building, this old brick convent, the daughter of the man Lestat had stalked and slain.
When he bound us to look out for her, I was angry, but only mildly so. I have fallen in love with mortals. I have those tales to tell. I am in love now with Sybelle and Benjamin, whom I call my children, and I had been a secret troubadour to other mortals in the dim past.
All right, he was in love with Dora, he'd laid his head on a mortal breast, he wanted the womb blood of her that would be no loss to her, he was smitten, crazed, goaded by the ghost of her Father and courted by the Prince of Evil Himself.
And she, what shall I say of her? That she possessed the power of a Rasputin behind the face of a nunnery postulant, when in fact she is a practiced theologian and not a mystic, a ranting raving leader, not a visionary, whose ecclesiastical ambitions would have dwarfed those of Saints Peter and Paul put together, and that of course, she is like any flower Lestat ever gathered from the Savage Garden of this world: a most fine and fetching little creature, a glorious specimen of God's Creation-with raven hair, a pouty mouth, cheeks of porcelain and the dashing limbs of a nymph.
Of course I knew the very moment that he left this world. I felt it. I was in New York already, very near to him and aware that you were there as well. Neither of us meant to let him out of our sight if at all possible. Then came the moment when he vanished in the blizzard, when he was sucked out of the earthly atmosphere as if he'd never been there.
Being his fledgling you couldn't hear the perfect silence that descended when he vanished. You couldn't know how completely he'd been withdrawn from all things minuscule yet material which had once echoed with the beating of his heart.
I knew, and I think it was to distract us both that I proposed we go to the wounded mortal who must have been shattered by her Father's death at the hands of a blond-haired handsome blood-swilling monster who'd made her his confidant and a friend.
It was not difficult to help her in the short event-filled nights that followed, when horror was heaped upon horror, her Father's murder discovered, his sordid life at once made by media magic the madcap conversation of the wide world.
It seems a century ago, not merely so short a time, that we moved south to these rooms, her father's legacy of crucifixes and statues, of ikons which I handled so coolly as if I'd never loved such treasures at all.
It seems a century ago that I dressed decently for her, finding in some fashionable Fifth Avenue shop a shapely coat of old red velvet, a poet's shirt, as they call it now, of starched cotton and ample flopping lace, and to set this off, pegged-leg trousers of black wool and shiny boots that buckled at the ankle, all this the better to accompany her to identify her Father's severed head under the leeching fluorescent lights of some immense and overcrowded morgue.
One good thing about this final decade of the twentieth century is that a man of any age can wear his hair at any length.
It seems a century ago that I combed out mine, full and curly and clean for once, just for her.
It seems a century ago we stood so staunchly beside her, indeed even held her, this long-necked, short-haired, spellbinding witchlet, in our very arms as she wept over the death of her Father and pelted us with feverish and maniacally intelligent and dispassionate questions about our sinister nature, as if a great crash course in the anatomy of the vampire could somehow close the cycle of horror threatening her wholesomeness and her sanity and somehow bring her wicked conscienceless Father back.
No, it wasn't the return of Roger, actually, that she prayed for; she believed too totally in the omniscience and mercy of God. Besides, seeing a man's severed head is a bit of a shock, even if the head is frozen, and a dog had chomped on Roger a bit before he'd been discovered, and what with the strict "no touch" rules of modern forensics, he was-for me even-quite a sight. (I remember the coroner's assistant saying soulfully to me that I was awfully young to have to see such a thing. She