover some manners before our arrival, comes dispassionately, at odds with the eager gleam in her eyes. It might save your lovely face.
Louis snarls wordlessly back at her, and she smiles, tells him, Here. Let us practice, and digs the talons of her power deeper into his mind, plunging them both into inky darkness.
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Only technically flight, maybe, at this point, or a kind of precise, well-aimed falling, as Real Rashid peels around a corner to tail after the van in time to see a figure drop from the sky like a stone.
Within the van, possibly too muffled by pain and psychic torment for Louis to register, it sounds like a shotgun going off when impact is made. Splintered glass, dented metal, and a metallic shriek as this landing brings with it a sword blade piercing through the roof of the cab, down to split between shoulder and clavicle of the driver.
Doesn't kill him right away, but his hands spasm, and the van swerves violently, sends a civilian vehicle panicky swerving out of the way and crashing into a signpost. Vampires inside, rattled.
The van lurches. Goes faster. Someone in the passenger seat lunging to course correct. Above, crouching, Lestat twists the hilt. It produces some gurgling sounds from the driver.
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Other details are in there, like an expulsion from the British Isles region for beefing with the established coven there and a blip-on-the-radar appearance in Toronto, but Daniel can't focus on them. Feeling panic strangle him about Louis, and the way he feels so muffled. This seems like the most vital information. Potential power range, experience, how diluted her attention and her presence might be. Is that the right shit to convey?
Has to be.
Fuck.
A block ahead, a young woman plows a limousine in past an intersection and begins a tire-squealing three point turn to block as many lanes as possible, before throwing the parking brake and diving out of the vehicle. A mortal, all she can do is book it as fast as possible in the other direction, and pray. Her handlers are arguing blisteringly furious in her earpiece, and she's pretty sure one of them is Raglan, who is actually laughing.
Unless somebody slams on the brakes in the van—
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He can feel her glee. They are mingled so close; this is an intimate kind of torture, invasive. Delicate. Bypassing memory and touching nerves and senses, setting them aflame.
And then the whole truck jolts. Swerves erratically. A distraction, twitching Eimear's attention for a split second. Just time enough for Louis to gather all his fury and rage and use it to propel her away, expelling her, clawing out of the dark in her wake.
Her expression is dark with anger, brows drawn together as she hisses. The truck is going too fast, and the two of them are sliding, Louis' chains clanking, clattering, against the floor. He snarls at her, she twists her fingers harder in his hair. She drags him upright, spiking him to the wall of the truck just as Louis expends a last push of strength outward.
Eimear catches abruptly on fire, flame licking up her body, catching in her hair. A wild gamble in an enclosed space, but the one hand Louis has to play.
The ensuing scream carries, magnified and echoing, underscored by the grind of sword-split metal from the cab.
Outside a bodega, a cluster of college students are holding up their phones as the truck speeds by, chattering confused at the spectacle.
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The sword is left behind. Which co-pilot can tell, because it remains there, wedged in metal, and he can hear something moving above.
Eimear, who has over a century on him, who has her own gifts, he's sure. Lestat climbs his way across the roof, hand over hand, claws digging in for stability, eyes black and hair everywhere and this will probably make a good album cover too. It is not actually useful information for Daniel in particular when Lestat replies with, 'She burns', serene in delivery despite the objective chaos he is experiencing and causing.
Reaches over the side, grasping the handle of the sliding door. Within the van, the sound of locks being psychically forced into giving way, which only benefits Lestat in that he can open it enough to get his fingers in and then heave, snapping the door off and away with more strength than expected, careening off somewhere to cause some property damage they all zoom past.
A flare of fire whips out of the open space. Lestat, moving with a vaguely arachnid agility to climb in, reaching to grasp scorched flesh and burning hair.
As if flung from an airlock, Louis will see the burning vampiress hauled backwards, and then up (up and away).
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Sure, he thinks, watching Lestat abduct an on-fire vampire.
'Car's gonna hit something in ten seconds,' he sends to Louis, and says it out loud at the same time, which prompts Rashid to start trying to slow down. Daniel thinks please hear me please be awake please let the fire be a sign you are awake and not dying from whatever was in there, is that a fucking chain, what the fuck—
A door handle smacks into the windshield, sending a spiderweb crack through it, but it holds. Is this a Toyota?
The van doesn't stop, and though it begins to lose speed as dead weight is finally lifted off the gas pedal, it's not soon enough. Daniel is off, it's more like twelve seconds, but the van does collide with the limo, no squeal of tires, no attempt at braking, BAM, a bomb-like noise of the hit and shattered glass everywhere. The t-boned vehicles skid further down the road for a few meters and grind to a halt, and Daniel hears sirens before Rashid will be able to, and he repeats the extremely vulgar thing.
Not for long. Up, out, to the ruined mangle of van-limo-hybrid creature.
"Louis?!"
There are still two guys in the front. The limo driver (technically, the limo thief) is still going at a dead sprint, though she's starting to feel very lightheaded.
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A voice. Daniel.
Ten seconds isn't not good information to have. Louis is only lacking much ability to act on it. The paralytic is burning out of his system, but not fast enough that Louis can meaningfully brace for impact.
The impact must coincide with whatever success Lestat is having. Louis is flung forward, cratering into the divider between the interior of the truck and the cab. Has movement enough to kick himself free of the debris. Can hear pained groans from beneath the crumpled metal, and takes some vicious satisfaction in it.
I'm okay. projected into Daniel's head, words like a hand pressing to Daniel's cheek, moments before Louis realizes he can see Daniel looking at him from the gap left by the missing door. Had banked, maybe, on a few minutes to assess how presentable he looked, but here they are, apparently.
"There's two still alive," Louis reports, from within the mangle of the truck's interior. "One only just. Where's Lestat?"
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A streak of light, first, where fire trails in their wake, before this is extinguished into a smear of smoke, and they vanish into the sky, obscured by looming city buildings from anyone's position on the street.
Vicious, this fight, both of them locked together like two feral cats unwilling to break apart and cede territory or opportunity. Claws dig, jaws bite, and some maddened scramble of psychic wrestling transpiring on another plane of existence entirely. But Eimear's pain is easier to access than Lestat's, her body freshly immolated, her mind ablaze with fury, and even beyond these elements—
Muscle and bone crumbles beneath a hand at her side. Another snaps her neck. Easy in a way it should not be, not against her, even injured, even as his fangs find her neck and pulls blood from her heart, barely even drinking it where it flows past his mouth. In that moment of frantic connection, she might sense it, like seeing the larger, monstrous shadow that he should not be able to cast, and understand that victory was never possible.
He will deposit pieces of her into the water from on high, with the lazy apathy of a shark now swimming away from its own frenzy.
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"He's—"
Up, potentially about to drop a vampire to the ground? It sticks in Daniel's throat, but only for a second.
"Fine. Come on, we have to move."
"Mr du Lac?"
Hey, Rashid is here, by the way. Daniel scrambles around to the crushed front end so he can drive his makeshift stick through the living, but dazed, vampire's head. No idea if this will cause death, but it will cause a stop for now.
"Law enforcement and fucking Tiktok! Very fucking soon, move!"
"We have people—"
"For this?!"
Maybe not, says the wince.
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Now, however, is not the time.
Louis kicks his way from the interior, emerging with a tangled clanking of titanium chain. Bloody, ash-streaked, tired. Louis is all of these things, but he is upright. Briskly hooks the loop of the chain on some remaining, jagged bit of the van to use as leverage to break the loops of chain from his body.
Amid the creaking and cracking of chain link and metal, Louis questions, "Is that the car we'll be leaving in?"
Theirs now, perhaps?
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Are these crippled vampires dead? Daniel doesn't think so— heads kind of on, if mangled, not burned even though there's so much smoke and ash from Louis' pyrowhatever. Should he, just. Well. He does what he thinks he should, which is shove his hand into the cavity he's created in the passenger vampire's head and yank so that it detaches from his body. It thunks back into the wreckage, flopping against the barely-alive driver.
He feels far away.
"Yeah," he hears himself say, about the car with the cracked windshield. He watches himself walk back around and look at Louis.
"Are you okay?"
Daniel doesn't feel any urgency from his distant vantage point, dizzy and greyish, but Rashid must, because he ushers them towards it with all the precision he had used to delivery drinks and newspapers.
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A narrowed look from the backseat at Rashid, measuring the amount of years Rashid had moved within the penthouse. Considering what he wishes to do about the invasion of privacy involved in it.
But most immediately: Daniel.
Daniel, who has been robbed of the front seat by Louis' latched grip on his wrist. A split second of recognition, seeing something in Daniel's face that Louis knows very well, and wanting to keep him close more than he wants Daniel wielding an abandoned Talamasca agent's laptop.
Daniel's Are you okay? left by the wayside as Louis looks into his face. Touches his cheek, briefly. The titanium cuffs still gleaming on his wrists, ignored for the moment.
Boxes Rashid out of the conversation entirely by touching Daniel's mind, asking Are you with me?
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Doesn't he? He just killed two vampires in grotesquely violent ways, and he had only recently struggled to communicate to Armand the ethical facade he's put up in himself to be alright with murder. Accepting blood from his maker to repair his head the rest of the way had tripped it, because he's only ever taken blood from mortals, and following that, until tonight, had only ever been violent with mortals, and something about the veil is shredded now, forcing him into looking at how he's existing.
A startle, when Louis touches his mind.
"Yeah," out loud, in-mind. The bad yeah, the lying one. He looks at him, looks down at their hands, frowns.
'You shouldn't have done that.'
Still not-quite-present. Freaking out, but quietly. He slides fingers around Louis' wrist and beneath the cuff, hating it.
'Help me with this,' he implores. He can tell it's made to be a pain in the ass, that it'll cut into Louis if he just yanks it, but they can probably do it without any damage with three hands. C'mon.
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Even if it feels true. If Louis is more concerned with how Daniel might have been hurt than about the cuffs on his wrist, about Eimear plucking at his nervous system until Louis screamed, about what might have waited for them at the end of the truck's route. Maybe nothing. Maybe just a quiet place for Eimear and her fledglings to strip the flesh from Louis' bones until here was nothing more of him.
Doesn't believe Daniel's Yeah, so refrains from asking if he can touch Lestat's mind. Has to content himself with fine as a placeholder for all his fears as Daniel fidgets with the cuff.
Rashid catches Louis' eye in the rearview mirror, and Louis' lip curls back off the silent threat of a sharp fang. Eyes front.
Touches Daniel's cheek again, eyes searching. Daniel, largely unharmed. Daniel, who did a fair share of violence tonight, and should have been spared it all. Louis' thumb runs along his cheek. He breathes out. Nods.
Alright, let's try, Louis acquiesces, hooking two fingers beneath the cuff alongside Daniel. Try because he is exhausted. Try because Eimear turned his pain receptors on at full force and as adrenaline begins to ebb, the shuddery after effect of that is gaining purchase.
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Hurts to see Louis in chains, but he can tell in an instant what the problem is, so he stops, covers the cuff and Louis' hand with his own.
They're driving fast, but not action movie fast. Rashid is just getting them away, and probably won't start looping them back around to anyplace familiar until he's certain they're no longer being observed. Daniel stays like that for a long moment, just holding Louis' hand, somewhere being angry and dissociative.
Instead of communicating anything else to Louis, he tries Lestat.
'Told him you're fine, so you'd better be. Can you find us?'
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His actual reaction should be fierce relief that Daniel's words imply that Louis is alive, perhaps even well, but this information is absorbed as something that is good and correct, as expected. There is still a head to dispose of, and he drifts out a little further. Stops.
Evaluates the very grim, gory sight in his hands, this creature rent to meat. Butchery. It takes a moment to remember why he has done this thing, and when he does, it's easy to let decapitated head slip from his hands and plummet into the water below. 'Is,' Lestat starts, reaching for Daniel once more. 'Is he alright? Where are you both?'
He needs to go back, needs to find them, needs to see for himself that Louis is well, a tide of feeling that could shock him out of the sky if he let it.
'Tell me where to go.'
He could, probably, find them, but it would take longer without a clue.
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Rashid's attention flickers a little before he exchanges a look with Daniel in the rear-view mirror, apparently torn between leaning on the secret rapport they had during the interview (sorry Louis) and detached fear about the journalist's nature now. But he nods, and turns to pull them over into a residential area out of any major traffic crossings.
'Here.' Shown as best he can, offering a mental beacon. 'He's shaken, I don't know how bad, but in one piece. Help me get these fucking things off of him.'
A brief, shared image of Louis' hands. It unsettles Daniel in a major way. He just wants all traces of his bullshit gone. Doesn't ask if the woman is dead. He has complete faith in Lestat in that respect.
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"Is he coming?" Louis asks, a question with an answer so clear that Louis doesn't bother to wait for one. Moves past it, winding into Daniel's mind as the car comes to a stop. As Louis straightens, slowly, from the heavy slouch he'd fallen into as they'd sped through the streets in silence.
Were you hurt?
Louis' impression is that Eimear had stayed her hand. That Daniel was not touched by whatever violence that followed.
It's only that he needs to hear it, he thinks. Needs to hear it while they wait for Lestat to reappear, so Louis can put aside at least one set of fears.
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Less dignity in the jog around to the door that would lead him to Louis. He is a sight since they last saw him, absolutely drenched in blood, soaked into his nice suit, hands gloved in drying gore, crimson up to his ears, higher in spatters. Wrenches open the door and enters with the uncomfortably bullish energy of a dog that doesn't realise it's about to get mud everywhere jumping in, oblivious.
Still a little glassily black eyed, fangs present, and this backseat is not designed to comfortably house three fully grown men which is why Louis has to take a knee to the thigh as Lestat insists on an embrace.
"Why did you do that," sounds agonised, angry, despite this tangle of limbs.
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This doesn't sound like some badass, delusional assertion. There's tired, frustrated logic to it. But before any conversation can manifest, a big bloody mastiff is pawing into the car, and Daniel feels incredible relief that he hasn't lied to either of them, or himself. Everyone is fine.
Daniel knows why Louis did it but he keeps his mouth shut, because hollering at him is not going to help. Instead he looks forward, seeing the statue stillness of the mortal still in the driver's seat, expression a mask of blankness but knuckles very white on the wheel.
Yeah, makes sense.
"Out," Daniel tells him, and Rashid wastes no time. Daniel follows him, leaving Lestat and Louis in the car. Hopefully it looks enough like he's mind controlling a random jerk that it doesn't draw any attention— not that he thinks there's much of a chance of pulling Lestat away from what he's doing right this minute anyway.
(A few paces out,
"You're free, Double-oh-sixty-nine, fucking get out of here." A beat, and Rashid finally looks shaken. Daniel tells him, sincerely, Thank you, and agrees to talk to Raglan, and soon. Rashid has enough self-preservation not to glance back at the laptop as he makes his escape, handing the beat up car's keys to Daniel as he does.
Sigh.)
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bow??
🎀