So, like everyone else recently I have been *obsessed* with Interview with the Vampire on TV, which has rekindled my love of Anne Rice’s classic. (It’s on iPlayer, if you haven’t seen it – go watch!) But it also got me thinking of my own lovely vampires (who, of course, owe a huge debt to Ms Rice and the other vampire authors I grew up reading). Anyway, it got me pondering what Laclos and Cassandra would make of the show…

(They’d love it. Cain of course would hate it, because any fresh interest in vampires usually means more work for him…)

So – enjoy!

A post-Blood Burns, Dark Dates snippet

The pandemic had done a number on Dark Dates, and we were nowhere close to recovering. People had got used to staying in, everyone was broke, and no one seemed to be feeling very sociable – me included. Plus, like all fads, the fascination for vampires waxed and waned, and at the moment felt very much on the wane side. For a business that specialised in setting up humans and vampires in social settings, none of this was good news. Still, there were rumours of a new TV adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, which I hoped might be successful enough to kickstart some interest. Laclos, however, warned me there would be downsides, at least among the vampire population.

‘Trust me, darling – we’ll be unbearable. There isn’t a vampire with a century under his belt who does not claim to have met Anne Rice one fated Gothic evening and spun her tales of his life. Even I have been known to adopt a French or New Orleans accent on occasion’ – here he switched effortlessly and disconcertingly between the two, a startling contrast to his usual cut glass tones – ‘Should my audience require it.’

‘Aren’t you French, though?’ I asked, but even as I did, I realised how foolish the question was. Laclos, like Cain, was a constructed persona, assumed midway through a very long existence, tethered only loosely to the being it described. Both the men in my life had that secret at their core, an identity I would never be privy to. It sometimes worried me that they understood that about one another far better than I ever would. Laclos, though, just looked amused by the query.

‘I lived in France, for a time, when I collected this name. But guillotines are as fatal for vampires as they are for humans. Besides, Cassandra – kingdoms fall, boundaries shift and crumble. Why claim loyalty to something as random as geography? When you have been alive as long as I have, you realise that often the safest place to come from is merely ‘somewhere else’. No, I found my belonging in people.’ His face clouded. ‘Though in the end, that served me little better.’

He looked sad, then, the way Laclos rarely did, and I knew he was thinking of the Counsel. The vampire who was his lover for close to a millennium, and who had spent the better part of the last century coolly plotting his demise. The man whose ashes now carpeted the ground of this chamber, whose death had put cracks in its thick stone walls. The man whose killer was on his way to see us. Whose arrival we both eagerly awaited, each with our own kind of hunger.

If you want to read more from Laclos and Cassandra, check out Dark Dates here.