“It will drive Benji out of his gourd to have ‘secret intelligence’ about the twins perhaps immolating themselves,” David said. “That I will not do. But I will indeed try to find Marius.”

“Surely there are old ones in Paris,” I said, “old enough to have spied on us here tonight.” I wasn’t speaking of the riffraff.

Yet I had the feeling Jesse didn’t care. Let the riffraff hear it, for all Jesse cared. Let the old ones hear it. Jesse was frayed from conflict and anxiety. And even confiding in us had not eased her pain.

“Were you ever happy in the Blood?” I asked suddenly.

She was startled. “What do you mean?”

“In the beginning, during those first years. Were you happy?”

“Yes,” she said. “And, I know that I will be happy again. Life is a gift. Immortality is a precious gift. It shouldn’t be called the Dark Gift. That’s not fair.”

“I want to see Maharet in person,” said David. “I want to go with you home.”

Jesse shook her head. “She won’t allow it, David. She knew what I meant to say when I found you. She allowed this. But she will not receive anyone now at home.”

“Do you still trust in her?” asked David.

“In Maharet?” Jesse asked. “Always. Yes, in Maharet.”

That was significant. She didn’t trust the other two.

She was backing away from us towards the double doors to the hallway.

“I’ve given you what I have to give for now,” she said.

“And what if I want to find that vampire in Geneva?” I asked.

“That would be your decision. He’s in love with you. I can’t imagine him hurting you. Does anyone ever try to hurt you?”

“Are you joking?” I asked bitterly. Then I shrugged again. “No, I don’t guess anyone ever does anymore.”

“You’re the one they look to …,” she said.

“So Benji says!” I muttered under my breath. “Well, there’s no reason for them to look to me. I may have started it but I sure as Hell can’t finish it.”

She didn’t answer.

David sprang up suddenly and went to her and took her in his arms. They held each other silently for a moment and then he went with her to the doors.

I knew she was as good at the Cloud Gift as I was, what with all that ancient blood. She’d leave the hotel by the roof so fast she might as well have been invisible.

David closed the doors behind her.

“I want to go walking,” I said. My voice was thick, and suddenly I realized I was weeping. “I want to see that old district where the markets used to be, and the old church. Haven’t been there since … Will you come with me?” I had half a mind to flee now, just go. But I didn’t.

He nodded. He knew what I wanted. I wanted to see the area of Paris where once les Innocents, the ancient cemetery, had existed—beneath which, in torch-lit catacombs, Armand and his Children of Satan coven had held court. It was there that, orphaned by my maker, I’d discovered with shock the others of our kind.

He embraced me and kissed me. This was David whom I knew intimately in this body. This was David’s powerful heart against me. His skin was silken and fragrant with some subtle male perfume, and his fingers were thrilling me vaguely as he took my hand. Blood of my Blood.

“Why do people want me to do something about all this?” I asked. “I don’t know what to do?”

“You’re a star in our world,” he said. “You made yourself that. And before you say anything rash or angry, remember. That’s what you wanted to be.”

We spent hours together.

We moved over the rooftops far too fast for the fledglings below to track us.

We drifted through the streets of les Halles, and through the darkened interior of the great old church of Saint-Eustache with its paintings by Rubens. We sought out the little Fontaine des Innocents in the Rue Saint-Denis—a tiny relic of the olden times—which had once stood beside the wall of the vanished cemetery.

This made my heart both glad and anguished. And I let the memories come back to me of my battles with Armand and his followers who believed so fervently we were anointed servants of the Devil. Such superstition. Such rot.

Eventually some of the paparazzi vampires found us. They were persistent. But they kept their distance. We didn’t have much time.

Pain, pain, and more pain.

No trace remained of the old Théâtre des Vampires or where it had once stood. Of course I’d known that but had to visit the old geography anyway, confirm that the old filthy world of my time had been paved over.

Armand’s magnificent nineteenth-century house—which he’d built in Saint-Germaine-de-Prés—was shut up and maintained by unwitting mortals, full of murals, carpets, and antique furniture covered in white sheets.

He’d refurbished that house for Louis right before the dawn of the twentieth century, but I don’t think Louis had ever been at home in it. In Interview with the Vampire he did not so much as even mention it. The fin de siècle with its glorious painters, actors, and composers had meant nothing to Louis, for all his pretensions to sensitivity. Ah, but I couldn’t blame Louis for shunning Paris. He’d lost his beloved Claudia—our beloved Claudia—in Paris. How could he be expected ever to forget that? And he’d known Armand was a jungle wildcat among revenants, hadn’t he?

Still … Paris … I’d suffered here too, had I not? But not at the hands of Paris, no. Paris had always fulfilled my dreams and expectations. Paris, my eternal city, my home.

Ah, but Notre Dame, the great vast cathedral of Notre Dame was as always Notre Dame, and there we spent hours together, safe in the cold shadows in that great forest grove of arches and columns where I’d come more than two hundred years ago to weep over my transformation, and was in some way weeping over it even now.

David and I walked the narrow quiet streets of the Île Saint-Louis talking together. The fledgling paparazzi were within blocks of us but dared not come closer. The grand townhouse in which I’d made my mother, Gabrielle, into a Child of Darkness was still there.

Gradually we fell to talking again, naturally. I asked David how he had come to know Fareed.

“I sought out Fareed,” David said. “I’d heard plenty of whispers of this mad vampire scientist and his ancient guardian angel, and their ‘evil’ experiments, you know, the gossip of the misbegotten. So I went to the West Coast and looked for him till I found him.”