A loud piercing laughter erupted from him. His chest shivered with it, his arms and legs quaking with it.

“But you didn’t go down, Lestat,” he said, his eyebrows rising. “The hunger, the cold—none of it stopped you. You were a triumph!” The rage thickened his voice again.

I just want to go down there alone and do it. It has something to do with Nicki maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know!

None of the merchants ever spoke to me like that. We were boys again for a moment. And I laughed out loud. His father was disconcerted. My brothers stopped whispering, but Nicolas de Lenfent kept smiling with a Parisian’s composure.

I searched everywhere and didn’t find the damned violin. What could Nicki have done with it? I couldn’t think.

I sat up and pushed myself back against the paneled wall and stared at him because I couldn’t believe the sound I was hearing.

And as we came to describe our longings and dissatisfactions, we were saying things to each other with great exuberance, like “Yes, yes,” and “Exactly,” and “I know completely what you mean,” and “And yes, of course, you felt that you could not bear it,” etc.

But what was the crux? That he wanted it? That he had screamed over and over that I had denied him the power? Or was it that I now had the excuses I needed to bring him to me as I had wanted to do from the first moment?

I tried to think of some way to encourage him. I reminded him that his playing produced profound emotions in people, that even the actors backstage stopped to listen when he played. He had an undeniable talent.

“Lestat, let me be frank with you,” he said. “Things are easy for you.”

He was close enough to kiss me, the blood of his spittle hitting my face.

Whatever the case, they hadn’t entered my old dressing room, the room that Nicki and I had shared before every performance. It was locked still. And when I broke open the door, I got an ugly shock. The room was exactly the way I’d left it.

I lifted the key and put it in the lock and he went silent, his thoughts washing backwards and into him as if the ocean could be sucked back into the tiny mysterious coils of a single shell.

And here it was nearly spring. And the nights were getting warmer, and the House of Thespians was putting on a new drama with new acrobats between the acts. And the trees were in bloom again, and every waking moment I thought of Nicki.

I searched everywhere and didn’t find the damned violin. What could Nicki have done with it? I couldn’t think.

[LESTAT] I can scarce remember my lines with you fiddling away in the pit. [NICOLAS] The notes blur when I hear your feet on the boards.

Frozen, I stared at the image: the preternatural dancers, the monster violinist, limbs moving with inhuman slowness, tantalizing grace. The music was like a fire consuming us all.

“Why is he impossible?” I asked her. “He said this with feeling, as if it meant something.” She laughed. “It means something all right,” she said. “He’s in disgrace.”

I wasn’t the lead, but I was the young lover, a sort of Lelio again really, which was almost better than the lead, and I stole every scene in which I appeared. Nicolas had taught me the part, bawling me out constantly for not learning to read.

“Play it,” I whispered. “Play it here just for us.”