The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [8]
“What?”
“To tell me what happened. How you died and how you lived.”
“Expect no miracles, perplexing scholar. I didn’t die in New York that morning. I almost died.”
He had me faintly curious, but I could never do what he wanted. Nevertheless he was honest, amazingly so, as far as I could measure, and therefore sincere.
“Ah, so, I didn’t mean literally. I meant that you should tell me what it was like to climb so high into the sun, and suffer so much, and, as you said, to discover in your pain all these memories, these connecting links. Tell me! Tell me.”
“Not if you mean to make it coherent,” I said crossly. I gauged his reaction. I wasn’t bothering him. He wanted to talk more.
“Make it coherent? Armand, I’ll simply write down what you say.” He made his words simple yet curiously passionate.
“Promise?”
I flashed on him a playful look. Me! To do that.
He smiled. He wadded up the little dress and then dropped it carefully so it might fall in the middle of the pile of her old clothes.
“I’ll not alter one syllable,” he said. “Come be with me, and talk to me, and be my love.” Again, he smiled.
Suddenly he came towards me, much in the aggressive manner in which I’d thought earlier to approach him. He slipped his hands under my hair, and felt of my face, and then he gathered up the hair and he put his face down into my curls, and he laughed. He kissed my cheek.
“Your hair’s like something spun from amber, as if the amber would melt and could be drawn from candle flames in long fine airy threads and let to dry that way to make all these shining tresses. You’re sweet, boylike and pretty as a girl. I wish I had one glimpse of you in antique velvet the way you were for him, for Marius. I wish I could see for one moment how it was when you dressed in stockings and wore a belted doublet sewn with rubies. Look at you, the frosty child. My love doesn’t even touch you.”
This wasn’t true.
His lips were hot, and I could feel the fangs under them, feel the urgency suddenly in his fingers pressing against my scalp. It sent the shivers through me, and my body tensed and then shuddered, and it was sweet beyond prediction. I resented this lonely intimacy, resented it enough to transform it, or rid myself of it utterly. I’d rather die or be away, in the dark, simple and lonely with common tears.
From the look in his eyes, I thought he could love without giving anything. Not a connoisseur, just a blood drinker.
“You make me hungry,” I whispered. “Not for you but for one who is doomed and yet alive. I want to hunt. Stop it. Why do you touch me? Why be so gentle?”
“Everyone wants you,” he said.
“Oh, I know. Everyone would ravage a guilty cunning child! Everyone would have a laughing boy who knows his way around the block. Kids make better food than women, and girls are all too much like women, but young boys? They’re not like men, are they?”
“Don’t mock me. I meant I wanted only to touch you, to feel how soft you are, how eternally young.”
“Oh, that’s me, eternally young,” I said. “You speak nonsense words for one so pretty yourself. I’m going out. I have to feed. And when I’ve finished with that, when I’m full and hot, then I’ll come and I’ll talk to you and tell you anything you want.” I stepped back just a little from him, feeling the quivers through me as his fingers released my hair. I looked at the empty white window, peering too high for the trees.
“They could see nothing green here, and it’s spring outside, southern spring. I can smell it through the walls. I want to look just for a moment on flowers. To kill, to drink blood and to have flowers.”
“Not good enough. Want to make the book,” he said.