of that might remain in the town house, to which I was certain I would return sooner or later, if only to move my possessions to another similar one and start a new life in New Orleans. I couldn't conceive of leaving it forever. Wouldn't. But I fixed my mind and heart on Europe.
"It began to penetrate for the first time that I might see the world if I wanted. That I was, as Claudia said, free.
"Meantime, she made a plan. It was her idea most definitely that we must go first to central Europe, where the vampire seemed most prevalent. She was certain we could find something there that would instruct us, explain our origins. But she seemed anxious for more than answers: a communion with her own kind. She mentioned this over and over,'My own kind,' and she said it with a different intonation than I might have used. She made me feel the gulf that separated us. In the first years of our life together, I had thought her like Lestat, imbibing his instinct to kill, though she shared my tastes in everything else. Now I knew her to be less human than either of us, less human than either of us might have dreamed. Not the faintest conception bound her to the sympathies of human existence. Perhaps this explained why-despite everything I had done or failed to do-she clung to me. I was not her own kind. Merely the closest thing to it."
"But wouldn't it have been possible," asked the boy suddenly, "to instruct her in the ways of the human heart the way you'd instructed her in everything else?"
"To what avail?" asked the vampire frankly. "So she night suffer as I did? Oh, I'll grant you I should have taught her something to prevail against her desire to kill Lestat. For my own sake, I should have done that. But you see, I had no confidence in anything else. Once fallen from grace, I had confidence in nothing."
The boy nodded. "I didn't mean to interrupt you. You were coming to something," he.. said.
"Only to the point that it was possible to forget what had happened to Lestat by turning my mind to Europe. And the thought of the other vampires inspired me also. I had not been cynical for one moment about the existence of God. Only lost from it. Drifting, preternatural, through the natural world.
"But we had another matter before we left for Europe. Oh, a great deal happened indeed. It began with the musician. He had called while I was gone that evening to the cathedral, and the next night he was to come again. I had dismissed the servants and went down to him myself. And his appearance startled me at once.
"He was much thinner than rd remembered him and very pale, with a moist gleam about his face that suggested fever. And he was perfectly miserable. When I told him Lestat had gone away, he refused at first to believe me and began insisting Lestat would have left him some message, something. And then he went off up the Rue Royale, talking to himself about it, as if he had little awareness of anyone around him. I caught up with him under a gas lamp.'He did leave you something,' I said, quickly feeling for my wallet. I didn't know how much I had in it, but I planned to give it to him. It was several hundred dollars. I put it into his hands. They were so thin I could see the blue veins pulsing beneath the watery skin. Now he became exultant, and I sensed at once that the matter went beyond the money.'Then he spoke of me, he told you to give this to me!' he said, holding onto it as though it were a relic.'He must have said something else to you!' He stared at me with bulging, tortured eyes. I didn't answer him at once, because during these moments I had seen the puncture wounds in his neck. Two red scratch-like marks to the right, just above his soiled collar. The money flapped in his hand; he was oblivious to the evening traffic of the street, the people who pushed close around us.'Put it away,' I whispered.'He did speak of you, that it was important you go 'on with your music.'
"He stared at me as if anticipating something else.'Yes? Did he say anything else?' he asked me. I didn't know what to tell him. I would have