Do devils love each other?

"I have no gift for being miserable," I said. "I know," he said. He laughed. Such a human face. Such a lovely face. There must surely have been twice as many blood drinkers now in this ballroom as there had ever been, and I sensed that I had ought to stop having such a marvelous time and return to greeting newcomers as the Prince should. But not before holding Louis for a moment, and then kissing him and telling him low in French that I loved him and always had.

Of course Louis released Rose and then he bowed just as if he were at a ball in old New Orleans after the opera. I came up beside him and took his hand. "What are you doing?" he asked. "Dancing with you," I said. I turned him easily this way and that to the music. I could see he found this immediately awkward, to be dancing with me as a woman might dance with a man, and then something playful and vibrant came into his eyes. He gave himself up to it. I turned us around fast twice and then three times, and we broke the pattern and then my arm slipped around his waist and I danced beside him, in step with him, like the Greek men do it. "Do you like this better?" I asked. "I don't know," he said. He appeared brimming with happiness. But I was the one truly brimming with happiness. The music seemed to move us as if we were powerless, borne along exquisitely, and then we faced each other again and we were simply dancing in a loose, comfortable embrace, intimate, making one body and then two bodies, and one body again. All around us were dancers, dancers pressing in so that at last we were dancing without really moving our feet. But what did it matter? One can dance that way. One can dance a thousand ways.

A thought occured to me. I stood and moved out among the dancers. I looked for Louis, and I found him almost at once.

There followed Fontayne in his old-fashioned frock coat, lace studded with pearls, his lean face bright as if illuminated from within, and Louis, my handsome Louis, in dark wool and old-fashioned high-collared linen, gazing down on us with a look of thinly veiled amusement, but with a secret in his hypnotic green eyes.

I realized suddenly and silently that Louis was regarding me the way the others did, that he was actually looking at me with a mixture of awe and wonder. "Good Lord, don't tell me you are starting to believe all this!" I said. A shadow of disappointment fell over his face. He implored me as he spoke: "You mean to tell me that you don't believe it?"

But how could I explain this to Gabrielle and Louis, Louis who had confessed long years ago that the taking of human life was his unequivocal definition of evil? Louis who was hungry now and pale, and had asked me more than once if I'd come with him to Paris, Paris where he might hunt in the early hours, alone with only me at his side, hunt for something neither of us every really found.

And now he had taken my Louis, my helpless Louis. Penetrated our most fortified refuge, and taken Louis away.

When I was finally led down the stairs, Louis came with me. In the darkened passage before my resting place, he embraced me and held tight to me, his lips pressed to my ear. I was aware of my hands moving over his hair, embracing his neck, drawing him ever closer, in a way I had never done in our long years in New Orleans. We joined in the posture of lovers, brothers, fathers with sons.  "I love you with my whole soul, and I will always love you", he confided to me. "You are my life. I have hated you for that and love you now so much that you've been my instructor in loving. And believe me when I say you will survive because you always have and you always will." I couldn't answer. I knew I loved him more than words could say, but I couldn't respond.

Louis continued to feel that he was out of place at these meetings, but I wouldn't hear of such an idea. He took the chair to my right as always.

I put my arm around him and we moved through the various deserted salons making our way to the Council Chamber. "What happened was not Marius's fault," Louis said. There was a pained expression on is usually serene face and a slight tremor to his lip. "Arjun attacked Marius," he said. His voice was a near whisper again, but I realized that it was what Louis did, lower his voice the more emotional he became.

A passage came to me suddenly from Tolstoy, something that Louis had read to me, something that Prince Andrei Bolkonsky was thinking as he lay close to death. Something about love, love making everything possible, and then Louis's strange comment that Tolstoy's first two great novels were studies of happiness.

I don't think I'd ever encountered a blood drinker with quite this background. And there was a great deal I wanted to tell him about Louis suddenly, Louis who was immersed in the novels of Tolstoy, and had myriad questions about them which no one cared to answer, and how much Louis would love him right off.

Well, Louis and I have been reunited a number of times, and this time around, at the Court in France, our reunion is enduring.

And it was Louis's outrageous lies about me, intentional and unintentional (some people should not be granted a poetic license), that prompted me to write my own autobiography and tell the secrets of Marius to the whole world.

Louis de Pointe du Lac was a landowner in French colonial Louisiana when I gave im the Dark Blood sometime before the close of the eighteenth century. A little while after that, largely to bind him to me, as I loved him very much, I brought a child vampire into our family, and the three of us lived together in relative peace for sixty years in the old French part of New Orleans.

"Lestat, sit down again, please," said Louis. "Don't you see the point? It isn't merely their considerable age and power. It isn't merely their resources. It's who they truly are. They know of us, they can resolve to interfere with us. They can resolve to cause us great harm wherever we might go, anywhere in this world." "You're dreaming, handsome friend," Lestat said.