Prince Lestat (66 page)

The blood drinker, Teskhamen, a spare white-haired being of considerable elegance, stepped forward. He introduced himself again with a soft agreeable voice. “Yes, you will forgive us, I hope, for coming to you so unexpectedly. But you see we are so eager for a meeting, and simply could not, after what has happened, remain away.”

What did they know of what had happened? But then of course they knew. How could they not? Ghosts, spirits, what limits were there to what they could know? For all I knew they’d been in the house, present invisibly when I had taken Amel into me.

But it did seem this Teskhamen wanted to put me at ease.

“Lestat,” he said warmly. “We are the ancient Elders of the Talamasca. You’ve been told this. We are the founders of the Order. In a sense, we are the real Talamasca and the enduring Talamasca—no longer in need of the mortal Order that survives—and we want to talk with you very much.”

Armand standing silently against the wall said and did nothing.

“Well, I couldn’t be more eager to talk to you myself,” I said. “And I understand why you came. And I suspect I understand why you’ve cut loose your mortal scholars. I think I do, at any rate. But I need time to prepare my home in France, before I see you. And I ask that you come to me there, and soon.”

“My name is Hesketh,” said the woman, “and we are so longing for this meeting. We can’t tell you how very much we want it.” She had her smooth blond hair swept back from her face in rather beautiful waves, held in place by bits of pearl and platinum and then flowing over her shoulders in a timeless fashion.

She extended to me a gloved hand, a hand covered in soft gray
kid leather, and of course it felt as vital as a human hand. I could feel the deceptive pulse in it. Why did they make themselves so perfectly physical? Her eyes were arresting, not only because they were such a dark shade of gray but because they were a little wider apart than most people’s eyes, and that gave her face a certain mystery. All the details of her, eyelashes, eyebrows, succulent lips—were exquisitely convincing and fetching. I had to wonder precisely what accounted for this and the other gorgeous illusions I was seeing here. Was it skill, magnetism, aesthetic depth, genius?
Was it the soul?

The other ghosts hung back. And one of them, a very personable young male, rather husky, with dark olive skin and curling black hair, appeared to have been weeping. I couldn’t help notice that Armand was almost directly behind him and rather close to him. But there was no time for me to be noticing all these things, or puzzling over them.

“What makes us the physical beings we are? It is all of those things,” said Gremt responding directly to my thoughts and of course reminding me that he could do this. “Oh, we have so much to tell you, so much to … And we will come to you in France as soon as you tell us to come. We have a house there not very far at all from yours, a very old house that goes back to our earliest times together.” He was cheerful suddenly and almost excited. “This has been our wish for so long.” He stopped as if he’d said too much but his expression never really changed.

The ghost of Magnus, as solid as before, hung back, but there came from his face a look of love, of doting love.

This caught me off guard.

“Listen, my friends,” I said. “There are important things happening under this roof tonight and I cannot invite you to remain and to sit down with us just now. You must trust me, and trust in my goodwill. But soon, under my roof in France, it’s agreed, we will indeed come together.” We were repeating ourselves, weren’t we? This was like a dance.

“Yes,” said Gremt, but his eyes were almost glazed, as though his physicality was as much at the mercy of his emotions and obsessions as that of a human.

Yet he didn’t move to take his leave. None of them did. And suddenly I caught on. They were deliberately biding their time, drawing out the essentially formal and meaningless conversation because they
were studying me at close hand. They were likely monitoring countless aspects of my physicality of which I was totally unaware.

They knew Amel was inside me. They knew that Amel and I were one. They knew that Amel was studying them, too, just as I was studying them, and as they were studying me.

I think something dark and slightly ominous must have appeared in my expression or my demeanor because all at once they seemed to react, to gather themselves up, to exchange infinitesimal signals and to look to Teskhamen for a decisive gesture or word.

“You will excuse me now, won’t you?” I said, striving to be gracious, as gracious as I could. “There are others waiting for me. I’m leaving for home in a matter of nights to prepare a place for a wholly new—.” I stopped. A wholly new what?

“A wholly new reign,” said Magnus gently. There was the same loving smile on his lips.

“A wholly new era will suffice,” I said. “I’m not sure I want it to be called a reign.”

He smiled at this as though he found it not only impressive but somehow endearing. I didn’t know whether I was feeling love or hatred for him. Well, it certainly couldn’t be hatred. I was too completely happy to be alive.

I had the sense again that they were studying me in ways I couldn’t fathom, searching my face and form for signs of what was within. Yet Amel was silent. Amel was not helping me with them. Amel was there, yes, but utterly quiet.

Teskhamen caught my hand. His was far colder than mine. It had the hard icy texture of the Children of the Millennia. But his face was very warm and he said, “Forgive us for troubling you on this night, and so soon. But we were eager to see you with our own eyes. And we will go now, yes. I give you my apologies for our conduct. I think we are more impetuous and perhaps more excited than you can know.”

“I understand,” I said. “Thank you, my friends.” But I couldn’t repress my suspicions as they took their leave now, moving in a small loose body past me out of the drawing room into the hall and through the front door.

Armand went with them, his arm around the dark-haired ghost, the ghost who had been weeping, and the door was closed.

I realized that I was alone with Louis in the empty hallway. The others had gone.

“You know who they are?” I whispered.

“I know what they told me,” he said, walking along with me. “And I know what they told you. And the others obviously know who they are and they’re not afraid of them. Yet all wait for you to take command, you to come, you to greet them and invite them to your home in France. You are the leader, Lestat, no doubt about it. All know it. And these ghosts and spirits or whoever they are—they know it too.”

I stopped. I put my arm around him. I held him close to me.

“I’m Lestat,” I said in a low voice. “Your Lestat. I’m the same Lestat you’ve always known, and no matter how I’m changed, I’m still that same being.”

“I know,” he said warmly.

I kissed him. I pressed my lips to his and I held this kiss for a long silent moment. And then I gave in to a silent wave of feeling, and I took him in my arms. I held him tight against me. I felt his unmistakable silken skin, his soft shining black hair. I heard the blood throbbing in him, and time dissolved, and it seemed I was in some old and secret place, some warm tropical grotto we’d once shared, ours alone in some way, with the scent of sweet olive blossoms and the whisper of moist breeze. “I love you,” I whispered.

In a low intimate voice, he answered: “My heart is yours.”

I wanted to weep.

But there was no time.

At that moment, Gregory and Seth reappeared with Sevraine, and Sevraine told me that they had seen to the ballroom and all was in readiness. Marius and Pandora were prepared. The candles had been lighted.

“I’m sorry about our unexpected guests,” said Sevraine. “It seems a true prince is much in demand. But you go now to those waiting for you.”

Viktor and Rose were in the French library.

They had chosen a kind of muted finery for the ceremony. Rose wore a long-sleeved dress of soft clinging black silk that left her throat bare, and hung beautifully to her feet. And Viktor wore a simple
thawb
, of black wool. The severity of these garments made their shining complexions all the more vivid, their lips all the more naturally pink, and their eager eyes all the more heartbreakingly innocent as well as vibrant.

I wanted to be with them, but I felt immediately that I was going
to weep, that I couldn’t prevent it, and I almost fled. But this really was not a choice available to me. I had to do what was right for them.

I took them in my arms and asked if they were still resolved to come to us.

Of course they were.

“I know there’s no turning back for either of you,” I said. “And I know you both believe that you’re prepared for the road you’re taking. I know this. But you must know how much I grieve right now for what you might have been in the course of time, and what now you will never be.”

“But why, Father?” asked Viktor. “Yes, we’re young, we know this. We don’t challenge it. But we’re already dying as are all young things. Why can’t you be completely happy for us?”

“Dying?” I asked. “Well, yes, that’s true. I don’t say it’s not true. But can I be blamed for wondering what you might have been in ten more years of mortal life, or twenty or thirty? Is that dying, for a young man to grow into a man in his prime, for a beautiful young bud of a woman to become the full blossom?”

“We want to be forever as we are now,” said Rose. Her voice was so sweet, so tender. She didn’t want this to be painful for me. She was comforting me. “Surely, you of all people understand,” she pressed.

How could I? What was the point of reminding them that I’d never chosen the Blood. I’d never had such a chance. And what was the point of sentimentalizing the fact that had I lived out my life as a mortal man, even my bones would be gone now, perished in the earth, if I’d died in my bed at the age of ninety?

I was about to speak to them when I heard Amel inside me. He spoke in the softest whisper.

“Keep to your vow,” he said. “They are not dying. They are coming to you as a prince and princess to be part of your court. We are not Death. No. We have never been, have we? We are immortal.”

His voice was so resonant, so subtle in tone, that it shocked me, but this was in fact the same tone he’d used since he’d come into me. And yet it was the Voice that I’d been hearing for decades.

“Give them courage,” he whispered. “But I leave you these moments. They are yours more truly than they are mine.”

Inwardly I thanked him.

I looked at them, Viktor to my left, at eye level with me, and Rose gazing up, her face a perfect oval framed by her shining black hair.

“I know,” I said. “I do know. We can’t ask you to wait. We shouldn’t. We can’t live either with the simple fact that some gruesome accident might take you away from us at any random moment. Once the Blood’s been offered, there is no waiting, no preparing, not really.”

Rose kissed me on the cheek. Viktor stood patiently beside me, merely smiling.

“All right, my babies,” I said. “This is a grand moment.”

I couldn’t prevent the tears. The clock would soon strike nine.

High above in the ballroom, Marius and Pandora waited, and it would have been purely selfish of me to delay this further.

The whole great house of Trinity Gate was scented with flowers.

“It
is
the finest gift,” I whispered, the tears tinting my vision. “It is the gift that
we
can give, which means life everlasting.”

They clung to me tightly.

“Go now,” I said. “They’re waiting for you. Before the sun rises, you’ll be Born to Darkness, but you will see all light then as you’ve never before imagined it. As Marius once said,
‘an endless illumination in which to understand all things.’
And when I set eyes on you again, I’ll give you my blood as my blessing. And you will really be my children.”

H
E WAS HUNGRY AGAIN
, and disappointed to be bothered by it so soon. He listened and the great emptiness amazed him. He lay in his cave, in blessed solitude and darkness, and he thought, They are all gone.

Quiet the cities around him. Quiet the land. Only the cries and rumbling and human voices.

Except for that radio voice, that blood drinker from America speaking through a computer or a cellphone somewhere out there in the wilderness of Tokyo.

“The Voice is now one of us. The Voice is the root of our tribe.”

What could that possibly mean?

He slipped out into the warm night.

Seems it was another one now speaking through the radio and not one of those desperate young ones weeping to Benji Mahmoud for solace or help. No. It was a calm voice simply talking, talking about the quiet that had descended over “our world.”

Before midnight, Cyril had visited the silence of Beijing and the silence of Hong Kong.

Was it thirst that had awakened him, or was it curiosity? Something had happened, as remarkable as the waking of the Queen years ago, something as remarkable as the coming of the Voice.

They were gone, the others!

On he moved to Mumbai, and then to Kolkata and on towards the cities of the two rivers and the mighty Nile.

Gone, all of them, everywhere, those miserable little monsters struggling for their rung on the ladder to eternal life.

At last he stood in the ancient city of Alexandria, in the small hours, near dawn—this modern metropolis he so loathed on account of the stones and blood buried beneath it, the old catacombs in which the wicked Queen had been worshipped by the priesthood that had taken him out of life so long ago.

Even here the voice of Benji Mahmoud continued but it was recorded now. “It is a new era. It is a new time. We are the People of Darkness, we are the People of Everlasting Life. The Prince has spoken. The Prince rules.”

The Prince? He couldn’t fathom it. Who was the Prince?

He walked through a narrow street, listening for that recorded broadcast, until he came upon a small dark tavern filled with drunk lazy mortals on whom he might easily feed. Skins of all nations here. That pulsing twanging music he hated. And in the corner on a filthy little table against a wall covered with a beaded curtain stood the computer through which Benji Mahmoud addressed the world.