my hair. I looked at the empty white window, peering too high for the trees.
"They could see nothing green here, and it's spring outside, southern spring. I can smell it through the walls. I want to look just for a moment on flowers. To kill, to drink blood and to have flowers."
"Not good enough. Want to make the book," he said. "Want to make it now and want you to come with me. I won't hang around forever."
"Oh, nonsense, of course you will. You think I'm a doll, don't you? You think I'm cute and made of poured wax, and you'll stay as long as I stay."
"You're a bit mean, Armand. You look like an angel, and talk like a common thug."
"Such arrogance! I thought you wanted me."
"Only on certain terms."
"You lie, David Talbot," I said.
I headed past him for the stairs. Cicadas sang in the night as they often do, to no clock, in New Orleans.
Through the nine-pane windows of the stairwell, I glimpsed the flowering trees of spring, a bit of vine curling on a porch top.
He followed. Down and down we went, walking like regular men, down to the first floor, and out the sparkling glass doors and into the broad lighted space of Napoleon Avenue with its damp, sweet park of green down the middle, a park thick with carefully planted flowers and old gnarled and humble, bending trees.
The whole picture moved with the subtle river winds, and wet mist swirled but would not fall into rain itself, and tiny green leaves drifted down like wilting ashes to the ground. Soft soft southern spring. Even the sky seemed pregnant with the season, lowering yet blushing with reflected light, giving birth to the mist from all its pores.
Strident perfume rose from the gardens right and left, from purple Four O'Clocks, as mortals call them here, a rampant flower like unto weed, but infinitely sweet, and the wild irises stabbing upwards like blades out of the black mud, throaty petals monstrously big, battering themselves on old walls and concrete steps, and then as always there were roses, roses of old women and roses of the young, roses too whole for the tropical night, roses coated with poison.
There had been streetcars here once on this center strip of grass. I knew it, that the tracks had run along this wide deep green space where I walked ahead of him, slumward, riverward, deathward, Woodward. He came after me. I could close my eyes as I walked, never losing a step, and see the streetcars.
"Come on, follow me," I said, describing what he did, not inviting him.
Blocks and blocks within seconds. He kept up. Very strong. The blood of an entire Royal Vampire court was inside him, no doubt of it. Count on Lestat to make the most lethal of monsters, that is, after his initial seductive blunders-Nicolas, Louis, Claudia-not a single one of the three able to take care of themselves alone, and two perished, and one lingering and perhaps the weakest vampire yet walking in the great world.
I looked back. His tight, polished brown face startled me. He looked lacquered all over, waxed, buffed, and once again I thought of spicy things, of the meat of candied nuts, and delicious aromas, of chocolates sweet with sugar and dark rich butterscotch, and it seemed a good thing suddenly to maybe grab ahold of him.
But this was no substitute for one rotten, cheap, ripe and odoriferous mortal. And guess what? I pointed. "Over there."
He looked as I directed him. He saw the sagging line of old buildings. Mortals everywhere lurked, slept, sat, dined, wandered, amid tiny narrow stairs, behind peeling walls and under cracked ceilings.
I had found one, most perfect in his wickedness, a great flurry of hateful embers, of malice and greed and contempt smoldering as he waited for me.
We'd come to Magazine Street and passed it, but we were not at the river, only almost, and this was a street I had no recollection of, or knowledge of, in my wanderings of this city-their city, Louis's and Lestat's-just a narrow street with these houses the color of driftwood under the moon and windows hung with makeshift coverings, and inside there was this one slouching, arrogant, vicious mortal fixed to a television set and guzzling malt from a brown bottle, ignoring the roaches and the pulsing heat that pressed in from the open window, this ugly, sweating, filthy and irresistible thing, this flesh and blood for me.
The house was so