Part 2


Talk about irony.

I mean, just a few nights ago, I'd been nothing if not determined to deny him my luscious body, at least until he came to love Lestat the killer vampire the same way he loved Lestat the former man.

Talk about timing.

Why couldn't he have gotten full of self-righteous error then, for God's sake? It would have made my life simpler. No, instead he had to seduce me and seduce me and come all over the place like a randy schoolboy---not that I'm complaining, mind you---until I'd given up my lofty ideals. Until I gave in, and decided our relationship would be limited in no way at all...

And now, NOW, he wanted to turn the clock back.

Well, I'd had just about enough of his nonsense, I can tell you that. He'd surprised me, back in the woods, with all his idiotic blather. I mean, I hadn't been expecting it. But now that I'd had a few moments to gather my thoughts, I was ready to counter his insane assumptions.

Can't I talk my way out of a jam? Really, I'd bested that demon Armand using little more that the wits I had at my disposal. Oh, and a rosary. Wonder whatever happened to Armand....? Had he made it alive out of that snowbank? He had been burned pretty badly, and all over a veil. . .

What? Louis had me more beside myself than I would have guessed. Snowbank, veil. . . Armand a blackened cinder? Yeah, that'd be the day. He was a survivor, Armand. He'd never let the sun catch him as it had caught my Claudia.

My who?

I was losing my mind, I guess. See what just the thought of losing Louis does to me?

"You get back here, Pointe du Lac!" I screamed, which of course did no good at all. The man had a mind of his own. And determination. And a fair amount of fearlessness, telling a blood-drinking murderous vampire what he would and would not do. Well, I suppose I wouldn't want him any other way. I mean, why on earth would I prefer to have a Louis quaking in fear at the sight of my anger?

Never mind that it just might be damned convenient from time to time.

I bounded over hill and dale---okay, a couple of mulberry bushes--- and landed square in front of him.

"Let me pass, Lestat," he calmly said, and stepped to the right.

I followed suit, and when he stepped to the left, blocked him there, too.

"Lovely dance," I quipped, holding out my arms. "Shall we?"

"Don't be an ass," Louis rebuked me. "It's not a lovable trait."

"What about blathering on and on as if you're the fount of all wisdom? What about presuming to know me better than I know myself, eh? How lovable was that?"

"It was honest, at least."

"It was horseshit."

Louis sighed. "I didn't expect you to take it well. You're just running true to form."

"Let's see you take it," I suggested, looking at him sidewise. And no, that wasn't an innuendo, although Louis seemed to think it was.

"Must we go through this again?" he asked, rolling his eyes.

"We must, yes," I said. "After all, it's your turn."

"I don't understand."

"Well, glory be!" I announced, pasting a saintly emphasis on the phrase. "Some truth for once. There may be hope yet!"

"What's your point?" Louis asked, rather patiently. He was right; I was rather being an ass. And he was loving me, all the same.

"Just this," I announced, laying hands on his shoulders again, but gentle ones, this time. "For all your protestations, you did say that you wanted me."

"Oh, I do," he murmured, eyes deep and dark as he imagined the way it would be. "But I told you---"

"I know. Let me ask you something, Louis. What makes you want me?"

He sighed, lost in thought as he considered that. "You do, I suppose. You. . . oh dear, I'm quite unused to this. I mean, I never had to discuss much with Colette. I just told her what to do, and she did it."

"Must you bring up your past lovers?"

"You brought up Nicolas!"

"Touché. But you're not getting off the hook so easily. Answer the question, Louis. You owe me that much, at least. What makes you want me?"

"You," he whispered, blushing. "You're magnetic. Seductive. I almost would think that you're making me feel this way, except that I know you wouldn't abuse my trust. So the feeling must be honest."

"Anything else?" I pressed, trying hard not to preen. Magnetic! Seductive! And ye gods, trustworthy! I wanted to whirl him into my arms and dance about the meadow, singing!

"You're very handsome," Louis admitted, clearing his throat. "A golden Adonis."

Oooh, was I ever enjoying this. "Anything else?" I repeated, feeling that I could go on all night long, if he would.

"Your muscles." Louis' blush deepened to crimson. "I saw a sketch once, of the David by Michelangelo. . ."

David's an old flabby man, I almost said. At least he used to be, before I tossed him into another body, a body with no mind of its own. Don't be jealous of David.

Perhaps the night was getting to me more than I thought, because all that was certainly daft. I didn't even know a David! Although, I had seen the statue in question, years ago with Gabrielle. Quite the compliment.

"Anything else?" I asked a third time, flexing my biceps just a little bit. And grinning.

"Your absolute conceit and pushiness!" Louis erupted.

"Anything else?"

"No, that should just about account for it!"

"You're sure?" I pressed. "This is important, Louis, so think. Really think. Is there any other reason in the whole world why you find yourself attracted to me? Doesn't have to be a reason connected to me, mind you. I'm not fishing for yet more compliments, nice as they were. I'm serious."

He did think as I had requested, but came out with, "Er. . . no, nothing comes to mind."

"That's strange," I said, my tone deceptively mild. "I thought you had concluded that the sort of attraction we're talking about was something unnatural, predicated on a bad childhood experience. Wasn't that your thesis with regard to me? And here you are, a grown man with no trauma to back up his impulses, and you want nothing more at this moment than to kiss me senseless---"

"You flatter yourself," Louis sharply interrupted. "At this precise instant I have rather more violent urges in mind."

He meant a swift uppercut to the jaw, since I was being so very sarcastic. Belittling his concerns, in fact. But what else could I do, take them seriously?

I sidled closer to his warm body and buried my lips in the hair curling over his ear. "Oooh, violence. What do you think, mon amour, mon coeur? A little silken rope, a few love bites to spice the night? Do tell."

"I can't think," Louis gasped.

"Good. I don't appreciate what you've been thinking in the past few minutes, anyway." One finger under his chin, I swiveled his face to mine, and then I kissed him. Passionately, with everything that was in me. Well, everything except blood. Too much like a drug, my blood, and for all I had just disparaged his thinking, I did want him clear-headed. For the moment.

My hand slid beneath his shirt, my fingers teasing his nipples. He gasped, straining against me, against his own clothes, his desire hot and hard, and all too evident. "Wouldn't it be nice to use that?" I suggested, every word as seductive and magnetic as I could make it. And when I put my mind to being seductive. . . well, I could make a stranger swoon. A man in love with me had no chance at all, really.

Quite proper, that.

"I... I... mon Dieu, oui, it would be nice to use that," he gasped. "One more kiss, Lestat. Please!"

Ha, like I'd let him off that easy. After what he'd put me through back there? Love is patient, love is kind? Don't you believe it. Oh, maybe some milksop love, the handholding kind. What we had was firebreathing passion.

"No, no more kisses until you see sense," I lectured him. "Can you cast your lust-clouded mind back to the subject at hand?"

He did try. "That it would be nice to put this arousal to use. . . ?"

"Further back, mon très beau cher."

He closed his eyes and swayed into me, my sculpted strength keeping him from falling. "No childhood trauma, that was it."

"There you go," I said, and kissed him again as reward. Just on the nose, though. I wanted him able to think, as I said. Well, part of me wanted that. "Now, listen."

"Oui, Lestat," he moaned.

Amazing. I mean, he wasn't the submissive type. But I liked it. Hell, I loved it. But then, I'd love anything that brought Louis and me together.

Even a little blonde-haired angel who'd end up sticking a knife in my back. . . .

WHAT????

"Listen," I said again, shoving away my insane memories, premonitions, fits of insanity, whatever. "You had no childhood trauma, not like mine. Your father was a good man, strong and true, who would never have dreamed of lifting a strap to you, let alone. . . anything else. And yet you want me with every breath you draw, is that not so?"

"Mais oui, Lestat. . ."

"But if I want you, it has to be because of what the marquis did? My love and desire can't be pure and unsullied as is your own? What makes us so different, Louis? Have I some stain in my soul that makes my passion foul? It can't be my father's fault, not given what we know about your own past, so it must be me. Am I so contemptible?"

"No, no, I didn't mean that!" he cried, anguished. "It's not you at all, it's him! Lestat, you mustn't ever think yourself unworthy of me, it isn't like that!"

"It isn't like what you said earlier, either," I announced. "How about this for explanation, Louis? You and I are fated. Meant to be, the one for the other. And Nicolas, and the others, that was just me reaching out towards the future, towards a you I didn't yet know existed. It was hope and expectation, it was knowledge that you were out there somewhere, if only I could find you. And I'm the same for you, although raised as you were in such strict mores, you had less freedom to explore your natural impulses. Yes, natural, Louis. Yours and mine both."

"And your father, then?" he gasped.

"Is no more significant in the scheme of things than the fact that you were raised in a swamp while I grew up on a snow-covered mountain. He simply was, Louis. Part of the landscape. But not part of me. No, not the way you thought."

"Oh, Lestat," he said, tears rising to his eyes. "You must be right. I mean, how could I want you with every part, with that part, if it has to come from pain? And so why must your need of me come from pain? I. . . I feel so very foolish."

And burying his head in the frock coat covering my shoulder, he wept.

"Non, non, none of that," I chided him. "It's not so bad. You love me dearly, I know. You thought to help me, to be a true friend, that's all it was. Noble, really. I'm sorry I shouted so."

"I'm sorry too," he murmured, clutching me.

"And so?" I asked, and Louis looked at me, his face none the less beautiful for his poignant expression.

And then he blushed.

"I do want you. And I do know what to do now, what you would like me to do, I mean. Not so very different than---"

Than what I had with Colette, he was thinking, but he spared me hearing it aloud.

"And so?" I asked again.

"I confess to wanting you with all my heart but still I do think the entire suggestion. . . a bit odd."

Well, that was Louis for you. Staid. Prim. Proper. Except I knew how to make him let go of all his inhibitions, didn't I?

Oh yes, I did.

Every last one.

Part 33


I was just about to kiss him until his knees went weak, which is to say, I was about to lay my lips across his for the barest hint of an instant, heh heh, when Louis, bless his little Creole heart, saw fit to interrupt my mood by gasping, "The duel!"

"Not trying to change the subject, are you, Louis?"

"The duel," he said again, this time grating the words, and I sighed. What could I do, really? I was the man's slave, I really was. Besides, I knew this little feint was more than a distraction, really. He genuinely was uncomfortable---though intrigued---by the suggestion that he and I get on far more intimate terms. Well, let him get used to the ideas I'd planted, eh? Let him mull them over, during the daytime when he missed me most, heh heh. Let him get a little hot under the collar.

The way I figured it, I would let him fill with steam until he came to me for release.

"The DUEL, Lestat!" Louis shouted, which made me wonder just how long I'd been ruminating. Had I gone into one of those distracted states, when I could just stare for hours at the reflections within a rain puddle? I guess so, since I could scarcely get my mind back to the topic Louis wanted to discuss.

"Oh, the duel?" I asked stupidly, and when he tapped the toe of one boot against the damp mossy ground, I blinked and got my thoughts in order. "Very well, since you insist. Young monsieur César Alfonso Gutierrez Álvarez de Reyes was not terribly pleased to learn that his only sister was being played for a fool by Freniere. I think he might have been satisfied to see Freniere marry his sister, but when he learned that the cad was already affianced to Sophie. . . well, now he must redeem the family honor. Quite bloodthirsty, he seemed."

Louis looked at me askance, until I added, "Well, for a mortal. You know what I mean."

"Has Reyes already challenged Freniere, though?"

"He swore to do so this very night. Of course I fully expect Freniere to flee the parish rather than face his destiny, but there you have it. One way or another, Sophie will be free of the scoundrel. That is, the Spanish boy is a crack shot. I doubt Freniere has much of a chance if he chooses to fight."

"I don't know," Louis murmured. "He's handy with a pistol. It will be pistols?"

I shrugged. "I would think so, given all the Spanish boy had to say on the subject. He was quite forthcoming after I suggested he tell me all. Oh, and the mademoiselle Consuelo Álvarez de Reyes is quite something, Louis. Gorgeous long black hair. If Sophie makes her acquaintance she'll be enraged. Good for her. Better than crying in her soup."

"And so, tomorrow," Louis murmured. "Poor Sophie. What if Freniere wins the duel, though?"

"His unfaithfulness will have been made public," I reminded him. "Can you really think that Sophie would want him after she's become convinced that he was making the señorita his little courgette, as well?"

"She does have her pride," Louis murmured.

"So, either way, she'll be free of him," I promised. "And Louis? She'll surprise you. She's a survivor."

But when the next night dawned, I was the one who was surprised. Freniere was even more of a scoundrel than I had ever supposed. To all accounts, it looked as though he would claim victory in the duel, and claim Sophie as well, all in one fell swoop.

And it was up to me to stop him.

I went tearing over to the Freniere place, riding bareback as if the devil were on my heels. But of course he wasn't.

The one hell-bent on chasing me down was none other than my beloved Louis.

Part 34


But when the next night dawned, I was the one who was surprised. Freniere was even more of a scoundrel than I had ever supposed. To all accounts, it looked as though he would claim victory in the duel, and claim Sophie as well, all in one fell swoop.

And it was up to me to stop him.

I went tearing over to the Freniere place, riding bareback as if the devil were on my heels. But of course he wasn't.

The one hell-bent on chasing me down was none other than my beloved Louis.

That's right, my beloved Louis, astride a horse just a few paces behind me, and urging his mount on for all he was worth. The way he was chasing me as I rushed to that duel, you would have thought that I was the villain of the piece.

Right.

All I wanted to do was safeguard Sophie's state of mind, and her tender heart, although mind you it wasn't anywhere near as tender as Louis liked to make out. That Sophie had nerves of steel. Sort of like Louis, really. She was made out of sterner stuff than to fold under pressure.

But what would a brother not do for a dear sister? Or ask a friend to do?

What, indeed. . .

But I get ahead of myself, ahead of my story. Habit of mine, you know. I suppose I should back up a tad and fill in the gaps.

The duel. We were on our way to that accursed duel. It was the next night after I had told Louis that the Spanish boy would be challenging Freniere. It was hardly night any more, though. It was close to dawn, and growing lighter all the time, but I was determined to get to that duel before Freniere's tricks and lies undid all my fine work.

Earlier in the evening, you see--but not that early; past midnight unless I miss my guess--I'd had word from the Freniere place, and it was word I didn't like.

It happened like this: I'd had a hunch, a strong hunch from way back, that Freniere was even slimier deep down than I'd sensed at first. Plain and simple, I didn't trust him. I didn't trust him to treat Sophie right, or to deal honestly with Louis, and I certainly didn't think he was going to stand up in a duel without arranging for himself some underhanded advantage.

So the previous night, I'd had quite a busy time. First I rushed over to the Álvarez de Reyes place to incite murder in the Spanish boy--a task easier done that said, as it turned out. Did I mention that he was more than a little bloodthirsty? Et mon Dieu, the curses that came out of the young señor's mouth! I'd picked up a bit of Spanish during my troubles with Gabrielle, and believe you me, the boy could swear a blue streak. And a purple streak. And I kid you not, a green one variegated with red! Well, you get the idea.

Anyway, after he was hot as a little chili pepper under the collar--such a pity I'd never gotten to try any Cajun cuisine while I was mortal, but c'est la vie, or perhaps c'est la morte would be more apropos--I had second thoughts about going right back to Pointe du Lac. I had a feeling about Freniere, you see, a feeling that he would take none too kindly to the prospect of a duel. Earlier, I'd been more-or-less convinced that he would high-tail it out of Louisiana the minute he got wind that his Frenchified little ass might be in danger. But now, I didn't know.

I just didn't know.

Call it intuition. Or call it my godlike omniscience, heh heh, but for no apparent reason I suddenly became absolutely convinced that Freniere would have an ace up his sleeve when it came to duelsville. Well, hell. He was a card cheat, wasn't he? And a swindler! I guess maybe it was just good old-fashioned logic dictating my actions after I left the Reyes plantation.

I went over to Frenieres to sniff out anything fishy. Well, not literally, although sometimes the catfish in the ponds near there could STINK. My word, I'd never had to put up with that in the Auvergne. Don't get my wrong, here; my old stomping grounds in France were none too pleasant, but by and large they hadn't smelled too godawful. But Louisiana? The swamps? Don't EVEN get me started. I mean, loving Louis made it all worthwhile so I'm not complaining, but if I were, I'd tell you that a preternatural sense of smell was most definitely NOT an asset when you got too near stagnant water.

And imagine what it would be to be immersed in the dank glop, wrapped in a sheet, or maybe some sort of shroud, and slipped into the swamp while the little blonde-haired angle who'd done you in egged on the alligators to eat what was left of your shriveled corpse. . .

Oh mon Dieu, I was doing it again, letting my insane ramblings drift down truly ludicrous turns. The worst part was that I didn't just think these things, or hear them echo in my head, I actually saw them happening. I'd seen her. A doll, a living doll chiseled out of porcelain so fine and white that it could not be flesh, yet she moved and talked. Ye gods, she talked just like an adult, her French subtly shaded with cynicism and humor, but she could not have been more than five, six at the most. Bizarre. . . and who was that man with her, that man standing in the shadows by the bank of the swamp, his green eyes shadowed with grief, his black hair drifting in the slight wind.

Come to me, come to me, come down to me, I called from the depths of my watery grave. Come, Louis. I won't hurt you, Louis. I understand. You did it for her. You love her. But now do this for me. Love me. Come down into the dark waters to my wounded heart, and unwind me from this bloody mass of cloth. Save me, Louis. Heal me. Feed me with your blood. Give back what I have given you, and together we'll find a way to reach her, a way to help her survive the eons in her hopeless form, her helpless guise. . .

That's right, it was Louis with her!

Louis with her, and me in the swamp waters, all but dead, and yet not quite dead. That's right, the two of them hadn't burned me yet.

THEY HADN'T BURNED ME YET??????

Well, it doesn't exactly make me proud to admit it, but I'll tell you what I did next. Sick to death of these ridiculous visions, I actually slapped myself upside the head, and yelled at my sorry hide for good measure. Snap out of it, Lestat! Something like that. And it didn't exactly work, but it did get my attention back on what mattered.

Freniere.

I delved deep into his thoughts, but of course there wasn't much there to illuminate me. He hadn't received word of the proposed duel yet, so he had no worries.

Except, he did have one.

He was worried about Sophie. Hmm, interesting. I suppose he did care for her in his own crass, selfish, ill-mannered, boorish, coarse, uncouth, churlish way. He was worried about her, but he didn't know why. She just seemed. . . off, somehow. Not like herself, not quite.

Well, good! Maybe she was wising up to him and his nefarious ways.

I snooped around the servants next, and the slave quarters, and pretty much cast out a blanket mental request that if they saw or heard or even suspected anything suspicious with regard to an upcoming duel, or one Mademoiselle Sophie de Pointe du Lac, they were to get word to Monsieur Louis de Pointe du Lac at once. Then I cast out a mental image of myself to let them know they could talk to me just as well. But I didn't mention my name. Not that I'm big on rules, of course--although know-it-all Marius sure had threatened to squash me like a bug if I breathed a word of You-Know-Who-Who-Must-Be-You-Know-What--but in any case, I never had been much of a name dropper. I mean, even when my father's title might have gotten me somewhere, I went by pedestrian de Valois instead. Just personal preference, you know.

Don't look at me like that! I am NOT afraid of Marius. Not! Not, not, not! And I am NOT defensive! Why should I be? My blood's 6,000 years old or maybe 4,000. That damned woman never can remember how old the queen was. . .

What damned woman?

Ah well, what did it matter? Some deep instinct told me that "damned" was the right epithet, in any case. Or maybe something worse for the likes of her. . .

But QUEEN? What queen? And old blood? What the hell did that mean? I mean sure, I suppose I had a bit of Marius', but he wasn't a queen. Not that I knew of, anyway, heh heh heh. . . But red velvet??? You know, it did make you wonder, didn't it? Red velvet. Very sensuous, that, but wasn't it just the littlest bit . . . oh, never mind. I'm probably just biased towards blue, that's all.

Or maybe You-Know-Who-Who-Must-Be-You-Know-What, maybe she was a queen? I didn't know. Wouldn't surprise me, come to think of it. But then it's hardly accurate to say that I had old blood merely on account of her. I hadn't gotten that much. And I'd trade every drop of it for more of Louis'. I mean, now that I think about it, drinking from her was more like a cry for help than anything else. Yeah, that's right. Nicolas was gone and I was really still mourning, and I didn't know there would be a Louis in my future, and I was reaching out to whoever was around.

Sort of distasteful now, actually.

I finished up at the Freniere place, made sure I'd get wind of any nasty business well in advance of the duel, and then I was off to see my Louis.

Well, I did get wind of some nasty business. But it wasn't well in advance of the duel, it was just before.

And that was why I was riding full-out to save the Spanish boy from Freniere's treachery.

But as for why Louis was hell-bent on stopping me, well. . . that's quite another matter, altogether.

Part 35



I could hardly stand it, and I kid you not. Louis, chasing me? Trying to stop me? I wanted to let him, you know? Wanted to let him stop me so we could talk it all out. Yell it all out, if need be. Because I knew just what his problem was. How could I not? Louis was so upset that his thoughts were coming across loud and clear.

And *what* he thought -- well, he had a point, he really did.

But he also had a whole moral perspective that just *wasn't* going to help us, not in the circumstances. If I let Louis run this show, he was going to ruin things for Sophie, absolutely ruin them. Never mind that his intentions were perfectly good. Louis couldn't read minds like me, couldn't know that for all his "love," Anton Freniere was bad news, just plain bad news. I couldn't let him get Sophie into his clutches.

And that was precisely what Louis had in mind.

Confused?

It was simple, really. Louis loved Sophie too damned much, that was the real issue. And earlier that day, he had been trying to make her see that Freniere was a real heel. I guess he'd thought that things would be easier for her, that way. Before the day and night were out, Freniere was going to be dead--not to mention outed as a philandering womanizer who had cheated on Sophie--and I suppose that Louis didn't want Sophie to be too shocked. Or he didn't want her mourning his passing.

So he had spent the day trying to make her see Freniere's flaws.

Trouble was, that Sophie was damned stubborn. Of course she had reason to be, but Louis didn't know that, not at the time. All he knew was that she was determined to be staunchly loyal to her man. Refused to believe ill of him.

And in his frustration, Louis had said one thing too much.

He hadn't mentioned the duel, but he might as well have, because Sophie cottoned to the plot and came unglued all over Louis. And I mean UNGLUED. I'd seen her throw her little hissy fits, as you know, and like a dunce, I'd never realized what was making the young madamoiselle--normally so logical and level-headed--hysterical at the drop of a hat.

But Louis realized, that day, right after Sophie realized that Freniere was a goner. He had to realize. His sister left him with no choice.

"You can't let this duel happen!" she had screamed, slapping Louis straight across the face. And it wasn't a feminine little pansy blow either. She knocked him backwards, and followed it up with a hissed explanation that made Louis' knees turn to water: "I'm with child, Louis, and Anton is the father!"

He tried to deny it---I love him, I really do, but my God, what a fool!---stammering on that she was just upset and making things up, that he knew she wasn't *that* kind of a girl. Drivel, absolute drivel.

And Sophie soon called him on it, telling him in no uncertain terms that she was a *woman,* thank you, with all a woman's desires. Then she had added---rather snidely in my opinion but she was beside herself with worry---that she understood Louis didn't have the faintest notion about a *woman's* desires, considering who he had picked to be his consort (funny word, don't like it much; I prefer "lover," or at least "heart's only joy").

Louis was sitting on the floor by then, his mind just about in collapse. Too bad I hadn't been with him. I knew all this from his heated memories of the exchange, but if I'd been with him at the time I might have slapped him too, and yelled at him to grow up, that he didn't have some monopoly on passion just because he was a drop-dead (at least I hoped he would someday, right at my feet) gorgeous European white male.

But I wasn't there.

Sophie was at least keeping her wits about her. She'd conducted the entire conversation in a hushed whisper, ever since that first "I'm with child." Propriety, you know. She wasn't ashamed of herself for being three months along, but she wasn't stupid enough to advertise it to all and sundry, either. And Louis, a gentleman even when he was in agony, had whispered just as softly all his denials. . . and then accusations.

Sophie had laid it on the line, and laid it on pretty thick. Louis was NOT going to stand by and let this duel proceed, did he understand? Her baby needed a father and she needed a husband, and if Louis let Freniere die, she would never, ever forgive him. Did he want his nephew or niece to grow up knowing that a Pointe du Lac had arranged to have his father slaughtered? And what was Louis going to say to the priest when he confessed to this horrid sin, she asked, really rubbing salt in the wound. You see, Louis hadn't been to confession since the night his brother had died. That idiot priest who had blathered on about Satan had really soured him on the organized church. Unfair reaction, really. I mean, for all I had issues with the church, I could see a difference between one cold, callous, self-righteous individual and all the genuinely self-sacrificing sorts to be found there. But Louis couldn't bear confession afterwards, and had lived ever since with this sort of burden heavy on his heart, that he knew he should participate in the rituals. But he couldn't.

And Sophie knew it.

Throwing confession in his face was a low blow. A low, low blow.

But it got to Louis, got to him at a primal level that he could not ignore.

Well, as I said, I had spent most of the night haunting both Freniere and the Álvarez boy, trying to see which way the wind was blowing as far as the duel was concerned. And when I knew what was in everyone's mind, I headed back to Pointe du Lac to tell Louis.

But I never did tell him. Didn't get the chance.

He waylaid me and demanded that I put an end to the duel. And sure, he told me about Sophie and all that, hard as it was for him. He trustee her secret to me. Which might have warmed my heart if not for the fact that he was shaking me for all he was worth and yelling, over and over, that I had to stop it. The duel, that is.

"How am I supposed to do that?" I had scoffed. "The Spanish boy is out for blood. His family honor's been stained. His sister has been dallied with---"

Louis went white in the face. Really white. Vampire white. But I was given no chance to admire it----mmmm, thinking back he *was* beautiful that way. My Beautiful One, I think I'll call him---because in the next moment he was angrily charging me,

"You stop it, Lestat! I don't care how! Use your mystical powers to convince the Spanish boy that nothing happened with his sister!"

"You want me to mess around erasing memories? It's not just his, Louis. By now word has spread to the whole Spanish coast! Servants, you know. Damned servants."

Louis had glanced at the door to his study to be sure it was shut tight.

"Solve it, even if you have to spellbind the whole coast!"

"Your faith in my powers does my heart good. . ." I was saying, when all of a sudden I had the most godlike rush of images bursting through my veins. Lestat, king of the vampires. Lestat, so powerful he doesn't need the blood any more. Lestat, rising from his body to take on a mortal's, rising from his body to travel the world. Lestat. . . able to fly---

Oh my God, it was awful, just awful. All of it. You might think I'd revel in such revelations ---hmm, nice pun, that--- but I didn't. Ugh. Not at all. Because you see, what had come right alongside those visions were unassailable facts of what such powers had cost me. Loneliness. Despair. A journey to hell and back. And Louis, unable to drink of me because he, too, feared the power that would render him alone among his own kind.

I shuddered, and resolved to never let myself become that extraordinary *thing* I'd seen in the visions. Then I turned to Louis and finished my thought.

"I can't spellbind the whole coast, Louis. It's as simple as that. I'm just one vampire. I'm not Jehovah almighty, all right?"

Louis' eyes had hardened to emerald granite. "Then kill Álvarez before he kills Freniere," he'd said, his voice ruthless. Merciless. Mon Dieu, I loved it! This was the Louis I wanted in the night with me. A Louis who could kill without remorse, a vampire par extraordinaire to share my hunts, share my bed.... oooh, it gave me gooseflesh to hear him say a thing like that. It was all I could do not to grab him for a big long smooch right there in his study!

But I knew what he didn't---that Sophie or no Sophie, Freniere did not deserve to live.

"I won't kill Álvarez," I'd said, baring my teeth. "The boy's done nothing wrong!"

"Like you care!"

"I kill the evil doer, I *told* you!"

And then, Louis just about made me faint. "If you won't kill him then I will," he'd menaced, and without another word, got his pistols from where he'd secured them after my father had used them to attempt suicide.

Well, I didn't faint.

And neither did I thrust him to the paisley carpet and have my wicked way with him. Believe you me, I was hot and ready and randy after hearing him say that.

Louis, my killer, I wanted to gush. Louis, I love you. I love you this way. I love the new you.

But Louis was in no mood for sweet talk. He was mounted and away, and it was left to me to leap on my horse and overtake him. And outdistance him.

That pissed him off. He liked to think himself the superior horseman... and really I suppose he was, but he couldn't drive his mount into a preternatural frenzy like I could. So of course my horse ran faster.

And there we were, rushing to the duel.

Me, determined to kill Freniere before he messed up Sophie's life any further---and he would, I just knew he would.

Louis, determined to save Freniere. Come what may, even if he had to kill the Álvarez boy in cold blood.

But Louis already knew--for I had said so, point blank--that if the Spanish boy missed his shot, I would take on Freniere myself, and see to it that he ended up dead before morning.

And so I suppose that Louis was planning to take me on, as well.

Just the thought gives me the chills.

You see, we were going to a duel, all right, but it wasn't really Freniere against the Spanish boy.

It was Louis against me.

And that meant that I was pretty much destined to lose no matter what the technical outcome. I was going to lose Louis.

Fuck!

Part 36



Pistols at dawn, or so they say.

Well, I can only be grateful that they didn't quite do things that way down in the bayou, because if they did, things would have gone differently.

Far differently.

Louis was mortal; he could withstand the sunlight. But moi? Non. Or as they say these days, no way?

Don't ask me what days, either. I am *always* just *always* getting these deja-vu-been-there-done-that-obey-your-thirst kind of phrases from God only knows where, and they sneak their way into my narrative. Damned deja vu. Although I do rather like the "obey your thirst:" one. Don't know who coined that but it *had* to be a vampire.

Anyway, if the duel had commenced at dawn, Louis would have got his way. I can just see it now. The Spanish boy six feet under, Sophie marching down the aisle, and Freniere as a husband who would cheat and lie and steal and pretty much destroy Pointe du Lac and all its inhabitants before he left his wife and child destitute in the plague districts of New Orleans. Sophie dead of plague, a beautiful little blonde-haired angel child shaking her decaying body crying, "Mama, mama, mama...." Louis stumbling in on the scene, pity for the child, pity and then thirst, and then his fangs deep into the delicate little five-year-old neck....

All I could say to that was one big huge fat ******yech!!!!****** I mean sure, yes, of course, I wanted Louis to become a killer as ruthless as moi. But feeding off a child? I'd done it in Notre Dame, but believe you me, I'm not proud of it. What can I say? I was going through a rough time. Of course I'm always going through a rough time, but I'm trying to handle things better. Back then, I hadn't even adjusted, didn't know I'd ever find true love. I could do better now, couldn't I?

Besides, the creepsville vision I'd just had wasn't just of Louis feeding on a holy innocent, but on his own niece!!! With his dead sister looking on, so to speak. Not *that* is truly disgusting.

And I had to see that it didn't come to that.

I had to make sure the duel went the right way. Which is to say, my way. My way or the highway.... you know some of these damned phrases that come to me don't even make sense. What the hell is a highway? Never mind.

Ok, so my objectives were as follows as I sped into the swampy clearing where Freniere and Álvarez were squared off.

One. Make sure Freniere didn't pull a fast one on the Spanish boy. As far as I was concerned, Álvarez was welcome to cheat all he liked. Save me some trouble. But Freniere better be on the up and up or he'd have me to reckon with. Hell, he already had me to reckon with, he just didn't know it. Freniere thought that HE knew how to cheat his way out of a duel? Please! He had a thing or two to learn about just what mischief one can get up to with a disgruntled servant and a bit of mental persuasion....

Two. Make sure Freniere ended up alligator bait, one way or another. And if that meant kill the smarmy bastard, well, I could certainly do worse. He qualified as an evil doer, and he'd messed with my Louis, and my Sophie, and it was unthinkable that he should do so and live. The boy was mine. MINE. Assuming a bullet didn't get him. I almost wished that Álvarez would miss, you know? Because I was in the mood for Freniere's lying blood. But really it was better for the duel to just go on as planned. Less chance of Louis hating my guts. Which brings me to

Three. Make sure Louis was okay with me when all was said and done. Tall order. Sophie had him twisted inside out. He wasn't even thinking straight. But not even to mollify my dearest love, my beautiful one, could I let the Freniere bastard live.

Case closed.

The two opponents were standing opposite, twenty paces apart, gun arms raised to fire when I burst into the clearing. And Álvarez had won the coin toss or whatever they had done, so he was going to fire first.

But his shot went wide of the mark. His ebony eyebrows shot upward, and he yelled something at his seconds, and Freniere got the most know-it-all look on his face. Right, everything just as planned, for he had just that day paid a disgruntled servant in the Spanish boy's employ to do a little work on his dueling pistols. Nothing major, you understand. Just a file stuck down the barrel and rubbed back and forth, back and forth, until even the best aim in the world could not make a shot sail true.

Damned cheat.

Álvarez knew that something was wrong, but not exactly what.

And in the meantime, he was standing stock still and facing certain death as Freniere raised his own pistol....

You know what, though?

Álvarez wasn't the only slavemaster in Louisiana with disgruntled servants lurking about his house. Freniere had them too. More of them, I dare say.

But I am The Vampire Lestat. When I commission a job done, I don't arrange for half-assed measures like slightly warped gun barrels. I go for the whole potato. (New World crop, very appropriate imagery).

Anyway, the little machinations I'd arranged were ones I'd sort of spellbound Freniere and his seconds into "overlooking"... weak minded fools, it wasn't any trouble at all. But those same machinations were serious indeed. There was more wrong with Freniere's gun barrel than a little misguided aim. There were things seriously wrong. Things that kept a bullet in there where it damned well belonged.

Anyway, he aimed and with that smarmy look still pasted all over his face, he pulled back the hammer and gently contracted the trigger.

And his elegant, ivory-inlaid pistol blew up, right there, just like that.

Blew his hand completely off.

And he fell to the ground screaming like a stuck pig, lovely luscious blood flowing all over the place. Wasted, right into the swamp.

But Freniere was not the only one screaming.

Right behind me, bursting into the clearing on his mount, Louis took in what had happened in one overarching glance. And he wasn't fooled, either, as I had intended him to be. He was supposed to look at Freniere's mangled.... ooops, I mean missing.... hand, and assume that guns just simply did that on occasion. Well, they did, didn't they? Sometimes? But Louis was smart. He knew which end was up, knew that I had fiddled... or arranged for some foul play... with that gun. Too bad he hadn't been around to see that Freniere deserved it, that he had tampered first. Fact was, Freniere himself had given me the idea of messing around with the weapons! But was that going to mollify my Louis?

Don't you bet on it.

So he was screaming, his lungs filled to bursting with rage, "De Lioncourt! Forget Álvarez, you're the one I'm going to kill!"

All at once, I didn't like to see Louis as a killer any longer.

Not. At. All.

Dare I say it again? Perhaps I'd better.

Fuck!

Part 37


In nothing flat, Louis had leapt off his horse and thrown himself to Freniere's side. He grabbed the boy's hand---oops, I mean stump---and screamed for all and sundry to hear, "Blood, Lestat! Now! Heal him! You know how, now do it!"

One of the hardest things I ever had to say I said then.

"No."

And then I had this strange almost out-of-body experience in which I saw myself reading a book entitled "When I Say NO, I Feel Guilty...."

Yeah, right!

What sort of stupid book was that? When I say no, I don't feel guilty! When I say no, I feel like I'm right to say it. Of course that goes along with just plain being right, full stop.

And if anything is for sure, it's that you'd never find moi, The Vampire Lestat... excuse me, THE Vampire Lestat I mean, reading anything as idiotic sounding as that book. I mean, I have taste. Macbeth, that sort of thing.

"What do you mean, no?" Louis screamed. By then he was shaking Freniere to try to wake him up. Not much use. The boy had lost half his blood volume already! And just think, out of deference to Louis' feelings, I hadn't drunk a drop. Is that virtue, or what?

And yet he was throwing things at me, now. Rocks, clods of dirt. Even a chunk of the pistol Freniere had been using. It hit me in the eye, and really smarted!

I think that Louis was just trying to get my attention, not actually attack me, but I was in no mood to appreciate the difference, not then. My thirst was spiked to the hilt by the scent of that blood flooding into the grass. Not just blood, either, but evildoer's blood. My favorite kind. And I was abstaining--not my specialty--and now Louis was chucking hunks of granite at me?

Pissed doesn't even come close to describing my state of mind.

Stomping over to the tragic pair--Freniere unconscious and gasping out his last, Louis crying as he held him--I snarled, "No means no, that's what it means! I wouldn't heal the likes of him! He's a liar, a card cheat, a thief, a swindler---"

"No, you only heal blind old men who spent their lives raping young boys!"

Considering that Louis had fully approved of my healing my father--and forgiving him to boot--that was a low blow. To say the least. The very least. But it did give me a measure of Louis' state of mind.

Unfortunately, it was a state of mind I had to shatter, here and now. For Sophie's sake. Or maybe for mine.

"For your information," I spat (literally, a little of the blood-saliva splashing on Louis), "this man you're holding so tenderly---Saint Anton, is it now?---has no intention of making an honest woman out of Sophie. Not unless, that is, you sign over the title to all of Pointe du Lac and the indigo manufacturies, not unless, in other words, you buy his good will!"

"He can have it," Louis gasped. "Anything for Sophie. This will kill her. The scandal, a child out of wedlock---"

"Sophie's not some delicate pansy to be blown off her roots by a few vicious winds!" I retored. "Mon Dieu, Louis, do you not know your own sister? She's strong, a fighter. She'll triumph over this, and she doesn't need the likes of Freniere to do it!"

"She's just a woman," Louis moaned, trying to staunch the flow of blood from what was left of Freniere's arm. "Not even that, a young girl---"

I threw up my hands, recognizing a useless if argument if ever I saw one. Louis was mortal, he simply couldn't SEE. He thought of his slaves as childlike, for heaven's sake, when a more clearthinking, cagey bunch of imprisoned humans I'd yet to see. And so it was no wonder he believed Sophie helpless.

"Please," Louis moaned. "Please, Lestat."

"It's too late anyway," I said then, and it was true. Freniere's heart had nearly ceased to beat; he was bled dry. His color was ashen, almost as light as mine. "He's done for."

"There must be something you can do---"

Well of course there was something I could do! If it was Louis there, gasping out his last, you'd better believe I wouldn't let him die. But Freniere?

"He's dead, Louis," I said, and that was true, too.

Louis stared at me, dumbfounded. Why it should come as such a shock I didn't know, except that he had believed, really believed, that I would relent. And I hadn't.

"How am I going to tell Sophie?" he moaned. "How am I going to face her?"

You know, as far as I was concerned, that brought up a good point. "Where is Sophie, anyway?" I wondered aloud. I mean, that young lady was such a firebreather that I could hardly imagine her sending Louis off to stop the duel while she stayed home to work her petit pointe. If I knew Sophie, she'd throw herself into the thick of things; she'd never be content to sit home while her man was in danger---

"Maman said she was hysterical and dosed her with laudanum," Louis admitted.

Now I was the one who was dumbfounded. "Louis! She's with child!"

His weary glance met mine. "So?"

"Don't let your loving *Maman* do that again," I warned. "It's not right."

Funny, I couldn't have said how I knew that, but knew it I did.

"Speaking of not right, killing her child's father hardly qualifies," Louis spat back.

"Messieurs," a voice interrupted us, and I turned to see the Álvarez boy close at hand.

"Oui," Louis moaned, all honor even in this situation. "You have won the duel, monsieur."

Álvarez shrugged. "I think not. My weapon misfired, as did his." For a moment his dark eyes clouded with puzzlement at such a strange coincidence, but then he put it behind him. And think, I wasn't even helping him. Spanish temperament, you know. They boil hot, but when the anger's gone, it's gone. Or maybe not, because just as I was thinking that, the boy stamped his feet. "I cannot help but be satisfied with the outcome, all the same," he admitted. Then his own honor came to the forefront. "My seconds and I are ready to leave, unless you gentlemen need any assistance?"

Kind of him to offer. I guess he'd noticed that Freniere's own seconds had skedaddled as soon as the gun had blown up. They'd figured that they were done for, that Álvarez would realize his gun had been tampered with and kill them on the spot.

"No," I answered. "We will manage. Thank you, monsieur."

A sharp nod of acknowledgement, that was all I got, and then he was gone, and I was alone with Louis.

Well, Louis and a corpse.

"So," he rasped, his anger reaching full summit now that he felt free to really have at me, "you have gotten your way. Have you always trampled others' feelings, Lestat? Is that why no one's ever loved you, as you do so enjoy lamenting?"

"Shut up," I said, but without much heat. I wasn't mad at him for saying that. It was pain talking. Agony. Worry for Sophie. It wasn't personal. You know what, though? It still did sting.

"I will not shut up!" Louis cried. "Do you know what you've done here tonight?"

"I've saved Sophie from a man who would have ripped her heart to shreds in the end. So what if it is bruised now? She'll recover."

"You have slaughtered her!"

"Oh, don't be stupid," I scathed. Wrong choice of words.

"Stupid," Louis stressed, "was trusting you. Stupid was believing that we were partners not just in the plantation but in life. You can never make this up to me, Lestat! Never! You have stolen Sophie's husband away from her, and with him, all hope of contentment and respectability. There is nothing you can ever do in recompense. Nothing!"

"There's nothing I need to do," I patiently replied. "Sophie will sail through this just fine."

"I pray God you're right," Louis muttered. "But it won't excuse you. Because you don't know the future, Lestat---"

"Oh, I think I do," I softly menaced, thinking on all those visions. God, maybe I was the stupid one! Maybe I should have just brought Louis over to me from the first, and just be done with it. But those visions of the future said loud and clear the only heartache could grow out of such a path....

"You don't know anything! Did you come to Louisiana to ruin the Pointe du Lacs? Because that is what you have done tonight, Lestat! That, and nothing else! Now, get yourself from my sight!"

I started to pick up the corpse, but Louis forcibly shoved me away.

"No! I'll do it. You just... oh, get the hell out of my way!"

And so saying, he hauled Freniere's body to his horse, hefted it atop the saddle, and used the reins to awkwardly tie it on. Then he started out on foot towards the Freniere plantation, the horse dutifully following. Pretty neat trick. I don't think my mount would follow me except if I used a little vampire influence.

I walked alongside him for a while, but he ignored me.

"Louis," I finally said. "What will you tell Sophie?"

He glared at me. "She'd never forgive me should she learn that it was my friend who tampered with the gun and caused it to blow up. So I'll tell her that it was an accident."

"How did you know---"

"I know you. Unfortunately."

"And I know Sophie," I retorted. "She'll get over it. She'll be just fine."

"And what will you do about it if she's not?" Louis countered, his lips twisting. "I know you, too. You ruin lives without a thought to putting them back together. You did it with Nicolas when you made him! You did it in Paris when you destroyed a whole way of life, an entire culture, merely because you thought you knew a better way to live! No doubt you've done it again any number of times undisclosed to me. For you still do have your secrets, Lestat, don't you?"

Thoughts of Marius kept me from disputing that.

"Mon Dieu, I was a fool," Louis moaned. "And now Sophie is the one who shall have to pay the price for my folly."

He glared then. "I will never forgive this, Lestat. I will hate you forever. And I do mean forever! If by chance you decide to drag me by force into the night--I know you were thinking about it, I know you--then forever will be a long, long time! But I shall still hate you just as much!"

"Louis---"

"Monsieur de Point du Lac to you," he spat, and slapped my face.

After that, when he whirled on a heel and kept on walking, I let him.

Part 38



It wasn't until the next night that I realized I had been wrong.

Oh, not wrong about seeing to it that the scoundrel Freniere got what he deserved. No, no, never about that. He deserved no mercy and so he got none. I was the one who deserved more than he had gotten. I had deserved to sup from his life's blood as it drained away. To feast upon his evil, as was my right.

I was a vampire, was I not? A good vampire, and that meant that I didn't flinch from the full kill, that I in fact celebrated my nature in it, time and again. Freniere had been a wasted opportunity.

And Louis had not so much as appreciated my sacrifice.

Ah, well.

But yes, I had been wrong in one thing, after all.

A thing I'd told him.

I had been wrong about Sophie.

Oh, not in the essentials. She was indeed the strong-willed, brave, scrapper I had taken her for. But she was not invincible.

Somehow, I had ascribed to her a few personality traits more suited to myself, actually. Triumph in any circumstance whatsoever... godlike perception to see through the petty foibles of the bayou... ah, well.

As it turned out, Sophie was only human.

I found this out the next night. I was back to my old routine of haunting Pointe du Lac. After that vicious slap---immortal skin *can* bruise, believe me; it just does not last long---I had little inclination to confront Louis. He needed time to calm down.

And I needed to be near him, even if he didn't see me, hence the haunting.

Ah, well. The gardens of Pointe du Lac were in full flower, and really quite lovely, even if by night those flowers were not blooming. I could smell their scent lingering on the air.

And then I smelled something else.

Weeping, pitiful weeping, a noise to rend my heart asunder, for it was Sophie, and I knew that every tear of hers was an ache in Louis' soul.

I found her sitting forlorn upon a log deep in the trees that flanked the swamp, her face beautiful even if it was pink with crying.

I sat down by her, and drew her close against myself, and told her that it would be all right.

"Non, non," she groaned. "It can't. Anton is dead!" Then, in shock as if she had just revealed a dreadful secret, she had thought for me. "Did you know?"

"Oui, I knew." The log shifted under my weight as I cradled her yet closer. Amazing, really, that Sophie would permit it; I did know that I was not her favorite person. But that alone showed me just how much distress she suffered.

Evidently, it was a distress that she dare not show Louis, hence her solitary retreat to the woods, to the swamp, to mourn her lost Anton.

Reading her mind, I soon realized why Louis was not here with her. She had spoken to him much as *he* had spoken to me. She had told him that she would never forgive this, that she would hate him forever. And Louis had pleaded, had told her that he had tried his best to stop the duel.

All true.

But Sophie blamed him for it nonetheless.

Irrational. Unfair.

But Louis was getting from her just the same as he had dished out to me. A neat little circle, but so tragic that I would have had it otherwise.

Well, at least one thing had gone right. That very day, when Sophie had thrown a china pitcher at Louis, her mother had tried to dose her again with laudanum. And Louis had stopped it, had in fact dumped the plantation's entire supply of it out onto the sweeping lawn rather than see any of it administered to Sophie.

Ah, so he believed me about the drug. That was something.

Of course, he hadn't told his Maman that Sophie was with child. That was simply beyond him.

And beyond her, too, I soon sensed deep in her thoughts.

That was when it came to me.

She wasn't out here mourning Anton. Oh, well she was mourning him, but that wasn't why she had come out to the swamps. She was eyeing the waters with something approaching longing, her mortal mind---strong as it was---simply under too much stress to go on. And so she thought of ending it, ending it all, ending her life.

Little chance of survival, she thought. She couldn't swim, and before she could founder to shore, the alligators would have her...

And I knew with unfailing instinct that if I stopped her tonight, by force of arm I mean, she would merely return by day to do the deed.

No, I had to stop her by ferreting out her secrets and her pain, and helping her to deal with it instead of wish for oblivion to erase it all.

Because if Sophie died, that would be the end of Louis and I. I knew it. I knew it for a fact. We were going through a rough patch just now, but we had a chance to recover, if only I could make him see things my way...

But if Sophie killed herself, there would be no hope left.

And so I had to make her talk, make her admit aloud that she wished for death, make her confess just why she was so despondent.

Which meant, of course, that I had to make her admit to being with child.

I didn't know how to do that, short of mind-tricking her. And that would undermine the whole point. I wanted her healthy in her mental state, able to face this challenge with confidence, not befuddled into doing what I---or any other man---saw fit to tell her.

"Sophie," I gently said, "there is more to this than mourning Anton, is there not?"

She flinched, and sharp as a tack---I should have known better than to beat around the bush with Sophie---threw back, "He told you! Louis told you! I shall never forgive him that, either! It was in confidence, utmost confidence, and he has betrayed me!"

"Non, non," I assured her. "You understand." I crossed my index finger over my middle one and showed my hand to her. "Louis and moi, we are like that. Intertwined, oui? You know what we are, one to the other. You cannot expect that he would keep me from his confidence."

"Non," she admitted, sighing, slumping against me. "If Louis were married I would not expect him to keep secrets from his wife. And he is not married, mais oui, but. . . in many ways it is much the same. Oui, I understand."

"Then can we speak openly, Sophie?" I pled, wanting to help her with all my heart.

"What would be the point?" She sighed, and then pushed herself away from me, remembering just then that I was Louis', that for all she could trust me, she would do well to keep a certain decorous distance. "You can't change my plight."

"Perhaps I can help you, all the same," I softly vowed. "For Louis' sake, I would like to."

A quick glance in my direction, then her gaze skittered off. "Oh, help Louis. Oui, je vois. You should have heard him earlier. 'Our good name.' How many times he said the phrase. 'You have ruined our good name. All Louisiana shall laugh at us. Or worse, pity us.'" Sophie shrugged. "What can I do about that, though. He wants me to marry. Quickly. But I have no suitors. And after Anton, I can't. . . " Sobs rose into her voice. "I can't bear the thought of being touched, monsieur!"

"Lestat," I reminded her.

"Oui, Lestat. You are kind to care so much for Louis that you will bear my blubbering, Lestat."

"It is not only Louis I care for," I told her. "You, Sophie, you are strong and courageous and beautiful. I like and respect you, too. I care for you, too. In a different way, c'est vrai, but that does not make it any less authentic."

"Je sais," she murmured, looking away. Something was churning in her mind, but I wasn't quite sure what.

"Louis limits you," I told her. "He thinks of you as a woman instead of a person in your own right. He draws a tight circle around your behavior instead of giving you the freedom to be the Sophie you feel you are, deep inside."

She laughed slightly through her tears. "So speaks the decadent Parisian. Mais oui, we have heard the stories. Many, many stories of that city. You come from France, Lestat! Of course you see such things, feel so unfettered by moral rules. But here, life is different. I feel. . . constricted. Constrained. This very conversation is inappropriate."

"Who shall know?" I asked, carefree, trying to impart that same attitude to her. "I shall take it to the grave."

"Ah, I do feel better," Sophie admitted. "And yet every problem remains. Most likely I should leave Louisiana, make my own way in the world, the child and I."

"As alarmed as Louis is over his good name, I can't believe he wants that. A niece, a nephew, he will want to know this child."

"Well, he can't!" Sophie announced, briskly standing up. "In the first place, he doesn't deserve to, after the way he treated Anton, time and again. And in the second..." All fire went abruptly from her voice. "I shall be an outcast if I stay. I, and Louis with me. Without proper contacts in the correct circles, the plantation shall fail. Louis without Pointe du Lac? He might well go the way Paul did, and throw himself down the stairs."

"Nonsense," I countered her. "Why would he do anything so foolish, when one day not too far hence, he'll burn it down himself?"

Sophie rounded on a heel. "What?"

Only then realizing that I had let visions step into my speech, I quickly rallied, "He will burn with fury, I meant to say, should you leave in circumstances like these. You are with child---" She blushed just to hear me say it, "And when your time comes you will need help."

"Regardless, I have no real choice," she murmured. "I must be gone from here. Louis aside, it will kill Maman to know what my relationship with Anton has led to."

"Your mother is stronger than you think, too."

"Non," she disputed me. "It will kill her. And I would much prefer to---"

"Kill yourself?"

She gazed at those murky waters again, and said nothing.

"Stay, Sophie," I bid her. "Stay and talk this through with Louis. He will recover from his fit of morality. And you will triumph over those who will seek to shame you with idle talk."

"I cannot stay without a husband," she sadly announced, her mind made up. "And I have no prospect of one, not now."

In the back of my mind, I heard Louis screaming at me again. Nothing you can ever do can set this to rights. You have ruined Sophie's life, ruined Sophie's chances. There is nothing you can do to make this up, Lestat.

Except, there was.

One thing. I dropped to one knee before her and slid from my smallest finger a simple gold ring emblazoned with the de Lioncourt family crest.

"Will you marry me, Sophie?" I asked.

Part 39


I must say, if ever I had imagined myself proposing marriage to a lovely young lady, I certainly had envisioned a more romantic response than Sophie gave me.

At first, she just stared, her eyes glowing deep within. Then she cleared her throat, and glanced at the ring I was holding out, and uttered a single syllable.

"Huh?"

That's right. The Marquis of the Auvergne, rich as sin, down on one knee, proposing holy matrimony, and she says, "huh."

Not my most dashing moment.

Then again, I don't suppose I would want it to be, considering. This wouldn't be a love match. I wasn't doing it for me, after all. And as much as I did care about her, I wasn't doing it for Sophie, either. Plain and simple, I was doing everything for Louis.

As usual.

What else could I do, when he was my heart and soul?

"Will you marry me?" I said again, and beamed a smile her way. *No* woman ---or man, come to think of it--- could resist my smile. She'd be swooning soon. She'd be falling into my arms, agreeing. She'd look at me with gratitude spilling from her marvelous eyes...

"No," she said.

And then it was my turn to be erudite.

"Huh?" I asked.

"No, I won't marry you," she said, most clearly, and reaching down, pulled me off my knee, made me stand. I towered over her that way, but all right. It seemed as though intimidation might be called for.

"Why not?" I pressed.

Her eyes, so compassionate, so concerned. "I told you. I can't bear for a man to. . ." Then her eyes closed. "Never again. I shall love Anton forever."

"Suits me," I carelessly tossed back. "Look, Sophie, and don't misunderstand. I'm not proposing marriage, not really. I'm just proposing to give you my name so that little Anton there can be born with a surname other than Pointe du Lac."

She blushed to the roots of her beautiful hair. "Oh, little Anton. But it might not be a boy, you know."

"It will," I told her with certainty, and then realizing that might be considered a trifle odd, explained, "I have an instinct for this sort of thing."

"Still," she said, clearly wavering, "I understand about you and Louis..."

"And Louis will understand about you and me."

Two blunt incisors worried her lower lip. "It would solve considerable issues, I suppose. But it wouldn't be a real marriage? I mean, ever? Think, Lestat, because this is important. I. . . I can't. This isn't something I shall laugh off in a few years' time."

"I know," I said. "It wouldn't be a real marriage ever, Sophie, word of honor. Just a paper one. For the sake of the child."

"For the sake of the family name," she bitterly corrected, hands on slender yet curvaceous hips. "That's all Louis cares about."

"Wrong, wrong, wrong," I told her, as emphatic as I knew to be. "He's worried most about you, your prospects, your future. But he doesn't know how to best express it. Emotion does that. Warps words around it."

"Oh, does it?" she sweetly inquired, but I was far from being fooled. Her sentiments weren't sweet, not at all. Beneath her tears and her grief burned anger. "Emotion warps more than words, I must think. For it was action that sent my beloved to his grave! Heinous action! Louis did it!"

"Freniere's gun exploded!" I shouted. Useless, for of course she must surely know that. "You can't blame Louis for that!"

She could blame me. . . but she did not know to.

"I can blame him for stirring up trouble in the first place. You think I don't realize it was he who involved the Álvarez family? He who spread the slanderous reports that my Anton was untrue to me with some prancing Spanish woman?"

Fine, fine. She wanted to play the game that way, I could play that way.

"That was me," I admitted. "And what is more, I sabotaged the gun to make it explode. Well, in truth I arranged for a slave to do it. Same difference. But don't blame Louis. He tried to stop the duel, when he realized---"

"Your confession does you little good," she sniffed. "I still hate Louis. He could have stopped it. I don't care what you say, he could have stopped it. And he didn't. And for that, I shall never forgive him."

I saw it then, saw it all.

"This great sacrifice of yours," I accused, "going away with the child... it's not because to stay is impossible! It's not because the facts will kill dear old Maman! It's to punish Louis! And this talk of suicide is more of the same!"

I grabbed her by both shoulders and shook her, but not too hard. She was with child, after all. "You think that after your body is found cold and stinking in the swamps, he'll be sorry! Do you not know anything? He is already sorry! He wears woe like velvet---" Amazing phrase, I would have to write that one down sometime.

"And you don't wear it at all!" she screamed.

"Nor you," I scathed. "Else you would not so easily contemplate putting this child to death along with you. Anton's child. And he needs a name."

"Not yours," she retorted, but then her eyes glowed like demon-fire and I knew just what she was thinking. Revenge. She wanted revenge. Upon not just Louis now, but me as well. And what better way to have it than to come between us, to deny us our love as we had denied her hers? "All right, yours," she all but crooned. "I'll marry you, Lestat."

"Good," I answered. "Louis will be relieved."

Oh no he won't, she thought, determined to see to it.

Ah, but I knew Louis, did I not? Sophie's little games could not part us. Nothing could. Louis was mine. He would always be mine.

He would toast us with champagne while his eyes and mine danced a private dance of knowledge. While Maman gushed that Sophie had landed herself a true Marquis, a man of wealth and taste unparalleled, Louis would hide his smile behind his elegantly tapered fingers, and laugh so politely that none could find fault.

While she walked down the aisle, Louis and I would have eyes only for one another.

And he would love me all the more that I was willing to give my name so that his might remain above reproach.

We would be partners again, more intimate than before, partners on life's journey. And Sophie with us, although unknowingly, for the secret of my existence she would never learn...

"Yes, let us go tell Louis," she simpered, and neatly plucked the ring I still held in one hand. She slipped it onto her finger herself, and beamed, her eyes too vengeful now to be truly beautiful. "Louis will be surprised. Oh, how he will be surprised."

"Pleasantly," I insisted.

"Oh, indeed," she murmured, and then, for all her talk of Anton being the only one for her, she stretched her arms up high above her head to circle behind my neck, and pulling my close, she kissed me.

Part 40



I was so taken by surprise --and this, considering I was reading her mind, showed you what a state I was in-- that I half expected to turn and see Louis there behind us, full of denunciations. Why else would Sophie kiss me--an open-mouthed tongue on tongue kiss, mind you--except to further the little (or not so little) revenge plot she was spinning?

Well, I pushed her away fast enough, and spun round to explain to Louis, but he wasn't there. The empty swamp mocked my vampire eyes.

Angry, then I turned back to Sophie. Now, don't get me wrong. She was a lovely, vibrant young woman--and I am drawn to physical beauty. C'est la vie. And actually she was more than a fair hand at kissing, despite her relative inexperience. Innocence, that was it. Oh sure, she'd been carnal and all that with her Anton, but compared to moi? You guessed it, innocent. And that was rather nice.

But for all that, her kissing me had been absolutely repugant. I mean, I loved Louis. Only Louis. Well, only him in that way. And Sophie was his sister. Kissing her was akin to kissing my own sister, if I'd ever had any. That was it, yes. Exactly. She was my sister by proxy, by virtue of my close liaison with Louis, and I couldn't see dallying with her, not even in so much as a kiss.

"Merde!" I swore, and she took a step back. Wise girl.

But for all her wisdom, she had a mouth. "You'll have to be a bit less cold-blooded in future," she admonished me, shaking a mocking finger, and I thought:

Oh no, that's it, she's guessed. She knows....

But then she went on. "After all, Maman will never believe I've affianced myself to the likes of you if you show me so little interest, Lestat."

My name rolled off her tongue much as would a drop of honey, that sweet. But her remark was so self-serving that I saw red.

"You don't care what dear old Maman thinks! Not of me, at any rate. You just look for excuses to come between Louis and me. Don't you know that's pointless?" At this juncture a rather passionate wave swept hold of me, and I fairly rhapsodized, "He's as angry as you about the duel. All my fault, I told you. But with this solution to everyone's problems, he'll love me again as never before."

"Indeed," Sophie drawled. "Let us discuss Maman for a moment, then. She is not the addle-brained old peahen you take her for. She's sharp and critical, Lestat. Now, my problem is solved---" She danced her ring-finger before my eyes, the cheek of that girl! "But yours has just begun. Because all along she has looked rather, askance shall we say, at your not-terribly-veiled interest in my brother. Unnatural interest, she would term it. Do you seriously believe she is going to stand by and watch a man more interested in kissing my brother marry me?"

"She damned well will," I scathed, "unless she wants a little Pointe du Lac born on the wrong side of the duvet!"

Sophie shook her head as she perched on the log again, a picture of composure. "No, no. It is scandal she fears most, Lestat. Social scandal. A child without a father is almost nothing compared to a daughter married to a reprobate who sneaks from her bed in the dead of night into her very brother's. If she expects scandal such as that, she will refuse the match, and prevail upon Louis to do the same."

"Louis has more backbone than that!"

Another calm shake of that head, her hair swaying. "You wish he did. But I have seen the two of you, the way you act for her. Sneaking around like cats in the dark, that's what you do. I have eyes. My word, you arrive at the house after the whole family is asleep, and rather than ring the bell to be admitted, climb the outside to the second story, to Louis' window! And he opens it, and kisses you long and hard, and lets you in!"

"How do you know such things?" I demanded, furious. I'd been so careful, so very careful! But Sophie knew all my secrets. Well, all but one.

She waved a nonchalant hand. "You are not the only one sneaking around the house after dark." Her hands lay calmly on her belly beneath which Anton's son grew. "Else I should not have him."

I bared my teeth. Actually my fangs, but I curled my lips around them quick enough when I saw her gaze grow distinctly puzzled.

"You seem to have made an amazing recovery from the weepy young lady wanting to throw herself to the alligators not an hour ago!"

At that, she laughed. "Well, my emotions seem to swing widely to and fro these days. My prerogative, considering." And again she lightly patted her belly.

"You're caressing the steak au poivre you had for dinner," I pointed out. "The baby is a little bit further south."

She must have thought I was joking, or trying to be rude, or both. She certainly didn't realize---just as well---that I knew what I was talking about, vampire senses being very finely tuned indeed. The little one didn't have a heartbeat yet, at least not one that I could perceive, but I knew where he was, all the same.

No, Sophie rose to my bait with bait of her own.

"And you say you've no fear of Maman's reaction," she chided. "But what are you doing of an evening but gazing through windows at hour dinner-hour?"

"It was fear of Louis," I corrected her. "Because until I set this to rights, he'll remain madder than blazes with me. But now that everything is resolved, we can be one happy family."

One happy family. . .

"Everything is not set to rights," she pertly informed me. "We have yet to clear up this matter of your apparent affections for me. They must appear genuine or there will be no marriage."

"Oh, fine. I'll make you disgusting cow-eyes and slobber over your hand if you insist," I said with remarkably bad grace. Quite unlike me. I'm hardly ever vulgar.

"Not good enough," Sophie chastised me. "I am telling you, Maman is not an imbecile. She has sharp eyes and a sharper nose to sniff out anything she disapproves of. Heavens, if not for the duel distracting us all, she might already have realized my condition. So you must learn, Lestat, burdensome as the chore might be."

"Learn?"

"Learn to kiss me with true passion," she explained. "Otherwise all will be lost. Now, don't flinch away again, and don't you dare think of Louis! You would hold a woman differently, wouldn't you? Kiss her differently? I've seen Louis after you have at him, you know. He looks. . . devastated. As though you've attacked him in the kiss. He seems to like it, so I've no complaint on his account. But with me, you must take more care."

And so saying, she smoothed her skirts and waved toward the space on the log alongside her, and beckoned, "So come here, Lestat. We must practice, do you not understand? We can't possibly announce this engagement until you can kiss me like a lover, kiss me as though you mean it, as though Louis is nothing whatsoever to you."

"I'll never be able to do that!" I said straight off.

"I said 'as though,' silly," she chided. "As thought. Can't you even pretend?"

Can't you even pretend, can't you even pretend....

I saw myself hurling those same words at Louis, at a vampire Louis who sat bewildered that I would castigate him. And I felt myself wanting to go to him, to hug him close and tell him that it would be all right, that I loved him no matter what, but we didn't have that sort of relationship, that sort of intimacy.

And now I knew why. It was because I'd walked the wrong path with Louis, the wrong path in that dream existence or whatever it was that I was sensing in these visions. The wrong path, because I hadn't thought enough of his needs. Because I'd thought of myself, and Louis could afterwards never truly trust me.

Now, I was determined to stay on the right path with him. I had to think of his needs, not my own. No matter that the thought of kissing Sophie, really kissing her, was anathema to me. It was Louis' needs that mattered.

And he needed a married sister, not a disgraced one.

I sat down beside her, and leaned in close, and taking a deep breath, I kissed her.

Really kissed her.

Part 41





"Humph," was Sophie's reaction. "Well, I suppose that will have to do."

It wasn't quite as rude as telling me that I was a bad kisser, but it was the next closest thing. I shouldn't have been offended, really. It wasn't as though I had wanted to rouse her passion; I wanted anything but. Still, the comment stung. Vanity, I suppose. Apparently I'm subject to it.

On a very occasional basis, I'm sure.

"You aren't exactly my dream date," I snarled, backing away. "And you know who is, so don't you get any clever ideas cluttering up your pretty little head."

"Oh, I wouldn't dream," she simpered, all sarcasm. "I won't have to. Louis will take care of all the clever ideas I could wish."

Ha. Well, let her think that. She thought that she could get a name for her baby, social respectablility, *and* get her revenge on Louis and me both, all in one neat maneuver. But she was doomed to be disappointed. I was sure of it.

"Let's just go see, shall we? We'll announce the happy day."

Wrong choice of words. I had to remember that Sophie was sharp as a tack, and ready to prick me.

"Day," she murmured. "Well that's another thing, I suppose. I never have seen you in the day, have I? Hmm, don't think so. You'll have to get a bit less reclusive, Lestat. I won't want it said that my husband cares more for his business in town than for me."

"My days, madam, are sacrosanct," I sternly announced. Strange, very strange, that line. Not like me at all. Besides, I sort of had the feeling that I'd said it to a dressmaker, of all things, and than when I did so, I wasn't anywhere *near* as tall as I usually am. With dyed hair, no less.

It got my point across, at any rate.

"Oh, very well," Sophie grumbled. "I don't suppose I want you around so much after all. You helped kill Anton, you said so yourself."

"He wasn't going to marry you unless Louis deeded him all of Pointe du Lac," I disclosed.

"Liar."

She said it without much heat. I could have convinced her, but Louis wouldn't approve of the tactics I would use, so I let it rest.

"Let's go, then," I said again.

With her usual cheek, she offered me her arm and waited rather ostentatiously until I consented the act the gentleman. Then, with a flounce of her skirts, we were on our way.

And you know what? When we got to the house, when we told Louis what we were going to do... well, I was right. He understood. He knew it wasn't romantic. He loved me, even more than before, when he saw to what lengths I would go in order to help his sister.

But you know what else?

Damn, damn, damn. Because Sophie was right, too. My Louis was just filled with clever ideas. Except, as far as I was concerned, they weren't all that clever.


****


"If you hadn't killed Freniere, none of this would be necessary."

That was what Louis said the moment that we were alone. Of course, it took quite a while to get him alone. First I had to endure practically the third degree from Maman, who ---Sophie was right--- looked askance at me these days, even if I was a Marquis. Too many heated looks flying between Louis and me, I suppose.

I had to act the lover, and simper over Sophie, and even kiss her at Maman's uging. Scandalous, really, such a demand. But Sophie had had her mother nailed dead to rights. Just as well we had practiced up, I suppose.

Then, of course, the obligatory toast, and I had to pretend to drink. . .

And all the while, Louis had looked on with tolerant eyes. Saying very little, just watching. He looked. . . hmm, well the truth is that he looked beautiful to me, more than ever, even if his face was drawn with lines of strain. At times I thought that he looked amused. That was when I knew that no acting could fool *him*. He knew. Knew I was doing it for him, knew that I loved Sophie, but not as anything but the dear sister that she was to him.

Finally he had cut the congratulations short by saying that he had some plantation business to discuss with his brother-in-law to be, and that the two of us would retire to his study. Maman looked askance at that, sure enough, but there wasn't much she could do. For all she knew, it was true.

And she was thinking of my pile of gold, how I'd invested heavily in Pointe du Lac and now I had every right to hold Louis to a certain standard of business conduct. . .

Well, I wanted to hold Louis, all right. Just not to a standard.

He closed the door quietly behind us, and turned, an elegant motion that made me want to kiss him until he swooned, and then he delivered the line he'd waited over an hour to say:

"If you hadn't killed Freniere, none of this would be necessary."

"Not true," I disputed. "Ten to one he'd have abandoned her eventually even if you did deed him the plantation."

Louis waved a hand as though to say that such things did not matter. And he was right, they didn't. The boy was dead.

"I love you," I said, mostly because I needed to hear him say it back.

"I know," he answered on a sigh. "Yes, you love me. You do this out of love. Thank you, Lestat. You are a true friend."

Ah, the relief that sang through my soul!

"You shouldn't have killed him, though," he had to tack on to the end.

"Louis!"

"Oh, all right. I don't suppose we're destined to agree about that. Let's not discuss it further. I suppose we had better plan a wedding. I'll make sure Maman consents to an evening ceremony, of course. Unorthodox, but she will have to live with it. Where will you and Sophie live, Lestat? Pointe du Lac? You're welcome, of course, but once you are her husband your daylight absence is bound to raise eyebrows. Perhaps I should buy Sophie a house in town for a wedding present---"

As far as I was concerned, he was rushing straight off into a multitude of details that didn't really matter. I wanted to kiss him! I wanted to talk about us!

But when I leaned in to do the former, he leaned back. Fractionally, but he did it.

Well, perhaps he was on edge. I certainly was.

"Do you still hate me?" were the words that came flooding out my mouth.

Part 42



Well, perhaps he was on edge. I certainly was.

"Do you still hate me?" were the words that came flooding out my mouth.

"Oh, Lestat, of course I don't hate you," Louis answered, a smile hovering about his lush lips. I leaned in for another kiss, then, but he backed off once more.

"You said you did," I sniffed, hurt. "You act like you do."

"No, no, mon ami, I most certainly don't hate you," Louis assured me. "This matter of Freniere. . . well, I don't suppose we'll ever really come to a meeting of the minds. Better to put it behind us. Actually, I can understand your point of view. I just count it a pity that you can't comprehend mine."

I didn't know what would be smart to reply to that, so I made no reply at all. Not a bad reaction, as it turned out, because Louis became even more forthcoming.

"Now, as to the rest," he announced, beginning to pace, "I must say that it's kind indeed of you to offer to do this for Sophie. You do understand that you're her only chance, really?"

He seemed so deadly serious that I had to insert, "But Louis? You do understand, don't *you*, that it won't be a real marriage?"

"It must be entirely legal," he sharply insisted. "You're not proposing to simply announce a marriage instead of actually enact one, are you, Lestat?"

"No, no, I didn't mean that. . ." Damn, how could he be so dense? I mean, you'd have thought that sixty-odd years of living with my adoration would be enough to clue the man in that I had some feelings for him, but NOOOO, Louis was denser than a doornail. . .

Sixty-odd years????

I pushed it aside and decided to lay my cards on the table. "I meant no sex, Louis," I bluntly informed him.

"I rather understood that you weren't capable at any rate," he murmured. "But I see no difficulty with that, really. Sophie is a lady, after all."

Damn, if you looked up dense in a dictionary, Louis' picture would be there, gawking out at you. He still thought Sophie was too much an ice-princess to want a little roll in the hay now and again? Where was his brain?

Then again, where was mine? I mean, it was just as well if Louis couldn't wrap his mind around the ludicrous idea of Sophie and moi.

"Sophie and I already discussed the matter," I softly told him, moving alongside him and pressing a hand to his nape. "We're very clear that this marriage is a paper one only, for all that it is entirely real."

"Good," he said. "Because God help me, Lestat, if I ever hear one word that you are pressuring her for things. . . unseemly."

I stared at him. "Louis! How can you think I'd do such a thing?"

He stared right back. "You said it yourself that abstinence rather did pall on you. But I simply must insist here and now, Lestat, that if you find it impossible to keep from. . . dallying, shall we say, you use the utmost discretion. No slaves from the plantation. No one in New Orleans at all. Can you manage that?"

My eyes were bugging out, I swear. "What's gotten into you, Louis? You know perfectly well that I'll dally plenty, and you know with whom! You're my one and only!"

"Quiet!" he snapped, and then, shading his eyes, groaned, "I was afraid of this. Afraid you hadn't thought matters through. And sure enough. . ." Resolute, then, his green gaze blazed into mine. "You're soon to be my brother, Lestat. I love you in another way, as you well know, but one thing I will not do, ever, and that is besmirch my good name. You will be my sister's husband, do you not understand? I could no more allow anything untoward between us than I could pick Sophie up right now and toss her into a cesspool."

My hands groped through the air, frantic, then grasped onto the edge of Louis' desk. It kept me upright, at least, but I was still seeing stars. You'd have thought that Louis had hit me, the way I felt. But of course, he had. He'd hit me below the belt.

Literally.

"But I offered to marry her so that you would forgive me!" I cried. "So that you would love me again!" I know it was pitiful, but pain came surging out between my teeth. "Nobody's ever really loved me, Louis. They all leave! But you are the one. You're going to love me as I deserve!"

"I have forgiven you," Louis assured me, patting my hand as though I were a child in need of a sweet. "And I do love you. Mon Dieu, Lestat, I love you more than you can know. That you would make this sacrifice for me, that you would love me so well as to save my sister from ruin, even at the cost of having me yourself. I am done up with love for you, mon ami."

"It wasn't supposed to be a sacrifice," I blubbered. "I was supposed to get you back!"

"I shall be your friend until I breathe my last, this I swear," Louis solemnly uttered. "But I could not hold my head up afterwards if ever you and I. . . indulged again. Sophie deserves more honor that that, and so do you, Lestat."

"Mon Dieu, I think I shall be ill if you go on," I moaned. "Bayou morals, propriety! What use is it to me, any of it? I don't want to marry Sophie if it costs me you!"

"But you have pledged yourself already," Louis pointed out. "And the man I love with all my heart, Lestat, is not one that could break so grave a promise as this one. Sophie is counting on you, and so am I."

Well, a semblance of common sense returned to me, then. I mean, who was Louis kidding? It was one thing to be full of lofty ideals, but quite another to actually enact them. I knew him. He couldn't stand the abstinence any more than I could, and he wasn't about to go back to bedding the slave girls. No, it was me he wanted.

All I had to do was get him to admit it.

Rushing him, I grabbed him to me in a hug so fierce that Hercules himself could not break it, and then I ravaged his lips.

And Louis took it, calmly took it.

But he didn't respond.

He certainly didn't come with wild abandon as he would have a few nights back. His jollystick down there didn't even twitch.

I pulled back, frustrated. Baffled. Enraged.

And Louis smiled at me and without much heat at all, just said, "You see, Lestat? Things are different, now. I love you, but I won't. Is that clear. I won't. Ever."

And then it came to me, the heartbreakingly shattering truth. What was stronger than Louis' love? What would always be stronger, always triumph?

His will.

Part 43


"White tapers, or red ones to match the roses I shall carry?" Sophie
asked, her hand poised to write down whatever I decreed.

"Black ones," I snarled. "Black, to match my mood!"

"Now, Lestat," she chided. "We have approximately three hundred decisions left before the wedding arrangements will be finalized. This bear-like attitude of yours won't do, it simply won't do. You must treat the future Marquise of the House of Lioncourt with a more respect."

"My mother's the Marquise and she's worth ten of you," I informed Sophie.

"Ah yes, your mother," she went right on, undaunted. "Shall she be joining us for the nuptials, do you think?"

"Not fucking likely," I drawled.

"Lestat!"

That was Louis, who had been listening at the door for who knows how long. Actually, I knew. I just didn't much care. This was no love match. Why pretend?

"Apologize to Sophie!"

I glared at Louis, then at his damned sister. "I'm sorry," I snarled. "Sorry I got myself saddled with you in the first place."

She grinned, a picture of positive delight, and trilled, "Oh, now, it's not so bad. Louis has kindly consented for us both to live here at Pointe du Lac, did you know that?"

"I thought Louis believed we were better suited in town." Puzzled, I glanced at Louis, who shrugged.

It was Sophie who explained. "Oh, he told me that, too, but I told him that it simply wouldn't do. Why, the plagues that sweep that city! The filth, the crime! I wouldn't dream of raising a family there. I told Louis that he simply must allot us rooms here in the house, and really there is only one suite remotely appropriate for a newly married couple." Her eyes took on an evil tint, I kid you not. "It's next to Louis' rooms. You shall have to be careful of a night, Lestat, that you don't walk in on my brother when you seek the marriage bed. Goodness, he might be in a state of, shall we say, déshabille, and it would be so embarrasing for you both--"

Ye gods, she did know how to turn the screw, didn't she? I was the one who was dense, to have fallen into this trap. I'd been so confident, all along, that Louis wouldn't be jealous, that he was too much the intelligent man to worry that our own love was blighted by a paper marriage to Sophie. And I'd been right, too.

But Sophie had gone me one better, had known that Louis was possessed of far too much upstanding pious righteousness to dally with me, ever again, once I was promised to his shrew of a sister!

And she'd played her cards just right, had lulled me in, and now I was locked out of Louis' embrace forevermore!

"Bitch," I said to her, then.

Louis punched me in the nose, which was fine, except for the fact that he did it again when I sulkily protested, "Well, she is."

"Apologize!" he shouted.

"I'm sorry you're a bitch," I said to Sophie.

That time it was a right uppercut.

Having had enough, I grabbed his wrist. Louis flailed.

Meanwhile, the bitch in question was smiling like a cat that had just stolen all the cream. Oh, sure, she was bent over her wedding notes like some demure maiden from the Isle of the Enchanted Virgins, but she was grinning, all right.

When Louis stilled, recognizing defeat, I asked him in exasperation, "Don't you see what she's doing? She's coming between us, Louis, after all! That's her revenge for Freniere! Mon Dieu, could she be more cruel than to convince you that our marriage bed should be just across a thin wall from where you sleep?"

"If that's her revenge then so be it," Louis heavily announced. "For we did kill him, you and I. We deserve worse than we're getting."

"Oh, so that's what's got you being so noble these days," I scathed. "It's penance, is it, Louis? You can't go confess to a priest like you think you ought, so you're punishing yourself by imposing these straight-laced puritanical rules on us!"

"Shut up!" he raged. "It's nothing to do with you if I confess or if I don't!"

"Of course it's to do with me!"

Sophie looked up from her sheaf of notes, her eyes aglow with maliciousness. "Now, now, this won't do," she simpered. "My brother and my husband at blows, yet again? Do you two never stop?"

"I'll tell you what's going to stop," I snarled. "This godawful wedding planning! Tomorrow night, St. Stephens' Chapel, nine o'clock sharp, and I'll see to all the arrangements. You just show up and have Louis dear there on hand to give the fucking bride away!"

"Lestat!" Louis shouted again, incensed with my language, but I'd had enough of Monsieur le Public Morals. Standing, I left the room in a preternatural blur that left Sophie gasping and Louis clutching after phantom explanations. But what did I care if she found out what I was?

It's not like things with Louis could get worse, was it? The room next to his! Mon Dieu, I'd hear him breathing some night and I'd go straight through that wall to get to him!

As far as I was concerned, the best thing that could happen right now was if Sophie would cry off the wedding. Yes, yes, that would be best. Louis couldn't blame me if Sophie cried off, could he? Well, of course he could, but absolute desperation doesn't make for very rational decisions. And I was desperate, desperate for anything that would give me back the Louis I wanted, the one who would kiss me back!

So there it was. I'd tell Sophie that I was a murderous blood-drinking vampire, and that would be that. She'd never want to marry me after she knew the truth. And Louis would be pissed, but he'd get over it.

And even if he didn't, at least he wouldn't call me "mon frère" again.

"Oh Sophie," I trilled, fairly dancing my way back to the house, now that my decision had been reached. "Soph---eee---eeee, we have to talk...."

But it was Louis who stepped in front of me, and just as if he'd read my mind, sternly warned, "Don't you dare."

Part 44




"Don't I dare what?" I asked, all innocence.

"Oh, please," Louis scorned. "Credit me with a little intelligence. You're at your wits end to get out of this marriage. The day before yesterday you were explaining to Maman that after the Revolution, you in fact will not inherit any title. And then you tried to sell her a line of nonsense about the banks in France losing your funds and leaving you penniless. Then yesterday you were suggesting that your father's blindness ran in the family and that you'd be useless before long! What's it to be tonight, Lestat? You're going to go tell Maman that you're a wife-beater in hopes that she'll put an end to this match?"

"No," I softly growled. "I thought I'd tell her about you and me."

Well, that certainly took the wind from his sails. "No!" Louis gasped, his expression so pained that I had to relent. What else could I do? I did love the man, and I'd sworn long ago to be honest with him.

"Oh, fine then. No. No, I wasn't going to do that. I thought I'd talk to Sophie this time. If she's going to play such dangerous games, and piss me but good at every turn, it's only fair she know that she's playing them with one of the living dead."

"You will do no such thing!" Louis raged. "She's in a delicate state. A shock like that? No, I simply will not permit any such thing."

"Not your decision," I humphed, and pushed past him to enter the house.

He planted himself square in front of me again, and said quite distinctly, "We are partners, Lestat. That means it is my decision too, yes."

"Yeah? Well, it sure as shit wasn't my decision that marriage to Sophie was going to be the death of us, Louis! And some things are personal! What business of yours is it who I tell and who I don't that I don't exactly get drunk on wine, these days?"

"It's my business how you treat Sophie!" he shot right back.

"It's sure as fuck not," I gave him one better.

"And that's another thing! What *has* gotten into your language these days? Mon Dieu, I used to hear milder epithets from the whores I patronized after Paul was killed!"

"I'll talk how I like, and that includes my choice of words *and* just who I tell my secrets to!"

Louis all at once calmed, his black hair sweeping down across his brow as he frowned. "You will destroy us if this attitude persists," he quietly vowed.

"Oh? I thought that you had destroyed us already with your sanctimonious piety!"

"Non. I mean for us to be what we can to one another, that is all. Friends."

"Friends?"

"Have you ever had a friend, Lestat, save moi? A true friend?"

"You know I haven't," I sulkily admitted.

"Do not ruin this our friendship," he pleaded. "Be a true friend, instead. Do this thing for me. Marry Sophie as you promised; say nothing to put an end to the agreement. And treat her as she deserves---"

"With pleasure!"

"That did not come out as I intended," Louis admitted. "I am far from blind, Lestat. Sophie deserves. . . oh, her little machinations have not pleased me. And her glee when you and I fight pleases me still less. I don't wish for her to get what she most likely deserves out of all of this, though. I wish better things for Sophie, whatever her flaws."

"Louis. . ."

"Please, Lestat," he begged me, actually dropping to his knees. Now *that* was a posture I didn't want to see him in, not unless he planned to put it to good use and wrap his loving lips around my . . . but no, better not to think of that, not when quite obviously nothing could be farther from his mind. "Please, don't go ruin all chance for this wedding to take place."

Quite unlike Louis, in a way. I mean, the man had pride. And he did respect honesty. But here he was on his knees so that I might continue to deceive Sophie?

But as usual, I could refuse him nothing.

Not even this.

That wasn't to say, however, that I couldn't impose a condition of my own. . .

"One kiss," I said. "One real kiss, Louis. Because I think you mean what you say about never ever again. But I'm not her husband yet, am I? The least you could do is kiss me goodbye."

I pulled him to his feet.

And kiss me he did, but the passion was laced with pain.

Because it was goodbye, indeed.

The next night at nine o'clock I stood at the front of St. Stephen's Chapel, behind me the priest I'd spellbound into ignoring the posting of the banns and all that other mortal nonsense.

And the door at the far end of the small nave opened, and there stood my Louis, and I wished with all my heart that I could marry him, that I could have him.

But it wasn't to be.

Part 45



Louis stood there at the end of the aisle, but something was wrong, terribly wrong. He didn't look like a man attending a wedding, not that this particular ceremony was a cause for celebration. His hair was all in disarray, his clothes soaked with sweat. Not just his, either; the potent stench of horse-sweat rose from him like steam.

And then he saw me and he began to run down the aisle, stumbling in his haste, until just before me, he flung himself headlong at me to grab me by both lapels. You know, if he hadn't looked quite so devastated, I might have brushed him off with a few choice words. Something like, oh none of that, Louis, you're the one who says we're to be brothers and nothing but....

But he did look devastated.

And the words spilling off his trembling lips were awful, just awful. "You must come to Pointe du Lac at once," he gasped out. "Come! Now!"

I tossed the obliging priest a coin and followed Louis out of the church. "What is it?"

"Sophie," he gasped, and I stopped at once.

"What am I, Louis, a fish dangling at the end of her line? What is she, claiming cold feet, waiting for me to come there and beg her to get her sorry hide to church---"

"Shut up!" Louis screamed, and slugged me a good one across the face. I knew then and there that he was serious. His punches the night before had been love taps compared to that one. The man actually knocked me onto my keester. And then he stood over me and threw his head back toward the heavens and screamed. And I don't mean that he screamed words. It was one long heartrending screech of utter agony, released to the heavens.

I lumbered to my feet, took him in my arms, and whispered against his ear, "What about Sophie, Louis? What's wrong?"

"Oh, I am such a fool!" Louis cursed himself. "Standing here screaming when Sophie lies bleeding. Someone attacked her, Lestat. She's badly hurt. I need you, now come!"

Someone had attacked her? She was bleeding, badly hurt? May Louis forgive me, but for one glorious instant a wicked, wicked thought assailed me. Thank God I had better sense than to say anything to Louis. He was hardly going to appreciate that his sister's death would free the two of us to explore our love...

I mounted my horse and helped Louis up behind me --his mount had been run into the ground to get me--- and then, as I whipped my stallion into a preternatural frenzy and we fairly flew to Pointe du Lac, I cried out against the wind, "Louis? If you needed me, why didn't you call out within your mind?"

"I did, I did!" he shouted back.

Well, I sort of had left it until pretty late to get up, that night. Reluctance, you know. I'd laid abed and pretty much wished I hadn't gotten myself involved in the whole Sophie mess. And what was I doing now but involving myself even further? But I had to. Louis had asked me.

"What exactly happened?" I asked as we jumped off our horses at the plantation house.

But when I saw Sophie, I didn't need to be told. Her sheets were soaked red, a puddle running out from between her legs, her body contorted in pain as another spasm shook her. Another contraction.

"She's miscarrying," I told Louis, who almost slugged me again for saying something so useless. At least I wasn't the most useless one in the room, though. Maman was there in all her glory, blushing crimson as she shot to her feet---no thought for her daughter now, what on earth was *wrong* with the woman?--- and screamed at me, "Out, out, out! Louis, what can you be thinking? This is no place for a man---"

"Get her out of here, I don't care how," I spat at Louis, and left him to it. God only knows what he did. I had no attention to spare to the matter. But I knew I could trust him to do as I said. Maman's shock at seeing a man in her daughter's sick room could only get worse when she saw what that man meant to do to her precious Sophie.

You know, I'm ashamed to admit it, but the truth is, once I was alone with the girl, I wanted to let her die. Oh, not just because it would put an end to any marriage notions. It was also pure hatred for the girl herself. Not that I still hate her. But at that moment, after all she had just put me through. . . sure, I hated her. I didn't care then that she was hurting, that she felt she had more than enough cause for tormenting me.

Well, tempting as it was, I wasn't going to let her die. Not that I could help. Louis deserved my best effort.

I pushed my senses into hers, and did my best to cast a calm across her agonized spirit. And then, when she was lucid enough to listen, I laid a hand on her forehead and said, "Sophie? It's Lestat."

"Lestat!" she cried, agonized. "Oh where is Maman? I'm losing Anton's baby, losing---"

"No!" I sternly interrupted. "You mustn't think that, Sophie. Tell yourself 'I will keep this child, I will keep this child.' It is your will that must hold tight to this precious life inside you, do you understand? You're a Pointe du Lac; you have will beyond imagining. And nerve to defy the very heavens!"

"Yes," she said, but weakly. She lacked all confidence.

"Close your eyes and talk to your child," I urged her. "And whatever you hear or feel from me, Sophie, keep your eyes closed. I have. . . some medical training. Trust me. Do not become alarmed. Stay calm for your child. Hold it to your soul, hold it to your spirit."

I suppose it was asking a great deal of a genteel young lady to lie calm and quiet while I peeled the sodden, bloody sheets back and pushed her nightdress high on her thighs. Mon Dieu, what a mess. I truly didn't know if healing blood would do any good or not, at this juncture, but I had to try.

She yelped, and then she whimpered, and she fairly screamed when I moved her legs apart and then lifted them so that I could pour my blood inside her, where it might help. You can imagine the scene. Sophie trying her best to trust me and not thrash, for she did want that baby, me with my hands full even before I cut my wrist on my fang teeth to let the blood. And then, of course, it splashed all over the place instead of going inside her as she needed.

"I'm sorry, Sophie," I said. "Shhh, just take a deep breath and say, 'I want this child, I want this child, I want this child.' Think of the child, not what I'm doing," I urged, and then with a deep breath myself, I bit the tip clean off my index finger and thrust it inside her, deep, as deep as I could, and let blood pour directly into her womb.

"I want this child, I want this child," she chanted, but at the instant my finger invaded her, the shock was too much for her to bear. And no wonder. I hadn't been reading her mind; too much to do, but her thoughts fairly screamed at that moment, and I couldn't miss them.

I knew why she'd been attacked.

I knew why she was miscarrying.

And I knew why she let out an earsplitting scream when I touched her in such an intimate way. It wasn't me she feared.

Try telling that to Louis, though. Love or no, he wasn't about to stand out on the gallery while his sister screamed bloody murder. The door slammed open, Louis an avenging angel come to rescue her, and there I was with my hand buried practically to the wrist in *there*.

Not one of my finer moments.

Part 46




"Help me hold her!" I shouted at Louis.

"For God's sake, Lestat!" he chided me.

"Shut up and do as I say or I swear by all I hold holy that I'll beat you but good when I'm finished here!" I screamed. "Now, shut that door!"

He did, and then he held her as I asked, both his hands firm on her shoulders as she thrashed like a madwoman. I guess by then his shocked puritanical brain had figured out that I must have a damned good reason to bury a finger right up Sophie's....

She fainted, slumping, her frenzied screams dying away, and it came to me that I'd stopped the bleeding, that I'd done all that could be done, so I pulled my finger out and started fishing through the sheets looking for the tip I'd bitten off. It had gotten lost in the scuffle.

Louis found it, and his green eyes somber, watched me reattach it. I staggered to a chair, exhausted, and shading my eyes even against the dim light, said, "That's all I can do. The rest is up to whatever God you think might be up there."

"But what. . ." Louis' voice tapered off; he simply didn't know how to ask what he wanted. But I knew how to answer.

"I had to heal her," I said. "And blood doesn't do much good unless it's put on the injury, you understand. She was hurt inside. Inside her. . . well, you get the idea."

Apparently, he didn't.

"I don't understand," he murmured. "It was clear enough from her bruising that she'd been attacked, but she was hurt inside? How is that possible?"

Perhaps a true gentleman would be as dense as he, but I doubted it. It was more that this was just Louis. At the time I had little patience for it.
"Mon Dieu, do I have to spell it out in letters ten feet tall, Louis? Yes, she was hurt inside, hurt so badly that her body was trying to reject the baby! She was violated, do you understand now? Forced!"

"What?" Louis gasped, horrified.

"You heard me."

"But who...?"

"Your damned overseer," I spat. "I saw it all in her mind. He overheard her talking to you that night, overheard her admitting that she was pregnant. As far as he was concerned, that made her fair game. I mean, she wasn't Madonna any longer, so he figured she was fit to be his---"

I didn't say it. I didn't have to.

"Why tonight?" he gasped. "Her wedding night!"

"Look, the man is a drunken ass," I said, weary. "I warned you months ago that he was up to no good. I told you to get rid of him! But do you ever listen to me? Oh, no, Lestat is too cold and callous, Lestat is unforgiving, Lestat has no advice of value. Even when I cast gold upon your stinking plantation to save it you have nothing but contempt for me as a person! And now---"

"And now you need to feed," Louis interrupted.

"So?" I returned, belligerent.

"So, feed on him," he calmly announced. "I want to see you kill. Him. Now."

Part 47




"Well?" Louis pressed.

I was floored, absolutely floored. I mean, this was Louis. Le Monsieur Redemption, non? He didn't like the idea of killing, had resisted me all along simply because I no compunction about doing away with a mortal each night, or two, or three---

"What's the matter?" he snarled. "Isn't he enough of an evildoer to sate your appetite? He's done *this* to Sophie, and you hesitate!"

"Oh, he's an evildoer, all right," I murmured, still half in shock.

"And you need to feed," Louis repeated. "What's stopping you?"

"You," I answered. "You. Louis, are you thinking? I don't want to kill in front of you only to have you say later that the act sickened you, that I"m some degenerate murderer not fit to grace the halls of sainted Pointe du Lac!"

"That won't happen," Louis assured me, understanding better, I think, my reluctance.

"But what of confession and redemption and your loving God who would forgive any sin no matter how heinous, if only a man had time to come to regret his evil?"

"I don't want him to regret his evil!" Louis shouted, taking me by the shoulders and shaking me, hard. In my blood-deprived state it made me reel. "I want him to burn in Hell forever and ever, Lestat! And I expect to you to send him there for me, is that clear? Or I swear by all *I* hold holy that I shall send him there, myself!"

I must say, *that* was an interesting notion. I almost told him to go ahead. A sight to see, indeed. Louis the killer. Louis the ruthless killer. Louis, without remorse. Beautiful, powerful, and without regret. . .

But some deep core of knowledge inside me that came from I know not where told me that things were supposed to be the other way, that I was the one fated to kill that overseer, that Louis was supposed to watch.

Watch, and approve this deliberate taking of a human life as proof of his commitment and part of his change. . .

"Fine," I said, and Louis blew out a sigh of relief. Surely he hadn't actually expected me to refuse, had he? I suppose he might have. He was seething, anger needing to be released, a churning mass of emotion. Hardly rational, for all his suggestion had been a sound one.

"Call your mother here," I groaned, weary. "I'll convince her that Sophie has suffered nothing worse than a fall from her horse. Maman will put an end to her riding, then, which is as it should be, in my view. For the rest of her term she'll need to take it much easier---"

"Term?" Louis asked, glancing uncertainly at Sophie. "But I thought---"

That's right, he'd be in no position to know. But I was. "Oh, the little one is still tucked firmly up inside her," I assured him. "You got me here in time. What did you think I was doing a few moments ago?"

"Stopping the bleeding so she wouldn't die."

"Oh, that too, yes. But as I said, you got me here in time to save them both."

How could a man look both ecstatic and crestfallen all at once? Louis did. He started to speak, stopped, and then his eyes filled with tears.

"It's all right," I told him, lurching to my feet. "I understand. Don't feel guilty, Louis. It's only natural. You thought our problem was solved, didn't you? And for one glorious instant, you were relieved."

"But it's not solved," he gasped, horrified. "We're right back to where we've been all along."

"Not quite," I replied, tossing an arm around his shoulders. Louis held me upright when I would have fallen. "A few days ago you were still pretending to yourself that I wouldn't harm one hair of a mortal's head. And now you are going to watch me kill, and accept once and for all the stark reality of my existence. And what is more, you are going to approve."

"I approve already. Wholeheartedly. I only wish that you could kill the son of a bitch more than once."

"Yes, I know. And so you see, mon amour, we are making excellent progress, indeed."

"But Sophie, the wedding---"

"Yes, I know," I said again. "I love you, Louis. And for you, I'll do right for her, I swear. I'll even stop letting my resentful tongue run away with epithets, although I can't promise to never again get angry about what she's done."

"What has made you such a good man, Lestat?" Louis asked, all earnestness.

"You have, of course," I said, reaching for the door. "Call your mother, now. I take it no one else knows about the attack? The horse story will do, then, yes. And we will go to see your overseer."

"Yes," Louis said, his eyes gleaming with anticipation. The look of a killer, truly. It was all I could do not to kiss him, but I simply didn't have the strength. I needed blood in a bad way. What more proof of that could there be than that it was Louis who thought to summon maids first, to burn the bloody sheets that would ignite on their own come morning? To clean the room before Maman could witness the carnage.

Colette among those maids, wearing the red hairbow which Louis had given her once upon a time. She gazed at him with love, with longing, with lust.

But he had eyes only for me.

It was a damned shame that when Sophie had recovered, I would have to marry her.

Part 48


The overseer was laying on the bed in his narrow room, passed out with drink, his damned pants only half-fastened. And it wasn't whiskey gut that kept him from doing them up. He was smeared with evidence that he'd recently had a woman.

Louis nearly lost it, then and there, and I'm not talking about his lunch. An enraged snarl erupting from his midsection, he flung himself at the bed, intending to pummel the life out of the man.

I held him off, whispering lovingly in his ear, "Non, Louis mon amour. Allow me, please. He shall suffer, this I promise you. Let me do this thing for you, my sweet Louis---"

And he subsided. Trusting me.

Perhaps I should have allowed Louis to descend into his murderous impulses then and there, but I was guided--strongly--by this conviction that he was meant to watch while I did the deed.

Well, he didn't watch. I mean, not exactly. He was full of so much rancor that he pretty much couldn't bear to *just* watch. But I get ahead of myself, ahead of my story. Perhaps I should just tell what happened as it unfolded, bit by bit.

Louis folded his long, lean, elegant body into a chair, and watched with hooded eyes as I knelt by the side of the bed.

"Now," I said to prepare him, "you must keep in mind, Louis, you must promise me to understand, that I am not normally quite so vicious as you may see me be, tonight. But for you, I will indulge my darkest appetite."

"Yes," he thickly grated. "Do it. Start!"

My fingers woven through the overseer's hair, I roughly yanked his head to one side to wake him up, and when his eyes snapped open, I smiled in a way that had my long fangs jutting far out of my mouth.

"You're going to die, monsieur," I announced, soft in vicious intent. "You're going to die, and it will take all night, but by the time the end is near, you will be begging to feed your stinking blood to my hunger!"

He screeched and flailed, but I struck him across the face, stunning him enough to render him mute, and then I pierced his throat with a sharp fingernail and licked my finger with a loud, "Mmmm," while he stared at me in horror.

"That's right," I drawled. "I'm a vampire, monsieur, and I'm going to feast upon you."

If he hadn't been quite so drunk, he would have realized that Louis was sitting there, quietly observing, his emerald-sage eyes missing almost nothing as the swept the scene, back and forth, back and forth. But he was drunk.

So would I be, I supposed, when I was through with him.

"It's time to start," I menaced, and then I lifted his wrist to my lips and bit him, hard. No finesse, not this time. He didn't deserve it. Well, my victims never did, although sometimes it amused me to ply them with mercy. But I wanted to give Louis a good show, so I chomped him hard and rather savored his gasp of pain.

Oh, the frailty of the evildoer. He began to beg, to plead, because of course as I drank him down, I didn't let him have the swoon that would have made everything all right. I kept him conscious, aware that his life's blood was draining away.

"Please, monsieur," he cried, "Why torment me like this? I've done nothing---"

That was when Louis lost it. Big time.

He fairly leapt from his chair and flew across the room. One slap, two slaps, three. . . slaps, I don't know if the word is right. Louis was using his open palm, sure, but he was using it so very viciously that in just two blows he began to bloody the man's face. And still he went on, blow after punishing blow, his lips curled back in a feral snarl as he vented his rage in the only way he knew how.

"Louis," I finally said, dropping the overseer's wrist. "If you knock him completely out you'll spoil hours of our fun."

He stopped at once, and his skin afroth with sweat from his exertions, moved to sit beside me on the bed. "Too late, he's out cold, Lestat."

"Ah, well," I waved a hand, feeling remarkably good. It was the blood, of course. Restoring me from my ministrations to Sophie. But it was also the whiskey the overseer had glutted himself on. Oh, why dissemble? The alcohol was passing fast into my own system, and if there's one thing I've always been, it's a happy drunk.

"I love you, Louis," I sang as I leaned over into him, then slid down--accidentally, but that was all right--so that I was lying with my head atop his lap, looking up at him with adoring and no doubt adorable grey eyes. Ah, grey washed with blue. How could he resist me?

"I love you, too," he answered, and for some reason his voice seemed as musical as mine.

"Let's smooch," I said, puckering up.

"You, mon bel ami, are hopeless," Louis announced.

"Aw, come on," I urged him. "Be a devil. We have to amuse ourselves somehow, don't we?"

"I'd much prefer we wake up this worthless hunk of flesh and finish him off."

"Patience, patience," I counseled. "Come on, Louis. Kiss me good and proper. Please?"

He made a face. "You've been drinking blood, Lestat."

"Oh, all right then," I conceded. "I'll have a little tastee of yours to get me back in the mood. Please, Louis? It's a little hard to just quaff him down when you're sitting right here and I'd *so* much rather have a drippy drop of yours, you know."

"Incorrigible," he pronounced. "Absolutely incorrigible. We came up here to see justice done, not indulge our desires the one for the other."

"Oh, so you do still desire me," I trilled, delighted. "A taste, Louis, hmmm?"

I suppose he couldn't resist me when I was at my most adorable. "Oh, all right," he conceded, and offered me his wrist. But that wasn't what I wanted.

"Neck," I insisted. "Necky necky necky necky necky---"

"You're absolutely drunk!"

"Well, duh," I came back. Smart response, eh? Let him argue that one down. He didn't even try. He just stretched out his neck and let me do as I pleased.

I wasn't so drunk that I would overdo with Louis, though.

In fact, his sober blood had the effect of straightening out my reeling senses. Some, at least.

"Ok, him again," I decided. "Wake him up. No, wait. Strip him bare-assed naked, first---"

"No," Louis said.

"Spoil sport. Ok, just wake him up."

After that, it was bite and slash and rip and pretty much shred him, although I kept it careful. Not so much that I killed him outright, I mean. And then, near dawn, I drained him proper.

Louis and I waited the better part of an hour, watching him die.

And when it was over, Louis looked with hard green eyes at what we had done, and stated the obvious. "Let's dump the body in the swamps."

You know, I would have thought that handling a dead body with such a purpose would have made him nauseous. But not this Louis. He was stronger than that, now.

When at last everything was done, Louis looked at me. "You're drunker than before, Lestat. Will you be all right?"

"Oh, sure," I breezily answered, squinting as the dawn threatened to find me. "I'll just find my lairy lairy lair. Um... Louis? Where was it?"

"Oh, mon Dieu," he groaned. "I can't let you go, not like this. You can barely walk! You might burn!"

"Burny wurny zurny kurny," I sang, dancing out a rather neat jig, if I do say so myself.

"This is my fault," Louis murmured. "You'd have more sense than to take in that much liquor, if not for me insisting it had to be tonight."

"Nighty night," I echoed, and dropped to the grassy ground to snooze.

"None of that," Louis sternly announced. "Come with me."

"I'd like to come with you," I sang, but I think the double entrendre was lost on my Louis.

"I'll find you a safe place," he said. "Come on, Lestat!"

Some glimmer of reason reached me through the fog of drink. He'd find me a safe place? When had I ever entrusted myself to a mortal? Never. Never ever ever.

But I wanted to, with Louis.

"Don't come near me," I groggily warned. "I'm dangerous asleep, I might rip you limb from limby limby limby. Promise, Louis? Promise and then smoochy me once more---"

But I don't know if he ever did. All I know was that the lethargy swamping me took full charge then, and I plunged headlong into his waiting arms.

Part 49



I woke up to the feel of slimy water covering my face, the coldness slick and rank and pretty much disgusting. The sensation was so strange, so unexpected, that my first thought was that I must be dreaming. Louis had said he would take care of me. Louis would protect me from the sun. There was no way, no way on this earth, that he could possibly have done what it seemed he had done.

Because it seemed for all the world that he had tossed me into the swamp and gone on his merry way.

No, no, not my Louis. Except, I opened my eyes--no dream, this, but perhaps a nightmare--and I found out that he had. I was in the swamp, submerged to the very depths, the water thick and foul, and what was staring me straight in the face?

The overseer.

The corpse.

Yes, that's right. His body still tied tight with weights, more bloated than when we'd last seen him, his mouth open on a final scream. Except now, that mouth was filled with slimy water and a tiny fish was dancing about inside.

Absolutely revolted, I flinched back and sucked water into my lungs. Stupid, stupid reflex. What did I need with air to breathe? I had done all right underwater until *that*, but my finely tuned engine of a preternatural body--gorgeous if I do say so myself, but I'm too modest to do that, another one of my virtues, of which there are many--took decided exception to a strong measure of filthy water poured inside.

I shot to the surface, sputtering, nearly drowning even though I can't really drown, and then reflex took over. Vampire reflex. Let's just say that nothing's supposed to go inside me except good old fashioned, red and healthy, hot and satisfying, blood. Human, preferably. Definitely not water. Just think of what happens to us when we try to eat mortal food, and you'll get the idea.

I retched. Muscles I never knew I had contracted to get that water back out of me. The world spun with the violence of the maneuver. And then it was over, and I heaved in a breath--not necessary but it felt damned good after that stinking swamp water--and I shuddered.

So where the hell was Louis, eh? My dear devoted darling Louis that would save me from the sun only to dump me like so much unwanted garbage right in the very spot where we had gotten rid of the hated overseer?

You know, Freud hadn't lived and died yet, but I swear, right then as I sat there, heaving, on the muddy bank, I thought there was something damned Freudian about the whole set-up.

Or was it something else?

I stared at the swamp water, and a ghost rose up from it to mock me. My ghost. Except, I wasn't dead. I was very nearly so, my spirit trying to rise from a body stabbed and poisoned and shriveled. A husk.

The husk Lestat.

And who had put that husk in the water and gone on his way, gone off to enjoy the lights of Paris--although with a strange, very strange, detour all the way to Transylvania or something---oh yes, you guessed it.

Louis.

My very own Louis.

And did he miss me? Did he regret what he'd done? Oh, no. He had a new love. That beautiful child. Actually he'd had her nearly all along, and more fool me, I had actually believed him when he said she was his daughter, his beloved, but never his love, not that way.

The fool Lestat.

The chump Lestat.

The lovesick dupe, Lestat.

He was going to do it! Someday, he was going to let that child destroy me, and then he would dispose of the remains in a swamp not unlike this one...

Or, maybe not. Because the phantom Lestat I was seeing was fading away, now, fading into nothingness, and the sense of the future I had abruptly snapped in two. As though it had once been, but now would not.

Well, maybe the truth was that for some godforsaken reason, Louis had to dump me some time or other into a swamp. And now he'd done it. Gotten it out of his system. And it was over, never to see the light of day--all right, the dark of night--again.

Maybe.

But I still didn't appreciate being offloaded like so much offal.

I liked it even less that he'd apparently forgotten all about me. I mean, really! If he cared at all, if he loved, wouldn't he have come at dusk to greet me as I rose? Even if all I was to him was a husband for Sophie, you'd think he'd want to make sure I was all right.

But nooooooo.......

Maybe he was too chicken--or too smart, depended how you looked at it--to be near at hand until I'd cooled down.

Or maybe not, because after I bellowed loud and long, "Louis, Lou-iiiiii-iiiiis!" over and over and over, he came stumbling out of the underbrush, hands outstretched toward me.

But I was in no mood for it.

Toss me in a swamp, would he? Toss me in and leave me to spend the day with a corpse, of all things? I hadn't talked to Louis about it in any detail, but I was pretty danged sure that I'd mentioned that I didn't like to linger near a kill. Let alone spend hour past hour nose to nose with an evildoer drained of blood!

I'd had it with him, I really had.

The minute he reached me, I held out my arms as though to embrace him, as though to enfold him in a tender embrace, as though he was my one and only love in all the world.

And then, with one swift lift, heave, and throw, I chucked him far out over the fetid waters, and watched as he plunged head over heels straight down into the dank and dark and dreary swamp.

Part 50



He came up sputtering. Well, good. Let him find out what it's like to have a lungful of swampy water. Let him breathe it in deep, like I had!

My self-congratulation abruptly ended, though, when his head plunged under water once again, his arms flailing uselessly, and I began to think that something was wrong. Really wrong.

Still, my belabored brain didn't really put two and two together until he came up sputtering yet again, his face deathly white as he shouted, "Mon Dieu, Lestat, I can't swim! Merde, what is wrong avec toi ce soir--"

And that was it, he was submerged once again.

And so, of course, it was back in the swamp with moi, plunging straight down into the dank waters, kicking aside the overseer when he blocked my path to Louis. I took him in my arms and dragged him to the surface and then the shore, and laying him on his side, gave him a few hard claps to the back.

Nothing, no reaction.

I thumped him harder, this time on the chest, and then he spewed forth the water that had collected in his lungs, gasping and heaving and pretty much carrying on as I had. Except, he was mortal. This trauma was no doubt more destructive and longer lasting when enacted on his frail flesh.

When he was finally through, he was weak as a kitten. Far too weak to resist me as I pulled him to a sitting position and seated behind him, cradled him tenderly in my arms.

"I'm sorry, Louis," I said in my most penitent voice.

Inadequate, as he quickly made me realize.

"Fuck off," he tried to snarl. It came out more like a mewl. Poor Louis.

"I am sorry. My temper ran away with me."

"Your temper!" he gasped. "What did I do to incite your temper?" It took him a few more minutes before he could catch his breath, but when he did, he let fly at me. "I saved you from the sun! I had the borders of the swamps guarded all day so that no one could possibly enter and disturb your rest! I came an hour before dusk to wait for you! I loved you the best I could, Lestat, and for this you throw me headfirst into those disgusting waters?"

Hmm, I knew for a fact that Louis sometimes stretched the truth, so I sort of discounted most of what he had said. Oh, why dissemble? I didn't believe him for an instant. How could I? His version of events simply didn't match the facts.

"You threw me in there first," I coolly observed, backing away from him as he began to shiver. Having a vampire hold him, after all, could only make him colder.

"I did not throw you," he stiffly stated, back to me. "I gently and lovingly slipped you into the waters and watched to make sure you would sink deep enough that no light could penetrate. What did you expect me to do, Lestat? Dawn was breaking! You had fainted already, which meant that I had almost no time at all! I couldn't even make it to the slave cabins to shelter you, not that they are great shakes as shelters. I noticed that today, the overseer must have been drinking away some of the money I gave him for repair of the roofs---"

"And that's another thing, the overseer! Thank you very much for plunging me right next to his stinking corpse so it was the first thing I would see when first I woke!"

"I didn't!" Louis protested. "That's mad!

Then he looked around and gasped, "Oh, mon Dieu, you are not jesting. This is the same spot, n'est-ce pas? Ah, Lestat, je suis desolé, I am so very sorry."

"You didn't realize where you were, you didn't do it on purpose?"

"I didn't do it at all! I was dragging you back towards Pointe du Lac. For someone so lean and lithe and sculpted, mon cher, you sure do weigh a ton--"

"Muscle mass," I smugly broke in.

"Oui, well, I hadn't gone too far when the imminent light began to worry me and I realized that the swamps were indeed my only option. So I hasitly returned, but I most certainly did not return here!" He shuddered, but it wasn't the murder bothering him. He had not lost his resolve on that. It was only the thought of me trapped so near a dead body that distressed him.

Ah, my sweet Louis.

"The current must have drifted you," he said, standing. "If you recall, that *is* why we placed the foul remains in this very bog. So that they wouldn't drift, as you must have."

He shook himself all over rather like a dog shedding water. "I came at dusk and waited where I left you. A hundred yards that way, or so," and he pointed with a shaking arm. "I waited and waited, but you did not rise! And then I thought that I'd been wrong, oh so very wrong, that it wasn't merely the sun and fire that can destroy you, that you could die of drowning just as I could!" His voice shattered into a thousand different sobs, each one of them proof to rend my heart. "I thought I'd lost you forever, Lestat! Oh, it was awful, just awful awful awful! I wasn't prepared! I didn't think you *could* be lost, ever! And then I knew that you could be, and it was my fault, I should have risked the distance to the slave cabins rather than entrusted you to the waters---"

"Hush, Louis," I bid him, and cold or no, I folded him into my arms, where he shook with all the force of his anguish. "Hush. I'm still here. I didn't die. I won't die. I love you, Louis. I'd never leave you."

And from somewhere beyond time, the Gobi desert vanished clean away, and the inane thought came to me, ***God damn it, now I'll never have a nice tan.***

Strange, that thought. I mean, for one thing, I'd never heard of a desert called Gobi. Where the fuck was that? Even more weird, though, was the idea that I'd even *want* a tan. Come on! I was an aristocrat! I liked my skin vampire-white! Why should I want to bake it to the color the the peasants were forced to acquire as they slaved away in the fields of the Auvergne? Really, one of the first things I'd thought upon first looking into a mirror was that my white skin was rather regal.

Like moi.

Louis was still murmuring in cracked desperation, "And then I heard you call my name, and I didn't think, I just ran. Ran and ran and ran until I saw you. Oh, I did never so need a hug as I did right then, and what did I get? A dunking!"

"Pauvre Louis," I soothed him, my hands forcibly parting his shirt to reach the beautiful flesh beneath. Ah, hands on back, Louis pulled ever closer to me. But I did not deserve him. "Pauvre, pauvre Louis. I don't treat you right at all, do I? I've told you that I do not know how to love. I fear I fail you, my precious Louis. I fear that I shall never be your equal."

"It's all right," he murmured, his ruffled feathers settling down.

"Oh no, it is most certainly not all right," I vowed. "I must do better by you, my Louis. You are all I have. All I want. All I need."

He collapsed against me as we melted together in a kiss of true love. So rare, those kisses. They speak of them in fairy tales. A kiss surrounded by magic. A kiss to die by. But this was no fairy tale, nor were those kisses rare, not for me, not now. I could have one every hour on the hour, now that I had Louis. I could have one every minute---

Except, I couldn't.

I broke it off, remembering Sophie. And Louis, and all his restrictions, his pitiable efforts to apply human morality to a creature not at all human.

"What was that about guarding the swamps?" I asked, more to calm myself from my desperate thoughts than because it mattered.

He shrugged, and tried to get himself back under control, even as his eyes screamed emerald passion at me.

"Oh, I told them that Álvarez might come here for vengeance, that he felt he'd been cheated in that duel, Freniere's gun blowing up as it did. I said he might sneak onto my lands by way of the swamps, that my slaves were to surround them until nightfall, when it was so dark that he was more likely to simply come by road. No work was done at Pointe du Lac today, Lestat. Do you have any concept how much dye spoiled? I had every able-bodied man on swamp duty. Their real task, of course, was to provide such a presence that no one would dare enter. It worked, too. They were afraid that Álvarez was already in there, trapped in there, so they stayed just on the outside, as I said."

"Clever Louis."

He shrugged again, just that slight lifting of his shoulders that was so very, very French. Ah, I did love him!

"And where did you spend your day?" I asked.

"I wanted it to be with you. Mon Dieu, I wanted that. It was almost more than I could bear to walk away this morning. The waters seemed to call me down. 'Come to me, Louis, so we can be together...' I could almost hear your voice."

Uh-oh, there is was again. That hint of memory, of a path not taken, of Lestat left for dead in the swamp but calling Louis to stay and heal him. Or maybe I was just remembering that I had, in my utter folly, once mesmerized Louis and told him to seek for a way that we could be together.

"Not that way," I said, confusing him until I explained, "Don't seek to be with me, Louis, not that way. Not until you are transformed yourself can you rest by my side by day. Never mind that I would love to have you there, each and every day. It isn't safe, not so long as you are yet mortal."

Hmmm, very interesting. For once he didn't dispute the hints that permeated my very words...

"So where were you, then?"

"Oh, I couldn't stay," he admitted. "I wanted to. With everything I am. But Sophie, you know, she needed me..." He glanced up, his green eyes suffused with concern that I might fault him for that.

"Well, thank God for Sophie then," was my response. "How is she?"

"She won't speak," he said. "I mean, not at all. She just lies in bed and stares at the ceiling. I'd think her dead if not for the fact that once in a while she blinks."

"She's strong. She'll come out of it. But how is she otherwise?"

"Healed, I suppose," Louis said, kissing my cheek. "Thanks to you. The doctor's been. Oh, not the quack who bled me. Not even a doctor, really. Don't trust them, not any more. A midwife, I meant. An old slave woman who's delivered more babies than any doctor I ever heard of. Maman nearly had a fit. Actually, she did have a fit, and we had to fetch her smelling salts, but she was merely feigning, as it turned out. She insisted that no ignorant darkie was going to touch her Sophie *there*."

Sopping wet, we began to walk back to the plantation house. "And what did you do?"

"Well, I thought of what I'd seen you do to Sophie, and suddenly Maman's petty little concerns seemed stupid indeed. So I shoved her out of the room and told her that I was the master of the house and the head of the family and that Sophie was my responsibility, not hers. Then I admitted the midwife and watched the examination."

"You watched the examination."

"Yes," he merely said, and I let it go at that.

"And the midwife said?"

"You were right, the baby's fine. Three months along, she thinks."

"Of course I was right," I retorted, but inside I was thinking that Sophie would start to show soon and that I had better get matters at St. Stephens arranged once more.

And then Louis said something that rocked me to my core.

"I don't think I can bear to have you marry Sophie, after all. There has to be another way."

And I looked at him with sad eyes and said the truth that would shatter us.

"But there isn't."

Part 51



Candlelight on stone, the flickering flames in St. Stephen's chapel matching my mood exactly. Barely alive.

The priest behind me, Louis at my side as I watched the bride progress up the aisle toward where I waited. Sophie. Her face somber, her hair upswept in the simplest style that could possibly be thought dressed, her gown an unadorned sweep of creamy silk. Elegance personified, bu without the slightest affectation of joy.

Perhaps the candles matched her mood, as well.

She reached the small nave, took her place beside me, but when I reached for her hand, it was cold as any stone. Louis visibly flinched, and then swallowed hard, the sound clanging in my vampire ears. And then he sighed, gritting his teeth, and accepted his now and future role.

Now, best man.

And afterwards? Brother-in-law.

The priest began to speak, the marriage service in Latin. I could understand it, certainly; I'd learned a fair amount of Latin and Greek both during those years of travel with Gabrielle. I could understand what the priest said, yes. But I couldn't follow it, couldn't make sense of it. My mind swam with too many thoughts, too many regrets.

Louis, my love.

And yet he wasn't, not now. He couldn't be. . .

Then came vows, Sophie staring up at me with unseeing eyes as she listened to the priest, listened to me. . .

"I do," I said, but my gaze at Louis said something else. I don't, I don't, I don't. . .

He looked away.

My breath choked me, panic rising like floodwaters in my soul, but it was too late, and I knew it. Too late to back out, too late to change my mind, to change my fate. This was done. Written in stone.

But the stones wept as they were washed by candlelight.

Then the priest was talking to her, his black robes rustling slightly as he leaned closer to her diminutive height. The same questions, almost. Do you promise to love, honor, and obey?

No word, no answer from her lips. For a moment that stood suspended in time, the angels sang choruses in my ears.

Then she nodded, and the priest accepted it as consent given, for of course he knew that she had not spoken these past two weeks. . .

"With this ring I thee wed," I vowed when prompted. "With my body I thee worship. All my worldly goods I thee endow. Unto death do us part."

And then, Louis glared.

I slipped the simple gold band upon her finger, and once my own finger was similarly adorned, I leaned in to lay my lips on hers. Cold, dead, those lips. Like mine. How could a woman of flesh and blood be as frozen as ice?

Louis clapping me on the back when I pulled away. Louis, trying to be brave, trying to be jovial. Maman, blubbering. Mon Dieu, would I have to call her Maman, now? The thought nearly made me retch.

More Latin, except that this time, I didn't listen at all.

Strains of music for the recessional; Louis had insisted. Glide of silk beside me as Sophie walked at my side, this time.

Then outside, outside the church to begin a life as man and wife, a life that would be more a living death than anything I had yet endured. Warmth on my face. Strange, that warmth, when I was cold, clear through, my heart no longer something that beat within my breast but a rock, granite, a lump of pain that would never ease.

I looked up as sunlight hit my eyes, and inanely thought, "Nice day for a wedding. . ."

And then, the nightmare split apart.

I came abruptly awake, phantom pain searing me at merely the thought of walking into broad daylight. My skull connected with the lid of my coffin, a deep bruise forming on my forehead as French curses spewed forth from my lungs.

Irritated, I threw the bolt free, and flung the lid back, then heaved in breath after breath as I tried to get my bearings. Mon Dieu, all that. . . a dream, just a dream.

But what a dream!

My hands were slick with blood, and not just from sweat. In my agitation, my nails had punctured my palms, time and time again. My clothing was tattered from thrashing about in the tight confines of the casket. Considering that casket was lined with the slickest satin, and well-padded---nice and comfy, like I liked it---I could only think that in my death-sleep I must have gone well-nigh unto berserk, flailing about like a gutted fish, or something.

I was as exhausted as though I'd never slept at all.

And no wonder.

Mon Dieu, how was I going to go through with this? I couldn't even bear it in a dream, could I? But I'd promised, and it didn't really matter that Louis was ready for my to cry off. I'd promised Sophie.

And yet that promise wasn't the real reason I had to keep my word. Since when has the unstained truth been of paramount importance to *moi*? No, my reasons, like all else in my life, revolved firmly around Louis, the sun to my universe.

He might be saying now that I mustn't marry her, that we had to find another way, but what was he going to say if we actually did? Ye gods, I could just see it. Sophie, married to some poor fool I'd bewitched into falling for her. Louis would hate that. Eventually, he'd hate me, too.

But he was going to hate me for wedding her myself,it was as certain as the stars.

I crept out of my crypt and slew a baker's dozen of evildoers that night, but when I was finished, and sated, I felt no better than before.

Part 52

"She spoke," Louis confided to me a week later.

I tried to care, I really did.

Actually, I suppose that's a bit harsh. I did care. I wasn't heartless, and I did love Louis. This was important to him, I knew.

I just didn't care the way I would have if I had never gotten embroiled in Sophie's need for a husband.

"Really," I drawled, and hoped it sounded reasonably composed. "Does that mean you'll let me read her mind?"

"Don't you dare," Louis admonished. "She's enough to do just to heal, inside and out, without dealing with your presence in her thoughts where it does not belong."

"I told you, she'd never ever know I'd so much as peeked!"

"No," he repeated. "I told you, it's a risk I won't tolerate."

You know, ever since he'd kicked his own mother out of the room and let that slave midwife examine Sophie, Louis had really taken to this "head of the household, master of the house," role he'd assumed. Maman said but nothing when Louis was laying down the law. She'd even stopped faking her fainting spells. No point. Louis actually left her lying on the floor, stepping straight over her to continue on his way the last time she'd tried such nonsense. No more smelling salts, no more coddling.

Louis was a man in charge, and now, she knew it.

Sophie didn't, but we could hardly blame her for that. She didn't seem to know anything. Catatonic, now there's a word. It wasn't really coma, though. She could eat and drink; she was just very listless about it.

Maybe she was becoming less listless, though, if she had actually spoken. "What did she say?" I asked, and then I understood the pained expression Louis wore. Sophie's speaking was a good thing, I suppose, but it was difficult to view it in the light considering what was on her mind.

"Freniere," Louis admitted. "One word, just that one word. And then she wept."

"Maybe it's good that she's owning up to her grief, Louis."

"I'm sure you're right," he sighed. "But it hurts to see her this way. Mon Dieu, to think that men like that walk the earth!"

"So you don't regret what I did to him?" I pressed. Of course, I knew the answer. Louis' thoughts weren't off limits to me. But I wanted him to way it. I wanted it all the more firmly woven into the world in which he lived, the reality he encountered in his own mind.

"What we did," he corrected. "And I regret only that we couldn't have killed him several more times."

"Hmmm," I murmured, thinking that through. "Just think, Louis. . . How many young women are there out there who don't have someone like you to demand justice for them? Imagine if Sophie hadn't had a brother at all, let alone one with a vampire friend. . ."

"Just what are you getting at?" Louis asked, eyebrows raised.

"Just this. . . you said to me once that you couldn't condone my kills because even the most evil of men deserves a chance to repentance."

"Well, I obviously don't think that anymore."

"Right, right. But you don't think it in connection with this one man. And that's because you love Sophie. But the principle applies more broadly, don't you see that? There's a young woman somewhere being brutalized right now, who *has* no-one to avenge her. Is her attacker more worthy of a chance to repentance merely because he chose for his victim someone more alone in the world than Sophie?"

Louis stared at me. And then, believe it or not, the direness of the subject matter notwithstanding, he burst out laughing.

"I see your point," he admitted, shaking his head. "I don't know what to say, Lestat."

"Speak your mind."

And he did. Oh, how he did. "I feel stupid," he admitted. "Stupid for ever thinking *you* the evil one. You aren't, are you? You're an avenging angel, slaying the evil-doer."

"Don't lionize me too much," I cautioned. "It took time, and good advice, for me to get to this place. I mean. . ." I almost couldn't say it, not so bluntly, but Louia had to know. With him, I couldn't bear deceit. "I have killed innocents. But it's not my practice now."

Louis nodded, his glance hooded as he swiveled his gaze toward the distant swamps. "I'm glad Sophie had a defender," he merely replied. "I want all those other defenseless mortals being preyed upon by their own kind to have defenders, too."

And then he looked at me. "I want to be such a one, Lestat."

I swear, my heart stopped.

"Wh... wh... what, Louis?" I croaked. "What did you say, what did you mean?"

"I'm ready now," he said. "For everything. I want to join you in the endless night. I want to have you forever, Lestat. I don't want you to be alone, ever again."

One step, and he was in my arms, and offering me his luscious neck. "Drink of me," he begged. "But this time, mon cher, don't stop until you've taken all of me there is to have. Until you can give it back, and pour yourself inside me so that forevermore, we shall be one."

Part 53


I bent to take him, to pierce his most lovely vein with fangs to love him, never ever to hurt. I felt his blood begin to flow, to fill me, the taste intoxicating, the sensations so multilayered and complex that it was all I could do not to moan aloud.

Louis, my Louis. My perfect Louis.

But this wasn't perfect, and I knew it.

How often had I railed against Magnus that he hadn't given me a last day to enjoy, or a warning that I just might want to file my nails? Of course Magnus was a story unto himself, forcing me as he had. This, what I had with Louis, it would be done in love. But still, I ought to have enough love for him to do this truly right.

I mean, Louis had a plantation, a business! He had arrangements to make if the whole place wasn't going to fall down around his ears.

Or perhaps the truest thought in all my mind, really, was that making Louis so precipitously was going to cheat *me*. Yes, that's right, me. I wanted the man! I wanted him with all my heart and soul. And he was mortal, and I'd courted him for so long and well in part because I was counting on some lovely mortal frolics! We'd barely scratched the surface that time when we had snuck into New Orleans to indulge ourselves the one in the other. I wanted that again, that and more.

I wanted Louis buried to the hilt inside me while he still *had* a hilt, so to speak.

I wanted it all.

I closed the bite wounds on his neck and backed away, letting my hands fall to my sides.

Louis stared at me, confused.

"It's too soon," I thickly groaned.

"No, it is just right," he insisted. "I'm ready, Lestat. I'm sure of it. I want what you have. Not for the power, not for the eternal life, but for love. For you. I don't want to lose you. You don't know what it was like out at the swamps thinking that I had lost you!"

"You think not? What I know is that every day at sunrise I nearly have a heart attack worrying what might befall you when I am not there to set it right."

"Oh," Louis moaned. "Then you do understand, oui."

"Oui. But I also understand this: even if you think you don't want one, I owe you at least one more day to set your affairs in order."

"One more day. . ."

"Oui. But more than that, I still want you, mon cher. In all the mortal ways we once discussed before other matters. . . interfered. I should like to keep you as my lover for some time before we take that last step into eternity, my Louis."

"Keep me," he said, the words rolling off his tongue. He licked his lips. "It sounds. . . well in truth it should sound offensive, that you should keep me as though I am your doxy or something. But it is not offensive. It sounds. . . intriguing. I should quite like for you to keep me," he announced rather in the manner of someone making a grave decision.

Emboldened, I drew him against me again and caught him to me in a hard hug. Taking advantage of my greater strength, I crushed him to me and spoke in a rasped whisper as my deeper, darker desires rose to the surface of my lips. "I should like to keep you," I growled low against his ear. "I should like to own you, Louis. To brand you mine, to carve that one fact upon your soul in strokes so deep and wide that they can never heal---"

"Do it," he moaned, "I want it. I want it all."

And then, two things happened at exactly the same time. He thought of my owning him in exactly the way I had described, he thought of being utterly, utterly mine, and in my power, and helpless to escape. . . and he came in great spurts, his long delicious length convulsing as I held him clutched to me, my hands descending to lovingly cup his backside as his passion wildly spasmed.

"I love you," I whispered into his ear as his pleasure spun on.

But he said something even more profound, something that made me long to worship him.

"I trust you," he gasped, and he meant it literally. "I am yours, Lestat. Every part of me. Mon Dieu, I think of you taking charge of me as you said, I think of serving you, being your willing slave and--"

Well, he didn't need to say what he really thought of all that, because actions speak louder than words.

The man had come, fully and completely, not three minutes before, but when he thought of me loving him enough to own him outright just as he owned Colette, he spasmed yet again.

And screamed with the pain of it, his flesh being only mortal, after all.

"Calm down, my love," I gently advised him, and to help him do it, I pierced a vein and drained him just to the point of languid limpness.

"But... but..." He looked at me with green eyes so full of adoration that it stunned me. "You don't understand," he said. "You don't understand how much I love you. Mon cher, I thought I did before, but it wasn't like this. It's as though you are a primal force and all I can so is lay down and let myself be swept away. I. . . I thought I had some will, some self-respect. But I don't, not with you. I want only to be what you would have me be, do what you would have me do---"

"Shhh," I said, because if I let him go on much longer, he'd be coming a third time. I could tell. And he was sore already, mon pauvre Louis. "I do understand, mon amour. You've accepted me finally. That's what this is. And now you trust me as you never, ever did. Enough to give yourself utterly into my hands."

"Yes. That's it," he groaned, and then in something approaching desperation, begged, "Please make me, Lestat. Tonight. Now."

I clicked my teeth together, thinking. "Are you mine?" I asked. "Completely and wholly mine, Louis?"

"Yes," he breathed, hopeful.

"Will you trust me to do whatever is best for us, always?"

"Yes. Oui, oui, yes."

I sucked in a breath. "Louis. Will you do as say, Louis? We will be partners, this I swear. But while you are yet newly made there will be times when you will *have* to do as you are told. Some things aren't subject to debate. I must know that you trust me enough to follow my guidance, that you trust me never to abuse the power you give into my hands. Because if you are to be my fledgling, Louis, you give yourself to me. You do understand that?"

"I'll be yours forever!"

"And you'll obey me?" I pressed. "Starting right now, this instant, you'll trust my judgment in matters related to the night?"

"I'll obey you," he vowed. "Please, please Lestat! That's enough! Enough of promises, enough of vows. Drain me to the dregs and fill me back up with all that is yourself---"

"No," I said, setting him away. "You said that you would obey me, Louis. And this is the first thing. I'm going to bring you over, have no worries on that score. But I'm going to do it right. And that means that I don't do it until I think that it *is* right. For you. And for me."

My voice deepening, I said in heady promise, "I want you mortal, yet. Because I want you. And I'm going to have you, everything I want. And yoú re going to love it. And when I'm sated, and only then, mon très beau cher, will I bring you into night."

And Louis said, "Take me, Lestat. Any way you want."

Part 54



Ah, marvel of marvels. Who would have thought that Louis de Pointe du Lac would have a submissive streak in him, eh? Certainly not moi. It had only been quite recently, you know, that he had taken full charge of his own family. Putting Maman in her place, I mean. He didn't appear to care one whit *what* she thought of his decision, now.

Nice, that.

But now he was coming over all compliant with me. I liked it. Ah, why mince words? I *loved* it. In a way, it was all my fantasies come true. I mean, I'd always thirsted for love. Real love, the kind that wouldn't leave. And Louis there was ready to practically worship me, to let me do as I pleased with his willing body, to let me be in charge... well, that was trust.

That was love.

I wondered if he knew just how much it meant to me that he would give himself into my eager hands?

"We'll go into New Orleans again," I decided. "The same hotel, the same room, the same bed. And you'll be mine there. All mine."

"Yes," Louis breathed. "Oui, yes. I'd like to redeem that."

"Eh?" You know, profound I'm not. Not as Louis is, at any rate. I'd merely meant that in New Orleans we could have all the privacy we wished, and that as Louis deserved the absolute best, it would have to be the same room and all. I'd spared no expense the first time around, after all.

"I regret it, that's all. We had such pleasure in that room, you and I." He blushed just remembering, and kissed me on the lips before he could go on. "And then I spoiled it with my idiotic reaction to the revelation that you do in fact kill. Ach, Lestat, how can you so much as want me after that? The way I went on. Redemption, salvation!" He scoffed, the noise discordant. "I must have sounded like a first-class fool!"

"Oh no," I disclaimed. "You sounded like a man deep in shock. I'm the one who's sorry, mon Louis. I wish I'd known before that you didn't really realize what the vampire in me did of a night. I wish that I had broken matters to you more gently."

"Au contraire, mon amour. I was in such denial that there wasn't much you could have done, save take me along to witness a few kills. Can we do that now, though?"

I stared at him, dumbfounded. "Right now?" For some reason, the suggestion set of a storm warning in my head. Too much, too fast. To ask to see me kill? It was one thing to want to see me end the overseer's miserable life. That was personal. But this? Too unlike Louis. "I've already fed tonight, Louis. Fed well."

"Tomorrow, then."

"Tomorrow we're going in to New Orleans to have some fun," I reminded him, hoping to distract him from the other topic, at least until I'd had some time to consider it more carefully. "In fact, I don't want to waste any time with traveling. I want to have you all night long. So you meet me there, Louis."

"Oui," he agreed, tacking on, "I bet it's easier to find a real criminal type in the city, anyway. Where do you usually hunt? The wharves? The gambling hells?" He suddenly laughed, actually slapping his side. "Oh, mon Dieu, that's how you found me, eh? You were at the *worst* places in town, seeking your evildoers. I suppose it's a good thing I began to frequent such absolute dives." He gave me an arch look.

"Oui, a good thing," I distantly agreed, and then decided that since he was being so obtuse, I'd have to be a good deal more straightforward with him. Come to think of it, that would be an excellent policy in any case, wouldn't it? Keep us on the right path.

"Listen, mon cher," I urged him, and he quite adoringly turned his face up towards mine. "I'm not so sure that this is a sound idea, your coming with me on the hunt. I know I suggested it a time or two, but I wasn't thinking so clearly."

"You," Louis clearly stated, "are simply afraid. You think I'm going to see Lestat the vicious killer and change my mind about wanting to be like you." He sighed. "I do so wish that you could trust me, Stat. For I trust you. I'm not afraid that you might see some viciousness in me and back away from it. In fact, I want you to see that, want you to know that there's nothing about the night that frightens or horrifies me now. I embrace it all."

He had lost me some time back. "See some viciousness in you?" I echoed.

"What, did you think I was going to stand in the shadows and simply watch, Lestat? As if I'm not a part of your life, your world? Non, non. Did I leave the overseer to you alone? I told you that I wanted to be a defender of the weak and helpless. I want that *now,* Lestat. Whether you will transform me this week or next, this year or next, I want already to be as you are, to slay the evildoer, to provide a measure of justice to those who might othewise have none."

To say that he was passionate about it would be an understatement of the most extreme proportions. The man was quite literally enthralled by the mere idea.

And that was when I began to understand what was being unleashed in his soul. Louis, the killer. Louis, beautiful, powerful, and without the slightest regret. Once, I knew, it would have pained him to deal with the thirst. Each and every night would have been a struggle that could only end in defeat.

But not now. He'd given himself to me.

Not just in the sexual sense, but in every other way, too.

And he longed to demonstrate to me just how fit he was for the night. Not in any attempt to make me *make* him. Non, non, Louis was far from crass. He simply wanted, most sincerely, for me to understand how wholly mine he was.

That we were the same, now.

He was not yet a vampire. Yet inside, where it counted, we were just the same.

"I love you," I breathed. "Oui, yes, tomorrow we will hunt together. Meet me at the hotel."

A thought struck me. A delicious thought. One I knew that Louis would find just as appealing. This Louis, that was.

"You shall choose, eh?" I told him. "I'll read their minds so you can know the depths of each one's evil. But you shall choose my victim."

"My victim," he said, and his eyes became a shimmering demand. "Blood, Lestat. Give me blood. Now."

"Louis---"

It was sort of a token objection. Not that I was teasing him on purpose but he just kept taking me so much by *surprise* that I could hardly keep up! Where was my preternatural intelligence? Louis was dancing circles around me, transforming so fast that I was left whirling to catch up.

He shoved me down upon the damp ground---I let him, of course, shivers coursing through my spine---and straddled me, then bent and laid his torso on mine.

Teeth at my neck, my jugular. Mortal teeth, no hope of piercing my hard skin. Yet the sensation of him gnawing on me was quite delightful, every instant. He growled as he sought my blood.

Finally, I set him away.

"What's this?" I gently mocked him. "Shoving me, Louis? Trying to have your wicked way? What happened to submission, to docility, to 'I'm your slave, Lestat.'"

"I am your slave," he owned, not a particle of hesitation. He didn't even flinch at the word, which for the master of a large plantation was quite a feat. Believe me. "I'm just a very enthusiastic slave."

"To say the least."

He bit my neck again, that time hard. Very hard. Hmm, interesting. He just might draw blood after all if I let him go on. The prospect made me want to bite *him*. Of course.

"Would you stop if I told you to?" I managed to moan, thrashing slightly as his attack on me became ever more insistent and yes, violent. Mon Dieu, such a vampire he would make!

"Oui, I would stop," he agreed. But he didn't, because I hadn't said to.

I never did say to. This was too good.

When I could bear it no longer I opened a vein for him and let him drink. Not paltry drops, this time, but a long draught of purest me, my fingernail held inside the wound, applying pressure to keep it from closing up. It hurt. A lot.

But what made it all worthwhile was that Louis did more than suckle at the welling blood. He laved it. He went wild, his heartbeat pounding, his tongue making forays into the wound. He took and took until his mortal body could stand the intensity no more, and a violent convulsion wracked him. He pulled away then. Not by conscious choice, but rather reflex.

And then he bit his own wrist as he lay shivering, and had a taste of human blood, as well, and moaned in ecstasy.

Sitting up, he pinned me with a glare that was so violently green that it looked vampiric already.

"I want to hunt, *now,*" he thickly insisted.

"Really," I drawled, delighted. Oh, he was so very charming in this guise. Nothing maudlin left of him, nothing at all. Of course my delight, strong as it was, did not render me witless. "You want to hunt, Louis? You want to kill?"

"Oui!"

"We'll have a thousand years of nights to indulge your every inclination," I promised. "But for tonight, I think you'd better desist. If you trouble yourself to stand, I think you'll find that you can't so much as walk after all that blood."

He leapt to his feet to prove me wrong, and immediately reeled, falling straight over. I moved light lightning to catch him and gently cradled him back down to the ground. "Too much," I commiserated. "I think you'll pass out before long, my love. You'll have to sleep this off."

"No. Want more," he moaned. "Oh, Lestat, it tastes so good---"

"Imagine when you can drain me dry and feel none the worse for wear," I encouraged him. "Hang onto that image, Louis. The night is coming."

"When?" he groaned, his fingers weaving through my hair. For some reason he pulled sharply on it. I think he was trying to see if I was real. Because by then, hallucinations were taking him by storm.

"When I'm sated of your mortal passions," I explained. Hadn't we gone over this?

Ha, Louis was above all things a modest, self-effacing fellow. I mean, he didn't even believe that he was beautiful! But in the glimmering revelation of my blood---or perhaps what he had seen in it---he had acquired one essential truth about him. And me. And us.

"That will never happen," he said, his eyes turning back in his head. "I'm too scrumptious. You'll keep me mortal just so we can keep having lovely rendez-vous at luxury hotels---"

Hmm, good point.

"Well, let's say that I'll grant you the Dark Gift when I can bear no longer to not drain you to the very bottom of your veins, Louis."

"Ah," he whispered, his voice fading now. "Well that's all right. I'm sure you can't wait forever for that."

Damned straight I couldn't. Sometimes I thought I'd waited too long already.

Louis fainted in my arms, but not before I said, "You're to be at the hotel tomorrow at sunset, understand? You're to wait for me, there. And we'll do everything you wish, mon Louis. The hunt, the kill. More blood if you want it. And love. We'll make love. You'll be mine as never before."

But he thought as he lost consciousness, ***Silly Lestat. I always have been yours. Since the beginning of time itself.***

Part 55



Strangely enough, what I had most on my mind as I sauntered toward the hotel the next night was none other than Sophie. I couldn't read her thoughts---courtesy of Louis' dictates---but I could read Maman's, and so I'd been keeping track of Sophie's condition all along.

She still hadn't spoken except to say, "Freniere." At least that's all that Maman had heard her say.

The oddest part about all that was that for the last little bit, Louis hadn't so much as mentioned her to me. Ever since he'd admitted that he couldn't bear for me to marry her, after all, he had acted like it wasn't going to happen. As if there was another way out.

And yet he didn't speak of it, at all.

Well, neither had I, but not because I thought that Sophie had a better solution to her problem than moi. It was more that with Louis in denial, he was willing to indulge himself with me. And I needed that, I really did. The last thing I wanted was for him to realize that Sophie and I *would* be taking vows, and to come over all puritanical once again.

I wanted him, and I was going to have him, it was as simple as that. And if that meant I'd play along with this let's-not-discuss-Sophie phase, well, then so be it.

Ha, should have known that Louis had an ace up his sleeve. Should have known that love and lust and need and desire aside, he wasn't so crass as to dismiss his sister's interests just like that.

What I didn't know -- what I couldn't have known, without prying, and I was being good-- was that Sophie was... well, how to put it?

A far more free-thinking young lady than ever I'd imagined?

She hadn't known just how free-thinking she was, mind you. And neither had Louis.

But all this I discovered a bit later. What was on my mind as I approached that hotel was that I was just fine laying the Sophie issue to the side, for the time being.

Louis opened the door before I could so much as use the key, and one hand darting out into the hallway, swiftly drew me inside so that he could kiss me. And now, oh, that was nice. I was pretty used to stealing kisses from Louis, but to have him demand them from me? Definitely, nice.

When he let me breathe---just an expression, I didn't actually need air---I asked him if he'd changed his mind about our proposed plans for the evening.

He stared at me as if he didn't know what I meant.

"The hunt, Louis? I haven't fed. But if you've changed your mind, I shall be only too willing to hunt alone and return for our rendez-vous?"

"Oh no, I haven't changed my mind," he disclaimed. "When you said plans, I thought you meant that you had... er, scripted out the rest of the night's activties."

"Activities, eh?" I teased him, loving his demure turn of speech. He wanted me, enough to be dominant, enough to be submissive. Hell, he wanted me any way he could get me. Very nice. But for all that, he was still mon Louis. Crude speech had never much been his forté. "And what activities would those be?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?" he teased me right back. "As I recall, the last time we shared this room there was a good deal of nibbling involved--"

I guess he wasn't as demure as I thought, but he still managed to put a genteel twist on even the most lascivious comments, didn't he? Well, that was Louis.

"Mmmm," I said, stroking a hand along his sculpted cheekbone. "I recall your... nibbling... me. You know what else? As I recall, you loved it so much that you came to a rousing climax with no other stimulation needed save the touch of your feather lips upon my length."

"Beautiful, strong length," he corrected, stepping closer to me, his hand boldly palming me.

"Big, beautiful, long, strong length," I amended that, and put my hand atop his to guide him. Ah, lovely. I had all the inclinations of a mortal man, and every last sensation that went with them. The only thing I didn't have was the true physical reaction, the hardening. But with a fabulously well-endowed manroot like mine, who needs it to be stiff as a log, to boot?

"I love you," Louis whispered in my ear, his tongue darting out to lave me. "I love all of you."

"That part especially, eh?" I weakly joked. I shouldn't have. It was the sort of thing I had said with Nicki. Crude. Meaningless.

But Louis' answer was profound in its simplicity.

"No," he quietly responded, which sort of broke my heart until he traced my fangs with an adoring finger. "These parts especially, Lestat. Our mortal frolics, after all, will last just until you tire of them. But then, the blood-sharing, vampire passion, all night long until the end of time, as you promised..." Bending his head to mine, then, he kissed me again, but it was a different sort of kiss than the one before. He kissed my fangs.

I almost died of pleasure right there on the spot. Unlocalized pleasure, every nerve ending in my body throbbing to the sensation of Louis' warm tongue caressing my killing teeth. It was better than his saying he wanted the gift, I swear. For this was true acceptance, not just of my nature, but of my special vampire love for him.

"Let me give you blood, now," I said, but he chuckled and shook his head.

"Ah no, merci mille fois, mais non, Lestat. You were quite correct last night that I had taken too much. Even now, I can feel myself still slightly reeling."

"So?" I asked. "It's sort of nice to be drunk. I remember. And drunk on *moi* has got to be a hundred times better than on wine or whiskey--"

"A thousand," Louis softly interrupted. "But I don't want to be passing out again, Stat. Not tonight. Nothing is going to interfere with our pleasuring of one another."

He seemed so very confident that I had to ask, "You..." Well, I was the one lacking in confidence, obviously.

"Me...." he prompted.

"You... er, do you think we'll just be doing the same as before?" I said all in a rush. "I mean, that is... nibbling?"

"You tell me," he calmly insisted. "Didn't you say that you were going to keep me as your lover? Tonight we begin. Except, I don't quite know how to begin. You're the one with the experience at this special kind of love, n'est-ce pas? And so, you shall tell me what to do."

"And you'll do it, just like that?" I snapped my fingers.

"I trust that you can be sufficiently persuasive," he told me, his hand cupping me, now, "should I acquire any slight hesitations along the way."

He was being so very decorous now---well, not his hand but his speech, certainly---that I had to admit, "I'm sorry, those other things I said, about making you my slave, Louis. I wouldn't mistreat you---"

"I do not mistreat my slaves, either. I know that's not what you meant."

"What did you think I meant, then?"

He regarded me quite seriously through hooded eyes. "You were thinking of me, I know. My timidity, my inexperience. Mon Dieu, most probably my strange justifications about your childhood having harmed you! And you thought to make it easier for me, to relieve me of the burden of responsibility for what we do here tonight." He shrugged.

"You appear to have given this a great deal of thought."

"Mais oui."

"And what if I told you that I wasn't thinking of you? That I'm selfish clear through, that all I wanted was the base fulfillment of my every last desire?"

He sighed. "Do you not understand me yet, mon amour? We are of one mind, that is what I think. So much the better if you would like to take charge, for I should like to give it you."

"Because you don't want the responsibility of loving me?"

"Because in every other sphere of life I am replete with responsibility. At least for now. Why do we need to discuss this? I thought we had come to an agreement already. I am yours to do with as you please. And I am happy to be thus, I do assure you."

"I thought...."

Louis smiled. "Yes, mon cher? What was it that you thought? There is nothing standing between us, now. You must tell me this thought that makes your gaze skitter nervously away. You must hold nothing back."

"I thought that if I really came across tyrannical with you, later, you'd not truly like it! And I need you to like me, I do!"

"I like you," he assured me. "I love you. And nothing shall change that, Lestat. This I swear to you on bended knee."

And he did, he actually did!

I laughed slightly, but I was still nervous. This one night could be the culmination of my hopes and dreams. And let's be honest, I'd royally screwed up every other romantic entanglement I'd ever had. I was almost terrified to make a move on Louis, lest it be the wrong move despite all our talking. "Oh nothing, eh?" I pressed. "Nothing could change your love? What if I ripped off your clothes right here, right now, and tossed them in the fireplace to burn, and kept you naked all the rest of the night, Louis? I think of it, you know. Things like that. I'm...."

"Sensual," he finished. "If you want to do that, Lestat, do it. I welcome it. It's not tyrannical, not between us."

"Oh yes? Well what if I let my passions get out of hand and I drained you too far, eh? What about that?"

He only shrugged. "I trust you, mon cher. Is that what you need to hear? I have no fear of you. Not in that way, or any other. Nervousness, yes. Excitement. A certain thrill of danger. But not any fear. I want to join you in the night, you know that now. If you take too much tonight, or any other, I'll simply join you all the sooner. Pas de probléme."

He took my breath away, he truly did.

"Louis?" I prompted.

"Oui, mon Stat?"

"Take off your clothes," I thickly ordered.

"Now? I thought we were going hunting."

"Later," I brushed that off. "This can't wait. Take off your clothes, Louis. Every stitch. And let me look at you, if you're so very much mine."

"Oh, I am yours," he breathed, and then he did as I had said. A perfect male. Adonis, in all his dark glory.

"Give me blood," I demanded. "Now."

He laid his naked body atop my thighs as I sat on the bed, and stretched his neck in offering. But I had something else in mind.

"No, here," I insisted, and bit him hard on the tender inner thigh.

"Oui, there," Louis moaned. "Take all you like, Lestat."

I groaned with pleasure. So tempting, so tempting, to simply make him now. But I wanted all his mortal passion. I wanted him spending in me.

I drew back.

"Get dressed," I ordered. "We'll hunt, now. And you'll choose for me."

"Oui, Lestat."

Oh, he was loving this; I could tell. It suited him. God only knew why, but it did. He had his moments of dominance and aggression with me, true, but he also had these. . . I guess he was simply free to be anything with me; he trusted me that much. And for now, right now, it cleared his mind and soul to give up control of us to me.

It touched me. Or maybe that was Louis touching me. Dressed now, he was in my arms again and trying to undress *me*.

"Non, non, wait until I've fed properly," I urged him.

"I think I'll come, watching you," he said, shocking even me. "The mere thought of it is erotic."

"Don't you dare climax," I chided him. "If you do, you will regret it, Louis! I mean it! You save yourself for later, for me!"

"There'll be plenty left for you," he slyly whispered. "Promise."

Part 56



The thirst. The hunt. The kill. None of them strangers, not to me, but this was different. This time, I would share them openly with Louis.

He walked at my side, he step jaunty, his green eyes bright and alert in the darkness as we walked the wharves and scouted for evildoers. Louis was irrepressible, I kid you not. I didn't quite know what had gotten *into* the man. I mean, the mere fact that evildoers walked the earth shouldn't have been such an epiphany, but I guess it actually had been.

He believed in goodness, you see. True goodness. That was what all his talk of redemption had been about. Deep down, he believed that there was a core of virtue in every man, every woman... and that no matter how buried that core was, how tarnished, there was something of value that must be cherished, must be respected.

Well, the overseer had blown that theory straight out of the water.

And then I'd pointed out that many, many helpless victims of violence didn't have anyone to balance the scales of justice, that Sophie was actually lucky. Not to have been raped, of course, but given that she had been, she was lucky that she had a champion in her brother... and his friend.

Otherwise, the overseer would have gone on his merry way. Smirking every time he saw her, no doubt, for Sophie most likely would have been too mortified to inform her family of the incident. Well, considering Sophie, maybe not. I hate to be crude---oh hell, why dissemble? I *love* to be crude, especially with mon Louis---but Sophie had balls.

I know, I know that sounds funny. Don't even quite know where the phrase came from, it just popped into my mind. But it's the truth.

And you know what? The fact that she'd had a moment of weakness out at the swamps didn't negate that fact one bit. Of course it had gotten me engaged to her---her finger still did sport my ring, damn it---but she still had moxy. Yeah, moxy. Better to call it that. If I accidentally let slip "balls" and "Sophie" in the same sentence out loud, Louis might come unglued.

Speaking of unglued, I just could not believe that he was taking this hunt business so well. He was Monsieur le Composure, all the way.

"What about her?" he asked, pointing toward a whore in gaudy red silk. Stained, that silk.

I was frankly shocked that he would suggest I kill a woman. You know, thus far we'd pretty much spoken of the kill in relation to men alone. I think it had to do with the overseer being male, and Sophie his female victim. Louis sort of had it in mind to be this defender of the fairer sex. And that was all right by me. But now he wanted me to kill a woman?

Well, I suppose he had his reasons. He was glaring at the painted whore now, and remembering that although he had treated every one of his hired lovers as ladies and nothing but---oh, such a gentleman was my Louis; I really did admire that---he'd been unscrupulously robbed a few times by those same women. Robbed, and once beaten and left for dead by the prostitute's pimp.

I swallowed. Sure, sure, sure, there were some pretty reprehensible types among the "fairer" sex. No question. But that fact didn't make me completely stupid. I could not believe that I was going to aid my cause with Louis if I launched straight into killing women in front of him. Later, maybe. After I'd tested the waters. Last thing I wanted was for him to recant his new consciousness of evildoers and what they deserved.

"She's not so bad," I whispered back to Louis, and he scoffed. "No, no, she's not," I insisted, and reading her, divulged, "This life isn't her choice. Her husband went off on a ship, and never came back. He was supposed to send for her, but he never did, and she's got no one to look after her, no other way to make a living. She's got a child at home, Louis, a little girl! She tried getting decent work but no one would hire her. She looks too much like an octoroon, although she isn't. She thinks that's why the husband left her, actually. She's got *no* self-esteem. She was starving when she took to the streets."

Louis gave me a speaking look. Now what did that mean? "It's true, all true," I insisted, helplessly flinging my hands upward. "I wouldn't feel right drinking from her!"

Now, I will admit, that was stretching the truth a *teensy* bit. I mean, she was scrumptious! Definitely. She hadn't been at the life long enough for it to make her haggard, although that was no doubt coming soon. Whoring isn't much of a life. Poor girl. Yeah, maybe I wouldn't feel right, at that. Although the wicked vampire in me does have a mind of his own...

"I suppose next you're going to claim she's never harmed a customer," Louis calmly countered my retelling of her misery.

Customer. Yeah, I knew he was thinking of himself when he said that. Not that he'd ever had this particular whore. Never mind, he'd had plenty of ones similar.

"Look," I told him. "She's not perfect." Of course she wasn't. She'd knifed a customer, once, not that I would admit it to Louis, the mood he was in. The man had raped her, abused her most horribly---she hadn't been able to work for a week--- and then as a crowning blow, refused to pay. Claimed he'd be back the next night for more! He'd gotten what he had deserved, and good for her. I only wish that Sophie had had a nice, sharp, twelve-inch blade on her when that creep of an overseer had approached.

"But she's not an evildoer, Louis. Not like I mean. Mon Dieu, she deserves a helping hand, not a pair of fangs tearing out her throat."

"Really," Louis drawled, and then he was leaving me behind as he approached the woman himself, his hand reaching into his waistcoat pocket. Oh, dear lord, he didn't carry a pistol or a knife on him, did he? Oh, how could I think that? He was Louis!

But he was a different Louis, one unafraid of the hunt, the kill!

Besides, he wasn't stupid, not at all. He knew where I hunted; we had discussed it. Even with me along to protect him, he might well have carried a little something for self-defense. He was handy with a pistol! But I couldn't bear this... to see Louis use that weapon of self-defense to slay some poor innocent (or nearly, she *wasn't* perfect) young girl!

It came to me in an awful rush of understanding that *I* was the one who had a problem with killing! Oh, irony of ironies! I hadn't thought this through! To see my beautiful, innocent Louis initiated into this life of darkness and degradation, to see him feast upon the innocent (so to speak).... I was the one paralyzed with reluctance!

Well, I was paralyzed no more, for the moment my real problem came clear in my mind, I rushed with preternatural speed to Louis' side and cried out in desperation, "Wait! Don't! Oh God, Louis, don't!"

His glance at me, a puzzled green, and then I saw the money he had pulled from his wallet. A nice thick fat wad of money, and he was on the point of handing it to her. He loved me, though, and was hesitating upon my word.

"I thought you said she needed help?" he asked. "I trusted you to know for certain, what with your special talents, that help is what she does deserve, not the... other?"

The most horrible sensation assailed me. Well, of course it did. I wanted to laugh with relief, but I also wanted to throw up. I hadn't liked what I'd seen, what I'd sensed, what I'd thought in that moment of terrible realization that I was going to turn Louis into a killer.

Oh God, oh God, what was I going to do?

"Lestat?" Louis prompted me.

"Oh, oui, certainment, she deserves the help," I weakly managed to whisper. "Go on, give her the money, oui."

Louis took the prostitute's hand and turning it palm up, place the pile of bills in her hand, then wrapped her fingers around it.

She misunderstood, of course, even if customers never paid in advance like that. Batting her eyelashes with false and forced coquetry, she sidled closer to Louis and said in honeyed tones, "Do you have a room, monsieur? Your friend can come along too, if you wish."

Louis shook his head, and then what he said astounded beyond any surprise I have ever, ever felt.

"He's not my friend," he openly admitted, eyes hard as he made the woman understand. "He's my lover."

Mon Dieu, a public declaration! Well, not so public, but you get the point. Even if it was only to a whore we'd never see again, I was so touched I thought I'd collapse in a puddle at his feet. But Louis wasn't done.

"And with a lover such as that, a veritable sunbeam of beauty, ma chère, can you truly imagine I'm propositioning you? Non, non, the money is yours because you need it."

The whore took a step back, her dark eyes wary. She thought Louis was a lunatic. Deranged, and she had good reason. For all she'd heard of love between men, and even sexual relations---hell, she was a whore, she'd heard it all---she had never, ever dreamed to see a man admit to such feelings. Openly admit them, and in such a careless way, just as though it didn't matter a whit that the whole world would call it perverse.

She thought the money was a ruse, that Louis was playing some sick game of his own, and no doubt I was in league with him. Her back connected with a crate on the wharf, and she let out a scream as she felt herself trapped.

Well, no ordinary means were going to help her state of mind, I can tell you that. So I touched her thoughts and told her that we meant her no harm, quite the opposite, and that if she used this money properly, as Louis intended, she would someday be an upstanding, decent woman again, able to attract some man the calibre of my beautiful Louis.

And she relaxed.

Well, she had to. I made her.

She clutched that money to her chest. "Merci, messieurs," she said, including me in her thanks. I think Louis noticed that, but it didn't give him pause. He thought of us as a team, you see. Entirely a team. Oh, that man! I loved him so much!

"But you must promise never to walk the streets again," Louis counseled her. "Do you understand? Take that money and get yourself some clothes that do not provoke a man, comprends? And get yourself lodgings far, far from any place you have pursued the tawdry life. Then go to the convent of the Ursulines and beg their mercy. Do not admit to the life you have led. Say only that your husband has died and while you have a little money to live on for a while, you do not know what you will do when it is gone. They will help you find a way for you to both live and hold your head up, oui?"

"Oui," she whispered. "Merci. Merci mille fois."

"No more thanks," Louis said as he took my hand and caressed my palm. "Be gone, now, and go with God."

She fled, afraid that this had been a dream, afraid that Louis would change his mind and snatch the money back....

And then Louis smiled at me, and said, "By the way, my love, you don't have *a* pair of fangs, you know. I love your teeth. Let's go find you some dinner, then, shall we?"

And off he sauntered, down the wharves, just as though he hadn't the moment before been the model of Christian charity! Oh, what was I going to do? I could hardly stand this dichotomy! Louis, but not my Louis. Not the Louis I knew... although he was in there, too....

"Louis!" I called. "Wait!"

Part 57



Louis turned at once. "Yes, mon amour?"

"Er...." Mon dieu, I had no notion what to say to the man! He had just declared his love--sexual love, at that--for all to hear (never mind that only I and the prostitute were there to hear it), yet all I could think about was that I loved him the way he was! I wanted him with me, forever and ever, but I didn't want him to change!

"Lestat?" Louis patiently prompted when I just stood there shifting from one foot to the other.

"There's no need to get snippy with me!" I shouted, blustering. What I do best, you know, when I don't know what else to do.

Louis' kind green gaze never wavered. "Lestat," he drawled, "I don't know why you're so upset, but I'm sure that we can resolve it, tu et moi."

Well, let's just say I wasn't in the mood to be mollified. Hell, let's say I was in the mood to really indulge my temper. Never mind that he didn't deserve it. "Oh yeah?" I challenged. "Well, resolve this, Pointe du Lac! I'm more than half-inclined to change my damned mind and not give you the gift at *all*, so there!"

Louis there, he just had too much love in his soul to believe a bald-faced lie like that. Or maybe he knew that it was my insecurity talking. He placed his fingers upon my gloved hand, his own flesh so warm that I could feel him right through the soft layer of kid that separated us.

"You make me want to seduce you," he whispered teasingly in my ear as he came closer. "Seduce you with my body which you did once call gorgeous, though you're the beautiful one here. Ah, and I shall give you such pleasure that you will have no recourse but to drink and drink and drink, and when I'm drained of every drop, mon cher? Oh, no. You love me well. You won't suffer me to die, will you, mon très bel ange de la nuit? Ah non, you will fill me again with your dark wondrous blood and bring me into the beauty of the black night."

Let's just say that if I'd been mortal still, I'd have come right there in my pants.

But I wasn't mortal.

I was pissed as hell, because I knew he was right about what I would do, and I needed to think, and I couldn't *think*, could I, damn it, when he was sidling up to me and whispering sweet somethings like that!

I shoved him away, none too gently, and watched him fall to his delectable backside on the crumbling planks of the wharf. "You want to see the beauty of the black night?" I sneered. "You think this blood I had forced into me is wondrous, do you? Mon dieu, wondrous, he calls it! Well, then, you shall see! Get up, come on!"

Louis lurched to his feet and dusted himself off rather ostentatiously. He could have said any number of things. He could have really let fly that my behavior was absolutely reprehensible, which it was. But he loved me.

Enough to understand me.

Even the unreasonable parts.

"You really are quite a brat," he commented, his voice mild as he rejoined my side. "I don't know what's gotten into you. You were fine when we left the hotel."

"Yeah, well you're not the first to call me a brat," I glibly countered, trying at all costs to avoid the real topic at hand, which was his desire to know what my problem was.

"Indeed," he drawled, catching my hand in his. He lifted it to his mouth and with playful teeth, tugged off that glove, finger by finger by finger. Talk about erotic. I mean, for vampires teeth are *it*, you know? Erogenous. Oh, you'd better believe it. And once my hand was bare Louis was laving the soft flesh between my thumb and forefinger, his tongue alternately stroking and poking, and I thought I'd die.

Then he reached a hand into his pocket and did bring forth a tiny, folding knife. He nicked my skin, just enough to let a drop, and licked up that drop, moaning.

I guess we were both moaning.

"You're so good," I heard him say deep in his throat. And then louder, "So who else called you a brat?"

I was reeling, my senses swamped and submerging beneath the potent allure of Louis' desire for my blood, and his new confidence, new openness. He didn't care that some passerby might see him kissing my hand. Or my lips, because that was what came next. And this wasn't a kiss between friends, it was a full on mouth-to-mouth, tongue-to-tongue, hands all over me, moaning, gasping, thrusting desperate kiss of love too long denied. And in public, too!

"Who?" he prompted when he came up for air. Of course he knew nothing of the gravity of that question. Knew nothing of what he was starting with a query like that.

I knew.

But with Louis making love to me in public--and yes it was just a kiss but yes it was making love--I didn't care.

I didn't think.

I didn't do a damned thing I should have.

"Marius," I groaned in ecstasy. "Come here, Louis, let me taste you."

He offered me his neck, sweeping aside his own hair to grant me access, and as I was about to bite, he wondered aloud, "Who is Marius?"

All at once, what I'd done, what I was about to do, came crashing down on my head. All of it, in one fell lump that gave me a crashing headache, even though vampires aren't supposed to get these. Don't you believe it.

"Nobody!" I cried in panic. "Nobody! Forget the name! Er... I made it up, I was just putting you on, there's nobody even named that in all the world and certainly not in the Aegean---"

Worse and worse. "The Adriatic, I mean!" I shouted, going hoarse.

"Lestat?" Louis questioned, eyebrows aloft. "Why does mention of this Marius almost cause you apoplexy?"

"What Marius?" I tried, hoping that the I-don't-know-what-you're-talking-about card would be the right one to play just now.

"Lestat, explain about Marius and explain now!" Louis shouted. "Is he some other vampire, is that it? Has he threatened you?"

I began to laugh hysterically. I mean, it wasn't funny at all, but what else could I do? Had he threatened me? Gee, no, Louis, he hasn't threatened me. He only said that if I so much as mentioned his hallowed name he'd crush me underfoot. He only said that he could do anything he liked to me....

And what would he do to Louis?

"I can't stay here," I gasped. "I can't be with you, ever again! I'm leaving Louisiana, Louis, leaving the New World. H-- H-- Have---" I burst out into flooding tears, but went forward. "Have a good life, L-- L-- Louis! I wish that you could be with me, but you can't, not now."

"But what is wrong?" I heard Louis ask from behind me.

But by that time I was long gone, running at such speeds that the city of New Orleans became a blur.

Part 58


I couldn't bear to think of Louis, let alone read his mind, read his thoughts. It was all I could do just to stay clear of him, just to stay away. But I had to stay away. Ah, God, I could hardly endure it. And yet I knew I had done this to myself, all by myself.

I couldn't blame Louis. He didn't know where his questions might lead, didn't know that there were things I was forbidden to speak of, forbidden on pain of my death, and that of all the fledglings I had revealed the secret to...

Granted, he wasn't my fledgling yet, but I hardly thought that Marius would consider *that* an extenuating circumstance. Mon Dieu, Marius wouldn't need five seconds to figure out that fledgling was just what I had planned for him.

And I'd mentioned *the* things I'd been sworn to keep secret! Marius' name, the location of his hideaway in Greece... of course I hadn't blabbed about you-know-who-who-must-be-you-know-what, but now, more than ever before, I could understand Marius' warning in that regard.

I could, I really could.

Do not tell the least part, he had advised me. Because then their questions will not stop, and you will tell more and more and more, until you have told all there is to tell....

I could see it, now. Just saying his name to Louis had opened the floodgates in my mind, and what had spilled out next but the word Aegean? Mon Dieu, Marius had been right to tell me not to breathe the slightest hint of *any* of it!

But why had he dumped this load on me in the first place, that's what I wanted to know! So what if I had chased him around the world for ten years, begging for secrets? He was old enough to know better than to tell me things that were going to absolutely wreck all future relationships! I mean, how *did* he expect me to have a decent heart-to-heart about my past with anyone, what with *those* restrictions?

No, no, he'd been wrong, utterly wrong, to grant me those secrets I had lusted after. He'd been in a position to know just how debilitating that knowledge was, what a burden it was to keep it absolutely secret, and instead of doing the right thing, he'd dumped that awful burden on shoulders too, too young to handle it. Was I eighteen hundred years old in the blood? Hell, was I so much as eighteen at the time?

I was pissed at Marius, so pissed that I had half a mind to sail back to the damned Aegean and give him a piece of my mind.

But I couldn't do that, of course. I couldn't go anywhere near him, or he'd read from my mind that I had spilled his secrets. And then, my life wouldn't be worth spit. But forget my life -- it was Louis who worried me most. If Marius caught wind of a mortal who knew his secrets? I shuddered. I couldn't go near Louis for fear of endangering him, and I certainly couldn't make him, now. If Marius was keeping track of me at *all*, he'd be sure to notice when I made a fledgling, and stick his nose deep into making sure I was behaving myself.

Oh God, oh God, this was awful, just awful from start to finish!

And the only thing that could make is *less* awful was for Marius to cut Louis' mortal life short, too. It was all he had left, and it was up to me to preserve it, by staying the hell away from him.

I went north.

On and on, up to the British dominions, the Arctic wilds, where I fed off hunters and trappers and the occasional French ex-patriate. Oh, why dissemble? The truth was that I was depressed enough to kill anything on two legs, or four. Wolves. Now that was an experience. I was the Wolfkiller all over again, but it gave me no joy, no vicious satisfaction. The blood was just blood.

I mean, I might as well be eating rats.

"Rats? When did you eat rats, Louis?"

Ah, what I'd give for a Louis in the night with me *now*, even if he did insist on eating rats!

But it wasn't to be. I'd opened my big mouth, and now I'd have to live with what I'd wreaked, come what may.

Self-discipline has never much been my thing, but from that moment forward, I steeled myself to not think on Louis, to forget him.

You know what, though?

After a few weeks in the wilds, I realized that I owed Louis better than I'd given him. I still owed him a promise, didn't I? I was still engaged to that sister of his! Never mind that a marriage was out of the question, now. I should at least tell Sophie so to her face.

I'd go back to Pointe du Lac, I decided. I'd go back and sneak into Sophie's room, and tell her that she'd have to rely on her own innate strength, now. I'd make sure she didn't ever expect that wedding to come off.

And I wouldn't see Louis. No, no, not that. That, I couldn't bear. I'd let Sophie pass him a message, that's all.

I'll love you forever, Louis, and for me, forever is a very long time. I'll love you forever but I'll never be back. That's how much I love you, Louis. Your life is worth more to me than the pleasure of spending *my* life with you. I'll never forget you, Louis, and I'll never have a fledgling, notnow. I'll be alone forever. Be happy, Louis...

Yes, all that. Sophie would tell him all that for me, I'd make sure of it. I'd mesmerize every last word into her.

And then I'd take my father----cruel to burden Louis with any reminders of my existence, really---and I'd be gone.

Forever.

Guess what, though?

The moment I slipped into Pointe du Lac later that week, I knew that all my plans had been shot to smithereens.

For Sophie wasn't there.

And neither was my Louis.

There was only my father still in residence, and Maman left behind to care for him.

For Louis and Sophie had gone on a voyage, both of them. A long voyage.

Well, that made sense. I mean, with me out of the picture, they had to do *something* about that pregnancy. So Sophie was going to deliver abroad and not come back until the child was born. Probably she'd say that she adopted it abroad...

Well, I had it right, but I also had it wrong, as I found out when I questioned Louis' Maman about all she knew. She didn't want to tell me the half of it. Well, of course not! She still wanted me to marry Sophie, even after all she had learned! Things I didn't know yet, but I wasn't to remain in ignorance for long. I read her mind until I was satisfied that I had the whole story.

And what a story!

Not just the truth about Sophie, but Louis, too!

I flopped down into a chair and wished with all my heart that I could down a bottle of whiskey.

Part 59




Maman was practically in tears when she first saw me that night, and not those crocodile tears she was so fond of, either. Real tears.

"Monsieur de Lioncourt," she gasped as I slammed into her bedroom.

"Where's Sophie?" I growled. I wanted to see her and be done with this business. I wanted to get the hell away from Pointe du Lac before Louis caught wind of my presence. In the next instant, though, I knew that I need have no worries on that score.

"She's gone away with Louis!" Maman blubbered. "Oh, I told her not to, told her to stay put like a good girl, that if she just behaved herself from now on, you would forgive her, but no, no, no, she insisted! Packed her bags herself, and flounced out to the carriage where Louis and that horrid woman were waiting!"

At this point, I began to get confused. I mean, why should I have to forgive Sophie? Granted, I hadn't appreciated her little digs and me and Louis, but I understood them. She'd been hurting over Freniere. Besides, Maman didn't know about those little digs, did she? And what horrid woman?

"Where were Louis and Sophie going?" I pressed. "And why? Was it just for her lying-in, was that it?"

"If only that was all it was!" Maman cried out in agony. "No, it's worse than that, Monsieur de Lioncourt. Far worse. I told Sophie to sit tight, that you would be back, that there was no need at all to involve Mademoiselle Freniere in any of our private business, and Sophie said, Sophie said---" She gulped, her words coming to a standstill. She would not speak further, for fear of alienating my affections for Sophie.

Maman still did have hope in that regard. A title for her daughter, no matter that the Revolution had put an end to all of that. A fortune... well, that much was still true. Yes, Maman had her hopes and she wasn't going to let them go with careless words.

That was when I read her mind.

And oh, my goodness... to say that I was shocked was an understatement indeed. That "horrid woman," otherwise known as Mademoiselle Freniere, had gone on the voyage with Louis and Sophie. But why had she gone, that was the interesting part.... well, Sophie had invited her along.

But why did Sophie want the company of Freniere's sister Babette?

That was the part that was giving Maman a fit of the vapors.

"Sophie's in love with Babette," I breathed aloud as I saw the things she had told Maman. "She's was in love with Babette, all along, but she didn't know it. She turned her affections toward Anton only because her morality-bound mind could not accept the other, could not even contemplate it. She diverted all her passions into a relationship that her family would find more acceptable!"

"Non, non," Maman insisted, but she was lying through her teeth. Or maybe she even believed it. She certainly hadn't believed Sophie's passionate declarations about Babette!

But I did.

It all fit. Sophie's love for Anton had always seemed a bit too frantic to be genuine. At times, it was almost as if she'd been forcing herself to love him. Which of course she had. She didn't know what else to do. True love, sexual love, between two women was so taboo that she couldn't even accept it when it was flowering forth in her heart and mind and soul. She told herself that it had to be Anton.

Anton, who looked so much like Babette that it was eerie. The same eyes, the same shade of hair... the same features remolded into a masculine cast...

Anton, who spoke with Babette's turn of phrase and had her same sharp wit and sense of humor...

Anton, whom she could kiss without thinking that there was something wrong with her....

Now I understood those times when intelligent Sophie had ignored the most blatant warning signs about Anton Freniere's dishonest personality. Quite simply, she believed that she *had* to love him, come what may. For if she ever stopped loving him, her natural passions, the ones she had repressed without even recognizing them, might surge to life, might erupt beyond her capacity to control them...

"Sophie's in love with Babette Freniere," I said again, aloud, to cement it into Maman's world-view. "And the plan is for Sophie and Babette to wait out her confinement abroad, then raise the child to the age of two or three before returning here." Reading her even deeper, I detailed. "Ah, yes. They're going to acknowledge him as a Freniere, after all. They're going to say they took him on in France, a distant relative orphaned by the revolution, a Freniere in blood as well as name. But they've no plans to go anywhere near France, of course. And then when they return to Louisiana, Sophie will move into Babette's household, and people will say that she is still devoted to Anton, that in her devotion she wants to raise this child as though it were her very own..."

Maman was pasty-faced, not understanding how I could know such things, or know so very much. "Non, monsieur," she tried to dissuade me. "Sophie is distraught. Confused. She will marry you still and forget that horrid woman; I will see to it. You must not think ill of her. The attack she suffered, comprends, it has warped her view of men. But she will recover from that and be once again the vibrant young woman you came to love---"

"For your information, Madame, I have never loved Sophie," I corrected her. "Other than as a cherished sister, that is. It is Louis whom I love."

She gasped, outraged, scandalized. Well, so be it. Let her be scandalized. Louis had publicly acknowledged our love and I was not about to do any less.

"Non, the strain of realizing about that filthy Babette woman makes you say such things---"

"Babette Freniere is good for Sophie and I am happy for them both."

"You are discarding Sophie because she was attacked---"

"I mourn her pain," I admitted. "But you are mistaken about what that attack has done for her. It did not warp her values; it clarified them. She realized how short life was, and how wrong to waste it in pursuit of someone else's idea of how she should henceforth live."

In truth the rape had accomplished more than that. It had made Sophie face the fact that she'd never much cared for men at all, that she had tolerated Anton's touch only because she had convinced herself to be in love with him. It had made her see her true nature.

And it had made her strong enough to accept this nature, strong enough to tell Louis what she had decided about her future.

"What did Louis say of all this?" I had to ask. Louis, who had refused to acknowledge that his sister could *be* a sexual being...

On the other hand, Louis, who had grown up in one fell swoop, who had accepted our own love to the point where he could publicly proclaim it...

Maman snorted. "I don't know what he said to her upstairs the night she broke the news. I only know that when the came---together---to confront me, they did it in concert! He told me that her life was her own, not mine! He told me that he was happy to chaperone Sophie and Babette to the islands where they would hide her shame and raise her bastard child---"

"She has no shame!" I sharply corrected. "And she'll have no bastard child, either! That child will be acknowledged as a Freniere, the heir to the plantation, adopted out of the tragic carnage which is France, and you will not say one word further to dispute that, ever!"

And she wouldn't, either. My powers were more than proof of that.

And so Sophie was taken care of. She had taken care of herself, had tapped into that reservoir of great strength I had always sensed in her, and I knew then and there that Sophie would be all right. She had Babette to bolster her now, when things grew rough. And together, with the plan they had hatched, they would raise Anton's child and live together in love *and* defy the neighborhood to find fault in them. All Sophie's love for Babette would appear as devotion to her slain fiancée, her affection for her own child thought to be equally righteous, for no one would know that the child was in fact her very own...

"She loves that child as if it were her own," people would say in years to come, and Sophie would smile in secret acknowledgement.

I told myself that I shouldn't ask anything more, that it was best for me to stay completely out of Louis' sphere... but I had to know.

"And so will Louis stay in the islands with them until they return hre together?"

Maman flinched, and started, and then clenched her lips tightly together. Well, I knew what that was all about. It was plain as day. No, Louis wasn't planning on staying with Sophie and Babette, but neither did Maman want *me* to know where to find him.

Well, she needn't have worried. I had no intention of finding him, did I? I didn't want to endanger him. But for myself, my peace of mind, I did want to know.

"Where is Louis going?" I demanded, my voice broking no disobedience, and she told me. Of course, she told me.

"Greece," she murmured, her voice as lost as a little girl's. "The Aegean. He has to find someone called Marius, he says. You're afraid of Marius, he says. Louis has to tell him to leave you alone."

I flopped straight down into that chair and wished I had that bottle of whiskey.

But after a moment, I roused myself to do something intelligent, for once. "Forget you ever heard that name," I strictly instructed. "Forget that Louis had gone where you said. He's away on an extended trip arranging some plantation business, that's all."

"But he hired new supervisors to oversee both this place and the Freniere plantation," she told me, still caught in thrall. "The ones you recommended. He said he should have listened to you all along, that you were truly his partner in every way and he had done you wrong."

Well, this was too interesting to pass up.

"What else did he say of me?" I had to know.

Her voice slurred as she went on. "That you were upset the last time he saw you, terribly upset, and he did not understand why, but he was going to find out. That you were all that mattered to him in all the world and I was to take good care of your father for some day, you would be back, he said, you surely would---"

She fainted then, the stress of my powers on her poor mortal mind simply too much to her to long withstand.

I roused her, but just enough to reinforce Louis' words that she must care for my father. She must, because I could not.

I had to go after Louis.

I'd sworn to protect him, to stay away from him forever if that was what it took, but I couldn't, not now. To protect him now meant to keep him away from Marius, and I couldn't do that from a distance. I had to find Louis, and convince him that he courted not just danger but death, that Marius would stop at nothing to protect the secrets he had so precipitously showed me. How I wished I had searched for the old ones, or delved into the ancient mysteries Marius had been so eager to reveal!

But I had. Not knowing what I did, not knowing how dangerous it would prove, I had. And now Louis was the one who might well pay for my rash past.

And my rash present, for the crux of all of this was the way I'd breathed Marius' name all those weeks ago.

Or was it?

The more I thought of it, the more I understood that Marius had placed unfair restrictions on me back on that island in the Aegean. Never tell my own fledglings a single thing about our origins, about the knowledge that I possessed? And yet he said to make them in love!

Well, I hadn't seen the disconnect before, I really hadn't. That's just me. Until I met Louis, the words "Lestat" and "relationship" just didn't really go together.

But thanks to him, now I saw ever so much more. You couldn't keep secrets from the one you loved, you just couldn't. Deep down inside, I had wanted to tell him all, to bring him fully into my world, Marius included. And so it was more than a slip of the tongue, the way I'd breathed his name. It was probably deliberate.

At some level.

But a mistake, nonetheless, because now Louis was flinging himself into the path of danger. Straight into the path of the oldest vampire in existence---the oldest one who still lived as a vampire instead of a statue, that is. What was one mortal to the likes of Marius? Never mind that he'd told me to feed from the evildoer, and Louis was hardly that. That wouldn't matter, not when it came to a mortal who knew both me *and* his sacred name. Never mind that as of yet, Marius' secrets were well-secured. He would read Louis' mind and realize that I'd said that first word, the one that led to more and more words, to revelations the likes of which he'd kill Louis without a second thought. Without a qualm.

Louis was a dead man unless I got to him before he got to Marius, before he even got nearby, before Marius caught a whiff of his thoughts and knew that I'd betrayed him.

He wouldn't care about my reasons. Hell, he didn't really care about me. If he had, he'd have kept his own damned secrets and not weighed me down with ridiculous demands to shut the one I was to love with all my heart *out* of parts of me!

Well, Maman was pretty well tuckered, so I lifted her back into bed and settled the blankets around her, and my power reaching into her mind, told her once more that she was to care for my father, and welcome Sophie and Babette with good grace and civility, whenever they returned.

Then I went upstairs to see my father. Because the truth was that I had no idea how long it would take me to track Louis down and talk some sense into him. Sense, as in, Leave Marius Alone. As in, I can't be with you, Louis, it's for your own good. As in, Go back to your own home and find a way to be happy without me, because it simply isn't going to work, you and me. Marius will see to it...

I went upstairs to see my father. To say good-bye, perhaps forever. He was a sick old man, and I was embarking on a quest that would take months if not years. And even if he lived on through those years, I doubted I would see him again.

I couldn't. Once I straightened Louis out, I had to leave him alone. Completely alone.

After this night, I vowed, I would never set one foot in Louisiana again. Never, ever again.

For Louis, I would deny myself the charm of New Orleans, a city I'd grown to love. I would deny myself the haunting sounds of the bayou, the easy pickings of evildoers both slave and free.

But mostly, I would deny myself my precious Louis.

Part 60




I laid a hand upon his shoulder and shook him until he woke.

He started, blinking his eyes against the glare of the candelabra I had set close by. Strange, that blink, for of course he couldn't see. I suppose that he felt the heat, and the rest was reflex.

I had to wonder why I even bothered with the light, really. I could see him fine without it, and he couldn't see in any case. I pondered it for a minute as he mentally got his bearings and came fully awake. Why had I brought the candles? This wasn't like the times when Louis and I would both visit him, when Louis would sit patiently playing chess with him while I watched with hooded eyes and pondered the past, the Auvergne.

He pushed up a bit on his palms to sit up further, and my hands came out by reflex to grasp him gently beneath the arms and help him. And that was when it came to him. The reason for the candles.

Normality, that was it. I was striving for normality. I'd never had a decent relationship with him--no pun intended--but I suppose I wanted one, now. Especially now, when we were at the end of our long road, when I knew that I would never see him again.

And yet old habits died hard, they really did. My voice was stiff and cold when it emerged from my lips, and the word I said was stiffer still.

"Sir."

He flinched a little, remembering too many times when I'd called him that without the slightest hint of familial affection.

"Lestat," he cautiously ventured, long pauses between each word. "I haven't seen you in quite some time."

Once, I would have jumped upon his phrasing to scathe that he couldn't see me at all and never would again. But now that I knew why he was blind, it wasn't a subject to treat lightly. He was blind because he had loved me. And certainly, his love had not been perfect. In fact, it had stunk to high heaven. But now, at least I knew that it had been there. That he had tried. That he had loved me and had wanted to honor it, but that demons of his own had dragged us both down into the pit during those long nights in the cold dark castle I'd had no choice but to call home.

"I had to leave," I told him. "Personal reasons."

He scoffed aloud. "Personal, Lestat? You might want to let Louis know that you consider your reasons personal. He told me all about it. What is wrong with you, running out on him like that? He loves you, don't you know that yet?"

"Of course I know that," I snapped. "And I didn't run out of him. It wasn't like that."

"Hmmph." He shook a decided head. "The way I hear it, you remembered some fool name of Marius and it spooked you from here back to France, or some such. Louis said you ran off without a backwards glance, told him you could never see him again. Listen, Lestat. It's not my place to counsel you on your love-life and I know it, but if you let Louis slip through your fingers in favor of this Marius fellow, you're a damned fool!"

"This is absurd," I tried to explain. "Louis doesn't think I'm in love with Marius! Because I'm not."

Of course Louis didn't think that -- he was the one who had astutely reasoned that Marius had threatened me, that Marius had some hold over me, a hold he wouldn't let go, ever.

"All I know is that he said that his relationship with you would not be possible until he had gotten this Marius out of the picture," my father tightly announced.

I decided it wouldn't do much good to argue the fine nuances of Louis, Marius and I. In fact, the less said the better.

"Forget Marius," I advised him, and made it stick.

"I miss Louis," he said then.

"He'll be home soon, Papa," I said, and all at once the warmth that had been missing from my voice came rushing in. I sounded like a son, for once. "I'm going to bring Louis back home."

"Oh, good," he said. His hand reached out toward mine, blindly, and I clasped it, remembering too late that for once, I wasn't wearing my habitual gloves.

"You miss him, too," my father observed. "Your skin is chill with it."

I wished that I could tell him the truth. I'd never once felt that way, before, but I did now. I wanted true accord with him, or perhaps I simply wanted truth. No secrets from the ones you love, that was what I had learned...

And I did love him.

It wasn't perfect, my love. In fact, I'm sure that it was pitiful, but it was love.

"Papa," I said, "I want to do something special for you."

He blinked in surprise. "Lestat?"

"It might not even work," I warned. "I've no reason to think that it will, but I want to try." I swallowed back a lump in my throat. "I have some medicine here, some special medicine I'm sure the doctors back in France never had any knowledge of."

His nod was almost sage. "Ah, yes. I've heard of the native cures. Not just the ones the Indians know, but also concoctions from the islands. Marvelous, some of the plants these people know. But what is it medicine for, Lestat? My arthritis?"

I swallowed again. "Your eyes, Papa. It's for your eyes. I want... I want you to be able to see me as I am now."

"A man," his voice sounded worshipful. "A grown man, strong and capable, full of honor such as I never knew. A son to be proud of. Ah yes, Lestat mon fils, I should like to see that, I surely should."

Part 61



"I would like that too, Papa," I whispered, reaching for his hand and holding it firm. "For you to see me as I truly am. See me, and love me all the same."

"I do love you, mon fils," came a throaty murmur from his lips. "I always did, even when my terrible sickness was at its very worst."

Without warning then, he snatched his hand from my grasp and clutched it to his own chest. Heaving breaths convulsed him as his features took on an absolutely air of lucidity, of complete and horrifying awareness.

I tried to take his fingers in mine again---no gloves for once---but the moment he felt my touch, he flinched away.

And not because of the cold. Well, not the cold in my hands, at any rate. A terrible coldness of spirit had him in its tenacious grip.

"Papa?"

He shook his head, frail strands of silvery gray hair dusting his forehead, but it was his eyes that held me in thrall. So hopeless, those eyes. So full of self-hatred. Recrimination. The wish for death.

"I don't deserve to see," he whispered, the sound most pitiful in the confines of the luxurious room Louis had given him. Strange, that same room, the whole suite even, now seemed like a prison. A dank, dark cell... well, my father's mood was getting to me, no doubt. Attuned to him as never ever before, I was seeing things as he saw them.

"I blinded myself for a reason," came a groan of agony. "A good reason. But even afterwards, even after I could no longer see your beautiful face... ah mon Dieu, the memories! Forgive me, mon fils, for even speaking such things to you---"

"Non, you must speak," I assured him, and then no matter how he flinched and shivered, I drew him bodily into my arms and held his trembling body tight. "Go on, speak, Papa. Tell me what is in your heart."

"I thought the blindness would cure me, but it didn't. And so it has been my long penance all these many years, for above and beyond all hope of healing was the knowledge that I did not deserve to look upon you, ever again. And I live to this day with that same knowledge, Lestat."

With one finger, I swiped away the tears that dripped upon his cheeks. To say that I did not wish to speak my mind was to state the patently obvious. But I was about to embark on a journey of God-knows-how-long in search of Louis, and I would almost certainly never see my father again. I could not let past hurts part us, not now. I could not let new misunderstandings ferment to torment him until his death---or torment me, forever afterwards.

I had to say it, painful as it might be.

"Papa..." For all my good intentions, still I hesitated. Still the awful words stuck deep in my throat. I actually had to cough them up. You know that expression, swallowing your pride? Well, I know the feeling, although I'm not sure that pride is precisely the right word in this case.

"Papa," I tried again, pushing him away just enough to see his face. "Are you telling me... are you saying that you don't want your sight because you are afraid that if you see me, you'll want.... you know? Like in the Auvergne?"

He blanched, his countenance fading to a white every bit as stark as mine. And he shook his head furiously, almost hysterically. "Ah mon Dieu, mon pauvre Lestat, tht you should hve to ask that! Non, non, a thousand times non. I swear, Lestat, nothing was further from my mind. I haven't thought of you... like that... since you left never to return. I did not deserve a son like you, the finest of them all---"

"Gabrielle said that of me, too," I murmured.

"To call your own mother Gabrielle..." he pushed that matter aside. "But it was so, Lestat. I knew that I had driven you away, and one morning I woke up changed, the old evil desires burned clean away by grief. When the Revolution took your brothers I should have died as well. I deserved no better. And now, I certainly don't deserve this medicine you have unearthed in this strange New World."

"You've done enough penance," I told him. "Lie down on your back, Papa, and let us see if this elixir can heal old wounds."

"The deepest wounds I bear can never be healed," he moaned, even as he did recline. "Never. I will carry them always. The past cannot be undone."

"No, but it can be healed, all the same. Have I not forgiven you, Papa?"

"I don't know," he whispered, fluttering fingers reaching out for me. "Have you?"

At that moment, I coudln't remember if I'd told him in so many words. So much for preternatural memory. Or rather, when emotions are strung tight, sometimes they take precedence. Perhaps I'd told him but he needed to hear it yet again.

"Yes, I have," I soothed his pain, his fears. "I have forgiven you, Papa. You can't imagine what it was worth to me to learn, at long last, that you actually regretted what you'd done. That you tried to stop. That you even went to such lengths as to wound yourself instead of me---"

"If your eye causeth you to sin, pluck it out," he quoted. Most unusual, considering he didn't believe in God.

"And it won't cause you to sin any longer, so no need to keep it plucked," I briskly assured him. Too much more of this and I'd be weeping.

"Now," I assured him, "this may well hurt. Sting. I don't know. I've not had occasion to test the effiaciousness of this... formula, before."

"Don't know so many blind old men," he tried to joke.

"Not well enough to attempt a miracle," I agreed. "But you, Papa, you are special to me. I want you to know that, once and finally and forever. I have to go after Louis, you know. I may be gone years, but I want to leave you---"

"To die in peace," he interrupted, and at my strangled noise of distress, he whispered, "It is all right, Lestat. Death comes for all of us, someday. And I have staved it off for many a long year."

It was the perfect opening.

Death doesn't come for all of us, I could say...

But no, better to simply heal his eyes---if I could---and let the facts speak for themselves.

"Keep your eyes wide open now," I instructed, and then biting fiercely into my thumb, I held one eye open with my free hand and let the blood flow.

"Brr, cold," he complained.

"It has to be that way, to work," I invented.

"What's in that medicine, anyway?" I heard him murmur. "It smells divine." And a smile crossed his face just as if he could get drunk on the mere scent of my potent blood.

"It's sunlight in a bottle," I temporized. "Just what you need to end the darkness that has you trapped."

He began blinking as soon as I had treated his other eye, and then reaching up a hand, he rubbed furiously at both eyes.

"Itchy?" I sympathized.

"Sticky," he corrected, and then stretched his eyes wide in an attempt to see. "Rien," he moaned. "I knew it, Lestat. Whatever fate controls our lives will not permit a glimmer of sight again to one such as me."

Drawing him in my arms, I tried to comfort him, but he was so distraught that it broke my heart. Whatever he had said of penance, of not deserving his sight, a part of him had hoped. And that part was crushed.

I wished I'd never begun this wild enterprise. I had meant to offer him a gift, a wondrous gift, and one that would undo the horrible past that had separated us for so very long. To erase that day when he'd taken his sight. To acknowledge that he had changed, that he no longer needed to be punished for the evil he had done. I had wanted to heal the last lingering cracks in the foundation of our relationship.

Filial duty... a phrase that had never resonated before. Actually, it didn't resonate now, either.

Filial love.

And instead I had wounded him anew. The sobs that shook him were pitiful, and what was worse was that he wasn't mourning the fact that he couldn't see. What had him firmly in sorrow's grip was the notion that he would never see ME. And that had been his fondest dream, all he'd wanted, for years without number, ever since I'd grown into a man.

A man he couldn't see. A son he'd never really known.

Well, I always have been prone to weep buckets at the drop of hat, haven't I? I've always been a reature of the senses, a creature of emotion. Something deep inside me broke apart, and all at once, the pathos was simply too much for me. To think that I would have to leave him soon, and I would have to leave him like this, full of regrets...

I burst into tears which were fast flowing liquid, for all they were frozen as they dripped from my eyes and onto his upturned face. "Papa," I cried, "I'm sorry, so sorry! I tried! I wanted to help you, wanted to let you know in the most concrete way imaginable that the past is past, that it doesn't matter to me---"

"I love you, Lestat," he groaned, fresh tears flowing from his eyes, washing away the blood I'd let drip there. Mon Dieu, he looked a mess. Smeared blood everywhere, and fresh tracks of it dripping onto him even then, as I continued to weep in copious Lestat fashion. What can I say? I don't do things by halves.

Good thing, too.

I don't know quite what it was that did it, that granted me my miracle at last. Maybe it was just the volume of blood I wept onto him--those few drops from my thumb being nowhere near enough to heal him. I prefer to think, however, that it was the tears themselves that made the difference. That blood, you see, was truly from my heart.

"Lestat," he suddenly gasped. "The world--- I see things. Something! Oh, not much. It's a mass of black, but I can just barely make out the shape of a man before me."

"Oui, Papa," I smiled through my tears. "C'est moi. C'est ton fils Lestat."

Another gasp as he registered that the dark-cloaked man he'd spied had been the one to speak.

"Ah, it's enough," he said, his tones definite as this time, he drew me into an embrace. "I can barely see you, but it's enough to know you're there, Lestat."

That was right, he didn't know... well, how could he? It was pitch black in that room. No impediment to moi, not with my vampire eyes...

Vampire eyes...

Now, look, with your vampire eyes, I would say to Louis....

But the point was that my father would have no way to know that it was dark in that room simply because it was dark! He certainly wouldn't have expected me to sit there in the total blackness as we spoke, let alone attempt my feat of healing without benefit of light.

"Let me turn up the lamp," I murmured. "Then we'll see just how strong your eyes are."

It took a moment to adjust the flame, but when I did, my father gasped anew, his hand flying to cover his mouth.

"Lestat?"

"Oui, c'est moi," I said again.

"But you..." he cleared his throat. "Are you well? You are so very pale! Oh Lestat, I would much rather have continued in blindness than see you ailing! So pale, so gaunt, your eyes glittering most unnaturally. Are you feverish?"

And before I could stop him---would I have stopped him? don't know---he reached out to feel my forehead for fever.

"You're as cold as any stone!"

"I thought I was the one who liked to quote Shakespeare," I laughed, but the joke fell flat. I don't think my father knew he was quoting a thing. Well-read, he wasn't. Well, of course not... but what I mean was that even before he'd blinded himself with lye, he had only contempt for books.

"Lestat, you're freezing! Ach, how could I have been so thoughtless to keep you here when you are quite obviously ill. Come, get yourself between the covers so you can warm up---"

He stopped himself short, the most awful look on his face when he realized quite what he had said to me.

"It's all right," I assured him. "Don't be on pins and needles with me, Papa. I know what you meant, and what you didn't mean."

"Merci," he whispered. "But what can I do for you, Lestat? You hardly look well enough to embark on a voyage, much as I know you do love Louis and must bring him back--"

Moment of truth.

"I look quite well," I assured him. "What you see is simply normal for me, Papa. The chill skin, the pale face, changeable eyes.... nothing at all is wrong."

He blinked, rubbed at his eyes again, and stared curiously at the red staining his hands, but had little thought for anything but me. "I may be a feeble old man, Lestat," he rebuked me, "but remember perfectly well what is normal for you! I wouldn't say you were exactly a ruddy child-- pale colors always did animate you-- but you weren't white as a sheet back in the Auvergne, and you sure as hell weren't the same temperature as the root cellar in winter!"

"Ah, but back in the Auvergne," I explained, my voice carefully modulated to communicate absolute surety, "I was just a boy, Papa."

Then leaning close, I let him see my fangs.

"Whereas now, you see, I am a vampire."

Part 62 of 62



All the love and understanding in the world couldn't overcome that first instant of dawning realization, that first rush of shocked horror...

But that was all it was, an instant.

My father reared back, very nearly slamming his skull into the headboard. Only my quick reflexes saved him, my powerful arm darting out to cushion his neck as he flung himself away from me.

And there we sat, he suddenly paralyzed, and me just waiting. Patiently, I hoped, for him to recover.

Little did I know it, though, but he had already recovered.

"Oh, Lestat," he groaned. "I am so sorry, mon fils. So very very sorry. Très, très desolé, oui."

"Oh, don't be," I chided him, my fingers moving slightly to cup his nape. There I massaged the tight cords in his neck. So stiff he was! Was he still so very afraid? What did he think I was going to do, suck his blood?

I come to suck your vvvvloood.... I heard some hackneyed motion picture vampire drawl in an absolutely horrid rendition of a Rumanian accent. But what the hell was a motion picture? Honestly, these visions of the future were getting to be truly ludicrous! How could a picture move? It was by definition impossible!

"Don't be sorry," I urged my father, my voice encouraging. "It's true that I didn't exactly choose this life, but you know what? If I'd been given more time to think it over, if the one who made me had bothered to explain it all and let me mull it over, I just might have chosen it, I just might have. Don't ever be sorry for me, Papa. I've had a hard time in the past few years, it's true, but that was because I was so desperately questing for love. And now I've found that in Louis..."

"I wasn't sorry that you're a vampire," my father explained, relaxing a little and leaning into my touch. "I was sorry that I reacted so badly, Lestat. Mon Dieu, that you trust me with such knowledge! And my first act upon knowing it is to flinch from you, my own dear son!"

"Oh, I've seen worse," I laughed it off. Why not? Initial reactions don't mean much. That we hadn't lost our newfound accord, that was all that mattered to me. "At least it wasn't the old Get Thee Behind Me, Satan."

Get thee behind me, Satan.... Get thee behind me, Satan.... except nobody was saying those words to me. It was a woman, throwing them at Louis... and not just any woman. It was that dark haired sister of Freniere, the one Sophie had fallen in love with. Babette...

Except, THIS Babette had been half in love with Louis, and Louis was head over heels for her, mooning night after night at her window. Louis, already a vampire yet scorning me utterly for this mortal woman....

Well, once upon a time I suppose such a vision would have disturbed me. But no longer. I mean, get real! How much more proof could there be that these visions were nonsense than THAT one? Really! Louis forsaking my tender loving care--not to mention my seriously lusty attention--for some woman?

It had fiction written all over it!

A story like that belonged in a bookstore, I kid you not!

"You aren't actually in league with Satan, are you?" my father asked, a trifle diffidently, just in case I was. I don't suppose even that would have made him turn from me, he was that determined to cling to our newly forged relationship. Sort of sweet. I mean, in a sick way. If Satan were real, being in league with him would be no joke.

"I don't even know that such a being ever existed or ever will," I assured my father. "What I am... well, it's not so easy to explain, except to say that my kind far, far predates the Christian myths of our purpose."

He nodded, and reached out a hand to trace my features. "It suits you," he said finally. "When I thought to see you, earlier tonight, I certainly never dreamed you'd look like this... but you make a very handsome vampire indeed, mon fils."

I nodded. Conceited, I know, but what else could I do? He was obviously right.

"I suppose your plan is to bring Louis into this as well," my father sighed. "I've noted some distance between the two of you, at times. Is he not amenable to the idea, is that it?"

"We've worked through some issues," I short-listed. I didn't see any point in getting into it. The truth was now that Louis was on this rabid hunt for Marius, my plans were all on hold. If I could get to him before he got to Marius, I was going to do what was best for him, which was give him up. No point in making him a vampire when that very act would only call Marius' attention... Marius, who would realize at once that I'd broken my promises to keep his existence a secret.

I was going to wipe Louis' memory clean, love or no love. No recollection of me, not a glimmer, let alone Marius. I suppose I'd have to deal with Sophie and Maman in the same way. And if my father still lived, I'd have to find new lodgings for him. *Sigh*. Louis had been so good for him.

And for me.

But it wasn't meant to be.

Which reminded me...

"Papa," I intoned, my glance catching his. "You're not to remember anything about Marius, is that clear? Louis' gone away on business, that's all. And not to the Aegean. Forget all about the Aegean. He went to... er, Mississippi to investigate some new indigo techniques."

"Mississippi," he murmured, lost in thought. "Mississippi..."

"Oui, and I miss him terribly, as you know. I can't bear another night without his sweet smiling face, so I'm off to Mississippi, too."

"Mississippi," he said again, thoroughly bewitched.

Bending down from where I had stood, I dropped a kiss on first one cheek and then the other. "À revoir, Papa," I quietly bid him, hoping this wasn't more a case for "Adieu."

"À revoir, mon fils," he whispered, and then, before I could move away, he kissed me back. A fatherly kiss.

The kind Marius might give me, actually.

Except that now, Marius, vengeful Marius, was like as not to kill my one and only, my perfect match.

Except that I was going to stop him. Even if Louis had already found him, I was going to keep him safe from Marius' wrath.

Don't you dare ask me how.



The End


----the adventures of our heros will continue in "Path Not Taken."