Chapter 30 Its ok to love
\`You'll let me go. I have to go to the priest. You'll let me go.' " \`But my friend is a priest,' said Lestat, smiling. As if he'd just thought of it as a joke. \`This is your funeral, dear. You see, you were at a dinner party and you died. But God has given you another chance to be absolved.
Don't you see? Tell him your sins'
"She shook her head at first, and then she looked at me again with those pleading eyes. \`Is it true?' she whispered. \`Well,' said Lestat, \`I suppose you're not contrite, dear. I shall have to shut the lid!'
" \`Stop this, Lestat!' I shouted at him. The girl was screaming again, and I could not stand the sight of it any longer. I bent down to her and took her hand. \`I can't remember my sins,' she said, just as I was looking at her wrist, resolved to kill her.
\`You mustn't try. Tell God only that you are sorry,' I said, \`and then you'll die and it will be over.' She lay back, and her eyes shut. I sank my teeth into her wrist and began to suck her dry. She stirred once as if dreaming and said a name; and then, when I felt her heartbeat reach that hypnotic slowness, I drew back from her, dizzy, confused for the moment, my hands reaching for the door frame. I saw her as if in a dream. The candles glared in the corner of my eye. I saw her lying utterly still. And Lestat sat composed beside her, like a mourner. Ibis face was still. \`Louis,' he said to me. \`Don't you understand? Peace will only come to you when you can do this every night of your life. There is nothing else. But this is everything!' Isis voice was almost tender as he spoke, and he rose and put both his hands on my shoulders. I walked into the
parlor, shying away from his touch but not resolute enough to push him off. \`Come with me, out into the streets. It's late. You haven't drunk enough. Let me show you what you are. Really! Forgive me if I bungled it, left too much to nature. Come!'
" \`I can't bear it, Lestat,' I said to him. \`You chose your companion badly.' " \`But Luis,' he said, \`you haven't tried!.'
The vampire stopped. He was studying the boy. And the boy, astonished, said nothing.
"It was true what he'd said. I had not drunk enough; and shaken by the girl's fear, I let him lead me out of the hotel, down the back stairs. People were coming now from the Conde Street ballroom, and the narrow street was jammed. There were supper parties in the hotels, and the planter families were lodged in town in great numbers and we passed through them like a nightmare. My agony was unbearable. Never since I was a human being had I felt such mental pain. It was because all of Lestat's words had made sense to me. I knew peace only when I killed, only for that minute; and there was no question in my mind that the killing of anything less than a human being brought nothing but a vague longing, the discontent which had brought me close to humans, to watch their lives through glass. I was no vampire. And in my pain, I asked irrationally, like a child, Could I not return? Could I not be human again? Even as the blood of that girl was warm in me and I felt that physical thrill and strength, I asked that question. The faces of humans passed me like candle flames in the night dancing on dark waves. I was sinking into the darkness. I was weary of longing.
I can't bear it.
"Suddenly there was one of those arresting moments. The street was utterly quiet. We had strayed far from the main part of the old town and were near the ramparts. There were no lights, only the fire in a window and the far-off sound of people laughing. But no one here. No one near us. I could feel the breeze suddenly from the river and the hot air of the night rising and Lestat near me, so still he might have been made of stone. Over the long, low row of pointed roofs were the massive shapes of oak trees in the dark, great swaying forms of myriad sounds under the lowhung stars. The pain for the moment was gone; the confusion was gone. I closed my eyes and heard the wind and the sound of water flowing softly, swiftly in the river. It was enough, for one moment. And I knew that it would not endure, that it would fly away from me like something torn out of my arms, and I would By after it, more desperately lonely than any creature under God, to get it back. And then a voice beside e rumbled deep in the sound of the night, a drumbeat as the moment ended, saying, \`Do what it is your nature to do. This is but a taste of it. Do what it is your nature to do.' And the moment was gone. I stood like the girl in the parlor in the hotel, dazed and ready for the slightest suggestion. I was nodding at Lestat as he nodded at me. \`Pain is terrible for you,' he said. \`You feel it like no other creature because you are a vampire. You don't want it to go on.'
" \`No,' I answered him. \`I'll feel as I felt with her, wed to her and weightless, caught as if by a dance.'
" \`That and more.' His hand tightened on mine. \`Don't turn away from it, come with me.'
"He led me quickly through the street, turning every time I hesitated, his hand out for mine, a smile on his lips, his presence as marvelous to me as the night he'd come in my mortal life and told me we would be vampires. \`Evil is a point of view,' he whispered now. ' We are immortal. And what we have before us are the rich feasts
that conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without regret. God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingd
oms.