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By Root 3414 0

a heart that beat and beat until I had to let you go, had to cast you away from me lest you quicken my pulse till I would die. And it was Lestat who found me out; Louis the sentimentalist, the fool, feasting on a golden-haired child, a Holy Innocent, a little girl. He brought you back from the hospital where they’d put you, and I never knew what he meant to do except teach me my nature. “Take her, finish it,” he said. And I felt that passion for you again. Oh, I know I’ve lost you now forever. I can see it in your eyes! You look at me as you look on mortals, from aloft, from some region of cold self-sufficiency I can’t understand. But I did it. I felt it for you again, a vile unsupportable hunger for your hammering heart, this cheek, this skin. You were pink and fragrant as mortal children are, sweet with the bite of salt and dust. I held you again, I took you again. And when I thought your heart would kill me and I didn’t care, he parted us and, gashing his own wrist, gave it to you to drink. And drink you did. And drink and drink until you nearly drained him and he was reeling. But you were a vampire then. And that very night you drank a human’s blood and have every night thereafter.’

“Her face had not changed. The flesh was like the wax of ivory candles; only the eyes showed life. There was nothing more to say to her. I set her down. ‘I took your life,’ I said. ‘He gave it back to you.’

“ ‘And here it is,’ she said under her breath. ‘And I hate you both!’ ”

The vampire stopped.

“But why did you tell her?” asked the boy after a respectful pause.

“How could I not tell her?” The vampire looked up in mild astonishment. “She had to know it. She had to weigh one thing against the other. It was not as if Lestat had taken her full from life as he had taken me; I had stricken her. She would have died! There would have been no mortal life for her. But what’s the difference? For all of us it’s a matter of years, dying! So what she saw more graphically then was what all men know: that death will come inevitably, unless one chooses … this!” He opened his white hands now and looked at the palms.

“And did you lose her? Did she go?”

“Go! Where would she have gone? She was a child no bigger than that. Who would have sheltered her? Would she have found some vault, like a mythical vampire, lying down with worms and ants by day and rising to haunt some small cemetery and its surroundings? But that’s not why she didn’t go. Something in her was as akin to me as anything in her could have been. That thing in Lestat was the same. We could not bear to live alone! We needed our little company! A wilderness of mortals surrounded us, groping, blind, preoccupied, and the brides and bridegrooms of death.

“ ‘Locked together in hatred,’ she said to me calmly afterwards. I found her by the empty hearth, picking the small blossoms from a long stem of lavender. I was so relieved to see her there that I would have done anything, said anything. And when I heard her ask me in a low voice if I would tell her all I knew, I did this gladly. For all the rest was nothing compared to that old secret, that I had claimed her life. I told her of myself as I’ve told you, of how Lestat came to me and what went on the night he carried her from the little hospital. She asked no questions and only occasionally looked up from her flowers. And then, when it was finished and I was sitting there, staring again at that wretched skull and listening to the soft slithering of the petals of the flowers on her dress and feeling a dull misery in my limbs and mind, she said to me, ‘I don’t despise you!’ I wakened. She slipped off the high, rounded damask cushion and came towards me, covered with the scent of flowers, the petals in her hand. ‘Is this the aroma of mortal child?’ she whispered. ‘Louis. Lover.’ I remember holding her and burying my head in her small chest, crushing her bird-shoulders, her small hands working into my hair, soothing me, holding me. ‘I was mortal to you,’ she said, and when I lifted my eyes I saw her smiling; but the softness on her lips was evanescent,