Prince Lestat: The Vampire Chronicles

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Prince Lestat: The Vampire Chronicles Page 50

by Anne Rice


  Her face was fiercely white in the light of the fire.

  Her pale-blue eyes were fixed on me but the flesh around them was softened as it had always been. The fire glinted on her golden eyelashes, on her golden eyebrows, and on her white hands and face.

  She came towards me with those slow steps as if the effort cost her body pain, pain that she did not acknowledge, but pain which slowed her every movement. She took her place in front of me, the fire just to her right.

  “You want to go to your sister, don’t you?” I asked.

  Very slowly, her pink lips, so very like the pink insides of a seashell, spread into a smile. The masklike face fired with subtle perception.

  I rose to my feet. My heart was pounding.

  She lifted her two hands, palms turned inwards, and gradually brought her fingers to her eyes.

  With her left hand poised, she reached with her right hand for her right eye.

  I gasped, but it was done before I could stop her, and the blood was pouring down her cheek, the eye gone, plucked out and fallen to the floor, and only the empty bleeding socket was there and then her fingers—the first two fingers—once more jabbed, jabbed into the blood and broke the tender bones, the tender occipital bones, at the back of the eye socket. I heard the little cone of bones snap and shatter.

  I understood.

  She reached out to me, imploring me, and out of her there came a low desperate sigh.

  I took her head in my hands and closed my lips on the bleeding eye socket. I felt her powerful hands caressing my head. I sucked with all my strength, drawing as strongly as ever I’d drawn blood in my life, and I felt the brain coming into my mouth, flowing viscous and sweet as the blood, flowing out of her and coming into me. I felt it fill my mouth, a great gusher of tissue against all the tender flesh inside my mouth, and then filling my throat as it passed down into me.

  The world went dark. Black.

  And then it exploded with light. All I could see was this light. Galaxies exploded in this light, whole sweeping pathways of innumerable stars pulsed and disintegrated as the light grew brighter and brighter. I heard my own distant cry.

  Her body had gone limp in my arms, but I wouldn’t let it go. I held fast, drawing on the blood, drawing on the gusher of tissue, drawing and drawing and hearing the beat of her heart swell to deafening volume and then stop. I swallowed again and again until nothing but blood was in my mouth. My own heart exploded.

  I felt her body fall to the floor but I saw nothing. Blackness again. Blackness. Disaster. And then the light, the blinding light.

  I lay on the floor my arms and legs outstretched, and a great searing current was moving through my limbs, through my organs, through the chambers of my heart. It pervaded every cell of my skin, all over my body, my arms, my legs, my face, my head. Like electricity it burned through every circuit of my being. The light flashed and brightened. My arms and legs were flopping and I couldn’t control them but the sensations were orgasmic and they had become my body, all heavy tissue and bone suddenly gathered up into this weightless yet glorious thing that I was.

  My body had become this light, this throbbing, pulsing, shivering light, this simmering light. And I felt as if it were pouring out of me through my fingers and my toes, through my cock, through my skull. I could feel it generated and regenerated inside me, inside my pounding heart and pouring out so that I seemed immense, immense beyond all imagining, expanding in a void of light, light that was blinding, light that was beautiful, light that was perfect.

  I cried out again. I heard it but never meant to do it. I heard it.

  Then the light flashed as if to blind me forever, and I saw the ceiling above me, and I saw the circle of the chandelier—the flashing prismatic colors of that chandelier. The room came down around me as if descending from Heaven and I was not on the floor at all. I was standing on my feet.

  Never in all my existence had I felt so powerful. Not even ascending with the Cloud Gift had I ever known such fearlessness, such buoyancy, such limitless and utterly sublime strength. I was climbing to the stars yet I had not left the room.

  I stared down at Mekare. She was dead. She had sunk to her knees and then fallen on her right side, her blighted eye socket hidden, her left profile perfect as she lay there staring forward with one half-lidded blue eye as if she were asleep. How beautiful she looked, how complete, how like a flower fallen there on the gravel path of a garden, how destined for this fragile moment.

  The sound of wind filled my ears, wind and singing as if I’d passed into realms of angels, and then voices assailed me, voices from everywhere, rising and falling in waves, relentless voices, voices in splashes, as if someone were splashing the very walls of my entire universe with great splashes of molten gold paint.

  “Are you with me?” I whispered.

  “I am with you,” he said clearly, distinctly in my brain.

  “Do you see what I see?”

  “It’s magnificent.”

  “Do you hear what I hear?”

  “It’s magnificent.”

  “I see as never before,” I said.

  “As do I.”

  We were wrapped in a cloud of sound together, immense, unending, and symphonic sound.

  I looked down at my hands. They were throbbing as was all my body, as was the whole brilliant world. Never had they seemed such a miracle of texture and perfection.

  “Are these your hands?” I asked.

  “They are mine,” he said calmly.

  I turned to the mirror.

  “Are these your eyes?” I asked, staring into my own.

  “They are mine.”

  I gave a long low sigh.

  “We are beautiful, you and I,” he said.

  Behind me in the glass, behind my still awestruck face, I saw them all. They had all come into the room.

  I turned to face them. Every single one of them was gathered here now from right to left. They were astonished. They looked at me, not a single one speaking, not a single one looking with surprise or horror at the body of Mekare on the floor.

  They had seen it! They had seen it in their minds. They’d seen it, and they knew. I had not shed her precious blood. I had not done her violence. I had accepted her invitation. All of them knew what had happened. They’d felt it, inescapably, just as I’d felt it on that long-ago day when Mekare took the Core from Akasha.

  Never had they or any gathering of persons looked so very distinct to me, each individual there radiant with a subtle power, each stamped with a signature of distinct and defining energy, each marked with a unique gift.

  I couldn’t stop looking at them, marveling at the details of their faces, at their delicate flashing expressions playing over eyes and lips.

  “Well, Prince Lestat,” cried Benji. “It is done.”

  “You are our prince,” said Seth.

  “You are anointed now,” said Sevraine.

  “You were chosen,” said Gregory, “by him and by her, by him who animates all of us, and by the one who was our Queen of the Damned.”

  Amel laughed softly inside me. “You are my beloved,” he whispered.

  I stood silent, feeling a slow subtle movement inside of my body, as if some fine tangle of tendrils were moving purposefully out of my brain and down the length of my spine and then out again through my limbs. I could see this as I felt it, see its subtle golden electric pulse.

  Out of the depths of my soul, my soul that was the sad and struggling sum of all I’d ever known, I felt my own voice yearning to say, And I will never be alone again.

  “No, you will never,” said the Voice, “you will never be alone again.”

  I looked at the others once more, all gathered there so expectantly and in awe. I could see the muted wonder in Marius, and the quiet sad trust in Louis, and the childlike amazement in Armand. I saw their doubts, their suspicions, their questions all so uneasily subsumed in the moment by wonder. I knew.

  And how could I ever explain how I had reache
d this moment, I who had been Born to Darkness of rape, and sought for redemption in a borrowed mortal body, and followed spirits yet unexplained to realms of inexplicable Heaven and nightmarish Hell, only to fall back again to the brutal Earth, broken, and battered, and defeated? How to explain why this, this alone, was the bold and terrifying alliance that would give me the passion to travel the road of the centuries, of the millennia, of the aeons of uncharted and unimagined time?

  “I will not be the Prince of the Damned,” I said. “I give no power to that old poetry! No. Never. We claim now the Devil’s Road as our road, and we will rename it for ourselves and our tribe and our journey. We are reborn!”

  “Prince Lestat,” said Benji again, and then Sybelle echoed it, and then Antoine and Louis and Armand and Marius and Gregory, Seth, Fareed, Rhoshamandes, Everard, Benedict, Sevraine, Bianca, Notker, all of them echoed it, and on the words kept coming from those for whom as yet I had no names.

  Viktor stood in the shadows with Rose, and Viktor said it and so did Rose, and Benji shouted it again, throwing up his hands and balling his fists.

  “They are beautiful,” said Amel. “These children of me, these parts of me, this tribe of me.”

  “Yes, beloved, they have always been that,” I answered. “That has always been true.”

  “So beautiful,” he said again. “How can we not love them?”

  “Oh, but we do,” I said. “We certainly do.”

  Part IV

  THE PRINCIPALITY

  OF

  DARKNESS

  28

  Lestat

  The Prince’s Speech

  MY FIRST TRUE DECISION as monarch was that I wanted to go home to France. This monarch was going to rule from his ancestral Château de Lioncourt on one of the most isolated mountain plateaus of the Massif Central where he had been born. And it was also decided that Armand’s luxurious house in Saint-Germaine-de-Prés would hence forward be the Paris headquarters of the court.

  Trinity Gate would be the royal residence in New York, and we would have the ceremony for Rose and Viktor tomorrow night at Trinity Gate as planned.

  An hour after the transformation—when I was at last ready for it—we took the remains of Mekare from the library, and buried them in the rear garden in a spot surrounded by flowers and open to the sun in the day. We were all to a one gathered for this, including Rhoshamandes and Benedict.

  Mekare’s body had turned to something resembling clear plastic, though I detest the crudeness of that word. What blood she’d retained had pooled as she lay on the floor and her remains were largely completely translucent by the time we carried her to her grave. Even her hair was becoming colorless, and breaking apart into myriad silver needlelike fragments. So Sevraine and my mother and the other women laid her out on a bier for the burial, placing the missing eye back into its socket, and covered her over with black velvet.

  We stood silent at the site as she was laid to rest in what was a shallow but completely adequate grave. Flower petals were gathered by some of us from throughout the garden and these were sprinkled over the bier. Then others gathered more flowers. I turned back the velvet one last time and bent down to kiss Mekare’s forehead. Rhoshamandes and Benedict did nothing, because they obviously feared the censure of all if they tried to make any gesture. And Everard de Landen, the French-Italian fledgling of Rhoshamandes, was the last to place several roses on the corpse.

  Finally, we began to fill the grave with earth, and soon all sight of Mekare’s form was lost.

  It was agreed that two of those vampire physicians working for Seth and Fareed would go to the Amazon compound and exhume whatever remained of Khayman and Maharet and bring those relics here to be laid to rest with Mekare sometime in the coming month. And of course I knew full well that Fareed and Seth would harvest samples from those remains. Possibly they had done it with Mekare, but then again perhaps not, as this was a solemn occasion.

  David and Jesse would also go there to retrieve whatever had survived of Maharet’s library and archives, of her keepsakes and belongings, and any legal papers that were worth preserving for her mortal family or for Jesse herself.

  I found all this unrelievedly grim, but I noticed that the others, to a one, seemed comforted by these arrangements. It took me back to the night long ago when Akasha had died at the hand of Mekare. I realized with shame I had not the slightest idea what had become of her corpse.

  Not to care, not to question, not to bother—all this had been part of the old way for me, one of shame and melancholy, an existence in which I assumed completely that we were cursed and the victims of the Blood as surely as mortals thought themselves to be the guilty victims of Original Sin. I had not seen us as worthy of ceremonies. I had not believed in the small coven that Armand had sought to rescue from those ghastly nights when he created the old Night Island for us to gather in the Florida climes.

  Well, I saw the sense of all this now. I saw its immense value, for the old and the young.

  I had been tired before the momentous change had been worked and, elated as I was—and the word does little justice to what I felt—I was still tired and needing to be alone now, alone with Amel.

  But before I retired for the night, back to the French library, I felt we had to meet in the attic ballroom once more around the long rectangular gilded table that was still in place as it had been for our first assembly.

  For one thing, every single immortal inhabitant of the household was watching me, trying to figure how Amel was infecting and affecting me, and I knew this, and so I had no hesitation about spending more time with them now.

  So we returned to the long golden table and chairs. I stood at the head as before. Rose and Viktor kept to the wall with those retiring blood drinkers brought to Trinity Gate by Notker and Sevraine, whom I was determined to come to know before I left this place.

  Whatever it might have been like for Akasha or Mekare to hold the Core, I couldn’t know. But for me, having Amel inside of me multiplied and expanded my senses and my energy beyond measure. I still saw each of them and all of them when I looked at the assembly in a new and remarkably vivid way.

  “I think this ballroom should be the place for Rose and Viktor to receive the Dark Gift,” I said. “The table should be broken up and its parts put back on the periphery. I think the place should be filled with all the flowers from the shops of Manhattan that it can hold. Armand’s local mortal agents can surely see to this during the daylight hours.” He at once agreed. “And I suggest that all be present under the roof, but not in this room, leaving this room alone to Rose and to Viktor and Pandora and Marius for the giving of the Gift.”

  No one objected.

  “Then at such a time as the ceremony is complete, others may be invited up, one by one, to give their ancient blood. Gregory, Sevraine, Seth. Perhaps you will agree to this. Marius, and Pandora, you will approve. Rose and Viktor, you will be willing. And I will give you a measure of my blood then too.”

  Agreement all around.

  “Marius and Pandora can then take the fledglings down to the garden,” I said, “for the physical death and its pain. And when that’s past, they can be clothed in new garments and come into the house reborn. After that, Marius and Pandora can take our young ones out to experience the hunt for the first time.”

  Again there was obvious and enthusiastic agreement.

  Rhoshamandes asked for permission to speak.

  I gave it.

  His arm and his hand had been working perfectly since their reattachment with no problem whatsoever as I knew they’d be, and he was handsomely clothed in a tailored gray leather jacket and a sweater of lighter gray wool.

  He looked cool and collected and charming as if he’d never hacked anyone to death or kidnapped anyone, or threatened to kill my son if he didn’t get his way.

  “I can well understand if no one wants me to do more than be a quiet prisoner here,” he said. “But I will give my blood to the young couple if they will acce
pt it. And maybe this can go towards my forgiveness by this group.”

  Viktor and Rose waited on me for my response. And I, after looking intently at Rhoshamandes and Benedict for a long moment, noting the dazzling equanimity of the former and the obvious abject misery of the latter, said yes to this if Marius and Pandora approved, and if Viktor and Rose gave their consent.

  Understand, I could hardly believe myself that I was doing this, but the Prince was in charge now and the Brat Prince was no more.

  The motion carried, so to speak.

  “I am sorry from my heart,” said Rhoshamandes, with amazing calmness. “I have truly in my long life among the Undead never sought conflict even when others thought I should. I am sorry. I lost my own fledglings to the Children of Satan rather than make war. I ask the tribe to forgive me, and to accept me as one of its own.”

  Benji was staring at him with fierce narrow black eyes, and Armand was looking up at me from his chair with slightly raised eyebrows, and Jesse merely looked at him coldly, her arms folded. David had no discernible expression, but I felt I knew what he was thinking even though I couldn’t read his thoughts.

  What precisely are we to do with this one if we don’t accept him back into the tribe? And what danger is he to anyone if we do?

  Well, as I saw it, he was no danger. If he was not accepted, well then, he might become a danger, especially if others took this to mean that he had been “proscribed” like the ancient enemies of the dictator Sulla, who were then free game to be murdered by their Roman brethren. I was no Sulla.

  I listened quietly for the voice of Amel, conscious that I wanted very much to know what he had to say. All had changed between us so totally that he was no longer even the specter in my mind of the old Voice. But if I had underestimated the complexity of all this, I did want a hint of that now.

  In the silence, I heard his faint whisper. “I used him. Can we not be thankful that he failed?”

 

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