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"Yes. That's The Man, all right, the Being, the male Thing. No, wait, stop, I don't know if it's male; I mean . . . why, I don't know what gender it is . . . it's not distinctly female, let's put it that way, and not being distinctly female, it seems therefore . . . to be male. "
"I understand. "
"You think I've gone mad, don't you? You hope so, don't you?"
"Of course I don't. "
"You ought to," I said. "Because if this being doesn't exist inside my head, if he exists outside, then he can get you too. "
This made him very obviously thoughtful and distant and then he said strange words to me I didn't expect.
"But he doesn't want me, does he? And he doesn't want the others, either. He wants you. "
I was crestfallen. I am proud, I am an egomaniac of a being; I do love attention; I want glory; I want to be wanted by God and the Devil. I want, I want, I want, I want.
"I'm not upbraiding you," he said. "I'm merely suggesting that this thing has not threatened the others. That in all of these hundreds of years, none of the others . . . none that we know has ever spoken of such a thing. Indeed, in your writing, in your books, you've been most explicit that no vampire had ever seen the Devil, have you not?"
I admitted it with a shrug. Louis, my beloved pupil and fledgling, had once crossed the world to find the "eldest" of the vampires, and Armand had stepped forward with open arms to tell him that there was no God or Devil. And I, half a century before that, had made my own journey for the "eldest" and it had been Marius, made in the days of Rome, who had said the very same thing to me. No God. No Devil.
I sat still, conscious of stupid discomforts, that the place was stuffy, that the perfume was not really perfume, that there were no lilies in these rooms, that it was going to be very cold outside, and I couldn't think of rest until dawn forced me to it, and the night was long, and I was not making sense to David, and I might lose him . . . and that Thing might come, that Thing might come again.
"Will you stay near me?" I hated my own words.
"I'll stand at your side, and I'll try to hold on to you if it tries to take you. "
"You will?"
"Yes," he said.
"Why?"
"Don't be foolish," he said. "Look, I don't know what I saw in the cafe. Never again in my life did I ever see anything like that or hear it. You know, I told you my story once. I went to Brazil, I learned the Candomble secrets. The night you . . . you came after me, I tried to summon the spirits. "
"They came. They were too weak to help. "
"Right. But. . . what is my point? My point is simply that I love you, that we're linked in some way that none of the others is linked. Louis worships you. You're some sort of dark god to him, though he pretends to hate you for having made him. Armand envies you and spies on you far more than you might think. "
"I hear Armand and I see him and I ignore him," I said.
"Marius, he hasn't forgiven you for not becoming his pupil, I think you know that, for not becoming his acolyte, for not believing in history as some sort of redemptive coherence. "
"Well put. That is what he believes. Oh, but he's angry with me for much greater things than that, you weren't one of us when I woke the Mother and the Father. You weren't there. But that's another tale. "
"I know all of it. You forget your books. I read your work as soon as you write it, as soon as you let it loose into the mortal world. "
I laughed bitterly. "Maybe the Devil's read my books too," I said.
Again, I loathed being afraid. It made me furious.
"But the point is," he said, "I'll stand with you. " He looked down at the table, drifting, the way he so often had when he was mortal, when I could read his mind yet he could defeat me, consciously locking me out. Now it was simply a barrier. I would never again know what his thoughts felt like.
"I'm hungry," I whispered.
"Hunt. "
I shook my head. "When I'm ready, I'll take the Victim. As soon as Dora leaves New York. Soon as she goes back to her old convent. She knows the bastard's doomed. That's what she will think after I've done it, that one of his many enemies got him, that his evil came back on him, very Biblical, when all the time it was just a species of killer roaming the Savage Garden of the Earth, a vampire, looking for a juicy mortal, and her father had caught my eye, and it's going to be over, just like that. "
"Are you planning to torture this man?"
