as he looked at me. Then he stared slowly at the scars that covered my face and hands, and he said softly and almost compassionately:
"Come in, Lestat."
He took my hand. And we walked together through the house he had built at the foot of Magnus's tower, a dark and dreary place fit for all the Byronic horrors of this strange age.
"You know, the rumor is that you met the end somewhere in Egypt, or the Far East," he said quickly in everyday French with an animation I'd never seen in him before. He was skilled now at pretending to be a living being. "You went with the old century, and no one has heard of you since."
"And Gabrielle?" I demanded immediately, wondering that I had not blurted it out at the door.
"No one has ever seen her or heard of her since you left Paris," he said.
Once again his eyes moved over me caressingly. And there was thinly veiled excitement in him, a fever that I could feel like the warmth of the nearby fire. I knew he was trying to read my thoughts.
"What's happened to you?" he asked.
My scars were puzzling him. They were too numerous, too intricate, scars of an attack that should have meant death. I felt a sudden panic that in my confusion I'd reveal everything to him, the things that Marius had long ago forbidden me to tell.
But it was the story of Louis and Claudia that came rushing out, in stammering and half truths, sans one salient fact: that Claudia had been only ... a child.
I told briefly of the years in Louisiana, of how they had finally risen against me just as he had predicted my children might. I conceded everything to him, without guile or pride, explaining that it was his blood I needed now. Pain and pain and pain, to lay it out for him, to feel him considering it. To say, yes, you were right. It isn't the whole story. But in the main, you were right.
Was it sadness I saw in his face then? Surely it wasn't triumph. Unobtrusively, he watched my trembling hands as I gestured. He waited patiently when I faltered, couldn't find the right words.
A small infusion of his blood would hasten my healing, I whispered. A small infusion would clear my mind. I tried not to be lofty or righteous when I reminded him that I had given him this tower, and the gold he'd used to build this house, that I still owned the Theater of the Vampires, that surely he could do this little thing, this intimate thing, for me now. There was an ugly naivet茅 to the words I spoke to him, addled as I was, and weak and thirsting and afraid. The blaze of the fire made me anxious. The light on the dark grain of the woodwork of these stuffy rooms made imagined faces appear and disappear.
"I don't want to stay in Paris," I said. "I don't want to trouble you or the coven at the theater. I am asking this small thing. I am asking..." It seemed my courage and the words had run out.
A long moment passed:
"Tell me again about this Louis," he said.
The tears rose to my eyes disgracefully. I repeated some foolish phrases about Louis's indestructible humanity, his understanding of things that other immortals couldn't grasp. Carelessly I whispered things from the heart. It wasn't Louis who had attacked me. It was the woman, Claudia...
I saw something in him quicken. A faint blush came to his cheeks.
"They have been seen here in Paris," he said softly. "And she is no woman, this creature. She is a vampire child."
I can't remember what followed. Maybe I tried to explain the blunder. Maybe I admitted there was no accounting for what I'd done. Maybe I brought us round again to the purpose of my visit, to what I needed, what I must have. I remember being utterly humiliated as he led me out of the house and into the waiting carriage, as he told me that I must go with him to the Theater of the Vampires.
"You don't understand," I said. "I can't go there. I will not be seen like this by the others. You must stop this carriage. You must do as I ask."
"No, you have it backwards," he said in the tenderest voice. We were already in the crowded Paris streets. I couldn't see the city I remembered. This was a nightmare, this metropolis of roaring