“I understand,” I said. I was in a fever. “And I never thought to do it, to punish him with it, but think how he learns now. He’s quick. He knows already what’s obvious to me and to you, no doubt, that if I try to burn him, if either of us does again, he’ll fuse with me again and make the fire burn me.”

“Maybe he’ll do that,” said Lestat, guiding me to the straight-back chair at the table. “But do you think he wants for you to die?”

“No, he can’t want that,” I answered. I was out of breath, as though I’d been running. “He takes his life from me. Whatever he was before I came along, I can’t imagine. But it’s my focus, my love, that makes him strong now. And goddamn it, I can’t stop loving him, feeling I’m betraying him, and he feeds off that!”

The blinking of the lights had stopped. The lace curtains were still. Chills ran up and down my spine. With a noise of static in the speakers, the computer suddenly went off.

Stammering, I told Lestat about the image I’d seen, of myself in the playpen, of the old linoleum that must have been in the kitchen, and of Goblin with me, and that it wasn’t something I remembered but something I knew to be true.

“He’s shown me those images before when he’s attacked me, images of myself as an infant.”

“And all this over the years?”

“No, only now after the Dark Gift—with these attacks, when I fuse with him as I would with a mortal victim. It’s the Dark Blood. It’s become the currency of memory, the vampiric blood. He wants me to know he has these memories of a time when I saw him and strengthened him with that vision even before I knew how to talk.”

Lestat had settled in the chair on the other side of the table, and in a split second I developed a positive superstition about him having his back to the hallway door.

I went to the door and closed it, and then, coming back, I unplugged the computer entirely, and I asked if we could rearrange the chairs. Lestat caught me as I reached out to do this.

“Be patient, Little Brother,” he said. “The creature’s pushed you right out of your mind.”

We sat down again, facing each other, Lestat with his back to the front of the house, and me with my back to my bedroom.

“He wants to be a Blood Hunter, don’t you see?” I said. “I’m terrified of him and what he can do.” I looked up at the gasolier to see if the electric bulbs were blinking. No. I looked at the computer to make sure that its screen was blank. Yes.