“ ‘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 flower, 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 he smiling; but the softness on her lips was evanescent and in a moment she was looking past me like some one listening for faint, important music. ‘You gave me your immortal kiss,’ she said, though not to me, but to herself. ‘You loved me with your vampire nature.’
“ ‘I love you now with my human nature, if ever I had it,’ I said to her.
“ ‘Ah yes…’ she answered, still musing. ‘Yes, and that’s your flaw, and why your face was miserable when I said as humans say, “I hate you,” and why you look at me as you do now. Human nature. I have no human nature. And no short story of a mother’ corpse and hotel rooms where children learn monstrosity can give me one. I have none. Your eyes grow cold with fear when I say this to you. Yet I have your tongue. Your passion for the truth. Your need to drive the needle of the mind right to the heart of it all like the beak of the hummingbird, who beats so wild and fast that mortals might think he had no tiny feet, could never set, just go from quest to quest, going again and again for the heart of it. I am your vampire self more than you are. And now the sleep of sixty five years has ended’
“The sleep of sixty-five years has ended! I heard her say it, disbelieving, not wanting to believe she knew and meant precisely what she’d said. For it had been exactly that since the night I tried to leave Lestat and failed and, falling in love with her, forgot my teeming brain, my awful questions. And now she had the awful questions on her lips and must know. She’d strolled slowly to the center of the room and strewn the crumpled lavender all around her. She broke the brittle stem and touched it to her lips. And having heard the whole story said, ‘He made me then… to be your companion. No chains could have held you in your loneliness, and he could give you nothing. He gives me nothing… I used to think him charming. I liked the way he walked, the way he tapped the flagstones with his walking stick and swung me in his arms. And the abandon with which he killed, which was as I felt. But I no longer find him charming. And you never have. And we’ve been his puppets, you and I; you remaining to take care of him, and I your saving companion. Now’s time to end it, Louis. Now’s time to leave him.’
“Time to leave him.
“I hadn’t thought of it, dreamed of it in so long; I’d grown accustomed to him, as if he were a condition of life itself. I could hear a vague mingling of sounds now, which meant he had entered the carriage way, that he would soon be on the back stairs. And I thought of what I always felt when I heard him coming, a vague anxiety, a vague need. And then the thought of being free of him forever rushed over me like water I’d forgotten, waves and waves of cool water. I was standing now, whispering to her that he was coming.
“ ‘I know,’ she smiled. ‘I heard him when he turned the far corner.’
“ ‘But he’ll never let us leave,’ I whispered, though I’d caught the implication of her words; her vampire sense was keen. She stood en garde magnificently. ‘But you don’t know him if you think he’ll let us leave,’ I said to her, alarmed at her self-confidence. ‘He will not let us go.’
“And she, still smiling, said, ‘Oh… really?’ ”
“It was agreed then to make plans. At once. The following night my agent came with his usual complaints about doing business by the light of one wretched candle and took my explicit orders for an ocean crossing. Claudia and I would go to Europe, on the first available ship, regardless of what port we had to settle for. And paramount was that an important chest be shipped with us, a chest which might have to be fetched carefully from our house during the day and put on board, not in the freight but in our cabin. And then there were arrangements for Lestat. I had planned to leave him the rents for several shops and town houses and a small construction company operating in the Faubourg Marigny. I put my signature to these things readily. I wanted to buy our freedom: to convince Lestat we wanted only to take a trip together and that he could remain in the style to which he was accustomed; he would have his own money and need come to me for nothing. For all these years, I’d kept him dependent on me. Of course, he demanded his funds from me as if I were merely his banker, and thanked me with the most acrimonious words at his command; but he loathed his dependence. I hoped to deflect his suspicion by playing to his greed. And, convinced that he could read any emotion in my face, I was more than fearful. I did not believe it would be possible to escape him. Do you understand what that means? I acted as though I believed it, but I did not.
“Claudia, meantime, was flirting with disaster, her equanimity overwhelming to me as she read her vampire books and asked Lestat questions. She remained undisturbed by his caustic outbursts, sometimes asking the same question over and over again in different ways and carefully considering what little information he might let escape in spite of himself. ‘What vampire made you what you are?’ she asked, without looking up from her book and keeping her lids lowered under his onslaught. ‘Why do you never talk about him?’ she went on, as if his fierce objections were thin air. She seemed immune to his irritation.
“ ‘You’re greedy, both of you!’ he said the next night as he paced back and forth in the dark of the center of the room, turning a vengeful eye on Claudia, who was fitted into her corner, in the circle of her candle flame, her books in stacks about her. ‘Immortality is not enough for you! No, you would look the Gift Horse of God in the mouth! I could offer it to any man out there in the street and he would jump for it…’
“ ‘Did you jump for it?’ she asked softly, her lips barely moving… ‘but you, you would know the reason for it. Do you want to end it? I can give you death more easily than I gave you life!’ He turned to me, her fragile flame throwing his shadow across me. It made a halo around his blond hair and left his face, except for the gleaming cheekbone, dark. ‘Do you want death?’
“ ‘Consciousness is not death,’ she whispered.
“ ‘Answer me! Do you want death!’
“ ‘And you give all these things. They proceed from you. Life and death,’ she whispered, mocking him.