“No, Sir,” I answered deferentially. “May I have the one in front of the mirror?”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because I can see her face in the mirror, and she’s cruel.”

He nodded.

He slipped the door open and we came into the cool refreshing air of the room. The thirst was too hot for it. The thirst was hopeless.

At once, the women cried out in protest. Where had we come from? Who were we? Vulgar words, threats.

With a remnant of my rational mind, I saw that the suitcase was filled with money, but what did it matter? How much more interesting was a huge vase of flowers near the far window, bursting with color. How much more interesting the blood.

Lestat drifted past me and caught the woman who ran to the right with both his arms. The rush of furious words from her came to an abrupt stop.

The other woman darted to the sofa, and I saw the gun there that she wanted so desperately to reach. I had her before she could lay her hand on it, and I crushed her against me, looking into her black eyes.

She gave me a string of curses in Spanish, and the thirst in me rose even more violently, as if her curses had drawn it out. I brushed her thick black hair back from her neck and ran my thumb over the artery. She was maddened, full of hatred.

Slowly, I bit into the fount of blood.

My Maker’s lessons came back to me. Love her sins, follow the path with her, make her evil your evil and you will do no evil. I struggled to obey as her mind was broken open. I probed for the murders and I found them, rampant, savage and always over the white powder; and the wealth that had drawn her out of the deep filthy slums of her birth to finery and fortune, to those who toasted her beauty and her cunning; and murder after murder of those as covered in blood as herself. Yes, love you, I whispered, love the sheer will and the ever present anger; yes, give it to me, the rage in the warm sweet blood flowing, and suddenly there came, towards me, her unbounded love.

Without language, she said, Surrender. Without language, she said, I see it!, and it was all of her life, without pagination, and her ripened soul expanded, and there was a terrifying recognition of circumstance and inevitability, her crimes pulled up by the roots from her heart as though by the hand of Heaven.

But the hunger in me was sated, I was filled by her, I had had her, and I drew back, kissing the puncture wounds, lapping the tiny trickles of blood that I’d spilled, healing the evidence, even as the drowsiness overcame me and then gently, gently I set her down on one of the indifferent chairs. I kissed her lips.

I knelt down before her. I forced my tongue between her lips and, opening her mouth, I sucked on her tongue and sank my teeth into it delicately, and there came again a small rush of blood.