by Anne Rice
Yet Marius had told Daniel tonight, “Stay away from that coven house in Santa Teresa.” He sent the message telepathically now to Daniel with all the force he could put behind it. “You see another blood drinker, you come back here!”
Was there a response? A faint whisper?
He wasn’t sure.
He stood still, the palette in his left hand, the brush lifted in his right, and the strangest most unexpected idea came over him.
What if he himself went to the coven house and burnt them out? He knew where it was. He knew there were twenty young blood drinkers who called it a safe haven. What if he were to go now, and wait until the early hours came, when they’d be returning home, slinking back to their filthy makeshift graves beneath the foundations, and then burn them out, down to the last one, slamming the rafters with the Fire Gift until the structure and its inhabitants were no more?
He could see it as if he were doing it! He could all but feel the Fire Gift concentrating behind his forehead, all but feel that lovely burst of strength when the telekinetic force leapt out like the tongue of a serpent!
Flames and flames. How gorgeous were these flames, dancing against his imagination as if in cinematic slow motion, rolling, expanding, rollicking upwards.
But this was not something he wanted to do. This was not something he had ever in all his long existence wanted to do—destroy his own kind for the sheer pleasure of it.
He shook himself all over, wondering how in the world he had even thought of such a thing.
Ah, but you do want to do it.
“I do?” he asked. Again, he saw that old colonial house burning, that multistoried mansion in its gardens in Santa Teresa, white arches engulfed in flames, the young blood drinkers spinning in flame like whirling dervishes.
“No.” He spoke it aloud. “This is a repulsive ugly image.”
For one moment he stood stock-still. He listened with all his powers for the presence of another immortal, some unwelcome and intrusive being who might have drawn closer to him than he should ever have allowed.
He heard nothing.
But these alien thoughts had not originated with him, and a chill passed through him. What force outside himself was powerful enough to do this?
He heard faint laughter. It was close, like an invisible being whispering in his ear. Indeed it was inside his head.
What right has that trash to threaten you and your beloved Daniel? Burn them out; burn the house down around them; burn them as they escape.
He saw the flames again, saw the square tower of the old mansion engulfed, saw the adobe tiles of the roofs cascading into the flames and again the Blood Children running.…
“No,” he said quietly. He lifted the brush in a brave show of nonchalance and caught up a thick daub of Hooker’s green on the wall before him, shaping it almost mechanically into an explosion of leaves, ever more detailed leaves.…
Burn them. I tell you. Burn them before they burn the young one. Why are you not listening to me?
He continued to paint, as if he were being watched, determined to ignore this outrageous intrusion.
It grew louder suddenly, distinct, so loud it seemed to be not in his head but in this long shadowy room. “I tell you burn them!” It was almost a sobbing voice.
“And who are you?”
No answer. Simply the quiet suddenly of the old predictable noises. Rats scurrying about in this old house. The lantern giving off a low sputter. And that waterfall of traffic that never stopped, and a plane circling above.
“Daniel,” he said aloud. Daniel.
The noises of the night enveloped him suddenly, deafening him. He threw down the palette and took his iPhone from his coat pocket, quickly stabbing in Daniel’s number.
“Come home now,” he said. “I’ll meet you there.”
He stood stranded in the room for a moment, looking at the long spread of color and figure that he had created in this anonymous and unimportant place. Then he snuffed out the lantern and left it behind.
In less than an hour, he walked into his penthouse suite at the Copacabana Hotel to find Daniel lying on the moss-green velvet couch, ankles crossed, head propped on the arm. The windows were open to the white balustraded veranda, and beyond sang the shining ocean.
The room was dark, illuminated only by the bright night sky over the beach and an open laptop computer on the polished coffee table from which the voice of Benji Mahmoud was holding forth on the sorrows of the Undead around the planet.
“What’s the matter?” Daniel said, at once getting to his feet.
For a moment, Marius couldn’t answer. He was staring at the bright, youthful, and sensitive face, at the appealing eyes, and the fresh young preternatural skin, and he could hear nothing but the beating of Daniel’s heart.
Slowly the voice of Benji Mahmoud penetrated. “… reports of young vampires immolated in Shanghai, and in Taiwan, in Delhi …”
Respectfully, patiently, Daniel waited.
Marius moved past him in silence and went through the open doors to the white railing and let the ocean breeze wash over him as he looked up at the pale and luminous Heavens. Below, the beach was white beyond the traffic moving on the avenue.
Burn them! How can you look at him and think of their hurting him? Burn them, I tell you. Destroy that house. Destroy them all. Hunt them down.…
“Stop it,” he whispered, his words lost in the breeze. “Tell me who you are.”
Low laughter rolling into silence. And then the Voice was against his ear again. “I would never hurt him or you, don’t you know that? But what are they to you but an offense? Were you not glad, secretly, when Akasha hunted them down in the streets and the back alleys and in the woods and in the swamps? Were you not exultant to have stepped forth on Mount Ararat above the world, unharmed, with your mighty friends?”
“You’re wasting my time,” said Marius, “if you don’t identify yourself.”
“In time, beautiful Marius,” said the Voice. “In time, and oh, I have always so loved the flowers.…”
Laughter.
The flowers. There flashed into his mind the flowers he’d painted tonight on the cracked and chipped wall of the abandoned house. But what could this mean? What could this conceivably mean?
Daniel was standing next to him.
“I don’t want you to leave me again,” Marius said under his breath, still staring out at the shining horizon. “Not just now, not tomorrow, not for I don’t know how many nights. I want you at my side. Do you hear me?”
“Very well,” Daniel said agreeably.
“I know I try your patience,” said Marius.
“And haven’t I tried yours?” asked Daniel. “Would I be here or anywhere if it wasn’t for you?”
“We’ll do things,” said Marius as though placating a restless spouse, a demanding spouse. “We’ll go out tomorrow; we’ll hunt together. There are films we should see, I don’t remember the names now, I can’t think—.”
“Tell me what’s the matter?”
From the living room came the voice of Benji Mahmoud. “Go to the website. See the images for yourselves. See the photographs being posted hourly. Death and death and death to our kind. I tell you it is a new Burning.”
“You don’t believe all that, do you?” Daniel asked.
Marius turned and slipped his arm around Daniel’s waist. “I don’t know,” he said frankly. But he managed a reassuring smile. Seldom had another blood drinker ever trusted in him so completely as this one, this one salvaged so easily and so selfishly from madness and disintegration.
“Whatever you say,” said Daniel.
I have always so loved the flowers.
“Yes, humor me for now,” said Marius. “Stay close … where …”
“I know. Where you can protect me.”
Marius nodded. Again he saw painted flowers, but not the flowers of tonight in this vast tropical city but flowers painted long ago on another wall, flowers of a green garden in w
hich he’d walked in his dreams, right into the shimmering Eden that he had created. Flowers. Flowers shivering in their marble vases as if in some church or shrine … flowers.
Beyond the banks of fresh and fragrant flowers in the lamp-lit shrine sat the immovable pair: Akasha and Enkil.
And around Marius there formed the gardens he had created for their walls, resplendent with lilies and roses and the twining of green vines.
The twining of vines.
“Come inside,” said Daniel gently, coaxingly. “It’s early. If you don’t want to go out again, there’s a film I want you to see tonight. Come on, let’s go in.”
Marius wanted to say yes, of course. He wanted to move. But he stood still at the railing staring out, this time trying to find the stars beyond the veil of the clouds. The flowers.
Another voice was talking from the laptop on the coffee table behind him, a young female blood drinker somewhere in the world pleading for reassurance over the wires or airwaves as she poured out her heart. “And they say it happened in Iran, a refuge there up in smoke, and nobody survived, nobody.”
“But then how do we know?” asked Benji Mahmoud.
“Because they found it like that the next night and all the others were gone, dead, burned. Benji, what can we do? Where are the old ones? Are they the ones doing this to us?”
9
The Story of Gregory
GREGORY DUFF COLLINGSWORTH STOOD watching and listening in Central Park. A tall male of compact and well-proportioned build, with very short black hair and black eyes, he stood in the deep fragrant darkness of a thicket of trees, listening with his powerful preternatural ears and seeing with his powerful preternatural eyes all that was taking place—with Antoine and Armand and Benji and Sybelle—inside of the Belle Époque mansion in which Armand’s family now lived.
In his English bespoke gray suit and brown shoes, and with his darkly tanned skin, Gregory looked very much like the corporate executive that he had been for decades. Indeed his pharmaceutical empire was one of the most successful in the international marketplace right now, and he was one of those immortals who had always been highly capable at managing wealth “in the real world.”
He had come from Switzerland not only to attend to business in his New York offices, but to spy upon the fabled coven of New York at close hand.
He’d picked up the raging emotions of the young blood drinker Antoine as the boy had driven into the city this evening, and if Armand had tried to destroy Antoine, Gregory would have intervened, instantly and effectively, and taken the boy away with him. This he would have done out of the goodness of his heart.
Decades ago, outside the Vampire Lestat’s one and only rock concert in San Francisco, Gregory had intervened to save a black blood drinker named Davis, carrying him up and away from the carnage wreaked upon his hapless cohorts by the Queen of Heaven, who gazed pitilessly upon the scene from a nearby hill.
In the case of this complex and interesting young blood drinker, Antoine, Gregory could easily have deflected any blast of the Fire Gift coming directly at the fledgling, especially from one so young and inexperienced as the notorious Armand.
Not that Gregory had anything against Armand. Quite the opposite. He was as eager to meet him in some ways as he was to meet any blood drinker on the planet, though in his heart of hearts he nourished the precious dream of meeting Lestat above all other hopes. Gregory had come here this very evening to spy on the Upper East Side vampires because he thought surely Lestat had come to join them by now. If Lestat had been there, which he was not, Gregory would have come knocking at the door.
Benji Mahmoud’s broadcasts had Gregory’s understanding and sympathy and he had wanted to assure himself once again that Benji was not the dupe of powerful brothers and sisters, but in fact an authentic soul putting forth the idea of a future for the blood drinker tribe. He had been assured. Indeed Benji was not only the genuine article but something of a rebel in the house, as arguments Gregory had overheard easily proved.
“Oh, brave new world that hath such blood drinkers in it,” Gregory sighed, pondering whether he should make himself known right now to the refined and erudite vampires of the residence in the middle of the block before him or hold back.
Whenever he did reveal himself, the secretive existence he’d guarded for well over a thousand years would be inalterably influenced, and he was not in fact ready for the measures that would have to be taken when that occurred.
No, best for now to hang back, to listen, to try to learn.
That had always been his way.
Gregory was six thousand years old. He’d been made by Queen Akasha and was very likely only the fourth blood drinker to be created by her, after the defection of her blood drinker steward Khayman and the accursed twins, Mekare and Maharet, who became the rebels of the First Brood.
Gregory had been in the royal palace the night that the vampire race was born. He hadn’t been called Gregory then, but Nebamun, and that was the name he’d used in the world until the third century after Christ—when he took the name of Gregory and began a new and enduring life.
Nebamun had been a lover of Akasha, chosen from the special guard she’d brought with her from the city of Nineveh into Egypt, and as such, Nebamun had not expected to live very long. He was nineteen years old, robust and healthy, when the Queen selected him for the bedchamber and just twenty years old the night the Queen became a blood drinker and brought King Enkil over with her into the curse.
He’d been hiding helpless inside a huge gold-plated chest, the lid propped so that he might see the full horror of the conspirators stabbing the King and the Queen on that night—unable to protect his sovereign. Then with fearful and horrified eyes, he’d seen a swirling cloud of blood particles above the dying Queen, and seen that cloud drawn down into her, seemingly through her many obviously fatal wounds. He’d seen her rise, eyes like the painted orbs of a statue, her skin flashing white in the lamplight. He’d seen her sink her teeth into the neck of the dying Enkil.
Those memories were as vivid to him now as ever—he felt the desert heat, the cooling breeze off the Nile. He heard the cries and whispers of the murderous conspirators. He saw those gold-threaded curtains tied back to the blue-painted columns, and he saw even the distant indifferent and brilliant stars in the black desert sky.
Like a loathsome thing she’d been when she crawled atop her husband’s body. To see him jerked into life by the mysterious blood as he drank from her wrist had been a frightful sight.
Nebamun might have gone mad after that, but he was too young, too strong, too optimistic by nature for madness. He had laid low, as they say now. He had survived.
But he’d been living with a death sentence for quite some time. Everyone knew that to please her jealous King Enkil, Akasha did away with her lovers in a matter of months. The King was said not to mind a steady stream of consorts in and out of his Queen’s bedroom in the cool of the evening, but he feared any one rising in power, and though Nebamun had been reassured a hundred times by Akasha’s affectionate whispers that he was not to be put to death anytime soon, Nebamun knew otherwise, and he had lost all skill at pleasing her, and spent many hours merely thinking about his life, and the meaning of life in general, and getting drunk. He’d had a great passion for life ever since he could remember, and did not want to die.
Once the Queen and King had been infected by the demon Amel, the Queen seemed utterly to have forgotten about Nebamun.
He’d gone back into the guard, defending the palace against those who called the King and Queen monsters. He told no one what he had witnessed. Again and again, he pondered that eerie cloud of bloody particles, that living swirling mass of tiny gnatlike points that had been sucked into the Queen as if by an intake of breath. She’d tried to make a new cult of it, believing firmly that she was now a goddess, and the “will of the gods” had subjected her to this divine violence because of her innate virtue and the needs of the land she ruled.
; Well, that was, as they say these days, a load of bunk. Yes, Nebamun had believed in magic, and yes, he’d believed in gods and demons, but he had always been practical in a ruthless way, like many of his time. Besides, gods even if they did exist could be capricious and evil. And when the captive witches Mekare and Maharet explained how this seeming “miracle” had happened, that it was no more than the caprice of a vagrant spirit, Nebamun had smiled.
Once the rebels were born under the rule of the renegade blood drinker Khayman, with Mekare and Maharet to spread “The Divine Blood” with them, Nebamun had been called back into the Queen’s presence, and made into a blood drinker without explanation or ceremony until he’d risen thirsting and half mad, and dreaming only of draining human victims of all the life and blood they contained.
“You are now the head of my blood army,” the Queen had explained. “You will be called the ‘Guard of the Queens Blood,’ and you will hunt down the rebels of the First Brood as they dare to call themselves and all the misbegotten blood drinkers made by them who have dared to rebel against me and my King and my laws.”
Blood drinkers were gods, the Queen had told Nebamun. Now he too was a god. And at that point, he’d actually started to believe it. How else to explain what he saw now with the new vision of the Blood? His heightened senses bedeviled and tantalized him. He fell in love with the song of the wind, with the rich colors that pulsed all around him in the flowers and drowsy palm trees of the palace gardens, with the chanting pulse of those succulent humans upon whom he fed.
For a thousand years he’d been the dupe of superstition. The world had seemed a grim and unchangeable place to him, full of folly and misery and injustice, and blood drinker fighting blood drinker as incessantly as human fought human, when he’d finally sought the refuge of Mother Earth as so many others had done.
He knew with an aching heart what young Antoine had suffered. Only one blood drinker in existence claimed to have never known such burial and rebirth, and that was the great indominable Maharet.
