2

We took him with us to the livery stables, and there I put him on my mare. But he looked as if he would let himself fall off at any moment, and so I mounted behind him, and the three of us rode out.

All the way through the country, I wondered what I would do. I wondered what it meant to bring him to my lair. Gabrielle didn't give any protest. Now and then she glanced over at him. I heard nothing from him, and he was small and self-contained as he sat in front of me, light as a child but not a child.

Surely he had always known where the tower was, but had its bars kept him out? Now I meant to take him inside it. And why didn't Gabrielle say something to me? It was the meeting we had wanted, it was the thing for which we had waited, but surely she knew what he had just done.

When we finally dismounted, he walked ahead of me, and he waited for me to reach the gate. I had taken out the iron key to the lock and I studied him, wondering what promises one exacts from such a monster before opening one's door. Did the ancient laws of hospitality mean anything to the creatures of the night?

His eyes were large and brown and defeated. Almost drowsy they seemed. He regarded me for a long silent moment and then he reached out with his left hand, and his fingers curled around the iron crossbar in the center of the gate. I stared helplessly as with a loud grinding noise the gate started to rip loose from the stone. But he stopped and contented himself with merely bending the iron bar a little. The point had been made. He could have entered this tower anytime that he wished.

I examined the iron bar that he'd twisted. I had beaten him. Could I do what he had just done? I didn't know. And unable to calculate my own powers, how could I ever calculate his?

"Come," Gabrielle said a little impatiently. And she led the way down the stairs to the dungeon crypt.

It was cold here as always, the fresh spring air never touching the place. She made a big fire in the old hearth while I lighted the candles. And as he sat on the stone bench watching us, I saw the effect of the warmth on him, the way that his body seemed to grow slightly larger, the way that he breathed it in.

As he looked about, it was as if he were absorbing the light. His gaze was clear.

Impossible to overestimate the effect of warmth and light on vampires. Yet the old coven had forsworn both.

I settled on another bench, and I let my eyes roam about the broad low chamber as his eyes roamed.

Gabrielle had been standing all this while. And now she approached him. She had taken out a handkerchief and she touched this to his face.

He stared at her in the same way that he stared at the fire and the candles, and the shadows leaping on the curved ceiling. This seemed to interest him as simply as anything else.

And I felt a shudder when I realized the bruises on his face were now almost gone! The bones were whole again, the shape of the face having been fully restored, and he was only a little gaunt from the blood he had lost.

My heart expanded slightly, against my will, as it had on the battlements when I had heard his voice.

I thought of the pain only half an hour ago in the Palais when the lie had broken with the stab of his fangs into my neck.

I hated him.

But I couldn't stop looking at him. Gabrielle combed his hair for him. She took his hands and wiped the blood from them. And he seemed helpless as all this was done. And she had not so much the expression of a ministering angel as an expression of curiosity, a desire to be near him and to touch him and examine him. In the quavering illumination they looked at one another.

He hunched forward a little, eyes darkening and full of expression now as they turned again to the grate. Had it not been for the blood on his lace ruff, he might have looked human. Might...

"What will you do now?" I asked. I spoke to make it clear to Gabrielle. "Will you remain in Paris and let Eleni and the others go on?"

No answer from him. He was studying me, studying the stone benches, the sarcophagi. Three sarcophagi.

"Surely you know what they're doing," I said. "Will you leave Paris or remain?"

It seemed he wanted to tell me again the magnitude of what I had done to him and the others, but this faded away. For one moment his face was wretched. It was defeated and warm and full of human misery. How old was he, I wondered. How long ago had he been a human who looked like that?

He heard me. But he didn't give an answer. He looked to Gabrielle, who stood near the fire, and then to me. And silently, he said, Love me. You have destroyed everything! But if you love me, it can all be restored in a new form. Love me.

This silent entreaty had an eloquence, however, that I can't put into words.

"What can I do to make you love me?" he whispered. "What can I give? The knowledge of all I have witnessed, the secrets of our powers, the mystery of what I am?"

It seemed blasphemous to answer. And as I had on the battlements, I found myself on the edge of tears. For all the purity of his silent communications, his voice gave a lovely resonance to his sentiments when he actually spoke.

It occurred to me as it had in Notre Dame that he spoke the way angels must speak, if they exist.

But I was awakened from this irrelevant thought, this obviating thought, by the fact that he was now beside me. He was closing his arm round me, and pressing his forehead against my face. He gave that summons again, not the rich, thudding seduction of that moment in the Palais Royal, but the voice that had sung to me over the miles, and he told me there were things the two of us would know and understand as mortals never could. He told me that if I opened to him and gave him my strength and my secrets that he would give me his. He had been driven to try to destroy me, and he loved me all the more that he could not.

That was a tantalizing thought. Yet I felt danger. The word that came unbidden to me was Beware.

I don't know what Gabrielle saw or heard. I don't know what she felt.

Instinctively I avoided his eyes. There seemed nothing in the world I wanted more at this moment than to look right at him and understand him, and yet I knew I must not. I saw the bones under les Innocents again, the flickering hellfires I had imagined in the Palais Royal. And all the lace and velvet in the eighteenth century could not give him a human face.

I couldn't keep this from him, and it pained me that it was impossible for me to explain it to Gabrielle. And the awful silence between me and Gabrielle was at that moment almost too much to bear.

With him, I could speak, yes, with him I could dream dreams. Some reverence and terror in me made me reach out and embrace him, and I held him, battling my confusion and my desire.

"Leave Paris, yes," he whispered. "But take me with you. I don't know how to exist here now. I stumble through a carnival of horrors. Please. . ."

I heard myself say: "No."

"Have I no value to you?" he asked. He turned to Gabrielle. Her face was anguished and still as she looked at him. I couldn't know what went on in her heart, and to my sadness, I realized that he was speaking to her and locking me out. What was her answer?

But he was imploring both of us now. "Is there nothing outside yourself you would respect?"

"I might have destroyed you tonight," I said. "It was respect which kept me from that."

"No." He shook his head in a startlingly human fashion. "That you never could have done."

I smiled. It was probably true. But we were destroying him quite completely in another way.

"Yes," he said, "that's true. You are destroying me. Help me," he whispered. "Give me but a few short years of all you have before you, the two of you. I beg you. That is all I ask."

"No," I said again.

He was only a foot from me on the bench. He was looking at me. And there came the horrible spectacle again of his face narrowing and darkening and caving in upon itself in rage. It was as if he had no real substance. Only will kept him robust and beautiful. And when the flow of his will was interrupted, he melted like a wax doll.

But, as before, he recovered himself almost instantly. The "hallucination" was past.

He stood up and backed away from me until he was in front of the fire.

The will coming from him was palpable. His eyes were like something that didn't belong to him, nor to anything on earth. And the fire blazing behind him made an eerie nimbus around his head.

"I curse you!" he whispered.

I felt a jet of fear.

"I curse you," he said again and came closer. "Love mortals then, and live as you have lived, recklessly, with appetite for everything and love for everything, but there will come a time when only the love of your own kind can save you." He glanced at Gabrielle. "And I don't mean children such as this!"

This was so strong that I couldn't conceal its effect on me, and I realized I was rising from the bench and slipping away from him towards Gabrielle.

"I don't come empty-handed to you," he pressed, his voice deliberately softening. "I don't come begging with nothing to give of my own. Look at me. Tell me you don't need what you see in me, one who has the strength to take you through the ordeals that lie ahead."

His, eyes flashed on Gabrielle and for one moment he remained locked to her and I saw her harden and begin to tremble.

"Let her be!" I said.

"You don't know what I say to her," he said coldly. "I do not try to hurt her. But in your love of mortals, what have you already done?"

He would say something terrible if I didn't stop him, something to wound me or Gabrielle. He knew all that had happened with Nicki. I knew that he did. If, somewhere deep down in my soul, I wished for the end of Nicki, he would know that too! Why had I let him in? Why had I not known what he could do?

"Oh, but it's always a travesty, don't you see?" he said with that same gentleness. "Each time the death and the awakening will ravage the mortal spirit, so that one will hate you for taking his life, another will run to excesses that you scorn. A third will emerge mad and raving, another a monster you cannot control. One will be jealous of your superiority, another shut you out." And here he shot his glance to Gabrielle again and half smiled. "And the veil will always come down between you. Make a legion. You will be, always and forever, alone!"

"I don't want to hear this. It means nothing," I said.

Gabrielle's face had undergone some ugly change. She was staring at him with hatred now, I was sure of it.

He made that bitter little noise that is a laugh but isn't a laugh at all.

"Lovers with a human face," he mocked me. "Don't you see your error? The other one hates you beyond all reason, and she -- why, the dark blood has made her even colder, has it not? But even for her, strong as she is, there will come moments when she fears to be immortal, and who will she blame for what was done to her?"

"You are a fool," Gabrielle whispered.

"You tried to protect the violinist from it. But you never sought to protect her."

"Don't say any more," I answered. "You make me hate you. Is that what you want?"

"But I speak the truth and you know it. And what you will never know, either of you, is the full depth of each other's hatreds and resentments. Or suffering. Or love."

He paused and I could say nothing. He was doing exactly what I feared he would, and I didn't know how to defend myself.

"If you leave me now with this one," he continued, "you will do it again. Nicolas you never possessed. And she already wonders how she will ever get free of you. And unlike her, you cannot stand to be alone."

I couldn't answer. Gabrielle's eyes became smaller, her mouth a little more cruel.

"So the time will come when you will seek other mortals," he went on, "hoping once more that the Dark trick will bring you the love you crave. And of these newly mutilated and unpredictable children you'll try to fashion your citadels against time. Well, they will be prisons if they last for half a century. I warn you. It is only with those as powerful and wise as yourself that the true citadel against time can be built."

The citadel against time. Even in my ignorance the words had their power. And the fear in me expanded, reached out to compass a thousand other causes.

He seemed distant for a moment, indescribably beautiful in the firelight, the dark auburn strands of his hair barely touching his smooth forehead, his lips parted in a beatific smile.

"If we cannot have the old ways, can't we have each other?" he asked, and now his voice was the voice of the summons again. "Who else can understand your suffering? Who else knows what passed through your mind the night you stood on the stage of your little theater and you frightened all those you had loved?"

"Don't speak about that," I whispered. But I was softening all over, drifting into his eyes and his voice. Very near to me was the ecstasy I'd felt that night on the battlements. With all my will I reached out for Gabrielle.

"Who understands what passed through your mind when my renegade followers, reveling in the music of your precious fiddler, devised their ghastly boulevard enterprise?" he asked.

I didn't speak.

"The Theater of the Vampires!" His lips lengthened in the saddest smile. "Does she comprehend the irony of it, the cruelty? Does she know what it was like when you stood on that stage as a young man and you heard the audience screaming for you? When time was your friend, not your enemy as it is now? When in the wings, you put out your arms and your mortal darlings came to you, your little family, folding themselves against you. . ."

"Stop, please. I ask you to stop."

"Does anyone else know the size of your soul?"

Witchcraft. Had it ever been used with more skill? And what was he really saying to us beneath this liquid flow of beautiful language: Come to me, and I shall be the sun round which you are locked in orbit, and my rays shall lay bare the secrets you keep from each other, and I, who possess charms and powers of which you have no inkling, shall control and possess and destroy you!

"I asked you before," I said. "What do you want? Really want?"

"You!" he said. "You and her! That we become three at this crossroads!"

Not that we surrender to you?

I shook my head. And I saw the same wariness and recoiling in Gabrielle.

He was not angry; there was no malice now. Yet he said again, in the same beguiling voice:

"I curse you," and I felt it as if he'd declaimed it.

"I offered myself to you at the moment you vanquished me," he said. "Remember that when your dark children strike out at you, when they rise up against you. Remember me."

I was shaken, more shaken even than I had been in the sad and awful finish with Nicolas at Renaud's. I had never once known fear in the crypt under les Innocents. But I had known it in this room since we came in.

And some anger boiled in him again, something too dreadful for him to control.

I watched him bow his head and turn away. He became small, light, and held his arms close to himself as he stood before the blaze and he thought of threats now to hurt me, and I heard them though they died before they ever reached his lips.

But something disturbed my vision for a fraction of a second. Maybe it was a candle guttering. Maybe it was the blink of my eye. Whatever it was, he vanished. Or he tried to vanish, and I saw him leaping away from the fire in a great dark streak.

"No!" I cried out. And lunging at something I couldn't even see, I held him, material again, in my hands.

He had only moved very fast, and I had moved faster, and we stood facing each other in the doorway of the crypt, and again I said that single negation and I wouldn't let him go.

"Not like this, we can't part. We can't leave each other in hatred, we can't." And my will dissolved suddenly as I embraced him and held tight to him so that he couldn't free himself nor even move.

I didn't care what he was, or what he had done in that doomed moment of lying to me, or even trying to overpower me, I didn't care that I was no longer mortal and would never be again.

i wanted only that he should remain. I wanted to be with him, what he was, and all the things he had said were true. Yet it could never be as he wished it to be. He could not have this power over us. He could not divide Gabrielle from me.

Yet I wondered, did he himself really understand what he was asking? Was it possible that he believed the more innocent words he spoke?

Without speaking, without asking his consent, I led him back to the bench by the fire. I felt danger again, terrible danger. But it didn't really matter. He had to remain here with us now.

Gabrielle was murmuring to herself. She was walking back and forth and her cloak hung from one shoulder and she seemed almost to have forgotten we were there.

Armand watched her, and when she turned to him, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, she spoke aloud.

"You come to him and you say; `Take me with you.' You say, `Love me,' and you hint of superior knowledge, secrets, yet you give us nothing, either of us, except lies."

"I showed my power to understand," he answered in a soft murmur.

"No, you did tricks with your understanding," she replied. "You made pictures. And rather childish pictures. You have done this all along. You lure Lestat in the Palais with the most gorgeous illusions only to attack him. And here, when there is a respite in the struggle, what do you do but try to sow dissension between us..."

"Yes, illusions before, I admit it," he answered. "But the things I've spoken here are true. Already you despise your son for his love of mortals, his need to be ever near them, his yielding to the violinist. You knew the Dark Gift would madden that one, and that it will finally destroy him. You do wish for your freedom, from all the Children of Darkness. You can't hide that from me."

"Ah, but you're so simple," she said. "You see, but you don't see. How many mortal years did you live? Do you remember anything of them? What you've perceived is not the sum total of the passion I feel for my son. I have loved him as I have never loved any other being in creation. In my loneliness, my son is everything to me. How is it you can't interpret what you see?"

"It's you who fail to interpret," he answered in the same soft manner. "If you had ever felt real longing for any other one, you would know that what you feel for your son is nothing at all."

"This is futile," I said, "to talk like this."

"No," she said to him without the slightest wavering. "My son and I are kin to each other in more ways than one. In fifty years of life, I've never known anyone as strong as myself, except my son. And what divides us we can always mend. But how are we to make you one of us when you use these things like wood for fire! But understand my larger point: what is it of yourself that you can give that we should want you?"

"My guidance is what you need," he answered. "You've only begun your adventure and you have no beliefs to hold you. You cannot live without some guidance..."

"Millions live without belief or guidance. It is you who cannot live without it," she said.

Pain coming from him. Suffering.

But she went on, her voice so steady and without expression it was almost a monologue:

"I have my questions," she asked. "There are things I must know. I cannot live without some embracing philosophy, but it has nothing to do with old beliefs in gods or devils." She started pacing again, glancing to him as she spoke.

"I want to know, for example, why beauty exists," she said, "why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire in us? If God does not exist, if these things are not unified into one metaphorical system, then why do they retain for us such symbolic power? Lestat calls it the Savage Garden, but for me that is not enough. And I must confess that this, this maniacal curiosity or call it what you will, leads me away from my human victims. It leads me into the open countryside, away from human creation. And maybe it will lead me away from my son, who is under the spell of all things human."

She came up to him, nothing in her manner suggesting a woman now, and she narrowed her eyes as she looked into his face.

"But that is the lantern by which I see the Devil's Road," she said. "By what lantern have you traveled it? What have you really learned besides devil worship and superstition? What do you know about us, and how we came into existence? Give that to us, and it might be worth something. And then again, it might be worth nothing."

He was speechless. He had no art to hide his amazement.

He stared at her in innocent confusion. Then he rose and he slipped away, obviously trying to escape her, a battered spirit as he stared blankly before him.

The silence closed in. And I felt for the moment strangely protective for him. She had spoken the unadorned truth about the things that interested her as had been her custom ever since I could remember, and as always, there was something violently disregarding about it. She spoke of what mattered to her with no thought of what had befallen him.

Come to a different plane, she had said, my plane. And he was stymied and belittled. The degree of his helplessness was becoming alarming. He was not recovering from her attack.

He turned and he moved towards the benches again, as if he would sit, then towards the sarcophagi, then towards the wall. It seemed these solid surfaces repelled him as though his will confronted them first in an invisible field and he was buffeted about.

He drifted out of the room and into the narrow stone stairwell and then he turned and came back.

His thoughts were locked inside himself or, worse, there were no thoughts!

There were only the tumbling images of what he saw before him, simple material things glaring back at him, the ironstudded door, the candles, the fire. Some full-blown evocation of the Paris streets, the vendors and the hawkers of papers, the cabriolets, the blended sound of an orchestra, a horrid din of words and phrases from the books he had so recently read.

I couldn't bear this, but Gabrielle gestured sternly that I should stay where I was.

Something was building in the crypt. Something was happening in the very air itself.

Something changed even as the candles melted, and the fire crackled and licked at the blackened stones behind it, and the rats moved in the chambers of the dead below.

Armand stood in the arched doorway, and it seemed hours had passed though they hadn't and Gabrielle was a long distance away in the corner of the room, her face cool in its concentration, her eyes as radiant as they were small.

Armand was going to speak to us, but it was no explanation he was going to give. There was no direction even to the things he would say, and it was as if we'd cut him open and the images were coming out like blood.

Armand was just a young boy in the doorway, holding the backs of his own arms. And I knew what I felt. It was a monstrous intimacy with another being, an intimacy that made even the rapt moments of the kill seem dim and under control. He was opened and could no longer contain the dazzling stream of pictures that made his old silent voice seem thin and lyrical and made up.

Had this been the danger all along, the trigger of my fear? Even as I recognized it, I was yielding, and it seemed the great lessons of my life had all been learned through the renunciation of fear. Fear was once again breaking the shell around me so that something else could spring to life.

Never, never in all my existence, not mortal or immortal, had I been threatened with an intimacy quite like this.