Blood Communion

by Anne Rice

  Hours passed. Had to be. Because we are beings of time, and time never stops, and hours and hours passed as I roamed the stars.

  A great rumbling noise awakened me. The very walls shook. I felt the stone roof was going to close in.

  The door flew off its hinges and slammed against Gregory. He threw it aside, and was gone.

  There was shouting, screaming. I felt the heat of an immense blast and saw flames in the darkness rolling upwards, a wall of orange flames, but they died down at once to cinders. Cyril lay on top of me, but I struggled against him as dust fell from the ceiling choking me and clouding my eyes.

  I found myself standing in the stone passage yards away from my crypt, Armand’s arm tight around me. Cyril had hold of us both.

  Rose and Viktor stood there as well, along with the pale Sybelle and Benji Mahmoud, who for once was not wearing his fedora. I stared stupidly at them. I knew they were there, but I couldn’t think. I knew they were still in their old finery from the last ball, and I knew they were terrified, though my son was doing his level best to conceal it. I wanted to show them a face of comfort and reassurance, but I couldn’t move or speak.

  The walls and ceilings were blackened with soot, and an acrid gas seemed to fill the air. Above there was more shouting and screaming and commotion. I closed my eyes and listened. Panic in the rooms above amongst those we knew and those we knew only little; and panic in the village.

  The village. The village was on fire. I saw the flames in the minds of the blood drinkers rushing everywhere to save it. I saw the humans flooding into the high street as the townhouses burst into flame. I heard the engines of automobiles, and screams of terror.

  And here it was almost dawn and I was helpless again, helpless in this miserable place in the earth, tormented by an enemy I couldn’t hope to destroy yet every cell in my body burned with hate against him. I struggled to get loose. These were my people. I had to go to them. I had to get Alain Abelard, my architect, and the others to safety.

  Cyril held me. So did Armand.

  “Be still, boss,” Cyril sobbed. “Be still.”

  Marius stood behind Cyril. Cyril was angry and flustered and covered in black soot. And the left side of his face had suffered deep scratches as if from the claw of a beast. His hair had been badly burnt, and his eyes were shot through with blood.

  Marius turned his back to us, and stood watch on the passage and the stair.

  “The village is on fire from end to end,” Cyril said, but he didn’t look at me. He didn’t look at any of us. He was staring at the blackened floor, searching back and forth, back and forth as if for something lost in the soot. “Gregory is getting the humans out of it and sending them to Paris.”

  “But the sprinkling systems!” I said.

  “Tanks burst, pipes melted,” he said, eyes on the floor. “Don’t worry about those mortals. No one is dead out there. They are on the way to Paris.”

  Then with his eyes still cast down, I saw his mouth twisted tight in a bitter smile and the blood tears rose in his eyes. He gave the hoarse awful sobs of a male who never weeps.

  “What is it?” said Armand. He looked from right to left and behind us. “Marius, tell me!”

  I looked at Armand. What was he talking about? What was it they were not telling both of us?

  “Cyril?” I asked. I looked at Rose and Viktor. They were pale with fear, yet Viktor held Rose in his arms as if he could protect her from anything. Benji had his arm around Sybelle, and they too merely looked at Cyril.

  “He took Louis, didn’t he?” asked Armand.

  Cyril covered his eyes with his huge hand.

  “Boss, I tried to stop him. I couldn’t even see him,” he said. “Boss, I tried.” And there came those deep, strangled sobs again.

  I couldn’t will myself to move, yet somehow I did, and I put my arms around Cyril, this great hulking figure who choked back his cries, both his hands on his bowed head.

  “I know you did,” I said. “I know.”

  “It was like he was made of the wind itself and the fire,” said Cyril. “And the whole crypt was shaking. The earth was shaking, and all the doors were blown open and…”

  “I know, I know,” I said.

  Marius turned around and looked at us. I could see he was struggling for calm. He had not changed his long velvet robe in two nights, and his face was tight and drawn, and devoid of expression.

  He spoke but without emotion.

  “He’s going to pick us off one by one, no matter where we hide. We have to find him somehow. We have to find him now.”

  Armand went wild. He turned and began driving his fists into the marble with fury, cracking the marble tiles, the blood splattering everywhere, until Marius gripped him and drew him back away from the wall, and took both his hands and held them tightly in his own.

  A long low moan came out of Armand.

  Cyril had turned away from me as if in shame, and then taken up his station behind me.

  Marius deftly turned Armand around and pressed Armand’s head against his own shoulder.

  He gave me a rather dry report that Kapetria had been unable to locate Rhoshamandes anywhere. There had been no attempted activity on his heavily used credit cards, no attempted withdrawals from his banks.

  I knew that the monster had other resources. We all do, the clever ones, who don’t wish to move through eternity like tramps. He had gold and jewels in hiding places. He had wealth undreamt of and unrecorded. And dwellings perhaps of which no one knew.

  And now he had taken my Louis, my helpless Louis. Penetrated our most fortified refuge, and taken Louis away.

  “Kapetria and Amel will not give up on this,” Marius said. I don’t think I had ever seen him look the way that he did now. He held Armand, who lay still against him, and he appeared dejected and in some dark place beyond anger. “They’ll keep searching for clues to where he might be sleeping.”

  “Searching the whole world,” Rose said. The sound of her uneven and fragile voice cut me, but I couldn’t speak.

  Viktor tried to comfort her. How completely human they both looked, immortals for such a short time, this splendid young male who had four inches of height over his father, and this delicate girl who had been saved from death so many times.

  Her black hair was tangled and full of dust and specks of dirt and stone. And her dark blue ball gown was torn.

  They were, all of them, dusty and windblown from the attack.

  Benji stood there in his natty three-piece wool suit, looking around himself with feverish black eyes, his small face knotted with rage. His right hand appeared to move without his governance, pulling at his tie, dragging it from around his neck, and stuffing it into his coat pocket.

  I knew they must have all been down here since sunset—and I’d been sleeping, charmed into deep sleep by Gregory, sleeping when they needed me and I had nothing, absolutely nothing, to give them.

  My son was looking at me. But I couldn’t meet his eyes because I couldn’t tell him that I would protect him. I couldn’t tell Rose that I’d protect her. What could I say to Sybelle or Benji?

  Armand was like something broken as he lay against Marius.

  Again, I was not thinking. I was merely knowing—and knowing that Louis, Louis the most vulnerable of us all, was in the grip of that monster—or already dead.

  I could feel the dawn creeping up on me, making me cold. Viktor took Rose with him into a large crypt that lay to the right off the passage. It was where they customarily slept when they were here, and not roaming all the great cities of the world, the cities they both wanted so very badly to see. Sybelle and Benji entered this crypt as well.

  Gregory returned. Avicus was with him—tall brown-haired Avicus whose powers just might equal those of Rhoshamandes, and beside him Flavius, the ancient Athenian who was as old as
Marius, short a few years.

  And Barbara came last. I was ashamed. I had not even noticed that she’d been gone.

  She told me that the house was all intact, and that anyone in residence was safe in the other dungeon. She had made sure of it herself.

  “The other dungeon?” I was confused. “What other dungeon?” Again. I could not think.

  I could see that Avicus and Flavius had only just arrived. Both were dressed in simple modern suits of dark leather, with high sweaters underneath and tall boots. They had been badly buffeted by the wind, their hair tangled, their faces exhausted, and the dawn was creeping into them as well. I knew all this. I didn’t think about it or wonder why I noticed it. I just knew.

  Thorne had just come down the steps, and he said that Baudwin in the old dungeon was unchanged, and maybe that is where we should hide, because that evil Rhoshamandes didn’t know of that dungeon.

  Marius said: “He knows. He is listening to everything. He knew of that dungeon when we discovered it. He knew when we put Baudwin in it. He knew.”

  Avicus told us that he would sleep with Thorne in the passageway. His was an agreeable voice, with a faint accent to the English, and there was no drama to his words. Flavius nodded in agreement, and Marius told them where they should take up their posts.

  I heard myself ask, “Where is Fontayne?”

  Seems Barbara explained to me that Fontayne was in the dungeon far down beneath Baudwin—two long coiling stairways down—along with Zenobia and Chrysanthe, and Bianca and Pandora. Notker was with them. Jesse and David Talbot were there as well. Spirits were with them, including Gremt, and Magnus my maker, and Hesketh. But the strongest guardian there was Teskhamen, who went back in aeons, as did Avicus and Cyril.

  David. How in God’s name had I forgotten David! David was my fledgling. He would go for David now!

  “He’s well guarded,” said Marius. “This was all determined last night. You are not remembering. You are not thinking.”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  He gestured for the rest of us to go into the large crypt also. And we obeyed without a word.

  Marius came in with Armand, led Armand to one of the many large marble shelves along the walls, and Armand stretched out on it, on his back, and turned his face away.

  Barbara found a place as well and appeared to lose consciousness almost at once.

  There were candles scattered in high niches, giving the low-ceilinged room a kind of golden light. I stared at these candles. I stared at the flames, noting how some were small and some were large, and all were moving in the current of a draft.

  I knew the cell was lined with granite and faced with marble because I had designed it and all the other crypts as I’d designed my own. Would granite keep back Rhoshamandes?

  Viktor and Rose lay together on the floor beneath one of the shelves. Viktor had turned his back to the light and I could hear Rose’s soft crying. Benji and Sybelle took their bed of marble together.

  I considered many things, in this strange frame of mind in which no consideration had purpose, and realized that I was doing nothing at all.

  I saw my mother, and I saw Louis, as if colored slides were being shuffled through my mind, and I banished these images, these salient moments as soon as they came.

  “Cyril and Gregory will sleep with their backs to the door,” said Marius. “I’ll lie there. I bid you good night. I won’t be sleeping for another hour, but I have nothing left to say to anyone.”

  Gregory was attempting to guide me to one of the resting places, but for some reason I wasn’t able to move.

  “Why didn’t he take me?” I asked. It was that same small voice, that pathetic voice.

  No one spoke. Marius closed the door on the passage and threw the giant iron bolts on it. What was the use of that?

  “If he could come down here and take Louis, why didn’t he take me?” I asked.

  “I was with you,” said Gregory. “I was guarding you. Louis was in the passage when Rhoshamandes took him.”

  “He was pacing back and forth and reading a book,” said Marius. “At least, that was what he was doing when I last glanced at him.”

  Cyril had tumbled down to the floor and slumped against the door, his head in his hands.

  “Speed and surprise,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Gregory. He gathered me in his arms and we lay down together on a marble shelf, spoon fashion, my face turned to the wall. I was glad that he remained with me, though I knew he would soon take up his place by the door.

  I listened to the candles. You can always hear candles if you listen carefully. And slowly the paralysis came, and the agony simply stopped.

  Chapter 15

  When the sun set, we talked amongst ourselves and agreed that Rose and Viktor had to remain below, but it was perhaps safe for Armand to go up and confer with Eleni and Allesandra and Everard, whom he had not spoken to now in two nights. They had repeatedly insisted that they were in no danger from Rhosh, and Armand thought they were wrong. They were in the far dungeon now.

  “This being has gone mad,” said Armand.

  It was then that the next package arrived, a small gold casket this time, which contained a vial of ashes and Louis’s favorite emerald ring.

  A fledgling had brought it down to us, in the form of a simple parcel from the same courier service, in the hands of a wan fragile thing with flowing hair and a short flowered dress with puff sleeves. Her arms were white.

  I’d turned my eyes away as Marius tore open the wrapping. But then I had looked back and seen the emerald ring.

  It seemed altogether impossible that this pain would stop, and altogether impossible that it could go on.

  “You never loved him,” Armand said bitterly. I closed my eyes. “You were cruel to him. I protected him from you.”

  I heard Marius’s soft murmur begging Armand not to say such things, and then Sybelle whispering to Armand that we all loved one another. That was the way now. And Rhoshamandes knew it, and could take any one of us and inflict unspeakable pain on the others.

  “Cursed dybbuk!” Benji said. “Come on, now, Armand, don’t torture him. Be wise. Be calm.”

  Talking. The fledgling’s name was Marie, simply Marie, the oldest and most popular name in Christendom, and she had met the “man” and signed for the package as she had approached the Château. She’d never been here before. She’d only found us after a search. Marius told her she must stay now. She was immensely excited by all that was happening, but she had the good sense to be quiet.

  I lay on the bench listening to the others.

  Marius didn’t want Armand to go to the other dungeon. Yes, said Marius, Eleni and Allesandra and Everard had told absolutely everything that they knew of their old master, Rhoshamandes, to Seth and Kapetria and her tribe. But Armand wanted to confer with them. Who knows? They might know something about Rhoshamandes, some little thing that others had forgotten.

  The house was empty now, save for those in the far dungeon. And Marius said that Armand could not go to the dungeon alone.

  Finally Marius raised his voice in exasperation, and told Armand to stay here, and the matter was settled, and if he dared to try to leave, he would deal him such a blow as he’d never felt.

  Silence after that.

  I wanted for all the world to sleep, but I would not ask Gregory for a charm now. I could not. I could not but lie on the shelf in the flickering candlelight and let the thoughts pass through my empty mind. My chest ached. My heart ached. My head ached.

  Marius went out into the passage and stood guard with Avicus and Flavius—and one hour later, Rhoshamandes came for him.

  Chapter 16

  We heard the battle, but we could not see it for the smoke and flames, and the broken marble battering us from all sides. Marius’s powerful voice rang out cursing Rho
shamandes. Doors were broken from their hinges once more, and the light bulbs exploded, and in the darkness we were thrown against the walls or the floors. I felt an intense heat pass over me, and I struggled to get to my feet as the broken and fragmented tiles swirled about the chamber.

  Ghastly screams came from Sybelle and I managed to get to her and I fell upon her trying to put out the flames. Her hair and clothes were on fire, and the horrible roaring continued above, and I saw through Marius’s eyes the ballroom above consumed with fire. Avicus and Flavius were in the midst of it. And once again, the stone wall was blown out, and the powerful sprinklers sent down a deluge.

  I cradled Sybelle in my arms, not daring to touch her burned shoulders and arms. Her dress had fallen away. Benji came up behind her to shelter her.

  Marius’s strong telepathic voice came from far away.

  Headed west…headed northwest at great speed.

  And then there was silence.

  What did it take to silence a being like Marius?

  I heard in the dusty choking air the distant telepathic cries of those in the far dungeon. Marius has been taken. Not Marius. Marius is gone.

  I looked about me in the fog of dust and swirling particles, and saw that no one else had been burned. But Armand had once again gone mad. He was beating at the walls again and howling. He was cursing me and calling me every name he knew in Russian or in French or in English and saying that I was to blame for all of it, always, that I had done nothing but destroy others all of my cursed existence, and now there were more deaths laid at my door, and I’d even brought Marius to ruin.

  I stood staring at him, watching him pound on the walls, drive his fists into the exposed earth. I watched Gregory collect him and hold him tight and put his hand over Armand’s mouth.

  Cyril and Avicus were looking at each other, and Flavius started to go over and over it in a heated whisper, all that had happened, the glimpses, the fire, the blast that had knocked him on his back, Marius struggling with Rhoshamandes, then gone. He kept trying to grasp it, put it in order, the ballroom in flames, with the draperies ignited and the mirrors shattering, and the screams from the faraway dungeon that were outrage and grief.