“ ‘Now, you give her to me!’ she said, her head bowing, her curls tumbling down to make a concealing veil. ‘You give her to me. You do this, or you finish what you did to me that night in the hotel in New Orleans. I will not live with this hatred any longer, I will not live with this rage! I cannot. I will not abide it!’ And tossing her hair, she put her hands to her ears as if to stop the sound of her own words, her breath, drawn in rapid gasps, the tears seeming to scald her cheeks.
“I had sunk to my knees at her side, and my arms were outstretched as if to enfold her. Yet I dared not touch her, dared not even say her name, lest my own pain break from me with the first syllable in a monstrous outpouring of hopelessly inarticulate cries. ‘Oooh.’ She shook her head now, squeezing the tears out onto her cheeks, her teeth clenched tight together. ‘I love you still, that’s the torment of it. Lestat I never loved. But you! The measure of my hatred is that love. They are the same! Do you know now how much I hate you!’ She flashed at me through the red film that covered her eyes.
“ ‘Yes,’ I whispered. I bowed my head. But she was gone from me into the arms of Madeleine, who enfolded her desperately, as if she might protect Claudia from me — the irony of it, the pathetic irony — protect Claudia from herself. She was whispering to Claudia, ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry?’ her hands stroking Claudia’s face and hair with a fierceness that would have bruised a human child.
“But Claudia seemed lost against her breast suddenly, her eyes closed, her face smooth, as if all passion were drained away from her, her arm sliding up around Madeleine’s neck, her head falling against the taffeta and lace. She lay still, the tears staining her cheeks, as if all this that had risen to the surface had left her weak and desperate for oblivion, as if the room around her, as if I, were not there.
“And there they were together, a tender mortal crying unstintingly now, her warm arms holding what she could not possibly understand, this white and fierce and unnatural child thing she believed she loved. And if I had not felt for her, this mad and reckless woman flirting with the damned, if I had not felt all the sorrow for her I felt for my mortal self, I would have wrested the demon thing from her arms, held it tight to me, denying over and over the words I’d just heard. But I knelt there still, thinking only, The love is equal to the hatred; gathering that selfishly to my own breast, holding onto that as I sank back against the bed.
“A long time before Madeleine was to know it, Claudia had ceased crying and sat still as a statue on Madeleine’s lap, her liquid eyes fixed on me, oblivious to the soft, red hair that fell around her or the woman’s hand that still stroked her. And I sat slumped against the bedpost, staring back at those vampire eyes, unable and unwilling to speak in my defense. Madeleine was whispering into Claudia’s ear, she was letting her tears fall into Claudia’s tresses. And then gently, Claudia said to her, ‘Leave us.’
“ ‘No.’ She shook her head, holding tight to Claudia. And then she shut her eyes and trembled all over with some terrible vexation, some awful torment. But Claudia was leading her from the chair, and she was now pliant and shocked and white-faced, the green taffeta ballooning around the small yellow
silk dress.
“In the archway of the parlor they stopped, and Madeleine stood as if confused, her hand at her throat, beating like a wing, then going still. She looked about her like that hapless victim on the stage of the Theatre des Vampires who did not know where she was. But Claudia had gone for something. And I saw her emerge from the shadows with what appeared to be a large doll. I rose on my knees to look at it. It was a doll, the doll of a little girl with raven hair and green eyes, adorned with lace and ribbons, sweet-faced and wide-eyed, its porcelain feet tinkling as Claudia put it into Madeleine’s arms. And Madeleine’s eyes appeared to harden as she held the doll, and her Lips drew back from her teeth in a grimace as she stroked its hair. She was laughing low under her breath. ‘Lie down,’ Claudia said to her; and together they appeared to sink into the cushions of the couch, the green taffeta rustling and giving way as Claudia lay with her and put her arms around her neck. I saw the doll sliding, dropping to the floor, yet Madeleine’s hand groped for it and held it dangling, her own head thrown back, her eyes shut tight, and Claudia’s curls stroking her face.
“I settled back on the floor and leaned against the soft siding of the bed. Claudia was speaking now in a low voice, barely above a whisper, telling Madeleine to be patient, to be still, I dreaded the sound of her step on the carpet; the sound of the doors sliding closed to shut Madeleine away from us, and the hatred that lay between us like a killing vapor.
“But when I looked up to her, Claudia was standing there as if transfixed and lost in thought, all rancor and bitterness gone from her face, so that she had the blank expression of that doll.
“ ‘All you’ve said to me is true,’ I said to her. ‘I deserve your hatred. I’ve deserved it from those first moments when Lestat put you in my arms.’
“She seemed unaware of me, and her eyes were infused with a soft light. Her beauty burned into my soul so that I could hardly stand it, and then she said, wondering, ‘You could have killed me then, despite him. You could have done it.’ Then her eyes rested on me calmly. ‘Do you wish to do it now?’
“ ‘Do it now!’ I put my arm around her, moved her close to me, warmed by her softened voice. ‘Are you mad, to say such things to me? Do I want to do it now!”
“ ‘I want you to do it,’ she said. ‘Bend down now as you did then, draw the blood out of me drop by drop, all you have the strength for; push my heart to the brink. I am small, you can take me. I won’t resist you, I am something frail you can crush like a flower.’
“ ‘You mean these things? You mean what you say to me?’ I asked. ‘Why don’t you place the knife here, why don’t you turn it?’
“ ‘Would you die with me?’ she asked, with a sly, mocking smile. ‘Would you in fact die with me?’ she pressed. ‘Don’t you understand what is happening to me? That he’s killing me, that master vampire who has you in thrall, that he won’t share your love with me, not a drop of it? I see his power in your eyes. I see your misery, your distress, the love for him you can’t hide. Turn around, I’ll make you look at me with those eyes that want him, I’ll make you listen’
“ ‘Don’t anymore, don’t… I won’t leave you. I’ve sworn to you, don’t you see? I cannot give you that woman’
“ ‘But I’m fighting for my life! Give her to me so she can care for me, complete the guise I must have to live! And he can have you then! I am fighting for my life!’
“I all but shoved her off. ‘No, no, it’s madness, it’s witchery,’ I said, trying to defy her. ‘It’s you who will not share me with him, it’s you who want every drop of that love. If not from me, from her. He overpowers you, he disregards you, and it’s you who wish him dead the way that you killed Lestat. Well, you won’t make me a party to this death, I tell you, not this death! I will not make her one of us, I will not damn the legions of mortals who’ll die at her hands if I do! Your power over me is broken. I will not!’
“Oh, if she could only have understood!
“Not for a moment could I truly believe her words against Armand, that out of that detachment which was beyond revenge he could selfishly wish for her death. But that was nothing to me now; something far more terrible than I could grasp was happening, something I was only beginning to understand, against which my anger was nothing but a mockery, a hollow attempt to oppose her tenacious will. She hated me, she loathed me, as she herself had confessed, and my heart shriveled inside me, as if, in depriving me of that love which had sustained me a lifetime, she had dealt me a mortal blow. The knife was there. I was dying for her, dying for that love as I was that very first night when Lestat gave her to me, turned her eyes to me, and told her my name; that love which had warmed me in my self-hatred, allowed me to exist. Oh, how Lestat had understood it, and now at last his plan was undone.
“But it went beyond that, in some region from which I was shrinking as I strode back and forth, back and forth, my hands opening and closing at my sides, feeling not only that hatred in her liquid eyes: It was her pain. She had shown me her pain! To give me immortality in this hopeless guise, this helpless form. I put my hands to my ears, as if she spoke the words yet, and the tears flowed. For all these years I had depended utterly upon her cruelty, her absolute lack of pain! And pain was what she showed to me, undeniable pain. Oh, how Lestat would have laughed at us. That was why she had put the knife to him, because he would have laughed. To destroy me utterly she need only show me that pain. The child I made a vampire suffered. Her agony was as my own.
“There was a coffin in that other room, a bed for Madeleine, to which Claudia retreated to leave me alone with what I could not abide. I welcomed the silence. And sometime during the few hours that remained of the night I found myself at the open window, feeling the slow mist of the rain. It glistened on the fronds of the ferns, on sweet white flowers that listed, bowed, and finally broke from their stems. A carpet of flowers littering the little balcony, the petals pounded softly by the rain. I felt weak now, and utterly alone. What had passed between us tonight could never be undone, and what had been done to Claudia by me could never be undone.
“But I was somehow, to my own bewilderment, empty of all regret. Perhaps it was the night, the starless sky, the gas lamps frozen in the mist that gave some strange comfort for which I never asked and didn’t know how, in this emptiness and aloneness, to receive. I am alone, I was thinking. I am alone. It seemed just, perfectly, and so to have a pleasing, inevitable form. And I pictured myself then forever alone, as if on gaining that vampire strength the night of my death I had left Lestat and never looked back for him, as I had moved on away from him, beyond the need of him and anyone else. As if the night had said to me, ‘You are the night and the night alone understands you and enfolds you in its arms.’ One with the shadows. Without nightmare. An inexplicable peace.
“Yet I could feel the end of this peace as surely as I’d felt my brief surrender to it, and it was breaking like the dark clouds. The urgent pain of Claudia’s loss pressed in on me, behind me, like a shape gathered from the corners of this cluttered and oddly alien room. But outside, even as the night seemed to dissolve in a fierce driving wind, I could feel something calling to me, something inanimate which I’d never known. And a power within me seemed to answer that power, not with resistance but with an inscrutable, chilling strength.
“I moved silently through the rooms, gently dividing the doors until I saw, in the dim light cast by the flickering gas flames behind me, that sleeping woman lying in my shadow on the couch, the doll limp against her breast. Sometime before I knelt at her side I saw her eyes open, and I could feel beyond her in the collected dark those other eyes watching me, that breathless tiny vampire face waiting.
“ ‘Will you care for her, Madeleine?’ I saw her hands clutch at the doll, turning its face against her breast. And my own hand went out for it, though I did not know why, even as she was answering me.
“ ‘Yes!’ She repeated it again desperately.
“ ‘Is this what you believe her to be, a do