“ ‘I know,’ she smiled. ‘I heard him when he turned the far corner.’

“ ‘But he’ll never let us leave,’ I whispered, though I’d caught the implication of her words; her vampire sense was keen. She stood en garde magnificently. ‘But you don’t know him if you think he’ll let us leave,’ I said to her, alarmed at her self-confidence. ‘He will not let us go.’

“And she, still smiling, said, ‘Oh… really?’ ”

“It was agreed then to make plans. At once. The following night my agent came with his usual complaints about doing business by the light of one wretched candle and took my explicit orders for an ocean crossing. Claudia and I would go to Europe, on the first available ship, regardless of what port we had to settle for. And paramount was that an important chest be shipped with us, a chest which might have to be fetched carefully from our house during the day and put on board, not in the freight but in our cabin. And then there were arrangements for Lestat. I had planned to leave him the rents for several shops and town houses and a small construction company operating in the Faubourg Marigny. I put my signature to these things readily. I wanted to buy our freedom: to convince Lestat we wanted only to take a trip together and that he could remain in the style to which he was accustomed; he would have his own money and need come to me for nothing. For all these years, I’d kept him dependent on me. Of course, he demanded his funds from me as if I were merely his banker, and thanked me with the most acrimonious words at his command; but he loathed his dependence. I hoped to deflect his suspicion by playing to his greed. And, convinced that he could read any emotion in my face, I was more than fearful. I did not believe it would be possible to escape him. Do you understand what that means? I acted as though I believed it, but I did not.

“Claudia, meantime, was flirting with disaster, her equanimity overwhelming to me as she read her vampire books and asked Lestat questions. She remained undisturbed by his caustic outbursts, sometimes asking the same question over and over again in different ways and carefully considering what little information he might let escape in spite of himself. ‘What vampire made you what you are?’ she asked, without looking up from her book and keeping her lids lowered under his onslaught. ‘Why do you never talk about him?’ she went on, as if his fierce objections were thin air. She seemed immune to his irritation.

“ ‘You’re greedy, both of you!’ he said the next night as he paced back and forth in the dark of the center of the room, turning a vengeful eye on Claudia, who was fitted into her corner, in the circle of her candle flame, her books in stacks about her. ‘Immortality is not enough for you! No, you would look the Gift Horse of God in the mouth! I could offer it to any man out there in the street and he would jump for it…’

“ ‘Did you jump for it?’ she asked softly, her lips barely moving… ‘but you, you would know the reason for it. Do you want to end it? I can give you death more easily than I gave you life!’ He turned to me, her fragile flame throwing his shadow across me. It made a halo around his blond hair and left his face, except for the gleaming cheekbone, dark. ‘Do you want death?’

“ ‘Consciousness is not death,’ she whispered.

“ ‘Answer me! Do you want death!’

“ ‘And you give all these things. They proceed from you. Life and death,’ she whispered, mocking him.

“ ‘I have,’ he said. ‘I do.’

“ ‘You know nothing,’ she said to him gravely, her voice so low that the slightest noise from the street interrupted it, might carry her words away, so that I found myself straining to hear her against myself as I lay with my head back against the chair. ‘And suppose the vampire who made you knew nothing, and the vampire who made that vampire knew nothing, and the vampire before him knew nothing, and so it goes back and back, nothing proceeding from nothing, until there is nothing! And we must live with the knowledge that there is no knowledge.’

“ ‘Yes!’ he cried out suddenly, his hands out, his voice tinged with something other than anger.

“He was silent. She was silent. He turned, slowly, as if I’d made some movement which alerted him, as if I were rising behind him. It reminded me of the way humans turn when they feel my breath against them and know suddenly that where they thought themselves to be utterly alone… that moment of awful suspicion before they see my face and gasp. He was looking at me now, and I could barely see his lips moving. And then I sensed it. He was afraid. Lestat afraid.

“And she was staring at him with the same level gaze, evincing no emotion, no thought.

“ ‘You infected her with this…’ he whispered.

“He struck a match now with a sharp crackle and lit the mantel candles, lifted the smoky shades of the lamps, went around the room making light, until Claudia’s small flame took on a solidity and he stood with his back to the marble mantel looking from light to light as if they restored some peace. ‘I’m going out,’ he said.

“She rose the instant he had reached the street, and suddenly she stopped in the center of the room and stretched, her tiny back arched, her arms straight up into small fists, her eyes squeezed shut for a moment and then wide open as if she were waking to the room from a dream. There was something obscene about her gesture; the room seemed to shimmer with Lestat’s fear, echo with his last response. It demanded her attention. I must have made some involuntary movement to turn away from her, because she was standing at the arm of my chair now and pressing her hand flat upon my book, a book I hadn’t been reading for hours. ‘Come out with me.’

“ ‘You were right. He knows nothing. There is nothing he can tell us,’ I said to her.

“ ‘Did you ever really think that he did?’ she asked me in the same small voice. ‘We’ll find others of our kind,’ she said. ‘We’ll find them in central Europe. That is where they live in such numbers that the stories, both fiction and fact, fill volumes. I’m convinced it was from there that all vampires came, if they came from any place at all. We’ve tarried too long with him. Come out. Let the flesh instruct the mind’

“I think I felt a tremor of delight when she said these words, Let the flesh instruct the mind. ‘Put books aside and kill,’ she was whispering to me. I followed her down the stairs, across the courtyard and down a narrow alley to another street. Then she turned with outstretched arms for me to pick her up and carry her, though, of course, she was not tired; she wanted only to be near my ear, to clutch my neck. ‘I haven’t told him my plan, about the voyage, the money,’ I was saying to her, conscious of something about her that was beyond me as she rode my measured steps, weightless in my arms.

“ ‘He killed the other vampire,’ she said.

“ ‘No, why do you say this?’ I asked her. But it wasn’t the saying of it that disturbed me, stirred my soul as if it were a pool of water longing to be still. I felt as if she were moving me slowly towards something, as if she were the pilot of our slow walk through the dark street. ‘Because I know it now,’ she said with authority. ‘The vampire made a slave of him, and he would no more be a slave than I would be a slave, and so he killed him. Killed him before he knew what he might know, and then in panic made a slave of you. And you’ve been his slave.’

“ ‘Never really…’ I whispered to her. I felt the press of her cheek against my temple. She was cold and needed the kill. ‘Not a slave. Just some sort of mindless accomplice,’ I confessed to her, confessed to myself. I could feel the fever for the kill rising in me, a knot of hunger in my insides, a throbbing in the temples, as if the veins were contracting and my body might become a map of tortured vessels.

“ ‘No, slave,’ she persisted in her grave monotone, as though thinking aloud, the words revelations, pieces of a puzzle. ‘And I shall free us both.’