I’d destroy him if I ever saw him again. ‘You see, someone must die every night that I walk, until I’ve the courage to end it,’ I told him. ‘And you’re an admirable choice for that victim, a killer as evil as myself.’

“And I left New Orleans the next night because the sorrow wasn’t leaving me. And I didn’t want to think of that old house where Lestat was dying. Or that sharp, modern vampire who’d fled me. Or of Armand.

“I wanted to be where there was nothing familiar to me. And nothing mattered.

“And that’s the end of it. There’s nothing else.”

THE BOY SAT MUTE, staring at the vampire. And the vampire sat collected, his hands folded on the table, his narrow, red-rimmed eyes fixed on the turning tapes. His face was so gaunt now that the veins of his temples showed as if carved out of stone. And he sat so still that only his green eyes evinced life, and that life was a dull fascination with the turning of the tapes.

Then the boy drew back and ran the fingers of his right hand loosely through his hair. “No,” he said with a short intake of breath. Then he said it again louder, “No!”

The vampire didn’t appear to hear him. His eyes moved away from the tapes towards the window, towards the dark, gray sky.

“It didn’t have to end like that!” said the boy, leaning forward.

The vampire, who continued to look at the sky, uttered a short, dry laugh.

“All the things you felt in Paris!” said the boy, his voice increasing in volume. “The love of Claudia, the feeling, even the feeling for Lestat! It didn’t have to end, not in this, not in despair! Because that’s what it is, isn’t it? Despair!”

“Stop,” said the vampire abruptly, lifting his right hand. His eyes shifted almost mechanically to the boy’s face. “I tell you and I have told you, that it could not have ended any other way.”

“I don’t accept it,” said the boy, and he folded his arms across his chest, shaking his head emphatically. “I can’t!” And the emotion seemed to build in him, so that without meaning to, he scraped his chair back on the bare boards and rose to pace the floor. But then, when he turned and looked at the vampire’s face again, the words he was about to speak died in his throat. The vampire was merely staring at him, and his face had that long drawn expression of both outrage and bitter amusement.

“Don’t you see how you made it sound? It was an adventure like I’ll never know in my whole life! You talk about passion, you talk about longing! You talk about things that millions of us won’t ever taste or come to understand. And then you tell me it ends like that. I tell you…” And he stood over the vampire now, his hands outstretched before him. “If you were to give me that power! The power to see and feel and live forever!”

The vampire’s eyes slowly began to widen, his lips parting. “What!” he demanded softly. “What!”

“Give it to me!” said the boy, his right hand tightening in a fist, the fist pounding his chest. “Make me a vampire now!” he said as the vampire stared aghast.

What happened then was swift and confused, but it ended abruptly with the vampire on his feet holding the boy by the shoulders, the boy’s moist face contorted with fear, the vampire glaring at him in rage. “This is what you want?” he whispered, his pale lips manifesting only the barest trace of movement. “This…after all I’ve told you…is what you ask for?”

A small cry escaped the boy’s lips, and he began to tremble all over, the sweat breaking out on his forehead and on the skin above his upper lip. His hand reached gingerly for the vampire’s arm. “You don’t know what human life is like!” he said, on the edge of breaking into tears. “You’ve forgotten. You don’t even understand the meaning of your own story, what it means to a human being like me.” And then a choked sob interrupted his words, and his fingers clung to the vampire’s arm.

“God,” the vampire uttered and, turning away from him, almost pushed the boy off-balance against the wall. He stood with his back to the boy, staring at the gray window.

“I beg you…give it all one more chance. One more chance in me!” said the boy.

The vampire turned to him, his face as