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A mortal woman stopped just a few paces from me. Her coat went down to the tops of her boots, and a scarf was wrapped entirely around her face and neck. She spoke to me in rapid French telling me I would catch my death of cold if I didn't go inside somewhere, get a coat to wear. I nodded and thanked her and she rushed on across the dim lawns of snow.

Well, it's as good a time as ever, I thought, to find out what had been lost, if anything. I went up, fast enough that no mortal eye would catch it, and was soon crossing the sky over Paris and headed infallibly as ever for home.

It was eight o'clock when I walked into the ballroom. I had heard the cheers and screaming before I ever reached the doors. And the sounds of people rushing through the many corridors and salons.

"Where is the orchestra?" I asked. I made my way into an open space beside the harpsichord. Marius took me in his arms. The musicians flooded into the little congregation of gilded chairs, and Antoine stepped up on the small black podium. Some lusty triumphal music soon swelled behind me.

I held still to Marius. "These have been the worst hours of my whole existence," he whispered in my ear. "Then they said you were alive, that you'd been seen in Paris. And I didn't believe it."

The crowd around us was getting thicker and thicker, with blood drinkers pushing here and there to diminish the space in which we stood.

All the faces were soon there, except for Louis and Rose and Viktor. But how could that be? I turned around. They stood only two feet away from me, huddled together, and down the pure whiteness of Louis's face were two thin lines of blood tears.

It must have been an hour of individual embraces, of reassuring myself and each person that I was whole and complete. I was thirsting, but I didn't care.

I couldn't mention his name. I couldn't. I couldn't say his name and it seemed they sensed it and they didn't say it either. They didn't ask, Is he here? Is he gone?

Only when at last it was over--all the festivities, and the questions, and my repeated answers--only when I went down into the crypt did I sit alone in the dark and say, "Amel. Amel, where are you? Are you flesh and blood? Are you safe?"

The blood tears ran down my face the way they'd run down Louis's face until the shirt and coat were ruined, and then I wept like a child.

32

Lestat

THE NEXT NIGHT I made about the best speech I had ever delivered to my kindred in the Blood. I didn't write it or plan it or think it through. I stood on the small conductor's podium and addressed the hundreds crowded into the room, and the hundreds listening from other rooms.

I told them first off that Amel was indeed gone.

That was all I said of him or what had happened.

Then I told them that we had to make our way of life sacred, that we had to see ourselves as sacred, and we had to see our journey through the world as sacred whether anybody else ever did.

I told them--in so many words--that no confraternity or sodality had ever been made sacred except by the faith of those who formed it, as there was no known power beyond this world or in it that could make anything sacred except the power we claimed for ourselves. I told them all that we were children of the universe no matter who thought otherwise, that we lived and breathed and thought and dreamed as do all sentient beings, and no one had a right to condemn us or deny us the right to love and to live.

Yes, the rules were being written, and yes, the history of the tribe was being written, and yes, we would seek a consensus before we went forward. But the thing to remember was this: the Devil's Road had never been easy or simple, and those who traveled it for more than a century did so because they had cared about something greater than themselves and their endless appetite for human blood. They had wanted to be part of something immensely bigger than they were, and they had rebelled in their own way against the inevitable isolation that closes around us all; they had survived because the beauty of life wouldn't let them leave it; and a thirst for knowledge had been born in them--a thirst for new ages and new forms and new expressions of art and love--even as they saw everything they had cherished crumbling and fading away.

If we wanted to survive, if we wanted to inherit the millennia as Thorne and Cyril, and Teskhamen and Chrysanthe had inherited them, as Avicus and Zenobia had inherited them, as Marius and Pandora and Flavius had inherited them, and as Rhoshamandes and Sevraine had inherited them--and as Seth and Gregory, now the very oldest among us, had inherited them--then we had to meet the future with respect as well as courage and count fear and selfishness to be small things.

"This is our universe," I said. "We too are made of stardust as are all things on this planet; we too belong."

Seems I went on for a while on that theme, and then when I realized I had in fact finished, I brought it to a close.

I didn't really provide any new or better answers than I'd grudgingly given last night, and when people praised me for my bravery in giving myself up to what was to happen, I waved that away and said, "It was not my courage. It was just what happened."

I left, taking Thorne and Cyril with me, and sought out Rhoshamandes, who was, as always, in his own castle in his own lofty and cold and relentlessly gray world.

He gave a violent start when I walked into his spacious drawing room or great hall, or whatever he might have called it. And he rose at once, dropping the book he'd been reading on the floor.

"No enmity between us," I said. I extended my hand. Thorne and Cyril were on either side of me and I could feel their hostility towards him. I knew how they longed for him to provoke a battle but even the three of us were no match for what one as old as he might do.

He regarded me coldly for a long time as if he couldn't believe what I was saying.

"All things," I said, "m

ust be made new. There can't be lingering grudges."

He didn't answer. I went on. "You said it would make up for what I'd done to you. Well, stick to your word."