Buckle up, this is kind of long. But I love all of Rice's writing about Nicki and Lestat and the contrast of light and dark within them both.

Having known what ultimately happens to Nicki I was struck by this passage on page 113 that seems to foreshadow his death. After becoming a vampire, Lestat says of Nicki: "Yet I wanted so to touch him -- his hands, his arms, his face. I wanted to feel his flesh with these new immortal fingers. And I found myself whispering the word, 'Alive.' Yes, you are alive and that means you can die. And everything I see when I look at you is utterly insubstantial. It is a commingling of tiny movements and indefinable colors as if you haven't a body at all, but are a collection of heat and light. You are light itself, and what am I now? Eternal as I am, I curl like a cinder in that blaze."

Lestat sees Nicki, human, as a beautiful "collection of heat and light." Nicki is still living the bright life of mortality while Lestat is, as a vampire, in darkness.

Later, after Lestat turns Nicki into a vampire, gives him the Dark Gift, Nicki tells Lestat how he saw him during their early time in Paris, an inversion of Lestat's previous description of Nicki: "And for every aspect of our proposed damnation you found exuberance, and there was no end to your enthusiasms and the passion coming out of you -- and the light, always the light. And in exact proportion to the light coming out of you, there was the darkness in me! Every exuberance piercing me and creating its exact proportion of darkness and despair! [...] What does it mean, the murdering monster who is filled with light?" (232-233)

Nicki's darkness is amplified once he is turned. He tells Lestat: 'In darkness, we're equal now' (233). Literally, yes, they are both vampires, but mentally Nicki is very much being dragged down into the dark while Lestat figuratively stays in the light of sanity.

Later, as Nicki becomes more unstable, Armand imprisons him, starves him, and cuts off his hands. Nicki asks the coven to let him die, and they do. In Eleni's letter to Lestat on page 300, she says that he asked that they should "call together for him somewhere in the countryside the ancient Sabbat with its customary blaze. If we did not, then he should make the theater his funeral pyre." And later: "We began to dance, all of us, to induce the customary frenzy, and I think we were never more moved, never more in terror, never more sad. He went into the flames."

The coven's feelings about dancing for Nicki's death echo how Lestat feels about him playing violin when they are young: frenzied, moved, sadness, terror. He was so amazed by the emotions that Nicki's playing made him feel, and maintained that music (Nicki's especially) was an ultimate source of beauty and good and light in the world.

It seems Nicki was always destined to burn too bright.

And finally, when Lestat and Gabrielle are about to leave their house in Alexandria, Lestat thinks about the birds he used to keep: "Gray African parrots that live to be as old as men. Nicki had lived to be thirty" (308).

Nicki himself, and his and Lestat's relationship, are so utterly tragic. I feel for them both so deeply.