locket even as I clutched it. It was guilt that was consuming her, not love. It was guilt-that shop of dolls Claudia had described to me, shelves and shelves of the effigy of that dead child. But guilt that absolutely understood the finality of death. There was something as hard in her as the evil in myself, something as powerful. She had her hand out towards me. She touched my waistcoat and opened her fingers there, pressing them against my chest. And I was on my knees, drawing close to her, her hair brushing my face.
"'Hold fast to me when I take you,' I said to her, seeing her eyes grow wide, her mouth open.'And when the swoon is strongest, listen all the harder for the beating of my heart. Hold and say over and over, "I will live."'
"'Yes, yes,' she was nodding, her heart pounding with her excitement.
"Her hands burned on my neck, fingers forcing their way into my collar.'Look beyond me at that distant light; don't take your eyes off of it, not for a second, and say over and over, "I will live."'
"She gasped as I broke the flesh, the warm current coming into me, her breasts crushed against me, her body arching up, helpless, from the couch. And I could see her eyes, even as I shut my own, see that taunting, provocative mouth. I was drawing on her, hard, lifting her, and I could feel her weakening, her hands dropping limp at her sides.'Tight, tight,' I whispered over the hot stream of. her blood, her heart thundering in my ears, her blood swelling my satiated veins.'The lamp,' I whispered, 'look at it!' Her heart was slowing, stopping, and her head dropped back from me on the velvet, her eyes dull to the point of death. It seemed dying for her, dying for that love as I was that very first night when Lestat gave her to me, turned her eyes to me, and told her my name; that love which had warmed me in my self-hatred, allowed me to exist. Oh, how Lestat had understood it, and now at last his plan was undone.
"But it went beyond that, in some region from which I was shrinking as I strode back and forth, back and forth, my hands opening and closing at my silos, feeling not only that hatred in her liquid eyes: It was her pain. She had shown me her pain! To give me immortality in this hopeless guise, this helpless form. I put my hands to my ears, as if she spoke the words yet, and the tears flowed. For all these years I had depended utterly upon her cruelty, her absolute lack of pain! And pain was what she showed to me, undeniable pain. Oh, how Lestat would have laughed at us. That was why she had put the knife to him, because he would have laughed. To destroy me utterly she need only show me that pain. The child I made a vampire suffered. Her agony was as my own.
"There was a coffin in that other room, a bed for Madeleine, to which Claudia retreated to leave me alone with what I could not abide. I welcomed the silence. And sometime during the few hours that remained of the night I found myself at the open window, feeling the slow mist of the rain. It glistened on the fronds of the ferns, on sweet white flowers that listed, bowed, and finally broke from their stems. A carpet of flowers littering the little balcony, the petals pounded softly by the rain. I felt weak now, and utterly alone. What had passed between us tonight could never he undone, and what had been done to Claudia by me could never be undone.
"But I was somehow, to my own bewilderment, empty of all regret. Perhaps it was the night, the starless sky, the gas lamps frozen in the mist that gave some strange comfort for which I never asked and didn't know how, in this emptiness and aloneness, to receive. I am alone, I was thinking. I am alone. It seemed dust, perfectly, and so to have a pleasing, inevitable form. And I pictured myself then forever alone, as if on gaining that vampire strength the night of my death I had left Lestat and never looked back for him, as if I had moved on away from him, beyond the need of him and anyone else. As if the night had said to