by Anne Rice
But she was talking, talking about what Amel was, and what Amel could do, and who she was, and how she had no choice but to try to free him and put him in a body very nearly like the one that had been blown to pieces in Atalantaya, sending him on his journey of thousands of years into the realm of the spirits out of which we had been born.
I stood against the parapet a few feet to her right looking out over the modern buildings of Collingsworth Pharmaceuticals and the modern towers of Paris all around it, a world away from the old city and the cathedral in which I'd first drunk innocent blood. Somewhere lost in the confusion of rooftops was the doorway to Fareed's laboratory in another building, but I couldn't tell where that was. The fact is, we were safe here and I heard no preternatural hearts near us, no foolish angels to the rescue. Gregory had not followed. Fareed and Flannery were likely miles away at Court, and we were alone.
And she, a fragile thing, in spite of all her gifts, had about her the perfume of innocent blood.
Innocent blood. Amel had stopped asking for it, stopped bringing it to my mind the way he had been only a few months ago. Innocent blood, that tasted just the same as evil blood, if you closed your eyes to the visions that traveled with it, and just drank and drank and drank.
It was supremely enticing to me that she would not die if I drank every drop of her innocent blood, and in my secret lawless mind where fantasies are nurtured only to die an early death, I saw her as a captive wife in the dungeons of my ancestral chateau, kept there for me the way Derek had been kept by the unfortunate Roland, and I thought what conversations we might have, me and my immortal bride whose blood would never run dry. She was so very lovely, with her shining dark skin, such rich dark skin, and her raven hair and her quick, crisp speaking voice so easy to listen to, if I really wanted to hear anything she said. And I'd always want to hear what she had to say, because she was brilliant, and she knew things impossible for me to know. She'd really been up there, with the moon and the stars, on a star called Bravenna, higher than I could ever soar.
"All right," I said bringing to a halt her latest exhortation as to why I should do it now. "I'm not ready, but I'll be ready and when I am I'll tell you."
I picked her up and carried her upwards again and back over the city, and as I approached the cathedral I slowed and took her down the last few hundred yards and deposited her standing, as she had been before, before the central door of the church.
No sign of her legions. They must have retreated when they saw it was no use looking for her.
She buttoned up her coat to her neck, and shoved her naked hands into her pockets, and looked at me, defeated and discouraged.
"The fact is I am ready to do it now! And only a half mile from here. Everything's ready!"
"I'm not ready," I said. "I could die. He could die!"
I had a lot more to say to her but I didn't know what it was. I wanted to say that Amel was silent, Amel wasn't urging me to come with her, and that alone was reason for me to delay. Then for the first time it occurred to me: what would I do when Amel did say go to her? Maybe I was waiting for that and that alone.
I couldn't refuse Amel, not loving him and understanding him as I did. And if he was willing, if he was ready, who was I to stand in his way?
So why are you silent, goddamn it! Why don't you settle this! Speak up now and I'll go with her!
Weeping. He was weeping--so soft, so far away, and yet so near.
Something shook me. Sound of a powerful ancient preternatural heart. Gregory, most likely, or Seth. But it was the wrong signature. All hearts do have a signature, I had only just come to realizing that in these last few months. Amel had taught me that.
I started to turn around--to confront the intruder--but it was too late.
The being had me, had his arms around me as he stood firm against my back. It was strength so far beyond my own I was trapped. I couldn't send the Fire Gift at him because I wasn't facing him. I seemed unable to muster any telekinetic resistance. Yet I tried with all my might to get free. I could have broken the grip of a gargoyle sooner than this grip.
Kapetria stood staring at the pair of us. Her black eyes were wide with amazement. The square was deserted. Paris was asleep. But the sky was filling with light.
"Let's call it reparation," said the voice against my ear. But he was talking to Kapetria. "I take him to your chopping block, and then we're even for what I did to your beloved Derek. And you, Lestat--we're even for what you did to me."
31
Lestat
IT WASN'T ALL that different from a hospital operating room, or so I imagined, since I'd never been in one. But I'd seen them enough in popular films to recognize all the equipment. Only difference was that the patient was strapped to a table by steel strips of seeming-impossible strength. And Rhoshamandes held me firmly there in place as we both waited for the rising sun.
There had been a battle in the square--desperate, confused, with Cyril and Thorne and the ghost of Magnus vainly assaulting Rhoshamandes. I'd sensed another spirit's presence, and even the presence of Armand. Others. There had been flashes of fire and howls and curses. I'd cried out, "No more. I surrender. Don't harm them." It had ended in a matter of seconds.
And now we were here, in this hospital room, and Rhoshamandes suddenly vanished.
I stared up at the ceiling of white acoustic tiles and at the surrounding wonderland of tanks and glistening plastic sacks of fluid and monitors and things that ticked and wheezed, and wires and cables and broad shining tubes--and dark-haired, dark-skinned Replimoids with beautiful almond-shaped dark eyes above their surgical masks, their entire bodies wrapped so tight in white surgical drapery and plastic that they appeared to be bandaged. A syringe held high in the air. Tap, tap, tap. Tiny squirt of sparkling fluid.
My hands were strapped down. My fingers were strapped down. My neck was strapped down. But a crank suddenly raised the upper half of this deathbed and I was sitting up. Of course. She had to remove the top of my skull! And all the steel straps had been arranged to allow this maneuver which took me further and further from anything that I could conceivably understand.
I wished I had had a glimpse of the other body, the body covered up on the table with all the tubes filled with blood running into it. Was that thing already alive?
Over my eyes, someone put a blindfold, thick and soft. And there perhaps goes your ability to see forever. How can you know?
I was groggy, almost unable to speak. The sun was above the horizon.
Amel was weeping.
Say something, you idiot! At least tell me goodbye.
Lights snapped on, so bright they burned through the blindfold and my eyelids, but the old familiar darkness would take care of that. Scissors cutting. Never really liked this jacket and shirt all that much anyway. Needles piercing. I am extremely...extremely fond of this skin.
It wasn't a dream. It was a different place. And no sooner had I reached out my hand to open the door, then it was gone.
Just gone.
Next thing I knew I was sleeping on my side. Then I turned over on my back and I thought to myself, How hard is this bed, and the scents I'm picking up, what are they, these noxious chemical scents? I heard the noises of traffic and somewhere very close the sounds of people walking as in a busy street.
My eyes snapped open. I stared up once again at the acoustical-tile ceiling.
I am alive.
Dim electric light softly illuminated the ceiling, and the place where I lay.
I sat up and looked around the room.
Most of the equipment was gone. The other body on the other table was gone. I was alone, seated on a gurney, and I was fully dressed.
The linen shirt was new, the suit jacket was new, and the pants were new, but the spiffily polished black boots were mine. And the rings on my fingers, of course, were mine. My beloved violet-tinted glasses were in my breast pocket.
I felt of my hair; it was as it always was when I awoke, full and long. Yet I
felt delicate but hard seams in the flesh of my head. I looked at my hands and then at the rest of myself.
I climbed off the gurney and walked through the scattering of tables and stands and metal cabinets and other seeming debris, and opened the door.
Empty hallway of a modern building, and at the far end a doorway to a busy street. I put on my violet glasses and went out.
It was the Marais--one of the oldest sections of Paris. And it was just after sunset, and all the lights were coming on. I soon found myself walking on one of those very narrow sidewalks so common in old Paris, past a crowded bookstore and a cafe with steamy windows, past shops, past restaurants, and after a while I was wandering under the vaulted ceilings of an old stone arcade. All around me were mortals, coming and going, ignoring my shocking white skin, or curious wobbly manner, as I struggled to put one foot before the other, following one stone street into another stone street. The crowds grew thicker, and it seemed this was the most vital city in all the world.
The sky was winter white and the air was not so terribly cold.
At last I wandered into a great square with a high triple-decker fountain in the middle of it. But the fountain was turned off. And the snow lay light and fresh and pure over everything, and the leafless trees were glistening with thin ice, ice that might crack into a million splinters if you touched it, and the deep sloping roofs of the mansions all about the square were shining with snow.
I was alone.
Purely alone. I took a deep breath of the bracing air and looked up through the whiteness and gradually I penetrated the layers of lowering clouds and I picked out the stars.
Alone. No warm hand on the back of the neck, nothing living and breathing inside me that wasn't me. No voice that could speak to me or hear me if I spoke. Just alone.
Just the way I'd been over two hundred years ago when Richelieu's statue of Louis XIII on horseback had been in the middle of this vast place, and these mansions had been down at heel, no longer fashionable, and I had walked through here briskly after the coming of the vampiric Blood, fierce and strong and able to roam all Paris, it seemed, driven by my thirst.
Innocent blood. That was my thought. It hadn't come from someone else.
Still alive.
A mortal woman stopped just a few paces from me. Her coat went down to the tops of her boots, and a scarf was wrapped entirely around her face and neck. She spoke to me in rapid French telling me I would catch my death of cold if I didn't go inside somewhere, get a coat to wear. I nodded and thanked her and she rushed on across the dim lawns of snow.
Well, it's as good a time as ever, I thought, to find out what had been lost, if anything. I went up, fast enough that no mortal eye would catch it, and was soon crossing the sky over Paris and headed infallibly as ever for home.
It was eight o'clock when I walked into the ballroom. I had heard the cheers and screaming before I ever reached the doors. And the sounds of people rushing through the many corridors and salons.
"Where is the orchestra?" I asked. I made my way into an open space beside the harpsichord. Marius took me in his arms. The musicians flooded into the little congregation of gilded chairs, and Antoine stepped up on the small black podium. Some lusty triumphal music soon swelled behind me.
I held still to Marius. "These have been the worst hours of my whole existence," he whispered in my ear. "Then they said you were alive, that you'd been seen in Paris. And I didn't believe it."
The crowd around us was getting thicker and thicker, with blood drinkers pushing here and there to diminish the space in which we stood.
All the faces were soon there, except for Louis and Rose and Viktor. But how could that be? I turned around. They stood only two feet away from me, huddled together, and down the pure whiteness of Louis's face were two thin lines of blood tears.
It must have been an hour of individual embraces, of reassuring myself and each person that I was whole and complete. I was thirsting, but I didn't care.
I couldn't mention his name. I couldn't. I couldn't say his name and it seemed they sensed it and they didn't say it either. They didn't ask, Is he here? Is he gone?
Only when at last it was over--all the festivities, and the questions, and my repeated answers--only when I went down into the crypt did I sit alone in the dark and say, "Amel. Amel, where are you? Are you flesh and blood? Are you safe?"
The blood tears ran down my face the way they'd run down Louis's face until the shirt and coat were ruined, and then I wept like a child.
32
Lestat
THE NEXT NIGHT I made about the best speech I had ever delivered to my kindred in the Blood. I didn't write it or plan it or think it through. I stood on the small conductor's podium and addressed the hundreds crowded into the room, and the hundreds listening from other rooms.
I told them first off that Amel was indeed gone.
That was all I said of him or what had happened.
Then I told them that we had to make our way of life sacred, that we had to see ourselves as sacred, and we had to see our journey through the world as sacred whether anybody else ever did.
I told them--in so many words--that no confraternity or sodality had ever been made sacred except by the faith of those who formed it, as there was no known power beyond this world or in it that could make anything sacred except the power we claimed for ourselves. I told them all that we were children of the universe no matter who thought otherwise, that we lived and breathed and thought and dreamed as do all sentient beings, and no one had a right to condemn us or deny us the right to love and to live.
Yes, the rules were being written, and yes, the history of the tribe was being written, and yes, we would seek a consensus before we went forward. But the thing to remember was this: the Devil's Road had never been easy or simple, and those who traveled it for more than a century did so because they had cared about something greater than themselves and their endless appetite for human blood. They had wanted to be part of something immensely bigger than they were, and they had rebelled in their own way against the inevitable isolation that closes around us all; they had survived because the beauty of life wouldn't let them leave it; and a thirst for knowledge had been born in them--a thirst for new ages and new forms and new expressions of art and love--even as they saw everything they had cherished crumbling and fading away.
If we wanted to survive, if we wanted to inherit the millennia as Thorne and Cyril, and Teskhamen and Chrysanthe had inherited them, as Avicus and Zenobia had inherited them, as Marius and Pandora and Flavius had inherited them, and as Rhoshamandes and Sevraine had inherited them--and as Seth and Gregory, now the very oldest among us, had inherited them--then we had to meet the future with respect as well as courage and count fear and selfishness to be small things.
"This is our universe," I said. "We too are made of stardust as are all things on this planet; we too belong."
Seems I went on for a while on that theme, and then when I realized I had in fact finished, I brought it to a close.
I didn't really provide any new or better answers than I'd grudgingly given last night, and when people praised me for my bravery in giving myself up to what was to happen, I waved that away and said, "It was not my courage. It was just what happened."
I left, taking Thorne and Cyril with me, and sought out Rhoshamandes, who was, as always, in his own castle in his own lofty and cold and relentlessly gray world.
He gave a violent start when I walked into his spacious drawing room or great hall, or whatever he might have called it. And he rose at once, dropping the book he'd been reading on the floor.
"No enmity between us," I said. I extended my hand. Thorne and Cyril were on either side of me and I could feel their hostility towards him. I knew how they longed for him to provoke a battle but even the three of us were no match for what one as old as he might do.
He regarded me coldly for a long time as if he couldn't believe what I was saying.
"All things," I said, "m
ust be made new. There can't be lingering grudges."
He didn't answer. I went on. "You said it would make up for what I'd done to you. Well, stick to your word."
At that he softened somewhat, and then he shrugged. Shrugged just the way I did so often. And he extended his hand.
"I know you were hoping I wouldn't survive," I said. "But let's just keep the peace now. You are welcome in my house anytime as long as you keep the peace."
I didn't wait for any cold, incomplete, inadequate, or disappointing rejoinders. I wanted to go home. But he stopped me as I turned to go and he said,
"Peace between us! I'm grateful to you." He seemed more than merely sincere. "I didn't want you to die," he said, "but I hope that Devil who was inside you perished. I hope he went up in smoke to hover in agony again over this world forever."
This stung me to the heart. But I didn't blame him for what he said. The general feeling throughout the world of the Undead was that we'd been born of a diabolical force that brought us alive to Darkness only through blindness and thirst. There had not been a tear shed anywhere by anyone for Amel.
I wanted to say Amel was flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood, but I said nothing. If you really want peace in any world you have to learn to say nothing. I clasped his hand again and said I hoped he would come to Court soon.
When we reached the Chateau, it was Cyril who asked me how I could do that, just shake hands with that monster, after he'd delivered me to that Kapetria creature and her schemes.
"I shook his hand because I don't give a damn about him," I answered. "I care about peace among us. After all, some new and hideous spirit may yet descend to lay waste every dream I still hold dear, or some rebellious band of envious revenants rise out of nowhere to overthrow the Court soon enough."
