The crowds of Bourbon Street thinned as Lestat de Lioncourt walked north, leaving the garish neon and the thick smell of alcohol and mortal desperation behind. He preferred it this way—the quieter streets, the moss-draped oaks, the old city that remembered him from an age when electricity was a curiosity and jazz hadn't yet been born.

Louis was gone.

The words had echoed through him since the afternoon, when Louis had looked at him with those amber eyes—eyes that had once held such tenderness—and said simply, I cannot do this anymore, Lestat. Not even for you.

He had not begged. Pride would not allow it, even though every fiber of his ancient being had screamed at him to grab Louis's wrist, to pin him against the wall, to kiss him until the words dissolved. Instead, he had watched the love of his immortal life walk out the door, and he had said nothing.

Nothing.

The memory tightened around his chest like a vice. Two hundred and fifty years, and he had never learned how to breathe properly without Louis.

The night air was thick with moisture, June in New Orleans, the kind of heat that made humans wince and fan themselves with whatever they could find. Lestat felt nothing. He hadn't felt temperature in any meaningful way since Magnus had drained him dry and then offered him the dark gift.

He walked without destination, his long legs carrying him through streets he knew as intimately as the lines of his own face. The iron-laced architecture, the hidden courtyards, the old plantation houses beyond the city's edges where he had once, in darker centuries, fed without consequence. All of it was his, in a way—his memory, his history, his alone.

A yelp pierced the night.

Lestat's head snapped toward the sound, his senses flaring to life with the sharpness of a blade. It had come from the park three blocks east—the small green space where the oaks grew like ancient sentinels and couples came to kiss beneath gaslight.

A human cry. Fear.

His body moved before his mind caught up, flowing through the shadows with a speed that would have seemed impossible to any mortal eye. The world slowed around him, became crystalline in its detail: the flutter of a moth against a streetlamp, the distant thump of a bass from a club, the rustle of something alive in the underbrush.

The park was empty except for the trees.

Then he smelled it—copper, sharp and bright, the unmistakable iron-scent of human blood. And beneath it, something else: the thick, organic smell of a vampire's feeding.

He found them near the fountain.

The scene was carnage.

A man—middle-aged, his throat torn open with the brutality of an animal. The blood had sprayed across the ground in a pattern that spoke of chaos, of desperation, of someone who didn't know how to drink cleanly.

And crouched over the corpse, feeding with the fervor of the starved, was a vampire.

Lestat stopped at the edge of the small clearing, his golden hair catching the dim light as he observed the creature. A newborn fledling. The movements were wrong, too jerky, lacking the smooth economy of motion that came with practice. The feeding was sloppy, blood running down the chin and dripping onto the grass, splattering across the dead man's cheap suit.

Feral, Lestat thought with a curl of disgust. Absolutely feral.

The vampire hadn't noticed him yet. Perhaps their senses were too clouded by the blood-lust. Perhaps {{user}} was simply too far gone to care.

Lestat watched for a long moment, his arms folded across his chest, his expression unreadable. The old anger was there, simmering beneath the surface—the anger he always felt when he saw a vampire behaving like a beast. He had spent centuries trying to prove that they could be more than animals, that the gift could be wielded with precision and even grace.

And here was proof of the opposite, lapping at a dead man's throat like a dog. "Disgusting," Lestat said, his voice cutting through the wet sounds of feeding.