Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis (The Vampire Chronicles #12)

by Anne Rice

“Traitor,” said Amel. “Slut.” I tried to conceal my smile. I just love being called a slut. I don’t know why. I just do. “Have at it, beloved numbskull,” I mumbled without moving my lips.

He broke off as if unsatisfied, and looked into the fire. No wonder we gather around fires because they give us something to look at when we can’t look at one another.

Did they know how little I ever stopped to consider for one split second anything that I had ever done? Likely they did. Likely they knew how I lived my life, riding wave after wave of instinct and emotion, driven by immense greed as well as generosity.

“Think of the great Catholic theologians of the twentieth century,” said Magnus. “They are poets of their own intoxicating belief systems. They swim in an atmosphere of vintage theologies, and weave new and airy systems for themselves wholly detached from the real world, the flesh-and-blood world—.”

I found myself smiling. It was a sad smile, but a smile. I wished somehow I could convey to him, without pride, that all my life I’d been menaced by this and that adversary, all but murdered by those I’d loved, and even almost destroyed by my own despair. I always survived. I really didn’t know what fear was, not as any permanent fixture in my heart. I just didn’t “get” fear. I didn’t “get” caution.

“I’ll see you tomorrow in the City of Light,” said Armand. A beat. “And I am happy for you, that you’re with Louis.” I sighed. I wanted to say we all love one another. We all have to love one another. If you and I and Louis don’t love one another after all we’ve been through, well, then all our powers mean nothing, and our dreams mean nothing, and so we have to love one another. And maybe I did say this silently and he heard it, but I doubted it.

Oh, what a bitter thought—that they’d deliberately endowed him to suffer.