My soul hurt.
  
  Up the stairs. Lie for a little while in this brick convent where the child's clothes 
were found. Lie with the child, murdered here in this convent, so say the rumormongers, 
the vampires who haunt these halls now, who have come to see the great Vampire Lestat in 
his Endymion-like sleep.
  
  I felt no murder here, only the tender voices of nuns.
  
  I went up the staircase, letting my body find its human weight and human tread.
  
  After five hundred years, I know such tricks. I could frighten all the young ones-the 
hangers-on and the gawkers-just as surely as the other ancient ones did it, even the most 
modest, uttering words to evince their telepathy, or vanishing when they chose to leave, 
or now and then even making the building tremble with their power-an interesting 
accomplishment even with these walls eighteen inches thick with cypress sills that will 
never rot.
  
  He must like the fragrances here, I thought. Marius, where is he? Before I had visited 
Lestat, I had not wanted to talk very much to Marius, and had spoken only a few civil 
words when I left my treasures in his charge.
  
  After all, I had brought my children into a menagerie of the Undead. Who better to 
safeguard them than my beloved Marius, so powerful that none here dared question his 
smallest request.
  
  There is no telepathic link between us naturally-Marius made me, I am forever his 
fledgling-but as soon as this occurred to me, I realized without the aid of this 
telepathic link that I could not feel the presence of Marius in the building. I didn't 
know what had happened in that brief interval when I knelt down to look at Lestat. I 
didn't know where Marius was. I couldn't catch the familiar human scents of Benji or 
Sybelle. A little stab of panic paralyzed me.
  
  I stood on the second story of the building. I leaned against the wall, my eyes 
settling with determined calm on the deeply varnished heart pine floor. The light made 
pools of yellow on the boards.
  
  Where were they, Benji and Sybelle? What had I done in bringing them here, two ripe and 
glorious humans? Benji was a spirited boy of twelve, Sybelle, a womanling of twenty-five. 
What if Marius, so generous in his own soul, had carelessly let them out of his sight?
  
  "I'm here, young one." The voice was abrupt, soft, welcome.
  
  My Maker stood on the landing just below me, having come up the steps behind me, or 
more truly, with his powers, having placed himself there, covering the preceding distance 
with silent and invisible speed.
  
  "Master," I said with a little trace of a smile. "I was afraid for them for a moment." 
It was an apology. "This place makes me sad."
  
  He nodded. "I have them, Armand," he said. "The city seethes with mortals. There's food 
enough for all the vagabonds wandering here. No one will hurt them. Even if I weren't 
here to say so, no one would dare."
  
  It was I who nodded now. I wasn't so sure, really. Vampires are by their very nature 
perverse and do wicked and terrible things simply for the sport of it. To kill another's 
mortal pet would be a worthy entertainment for some grim and alien creature, skirting the 
fringes here, drawn by remarkable events.
  
  "You're a wonder, young one," he said to me smiling. Young one! Who else would call me 
this but Marius, my Maker, and what is five hundred years to him? "You went into the sun, 
child," he continued with the same legible concern written on his kind face. "And you 
lived to tell the tale."
  
  "Into the sun, Master?" I questioned his words. But I myself did not want to reveal any 
more. I did not want to talk yet, to tell of what had happened, the legend of Veronica's 
Veil and the Face of Our Lord emblazoned upon it, and the morning when I had given up my 
soul with such perfect happiness. What a fable it was.
  
  He came up the steps to be near me, but kept a polite distance. He has always been the 
gentleman, even before there was such a word. In ancient Rome, they must have had a term 
for such a person, infallibly good mannered, and considerate as a point of honor, and 
wholly successful at common courtesy to rich and poor alike. This was Marius, and it had 
always been Marius, insofar as I could know.
  
  He let his snow-white hand rest on the dull satiny banister. He wore a long shapeless 
cloak of gray velvet, once perfectly extravagant, now downplayed with wear and rain, and 
his yellow hair was long like Lestat's hair, full of random light and unruly in the damp, 
and even studded with drops of dew from outside, the same dew clinging to his golden 
eyebrows and darkening his long curling eyelashes around his large cobalt-blue eyes.
  
  There was something altogether more Nordic and icy about him than there was about 
Lestat, whose hair tended more to golden, for all its luminous highlights, and whose eyes 
were forever prismatic, drinking up the colors around him, becoming even a gorgeous 
violet with the slightest provocation from the worshipful outside world.
  
  In Marius, I saw the sunny skies of the northern wilderness, eyes of steady radiance 
which rejected any outside color, perfect portals to his own most constant soul.
  
  "Armand," he said. "I want you to come with me."
  
  "Where is that, Master, come where?" I asked. I too wanted to be civil. He had always, 
even after a struggle of wits, brought such finer instincts out of me.
  
  "To my house, Armand, where they are now, Sybelle and Benji. Oh, don't fear for them 
for a second. Pandora's with them. They are rather astonishing mortals, brilliant, 
remarkably different, yet alike. They love you, and they know so much and have come with 
you rather a long way."
  
  I flushed with blood and color; the warmth was stinging and unpleasant, and then as the