"I AM TELLING YOU I AM A VAMPIRE!" I screamed suddenly.
Ecstasy, delirium.
"I AM EVIL! EVIL!"
"Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, YES, YES, YES."
I threw out my arms, my hands curved upwards:
"I WANT TO DRINK UP YOUR SOULS!"
The big woolly-haired biker in the black leather jacket backed up, knocking over those behind him, and leapt on the stage next to me, fists over his head. The bodyguards went to tackle him but I had him, locking him to my chest, lifting him off his feet in one arm and closing my mouth on his neck, teeth just touching him, just touching that geyser of blood ready to spew straight upwards!
But they had torn him loose, thrown him back like a fish into the sea. Tough Cookie was beside me, the light skittering on her black satin pants, her whirling cape, her arm out to steady me, even as I tried to slip free.
Now I knew all that had been left out of the pages I had read about the rock singers-this mad marriage of the primitive and the scientific, this religious frenzy. We were in the ancient grove all right. We were all with the gods.
And we were blowing out the fuses on the first song. And rolling into the next, as the crowd picked up the rhythm, shouting the lyrics they knew from the albums and the clips. Tough Cookie and I sang, stomping in time with it:
CHILDREN OF DARKNESS MEET THE CHILDREN OF LIGHT
CHILDREN OF MAN, FIGHT THE CHILDREN OF NIGHT
And again they cheered and bellowed and wailed, unmindful of the words. Could the old Keltoi have cut loose with lustier ululations on the verge of massacre?
But again there was no massacre, there was no burnt offering.
Passion rolled towards the images of evil, not evil. Passion embraced the image of death, not death. I could feel it like the scalding illumination on the pores of my skin, in the roots of my hair, Tough Cookie's amplified scream carrying the next stanza, my eyes sweeping the farthest nooks and crannies, the amphitheater become a great wailing soul.
Deliver me from this, deliver me from loving it. Deliver me from forgetting everything else, and sacrificing all purpose, all resolve to it. I want you, my babies. I want your blood, innocent blood. I want your adoration at the moment when I sink my teeth. Yes, this is beyond all temptation.
But in this moment of precious stillness and shame, I saw them for the first time, the real ones out there. Tiny white faces tossed like masks on the waves of shapeless mortal faces, distinct as Magnus's face had been in that long-ago little boulevard hall. And I knew that back beyond the curtains, Louis also saw them. But all I saw in them, all I felt emanating from them, was wonder and fear.
"ALL YOU REAL VAMPIRES OUT THERE," I shouted. "REVEAL YOURSELVES!" And they remained changeless, as the painted and costumed mortals about them went wild.
For three solid hours we danced, we sang, we beat the hell out of the metallic instruments, the whiskey splashing back and forth among Alex and Larry and Tough Cookie, the crowd surging towards us over and over until the phalanx of police had doubled, and the lights had been raised. Wooden seats were breaking in the high corners of the auditorium, cans rolled on the concrete floors. The real ones never ventured a step closer. Some vanished.
That's how it was.
Unbroken screaming, like fifteen thousand drunks on the town, right up to the final moments, when it was the ballad from the last clip, Age of Innocence.
And then the music softening. The drums rolling out, and the guitar dying, and the synthesizer throwing up the lovely translucent notes of an electric harpsichord, notes so light yet profuse that it was as if the air were showered with gold.
One mellow spot hit the place where I stood, my clothes streaked with blood sweat, my hair wet with it and tangled, the cape dangling from one shoulder.
Into a great yawning mouth of rapt and drunken attention I raised my voice slowly, letting each phrase become clear:
This is the Age of Innocence
True Innocence
All your Demons are visible
All your Demons are material
Call them Pain
Call them Hunger
Call them War
Mythic evil you don't need anymore.
Drive out the vampires and the devils
With the gods you no longer adore
Remember: The Man with the fangs wears a cloak.
What passes for charm
Is a charm
Understand what you see
When you see me!
Kill us, my brothers and sisters
The war is on
Understand what you see
When you see me.
I closed my eyes on the rising walls of applause. What were they really clapping for? What were they celebrating?
Electric daylight in this giant auditorium. The real ones were vanishing in the shifting throng. The uniformed police had jumped up onto the platform to make a solid row in front of us. Alex was tugging at me as we went through the curtain:
"Man, we have to run for it. They've got the damned limo surrounded. And you'll never make it to your own car."
I said no, they had to go on, to take the limo, to get going now.
And to my left I saw the hard white face of one of the real ones as he shoved his way through the press. He wore the black leather skins of the motorcycle riders, his silken preternatural hair a gleaming black mop.
The curtains were ripping from their overhead rods, letting the house flow into the backstage area. Louis was beside me.
I saw another immortal on my right, a thin grinning male with tiny dark eyes.
Blast of cold air as we pushed into the parking lot, and pandemonium of squirming, struggling mortals, the police yelling for order, the limo rocking like a boat as Tough Cookie and Alex and Larry were shoved into it. One of the bodyguards had the engine of the Porsche running for me, but the youngsters were beating on the hood and the roof as if it were a drum.
Behind the black haired vampire male there appeared another demon, a woman, and the pair were pushing inexorably closer. What the hell did they think they were going to do?
The giant motor of the limousine was growling like a lion at the children who wouldn't make way for it, and the motorcycle guards gunned their little engines, spewing fumes and noise into the throng.
The vampire trio was suddenly surrounding the Porsche, the tall male's face ugly with fury, and one thrust of his powerful arm lifted the low-slung car in spite of the youngsters who held to it. It was going to capsize. I felt an arm around my throat suddenly. And I felt Louis's body pivot, and I heard the sound of his fist strike the preternatural skin and bone behind me, heard the whispered curse.
Mortals everywhere were suddenly screaming. A policeman exhorted the crowd over a loudspeaker to clear out.
I rushed forward, knocking down several of the youngsters, and steadied the Porsche just before it went over like a scarab on its back. As I struggled to open the door, I felt the crowd crushing against me. Any moment this would become a riot. There would be a stampede.
Whistles, screams, sirens. Bodies shoving Louis and me together, and then the leather-clad vampire male rising on the other side of the Porsche, a great silver scythe flashing in the floodlights as he swung it over his head. I heard Louis's shout of warning. I saw another scythe gleaming in the comer of my eye.
But a preternatural screech cut through the cacophony as in a blinding flash the vampire male burst into flames. Another blaze exploded beside me. The scythe clattered to the concrete. And yards away yet another vampiric figure suddenly went up in a crackling gust.
The crowd was in utter panic, rushing back into the auditorium, streaming out into the parking lot, running anyplace it could to escape the whirling figures as they were burnt black in their own private infernos, their limbs melting in the heat to mere bones. And I saw other immortals streaking away at invisible speed through the sluggish human press.
Louis was stunned as he turned to me, and surely the look of amazement on m
y face only stunned him more. Neither of us had done this! Neither of us had the power! I knew but one immortal who did.
But I was suddenly slammed back by the car door opening and a small delicate white hand reached out to pull me inside.
"Hurry, both of you!" said a female voice in French suddenly. "What are you waiting for, the Church to pronounce it a miracle?" And I was jerked into the leather bucket seat before I realized what was happening, dragging Louis in on top of me so that he had to scramble over me into the compartment in back.
The Porsche lurched forward, scattering the fleeing mortals in front of its headlights. I stared at the slender figure of the driver beside me, her yellow hair streaming over her shoulders, her soiled felt hat smashed down over her eyes.
I wanted to throw my arms around her, to crush her with kisses, to press my heart against her heart and forget absolutely everything else. The hell with these idiot fledglings. But the Porsche almost went over again as she made the sharp right out of the gate and into the busy street.
"Gabrielle, stop!" I shouted, my hand closing on her arm. "You didn't do that, burn them like that-!"
"Of course not," she said, in sharp French still, barely glancing at me. She looked irresistible as with two fingers she twisted the wheel again, swinging us into yet another ninety-degree turn. We were headed for the freeway.
"Then you're driving us away from Marius!" I said. "Stop."
"So let him blow up the van that's following us!" she cried. "Then I'll stop." She had the gas pedal floored, her eyes fixed on the road in front of her, her hands locked to the leatherclad wheel.
I turned to see it over Louis's shoulder, a monster of a vehicle bearing down with surprising speed-an overgrown hearse it seemed, hulking and black, with a mouthful of chromium teeth across the snub-nosed front and four of the undead leering at us from behind the tinted windshield glass.
"We can't get clear of this traffic to outrun them!" I said.
"Turn around. Go back to the auditorium. Gabrielle, turn around!"
But she bore on, weaving in and out of the motor coaches wildly, driving some of them in sheer panic to the side.
The van was gaining.
"It's a war machine, that's what it is!" Louis said. "They've rigged it with an iron bumper. They're going to try to ram us, the little monsters!"
Oh, I had played this one wrong. I had underestimated. I had envisioned my own resources in this modem age, but not theirs.
And we were moving farther and farther away from the one immortal who could blow them to Kingdom Come. Well, I would handle them with pleasure. I'd smash their windshield to pieces for starters, then tear off their heads one by one. I opened the window, climbing halfway up and out of it, the wind whipping my hair, as I glared at them, their ugly white faces behind the glass.
As we shot up the freeway ramp, they were almost on top of us. Good. Just a little closer and I would spring. But our car was skidding to a halt. Gabrielle couldn't clear the path ahead.
"Hold on, it's coming!" she screamed.
"Like hell it is!" I shouted, and in an instant I would have jumped off the roof and gone into them like a battering ram.
But I didn't have that instant. They had struck us full force, and my body flew up in the air, diving over the side of the freeway as the Porsche shot out in front of me, sailing into space.
I saw Gabrielle break through the side door before the car hit the ground. And she and I were both rolling over on the grassy slope as the car capsized and exploded with a deafening roar.
"Louis!" I shouted. I scrambled towards the blaze. I would have gone right into it after him: But the glass of the back portal splintered as he came through it. He hit the embankment just as I reached him. And with my cape I beat at his smoking garments, Gabrielle ripping off her jacket to do the same.
The van had stopped at the freeway railing high above. The creatures were dropping over the edge, like big white insects, and landing on their feet on the slope.
And I was ready for them.
But again, as the first one skidded down towards us, scythe raised, there came that ghastly preternatural scream again and the blinding combustion, the creature's face a black mask in a riot of orange flame. The body convulsed in a horrid dance.
The others turned and ran under the freeway.
I started after them, but Gabrielle had her arms around me and wouldn't let me go. Her strength maddened me and amazed me.
"Stop, damn it!" she said. "Louis, help me!"
"Let me loose!" I said furiously. "I want one of them, just one of them. I can get the hindmost in the pack!"
But she wouldn't release me, and I certainly wasn't going to fight her, and Louis had joined with her in her angry and desperate entreaties.
"Lestat, don't go after them!" he said, his polite manner strained to the fullest. "We've had quite enough. We must leave here now."
"All right!" I said, giving it up resentfully. Besides, it was too late. The burnt one had expired in smoke and sputtering flames, and the others were gone into silence and darkness without a trace.
The night around us was suddenly empty, except for the thunder of the freeway traffic high above. And there we were, the three of us, standing together in the lurid glaze of the blazing car.
Louis wiped the soot from his face wearily, his stiff white shirtfront smudged, his long velvet opera cape burnt and torn.
And there was Gabrielle, the waif just as she'd been so long ago, the dusty, ragged boy in frayed khaki jungle jacket and pants, the squashed brown felt hat askew on her lovely head.
Out of the cacophony of city noises, we heard the thin whine of sirens approaching.
Yet we stood motionless, the three of us, waiting, glancing to one another. And I knew we were all scanning for Marius. Surely it was Marius. It had to be. And he was with us, not against us. And he would answer us now.
I said his name aloud softly. I peered into the dark under the freeway, and out over the endless army of little houses that crowded the surrounding slopes.
But all I could hear were the sirens growing louder and the murmur of human voices as mortals began the long climb from the boulevard below.
I saw fear in Gabrielle's face. I reached out for her, went towards her, in spite of all the hideous confusion, the mortals coming nearer and nearer, the vehicles stopped on the freeway above.
Her embrace was sudden, warm. But she gestured for me to hurry.
"We're in danger! All of us," she whispered. "Terrible danger. Come!"
3
It was five o'clock in the morning and I stood alone at the glass doors of the Carmel Valley ranch house. Gabrielle and Louis had gone into the hills together to find their rest.
A phone call north had told me that my mortal musicians were safe in the new Sonoma hideaway, partying madly behind electric fences and gates. As for the police and the press and all their inevitable questions, well, that would have to wait.
And now I waited alone for the morning light as I'd always done, wondering why Marius hadn't shown himself, why he had saved us only to vanish without a word.
"And suppose it wasn't Marius," Gabrielle had said anxiously as she paced the floor afterwards. "I tell you I felt an overwhelming sense of menace. I felt danger to us as well as to them. I felt it outside the auditorium when I drove away. I felt it when we stood by the burning car. Something about it. It wasn't Marius, I'm convinced-"
"Something almost barbaric about it," Louis had said. "Almost but not quite."
"Yes, almost savage," she had answered, glancing to him in acknowledgment. "And even if it was Marius, what makes you think he didn't save you so that he could take his private vengeance in his own way?"
"No," I had said, laughing softly. "Marius doesn't want revenge, or he would already have it, that much I know."
But I had been too excited just watching her, the old walk, the old gestures. And ah, the frayed safari clothing. After two hundred years, she was still the intrepid explore
r. She straddled the chair like a cowboy when she sat down, resting her chin on her hands on the high back.
We had so much to talk about, to tell each other, and I was simply too happy to be afraid.
And besides, being afraid was too awful, because I knew now I had made another serious miscalculation. I'd realized it for the first time when the Porsche exploded with Louis still inside it. This little war of mine would put all those I loved in danger. What a fool I'd been to think I could draw the venom to myself.
Anne Rice - Vampire Chronicles 2 - The Vampire Lestat (1985) Page 64
