The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles)

by Rice, Anne

  The elevator door had opened. My Victim and his daughter were rising floor after floor into the sky.

  “He slips in and out of here when he wants. He’s got bodyguards galore. She meets him on her own. I think they set it up by cellular phone. He’s a computer cocaine giant, and she’s one of his best-protected secret operations. His men are all over the lobby. If there’d been anyone nosing around, she would have left the restaurant alone first. But he’s a wizard at things like that. There’ll be warrants out for him in five states and he’ll show up ringside for a heavyweight match in Atlantic City, right in front of the cameras. They’ll never catch him. I’ll catch him, the vampire who’s just waiting to kill him. And isn’t he beautiful?”

  “Now, let me get this clear,” David said. “You’re being stalked by something, and it’s got nothing to do with this victim, this, er, drug dealer, or whatever, or this televangelist girl. But something is following you, something frightening you, but not enough to make you stop tracking this dark-skinned man who just got into the elevator?”

  I nodded, but then I caught myself in a little doubt. No, there couldn’t be any connection.

  Besides, this thing that had me rattled to the bone had started before I saw the Victim. It had “happened” first in Rio, the stalker, not long after I’d left Louis and David and gone back to Rio to hunt.

  I hadn’t picked up this Victim until he’d walked across my path in my own city of New Orleans. He’d come down there on a whim to see Dora for twenty minutes; they’d met in a little French Quarter bar, and I had been walking past and seen him, sparkling like a fire, and her white face and large compassionate eyes, and wham! It was fatal hunger.

  “No, it’s got nothing to do with him,” I said. “What’s stalking me started months before. He doesn’t know I’m following him. I didn’t catch on right away myself that I was being followed by this thing, this.…”

  “This what?”

  “Watching him and his daughter, it’s like my miniseries, you know. He’s so intricately evil.”

  “So you said, and what is stalking you? Is this a thing or a person or …?”

  “I’ll get to that. This Victim, he has killed so many people. Drugs. Such people wallow in numbers. Kilos, kills, coded accounts. And the girl, the girl of course turned out not to be some dim-witted little miracle worker telling diabetics she can cure them with the laying on of hands.”

  “Lestat, your mind’s wandering. What’s the matter with you? Why are you afraid? And why don’t you kill this victim and get that part over?”

  “You want to go back to Jesse and Maharet, don’t you?” I asked suddenly, a feeling of hopelessness descending on me. “You want to study for the next hundred years, among all those tablets and scrolls, and look into Maharet’s aching blue eyes, and hear her voice, I know you do. Does she still always choose blue eyes?”

  Maharet had been blind—eyes torn out—when she was made a vampire queen. She took eyes from her victims and wore them until they could see no more, no matter how the vampiric blood tried to preserve them. That was her shocking feature—the marble queen with the bleeding eyes. Why had she never wrung the neck of some vampire fledgling and stolen his or her eyes? It had never occurred to me before. Loyalty to our own kind? Maybe it wouldn’t work. But she had her scruples, and they were as hard as she was. A woman that old remembers when there was no Moses and no Hammurabi’s Code. When only the Pharaoh got to walk through the Valley of Death.…

  “Lestat,” David said. “Pay attention. You must tell me what you are talking about. I’ve never heard you admit so readily that you were afraid. You did say afraid. Forget about me for the moment. Forget that victim and the girl. What’s up, my friend? Who’s after you?”

  “I want to ask you some more questions first.”

  “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?”

  He looked at me sternly and reprimandingly. English schoolboy stuff probably.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you. Now, first, I have to remind you of something. A conversation we had. It was when you were alive still, when we last talked together in your place in the Cotswolds, you know, when you were just a charming old gentleman, dying in despair—”

  “I remember,” he said patiently. “Before you went into the desert.”

  “No, right after, when we knew I couldn’t die as easily as I thought I could, when I’d come back burnt. You cared for me. Then you started talking about yourself, your life. You said something about an experience you’d had before the war, you said, in a Paris café. You remember? You know what I’m talking about?”

  “Yes. I do. I told you that when I was a young man I thought I’d seen a vision.”

  “Yes, something about the fabric of life ripping for a moment so you glimpsed things you shouldn’t have seen.”

  He smiled. “You’re the one who suggested that, that the fabric had ripped somehow and I’d seen through the rip accidentally. I thought then and I still think now that it was a vision I was meant to see. But fifty years have passed since then. And my memory, my memory is surprisingly dim of the whole affair.”

  “Well, that’s to be expected. As a vampire, you will remember everything that happens to you from now on vividly, but the details of mortal life will slip rather fast, especially anything that had to do with the senses, you’ll find yourself chasing after it—what did wine taste like?”

  He motioned for me to be quiet. I was making him unhappy. I hadn’t meant to do this.

  I picked up my drink, savored the fragrance. It was some sort of hot Christmas punch. I think they called it wassail in England. I set down the glass. My hands and face were still dark from that excursion into the desert, that little attempt to fly into the face of the sun. That helped me pass for human. What an irony. And it made my hand a little more sensitive to the warmth.

  A ripple of pleasure ran through me. Warmth! Sometimes I think I get my money out of everything! There’s no way to cheat a sensualist like me, somebody who can die laughing for hours over the pattern of the carpet in a hotel lobby.

  I became aware again of his watching me.

  He seemed to have collected himself somewhat or forgiven me for the one thousandth time for having put his soul into a vampire’s body without his permission, indeed against his will. He looked at me, almost lovingly suddenly, as if I needed that reassurance.

  I took it. I did.

  “In this Paris café, you heard two beings talking to each other,” I said, going back to his vision of years before. “You were a young man. It all happened gradually. But you realized they weren’t ‘really’ there, the two, in a material sense, and the language they were speaking was understandable to you even though you didn’t know what it was.”

  He nodded. “That’s correct. And it sounded precisely like God and the Devil talking to each other.”

  I nodded. “And when I left you in the jungles last year, you said I wasn’t to worry, that you weren’t going off on any religious quest to find God and the Devil in a Paris café. You said you’d spent your mortal life looking for such things in the Talamasca. And now you would take a different turn.”

  “Yes, that’s what I said,” he admitted agreeably. “The vision’s dimmer now than it was when I told you. But I remember it. I still remember it, and I still believe I saw and heard something, and I’m as resigned as ever that I’ll never know what it was.”

  “You’re leaving God and the Devil to the Talamasca, then, as you promised.”

  “I’m leaving the Devil to the Talamasca,” he said. “I don’t think the Talamasca as a psychic order was ever that interes
ted in God.”

  All this was familiar verbal territory. I acknowledged it. We both kept our eye on the Talamasca, so to speak. But only one member of that devout order of scholars had ever known the true fate of David Talbot, the former Superior General, and now that human being was dead. His name had been Aaron Lightner. This had been a great sadness to David, the loss of the one human who knew what he was now, the human who had been his knowing mortal friend, as David had been mine.

  He wanted to pick up the thread.

  “You’ve seen a vision?” he asked. “That’s what’s frightening you?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing as clear as that. But the Thing is stalking me, and now and then it lets me see something in the blink of an eye. I hear it mostly. I hear it sometimes talking in a normal conversational voice to another, or I hear its steps behind me on the street, and I spin around. It’s true. I’m terrified of it. And then when it shows itself, well, I usually end up so disoriented, I’m sprawled in the gutter like a common drunk. A week will pass. Nothing. Then I’ll catch that fragment of conversation again.…”

  “And what are the words?”

  “Can’t give the fragments to you in order. I’d been hearing them before I realized what they were. On some level, I knew I was hearing a voice from some other locale, so to speak, you knew it wasn’t a mere mortal in the next room. But for all I knew, it could have had a natural explanation, an electronic explanation.”

  “I understand.”

  “But the fragments are things like two people talking, and one says—the one, that is—says, ‘Oh, no, he’s perfect, it has nothing to do with vengeance, how could you think I wanted mere vengeance?’ ” I broke off, shrugged. “It’s, you know, the middle of a conversation.”

  “Yes,” he said, “and you feel this Thing is letting you hear a little of it … just the way I thought the vision in the café was meant for me.”

  “You’ve got it exactly right. It’s tormenting me. Another time, this was only two days ago, I was in New Orleans; I was sort of spying on the Victim’s daughter, Dora. She lives there in the convent building I mentioned. It’s an old 1880s convent, unoccupied for years, and gutted, so that it’s like a brick castle, and this little sparrow of a girl, this lovely little woman, lives there fearlessly, completely alone. She walks about the house as if she were invincible.

  “Well, anyway, I was down there, and I had come into the courtyard of this building—it’s, you know, a shape as old as architecture, main building, two long wings, inner courtyard.”

  “The rather typical late-nineteenth-century brick institution.”

  “Exactly, and I was watching through the windows, the progress of that little girl walking by herself through the pitch-black corridor. She was carrying a flashlight. And she was singing to herself, one of her hymns. They’re all sort of medieval and modern at the same time.”

  “I believe the phrase is ‘New Age,’ ” David suggested.

  “Yes, it’s somewhat like that, but this girl is on an ecumenical religious network. I told you. Her program is very conventional. Believe in Jesus, be saved. She’s going to sing and dance people into Heaven, especially the women, apparently, or at least they’ll lead the way.”

  “Go on with the story, you were watching her.…”

  “Yes, and thinking how brave she was. She finally reached her own quarters; she lives in one of the four towers of the building; and I listened as she threw all the locks. And I thought, not many mortals would like to go prowling about this dark building, and the place wasn’t entirely spiritually clean.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Little spirits, elementals, whatever, what did you call them in the Talamasca?”

  “Elementals,” he said.

  “Well, there are some gathered about this building, but they’re no threat to this girl. She’s simply too brave and strong.

  “But not the Vampire Lestat, who was spying her. He was out in the courtyard, and he heard the voice right next to his ear, as if Two Men were talking at his right shoulder and the other one, the one who is not following me, says quite plainly, ‘No, I don’t see him in the same light.’ I turned round and round trying to find this Thing, close in on it mentally and spiritually, confront it, bait it, and then I realized I was shaking all over, and you know, the elementals, David, the little pesky spirits … the ones I could feel hanging about the convent … I don’t think they even realized this person, or whoever he was, had been talking in my ear.”

  “Lestat, you do sound as if you’ve lost your immortal mind,” he said. “No, no, don’t get angry. I believe you. But let’s backtrack. Why were you following the girl?”

  “I just wanted to see her. My Victim, he’s worried—about who he is, what’s he done, what the officials know about him. He’s afraid he’ll blemish her when the final indictment comes and all the newpaper stories. But the point is, he’ll never be indicted. I’m going to kill him first.”

  “You are. And then it actually might save her church, is that not right? Your killing him speedily, so to speak. Or am I mistaken?”

  “I wouldn’t hurt her for anything on this earth. Nothing could persuade me to do that.” I sat silent for a moment.

  “Are you sure you are not in love? You seem spellbound by her.”

  I was remembering. I had fallen in love only a short time ago with a mortal woman, a nun. Gretchen had been her name. And I had driven her mad. David knew the whole story. I’d written it; written all about David, too, and he and Gretchen had passed into the world in fictional form. He knew that.

  “I would never reveal myself to Dora as I did with Gretchen,” I said. “No. I won’t hurt Dora. I learnt my lesson. My only concern is to kill her father in such a way that she experiences the least suffering and the maximum benefit. She knows what her father is, but I’m not sure she’s prepared for all the bad things that could happen on account of him.”

  “My, but you are playing games.”

  “Well, I have to do something to keep my mind off this Thing that’s following me or I’ll go mad!”

  “Shhhh … what’s the matter with you? My God, but you’re rattled.”

  “Of course I am,” I whispered.

  “Explain more about the Thing. Give me more fragments.”

  “They’re not worth repeating. It’s an argument. It’s about me, I tell you. David, it’s like God and the Devil are arguing about me.”

  I caught my breath. My heart was hurting me, it was beating so fast, no mean feat for a vampiric heart. I rested back against the wall, let my eyes range over the bar—middle-aged mortals mostly, ladies in old-style fur coats, balding men just drunk enough to be loud and careless and almost young.

  The pianist had moved on into something popular, from the Broadway stage, I think. It was sad and sweet, and one of the old women in the bar was rocking slowly to the music, and mouthing the words with her rouged lips as she puffed on a cigarette. She was from that generation that had smoked so much that stopping now was out of the question. She had skin like a lizard. But she was a harmless and beautiful being. All of them were harmless and beautiful beings.

  My victim? I could hear him upstairs. He was still talking with his daughter. Would she not take just one more of his gifts? It was a picture, a painting perhaps.

  He would move mountains for his daughter, this victim, but she didn’t want his gift, and she wasn’t going to save his soul.

  I found myself wondering how late St. Patrick’s stayed open. She wanted so badly to go there. She was, as always, refusing his money. It’s “unclean,” she said to him now. “Roge, I want your soul. I can’t take the money for the church! It comes from crime. It’s filthy.”

  The snow fell outside. The piano music grew more rapid and urgent. Andrew Lloyd Webber at his best, I thought. Something from Phantom of the Opera.

  There was that noise again out in the lobby, and I turned abruptly in my chair and looked over my shoulder, and then back at David. I liste
ned. I thought I heard it again, like a footstep, an echoing footstep, a deliberately terrifying footstep. I did hear it. I knew I was trembling. But then it was gone, over. There came no voice in my ear.

  I looked at David.

  “Lestat, you’re petrified, aren’t you?” he asked, very sympathetically.

  “David, I think the Devil’s come for me. I think I’m going to Hell.”

  He was speechless. After all, what could he say? What does a vampire say to another vampire on such subjects? What would I have said if Armand, three hundred years older than me, and far more wicked, had said the Devil was corning for him? I would have laughed at him. I would have made some cruel joke about his fully deserving it and how he’d meet so many of our kind down there, subject to a special sort of vampiric torment, far worse than mere damned mortals ever experienced. I shuddered.

  “Good God,” I said under my breath.

  “You said you’ve seen it?”

  “Not quite. I was … somewhere, it’s not important. I think New York again, yes, back here with him—”

  “The victim.”

  “Yes, following him. He had some transaction at an art gallery. Midtown. He’s quite a smuggler. It’s all part of his peculiar personality, that he loves beautiful and ancient objects, the sort of things you love, David. I mean, when I finally do make a meal of him, I might bring you one of his treasures.”

  David said nothing, but I could see this was distasteful to him, the idea of purloining something precious from someone whom I had not yet killed but was surely to kill.

  “Medieval books, crosses, jewelry, relics, that’s the sort of thing he deals in. It’s what got him into the dope, ransoming church art that had been lost during the Second World War in Europe, you know, priceless statues of angels and saints that had been pillaged. He’s got his most valued treasures stashed in a flat on the Upper East Side. His big secret. I think the dope money started as a means to an end. Somebody had something he wanted. I don’t know. I read his mind and then I tire of it. And he’s evil, and all those relics have no magic, and I’m going to Hell.”