of my unclean desire to suck her very soul from her, to make her heart rise in the flesh 
inside her, to drag from her veins every precious particle of her that still wanted to 
survive.
  And she did want to survive. Wrapped in saints, and dreaming suddenly of the breasts 
that nursed her, her young body fought, pumping and pumping against me, she so soft, and 
my own form hard as a statue, my milkless nipples enshrined in marble, no comfort. Let 
her see her mother, dead, gone and now waiting. Let me glimpse through her dying eyes the 
light through which she sped towards this certain salvation.
  Then I forgot about you. I would not be robbed. I slowed the drinking, I let her sigh, 
I let her lungs fill with the cold river air, her mother drawing closer and closer so 
that death now was as safe for her as the womb. I took every drop from her that she could 
give.
  She hung dead against me, as one I'd rescued, one I would help from the bridge, some 
weakened, sickened, drunken girl. I slid my hand into her body, breaking the flesh so 
easily even with these delicate fingers, and I dosed my fingers around her heart and 
brought it to my lips and sucked it, my head tucked down by her face, sucked the heart 
like fruit, until no blood was left in any fiber or chamber, and then slowly - perhaps 
for your benefit - I lifted her and let her fall down into the water she had so desired.
  Now there would be no struggle as her lungs filled with the river. Now there would be 
no last desperate thrashing. I fed from the heart one last time, to take even the color 
of blood out of it, and then sent it after her - crushed grapes - poor child, child of a 
hundred men.
  Then I faced you, let you know that I knew you watched from the quay. I think I tried 
to frighten you. In rage I let you know how weak you were, that all the blood given to 
you by Lestat would make you no match should I choose to dismember you, pitch a fatal 
heat into you and immolate you, or only punish you with penetrating scar - simply for 
having spied upon me.
  Actually I have never done such a thing to a younger one. I feel sorry for them when 
they see us, the ancient ones, and quake in terror. But I should, by all the knowledge of 
myself I possess, have retreated so quickly that you could riot follow me in the night.
  Something in your demeanor charmed me, the manner in which you approached me on the 
bridge, your young Anglo-Indian brown-skinned body gifted by your true mortal age with 
such seductive grace. Your very posture seemed to ask of me, without humiliation:
  "Pandora, may we speak?"
  My mind wandered. Perhaps you knew it. I don't remember whether I shut you out of my 
thoughts, and I know that your telepathic abilities are not really very strong. My mind 
wandered suddenly, perhaps of itself, perhaps at your prodding. I thought of all the 
things I could tell you, which were so different from the tales of Lestat, and those of 
Marius through Lestat, and I wanted to warn you, warn you of the ancient vampires of the 
Far East who would kill you if you went into their territory, simply because you were 
there.
  I wanted to make certain you understood what we all had to accept - the Fount of our 
immortal vampiric hunger did reside in two beings - Mekare and Maharet - so ancient they 
are now both horrible to look upon, more than beautiful. And if they destroy themselves 
we will all die with them.
  I wanted to tell you of others who have never known us as a tribe or known our history, 
who survived the terrible fire brought down on her children by our Mother Akasha. I 
wanted to tell you that there were things walking the Earth that look like us but are not 
of our breed any more than they are human. And I wanted suddenly to take you under my 
wing.
  It must have been your prodding. You stood there, the English gentleman, wearing your 
decorum more lightly and naturally than any man I'd ever seen. I marveled at your fine 
clothes that you'd indulged yourself in a light black cloak of worsted wool, that you had 
even given yourself the luxury of a gleaming red silk scarf - so unlike you when you were 
newly made.
  Understand, I was not aware the night that Lestat transformed you into a vampire. I 
didn't feel that moment.
  All the preternatural world shimmered weeks earlier, however, with the knowledge that a 
mortal had jumped into the body of another mortal; we know these things, as if the stars 
tell us. One preter natural mind picks up the ripples of this sharp cut in the fabric of 
the ordinary, then another mind receives the image, and on and on it goes.
  David Talbot, the name we all knew from the venerable order of psychic detectives, the 
Talamasca, had managed to move his entire soul and etheric body - into that of another 
man. That body itself was in the possession of a body thief whom you forced from it. And 
once anchored in the young - body, you, with all your scruples and values, all your 
knowledge of seventy-four years, remained an chored in the young cells.
  And so it was David the Reborn, David with the high-gloss India beauty, and raw 
well-nourished strength of British lineage, that Lestat had made into a vampire, bringing 
over both body and soul, compounding miracle with the Dark Trick, achieving once more a 
sin that should stun his contemporaries and his elders. And this, this was done to you by 
your best friend!
  Welcome to the darkness, David. Welcome to the domain of Shakespeare's "inconstant 
moon."
  Bravely you came up the bridge towards me.
  "Forgive me, Pandora," you said so quietly. Flawless British upper-class accent, and 
the usual beguiling British rhythm that is so seductive it seems to say that "we will all 
save the world."
  You kept a polite distance between us, as if I were a virgin girl of the last century, 
and you didn't want to alarm me and my tender sensibilities. I smiled.
  I indulged myself then. I took your full measure, this fledgling that Lestat - against 
Marius's injunction - had dared to make. I saw the components of you as a man: an immense 
human soul, fearless, yet half in love with despair, and a body which Lestat had almost 
injured himself to render powerful. He had given you more blood than he could easily give 
in your transformation. He had tried to give you his courage, his cleverness, his 
cunning; he had tried to transport an armory for you through the blood.
  He had done well. Your strength was complex and obvious. Our Queen Mother Akasha's 
blood was mixed with that of Lestat. Marius, my ancient lover, had given him blood as 
well. Lestat, ah, now what do they say, they say that he may even have drunk the blood of 
the Christ.
  It was this first issue I took up with you, my curiosity overwhelming me, for to scan 
the world for knowledge is often to rake in such tragedy that I abhor it.
  "Tell me the truth of it," I said. "This story Memnoch the Devil. Lestat claimed he 
went to Heaven and to Hell. He brought back a veil from St. Veronica. The face of Christ 
was on it! It converted thousands to Christianity, it cured alienation and succored 
bitterness. It drove other Children of Darkness to :throw up their arms to the deadly 
morning light, as if the sun were in fact the fire of God."
  "Yes, it's all happened, as I described it," you said, lowering your head with a polite 
but unexaggerated modesty. "And you know a few... of us perished in this fervor, whilst 
newspapers and scientists collected our ashes for examination."
  I marveled at your calm attitude. A Twentieth-Century sensibility. A mind dominated by