love for you."
I didn't respond for a moment. My mind was leaping ahead to all manner of forbidden possibilities. Finally I put it in words:
"Marius, don't you ever have the desire to tell all of it to all of them! I mean, to make it known to the whole world of our kind., and to draw them together?"
"Good God, no, Lestat. Why would I do that?" He seemed genuinely puzzled.
"So that we might possess our legends, might at least ponder the riddles of our history, as men do. So that we might swap our stories and share our power --
"And combine to use it as the Children of Darkness have done, against men?"
"No ... Not like that."
"Lestat, in eternity, covens are actually rare. Most vampires are distrustful and solitary beings and they do not love others. They have no more than one or two well-chosen companions from time to time, and they guard their hunting grounds and their privacy as I do mine. They wouldn't want to come together, and if they did overcome the viciousness and suspicions that divide them, their convocation would end in terrible battles and struggles for supremacy like those revealed to me by Akasha, which happened thousands of years ago. We are evil things finally. We are killers. Better that those who unite on this earth be mortal and that they unite for the good."
I accepted this, ashamed of how it excited me, ashamed of all my weaknesses and all my impulsiveness. Yet another realm of possibilities was already obsessing me.
"And what about to mortals, Marius? Have you never wanted to reveal yourself to them, and tell them the whole story?"
Again, he seemed positively baffled by the notion.
"Have you never wanted the world to know about us, for better or for worse? Has it never seemed preferable to living in secret?"
He lowered his eyes for a moment and rested his chin against his closed hand. For the first time I perceived a communication of images coming from him, and I felt that he allowed me to see them because he was uncertain of his answer. He was remembering with a recall so powerful that it made my powers seem fragile. And what he remembered were the earliest times, when Rome had still ruled the world, and he was still within the range of a normal human lifetime.
"You remember wanting to tell them all," I said. "To make it known, the monstrous secret."
"Perhaps," he said, "in the very beginning, there was some desperate passion to communicate."
"Yes, communicate," I said, cherishing the word. And I remembered that long-ago night on the stage when I had so frightened the Paris audience.
"But that was in the dim beginning," he said slowly, speaking of himself. His eyes were narrow and remote as if he were looking back over all the centuries. "It would be folly, it would be madness. Were humanity ever really convinced, it would destroy us. I don't want to be destroyed. Such dangers and calamities are not interesting to me."
I didn't answer.
"You don't feel the urge yourself to reveal these things," he said to me almost soothingly.
But I do, I thought. I felt his fingers on the back of my hand. I was looking beyond him, back over my brief past -- the theater, my fairy -- tale fantasies. I felt paralyzed in sadness.
"What you feel is loneliness and monstrousness," he said. "And you're impulsive and defiant."
"True."
"But what would it matter to reveal anything to anyone? No one can forgive. No one can redeem. It's a childish illusion to think so. Reveal yourself and be destroyed, and what have you done? The Savage Garden would swallow your remains in pure vitality and silence. Where is there justice or understanding?"
I nodded.
I felt his hand close on mine. He rose slowly to his feet, and I stood up, reluctantly but compliantly.
"It's late," he said gently. His eyes were soft with compassion. "We've talked enough for now. And I must go down to my people. There's trouble in the nearby village, as I feared there would be. And it will take what time I have until dawn, and then more tomorrow evening. It may well be after midnight tomorrow before we can talk-"
He was distracted again, and he lowered his head and listened.
"Yes, I have to go," he said. And we embraced lightly and very comfortably.
And though I wanted to go with him and see what happened in the village -- how he would conduct his affairs there --