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“Why do people want me to do something about all this?” I asked. “I don’t know what to do?” “You’re a star in our world,” he said. “You made yourself that. And before you say anything rash or angry, remember. That’s what you wanted to be.”
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.
Like many a blood drinker, his morals had been forged in the crucible of his human experience, and they would not give way now to the blandishments of the Blood.
Lestat was known for having a temper almost as extreme as his sense of humor.
And all I’d been before this night was gone, absolutely gone. The world I’d only inhabited a short time ago seemed bleak and empty and over now.
He’d explained with great authority that she had ruined nothing, that life was in charge of life, that pain was everywhere, that it was as much a part of the process of life as birth and death. “But joy, the joy you’ve known, the love you’ve known, that is what matters, and we, the conscious ones, the ones who can grieve, only we can know joy.”
My mother, halfway down the table away from me on the left, started laughing. It was soft laughing but it made me positively furious.
Deep in my mind a thought did flash for a moment that one who commands must of necessity be wildly imperfect, boldly pragmatic, capable of compromises impossible for the truly wise and the truly good.
Armand spoke up now, not bothering to stand or raise his own voice, but merely addressing the group in a way that forced them to focus more attentively on him. Excellent trick of those who whisper so you must move forward to hear them.
And then I held up my hands for silence. I fully expected to be ignored, but the exact opposite happened.
We cannot keep talking about him as if he were a cheap villain who’s broken into our existence simply to inconvenience us and frighten us and bully us and demand things from us. He’s the fount of our very life.” I leaned forward and rested my hands on the table. “So he kills,” I said. “We kill. So he slaughters mercilessly. Who here of my age or older has not done the same? This entity, this being, is at the root of what we are.
“I assure you, I’m neither despotic nor obsessively interested in the conduct of blood drinkers. Like many a being who rises to power, I rise not because I want power, but because I don’t intend to be governed by anyone else.”
Rhosh raised his eyebrows in the most bitter ironical expression, and perhaps this was far more indicative of his true heart than that cavalier dismissive expression that kept competing with it as he continued to look at his severed parts.
“Or is that not something you’ve dreamed up, Lestat? You are such a romantic at heart. Oh, I know you fancy yourself hard-boiled and practical by nature. But you’re a romantic. You always have been.
He looked cool and collected and charming as if he’d never hacked anyone to death or kidnapped anyone, or threatened to kill my son if he didn’t get his way.
he saw that dark and lustrous age with its decayed beliefs and doomed rebellions as only a beginning—a vast and fertile kindergarten in which the terms of his struggle had not been without value but were now most certainly the phantoms of a past from which he had, in spite of himself, exorably emerged.
