by Anne Rice
"When Lestat comes, it will be his decision, of course."
"I'm not so sure why that should be," said Viktor. "I'm not sure at all why I can't make the decision with the agreement of Fareed or Seth. Fareed brought me into this world, really. Not Lestat."
"But nobody's going to make the decision except Uncle Lestan," said Rose. "That's clear enough. No one is willing to make it. And frankly, well, this evening we've had a chance to speak our hearts about this, and I'm grateful. We've had a chance to say out loud what we want."
Viktor looked at Louis. "You say wait. You say 'take your time.' But what if we die while we're waiting? What then? What would you think? Would you regret our having waited? I don't know the point anymore of waiting."
"You die to become this," said Louis. "You can't grasp it. You die. You can't become what we are unless you die. I suppose finally I'm saying this. You think you are making what the world calls an informed decision, but you're not. You can't. You can't know what this is like, to be both alive and dead."
Viktor didn't answer. He didn't even seem overly concerned. He was so excited that they were here, so excited that they'd come this far. He was full of anticipation.
Rose looked away and then back at the pensive face of Louis, at his dark green eyes, and the set of his mouth. A handsome man of twenty-four maybe when he'd been brought over, and what a scathing portrait he'd given the world of Uncle Lestan, his maker, Lestat. But that didn't matter now, did it? No, not at all.
She thought of the others whom she'd glimpsed last night, coming into the rooftop ballroom of the huge house called Trinity Gate. She had become used to the preternatural glow of Fareed, even of the powerful Seth, who always stood away from the bright electric lamps when he'd come to her, who spoke from the shadows in a low secretive voice as if he were afraid of its volume, its vibrato. But nothing had prepared her for seeing them all in that huge ballroom at the top of the long flight of marble stairs.
Fareed had been uneasy with her being brought there. She knew it. Could feel it. It was Seth who'd made the decision for her and for Viktor, Seth who had said, "Why keep them locked away?"
As far as Rose could see, Seth's mind was made up.
Gilded tables and chairs had been scattered on the periphery all along both sides of the dance floor, against walls of French doors paneled in mirrored glass. Drowsy green palms and blue and pink and red flowers in bronze pots were placed every few feet in tasteful groupings.
And at the end stood the grand piano and the cluster of musicians and singers, blood drinkers all, who'd enchanted her with their physical beauty as well as the sounds they made--violinists, harpists, singers making a symphony of sorts that filled the immense glass-ceilinged room.
There had been bright unnatural faces everywhere under the three crystal chandeliers in the dreamy gloom. The names had passed her in a steady numbing current as she was introduced--Pandora, Arjun, Gregory, Zenobia, Davis, Avicus, Everard.... She couldn't remember them all, couldn't recall at will all the remarkable visages, the particularities that had enthralled her as she was brought from table to table across the dark polished floor.
And then the striking otherworldly musicians, the tall, baldheaded, and smiling Notker who bowed to her, and his violinists from the mountains and the young boys and women who'd been singing with such brilliant and throbbing soprano voices, and then Antoine, Antoine who looked like the impersonation of Paganini with his violin, and Sybelle, Sybelle in long black chiffon, her neck positively wrapped in diamonds, rising from the piano bench to take her hand.
Out of the pages she'd read, out of the fictions that had permeated her dreams, they'd come alive around her, along with a multitude of strangers, and she had found herself seeking desperately to engrave every moment on her quivering heart.
Viktor had been so very much more prepared for it, a human child brought up amongst blood drinkers, easily clasping hands and nodding and answering questions, though he had stayed right at Rose's side. He'd picked the long white silk dress for her out of her closet, and worn a black velvet jacket with a boiled shirt for the occasion, beaming down at her again and again as if he were proud to have her hand on his arm.
She'd felt certain the blood drinkers were all concealing their curiosity and amazement at seeing them, which was so funny because she was so very shocked at seeing all of them.
Marius had embraced her, the only one to do it, and whispered poetry to her: " 'Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night Like a rich jewel ...' "
He'd kissed Viktor also. "Such a gift you are for your father," he had said. And Viktor had smiled.
She had known Viktor was on the edge of tears that Lestat had not come yet. But Lestat was on his way. That was now certain. He'd gone south on an errand to the Amazon that could not wait. But he was coming, most definitely coming. Seth assured them of this himself. He claimed to have heard it from an unimpeachable source, Lestat's own mother.
And Rose had been on the edge of breaking down at that news. But all this had made the suspense not only endurable but engulfing. Surely, Seth wouldn't have revealed the full depth of their world to her if Uncle Lestan--if Lestat was not to give both of them the Dark Gift.
"The Dark Gift." She liked to whisper those words.
There had come a moment last night when it seemed the entire company was on the dance floor, and some of the blood drinkers were singing softly with the musicians and the entire ballroom was wrapped in a cloud of golden light.
She had been dancing with Viktor, and he had bent and kissed her lips.
"I love you, Rose," he had said. And she'd dug deep down into her soul at that moment and asked herself could they turn away from this, actually turn away from it, and go to some other place, some safe place where their natural love for each other would be enough to dim the memories of this? She and Viktor had known surely the most tantalizing intimacy, the sweetest affection, the purest lovemaking she had ever imagined. It had erased for her all the ugliness and horror of what had happened with Gardner, all the shame and the crushing disappointment. By day when blood drinkers slept and their mysteries were gone along with them, she'd held Viktor against her heart and he'd held her, and that had been its own miracle, its own sacrament, its own gift.
She shuddered.
She realized now that Louis was looking at her and so was Viktor. Louis very likely had been reading her thoughts. Had he seen those images of her with Viktor, together? She blushed.
"I think Seth has made the decision," said Louis, speaking to her very thoughts. "Otherwise he would have never brought you to Trinity Gate last night. No. He's only waiting for Lestat to ratify it. He's made up his mind."
Rose smiled, but felt the sting of tears in her eyes.
"He'll come tonight, I know he will," said Louis.
"Fareed places a high value on human life, human experience," said Viktor. "Maybe my father does too. I think that Seth cares nothing for human experience much at all."
Rose knew that Viktor was right. She remembered too vividly the first time she'd ever laid eyes on Seth. It had been in the small hours, and she'd been in pain. Needles, tape, monitors all around her. Viktor wasn't coming back until morning, and Dr. Gilman could not be found.
Seth had come to her, a dark-eyed man in the ubiquitous white scrubs of the hospital, who stood at a remove from her bed, talking to her in a low voice.
He'd told her the pain would vanish if she would listen to him, just follow his words, and sure enough as he talked to her about the pain, as he asked her to describe it in colors, and to picture it, and to say what and where she felt it, the pain had melted away.
She'd cried. She'd told him about Uncle Lestan and how he'd wanted her to be a happy healthy young woman and how she'd ruined it again and again. Maybe she'd never been good enough, she'd said, for life.
A soft cold laugh had come from Seth. He'd explained with great authority that she had ruined nothing, that life
was in charge of life, that pain was everywhere, that it was as much a part of the process of life as birth and death. "But joy, the joy you've known, the love you've known, that is what matters, and we, the conscious ones, the ones who can grieve, only we can know joy."
It had been a strange meeting. And she hadn't seen him again till she was much better, and she'd been certain then that he was no more human than Uncle Lestan was human, and she'd known by then too that Fareed wasn't human and Dr. Gilman wasn't human either, and that Viktor knew all this with a far greater understanding than she could possibly have. She'd been wrestling with it, pacing the floor of her room in the desert hospital, interrogating her own senses, her own sense of normality, and Seth had appeared and said: "Don't let us drive you mad." He'd moved out of the shadows and taken her hands in his. "I am just what you think and what you fear," he'd told her. "Why shouldn't you know? Why shouldn't you understand?"
The effect of those nighttime conversations had been incalculable, and the first time that she and Viktor had been intimate, she'd said in his ear, "Don't be afraid for me. I do know what they are. I know all about it. I understand."
"Thank Heaven," Viktor had replied. They had snuggled together spoon fashion and he had kissed her hair. "Because I can't lie about it anymore. I can keep secrets. But I can't tell lies."
She looked at him now, looked at the manner in which he sat there in the chair, looking at the far glass wall and the vibrant cityscape beyond it. And she felt such love for him, such love and trust.
She looked at Louis, Louis who was watching her again as if reading her thoughts.
"You've been more than kind," she said, "but if we're cast out of all this, if that's what ultimately happens, I don't know what future there can be for us."
She looked at Viktor. His expression told her nothing, except that he loved her, and that he had a patience with this that she didn't have.
She tried to imagine it, them together, married, with children, their very own rosy-cheeked children, little children, drifting through the world on the magic carpet of the wealth bequeathed to them by beings of a secret and unknown realm. She couldn't imagine it, couldn't.
But surely somehow it would never come to that. This would not all be consigned to miraculous memory meant to fade with every passing year.
She looked at Louis.
And he gave her one of those rare bright smiles. He seemed warm and human suddenly and too grand to be mortal all at the same time.
"It really is a gift, isn't it?" asked Rose.
A shadow fell over his expression, but then he smiled again and he took her hand. "If Lestat can make it right, well, then, it will be made right," he said. "For both of you. But there are other things happening just now, other things and no one is going to bring you into our world until those challenges have been met."
"I know," she said. "I know."
She wanted to say more, that it was so kind of Louis to stay with them, to wait with them, when obviously it must have been difficult to leave the ever-growing crowds at Trinity Gate, but she'd said this over and over. And she knew that her thanks to anyone and everyone were becoming a kind of burden, and she left it where it was.
She got up and went to the great wall of glass to look out at the city, to let her eyes move through this glamorous wildwood in which life itself was teeming everywhere around her as surely as it did in faraway streets below, and only yards away it seemed there were darkened windows revealing smoky and ghostly offices and crowded bedrooms and living rooms, and rooftops lying before her with gleaming blue swimming pools and some with green gardens, perfect gardens like toy gardens, with toylike trees she felt she could reach out and pick up with her fingers, and all this stretching on towards the great distant shadow of Central Park.
I want to remember these nights always, she thought. I want to fix them forever in my memory. I want to lose nothing. When it's done, when it's decided and it's over, I will write a memoir seeking to capture everything forever. When it's happening it is too beautiful, too overwhelming, and you can feel it's being lost with every breath you take.
Quite suddenly a deep dark mass appeared above her, something like a cloud forming and descending right before her eyes. In a split second it thickened and rose up in front of her virtually blinding her as she fell back away from the transparent wall.
A great boom sounded, a great terrible crashing roar and a clatter, and she felt herself falling and all around her came down a rain of broken glittering glass. Her head hit the hardwood floor. There were deafening noises, furniture being smashed, pictures and mirrors falling, and the loud cold wind was rushing through the room. Doors slammed. More glass was breaking. She rolled over on her side, her hair whipped against her face by the wind, her hands grasping for something, anything firm, to steady her when she saw the treacherous glass splinters all around her, and she began to scream.
She saw Thorne fly at a brown-haired figure clothed all in black who stood before the overturned and broken table. But the figure slammed Thorne away with such force he appeared to fly across the length of the room. Louis lay sprawled on the floor in a pool of blood.
Viktor came rushing towards Rose.
The brown-haired figure snatched up Viktor in one arm though Viktor was fighting against him with all his strength, and as Thorne rushed at the figure again, he grabbed Thorne's hair with one hand and hurled him away once more.
For a moment this tall creature who held Viktor effortlessly in the grip of his left arm looked down at Rose and came towards her, but Louis rose up behind him like a great shadow and the stranger veered, spinning backwards and smashing Louis with his right fist.
Again and again, Rose screamed.
The figure rose off the floor, wrapping both arms around Viktor, and it went out through the great jagged hole in the glass wall. It went out and upwards and vanished into the sky. And she knew where that brown-haired one had taken Viktor, she knew--up and up, faster than the wind and towards the stars. Powerful as Uncle Lestan, unstoppable as Uncle Lestan, who'd rescued her from that little island in the Mediterranean so very long ago.
Viktor was gone!
Rose couldn't stop screaming. She crawled on her knees through the broken glass. Thorne lay to the far right, his face and head covered in blood. Louis crawled towards Rose.
Suddenly Louis was on his feet. He lifted her in his arms and carried her out of the room, out of the cold lashing wind. Thorne was staggering right behind him, hitting the walls on both sides like a drunken man, blood pouring down into his eyes.
Louis rushed with her down the long hallway. She clung to him crying, as he carried her into the bedroom that was hers in this place and put her down gently, gently as if she'd break on the white bed.
Thorne clung to the sides of the doorway as if he might fall.
There were voices in the hallway, feet pounding, shouts.
"Tell them all to get out," said Louis. "Call the house. We're going there now."
She tried to stop crying. She was choking. She couldn't breathe.
"But who was it, who took him, who did it?" she sobbed. Again, she began to scream.
"I don't know," Louis said.
Louis wrapped her up in the white cover of the bed, cradling her, rocking her, kissing her until she went quiet.
Then he carried her out of the apartment and held her tight against him in the elevator as they went down to the underground garage.
Finally, when they were in the car moving uptown sluggishly on Madison Avenue, with Thorne in the front seat beside the driver, she'd been able to stop crying altogether as she leaned against Louis's chest.
"But why did he take Viktor, why, where has he taken him?" She couldn't stop asking, couldn't stop.
She could hear Thorne in a low voice talking to Louis.
She felt Louis's right hand around her forehead, turning her face towards him, and his left hand lightly touching her waist. He bent his head and pressed his ear against her neck. His skin wa
s silky, just like Uncle Lestan's skin had always been, cold, but like silk.
"Rose, Lestat's come. He's at the house. He's waiting for you. You're safe. You're all right."
She stopped sobbing only when she saw him.
He stood in the front hallway with his arms out, her uncle Lestan, her beloved uncle Lestan, an angel to her, timeless, unchanged, forever beautiful.
"My Rose," he whispered. "My darling Rose."
"They took Viktor, Uncle Lestan," she sobbed. "Someone took him!" The tears ran down her face as she looked up at him. "Uncle Lestan, he's gone."
"I know, my darling. And we will get him back. Now come to me," he said, his powerful arms closing around her. "You are my daughter."
21
Rhoshamandes
The Devil's Gambit
HE WAS in a rage. But then he'd been in a rage since he'd struck down Maharet, since he'd doubled over with the machete in his hands, confronted with what he'd done, and the ghastly realization that he could not possibly undo it.
And now that he had Viktor in his hands, which the Voice had so furiously urged him to achieve, he was more than ever boiling with rage, against the Voice, against himself, against the wide world in which he'd survived for so long and in which he now found himself trapped and certain of nothing except that he had not wanted this! He personally had never wanted it.
He stood on the broad wooden deck of this house in Montauk on the shore of Long Island--staring out over the cold glassy Atlantic. What in the name of Hell was he to do now? How could he possibly achieve what the Voice insisted he must achieve?
The word had gone out over the airwaves immediately that Viktor had been kidnapped. Benji Mahmoud had been cagey and brilliant: an ancient immortal had committed a dastardly deed (yes, the vile little vampiric Edward R. Murrow had used that term) in kidnapping "one cherished by all the elders of the tribe" and he had called to the Children of the Night throughout the world to listen for the malignant heart and mind of this ancient one, to discover this one's evil designs and to call the numbers at Trinity Gate in New York as soon as the monster and his helpless victim were discovered!
Benedict sat in the spacious barren all-too-modern "living room" of this glorified peasants' hut on this expensive coast only hours by car from New York staring at the screen of the laptop as he listened to Benji's reports.
