“Don’t choose your allies among my friends!”

“Lestat, if this human comes near me, if I believe that I am in danger from him, I will destroy him. Understand.”

“Of course, I do. He wouldn’t approach you. He’s picked me, and with reason.”

“He’s picked you because you are careless and flamboyant and vain. Oh, I don’t say this to hurt you. Truly I don’t. You long to be seen and approached and understood and to get into mischief, to stir everything up and see if it won’t boil over and if God won’t come down and grab you by the hair. Well, there is no God. You might as well be God.”

“You and David … the same song, the same admonitions, though he claims to have seen God and you don’t believe He exists.”

“David has seen God?” he asked respectfully.

“Not really,” I murmured with a scornful gesture. “But you both scold in the same way. Marius scolds in the same way.”

“Well, of course, you pick the voices that scold you. You always have, in the same manner in which you pick those who will turn on you and stick the knife right into your heart.”

He meant Claudia, but he couldn’t bear to speak her name. I knew I could hurt him if I said it, like flinging a curse in his face. I wanted to say, You had a hand in it! You were there when I made her, and there when she lifted the knife!

“I don’t want to hear any more!” I said. “You’ll sing the song of limitations all your long dreary years on this earth, won’t you? Well, I am not God. And I am not the Devil from hell, though I sometimes pretend to be. I am not the crafty cunning lago. I don’t plot ghastly scenarios of evil. And I can’t quash my curiosity or my spirit. Yes, I want to know if this man can really do it. I want to know what will happen. And I won’t give up.”

“And you’ll sing the song of victory eternally though there is none to be had.”

“Ah, but there is. There must be.”

“No. The more we learn, the more we know there are no victories. Can’t we fall back on nature, do what we must to endure and nothing more?”

“That is the most paltry definition of nature I have ever heard. Take a hard look at it—not in poetry but in the world outside. What do you see in nature? What made the spiders that creep beneath the damp floorboards, what made the moths with their multicolored wings that look like great evil flowers in the dark? The shark in the sea, why does it exist?” I came towards him, planted my hands on his desk and looked into his face. “I was so sure you would understand this. And by the way, I wasn’t born a monster! I was a born a mortal child, the same as you. Stronger than you! More will to live than you! That was cruel of you to say.”