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I went further up the stairs towards him and the thirst sang in me. To hell with his cries. The thirst sang and I was an instrument of its singing.

And his cries had become inarticulate -- the pure essence of his curses, a dull punctuating to the misery that I could hear without need of any sound. Something divinely carnal in the broken syllables coming from his lips, like the low gush of blood through his heart.

I lifted the key and put it in the lock and he went silent, his thoughts washing backwards and into him as if the ocean could be sucked back into the tiny mysterious coils of a single shell.

I tried to see him in the shadows of the room, and not it the love for him, the aching, wrenching months of longing for him, the hideous and unshakable human need for him, the lust. I tried to see the mortal who didn't know what he was saying as he glared at me:

"You, and your talk of goodness" -- low seething voice, eyes glittering -- "your talk of good and evil, your talk of what was right and what was wrong and death, oh yes, death, the horror, the tragedy . . . "

Words. Borne on the ever swelling current of hatred, like flowers opening in the current, petals peeling back, then falling apart:

". . . and you shared it with her, the lord's son giveth to the lord's wife his great gift, the Dark Gift. Those who live in the castle share the Dark Gift -- never were they dragged to the witches' place where the human grease pools on the ground at the foot of the burnt stake, no, kill the old crone who can no longer see to sew, and the idiot boy who cannot till the field. And what does he give us, the lord's son, the wolfkiller, the one who screamed in the witches' place? Coin of the realm! That's good enough for us!"

Shuddering. Shirt soaked with sweat. Gleam of taut flesh through the torn lace. Tantalizing, the mere sight of it, the narrow tightly muscled torso that sculptors so love to represent, nipples pink against the dark skin.

"This power" -- sputtering as if all day long he had been saying the words over with the same intensity, and it does not really matter that now I am present -- "this power that made all the lies meaningless, this dark power that soared over everything, this truth that obliterated. . . "

No. Language. No truth.

The wine bottles were empty, the food devoured. His lean arms were hardened and tense for the struggle -- but what struggle? -- his brown hair fallen out of its ribbon, his eyes enormous and glazed.

But suddenly he pushed against the wall as if he'd go through it to get away from me -- dim remembrance of their drinking from him, the paralysis, the ecstasy -- yet he was drawn immediately forward again, staggering, putting his hands out to steady himself by taking hold of things that were not there.

But his voice had stopped.

Something breaking in his face.

"How could you keep it from me!" he whispered. Thoughts of old magic, luminous legend, some great eerie strata in which all the shadowy things thrived, an intoxication with forbidden knowledge in which the natural things become unimportant. No miracle anymore to the leaves falling from the autumn trees, the sun in the orchard.

No.

The scent was rising from him like incense, like the heat and the smoke of church candles rising. Heart thumping under the skin of his naked chest. Tight little belly glistening with sweat, sweat staining the thick leather belt. Blood full of salt. I could scarce breathe.

And we do breathe. We breathe and we taste and we smell and we feel and we thirst.

"You have misunderstood everything. " Is this Lestat speaking? It sounded like some other demon, some loathsome thing for whom the voice was the imitation of a human voice. "You have misunderstood everything you have seen and heard. "

"I would have shared anything I possessed with you!" Rage building again. He reached out. "It was you who never understood," he whispered.

"Take your life and leave with it. Run. "

"Don't you see it's the confirmation of everything? That it exists is the confirmation -- pure evil, sublime evil!" Triumph in his eyes. He reached out suddenly and closed his hand on my face.

"Don't taunt me!" I said. I struck him so hard he fell back wards, chastened, silent. "When it was offered me I said no. I tell you I said no. With my last breath, I said no. "

"You were always the fool," he said. "I told you that. " But he was breaking down. He was shuddering and the rage was alchemizing into desperation. He lifted his arms again and then stopped. "You believed things that didn't matter," he said almost gently. "There was something you failed to see. Is it impossible you don't know yourself what you possess now?" The glaze over his eyes broke instantly into tears.

His face knotted. Unspoken words coming from him of love.

And an awful self-consciousness came over me. Silent and lethal, I felt myself flooded with the power I had over him and his knowledge of it, and my love for him heated the sense of power, driving it towards a scorching embarrassment which suddenly changed into something else.

We were in the wings of the theater again; we were in the village in Auvergne in that little inn. I smelled not merely the blood in him, but the sudden terror. He had taken a step back. And the very movement stoked the blaze in me, as much as the vision of his stricken face.

He grew smalle

r, more fragile. Yet he'd never seemed stronger, more alluring than he was now.

All the expression drained from his face as I drew nearer. His eyes were wondrously clear. And his mind was opening as Gabrielle's mind had opened, and for one tiny second there flared a moment of us together in the garret, talking and talking as the moon glared on the snow-covered roofs, or walking through the Paris streets, passing the wine back and forth, heads bowed against the first gust of winter rain, and there had been the eternity of growing up and growing old before us, and so much joy even in misery, even in the misery -- the real eternity, the real forever -- the mortal mystery of that. But the moment faded in the shimmering expression on his face.