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

by Rice, Anne

  “What we always do,” said Stirling. “Write about it, put it into a report to the Elders, copy it to the File on the Vampire Lestat—that is, if you let me leave here, if that’s your choice.”

  “I haven’t harmed any of you, have I?” Lestat asked. “Think on it. When have I harmed a true and active member of the Talamasca? Don’t blame me for what others have done. And since your warlike declaration, since you sought to drive me right out of my home, I’ve shown remarkable restraint.”

  “No, you haven’t,” Stirling quietly replied.

  I was shocked.

  “What do you mean?” Lestat demanded. “What on earth can you mean? I think I’ve been a gentleman about it.” He smiled at Stirling for the first time.

  “Yes, you’ve been a gentleman,” Stirling responded. “But I hardly think you’ve been restrained.”

  “Do you know how it affects me to be driven out of New Orleans?” Lestat asked, voice still tempered. “Do you know how it affects me to know I can’t wander the French Quarter for fear of your spies in the Café du Monde, or wander the Rue Royale with the evening shoppers, just because one of your glorified gossips might be wandering about too? Do you know how it wounds me to leave behind the one city in the world with which I’m truly in love?”

  Stirling roused himself at these words. “But haven’t you always been too clever for us?” he asked.

  “Well, of course,” Lestat rejoined with a shrug.

  “Besides,” Stirling went on, “you haven’t been driven out. You’ve been here. You’ve been seen by our members, sitting very boldly in the Café du Monde, I might add, presiding over a hot cup of useless café au lait.”

  I was stunned.

  “Stirling!” I whispered. “For the love of Christ, don’t argue.”

  Again Lestat looked at me, but not with anger. He returned to Stirling.

  Stirling hadn’t finished. He went on firmly: “You still feed off the riffraff,” he said. “The authorities don’t care, but we recognize the patterns. We know it’s you.”

  I was mortified. How could Stirling talk like this?

  Lestat broke into an irrepressible laugh.

  “And even so, you came by night?” he demanded. “You dared to come, knowing I might find you here?”

  “I think …” Stirling hesitated, then went on. “I think I wanted to challenge you. I think, as I said, that I committed a sin of pride.”

  Thank God for this confession, I thought. “Committed a sin”—really good words. I was quaking, watching the two of them, appalled by Stirling’s fearless tone.

  “We respect you,” said Stirling, “more than you deserve.”

  I gasped.

  “Oh, do explain that to me!” said Lestat, smiling. “In what form comes this respect, I should like to know. If I’m truly in your debt, I should like to say thanks.”

  “St. Elizabeth’s,” said Stirling, his voice rolling gracefully now, “the building where you lay for so many years, sleeping on the chapel floor. We’ve never sought to enter it or discover what goes on there. And as you said we’re very good at bribing guards. Your Chronicles made your sleep famous. And we knew that we could penetrate the building. We could glimpse you in the daylight hours, unprotected, lying on the marble. What a lure that was—the sleeping vampire who no longer bothered with the trappings of a coffin. A dark deadly inverse of the sleeping King Arthur, waiting for England to need him again. But we never crept into your enormous lodgings. As I said, I think we respected you more than you deserve.”

  I shut my eyes for an instant, certain of disaster.

  But Lestat only broke into another fit of chuckling and laughing.

  “Sheer nonsense,” he said. “You and your members were afraid. You never came near St. Elizabeth’s night or day because you were plainly afraid of the ancient ones among us who could have put out your light like a match. You were afraid too of the rogue vampires who came prowling, the ones who wouldn’t respect the name Talamasca enough to give you a wide berth. As for the daylight hours, you had no clue what you’d find—what high-paid thugs might have terminated you and buried you under the concrete basement floor. It was a purely practical matter.”

  Stirling narrowed his eyes. “Yes, we did have to be careful,” he conceded. “Nevertheless, there were times—.”

  “Foolishness,” said Lestat. “In point of pure fact, my infamous sleep ended before your declaration of war on us was made. And what if I did show myself sitting ‘very boldly’ in the Café du Monde! How dare you use the word ‘boldly’? You imply I don’t have the right!”

  “You feed on your fellow human beings,” said Stirling calmly. “Have you seriously forgotten that?”

  I was frantic. Only the smile on Lestat’s face reassured me that Stirling wasn’t headed for certain death.

  “No, I never forget what I do,” said Lestat equably. “But surely you don’t mean to take on the whole question of what I do now for my own survival! And you must remember, I’m not a human being—far from it, and farther from it with every passing adventure and every passing year. I’ve been to Heaven and to Hell; let me ask you to remember that.”

  Lestat paused as though he himself were remembering this, and Stirling tried to answer but plainly could not. Lestat pressed on in a measured voice:

  “I’ve been in a human body and recovered this body you see before you. I’ve been the consort of a creature whom others called a goddess. And yes, I feed off my fellow human beings because it’s my nature, and you know it, and you know what care I take with every mortal morsel, that it be tainted and vicious and unfit for human life. The point I was trying to make is that your declaration against us was ill conceived.”

  “I agree with you; it was a foolish Declaration of Enmity. It should never have been put forth.”

  “Declaration of Enmity, is that what you called it?” Lestat asked.

  “I think those are the official words,” said Stirling. “We’ve always been an authoritarian order. In fact, we don’t know much about democracy at all. When I spoke of my vote, I was speaking of a symbolic voice rather than a literal one. Declaration of Enmity, yes, those were the words. It was a rather misguided and naive thing.”

  “Ah, misguided and naive,” Lestat repeated. “I like that. And it might do you good, all of you in the Talamasca, to remember that you’re a pretentious bunch of meddlers, and your Elders are no better than the rest of you.”

  Stirling seemed to be relaxing, mildly fascinated, but I couldn’t relax. I was too afraid of what might happen at any moment.

  “I have a theory about the Declaration of Enmity,” Stirling said.

  “Which is?” asked Lestat.

  “I think the Elders thought in their venerable minds, and God knows, I don’t really know their venerable minds, that the Declaration would bring certain of our members back to us who had been inducted into your ranks.”

  “Oh, that’s lovely.” Lestat laughed. “Why are you mincing words like this? Is it on account of the boy?”

  “Yes, perhaps I mince words because of him,” Stirling answered, “but honestly, we members of the Talamasca think in language such as this.”

  “Well, for your records and your files,” Lestat said, “we don’t have ranks. In fact, I’d say that as a species we are given to rigidly individual personalities and obdurate differences, and peculiar mobility as to matters of friendship and company and meeting of minds. We come together in small covens and then are driven wildly apart again. We know little lasting peace with each other. We have no ranks.”

  This was intriguing and my fear melted just a little as Stirling came back in his careful polite voice.

  “I understand that,” he said. “But to return to the question at hand, as to why the Elders made this warlike declaration, I think they honestly believed that those vampires who had once been part of us might come to try to reason with us, and we might benefit thereby in meeting with actual beings such as yourself. We might carry our knowl
edge of you to a higher realm.”

  “It was all scholastic is what you’re saying,” said Lestat.

  “Yes. And surely you must realize what it has meant for us to lose three members to your collective power, whatever the cause of it, and no matter how it was accomplished. We were stunned by each defection, and mystified as to the dialogue, if any, that might have preceded what happened. We wanted to learn, you see. We wanted … to know.”

  “Well, it didn’t work, did it?” said Lestat, his calm demeanor unchanged. “And you weren’t content with the Chronicles alone, were you? They told you all about the dialogue. But you and the Elders wanted this eye-to-eye view.”

  “No, it didn’t work,” said Stirling, and he seemed now to be possessed of his full dignity and strength. His gray eyes were clear. “On the contrary, we provoked from you more audacity. You dared to publish a Chronicle using the name Merrick Mayfair. You dared to do this even though a great family by the name of Mayfair lives in this city and its environs to this day. You had no care when you did that.”

  I felt a sharp stab in my heart. My own beloved Mayfair flashed before my eyes. But here was Stirling being positively reckless again.

  “Audacity!” said Lestat, his smile broadening as he glared at Stirling. “You accuse me of audacity! You’re living and breathing now entirely because I want it.”

  “No doubt of it, but you are audacious,” insisted Stirling.

  I was about to faint.

  “Audacious and proud of it,” Lestat fired back. “But let’s get one thing straight. I am not the sole author of the Chronicles. Blame your own versatile David Talbot for the Chronicle of Merrick Mayfair. It was David’s story to tell. Merrick wanted the Dark Gift. Merrick Mayfair was a witch before she was ever a vampire. Who should know that better than you? There was no lie there. And it was David’s choice to use her name, as well as the name of the Talamasca, I might add. What is all of this to me?”

  “He wouldn’t have done it without your blessing,” said Stirling with astonishing confidence.

  “You think not?” demanded Lestat. “And why should I care about some mortal family of witches? The Mayfairs, what are they to me? And what is a great family, pray tell, a rich family? Vampires loathe witches, whether they’re rich or poor. Anyone who reads the story of Merrick Mayfair can see why. Not that Merrick isn’t anything but a princess among us now. Besides, our eager readers think it’s all fiction, and how do you know what’s real and what’s not?”

  I wept inside thinking of my red-haired Mayfair! And on they talked.

  “Thank God your readers think it’s fiction,” said Stirling, becoming faintly more heated, “and the Mayfair family is unaware of the truths you told; and a great family is one that has survived the ages, and treasures bonds of love. What else? You seek a family, always and everywhere. I see it in your Chronicles.”

  “Stop, I won’t listen to you,” said Lestat sharply but without raising his voice. “I’m not here to be judged by you. You’ve had corruption in your ranks. You know you have. And I know full well myself. And now I find that you’re corrupt, disobeying your Elders to come here. You think I’d give you the Dark Blood?”

  “I don’t want it,” said Stirling in suppressed amazement. “I don’t seek it. I wanted to see you, and hear your voice.”

  “And now you have, and what will you do?”

  “I told you. Write about it. Confess to the Elders. Describe it all.”

  “Oh, no you won’t,” said Lestat. “You’ll leave out one key part.”

  “And what is that?” asked Stirling.

  “You’re such an admirable bunch,” said Lestat, shaking his head. “You can’t guess what part?”

  “We try to be admirable,” said Stirling. “I’ll be condemned by the Elders. I might even be removed from Louisiana, though I doubt it. I have other important work to do.”

  Again, there came that stab in my heart. I thought of the “great family of Mayfair.” I thought of my red-haired love, my Mayfair witch, whom I would never see again. Was that his important work? I wished with all my heart I could ask him.

  Lestat appeared to be studying Stirling, who had fallen silent, staring at Lestat, perhaps doing that little mental trick of memorizing all the details about which he would write later on. Members of the Talamasca were especially trained to do it.

  I tried to scan his mind, but I couldn’t get in, and I didn’t dare to try with Lestat. Lestat would know.

  Lestat broke the silence.

  “Revoke it, this Declaration of Enmity,” he said.

  Stirling was startled. He thought for a moment and then he said:

  “I can’t do that. I’m not one of the Elders. I can tell them that you asked me to revoke the Declaration. That’s all I can do.”

  Lestat’s eyes softened. They drifted over Stirling and then to me. For a long moment Lestat and I looked at each other, and then I weakened and looked politely away.

  I had glimpsed something as we looked at each other.

  It was something I’d never heard mentioned in the Chronicles—a shade of difference between Lestat’s eyes. One eye was almost imperceptibly larger than the other, and colored by a little blood. I’m not sure that as a mortal I could have detected such a small difference. I was confused by having seen it now. If Lestat counted it as a flaw, he would hate me for seeing it.

  Lestat was gazing at Stirling.

  “We’ll make a deal, you and I,” he said.

  “I’m relieved to hear it,” Stirling said. It had the same gentle arrogance of his earlier remarks.

  “It’s a simple bargain,” said Lestat, “but if you refuse me, or if you go against me, I’ll go against you. I could have done that before now, I’m sure you know.”

  “David Talbot won’t let you hurt us,” said Stirling with quiet spunk. “And there’s an old one, an ancient one, one of the grandest in your tales, and she, the great authority, won’t let you harm us either, isn’t that so?”

  “Stirling!” I whispered before I could stop myself.

  But Lestat seemed only to weigh this for a moment. Then:

  “I could still hurt you,” he said. “I don’t play by anybody’s rules but my own. As for the ancient ones, don’t be so sure they want to govern. I think they want utter privacy and complete peace.”

  Stirling reflected, then said quickly, “I see your point.”

  “You despise me now, don’t you?” Lestat asked with engaging sincerity.

  “Not at all,” was Stirling’s quick reply. “On the contrary, I see your charm. You know I do. Tell me about this bargain. What do you want me to do?”

  “First off, go back to your Elders and tell them that this Declaration of Enmity must be officially withdrawn. It doesn’t matter that much to me but it matters to others, and besides, I know that if you swear honorably to be no more than observers in the future, then you won’t annoy us, and with me that counts for a lot. I loathe being annoyed. It makes me feel angry and malicious.”

  “Very well.”

  “The second request stems from the first. Leave this boy completely alone. This boy is the key point which you must leave out of your report. Of course you can say that a nameless Blood Drinker assaulted you. You know, have it all make sense and do justice to whatever you think you may have learned here. I anticipate your inevitable fascination with all that. But this boy’s anonymity must become a point of honor … and there’s more.”

  Stirling was silent.

  “You know his name,” said Lestat, “you know where he lives, you know his family. All that was plain to me before I interrupted him in his bumbling attack on you. Now you know that he’s one of us, as the expression goes. You must not only leave him out of your records, you must leave him completely and utterly alone.”

  Stirling held Lestat’s gaze for a moment and then he nodded.

  “You move against this boy,” said Lestat, “you try to take up your combative posture where he is concerned, and as God
is my witness, I’ll wipe you out. I’ll kill all of you. I’ll leave you nothing but your empty libraries and your overflowing vaults. I’ll start in the Motherhouse in Louisiana and then I’ll move to the Motherhouses all over the world. It’s a cinch for me to do it. I’ll pick you off one at a time. Even if the ancients do rise to protect you, it won’t happen immediately, and what I can do immediately is an enormous amount of harm.”

  I went from fear to astonishment.

  “I understand you,” said Stirling. “Of course you want him protected. Thank heaven for that.”

  “I pray that you do understand me,” said Lestat. He glanced at me again. “This is a young one, an innocent one, and I’ll make the decision as to whether he survives or not.”

  I think Stirling let out a little gasp.

  As for me there came a flood of relief again, and then another wave of intelligent fear.

  Lestat gestured to Stirling.

  “Need I add that you’re to get out of here now and never trespass on my property again?” he asked.

  Stirling rose at once, and so did I. Stirling looked at me, and there came over me again the total realization that I’d almost ended his life tonight, and a recurrence of terrible shame.

  “Good-bye, my friend,” I said in as strong a voice as I could muster. I reached awkwardly for his hand and held it firmly. He looked at me and his face softened.

  “Quinn,” he said, “my brave Quinn.”

  He turned.

  “Farewell, Lestat de Lioncourt,” he said. “I think I understate my case when I say I’m deeply in your debt.”

  “You do but I find ingrates all around me eternally,” said Lestat, smiling slyly. “Go on, Mr. Oliver. It’s a good thing you have one of your prowling limousines waiting for you only a couple of blocks from here. I don’t think you’re up to walking far or driving a car by yourself.”

  “Right you are,” said Stirling, and then with no further words he hurried down the hallway and out the back door, and I heard his heavy rapid steps on the iron stairs.