by Anne Rice
Then he came to a halt. Danger.
There was no one in the little hallway but him. Beyond the kitchen wall to one side was the clatter and clang of pots and pans and the shrill cacophony of voices. He moved on, opened the door, and stepped into a large room containing a toilet and a fancy mirror and sink. As he turned to snap the lock, the door flew back, striking him on the forehead, and he found himself against the hard cold marble wall, stunned, as a blood drinker locked the door behind him.
Danger. Full alert. Massive danger.
Waxy, luminescent skin, a mass of dusty brown hair, and vicious eyes. A smile that was the baring of fangs and not a gesture of conciliation.
"You're coming with me, stranger," the male spoke in an ugly voice. "What do you mean stalkin' little Benji? I have friends who want to talk to you."
"And you are--?" asked Garekyn coldly. He did not move. He eyed the being as if he had all the time in the world to do so. Shorter than he; shorter arms; a massive head; old scars carved in the strange unnatural flesh as if painted on the face of a doll; and broken teeth between the glistering fangs; clothes that reeked of dust and mildew.
Laughter came from the other. "Killer's my name," he said. "And there's a reason for that. Now you're going to walk out of here with me, and back up to Trinity Gate, and don't attract the slightest attention. My friends have been alerted. I don't know who and what you are, but we'll get to all of that very soon."
As he spoke, the being's pale eyes appeared to narrow and glaze over. Something stirred in his battered face and it became as expressionless as the face of a giant cat. "Flesh and blood," he murmured. He took a deep breath and inhaled. He closed the gap between himself and Garekyn, driving his sharp vampiric teeth into Garekyn's neck before Garekyn could stop him.
A dizziness came over Garekyn. A great yawning darkness opened. He saw the immense circuitry of his own blood illuminated in a flash. No, not like this, no. He felt the pull on his veins and on centers of power within himself of which he knew nothing. A vision exploded in the darkness. Amel? Benji Mahmoud's face, the name Armand whispered. And then again Amel. Amel.
It was as if something invisible from within Garekyn was reaching into the other, the other who was sucking the blood so powerfully that Garekyn was shuddering and nauseated and suddenly terrified.
Garekyn fought it with all his strength, driving the creature back against the other wall so hard that the creature's head struck the marble with a dull sound. Now it was battle, the creature lunging for Garekyn again; and this time, applying all his might, Garekyn drove the creature back again and down, slamming his face hard against the porcelain of the sink. Something broke, but with a sound so soft Garekyn could barely hear it.
Blood flowed on the dirty white porcelain. The blood glittered! The darkness rose up to take hold of Garekyn again. The creature's hands closed on Garekyn's neck, but with his left hand, Garekyn grabbed a full hank of the creature's hair and swung his head down again and again on the edge of the sink.
The skull caved, the blood shot out of the creature's mouth like the jet of a fountain--glittering. Amel. Armand. Names called in a void that might replace the little lavatory room if Garekyn didn't hang on with every bit of stubbornness he could muster.
Again and again, he slammed the head down, this time on the chrome faucet and he felt the head close around the faucet as the faucet pierced the skull.
"Armand!" roared the creature as the blood bubbled from its lips.
Without hesitation, unsure of his strength, and determined to control all that would happen henceforth, Garekyn ripped the head forward and turned the head with all his might so as to break the creature's neck.
Done!
The creature dropped to the floor, his face appearing to slide from his skull like a mask, blood flooding from his eyes and his mouth and once again the blood glittered, glittered, as if with myriad tiny pulsing bits of living light, skittering, swirling in the blood.
The creature lay in a heap.
Garekyn put his fingers into the blood and lifted the blood to his lips. A zinging sensation swept through all his limbs. He licked and licked at the blood. Amel. Motion, voices, another realm breaking in.
He reached down and ripped with his fingers at the white flesh, scraping it loose from the gleaming white bones of the skull and there in a great fissure he saw what must have been the brain, sizzling and hissing with tiny pinpoints of light.
Images swam in his ken. The twins, the Mother, the devouring of the brain, Benji talking on and on about the old tales, the new tales...Amel in the brain.
He squatted down beside the battered heap of the creature, and he scooped up the brain and forced it into his own mouth, his throat locking in nausea even as he did it. But the nausea vanished. The world vanished.
An immense web, a web so intricate and beautiful and vast it appeared to compass the Heavens, and the stars pulsing in it like tiny beings, alive, calling, pleading. Dim echo rising as if it were a splash of blood on a wall: Armand, help me, attacked, murdered, not human, not human!
Retching, doubled over, Garekyn held the dissolving brain in his mouth, pressing against it with his tongue, the great web growing brighter and brighter.
He opened his eyes. He was sprawled against the cold white toilet. Blood all over his clothes. Blood all over his hands.
Unthinking, he shot to his feet, unlatched the door, and fled, not back into the restaurant but out a back passage and into a dim alley. Smashing into large glistening black plastic sacks and stacks of cardboard boxes he blundered, nearly falling, slipping in puddles of grease and water, running as fast as he could, with no idea of what lay ahead of him.
He heard someone pursuing him. He knew he was meant to hear this, hear the boots striking the stones. On he ran only to see a wall rise up in front of him.
He pivoted just in time to recognize the white-faced being who closed in on him. Beatific face, auburn hair! Armand. The master of Trinity Gate. Upwards, they rose, higher and higher until the wind was roaring in his ears. And once again, fang teeth were in his neck, and this time a chorus of voices crying in the great empty darkness.
All be warned. Something not human!
"Don't kill me!" he pleaded without a voice. "Help me. I didn't want to kill him. He hurt me. I didn't want to kill him. I wanted to know--." He had no voice and no body. He was just this sweetness and this pain, this swoon, and the voices rising all around him speaking words of condemnation and menace but in tones so tender and melodious it was like singing. He saw the circuit of his blood again and felt pain throughout as the blood was drawn out of him, his heart beating faster and faster as if it would explode.
Amel, it is you? Are you here? It is you after all these centuries, are you here? This is Garekyn.
He was high above the city, and he was dying. No escape this time, no matter what the Parents had said. And if the pain is too great to bear, you will lose consciousness, but you will not die. And you will slowly revive and restore, no matter what they have done to you. Snow without end, snow and ice. Go into the ice and freeze. Mountains of ice. Snow without end.
"They sent you here to destroy me, didn't they?" said Amel, Amel of old in his great office in Atalantaya. Warm air. Windows filled with the spectacle of the city's towers, like a forest made of glass. "Well, didn't they?"
Darkness. You will not die....
And how horrible that it should come finally like this, at the hands of monsters, this magnificent world, to see it no more, to lose it, to lose all of it, without my understanding anything!--
Before him suddenly, a sky of endless blue and the great translucent city of Atalantaya exploding with smoke and fire! Amel cried out against it. Or was it he, Garekyn, screaming in defiance as the towers melted, shattered, the great dome cracking, the whole city tilting and sliding into the boiling sea? My death, just my death. Because that was long ago and they are all dead.
4
Lestat
SOMEWHERE OV
ER THE North Atlantic, when I was riding the winds, Amel left me.
When I entered the carriageway of my old townhouse in the Rue Royale in New Orleans I was apparently alone. Had Louis come as I'd asked him to do? Very likely not. But how was I to know? Masters can't hear the thoughts of fledglings. Masters are forever locked out of the minds of their children. And for all I knew I was locked out of Louis's heart.
The back courtyard was luxuriantly overgrown the way I loved it, the bright magenta bougainvillea heaped over the high brick walls. The little common flowers of Louisiana, the yellow and the purple lantana, were huge and fragrant and softly beautiful with their dusty dark little leaves, and the oleander magnificent with its pink blooms. The giant banana trees were rustling and swaying in the cool breeze off the nearby river, and the new fountain, the splendid new fountain with its moss-covered cherubs, was filled with water singing in the lights of the lanterns along the back porch.
Did I feel an immediate sense of well-being? Well, no. This was as painful as it was sweet; this was honey with a bitter taste. I'd had my heart broken here more than once, almost died upstairs in this flat, hadn't I, and I'd come out of a deep sleep once not so long ago to find Louis in this very courtyard, in an open coffin, nearly burnt to death by the sun. I'd brought him back with my blood then. And my beloved fledgling David Talbot had helped me. Louis had been more powerful since then--thanks to that new infusion of my blood--and though at first he'd been happy, happy for a while with the love of David and a strange unearthly blood drinker named Merrick, he had come to hate me for the increased strength that took him even further away from the human he could never be again.
I knew what I was up against with Louis. I had to convince him that this time was different from the earlier times when we'd tried to come together--different from the brief coven of the old Night Island, different from the brief connection after he'd tried to destroy himself, different even from his time at Trinity Gate which was forever changed now by recent events--different because we were all different now and I, in my heart and soul, was different. And I needed him to help me write a new page in the history of our entire tribe.
But what was the point of pondering it further? Words wouldn't carry the motion. One way or other, he'd make a decision of the heart.
I hurried up the iron stairs to the door of the flat, ready to kick in a wall if the place was truly empty, ground the doorknob nearly to rusted powder as I turned it, and went inside.
The old back parlor looked splendid with its fresh burgundy velvet wallpaper, and a new Victorian couch of lacquered fruitwood with artful pillows plumped with modern chemical foam. Ah, I didn't care. What matters to me is how things look, and it all looked fine, the machine-made blue-and-beige Aubusson carpet as lovely as any ever made by human fingers. Same old gilded Louis XV desk and chairs, but all was shining, restored, pretty. A Chinese vase filled with fragrant leafy eucalyptus, and a small undoubtedly genuine French Impressionist painting on the wall of a woman in profile, a woman with long russet hair.
I breathed in the scent of furniture wax, the eucalyptus, and stronger blooms, roses perhaps in another room. The place felt tight, smaller than I remembered, but that was always the case when I first arrived.
There was someone here. And it was not Cyril or Thorne, who were now in the courtyard below, exploring the old slaves' quarters building and the concrete crypts recently created beneath them which could shield at least six of the Undead from sunshine or catastrophe during the hours of the day.
I stood for a moment in the hallway, peering towards the front parlor where the lights of the Rue Royale shone yellow in the lace curtains, and I closed my eyes.
For fifty years we'd lived here, Louis, Claudia, and I; and Claudia had put a match to it for all the inevitable reasons that Adam and Eve turn their backs on paradise every night or day. These boards, these very boards, once carpeted and now hard and gleaming with lacquer! How she loved to run the length of this hall, ribbons streaming, and leap into my arms! A shiver ran through me as if I were feeling her cold white cheek against mine, and her confidential husky voice in my ear.
Well, the place wasn't really empty, was it; it was haunted, and always would be haunted, and no new Chinese patterned wallpaper would change it, nor electric chandeliers replete with glistening crystal illuminating the rooms to the right and the left.
I went into his bedroom--the chamber that has always been for Louis, Louis sitting up against the back of his massive four-poster, reading Dickens, Louis writing at the desk in a diary I never read, Louis dozing there with his head on a pillow staring at the flowers above in the tester as if the flowers were alive.
Empty. Of course. A museum chamber, down to the old brass brackets of the gas lamps with their frosted globes, and the tall hulking armoire in which he'd once kept all of his simple black clothes. Well, what had I expected? Nothing personal marred the effect until I realized I was staring at a discarded pair of worn black shoes, shoes so thoroughly coated in dust they seemed made of it, and there on the chair beside the chest of drawers was a worn old shirt.
Could this possibly mean--?
I turned around.
Louis was standing in the door of the room opposite, across the hall.
I drew in my breath. I didn't say a word. I like to look at him through your eyes.
He was outfitted entirely in the new clothes I'd ordered for him, a long black riding jacket, sleek at the waist and flaring, and a pale pink European-linen handmade shirt. He wore a tie of green silk, almost exactly the color of his eyes, and there was an emerald ring on his finger of that very same green. Bit of handkerchief in his breast pocket to match the tie, and fine-cut trousers of black wool and sleek boots fitted to his calves like gloves.
I was unable to speak. He'd put on these clothes for me, and I knew it. Nothing else in this world would have prompted him to dress like this, or to have brushed all the dust out of his glistening black hair. And the hair he'd left long on rising so that it was full as it had been in the old days, wavy, a little unruly, curling just under his ears. Even his white skin looked polished. And a scent rose from him of a rare and expensive male cologne. That too, I had sent for. That too, servants had brought here along with my other gifts.
Silence. It was like when Gabrielle, my mother, undid her long braid and combed her free and luxuriant hair. I could scarcely breathe.
I sensed he understood. He crossed the hall and put his arms around me and kissed me on the lips.
"This is what you wanted, isn't it?" he asked. Nothing mocking or mean in the tone.
Shocked. Unable to respond.
"Well, I figured you could use some new clothes, that you always can." I was stammering, clinging to a shred of dignity, trivializing the moment with ridiculous words.
"A whole room full of clothes?" he asked. "Lestat, the century will be ended before I can wear all that."
"Come, let's hunt," I said. Which really meant, Let's get out of here, let's walk together and be quiet together and please let me see you drink. Let me see you draw the blood and the life out of a human being. Let me see you need it, and go for it, and have it, and be filled to the brim with it.
I slipped on my large violet-tinted sunglasses, so essential to helping me pass for human in crowded streets, and guided Louis to the door.
We made a swift exit like two normal human beings, and we were halfway down the block, and turning towards Chartres Street, before he noticed Cyril and Thorne behind us, too close, and too conspicuous, and asked if they were going to follow us wherever we went.
"Can't get rid of them," I said. "Price of having the Core in me. Price of being the Prince."
"And you truly are the Prince now, aren't you?" he asked. "You're really trying to make a go of it. You don't want it to fall apart."
"It will not fall apart," I said. "Not this time, not while I have breath in my body. It's more than another coven, more than a gathering of three or four in a new city. It's more than an
ything that ever happened to any of us ever in the past." I sighed. I gave up. "When you see the Court, you'll understand."
"I felt certain you'd already be sick of it," he said. "The Brat Prince becoming the Prince? I would never have predicted it."
"Me neither," I said. "But you know my motto, what it's always been. I refuse to be bad at what I do, and that includes being bad. I won't be bad at being bad. I won't do this badly now either. Wait and see."
"I already see," he said.
"I can make the bodyguards take to the roofs, if you want."
"They don't matter," he said. "You're the one who matters."
We headed down Chartres towards Jackson Square. There was a fancy restaurant cafe on a nearby corner, and he seemed drawn to it, though why I wasn't sure. It was too thrilling just being near him, walking with him as if we'd been walking like this for a hundred years. The night was balmy and almost warm, the way winter nights can be in New Orleans, between colder weather, and the crowds were mostly well-dressed tourists on the prowl, innocent, exuberant the way people become when they are in New Orleans and looking for a good time.
Soon as he was seated at the cafe table, he had his eyes on a couple near the back. I could tell from the manner in which he fixed on the woman that he was listening to her thoughts. He'd gained telepathic power from his new blood, and with time. She was perhaps fifty, in a sleeveless black dress, exquisitely groomed with hair like white nylon, and firm well-molded arms. She wore very dark glasses, which looked a bit ridiculous, and so did the man opposite, who was, however, disguised. She didn't know that he was disguised. His mouth had been deliberately distorted by something artificial that he wore on his gums, and his short uninteresting brown hair had been dyed. She was paying the man to kill her husband and she wanted the man to understand why. The man didn't care at all why she wanted the deed done. He wanted the money and to be gone. He thought the woman was a complete fool.