Vampire Chronicles 3: The Queen of the Damned

I was plotting the course firmly with one tiny part of my mind, the way she’d taught me to do it; and I was also remembering so many things; the first time, for example, that I’d ever seen him in a tavern in New Orleans.

The first thing I’d ever noticed about him—well, after his green eyes, that is—was his black hair. No, all that’s a lie. It was his expression; the passion and the innocence and the delicacy of conscience. I just loved it!

I did not want to be here. It was haunted; but real hauntings have nothing to do with ghosts finally; they have to do with the menace of memory;

Claudia. A face for a locket; or a small oval portrait done on porcelain and kept with a curl of her golden hair in a drawer. But how she would have hated such an image, such an unkind image.

I looked up at the balcony with its wrought-iron railings; I could picture Claudia there, on tiptoe, looking down at me, little fingers knotted on the rail.

In your isolation you dreamed dreams as thousands of mortals have done, protected from all scrutiny or challenge; and you emerge from your silence, ready to make these dreams real for the world? You bring them here to this table, among a handful of your fellow creatures, and they crumble. You cannot defend them. How could anyone defend them?

Don’t you realize the gift I offer you? I would save you! And what are you if I don’t do this thing! A blood drinker, a killer!

“Yes, and the cries of the dying, I too have heard them; we have all heard them, through all the decades; and even now, the world is shocked by daily reports of armed conflict. But it is the outcry against these horrors which is the light I speak of; it’s the attitudes which were never possible in the past.

Surely he realized that she was lying. I realized it. She loved him and it humiliated her, and so she sought to hurt him. And she had.

I don’t think you can hold in your mind the full conception of what the world is. None of us can; it is too varied, too immense; we seek to embrace it with our reason; but we can’t do it. You know a world; but it is not the world; it is the world you have selected from a dozen other worlds for reasons within yourself.”