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"Stop, Lestat, please," said Sevraine. "You're hurting my ears. Your mother only found these things out from me and went to fetch you immediately and bring you here as I asked. You have been living in your own well-fortified and solitary world. You gave no hint that any of this concerned you. Now come with us to join the others as we ask."

"I want to find David and Jesse ...," I said.

"David and Jesse have joined the others," said Gremt.

"And what do you know of Maharet right now!" I demanded. I hit the table with my fist.

"I'm not omniscient," said Gremt quietly. "I could leave this body and I could travel there--invisible, silent--easily enough. But I've forsworn that power. I've trained myself to walk and talk and see and hear as a human being. And besides, whatever is happening with Maharet, none of us can change."

I pushed back the chair and rose to my feet. "I have to be alone now," I said. "This is all simply too much. I have to wander out there, be alone.... I don't know what I'll do. We have several hours more to talk about it. I want to be alone. You should go on to New York, that's certain. All of you should go. And you should fight this Voice with all your power. As for me, I don't know."

Sevraine rose and came around the table and took me by the arm.

"All right then," she said. "You go wandering if you must. But I have something that might help you with your meditations, something I arranged especially for you."

She led me out of the room and down a long passage that was covered in soft glittering gold like so much of what I'd already seen. But soon another cruder and unadorned passage led us away from this one and down a l

ong steep rock-cut stairs.

It seemed we were in a labyrinth. And I caught the scent of human beings.

We came finally to a long ramp that led into a small room illuminated only by a couple of thick candles on ledges, and there beyond a wall of iron bars stood a golden-skinned human being staring at me out of the shadows with bitter furious black eyes.

The scent was overpowering, delicious, almost irresistible.

The man began to shake the bars with all his strength and rail at Sevraine in the most vulgar and coarse French I'd ever heard. He hurled one threat after another at her of confederates who would come to rip her limb from limb and visit every erotic abomination on her that he could conceive.

He swore his "brothers" would never let anyone live who had done harm to him, that she didn't know what she had done to herself, and so forth and so on, round now in circles, damning her under the worst words ever created in any language to denounce a female being.

I was fascinated. It had been a long time since I'd encountered anyone so totally given over to evil, and so blatant in his fury. The smell of the sea came off his filthy dungarees and his sweat-soaked denim shirt, and I saw scars cut into his face and into his right arm that had hardened into seams of pure white flesh.

Behind me a heavy door was closed.

The creature and I were alone. I saw the key to his cell on a hook to the right of the gate that held him back, and I took it down while he went on raving and cursing, and I turned it slowly in the lock.

He flung the gate back immediately and lunged at me, his hands moving to my throat.

I let him do this, let him hurl his full force at a body that did not yield even by a quarter of an inch. And there he was, trying to press his fingers into my neck and utterly impotent to make the slightest indentation in my skin and staring into my eyes.

He backed up, calculating, and took another tack. Did I want money? He had plenty of money. All right, he was dealing here with something he hadn't encountered before. Yes, we weren't human. He saw that. But he wasn't stupid. He wasn't a fool. What did we want?

"Tell me," he roared at me in French. His eyes moved feverishly over the ceiling, the floor, the walls. The doors.

"I want you," I said in French. I opened my mouth and ran my tongue under my fangs.

He didn't believe what he saw, of course he didn't believe, that was preposterous that such creatures as that were real. "Stop trying to frighten me!" he roared again.

He fell into a crouch, shoulders hunched, arms at the ready, fingers balled into fists.

"You're enough to take my mind off anything," I said.

I moved closer, sliding my arms around him, sliding them right against that delicious salty sweat, and drove my teeth swiftly into his neck. That's the least painful way to do it, go right for the artery and just let that first pull on his heart quiet his fear.

His soul broke open like a rotten carcass, and all of the filth of his life spent in smuggling and thievery and random murder, always murder, murder after murder, poured out like black viscid crude oil in his blood.

We were on the floor of the cell. He was still alive. I was drinking the last dregs slowly, letting the blood drain from his brain and his internal organs and pulling it towards me with the steady slow cooperation of his powerful heart.

He was a little boy now, a trusting little boy filled with curiosity and dreams and roaming some countryside very like my own fields and slopes in the Auvergne, and there was so much he wanted to know, so much he wanted to fathom, so many things that he would do. He would grow up and discover the answers. He would know. The snow fell suddenly on the place where he was playing, running, jumping, and spinning in circles with his arms out. And he threw his little head back to swallow the falling snow.