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When I caain with the last of the wood In a sloeary fashion, she stoked the blaze, and the light was red on her profile and in her eyes

I sat quietly on the bench watching her, watching the explosion of sparks against the blackened bricks

"Did he give you what you wanted?" I asked

"In his oay, yes," she said She put the poker aside and sat down opposite, her hair spilling down over her shoulders as she rested her hands beside her on the bench "I tell you, I don’t care if I never look upon another one of our kind," she said coldly "I aends, their curses, their sorrows And done with their insufferable hu they’ve revealed I’ht I died"

"But Marius -- " I said excitedly "Mother, there are ancient ones -- ones who have used immortality in a wholly different way"

"Are there?" she asked "Lestat, you’re too generous with your iination The story of Marius has the quality of a fairy tale"

"No, that’s not true"

"So the orphan demon claims descent not from the filthy peasant devils he reseod I tell you any dirty-faced village child drea at the kitchen fire can tell you tales like that"

"Mother, he couldn’t have invented Marius," I said "I ination, but he has ales I tell you he saw those things"

"I hadn’t thought of it exactly that way," she admitted with a little sends he heard"

"No," I said "There was a Marius and there is a Marius still And there are others like him There are Children of the Millennia who have done better than these Children of Darkness with the gifts given them"

"Lestat, what is important is that we do better," she said "All I learned from Armand, finally, was that immortals find death seductive and ultimately irresistible, that they fail to conquer death or hue and wear it like arh the world And luckily, I don’t e which these creatures have found so dangerous I mean the world that for eons has been the same"

She tossed her hair back as she looked at the fire again "It’s of snow-covered mountains I dreales, or the great north woods of America where they say white men have never been" Her face warmed just a little as she looked at me "Think on it," she said "There is nowhere that we cannot go And if the Children of the Millennia do exist, maybe that is where they are -- far from the world of men"

"And how do they live if they are?" I asked I was picturing s that s made "It’s man we feed on," I said

"There are hearts that beat in those forests," she said dreamily "There is blood that flows for the one who takes itI can do the things now that you used to do I could fight those wolves on hts "The i o wherever ish now, Lestat We’re free"

"I was free before," I said "I never cared for what Armand had to tell But Marius -- I know that Marius is alive I feel it I felt it when Ars and I don’t mean just about us, or about Those Who Must Be Kept or whatever the old s about life itself, about how to h time"

"So let him be your patron saint if you need it," she said

This angeredhtened s Armand said to divide us came back to me, just as I’d known they would when he had spoken his well-chosen words And so we live with our differences, I thought, just as erated as are our passions, as is our love

"There was one inkling" she said as she watched the fire, "one little indication that the story of Marius had truth"

"There were a thousand indications," I said