No, give me back my preternatural vision, I thought. Give me back the dark beauty of the world by night. Give me back my unnatural strength and endurance, and I shall cheerfully sacrifice this spectacle forever. The Vampire Lestat—c’est moi.

Stopping at the hotel desk, David left word that we would be in the coffee shop, and any fax material which came in must be brought to us at once.

Then we settled at a quiet white-draped table in the corner of the vast old-fashioned room with its fancy plaster ceiling and white silk draperies, and commenced to devour an enormous New Orleans breakfast of eggs, biscuits, fried meats, gravy, and thick buttery grits.

I had to confess that the food situation had improved with the journey south. Also I was better at eating now, and wasn’t choking so much, or scraping my tongue on my own teeth. The thick syrupy coffee of my home city was past perfection. And the dessert of broiled bananas and sugar was enough to bring any sensible human being to his knees.

But in spite of these tantalizing delights, and my desperate hope that we would soon have a report from London, my main concern was that of pouring out for David the entire woeful tale. Again, and again, he pushed for details, and interrupted me with questions, so it became in fact a far more thorough account than I had ever given Louis, and one that wrung from me considerably more pain.

It was agony to relive my naive conversation with James in the town house, to confess that I had not cared sufficiently to be suspicious of him, that I’d been too satisfied that a mere mortal could never trick me.

And then came the shameful rape, the poignant account of my time with Gretchen, the awful nightmares of Claudia, and the parting from Gretchen to come home to Louis, who misunderstood all that I laid before him, and insisted upon his own interpretation of my words as he refused to give me what I sought.

No small part of the pain was that my anger had left me, and I felt only the old crushing grief. I saw Louis again in my mind’s eye, and he was not my tender, embraceable lover any longer, so much as an unfeeling angel who had barred me from the Dark Court.

“I understand why he refused,” I said dully, barely able to speak about it. “Perhaps I should have known. And very truly, I can’t believe he will hold out against me forever. He’s simply carried away with this sublime idea of his that I ought to go save my soul. It’s what he would do, you see. And yet, in a way, he himself would never do it. And he’s never understood me. Never. That’s why he described me so vividly yet poorly in his book over and over again. If I am trapped in this body, if it becomes quite plain to him that I don’t intend to go off into the jungles of French Guiana with Gretchen, I think he will give in to me eventually. Even though I did burn his house. It might take years, of course! Years in this miserable—”