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the story of felix, as told by lestat.

wind cut through canal st, and the city howled like an organ with all its pipes ripped out. believe me, i would know. charity hospital was a dark cathedral that week. a place to serve the poor, as you would think all hospitals would be —— non, america, the land of the greedy. the corridors were hot, stairwells sticky with condensation, generators and the ill creating a cacophony of coughs within the silence that very few experience in modern times. i was used to the lack of power, the silence that swallows you when there is nothing to break it. iv bags swung like votives, orderlies fanned patients with clipboards. an air of desperation clung to the humidity. helicopters slashed through the sky, landing exclusively at the hospital next door, lifting the fortunate ones, leaving charity’s patients to rot ‘neath dead fluorescents and dwindling air. the unfairness was palpable, bitter as pennies.

felix was there with his mother. a dedicated charge nurse. the type of woman who could command a room by lowering her voice rather than raising. she shoved a bottle of water to him, gaze flicking down to reassure herself that he had his security issued gun. “ i have to make another round. go. find your brother and sister while it’s light.” it’s a bitter request, but it must be done. the stairwell swallowed her back into triage chants and the tinny scrape of battery radios. there were rumors that evacuations had been paused after reports of gunfire in the neighborhood, and everyone had started speaking in whispers, as if noise could draw catastrophe closer.

outside, the city had drowned and gone still. the water on conti street lapped at the porches and windows, urging debris along with every surge. the air smelled of river and rot, maybe something electrical. my beloved city was shorting out like a bad electronic. i was heartbroken. the sun had set and i crawled up and out onto the roof of a house two blocks from my own. it floated away. i listened to everything. i could not stop it. the slosh of the overwhleming amount of water, the wails from somewhere unseen, the last breaths of others, gunshots, radios crackling as they were re—adjusted, the low groan of the wind carving itself through the holes in the city. the city was dying right under me. her bones, veins, breath . . . and i, with all of my centuries, with all of my prowess, could do very little. a particular agony to live so long you learn the boundaries of your reach. i wanted to leap from window to window, swallow every one i could with my arms. mon dieu, i would’ve swallowed all of the water if i thought i could’ve. i just listened to it all. the music of my city’s undoing. i swore to myself, and to the night, that she would rise again and i alongside her.

i began to hear a specific beat —— a heart too determined to slow. from this beat, i could visualize something. my interest piqued, and i leapt from the roof. i started following it once it was closer, off of burgundy street. that is my curse. the ones who walk into dangerous storms glow to me like moths to flame. he was in his mid—twenties, rain cutting clean lines into the grime that covered him, hands raw from carrying supplies. he called their names. one soft, one hoarse. i assumed he was making his way to a house on the street to rescue the two young children that i was in his mind. i was positively enamored. he was pale from exhaustion, his eyes flickered to every sound like a scared animal. when he saw me, he flinched —— i must have looked like the storm itself had sent me. “ i can help, ” my voice cut through the howl of the wind. “ come. ” and he did, out into the black water, toward whatever help i could offer. he didn’t question that i knew which house, or how i could move a refrigerator with one arm to release his siblings from their hiding place, or how i could hold both and help us all through the water. his relief felt like heaven to me, and i yearned for more of it. he mentioned that they had relatives whose home would be above the floodline, that they’d be safe there, and i made it my mission to get them there. i cleared their path —— clearing obstacles, pushing doors, threatening whoever approached us. i felt like a mother again. once the siblings were tucked away and safe, i left cash with them and a promise that i would return. i expected felix to stay, but he wanted to go back to charity. of course. the hospital needed bodies to carry bodies; water for the ward; ice that no longer existed. but by then the city’s pulse was erratic. evacuations lurched and stuttered, and the heat inside the hospitals cooked time until hours stretched thin and strange. decisions turned moral and terrible in places where power and water had gone, where triage became a new and brutal language.

“ come with me, ” i told him finally, when the sun started to threaten the sky and the birdsong began its earliest rendition. “ just for a few hours. you need sleep, and so do i. ” we took to a dry floor in a building off of dumaine. candles, bottled water, and a pallet. he didn’t mind the coffin. it made sense to him at the time. i told him stories to distract him from the sounds of generators that would not start —— of wolves, winter, stages, paris in burning velvet, and new orleans in sopping silk. the more i spoke, the more he began to see what i was. he did not care.

he asked nothing out loud. he just watched me through the curls of candlelight and tried to reconcile how the woman before him who lifted a refrigerator one—handed was the same who tucked a blanket around him and smoothed his hair.

days spooled into weeks. we carried supplies, we stood on the roofs at night and counted the helicopters, cursed when they veered away.

when the streets finally stopped steaming and the smell of the river loosened its grip, he came with me to the same quiet room where i’d first laid him down. i did not make a grand speech. I told him what it meant: the end of hunger, and the beginning of other hungers; a life without storms, and a life inside them forever. he thought of his mother’s hands steadying a syringe by flashlight. he thought of the iv bags swinging like votives, the dead fluorescent lights, the smell of decay, the bodies in the chapel of charity. he thought of his brother asleep under a stranger’s quilt. he thought of the way the city’s heart had stuttered and how he had kept moving anyway.

he nodded.

the dark gift is never merciful, but it can be tender. i made it so. his last human breath left him like a secret. his first immortal breath came back like a vow. and the city —— ruined, radiant, unforgivable —— sounded again like music, because he was there to hear it with me.

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