appeared, shooting towards me, but I perceived what was to happen and stepped aside.
Some twenty feet away from me, I saw him sprawled on the stones staring at me with positive awe, as if I were a god. His long auburn hair was tossed about, his brown eyes enormous as he looked up. And for all the gentle innocence of his face, his will was rolling over me, a hot stream of commands, telling me I was weak and imperfect and a fool, and I would be torn limb from limb by his followers as soon as they appeared. They would roast my mortal lover slowly till he died.
I laughed silently. This was as ludicrous as a fight out of the old commedia.
Gabrielle was staring from one to the other of us. I sent the summons again to the others, and this time when I sent it, I heard them answering, questioning.
“Come into the church.” I repeated it over and over, even as he rose and ran at me again in blind and clumsy rage. Gabrielle caught him just as I did, and we both had hold of him and he couldn’t move.
In a moment of absolute horror for me he tried to sink his fangs into my neck. I saw his eyes round and empty as the fangs descended over his drawn lip. I flung him back and again he vanished.
They were coming nearer, the others.
“He’s in the church, your leader, look at him!” I repeated it. “And any of you can come into the church. You won’t be hurt.”
I heard Gabrielle let out a scream of warning. And too late. He rose up right in front of me, as if out of the floor itself, and struck my jaw, jerking my head back so that I saw the church ceiling. And before I could recover, he had dealt me one fine blow in the middle of the back that sent me flying out the door and onto the stones of the square.
1
I COULD see nothing but the rain. But I could hear them all around me. And he was giving his command.
“They have no great power, these two,” he was telling them in thoughts that had a curious simplicity to them, as if he were commanding vagrant children. “Take them both prisoner.”
Gabrielle said: “Lestat, don’t fight. It’s useless to prolong it.” And I knew she was right. But I’d never surrendered to anybody in my life. And pulling her with me past the Hôtel-Dieu, I made for the bridge.
We tore through the press of wet cloaks and mud-spattered carriages, yet they were gaining upon us, rushing so fast they were almost invisible to mortals, and with only a little fear of us now.
In the dark streets of the Left Bank, the game was finished.
White faces appeared above and below me as though they were demonic cherubs, and when I tried to draw my weapon, I felt their hands on my arms. I heard Gabrielle say, “Let it be done.”
I held fast to my sword but I couldn’t stop them from lifting me off the ground. They were lifting Gabrielle too.
And in a blaze of hideous images, I understood where they were taking us. It was to les Innocents, only yards away. I could already see the flicker of the bonfires that burned each night among the stinking open graves, the flames that were supposed to drive away the effluvia.
I locked my arm around Gabrielle’s neck and cried out that I couldn’t bear that stench, but they were carrying us on swiftly through the darkness, through the gates and past the white marble crypts.
“Surely you can’t endure it,” I said, struggling. “So why do you live among the dead when you were made to feed on life?”
But I felt such revulsion now I couldn’t keep it up, the verbal or physical struggle. All around us lay bodies in various states of decomposition, and even from the rich sepulchers there came that reek.
And as we moved into the darker part of the cemetery, as we entered an enormous sepulcher, I realized that they too hated the stench, as much as I. I could feel their disgust, and yet they opened their mouths and their lungs as if they were eating it. Gabrielle was trembling against me, her fingers digging into my neck.
Through another doorway we passed, and then, by dim torchlight, down an earthen stairs.
The smell grew stronger. It seemed to ooze from the mud walls. I turned my face