I moved closer to him, when suddenly he grasped my hand, and I felt him gently push me away.

“Why, David?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer. He lifted his right hand and brushed my hair back out of my eyes.

“I don’t know,” he whispered. “I can’t. I simply can’t.”

He got up gracefully, and went outside into the night.

I was too furious with pure stymied passion to do anything for a moment. Then I followed him out. He had gone down on the sand a ways and he stood there alone, as I had done before.

I came up behind him.

“Tell me, please, why not?”

“I don’t know,” he said again. “I only know I can’t. I want to. Believe me, I do. But I can’t. My past is … so close to me.” He let out a long sigh, and for a while was silent again. Then he went on. “My memories of those days are so clear. It’s as if I’m in India again, or Rio. Ah, yes, Rio. It’s as if I am that young man again.”

I knew I was to blame for this. I knew it, and that it was useless to say apologetic words. I also sensed something else. I was an evil being, and even when I was in this body, David could sense that evil. He could sense the powerful vampiric greed. It was an old evil, brooding and terrible. Gretchen hadn’t sensed it. I had deceived her with this warm and smiling body. But when David looked at me, he saw that blond blue-eyed demon whom he knew very well.

I said nothing. I merely looked out over the sea. Give me back my body. Let me be that devil, I thought. Take me away from this paltry brand of desire and this weakness. Take me back into the dark heavens where I belong. And it seemed suddenly that my loneliness and my misery were as terrible as they had ever been before this experiment, before this little sojourn into more vulnerable flesh. Yes, let me be outside it again, please. Let me be a watcher. How could I have been such a fool?

I heard David say something to me, but I didn’t really catch the words. I looked up slowly, pulling myself out of my thoughts, and I saw that he had turned to face me, and I realized that his hand was resting gently on my neck. I wanted to say something angry—Take your hand away, don’t torment me—but I didn’t speak.

“No, you’re not evil, that’s not it,” he whispered. “It’s me, don’t you understand. It’s my fear! You don’t know what this adventure has meant to me! To be here again in this part of the great world—and with you! I love you. I love you desperately and insanely, I love the soul inside you, and don’t you see, it’s not evil. It’s not greedy. But it’s immense. It overpowers even this youthful body because it is your soul, fierce and indomitable and outside time—the soul of the true Lestat. I can’t give in to it. I can’t … do it. I’ll lose myself forever if I do it, as surely as if … as if … ”