if his green eyes were hurting me. In modern parlance he was a laser beam. Deadly and delicate he seemed. His victims had always loved him.
And I had always loved him, hadn’t I, no matter what happened, and how strong could love grow if you had eternity to nourish it, and it took only these few moments in time to renew its momentum, its heat?
“How can you be sure of that, Lestat?” he asked. Intimate his speaking my name. And I had not brought myself to say Louis in that same natural way.
We were walking slowly now, without direction, and his arm was around me loosely as mine was around him.
“I have a battalion of mortals guarding us,” I said. “There’ll be bodyguards on the copter and in the limousine with my mortals. I’ll travel alone from the airport in the Porsche so I can more easily defend myself, but we’ll have a veritable motorcade. And just what can a handful of hateful twentieth-century fledglings do anyway? These idiot creatures use the telephone for their threats.”
“There are more than a handful,” he said. “But what about Marius? Your enemies out there are debating it, whether the story of Marius was true, whether Those Who Must Be Kept exist or not—”
“Naturally, and you, did you believe it?”
“Yes, as soon as I read it,” he said. And there passed between us a moment of silence, in which perhaps we were both remembering the questing immortal of long ago who had asked me over and over, Where did it begin?
Too much pain to be reinvoked. It was like taking pictures from the attic, cleaning away the dust and finding the colors still vibrant. And the pictures should have been portraits of dead ancestors and they were pictures of us.
I made some little nervous mortal gesture, raked my hair back off my forehead, tried to feel the cool of the breeze.
“What makes you so confident,” he asked, “that Marius won’t end this experiment as soon as you step on the stage tomorrow night?”
“Do you think any of the old ones would do that?” I answered.
He reflected for a long moment, slipping deep into his thoughts the way he used to do, so deep it was as if he forgot I was there. And it seemed that old rooms took shape around him, gaslight gave off its unsteady illumination, there came the sounds and scents of a former time from outside streets. We two in that New Orleans parlor, coal fire in the grate beneath the marble mantel, everything growing older except us.
And he stood now a modern child in sagging sweater and worn denim gazing off towards the deserted hills. Disheveled, eyes sparked with an inner fire, hair mussed. He roused himself slowly as if coming back to life.
“No. I think if the old ones trouble themselves with it at all, they will be too interested to do that.”
“Are you interested?”
“Yes, you know I am,” he said.
And his face colored slightly. It became even more human. In fact, he looked more like a mortal man than any of our kind I’ve ever known. “I’m here, aren’t I?” he said. And I sensed a pain in him, running like a vein of ore through his whole being, a vein that could carry feeling to the coldest depths.
I nodded. I took a deep breath and looked away from him, wishing I could say what I really wanted to say. That I loved him. But I couldn’t do that. The feeling was too strong.
“Whatever happens, it will be worth it,” I said. “That is, if you and I, and Gabrielle, and Armand . . . and Marius are together even for a short while, it will be worth it. Suppose Pandora chooses to show herself. And Mael. And God only knows how many others. What if all the old ones come. It will be worth it, Louis. As for the rest, I don’t care.”
“No, you care,” he said, smiling. He was deeply fascinated. “You’re just confident that it’s going to be exciting, and that whatever the battle, you’ll win.”
I bowed my head. I laughed. I slipped my hands into the pockets of my pants the way mortal men did in this day and age, and I walked on through the grass. The field still smelled of sun even in the cool California night. I didn’t tell him about the mortal part, the vanity of wanting to perform, the eerie madness that had come over me when I