Blood Communion (The Vampire Chronicles #13)

by Anne Rice

  No. I wasn’t going to linger on this, the baffling relationship between this person whom I loved devoutly and the blood drinkers who didn’t share that love or even understand him.

  If Amel remembered that council of cold immortals dispassionately discussing his fate—when none of us knew precisely what he was, or whence he’d come, or why or how he’d fused with a human being to make the first vampire—he didn’t let on.

  He’d been there, that spirit, inside of us, binding us to one another, binding us to a host, speaking in our minds when he chose, wheedling, and deceiving, and setting blood drinker against blood drinker. And he had sought to charm Rhoshamandes, to set him against Maharet, and he had succeeded. And into her lair, Rhoshamandes and his lover Benedict had gone to strike her down with such a brutal blow that I could scarcely bear to think of it.

  I let my eyes fix on Jesse Reeves, Maharet’s beloved niece and fledgling, and slowly her eyes turned to me, and I caught the message:

  Rhoshamandes must be put to death. There is no alternative. It is you, Lestat, who do not understand.

  “Destroy him,” said Amel, suddenly, impulsively, his face flushing red. “Destroy him before he destroys you or before he destroys us.”

  “That’s why we’re here, Lestat,” said Kapetria. This was the first time she’d spoken at this meeting. “We’re here because Rhoshamandes has begun to cast a shadow over our lives, and we cannot breathe easy in that shadow. Rhoshamandes does not mean to let us alone.”

  “Let’s explain what happened,” said Amel. He turned and looked at her and took her right hand and kissed it. He looked back to me as he spoke. “We’ve withdrawn from our colony in England. We’ve retreated into Gregory’s laboratories in Paris. We are living in hiding now with Gregory’s protection, because at every turn, for the last week, Rhoshamandes stalked us, watched us, found some reason to talk to us, entered our private rooms, seemingly appearing out of nowhere as ancient ones can do, and never left us a moment’s peace.”

  I was crestfallen. I had assured everyone that this would never happen. Rhoshamandes had assured me that he would leave the colony of the Children of Atlantis alone.

  I had spoken to him directly about this, and he had given me his word. He had said, “I have no interest in these creatures. I acknowledge that you wish to protect them. I am not a menace to them. I have nothing against them. As long as they leave me alone, I will leave them alone.”

  Now this.

  Kapetria appeared more troubled than I had ever seen her. I have always thought her powerfully beautiful, with her flawless bronze skin, her exquisitely sculpted features, and her thick wavy raven hair. Her eyes had an immediate warmth that I found reassuring and always had. And she had proved her loyalty to us. She had proved it more than once, but most spectacularly when she removed the spirit of Amel from my physical body, leaving my mind and body intact.

  She could easily have destroyed me in the process. But she had postponed this act until she knew well that she could achieve it while sparing my life.

  “You know how very much we love our colony,” said Kapetria directly to me. “You know how we sought to learn from you and from Gremt in founding it.”

  Of course I knew. And I loved what the colony had become.

  Kapetria with the assistance of Gregory and Gremt had bought an abandoned asylum in rural England, along with a stately manor house quite close to it, and a large stake in a nearby village much larger and more vital than my small re-created village here in France.

  The Replimoids had established a “health spa” as a cover for their activities, completely renovating the asylum and developing their laboratories there. They refurbished property in the village, invited new business interests, and renovated the ruined church and established a bequest to fund a vicar in residence.

  This was the sure way, Gremt had told them, of thriving among mortals, to show great generosity to the locals of the neighborhood, to become a force for good amongst them so that they could easily forgive anything they saw that might incite suspicion that an alien species was in their very midst.

  This was simple for the Children of Atlantis who had only good feelings for human beings, and were in fact People of the Purpose, in their mind—the purpose being to do what was good for human beings.

  I’d visited the British community several times in the last few months, astonished by the progress made by the colony which now numbered sixty-four Replimoids, thirty of which were clones of Kapetria and thirty clones of the other males.

  Now, if you’ve read the most recent stories in the Vampire Chronicles, then you know how these creatures multiply, and how it was discovered by accident when Rhoshamandes held one of them prisoner—it was Derek—and severed Derek’s arm. They multiply through the process in the plant kingdom that is called branching, in that once a limb is severed, it develops into an individual who is a clone of the parent body from which the limb was taken, while the parent body regenerates a replacement limb. This gives them, of course, a remarkable reproductive advantage in this world, and for that reason some of our tribe thought that for the good of the world the Replimoids should be destroyed.

  Armand had been the one to most forcefully put forward this idea, right in the presence of the Replimoids, and continuously when they were not present. As he watched the colony grow to sixty-four in number, he voiced his warning again and again.

  “Destroy them now or you will regret it later,” he had said. “We were humans before we were blood drinkers. How can we let this species menace the human race?”

  Armand had said nothing all this while. But I could see his cold, merciless eyes fixed with their characteristic apparent innocence on Kapetria, and I imagined a stream of malevolence flowing from him, but he was letting nothing of his mind or heart be known.

  Rhoshamandes had never expressed this view to me—an inherent horror of the Replimoids—but as Rhoshamandes had five thousand years in the Blood, undoubtedly he knew of Armand’s feelings on the matter. Rhoshamandes could spy on us telepathically over great distance, and surely he knew that we were discussing putting an end to him right now.

  Of course, he might not be listening to our conversations. He might be piloting one of his boats in the northern seas, or sitting in an opera house somewhere in Europe enveloped in the music. Or perhaps he was simply indifferent to us now and did not care what we said.

  I had, after all, assured him that we would never move to destroy him if he left us all alone, and “all” included the Children of Atlantis.

  I was deep in my thoughts on this, as I’m relating them to you, when Kapetria spoke up, and because I was not looking at her, but had been looking at Armand, I heard her voice quavering for the first time. I heard a weakness in it, a fragility I had never heard in her before.

  “Five nights ago,” she said, “as if he knew you would be crossing the Atlantic to your old home in New Orleans, Rhoshamandes appeared for hours walking in the village, or sitting in the church, or even strolling on our own grounds.”

  “Every night,” Amel interjected, “we have a service for Vespers in the chapel, and more and more of the villagers are attending it, and I love to attend it, and there he was suddenly, this tall, heavily wrapped figure in a hooded cape, in the back pew for the entire service, and then walking slowly up the village high street and off into the woods.”

  “It was unnerving, this sudden attention,” said Kapetria putting her hand on Amel’s arm perhaps to silence him or calm him. “But I spoke to him politely, I made a point of it, and he was artificial when he spoke with me, smiling artificially and saying how very nice it was . . . nice to see us so very close to his home. Of course I told him that I didn’t see the southern part of England as so very close to Saint Rayne, but he said that for a creature such as himself, it was a matter of seconds to cross the distance. And then in a rather solemn way he wished me well.”
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br />   “He spoke to others,” said Amel. “He even went out of his way to stop Derek in the village—and you know Derek is terrified of him!”

  “Yes,” said Kapetria. “Derek is convinced Rhoshamandes was stalking him, and one of the times when he stopped to speak to Derek he asked about Derek’s regenerated arm. He said something ironic about their sharing this form of suffering, that you had ‘hacked off’ his arm as he had ‘severed’ Derek’s arm. But of course it was such a ‘fortuitous’ event, was it not, for how long mightn’t it have been before we ever discovered that we could multiply in this simple way? He made some cold observation that you had been the author of the discovery, as you were the one who had ‘hacked off’ his arm in the presence of immortals he had known thousands of years ago when the world we share now could not be imagined. And he went on to say that this was too often the case with your blunders . . . what was it? . . .”

  “. . . That somehow,” Amel said, “Lestat manages to profit by his blunders as no other creature he’s ever known, and not only had you profited but the Children of Atlantis had profited as well. He asked if you still carried the ax inside your jacket.”

  “Derek couldn’t answer his question about the ax,” said Kapetria. “He laughed and laughed under his breath. Derek was utterly undone by all this. But it was two nights ago that he frightened me and I am not a being who is easily frightened. I dare say I lack an intelligent understanding of fear.” She hesitated.

  “What did he do?” asked Armand suddenly.

  Kapetria looked directly at Armand for the first time.

  “I was in my study,” she said. “I’d been working all evening in the laboratory, and at last I had some time to rest, and was tired, and I came in and flopped down in a chair by the hearth. I was cold, shivering, and rubbing my arms and about to give up when suddenly the oak logs in the fireplace burst into flame. There was a roaring sound as it happened, a crackling and roaring, and then I saw him sitting in the chair opposite me, just as if he’d been there all the time. It was as if he possessed magical powers, and I was defenseless against them. Magic by which he could invade our most private rooms.”

  “It was not magic,” said Gregory. “It was simple speed you cannot imagine, and of course surprise.”

  “Well, whatever it was, I was frightened,” said Kapetria. “I gained an insight into what people mean when they speak of being frightened. You could even say that it was a good thing, because I learned from it what it means to be frightened . . .”

  “Well, that’s exactly what he wanted you to be,” said Marius, “frightened, and that’s why he came unbidden into your study and ignited the fire.”

  “What did he say?” asked Gregory.

  “Well, at first nothing. I said nothing. I looked at the door to the hallway and saw it was open, and imagined that he had moved through that doorway silently and speedily so that I hadn’t seen . . .”

  “That’s what he did,” said Gregory. “That is all he did, Kapetria, and we all have that power, and that skill.”

  “So he left without saying anything?” Marius pressed.

  “No,” she said. “He finally broke the silence. He asked if I was not going to welcome him to my parlor, as he called it, and I said without thinking that it was not necessary apparently as he had come into my private study of his own accord. Then for the first time, the first time since his strange visits had started, he said something positively menacing. He told me in a low voice, a cold and hostile voice, that he found us all irritating and did not want us in England.

  “I asked him if he was telling me that we should go, and to that he replied that he would leave that to my judgment. ‘You are very enticing to blood drinkers,’ he said, ‘with your ever-regenerating blood, and it is really quite amazing that Lestat has received you and your cohorts as equals and put you under a protection which he can’t guarantee.’ ”

  “That’s exactly what he said?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she replied. “And we immediately left for France, all of us, that night by plane, landing in Paris well before morning. And we were all safely relocated to our old lodgings in Collingsworth Pharmaceuticals before the sun set.”

  “Yes,” said Amel with a deep sigh, “behind walls of steel in the very interior of a tower in which we have no windows, but are apparently quite safe.”

  Amel looked at Gregory. “And Gregory has accepted us again with his usual generosity, even agreeing to wait for the whole story until you returned.”

  I sat back in my chair. I couldn’t conceal a disgusted look.

  Everyone was silent for a moment and then David Talbot and Gregory began to speak at once. Gregory gave way to David.

  “Listen, my beloved friend,” he said to me, leaning forward over the table as he looked at me, “you must put an end to this being! Now wait, before you answer. I was a mortal man not fifty years ago, Lestat, a human being that recently, and a human being who had lived for seventy-four years before he lost his original body, assumed another, and saw that body transformed by the Dark Blood. I well remember all the moral lessons of being human, and I’m telling you—you must give the order immediately for the destruction of this creature. You’re gambling with your life and the lives of the Replimoids and you are gambling with the lives of all those here.”

  “And he is somewhere listening to every word,” I said.

  “All the more reason,” David said.

  “Give the order,” said Gregory.

  “Give the order,” said Sevraine.

  “Give the order,” said Seth.

  Jesse merely raised her right hand without a sound and nodded her head.

  All of them gave their assent by gesture or a few words, except for Armand. His eyes were fixed on me.

  “Why in Hell do you hesitate?” Armand said. “Where is the despicable villain who destroyed the coven of the Children of Satan in a single night?”

  “Oh, for the love of God, I did no such thing,” I said. “It was your taking me prisoner that brought me into your coven, and I struck down no one. Don’t bring up old grudges. That doesn’t help.”

  From the far side of the room, I hear Cyril’s voice. “Get rid of him, boss,” he said. “Get rid of him. He is too dangerous and too foolish and too without a soul.”

  No one on the council made any objection to my big disheveled leather-clad bodyguard speaking up. In fact, Marius expressed his agreement with the assessment at once.

  “That’s it precisely,” said Marius addressing me. “He has no soul in him to control a body that has grown in unspeakable power for thousands of years. Nothing tempers his shallow brittle view of the world.”

  “All right.” I put up my two hands. “Let me understand this, Marius. You, you who are demanding a public censure of some sort for your destroying Arjun, you are saying that I must reverse my decision now on Rhoshamandes because he has harried the Replimoids and violated the sanctity of Kapetria’s private study to discomfort her with a string of badly chosen words?”

  “You know all the old arguments,” said Marius.

  “And you’ve heard my response to them,” I replied. “What has changed is not sufficient to warrant the reversal of a prince’s pardon, not as far as I can see.”

  “He means to destroy us,” said Kapetria. “He plays with us like a restless cat.”

  I shook my head, and tried to withdraw within my own soul for a moment of pure thought on this matter, but found myself looking into Amel’s eyes.

  I’d never seen such a look of distress coupled with malice as I saw on his face now.

  His lower lip was trembling in a boyish way, and then he spoke. “Do you know what it means to rise from a long wretched slumber from which you’ve tried to wake again and again, and then to roam in darkness, searching for light at one remote station after another along the great roadways of a dark country without a nam
e?” He was trembling all over. And his voice trembled.

  “Imagine it,” Amel said. “Imagine a mind gradually awakening to its own contours as a mind, a mind struggling to grasp that it was once a person, a creature, a being . . . and struggling to make sense of what it could hear but not see, and then see but not see completely . . . amid a cacophony of voices that never ceased speaking.” He broke off. He put his hand to his forehead and looked down for a moment as if struggling violently with himself.

  “Amel, I’m listening to you,” I said. “I understand.”

  “What he wants to tell you,” said Kapetria, “was that on those endless journeys up and down the threads of the web the vampiric blood had created, he knew what seemed to him innumerable minds, and amongst those minds, he knew the mind of Rhoshamandes, and knew it to be selfish, small, brittle, and easily seduced.”

  I nodded.

  Amel had recovered himself. He looked at me again. “I know him,” he said, his voice raw. “He’s a monster. Kill him before he kills you. If you die, Lestat, if you perish, if you let that unspeakable—.”

  Kapetria put her arms around him, around this body that she had created for him, and kissed him, her hand stroking his hair. “He understands,” she said. And again. “He understands.”

  There was a pause. I felt the same reluctance I’d always felt to condemn Rhoshamandes. But I struggled to find a more persuasive way to express my deep feeling—that though his behavior had been aggressive and obnoxious in the extreme, he had done nothing to merit the penalty of death.