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(25) - (Louis/Lestat)
"What was his crime?"
"He was a killer," I said, and damn him, there was a note of defensiveness in my voice. "He planned tonight to take a woman, a young woman, from this very street."
Louis smiled, a fey tilt to his head. It made me furious--furious that he'd watched me, that he'd judge me for this now, when everything had been so perfect just moments before."Truly, then, his death was just."
"I don't kill the innocent. And I didn't play with him--I just ate him, okay? And now it's done."
"It was an extraordinarily clean kill, Lestat," he said mockingly. "I do notice."
"A service to the community. An execution."
"For my crime," Louis said softly. "My crime, and yours."
I turned from him, from his quiet and his beauty and his shining, pitiless morality.
"Was his death truly just?" He whispered. Louis was my tormentor as much as he ever had been; it was idiocy to think it could be otherwise. He shrugged indifferently. "Shall we go?"
"Are you sure you wouldn't rather stay and fight among the rats?"
"I haven't fed," Louis said simply. He smiled at me, showing me his fangs. "And I believe that somewhere in this city there is une jeune femme awaiting an appointment with Death." He looked down at the body I'd dropped amid the trash and grey snow. "Someone should keep it."
I didn't believe for an instant that he would do it.
The image had been clear in the young villain's mind; defiantly, I led him to the ramshackle prayer of walls in an ugly district of downtown Montreal. She looked up as we pressed toward her through the crowd. Her eyes met mine and skated off, and then she found Louis.
It was as if a path had opened between them. He moved through it serenely; I was as entranced as she, this beautiful creature, this doomed child. Louis walked in the footsteps of the killer I'd diverted, and took her in his arms.
Their bodies moved inevitably to the throbbing beat. He held her tenderly, like a lover, and before he took her he looked up at me for just an instant, his bright eyes afire with bloodlust, and something else. Something colder.
His mouth was at her throat, his teeth bared, glittering. Shaken to my very foundations, I left him.
I no longer wondered why Louis preferred to hunt alone. Leaning against the plank wall outside the shack's entrance, eyes turned up to the silent northern stars, I merely hoped my attendance would not be requested in the future.
A sound drew my attention to the doorway, and Louis staggered out, muttering in French and smiling at someone still inside. A wanton, pretty sight he made: disheveled, sleek, flushed with heat. My skin crawled, and yet--
He came to me, eyes hot, and pressed his body against mine. My hands found his shoulders and tightened, pulling him closer.
"Lestat."
"You murdered that girl," I hissed. "You!"
"Yes." His voice was pleasant, but distracted. His eyes wandered over my face, heavy-lidded. "It's a thing I do when I get hungry. As do we all."
He tasted of her. Dizzied, I opened my mouth to him and sank into his embrace. There was no decision in it, no choice, just the heat and the blood -- and where was my Merciful Death now? My Louis? I shoved myself away and leaned, panting for breath, against the wall.
The night lay in ruins around me, the night that could have been ours.