This made my heart both glad and anguished. And I let the memories come back to me of my battles with Armand and his followers who believed so fervently we were anointed servants of the Devil. Such superstition. Such rot.

Eventually some of the paparazzi vampires found us. They were persistent. But they kept their distance. We didn’t have much time.

Pain, pain, and more pain.

No trace remained of the old Théâtre des Vampires or where it had once stood. Of course I’d known that but had to visit the old geography anyway, confirm that the old filthy world of my time had been paved over.

Armand’s magnificent nineteenth-century house—which he’d built in Saint-Germaine-de-Prés—was shut up and maintained by unwitting mortals, full of murals, carpets, and antique furniture covered in white sheets.

He’d refurbished that house for Louis right before the dawn of the twentieth century, but I don’t think Louis had ever been at home in it. In Interview with the Vampire he did not so much as even mention it. The fin de siècle with its glorious painters, actors, and composers had meant nothing to Louis, for all his pretensions to sensitivity. Ah, but I couldn’t blame Louis for shunning Paris. He’d lost his beloved Claudia—our beloved Claudia—in Paris. How could he be expected ever to forget that? And he’d known Armand was a jungle wildcat among revenants, hadn’t he?

Still … Paris … I’d suffered here too, had I not? But not at the hands of Paris, no. Paris had always fulfilled my dreams and expectations. Paris, my eternal city, my home.

Ah, but Notre Dame, the great vast cathedral of Notre Dame was as always Notre Dame, and there we spent hours together, safe in the cold shadows in that great forest grove of arches and columns where I’d come more than two hundred years ago to weep over my transformation, and was in some way weeping over it even now.

David and I walked the narrow quiet streets of the Île Saint-Louis talking together. The fledgling paparazzi were within blocks of us but dared not come closer. The grand townhouse in which I’d made my mother, Gabrielle, into a Child of Darkness was still there.

Gradually we fell to talking again, naturally. I asked David how he had come to know Fareed.

“I sought out Fareed,” David said. “I’d heard plenty of whispers of this mad vampire scientist and his ancient guardian angel, and their ‘evil’ experiments, you know, the gossip of the misbegotten. So I went to the West Coast and looked for him till I found him.”