Lestat and his constant protectiveness/worry over Louis in the books
I saw Gabrielle break through the side door before the car hit the ground. And she and I were both rolling over on the grassy slope as the car capsized and exploded with a deafening roar.“
Louis!” I shouted. I scrambled towards the blaze. I would have gone right into it after him: But the glass of the back portal splintered as he came through it. He hit the embankment just as I reached him. And with my cape I beat at his smoking garments, Gabrielle ripping off her jacket to do the same. - The Vampire Lestat
What was she doing? Assessing their power? Looking from one to the other, and then back to me. A stranger looking down from some lofty height. And so now the fire comes, Lestat. Don’t dare to look at Gabrielle or Louis, lest she turn it that way. Die first, like a coward, and then you don’t have to see them die. - The Queen of the Damned
“Ah, Louis, forgive me.” The dark neglected hallway. I shuddered. “I came here because I was so concerned . . . about you.”
“No need,” he said considerately. “It was just a little pilgrimage I had to make.”
I touched his face with my fingers; so warm from the kill.
“She’s not here, Louis,” I said. “It was something Jesse imagined.”
“Yes, so it seems,” he said.
“We live forever; but they don’t come back.” - The Queen of the Damned
“All right,” he said despairingly. “I hope you discover the man’s seduced you with a pack of lies, that all he wants is the Dark Blood, and that you send him straight to hell. Once more, let me warn you, if I see him, if he threatens me, I shall kill him. I haven’t your strength. I depend upon my anonymity, that my little memoir, as you always call it, was so very far removed from the world of this century that no one took it as fact.”
“I won’t let him harm you, Louis,” I said. I turned and threw an evil glance at him. “I would never ever have let anyone harm you.”
And with this I left.
Of course, this was an accusation, and he felt the keen edge of it, I’d seen that to my satisfaction, before I turned again and went out. - The Tale of the Body Thief
Oh, yes, I had asked for it, as mortals so often declare. And I had done this despicable thing of letting loose the Body Thief with my powers. True. Guilty again of spectacular blunders and experiments. But had I ever dreamed of what it would truly mean to be stripped utterly of my powers and on the outside looking in? The others knew; they must know. And they had let Marius come to render the judgment, to let me know that for what I had done, I was cast out!
But Louis, my beautiful Louis, how could he have spurned me! I would have defied heaven to help Louis! I had so counted upon Louis, I had so counted upon waking this night with the old blood running powerful and true in my veins. - The Tale of the Body Thief
I thought then of Louis’s rejection, and that I would very soon see him again, and an evil satisfaction rilled me. Ah, he would be so very surprised. Then a little fear came over me. How would I forgive him? How would I keep my precious temper from exploding like a great wanton flame? - The Tale of the Body Thief
No scent of a mortal signaled an intruder. In fact, I knew the step that was approaching. I had heard it so many times in my life both mortal and preternatural. Yet I didn’t dare to believe in such a rescue from my misery, until the unheralded figure appeared in the courtyard, his velvet coat dusty, his yellow hair tangled, his violet eyes looking at once to the grim and appalling visage of Louis:
It was Lestat.
With an awkward step, as though his body, so long unused, revolted against him, he made his way closer to Merrick, who turned her tearstained face to him as if she too were seeing a Savior come in answer to her directionless prayers. - Merrick
Lestat seemed to be considering these things. How could he not? Once, he himself had gone into the sunlight in a distant desert place, and, having been burnt again and again, without release, he came back. His skin was still golden from this hurtful and terrible disaster. He would carry that imprint of the sun’s power for many years to come.
Straightaway, he stepped in front of Merrick, and as both of us watched, he knelt down beside the coffin, and he moved very close to the figure, and then he drew back. With his fingers, quite as delicately as she had done it, he touched the blackened hands, and he left no mark. Slowly, lightly, he touched the forehead, and once more, he left no mark.
He drew back, kneeling up, and, lifting his right hand to his mouth, he gashed his wrist with his own teeth before either Merrick or I knew what he meant to do.
At once a thick stream of blood poured down onto the perfectly molded face of the figure in the coffin, and as the vein sought to heal itself, again Lestat gashed it and let the blood flow. - Merrick
“Come now, enough of these ‘things,’ ” he said with a tone of remarkable weariness. “New Orleans waits. Louis waits. And if he hasn’t come down to New Orleans as you asked, I say we go to New York and get him.”
He had mentioned Louis countless times in the last six months, but the strange thing was, I didn’t trust him with all these mentions of how I needed Louis, and ought to write to Louis, and ought to pick up one of the many telephones around me and call Louis. I had some deep fear that he was in fact jealous of Louis, but I was ashamed of that feeling. Now he was saying, Let’s go, let’s find Louis.
[…]
This troubled me, and I wasn’t sure quite why. What if he suddenly wanted to hurt Louis? What if he became jealous of Louis—of my affection for Louis?
“Nonsense, go to him,” he said. Calm voice. Manly voice. “Am I jealous of your son, Viktor? Am I jealous of your beloved daughter, Rose? You need Louis and you know it, and he’s ready now to surrender. - Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis
And so it was done. Louis was putting on his jacket and scarf. I was unhappy. I watched him pulling on his gloves. I couldn’t imagine how this could end productively or happily. I didn’t want Louis to be humiliated, but what could Fareed and Seth say to talk of the silver cord? If they became impatient and short with him, I’d be furious. - Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis
I knew that the monster had other resources. We all do, the clever ones, who don’t wish to move through eternity like tramps. He had gold and jewels in hiding places. He had wealth undreamt of and unrecorded. And dwellings perhaps of which no one knew.
And now he had taken my Louis, my helpless Louis. Penetrated our most fortified refuge, and taken Louis away.
[…]
Again, I was not thinking. I was merely knowing—and knowing that Louis, Louis the most vulnerable of us all, was in the grip of that monster—or already dead. - Blood Communion
“In all these centuries,” said Cyril, “never have we known one whom we could see as our champion. You can’t really know, boss, just what you are now to the others. You think you know, but you don’t, and that’s why I’ll be right outside your door again sleeping in the passage, sleeping here so nothing and no one can get at you or hurt you—as long as I live and breathe.”
Then I was alone in the chilling darkness—with the villain Armand despised, and the son who had not protected his mother, and the lover who had never protected Louis from himself or others, and the miserable pupil of Marius who had so misjudged Rhoshamandes that now Marius was dead. - Blood Communion
Louis and his constant worry over Lestat in the books
“Lestat, don’t go on the stage tomorrow night,” he said. “Let the films and the book do what you want. But protect yourself. Let us come together and let us talk together. Let us have each other in this century the way we never did in the past. And I do mean all of us.” - The Vampire Lestat
Louis, the watcher, the patient one, was there on account of love pure and simple. The two had found each other only last night, and theirs had been an extraordinary reunion. Louis would go where Lestat led him. Louis would perish if Lestat perished. But their fears and hopes for this night were heartbreakingly human. - The Queen of the Damned
“Now we can go home,” he said.
Home. I smiled. I reached out and touched the graves on either side of me; I looked up again at the soft glow of the city lights against the ruffled clouds.
“You’re not going to leave us, are you?” he asked suddenly, voice sharpened with distress. - The Queen of the Damned
For a moment, I couldn’t understand the expression of horror on his face as he stared at me, or why he suddenly rose and came towards me and bent down and touched my face. Then I remembered. My sun-darkened skin.
“What have you done?” he whispered. He knelt down and looked up at me, resting his hand lightly on my shoulder. Lovely intimacy, but I wasn’t going to admit it. I remained composed in the chair.
“It’s nothing,” I said, “it’s finished. I went into a desert place, I wanted to see what would happen…”
“You wanted to see what would happen?” He stood up, took a step back, and glared at me. “You meant to destroy yourself, didn’t you?” - The Tale of the Body Thief
I came towards him, planted my hands on his desk and looked into his face. “I was so sure you would understand this. And by the way, I wasn’t born a monster! I was a born a mortal child, the same as you. Stronger than you! More will to live than you! That was cruel of you to say.”
“I know. It was wrong. Sometimes you frighten me so badly I hurl sticks and stones at you. It’s foolish. I’m glad to see you, though I dread admitting it. I shiver at the thought that you might have really brought an end to yourself in the desert! I can’t bear the thought of existence now without you! You infuriate me! Why don’t you laugh at me? You’ve done it before.”
- The Tale of the Body Thief
Dimly I thought I heard Louis’s gentle voice, protesting, pleading, arguing. I heard locks thrown, I heard nails going through wood. I heard Louis begging.
“For a while, just a little while.…” she said. “He is too powerful for us to do anything else. It is either that, or we do away with him.”
“No,” Louis cried. - Memnoch the Devil
I don’t live like our friend Louis, wandering from dusty corner to dusty corner, and then back to his flat in the Rue Royale when he’s convinced himself once more and for the thousandth time that no one can harm Lestat. - The Vampire Armand
All the faces were soon there, except for Louis and Rose and Viktor. But how could that be? I turned around. They stood only two feet away from me, huddled together, and down the pure whiteness of Louis’s face were two thin lines of blood tears. - Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis
Louis had been gravely hurt that Lestat had gone off to meet Rhoshamandes alone. So Lestat had promised never to do such a thing again.
- Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis
Lestat, Armand and their complicated love/hate relationship
I found myself backing out of the room and away from him, staring numbly at his small dirty figure. His auburn hair shimmered despite the dirt in it; his eyes burned like two lights.
Grotesque he seemed, among all the candles and the swimming colors of the flat, this filthy waif of the netherworld, and yet his beauty held sway. He hadn’t needed the shadows of Notre Dame or the torchlight of the crypt to flatter him. And there was a fierceness in him in this bright light that I hadn’t seen before.
I felt an overwhelming confusion. He was both dangerous and compelling. I could have looked on him forever, but an overpowering instinct said: Get away. Leave the place to him if he wants it. What does it matter now? - The Vampire Lestat
“It is like not knowing how to read, isn’t it?” he said aloud. “And your maker, the outcast Magnus, what did he care for your ignorance? He did not tell you the simplest things, did he?”
Nothing in his expression moved as he spoke.
“Hasn’t it always been this way? Has anyone ever cared to teach you anything?”
“You’re taking these things from my mind…” I said. I was appalled. I saw the monastery where I’d been as a boy, the rows and rows of books that I could not read, Gabrielle bent over her books, her back to all of us. “Stop this!” I whispered.
It seemed the longest time had passed. I was becoming disoriented. He was speaking again, but in silence.
They never satisfy you, the ones you make. In silence the estrangement and the resentment only grow.
I willed myself to move but I wasn’t moving. I was merely looking at him as he went on.
You long for me and I for you, and we alone in all this realm are worthy of each other. Don’t you know this? - The Vampire Lestat
I beat him again, turning him this way and that. And then I drew my sword to sever his head.
Let him live like that if he can. Let him be immortal like that if he can. I raised the sword and when I looked down at him, the rain was pelting his face, and he was staring up at me, as one half alive, unable to plead for mercy, unable to move.
I waited. I wanted him to beg. I wanted him to give me that powerful voice full of lies and cunning, the voice that had made me believe for one pure and dazzling instant that I was alive and free and in the state of grace again. Damnable, unforgivable lie. Lie I’d never forget for as long as I walked the earth. I wanted the rage to carry me over the threshold to his grave.
But nothing came from him.
And in this moment of stillness and misery for him, his beauty slowly returned.
He lay a broken child on the gravel path, only yards from the passing traffic, the ring of horses’ hooves, the rumble of the wooden wheels.
And in this broken child were centuries of evil and centuries of knowledge, and out of him there came no ignominious entreaty but merely the soft and bruised sense of what he was. Old, old evil, eyes that had seen dark ages of which I only dream.
I let him go, and I stood up and sheathed my sword. - The Vampire Lestat
He heard me. But he didn’t give an answer. He looked to Gabrielle, who
stood near the fire, and then to me. And silently, he said, Love me. You
have destroyed everything! But
if you love me, it can all be restored in a new form. Love me.
This silent entreaty had an eloquence, however, that I can’t put into words.
“What can I do to make you love me?” he whispered. “What can I give? The knowledge of all I have witnessed, the secrets of our powers, the mystery of what I am?”
It seemed blasphemous to answer. And as I had on the battlements, I found myself on the edge of tears. For all the purity of his silent communications, his voice gave a lovely resonance to his sentiments when he actually spoke. - The Vampire Lestat
“Each time the death and the awakening will ravage the mortal spirit, so that one will hate you for taking his life, another will run to excesses that you scorn. A third will emerge mad and raving, another a monster you cannot control. One will be jealous of your superiority, another shut you out.” And here he shot his glance to Gabrielle again and half smiled.
“And the veil will always come down between you. Make a legion. You will be, always and forever, alone!” - The Vampire Lestat
“Does anyone else know the size of your soul?”
Witchcraft. Had it ever been used with more skill? And what was he really saying to us beneath this liquid flow of beautiful language: Come to me, and I shall be the sun round which you are locked in orbit, and my rays shall lay bare the secrets you keep from each other, and I, who possess charms and powers of which you have no inkling, shall control and possess and destroy you!
“I asked you before,” I said. “What do you want? Really want?”
“You!” he said. - The Vampire Lestat
He had only moved very fast, and I had moved faster, and we stood facing each other in the doorway of the crypt, and again I said that single negation and I wouldn’t let him go.
“Not like this, we can’t part. We can’t leave each other in hatred, we can’t.” And my will dissolved suddenly as I embraced him and held tight to him so that he couldn’t free himself nor even move.
I didn’t care what he was, or what he had done in that doomed moment of lying to me, or even trying to overpower me, I didn’t care that I was no longer mortal and would never be again.
i wanted only that he should remain. I wanted to be with him, what he was, and all the things he had said were true. Yet it could never be as he wished it to be. - The Vampire Lestat
“You’re mad to blame it all on me. You have no right,” I insisted, but my voice was faltering so badly I couldn’t understand my own words.
And his voice shot out of him like the tongue of a snake.
“We had our Eden under that ancient cemetery,” he hissed. “We had our faith and our purpose. And it was you who drove us out of it with a flaming sword. What do we have now! Answer me! Nothing but the love of each other and what can that mean to creatures like us!”
“No, it’s not true, it was all happening already. You don’t understand anything. You never did.”
But he wasn’t listening to me. And it didn’t matter whether or not he was listening. He was drawing closer, and in a dark flash his hand went out, and my head went back, and I saw the sky and the city of Paris upside down.
I was falling through the air.
And I went down and down past the windows of the tower, until the stone walkway rose up to catch me, and every bone in my body broke within its thin case of preternatural skin. - The Vampire Lestat
Poor Armand. And you told me Louis was dead. Go dig a room for yourself under the Lafayette Cemetery. It’s just up the street. - The Vampire Lestat
“You always make me laugh,” I told him. “I would have laughed at you under that cemetery in Paris, except it didn’t seem the kind thing to do. And even when you cursed me and blamed me for all the stories about us, that was funny too. If you hadn’t been about to throw me off the tower I would have laughed. You always make me laugh.”
Delicious it was, the hatred between us, or so I thought. Such unfamiliar excitement, to have him there to ridicule and despise. - The Vampire Lestat
“It wasn’t that I wanted vengeance,” he whispered. His face was stricken, his heart broken. He said. “But you came to be healed, and you did not want me! A century I had waited, and you did not want me!”
And I knew, as I had all along really, that my restoration was illusion, that I was the same skeleton in rags, of course. And the house was still a ruin. And in the preternatural being who held me was the power that could give me back the sky and the wind.
“Love me and the blood is yours,” he said. “This blood that I have never given to another.” I felt his lips against my face.
“I can’t deceive you,” I answered. “I can’t love you. What are you to me that I should love you? A dead thing that hungers for the power and the passion of others? The embodiment of thirst itself?” - The Vampire Lestat
In mute fascination, Daniel had watched that little clip on MTV portraying Armand as the coven master of the old vampires beneath the Paris cemetery, presiding over demonic rituals until the Vampire Lestat, the eighteenth-century iconoclast, had destroyed the Old Ways.
Armand must have loathed it, his private history laid bare in flashing images, so much more crass than Lestat’s more thoughtful written history. Armand, whose eyes scanned perpetually the living beings around him, refusing even to speak of the undead. But it was impossible that he did not know. - The Queen of the Damned
At last particular movies struck his fancy. Over and over he watched Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, fascinated by Rutger Hauer, the powerfully built actor who, as the leader of the rebel androids, confronts his human maker, kisses him, and then crushes his skull. It would bring a slow and almost impish laugh from Armand, the bones cracking, the look in Hauer’s ice-cold blue eye.
“That’s your friend, Lestat, there,” Armand whispered once to Daniel. “Lestat would have the…how do you say?…guts?…to do that!” - The Queen of the Damned
At the door, I turned and kissed Gabrielle again. I felt her body collapse against me for an instant; then her attention locked on Akasha. I felt the faint tremor in her hands as she touched my face. I looked at Louis, my seemingly fragile Louis with his seemingly invincible composure; and at Armand, the urchin with the angel’s face. Finally those you love are simply… those you love. - The Queen of the Damned
The other immortals are still around, of course-Maharet and Mekare, the eldest of us all, Khayman of the First Brood, Eric, Santino, Pandora, and others whom we call the Children of the Millennia. Armand is still about, the lovely five-hundred-year-old boy-faced ancient who once ruled the Theatre des Vampires, and before that a coven of devil worshiping blood drinkers who lived beneath the Paris Cemetery, Les Innocents. Armand, I hope, will always be around. - The Tale of the Body Thief
“No. Just tell me what’s happened. You’re in danger, aren’t you? Or you think you are. You sent out the call for me to come to you here. It was an unabashed plea.”
“Are those the words Armand used, ‘unabashed plea’? I hate Armand.”
David only smiled and made a quick impatient gesture with both hands. “You don’t hate Armand and you know you don’t.”
“Wanna bet?” - Memnoch the Devil
“My point is simply that I love you, that we’re linked in some way that none of the others is linked. Louis worships you. You’re some sort of dark god to him, though he pretends to hate you for having made him. Armand envies you and spies on you far more than you might think.”
“I hear Armand and I see him and I ignore him,” I said. - Memnoch the Devil
This was Armand.
He sat on the stone park bench, boylike, casual, with one knee crooked, looking up at me with the predictable innocence, dusty all over, naturally, hair a long, tangled mess of auburn curls.
Dressed in heavy denim garments, tight pants, and a zippered jacket, he surely passed for human, a street vagabond maybe, though his face was now parchment white, and even smoother than it had been when last we met.
In a way, he made me think of a child doll, with brilliant faintly red-brown glass eyes—a doll that had been found in an attic. I wanted to polish him with kisses, clean him up, make him even more radiant than he was.
“That’s what you always want,” he said softly. His voice shocked me. If he had any French or Italian accent left, I couldn’t hear it. His tone was melancholy and had no meanness in it at all. “When you found me under Les Innocents,” he said, “you wanted to bathe me with perfume and dress me in velvet with great embroidered sleeves.”
“Yes,” I said, “and comb your hair, your beautiful russet hair.” My tone was angry. “You look good to me, you damnable little devil, good to embrace and good to love.”
We eyed each other for a moment. And then he surprised me, rising and coming towards me just as I moved to take him in my arms. His gesture wasn’t tentative, but it was extremely gentle. I could have backed away. I didn’t. We held each other tight for a moment. The cold embracing the cold. The hard embracing the hard.
“Cherub child,” I said. I did a bold thing, maybe even a defiant thing. I reached out and mussed his snaggled curls.
He is smaller than me physically, but he didn’t seem to mind this gesture.
In fact, he smiled, shook his head, and reclaimed his hair with a few casual strokes of his hand. His cheeks went apple-perfect suddenly, and his mouth softened, and then he lifted his right fist, and teasingly struck me hard on the chest.
Really hard. Show-off. Now it was my turn to smile and I did. - Memnoch the Devil
Lestat, not a bad friend to have, and one for whom I would lay down my immortal life, one for whose love and companionship I have ofttimes begged, one whom I find maddening and fascinating and intolerably annoying, one without whom I cannot exist. - The Vampire Armand
Lestat, my Lestat - for he was never theirs, was he? - my Lestat was crazed and railing as the result of his awful saga, and held prisoner by the very oldest of our kind on the final decree that if he did not cease to disturb the peace, which meant of course our secrecy, he would be destroyed, as only the oldest could accomplish, and no one could plead for him on any account.
No, that could not happen! I writhed and twisted. The pain sent its shocks through me, red and violet and pulsing with orange light. I hadn’t seen such colors since I’d fallen.
My mind was coming back, and coming back for what? Lestat to be destroyed! Lestat imprisoned, as I had once been centuries ago under Rome in Santino’s catacombs. Oh, God, this is worse than the sun’s fire, this is worse than seeing that bastard brother strike the little plum-cheeked face of Sybelle and knock her away from her piano, this is murderous rage I feel. - The Vampire Armand
“Lestat, give me this one embrace and I’ll never ask another thing of you for all eternity. Let me put my lips to your throat, Lestat, let me test the tale, let me do it!”
“You break my heart, you little fool,” he said with tears welling. “You always did.”
“Don’t judge me!” I cried. - The Vampire Armand
“Armand,” I said. “Please.” I dropped down on my knees in front of him, looking up into his face.
All the emotion he had held back was printed there now. He was in a rage.
“Is your heart totally turned against me?” I asked. “Do you have no faith in what we seek to build here?”
“Fool,” he said again. His voice was roughened now by emotion he couldn’t suppress. “I have always loved you,” he said. “I have loved you more than any being in all the world whom I’ve ever loved. I have loved you more than Louis. I have loved you more even than Marius. And you have never given me your love. I would be your most faithful counselor, if you allowed it. But you don’t. Your eyes pass over me as if I don’t exist. And so they always have.”
I knelt there defeated. I didn’t know where to begin. I didn’t know what to say. I felt such a huge exhaustion, I had no way out of it, no way to find eloquence or reason or the vigor to try to reach him, reach beyond his malice to his soul.
He went on again, staring at me as he spoke.
“I hate you as much as I have ever loved you,” he said. “Oh, I didn’t want for Rhoshamandes to destroy you. Good God, that I never wanted. Never. When I heard them crying out that you’d returned I wept like a child. […] But how could I not hate you, you who went in search of my maker all those long years ago when I scarce believed in him anymore — and was found by him, saved from the earth by him, welcomed into his lair by him, you whom he loved, you to whom he told the secrets of our beginning, when he had never come to free me from the Children of Satan, you to whom he gave his love, while resigning me to the ruins of all you’d destroyed around me. I hate you! I understand the very definition of ‘hate’ when I think of you.” - Blood Communion
“You who humiliated me and destroyed my world,” he said, his voice now a fragile whisper. “You who later told with such relish how you shattered my coven, my little coven, my little coven of holy purpose. Yet still I didn’t want for you to die. And I should have known that you wouldn’t. Of course not. How could anyone put an end to you? […]
I found myself on my feet again. I’d drawn back away from him without realizing it. The air was poison between us. But I couldn’t look away or go.
“I love you still,” he said. “Yes, even now, I love you, as they all love you, your minions seeking just a smile or a nod or a quick touch of your hand. I love you like all those throughout this palace who are dreaming of drinking just a drop of your blood. Well, you can leave me now. I’m not going anywhere. Where is there to go? I’ll be here if you want me. And grant me my wish for the moment, you and your august friends. Go and leave me alone.” - Blood Communion
The only thought in my mind, the only image, the only idea, was of Armand, and how Armand would feel when he too could hold Marius like this and know that Marius lived, that Marius had been restored, that all of them were safe and secure, and using my strongest power I sent the word to him. I sent the news. And I sent my love to Armand with it. - Blood Communion
