Eight children and eight wolves. Is there something there or did Anne just like the number 8?
There is! The wolfkilling sequence involving eight wolves is symbolic of Lestat's seven siblings and his father, a connection made direct with one of the wolves being older and blind, and Lestat's father going blind in his old age. The violence of the attack is an allegory for the violence within the household, but here, Lestat's able to overcome it and defeat the family in a way that he never actually does in reality. The horse - a mare - Lestat rides is symbolically Gabrielle as well, emphasising her othering within the family - a horse among wolves - but also her connection to Lestat. Lestat's mare is mauled by the wolves to the point where she can't survive, and Lestat's forced to mercy-kill her, which prophesises his turning of Gabrielle on her deathbed.
There's some really great meta about it floating around tumblr if you're able to find it!
This is kind of a little bit of an aside, but one of the things that's especially interesting to me with my own literary analysis hat on is that Lestat specifies that Gabrielle has eight children, and that he's the seventh son, but never if he's the youngest of all the children, or the second youngest. In that, either Lestat had an older sister among all the boys, or that there was another son or daughter born after him that passed. On the surface, that probably doesn't really matter - ultimately Lestat's the youngest one to survive, and even as a third, has no inheritance beyond what his eldest brother, Augustin, may allow him - but personally, I think there's a really compelling reading in there of Lestat's positioning of himself in the family when you consider that historically in both literature and Judeo-Christian religion (and before), the number 7 is symbolic of the 'whole' - spiritual perfection and divine completion.
It took God seven days to create the world, and as a result, seven permeates through religious texts - Job had 7 sons, there are 7 seals for the end of the world, 7 deadly sins, 7 heavenly virtues, 7 gifts of the Holy Spirit.
But it also permeates through fairytales and fiction too. In many of the former, seven was considered the perfect number of children, so there are many seven-children families in fairytales and folklore - Tom Thumb, The Seven Young Kids, The Six Swans (being about the seventh child), etc - but also it was considered to be a symbol of good luck, protection, and, again, completeness. You see this most prominently in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but it also builds across fiction, from C.S. Lewis to Tolkien.
Of course, Lestat's place as seventh son among eight children though is in many ways usurped by his position as third, as the last of three surviving children, and the rule of three is an ancient principle of storytelling that Anne definitely utilises and does so frequently. Even in TVL, you have that a lot - the three surviving sons, the family units of Lestat, Gabrielle, Nicki, and Lestat, Louis, Claudia, the three fathers in the Marquis, Magnus, and Marius, Lestat's three deaths (Magnus, burning and burying himself after Nicki + his brothers' deaths [a trio themselves, given Lestat finds out about them at the same time], Claudia and Louis killing him), etc.
The rule of three children though carries different weight in storytelling and in history. If fairytales don't have seven children, they usually have three, often taking on a moral fable structure where the two eldest siblings embody sinful or negative traits (i.e. they're greedy, superficial or neglect their parents), with the youngest traditionally being the virtuous hero of the story, but that's really juxtaposed by the fact that the third child traditionally, historically, has had neither power nor priority. I've talked about this a bit on here before, but traditionally your child order came down to 'the heir and the spare', and the third can vary. I've heard it said 'as then one for mum', which carries particular connotations in Lestat's story given Gabrielle does feel he's hers, but also as an anon said to me once, 'the heir, the spare and the mare' is another common expression, articulating the third child as the one to be married out of the family, which also carries connotations with Lestat's relationship to Gabrielle (especially given she's symbolically the mare he has to kill in the wolfkilling sequence), but also as the one raped into another bloodline via Magnus (as Gabrielle was by the Marquis).
There's no way out of being the third child and the youngest with his living siblings, but the ambiguity in his place among the eight, either as seventh or eighth child is just something I find really interesting? This is obviously a personal reading, but I do tend to read him as the last of Gabrielle's pregnancies, and that playing a role in her dynamic with him, but I wonder if for Lestat, as a character who spent time in his childhood in a monastery, within a deeply religious chapter of history, would hold to being seventh rather than eighth? If for a neglected and isolated child, seven would be sacred because it would be a part of a divine whole and not something extraneous. If it would mean completing the family in a way that could offer any sort of comfort, any way that being eighth could not, a justification for not just his existence, but his eternal survival. The number of perfection, for his ever imperfect self, and maybe he knows that beneath it all, he's not at all, that he's an eighth child, that his place in the family is at its frayed edges, and sometimes when he's angry and wounded, that's a good thing, but when he's lonely and alone and frightened, it just makes him feel like nothing at all.
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