Louis sat there, back to the trunk of the tree, a copy of his memoir, Interview with the Vampire, the memoir that had sparked the Vampire Chronicles, open on his lap. He wore his favorite old dark coat, a little threadbare but so comfortable, and his favorite old flannel trousers and a fine white shirt Armand had forced upon him with buttons of pearl and outrageous lace. But Louis had never really minded lace.

Unseasonably warm for September. But he liked it. Liked the dampness in the air, liked the music of the rain, and loved the seamless and never-ending roar of the city, as much a part of it as the great river was a part of New Orleans, the innumerable population around him holding him safe in this tiny walled place that was their garden, where the lilies opened their white throats and powdery yellow tongues to the rain.

On the page, Louis read the words he’d spoken years ago to Daniel Malloy when Daniel had been an eager and enchanted human, listening to Louis so desperately, and his tape recorder had seemed such an exotic novelty, the two together in that bare dusty room on Divisadero Street in San Francisco, unnoticed by the Undead world.

“ ‘I wanted love and goodness in this which is living death. It was impossible from the beginning, because you cannot have love and goodness when you do what you know to be evil, what you know to be wrong.’ ”

With his whole being Louis had believed those words; and they had shaped the blood drinker that he was then, and the blood drinker he remained after for many a year.

And was that dark conviction not still inside him, under the veneer of the resigned and contented creature he appeared to be now?

He didn’t honestly know. He remembered completely how he had spoken then of chasing “phantom goodness” in its human form. He looked down at the page.

“ ‘No one could in any guise convince me of what I myself knew to be true, that I was damned in my own mind and soul.’ ”

What had really changed? He’d learned once more somehow, after Lestat had shattered the Undead realm with his antics and his pronouncements, to live from night to night in a semblance of happiness, and to seek for grace once more in the music of operas, symphonies, and choruses, and in the splendor of paintings old and new, and in the simple miracle of human vitality all around him—with Armand and Benji and Sybelle at his side. He had learned his old theology was useless to him and perhaps always had been, an incurable canker inside him rather than a spark to kindle any kind of hope or faith.