Guards in the next-door apartment. Guards in the marble lobby downstairs, guards out on the narrow pavements of Fifty-Seventh Street. Guards in the apartment above and in the apartment below.

And Thorne here, the red-haired blood drinker, the Viking blood drinker, in a gray wool coat, standing like a sentinel beside the entrance to the hallway, his arms folded, staring out at the night. If he heard what they were saying to one another, he gave no sign of it. He’d been motionless since he’d arrived.

They sat across from one another—Louis and Rose—at a small round glass table with modern black-enameled Queen Anne chairs. He wore a long sweater of black wool that curled at the neck. His hair was as black as the sweater but it was glossy, and his eyes were shining like the emerald ring he wore on his hand.

His face was so bright, it made her think of something D. H. Lawrence had written, a line from Sons and Lovers, about a man’s face in his youth having been “the flower of his body.” For the first time Rose sensed she knew now what Lawrence had meant.

Louis was saying in his patient tender voice,

“You think you know, but you can’t know. Who wouldn’t be blinded by the offer of eternal life?” He’d been there for hours, patiently answering Rose’s questions, explaining things about his own point of view. “We don’t have eternal life firmly within our grasp. We have to work at it to remain ‘immortal.’ All around us we see other blood drinkers perish—because they don’t have the spiritual stamina for this, because they never transcend the first few years of shocks and revelations, or because they’re killed by others, ripped right out of life by violence. We’re only immortal in the sense that we don’t age, that illness can’t take us down, in that we have the potential to live forever, but most of us live very short lives indeed.”

She nodded. “What you’re trying to tell me is that it’s a completely final decision,” she said. “But I don’t know if you can possibly understand how total my obsession with it has become.”

He sighed. There was a sadness about him even in his brightest moments when he’d been talking of Lestat and Lestat’s ebullience and refusal to accept defeat. He’d smiled then and it had been rare sunshine, that smile. But his charm was obviously wrapped up in melancholy and unshakable gloom.

Viktor came forward and for the first time in an hour took a chair between them. Faint scent of that Acqua di Giò that was now all over her pillow and her sheets, and all over her dreams.