Chapter 27 Trust in You
Animals were to be banked on when all else failed, but never to be chosen. If I felt any sympathy for the women, it was buried deep in my own turmoil. I still felt in my chest the little hammer heart of that starving child; I still burned with the questions of my own divided nature. I was angry that Lestat had staged this show for me, waiting till I woke to kill the women; and I wondered again if I might somehow break loose from him and felt both hatred and my own weakness more than ever.
"Meantime, he propped their lovely corpses at the table and went about the room lighting all the candles until it blazed as if for a wedding. \`Come in, Louis,' he said. \`I would have arranged an escort for you, but I know what a man you are about choosing your own. Pity Mademoiselle Freniere likes to hurl flaming lanterns. It makes a party unwieldy, don't you think? Especially for a hotel?' He seated the blond-haired girl so that her head lay to one side against the damask back of the chair, and the darker woman lay with her chin resting just above her breasts; this one had blanched, and her features had a rigid look to them already, as though she was one of those women in whom the fire of personality makes beauty. But the other looked only as if she slept; and I was not sure that she was even dead. Lestat had made two gashes, one in her throat and one above her left breast, and both still bled freely. He lifted her wrist now, and slitting it with a knife, filled two wine glasses and bade me to sit down.
" \`I'm leaving you,' I said to him at once. \`I wish to tell you that now.'
" \`I thought as much,' he answered, sitting back in the chair, \`and I thought as well that you would make a flowery announcement. Tell me what a monster I am; what a vulgar fiend'
" \`I make no judgments upon you. I'm not interested in you. I am interested in my own nature now, and I've come to believe I can't trust you to tell me the truth about it. You use knowledge for personal power,' I told him. And I suppose, in the manner of many people making such an announcement, I was not looking to him at all. I was mainly listening to my own words. But now I saw that his face was once again the way it had been when he'd said we would talk. He was listening to me. I was suddenly at a loss. I felt that gulf between us as painfully as ever.
" 'Why did you become a vampire?' I blurted out. \`And why such a vampire as you are! Vengeful and delighting in taking human life even when you have no need. This girl . . . why did you kill her when one would have done? And way did you frighten her so before you killed her? And why have you propped her here in some grotesque manner, as if tempting the gods to strike you down for your blasphemy?'
"All this he listened to without speaking, and in the pause that followed I again felt at a loss. Lestat's eyes were large and thoughtful; I'd seen them that way before, but I couldn't remember when, certainly not when talking to me.
" \`What do you think a vampire is?' he asked me sincerely.
" \`I don't pretend to know. You pretend to know. What is it?' I asked. And to this he answered nothing. It was as if he sensed the insincerity of it, the spite. He just sat there looking at me with the same still expression. Then I said, \`I know that after leaving you, I shall try to find out. I'll travel the world, if I have to, to find other vampires. I know they must exist; I don't know of any reasons why they shouldn't exist in great numbers. And I'm confident I shall find vampires who have more in common with me than I with you. Vampires who understand knowledge as I do and
have used their superior vampire nature to learn secrets of which you don't even dream. If you haven't told me everything, I shall find things out for myself or from them, when I find them."
"He shook his head. \`Louis!' he said. \`You are in love with your mortal nature! You chase after the phantoms of your former self. Freniere, his sister . . . these are images for you of what you were and what you still long to be. And in your romance with mortal life, you're dead to your vampir
e nature!'