Prince Lestat (44 page)

“I’m sorry. Forgive me for interrupting,” Viktor said, with his usual courtesy. He’d been deferential to Seth and Fareed and his mother all his life.

“No one expects you to be indifferent to what’s happening,” Seth said gently. “But we’ve been through it. This is the way. This is our decision.”

Viktor nodded, but his eyes and complexion flashed with a warmth that no preternatural body could ever give forth. Fareed could hear Viktor’s accelerated pulse. He caught the faint scent of the sheen of sweat covering Viktor’s upper lip and forehead.

In the dim lunar light of the monitors Viktor looked so much like Lestat it was uncanny. He wasn’t angry as he looked at Fareed. In fact, it didn’t seem that Viktor had ever been angry in his entire short life with anyone. But he did look hurt and young and anxious. His unruly blond hair made him look more boyish than he was. It was long now, almost to his shoulders. And that is how the Vampire Lestat looked most of the time in videos, photos, and even the iPhone snapshots taken of him by vampire paparazzi in Paris.

“I beg you one more time, both of you,” Viktor said now in a trembling but rather deep voice, “to bring us over. Rose and me, bring us over! Do it before we make this journey to New York and you plant us, two helpless human beings, in a colony of the Undead.”

He had always had a way of being painfully honest and cutting through superfluous language as if every language he had ever learned was a “second tongue.” And that voice, that deep male voice, indicated a maturity he really didn’t possess yet, as far as Fareed was concerned.

“You won’t be in a colony of the Undead,” said Fareed reprovingly. “You’ll be in our own apartments, and you’ll be safe with our guards.”

Oh, he was beautifully behaved, never rash, Viktor, and never rebellious, and seldom if ever emotional in a confusing way, but he was a boy of nineteen, one year younger biologically than Rose, almost to the month, by sheer coincidence, and both of them were children.

“Bring us over,” Viktor whispered, glancing from Fareed to Seth.

“The answer is no,” said Seth. He placed a hand on Viktor’s shoulder. The two were about the same height, though Viktor was gaining.

Fareed sighed. He said again what he had said before.

“The Voice slays young blood drinkers,” said Fareed. “We will not bring you over and make you vulnerable to his attacks, simply to lose you. As mortals you are infinitely safer. And if this thing ends in ruin for us, you and Rose will survive. You and Rose will walk away. You may never know what happened, and all your life you’ll carry the burden of experiences you can’t share with others. But you’ll walk away. And we want this for you, regardless of what you want.”

“That’s the love a parent has for its child,” said Seth.

Viktor was plainly exasperated. “Oh, what I wouldn’t give,” he said, “for five minutes with my real father.” It wasn’t said with malice. It was a simple confession, and Viktor’s eyes were wondering as he said it.

“And you will likely get more than that in New York,” said Fareed. “That is only one of the reasons we must go there. Because you and Rose must meet with him and he must decide what happens with you.”

“Rose is half out of her mind,” said Viktor. “This can’t end any other way for her but with the Blood. You know this! Do you realize how helpless I feel?”

“Of course,” said Fareed. “We feel helpless ourselves. But now we must be going. We’ll reach New York before you do. And we’ll be there when the plane lands.”

Viktor could never know the depth of Fareed’s anxiety right now. Fareed had not brought this vital, splendid human being into the world simply to consign him to death, death in any form, yet Fareed knew how desperately and totally this boy wanted the Blood and had to want it. Only Lestat could consign these two to the Blood. Fareed could never do it.

Seth went quiet and still for a moment. But Fareed had heard it too, the thin wirelike voice of Benji emanating from some equipment somewhere in the compound.

“Be assured, the old ones are coming together. Be assured, Children of the Night, you are no longer alone. They are gathering. Meanwhile you must protect yourselves, wherever you are. Now the Voice is seeking to turn you against your fellow blood drinkers. We have reliable reports that that is what it is doing now, entering the
minds of the youngest and driving them to fight their makers and their fellow fledglings. You must be on guard against the Voice.
The Voice is a liar
. Tonight young ones have been slain in Guadalajara and in Dallas. The attacks have slowed, but they are still happening.”

Slowed. What did this mean?

“Is there any estimate coming from anyone,” Viktor asked, “as to how many have been slain?”

“Roughly? Based on the report,” said Fareed bringing his fingers together. “I’d say thousands. But then we have no idea how many Children of the Night there were before these massacres started. You ask me, based on all I’ve read and pondered, well, I would say the population was at the most five thousand the world over before this started, and now it’s down below a thousand. As for the elders, the true Children of the Millennia who are impervious to these raids of fire, I calculate there are less than thirty and most descended from Queens Blood and not from First Brood. But no one can know. As for all those in between, the powerful and clever ones like Armand and Louis and Lestat himself, and who knows who else, well, what, maybe one hundred? No one can ever know. I don’t think the Voice knows.”

It hit him suddenly with dark force that indeed the species could die out without anyone ever documenting fully what had actually happened to it. Its history, its physical characteristics, its spiritual dimensions, its tragedies, the portal it had established between the world of the seen and the unseen—all might very well be swallowed by the same implacable physical death that had swallowed millions of other species on this planet since before recorded time. And all Fareed had sought to know and achieve would be lost, just as his own individual consciousness would be lost, just as
he
would be lost. He found himself breathless. Not even as a dying man in a hospital bed in Mumbai had he confronted his mortality so totally.

He found himself turning slowly in the chair, and reaching for the button that would shut down all his computers simultaneously.

And when the screens went dark, he was peering through the immaculate glass wall at the great sweep of stars that hung over the distant mountains.

Stars over the desert; how bright and magnificent they look.

The ancient Akasha had seen such stars. The young and impulsive vampire Lestat had seen them the night he’d staggered into the Gobi Desert hoping in vain for the rising sun to destroy him.

It seemed horrible to him suddenly that he, Fareed, in any form was on this tiny bit of burnt rock in a system so vast and indifferent to all suffering.

All you can do, he thought, is fight to stay alive, to stay conscious, to remain a witness and hope somehow there is a meaning to it.

And Viktor, Viktor standing behind him had just begun his optimistic and promising journey. How would he and Rose escape whatever was to happen?

He rose to his feet.

“It’s time,” he said. “Viktor, take leave of your mother.”

“I have,” said Viktor. “I’m ready.”

Fareed took a last look around the room, a last look at his own bookshelves, computers, papers strewn here and there, the tip of the iceberg of twenty years of research, and he realized coldly that he might never see this great research compound again, that he might not survive this crisis precipitated by the Voice, that perhaps he’d come too late with too little into this great realm where he had seen such wonder and promise.

But what was to be done?

He embraced Viktor now, holding him tight and close and listening to that marvelous young heart pounding away with such splendid vigor. He looked into Viktor’s clear blue eyes.

“I love you,” he said.

“And I love you,” Viktor answered without hesitation, holding him tightly with both arms. In his ear he whispered, “Father.
Maker
.”

“I
KNOW
,” said Armand. “But why would a creature of your age and power want Lestat to exert some kind of leadership?”

He was talking to Gregory Duff Collingsworth as they sat in the long rear salon of Trinity Gate on the Upper East Side—a glass porch that in fact united all three townhouses along the back like the service galleries of old in southern mansions—the glass wall beside them open to a magically illuminated garden of slender oaks and masses of night-blooming flowers. Paradise in New York if ever Gregory had beheld one.

“If I wanted to lead our tribe, as Benji calls it, I would have done something about it long ago,” said Gregory. “I would have come forward, identified myself, involved myself. It’s never been my inclination. Look, I’ve been transformed by the last two millennia. I’ve chronicled for myself that transformation. But in a very real way, I’m still the young man who once slept in Akasha’s bed fully expecting to be murdered at any time to satisfy the fears of her king, Enkil. I commanded blood drinkers later, yes, with the Queens Blood, but under her cruel hand. No, life has me at a fever pitch of involvement after all this time, and I cannot back away from the luxury of studying all this and take up the confines of leadership.”

“But you think that Lestat will?” asked Armand.

It was unnerving, Gregory thought—this boyish face confronting him, this near-cherubic face, with its warm brown eyes and the soft waving auburn hair, unnerving that all this belonged to an immortal of five hundred years in the Blood who himself had become a leader twice in his existence because of something iron hard and ruthless of which the face reflected nothing.

“I know that Lestat will and that he can,” said Gregory. “Lestat is the only blood drinker truly known, in one way or another, to the entire world of the Undead. The only one. If they haven’t read his books, they’ve seen his little films, or heard his songs. They know him, his face, his voice—they feel they know the charismatic being himself. As soon as the crisis of the Voice is past, he will lead. He must lead. Benjamin has been right since the beginning. Why should we continue leaderless and disunited when so much is to be gained by establishing a hierarchy and pooling our resources?”

Armand shook his head.

They sat at a white-marble-top table in two white-painted Chinese Chippendale chairs in this glass garden room with its fragile white lilies and its exquisite wisteria. Gregory was dressed as always in his immaculate three-piece wool suit, hair very short, and Armand, the long-haired angel, wore a severe but beautifully colored dark burgundy jacket with bright gold buttons, and a white shirt that was almost luminous in its silk, with a thick white silk scarf for a tie wrapped around his neck and folded into the open shirt collar.

“These have been good times for you and Louis, haven’t they?” Gregory asked, taking a moment to breathe deeply, to sense the moment, to drink in the perfume of the lilies in their painted pots, to look at the shivering wisteria hanging down from the trellis that ran up the wall behind Armand, with its purple blossoms like an abstract painting of a cluster of grapes. That is what wisteria always made Gregory think of, of grapes.…

“Yes, they’ve been good times,” said Armand. He looked down at the marble black-and-white chess set between them. His right hand idly cradled the black queen on his side. “And it was a battle for us to achieve what we’ve achieved here. It’s far easier to wander in despair, isn’t it, to drift from place to place, never making a commitment. But I forced it. I brought Louis and Benji and Sybelle here. I insisted on it. And Antoine is now a vital part of us. I love Antoine. Benji and Sybelle love him too.”

He gestured with his eyes to the open doors. Antoine and Sybelle had been playing together for over an hour, she at the piano as always and Antoine with his violin. It was a waltz from a twentieth-century musical they played now, something “popular” and not highly regarded perhaps in the world of classical music, but surprisingly dark and evocative.

“But there’s no point in glorying in all of this just now, is there?” Armand asked. “Not with what we are facing.” He sighed. His square face and rounded cheeks added to his childlike appearance. “The time will come when we can talk about all we’ve witnessed and what we have to offer to one another. But surely this isn’t the time, not with the Voice turning blood drinkers against each other all over the American continent. And you know, of course, the young ones are pouring into New York, in spite of our warnings. Benji’s told them over and over not to come, to let the elders gather, yet they come. You must hear them even more sharply than I do. They’re out there in the park. They think the trees can hide them. They’re hungry. And they know that if they trouble the innocent in my domain I’ll destroy them. Yet still they’re here, and I can smell their hunger.”

Gregory didn’t respond. There were perhaps fifty at most out there. That was all. Those were the only survivors who had made it this far in their desperation. Even now stragglers and survivors in various cities were turning on each other, battling as the Voice urged them to do, beheading their own former cohorts, cutting out their hearts, smashing their skulls. The cities of the world were filled with black stains upon the pavements where immortal lives had been snuffed out, and remains had been scorched by the sun.

Surely Armand knew that. Gregory did not conceal his own thoughts.

“I’m not sorry they’re dying,” Armand confessed.

“But the survivors, the survivors are what matter now,” said Gregory, “and finding a leader. And if you won’t be that leader, you, after all your experience …”

“What experience?” asked Armand, his brown eyes brightening angrily. “You know what I was, a pawn, an executioner in the thrall of a cult.” He paused, then he uttered the words, “The Children of Satan,” with dark smoldering rage. “Well, I’m that no longer. Yes, I’ve driven them out of this city from time to time, and I once drove them
all out of New Orleans when Lestat was suffering there and they were constantly trying to get a glimpse of him. But you’d be surprised if you knew how often I used the Mind Gift to terrify them, force them into retreat. I did that much more than … than burn them.” His voice trailed away. A blush appeared in his cheeks. “I never took any pleasure in killing any immortal.”