“You’re not sorry! You’ve never been sorry! Say it. Say the truth! You deserved the knife when I put it through your heart, and you know it, you’ve always known it!”

“No!”

Something in me broke as I stared down at her, at the exquisite face in its frame of fine-spun hair. I lifted her, and rose, placing her in the chair before me and I dropped to my knees at her feet.

“Claudia, listen to me. I didn’t begin it. I didn’t make the world! It was always there, this evil. It was in the shadows, and it caught me, and made me part of it, and I did what I felt I must. Don’t laugh at me, please, don’t turn your head away. I didn’t make evil! I didn’t make myself!”

How perplexed she was, staring at me, watching me, and then her small full mouth spread beautifully in a smile.

“It wasn’t all anguish,” I said, my fingers digging into her little shoulders. “It wasn’t hell. Tell me it wasn’t. Tell me there was happiness. Can devils be happy? Dear God, I don’t understand.”

“You don’t understand, but you always do something, don’t you?”

“Yes, and I’m not sorry. I’m not. I would roar it from the rooftops right up into the dome of heaven. Claudia, I would do it again!” A great sigh passed out of me. I repeated the words, my voice growing louder. “I would do it again!”

Stillness in the room.

Her calm remained unbroken. Was she enraged? Surprised? Impossible to know as I looked into her expressionless eyes.

“Oh you are evil, my father,” she said in a soft voice. “How can you abide it?”

David turned from the window. He stood over her shoulder, looking down at me as I stayed there on my knees.

“I am the ideal of my kind,” I said. “I am the perfect vampire. You are looking at the Vampire Lestat when you look at me. No one outshines this figure you see before you—no one!” Slowly I rose to my feet. “I am not time’s fool, nor a god hardened by the millennia; I am not the trickster in the black cape, nor the sorrowful wanderer. I have a conscience. I know right from wrong. I know what I do, and yes, I do it. I am the Vampire Lestat. That’s your answer. Do with it what you will.”

DAWN. Colorless and bright over the snow. Gretchen slept, cradling me.

SHE didn’t wake when I sat up and reached for the glass of water. Tasteless, but cool.

Then her eyes opened, and she sat up with a start, her dark blond hair tumbling down around her face, dry and clean and full of thin light.

I kissed her warm cheek, and felt her fingers on my neck, and then again across my forehead.

“You brought me through it,” I said, my voice hoarse and shaky. Then I lay back down on the pillow, and I felt the tears once more on my cheeks, and closing my eyes, I whispered, “Good-bye, Claudia,” hoping that Gretchen wouldn’t hear.