The Vampire Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles, #2)

by Anne Rice

For the first time in history, perhaps, they were as strong and as interesting as men.

I had to find Louis. I had to talk to him. In fact, after reading his account of things, I ached for him, ached for his romantic illusions, and even his dishonesty. I ached even for his gentlemanly malice and his physical presence, the deceptively soft sound of his voice. Of course I hated him for the lies he told about me.

But that other lovely possibility of real revelation and disaster … Well, that added a hell of a lot of spice!

he is so diva

And in some vague way, I hated the fact that only extreme pain in me could ever wring from her the slightest warmth or interest. Yet she’d been my savior. And there was no one but her.

“Cried over the witches?” I looked at him blankly for a moment. But it stirred something painful, something humiliating. Too many of my memories had that quality. And now I had to remember crying over witches. “I don’t remember,” I said.

He reached out and put his arm around my neck and kissed me. We almost upset the table we were so blissfully drunk. “My lord, the wolfkiller,” he whispered.

“We’re going to die and not even know. We’ll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won’t any longer be witnesses to it. We won’t have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We’ll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing!”

“The wine of all wines,” he breathed. “This is my Body, this is my Blood.” And then his arms surrounded me. They drew me to him and I felt a great warmth emanating from him, and he seemed to be filled not with blood but with love for me. “Ask for it, Wolfkiller, and you will live forever,” he said, but his voice sounded weary and spiritless, and there was something distant and tragic in his gaze.

On the contrary, if I was a damned thing, then let the son of a bitch come for me! Let him tell me why I was meant to suffer. I would truly like to know.

This can still happen to me fairly easily. No loss, no pain, no deepening understanding of my predicament changes it. Something strikes me as funny. I begin to laugh and I can’t stop. It makes other vampires furious, by the way. But I jump ahead of the tale.

In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art—the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard’s canvases—beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.

Every particle in me said, “Take him, spirit him out of this place and away from it and feed on him and feed on him … until …” Until what! Until he’s dead!

love him so much gotta drink him

I just clung to the rafter and I saw in one great recollection all my victims, the scum of Paris, scraped up from its gutters, and I knew the madness of the course I’d chosen, and the lie of it, and what I really was. What a sublime idiocy that I had dragged that paltry morality with me, striking down the damned ones only—seeking to be saved in spite of it all? What had I thought I was, a righteous partner to the judges and executioners of Paris who strike down the poor for crimes that the rich commit every day?

Strong wine I’d had, in chipped and broken vessels, and now the priest was standing before me at the foot of the altar with the golden chalice in his hands, and the wine inside it was the Blood of the Lamb.

No one was safe from me now, no matter how innocent. And that included my dear friends at Renaud’s and it included my beloved Nick.

think we both found it simpler than we had imagined it would be. Yet he was clearly startled when he saw us at his side. And in the very act of being startled, he gave me a glimpse of his great weakness, pride. He was humiliated that we had crept up on him, moving so lightly and managing at the same time to conceal our thoughts.

What a gay and interesting little get-together this was going to be!

“The power of Satan will blast you into hell,” the boy bellowed, gathering all his remaining strength. “You keep saying that!” I said. “And it keeps not happening, as we can all see!”

Ah, sad lost child, roaming the catacombs beneath a great city and an incomprehensible century. Maybe your mortal form is more fitting than I supposed.

lol get fucked armand

“With the passage of time he comes to know mortals as they may never know each other,” she continued, undaunted, her eyebrows rising, “and finally there comes the moment when he cannot bear to take life, or bear to make suffering, and nothing but madness or his own death will ease his pain. That is the fate of the old ones which Magnus described to me, Magnus who suffered all afflictions in the end.”

I tried to see him in the shadows of the room, and not it—the love for him, the aching, wrenching months of longing for him, the hideous and unshakable human need for him, the lust.

they’re just friends

I only looked at her and thought how glorious it had been to see the Dark Trick work its magic in her, to see it restore her youthful beauty, render her again the goddess she’d been to me when I was a little child. To see Nicki change had been to see him die.

I was feeling more fear of him at this moment than ever during the earlier battles and arguments, and I hate those who make me feel fear, those who know things that I need to know, who have that power over me.

Yet never had Nicolas, mortal or immortal, been so alluring. Never had Gabrielle held me so in thrall. Dear God, this is love. This is desire. And all my past amours have been but the shadow of this. And it seemed in a murmuring pulse of thought he gave me to know that I had been very foolish to think it would not be so.

armand is so diva

“What can I do to make you love me?” he whispered. “What can I give? The knowledge of all I have witnessed, the secrets of our powers, the mystery of what I am?”

“So the time will come when you will seek other mortals,” he went on, “hoping once more that the Dark Trick will bring you the love you crave. And of these newly mutilated and unpredictable children you’ll try to fashion your citadels against time. Well, they will be prisons if they last for half a century. I warn you. It is only with those as powerful and wise as yourself that the true citadel against time can be built.”

That all things of the world are vanity, and thou shalt never use thy Dark Powers for any mortal vanity, not to paint, not to create music, not to dance, nor to recite for the amusement of mortals but only and forever in the service of Satan, thy Dark Powers to seduce and to terrify and to destroy, only to destroy …”

Injury, burning—these catastrophes, if they do not destroy the Child of Satan will only increase his powers when he is healed.

Yet Satan guards the flock from the power of old ones, for almost all, without exception, go mad.

ah… daniel

That’s why I think of Marius. Marius I understand. You I don’t understand.” Why? Silence. Didn’t he deserve the truth? “I’ve been a rebel always,” I said. “You’ve been the slave of everything that ever claimed you.”

Or write letters to a mortal family left behind?

i still have no idea why lestat insists on writing his brothers when they all hated each other so much

The first man who made laws—be he Moses or some ancient Egyptian king Osiris—

excuse me that would be hammurabi

“You sense my loneliness,” I answered, “my bitterness at being shut out of life. My bitterness that I’m evil, that I don’t deserve to be loved and yet I need love hungrily. My horror that I can never reveal myself to mortals. But these things don’t stop me, Mother. I’m too strong for them to stop me. As you said yourself once, I am very good at being what I am. These things merely now and then make me suffer, that’s all.”

You came of age without faith, and yet you aren’t cynical. And so it was with me. We sprang up from a crack between faith and despair, as it were.”

“Ooooh, you have to tell me all of it! You have to explain everything!” I said.

never change, lestat

“How on earth did this happen, I thought suddenly, that I’m a god, full of human blood, and running from thousands of Keltic barbarians through this damned woods!

‘And you are saying,’ I asked, ‘that this is what caused the others to burn up? That the Father and Mother were left out in the sun?’ “He nodded. “ ‘Our blood comes from them!’ he said. ‘It is their blood. The line is direct, and what befalls them befalls us. If they are burnt, we are burnt.’ “ ‘We are connected to them!’ I whispered in amazement.

oooooooo, interesting

“Quietly and slowly, she stepped on the back of his right knee, crushing it flat beneath her foot, the blood squirting from under her heel.

badass

And with the next step she crushed his pelvis just as flat while he roared like a dumb beast, the blood gushing from his mangled parts. Then came her next step down upon his shoulder and the next upon his head, which exploded beneath her weight as if it had been an acorn.

…BADASS

“Is it absolutely impossible now?” I asked. “Marius, can’t you spare me this lifetime?”

Even in his crudest moments, Louis touched the tenderness in me, seducing me with his staggering dependence, his infatuation with my every gesture and every spoken word.

And in a real way, Louis was always the sum of his flaws, the most beguilingly human fiend I have ever known.

But why was it that for purely selfish reasons, I didn’t listen to some of the advice given me? Why didn’t I learn from any of them—Gabrielle, Armand, Marius? But then, I never have listened to anyone, really. Somehow or other, I never can.

And I cannot say even now that I regret Claudia, that I wish I had never seen her, nor held her, nor whispered secrets to her, nor heard her laughter echoing through the shadowy gaslighted rooms of that all too human town house in which we moved amid the lacquered furniture and the darkening oil paintings and the brass flowerpots as living beings should. Claudia was my dark child, my love, evil of my evil. Claudia broke my heart.

She enticed me, she trapped me, and she plunged a knife over and over again into my drugged and poisoned body, until almost every drop of the vampiric blood gushed out of me before my wounds had the precious few seconds in which to heal. I don’t blame her. It was the sort of thing I might have done myself.

If there was not meaning, at least there was the luster of congruence, the stunning repetition of the same old theme.

“One thing, Louis,” I said. “Yes?” “Those clothes. Impossible. I mean, tomorrow night, as they say in the twentieth century, you will lose that sweater and those pants.”