said. ‘You feel it like no other creature because you are a vampire. You don’t want it to go on.’
“ ‘No,’ I answered him. ‘I’ll feel as I felt with her, wed to her and weightless, caught as if by a dance.’
“ ‘That and more.’ His hand tightened on mine. ‘Don’t turn away from it, come with me.’
“He led me quickly through the street, turning every time I hesitated, his hand out for mine, a smile on his lips, his presence as marvellous to me as the night he’d come in my mortal life and told me we would be vampires. ‘Evil is a point of view,’ he whispered now. ‘We are immortal. And what we have before us are the rich feasts that conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without regret. God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingdoms. I want a child tonight. I am like a mother…I want a child!’
“I should have known what he meant. I did not. He had me mesmerized, enchanted. He was playing to me as he had when I was mortal; he was leading me. He was saying, ‘Your pain will end.’
“We’d come to a street of lighted windows. It was a place of rooming houses, sailors, flatboat men. We entered a narrow door; and then, in a hollow stone passage in which I could hear my own breath like the wind, he crept along the wall until his shadow leapt out in the light of a doorway beside the shadow of another man, their heads bent together, their whispers like the rustling of dry leaves. ‘What is it?’ I drew near him as he came back, afraid suddenly this exhilaration in me would die. I saw again that nightmare landscape I’d seen when I spoke with Babette; I felt the chill of loneliness, the chill of guilt. ‘She’s there!’ he said. ‘Your wounded one. Your daughter.’
“ ‘What do you say, what are you talking about!’
“ ‘You’ve saved her,’ he whispered. ‘I knew it. You left the window wide on her and her dead mother, and people passing in the street brought her here.’
“ ‘The child. The little girl!’ I gasped. But he was already leading me through the door to stand at the end of the long ward of wooden beds, each with a child beneath a narrow white blanket, one candle at the end of the ward, where a nurse bent over a small desk. We walked down the aisle between the rows. ‘Starving children, orphans,’ he said. ‘Children of plague and fever.’ He stopped. I saw the little girl lying in the bed. And then the man was coming, and he was whispering with Lestat; such care for the sleeping little ones. Someone in another room was crying. The nurse rose and hurried away.
“And now the doctor bent and wrapped the child in the blanket. Lestat had taken money from his pocket and set it on the foot of the bed. The doctor was saying how glad he was we’d come for her, how most of them were orphans; they came in on the ships, sometimes orphans too young even to tell which body was that of their mother. He thought Lestat was the father.
“And in moments, Lestat was running through the streets with her, the white of the blanket gleaming against his dark coat and cape; and even to my expert vision, as I ran after him it seemed sometimes as if the blanket flew through the night with no one holding it, a shifting shape travelling on the wind like a leaf stood upright and sent scurrying along a passage, trying to gain the wind all the while and truly take flight. I caught him finally as we approached the lamps near the Place d’Armes. The child lay pale on his shoulder, her cheeks still full like plums, though she was drained and near death. She opened her eyes, or rather the lids slid back; and beneath the long curling lashes I saw a streak of white. ‘Lestat, what are you doing? Where are you taking her?’ I demanded. But I knew too well. He was heading for the hotel and meant to take her into our room.