Page 180

"But you have done well, Lestat. You have done well. "

What had I done? Borne testimony against them that they had broken the old rules? They'd risen against the coven master? What did they know of the old rules? I was screaming for Louis. And then I was drinking blood in the darkness, living blood from another victim, and it wasn't the healing blood, it was just blood.

We were in the carriage again and it was raining. We were riding through the country. And then we went up and up through the old tower to the roof. I had Claudia's bloody yellow dress in my hands. I had seen her in a narrow wet place where she had been burnt by the sun. "Scatter the ashes!" I had said. Yet no one moved to do it. The torn bloody yellow dress lay on the cellar floor. Now I held it in my hands. "They will scatter the ashes, won't they?" I said.

"Didn't you want justice?" Armand asked, his black wool cape close around him in the wind, his face dark with the power of the recent kill.

What did it have to do with justice? Why did I hold this thing, this little dress?

I looked out from Magnus's battlements and I saw the city had come to get me. It had reached out its long arms to embrace the tower, and the air stank of factory smoke.

Armand stood still at the stone railing watching me, and he seemed suddenly as young as Claudia had seemed. And make sure they have had some lifetime before you make them; and never, never make one as young as Armand. In death she said nothing. She had looked at those around her as if they were giants jabbering in an alien tongue.

Armand's eyes were red.

"Louis-where is he?" I asked. "They didn't kill him. I saw him. He went out into the rain. . . "

"They have gone after him," he answered. "He is already destroyed. "

Liar, with the face of a choirboy.

"Stop them, you have to! If there's still time. . . "

He shook his head.

"Why can't you stop them? Why did you do it, the trial, all of it, what do you care what they did to me?"

"It's finished. "

Under the roar of the winds came the scream of a steam whistle. Losing the train of thought. Losing it . . . Not wanting to go back. Louis, come back.

"And you don't mean to help me, do you?" Despair.

He leaned forward, and his face transformed itself as it had done years and years ago, as if his rage were melting it from within.

"You, who destroyed all of us, you who took everything. Whatever made you think that I would help you!" He came closer, the face all but collapsed upon itself. "You who put us on the lurid posters in the boulevard du Temple, you who made us the subject of cheap stories and drawing room talk!"

"But I didn't. You know I . . . I swear . . . It wasn't me!"

"You who carried our secrets into the limelight -- the fashionable one, the Marquis in the white gloves, the fiend in the velvet cape!"

"You're mad to blame it all on me. You have no right," I insisted, but my voice was faltering so badly I couldn't understand my own words.

And his voice shot out of him like the tongue of a snake.

"We had our Eden under that ancient cemetery," he hissed. "We had our faith and our purpose. And it was you who drove us out of it with a flaming sword. What do we have now! Answer me! Nothing but the love of each other and what can that mean to creatures li

ke us!"

"No, it's not true, it was all happening already. You don't understand anything. You never did. "

But he wasn't listening to me. And it didn't matter whether or not he was listening. He was drawing closer, and in a dark flash his hand went out, and my head went back, and I saw the sky and the city of Paris upside down.

I was falling through the air.

And I went down and down past the windows of the tower, until the stone walkway rose up to catch me, and every bone in my body broke within its thin case of preternatural skin.

Epilogue 2