He drove his fangs right into the arterial stream. How ever translate for a mortal world the heat and purity of this simple feast? Salt and blood, and dark shiny brittle fantasies of victories, all flowing into him and out of the victim with the last protest of his dying heart.

It was finished. The man lay dead among the lilies. Louis stood wondrously satisfied and reanimated, the night opening up above him through luminous clouds. And the music inside the house began again.

Flushed with blood, flushed with the old deceptive but seductive sense of illimitable power, he thought of Lestat across the sea. What charms would his great castle hold, and what manner of court would convene there in chambers of stone that Louis so longed to see? He had to smile when he thought of the easy swagger with which Lestat had fulfilled the tribe’s collective dreams.

The road ahead could not be smooth, and simplicity could never be the goal. The burden of conscience was part of Louis’s human heart and the heart of every blood drinker he had ever known, even Armand. And the struggle for goodness, actual goodness, would and must obsess them all. That was the miracle which now united the tribe.

How wondrous it seemed suddenly that such a struggle could now lay waste with such undeniable power the old dead dualities which had enslaved him for so long.

But he looked down at the man who lay dead at his feet, and a terrible sorrow took hold of him.

Death is the mother of beauty.

It was a line from a poem by Wallace Stevens, and it came to him now with a painful irony. Beauty for me perhaps but not beauty for this one whom I have destroyed.

He knew terror for a moment, terror that might never really leave him no matter how much he came to understand, or to learn. Terror. Terror that this tender young mortal might have lost his soul to utter meaninglessness and annihilation, and that all of them, his blood drinker brothers and sisters, no matter how powerful, how old, how grand, might someday fall victim to the same brutal end.

After all, what ghost or spirit, no matter how eloquent or skilled, could claim that anything of sentience lay beyond the thick mysterious air surrounding this planet? Again he thought of Stevens’s poem.

Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be

The blood of paradise? And shall the earth

Seem all of paradise that we shall know?

His heart was breaking for the young man who lay there dead, eyes closed in the final sleep. The remains were already slowly perishing in the warm rain. His heart broke for all the victims everywhere of blood lust, and war, and accident, and old age, and illness, and unendurable pain.

But his heart broke a little for once for himself too.