The next night after they’d hunted the country roads, he told Killer of his loneliness over the centuries, of how he’d grown to love mortals the way Lestat had once loved him, and how he’d pulled away from them finally, always afraid that he couldn’t make another, as Lestat had made him. Lestat had been badly wounded when he’d made Antoine. It hadn’t been easy. It was nothing like the majestic procedure of the Dark Trick described in the pages of Marius’s memoir, Blood and Gold. Marius made it sound like the giving of a sacrament when he’d made Armand in the 1500s in those Renaissance rooms in Venice, filled with Marius’s paintings. It had been nothing like that at all.

“Well, I can tell you as a fact,” said Killer, “that lately it’s not been working at all. Right before these massacres started, they were all talking about it, how hard it was to bring somebody over. It was like the Blood was played out. Too many in the Blood. Think about it. The power comes from the Mother, from that demon, Amel, who entered into Akasha and then passed into Mekare, the Queen of the Damned. Well, maybe Amel really is an invisible creature with tentacles just like Mekare once said, and those tentacles have stretched just as far as they can. They just can’t stretch forever.”

Killer sighed. Antoine looked away. He was obsessed.

“I’m going to tell you something horrible I hate to tell anybody,” said Killer. “Last two times I tried to bring somebody over, it flat-out failed. Now it was never like that before, I can tell you.” Killer shook his head. “I tried to bring over the most beautiful little girl I ever saw in one of those towns back there, and it just did not work. It just didn’t work. Come dawn, I did the only thing I could do—chop off her head and bury her, and I’d promised her eternal life and I had to do that. She was a zombie thing, and she couldn’t even talk and her heart wasn’t beating, but she wasn’t dead.”

Antoine shuddered. He’d never had the courage to try. But if this was true, if he did not have the slightest hope of ever ending this loneliness by making another, well, then, that was all the more reason to press on.