Louis considered the possibility that Kieren is just a human gone a little mad. When Kieren speaks, the thought is banished. He seems quite able to express his feelings--fear, mainly--and run off.

Louis is well and able to use the ability so like his previous vampiric speed. He follows in a blink with the quiet lope of a pursuing wolf, much more naturally than any ordinary human imbued with an unfamiliar feat. But he doesn't tackle him. Kieren moves wrong, and Louis is concerned.

"Boy, wait! I'm not goin' hurt you! Don't use this power, it'll make you starve! You're hurt!"

Not willing to run himself into near-starvation, Louis only has a short sprint in him before he'll refuse to run any more.

Louis stops running and approaches slowly with light but labored crunch of snow under his deerskin boots. Even that little sprint has him panting and very hungry. He tries to look more at Kieren's face than his neck.

"I guess so? Those ain't normal dreams, at any rate. And now your body has betrayed you with a trade you weren't prepared for."

He crunches closer. How like a new fledgling Kieren must feel, except Louis doesn't like using the word fledgling. It implies a subservience to their maker.

"Down in New Orleans, we eat everythin'. Feet, brains, you name it..." This is not the same at all, and the strained note in Louis's voice marks that. "You'll have to eat soon. Me too. We need to find another deer."

Existential crises aside, they need to eat, and Louis is just prideful enough that he thinks maybe he will have a little more tact than Lestat when stressing the importance of this.

"I'm a vampire."

He produces a handkerchief and wipes his mouth as if he's sitting at a fancy dinner table and not standing in the woods over the mutilated corpse of a deer. He thinks about reiterating the joke about him eating every part of the animal, even the blood, but he thinks it might be too much for the poor boy. There's the difference between him and Lestat.

"What happened, the last time your body betrayed you? Did you change? Were you human once?"

Like me, he almost says, but that way lies wistfulness and sorrow. He can wish to be human again or even to be truly dead, but he can't undrink Lestat's blood. He can't take back how it changed him into who he is now. He never appreciated life until he died, and therein lies the irony.

Louis only ever saw vampires back home, but he is encountering all manner of creatures here, from the Darkwalker to the Big Bad Wolf.

“You’re still a person,” Louis says quietly. If he can’t cling to that, then all is lost. “You didn’t even choose this… but I did. I wanted to throw away my miserable human life, but all I got was a miserable vampire one.”

He starts to move. “C’mon, boy. Night’s wastin’. You need to tell me your needs, why you run funny, anythin’ to do with you survivin’ and my brain not gettin’ eaten.”

Everyone has tests of their resilience, and Louis had adopted a morose disposition in the face of his struggles. So yes... he wanted to die, and he let Lestat do the deed.

"'Run in a unique manner' then," he sighs. Semantics to him in the face of larger supernatural things. He's on the hunt, impeccable Southern manners shelved. Only Lestat liked to play pretend as he hunted, affecting shock or disdain or humor as if murder was his stage, vampirism his theater.

"No explanation for why your body moves differently than when it did when you were alive? Rigor mortis don't affect me... I don't know the nature of my own condition except that it transfigured my flesh. I'm cold when I haven't fed, I don't age, even my hair stays the same. Like my body wants to preserve how it was when I died."

His steps are sure, but his words meander. Strange to talk of this at all, but he still holds some things back. A predator doesn't flash belly to every stranger, especially on the hunt.

"'Fancy.' Yes, I suppose... It only took me one night to die, and I don't have to bother with makeup, though I do look odd under very bright lights."

No point dwelling on that outside at night. He bends and squints at something on the ground in the dark. He hates not having better night vision like he used to.

"I'm less normal than I appear to be, but it requires close inspection. Not that I let most people that close. Here... finally, some tracks. They're goin' this way. We'll be a little quieter now as we look for a hidin' place."

He doesn't mention the other gifts his form could give him back home. No need to broadcast his potential strength and make Kieren more afraid of him than he is already. If he blabs, Louis would rather it not be too much.

"Goes without sayin' we ain't tellin' no one about this."

Louis knows of the penny dreadfuls and ridiculous monsters in film. Not to his taste. Zombies, however, had not yet gripped the public consciousness as vampires did. A zombi was simply a thrall. Even vampires are, currently, delightfully passé, niche, with no place in the modern world of bright electric lights.

Louis knows well the dependence on a substance. He did it when he was human. To an extent, he does it when he's a vampire too. There's nothing quite as nourishing as people. So he is understandably concerned, though not exactly for Kieren, and he affects casualness:

"What happens when you run out of medicine? At least blood replenishes itself, given time. Even if I wanted to eat everyone in town, which I most assuredly do not, that would just leave me to starve. What is Capri-Sun, some kinda fruit?"

"Betrayed by your body again... Betrayed upwards, is the hope."

Louis watches Kieren's hands with interest. "Damn crazy..." he mutters to himself, but loud enough for Kieren to hear. "Like that thing I saw about the bag milk... Ain't natural..." Kieren sounds English, so Louis summarily adds Capri-Suns to the list of England's crimes.

Louis imagines the creatures in shoddy pulp fiction and garish movies, the mindless nameless things little better than rabid dogs meant to be put down. The beautiful vampire stalking parlors, what Lestat taught him to be, is entirely different. Unnatural, preternatural, a wolf in sheep's clothing, a vampire for Lestat's modern age and the more sensual of gothic fictions. Which begs the question, what does the vampire of Louis's modern age look like?

"A vampire who brings the town down on him with torches and pitchforks has slipped. No one ever writes about some guy settin' traps in his home so he can bite the rats later like your little Capri suns."

Louis has slipped in Milton. He bit people in hunger. He outed himself to others when he was in need. Part of it is his loneliness and part of it his appetite for self destruction.

"Here we go, deer tracks. And deer shit, of course... We keep goin' this way."