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Not that we surrender to you?

I shook my head. And I saw the same wariness and recoiling in Gabrielle.

He was not angry; there was no malice now. Yet he said again, in the same beguiling voice:

"I curse you," and I felt it as if he'd declaimed it.

"I offered myself to you at the moment you vanquished me," he said. "Remember that when your dark children strike out at you, when they rise up against you. Remember me. "

I was shaken, more shaken even than I had been in the sad and awful finish with Nicolas at Renaud's. I had never once known fear in the crypt under les Innocents. But I had known it in this room since we came in.

And some anger boiled in him again, something too dreadful for him to control.

I watched him bow his head and turn away. He became small, light, and held his arms close to himself as he stood before the blaze and he thought of threats now to hurt me, and I heard them though they died before they ever reached his lips.

But something disturbed my vision for a fraction of a second. Maybe it was a candle guttering. Maybe it was the blink of my eye. Whatever it was, he vanished. Or he tried to vanish, and I saw him leaping away from the fire in a great dark streak.

"No!" I cried out. And lunging at something I couldn't even see, I held him, material again, in my hands.

He had only moved very fast, and I had moved faster, and we stood facing each other in the doorway of the crypt, and again I said that single negation and I wouldn't let him go.

"Not like this, we can't part. We can't leave each other in hatred, we can't. " And my will dissolved suddenly as I embraced him and held tight to him so that he couldn't free himself nor even move.

I didn't care what he was, or what he had done in that doomed moment of lying to me, or even trying to overpo

wer me, I didn't care that I was no longer mortal and would never be again.

i wanted only that he should remain. I wanted to be with him, what he was, and all the things he had said were true. Yet it could never be as he wished it to be. He could not have this power over us. He could not divide Gabrielle from me.

Yet I wondered, did he himself really understand what he was asking? Was it possible that he believed the more innocent words he spoke?

Without speaking, without asking his consent, I led him back to the bench by the fire. I felt danger again, terrible danger. But it didn't really matter. He had to remain here with us now.

Gabrielle was murmuring to herself. She was walking back and forth and her cloak hung from one shoulder and she seemed almost to have forgotten we were there.

Armand watched her, and when she turned to him, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, she spoke aloud.

"You come to him and you say; `Take me with you. ' You say, `Love me,' and you hint of superior knowledge, secrets, yet you give us nothing, either of us, except lies. "

"I showed my power to understand," he answered in a soft murmur.

"No, you did tricks with your understanding," she replied. "You made pictures. And rather childish pictures. You have done this all along. You lure Lestat in the Palais with the most gorgeous illusions only to attack him. And here, when there is a respite in the struggle, what do you do but try to sow dissension between us. . . "

"Yes, illusions before, I admit it," he answered. "But the things I've spoken here are true. Already you despise your son for his love of mortals, his need to be ever near them, his yielding to the violinist. You knew the Dark Gift would madden that one, and that it will finally destroy him. You do wish for your freedom, from all the Children of Darkness. You can't hide that from me. "

"Ah, but you're so simple," she said. "You see, but you don't see. How many mortal years did you live? Do you remember anything of them? What you've perceived is not the sum total of the passion I feel for my son. I have loved him as I have never loved any other being in creation. In my loneliness, my son is everything to me. How is it you can't interpret what you see?"

"It's you who fail to interpret," he answered in the same soft manner. "If you had ever felt real longing for any other one, you would know that what you feel for your son is nothing at all. "

"This is futile," I said, "to talk like this. "

"No," she said to him without the slightest wavering. "My son and I are kin to each other in more ways than one. In fifty years of life, I've never known anyone as strong as myself, except my son. And what divides us we can always mend. But how are we to make you one of us when you use these things like wood for fire! But understand my larger point: what is it of yourself that you can give that we should want you?"

"My guidance is what you need," he answered. "You've only begun your adventure and you have no beliefs to hold you. You cannot live without some guidance. . . "

"Millions live without belief or guidance. It is you who cannot live without it," she said.

Pain coming from him. Suffering.