Prince Lestat (28 page)

Was Lestat still completely ignorant of Viktor’s existence? And where were the twins at this very hour?

Gregory realized he’d not be joining Armand and Louis and the others tonight, even if the loveliest music on Earth was now coming from the townhouse, with Antoine playing his violin as Sybelle played the piano, both of them traveling the exhilarating crescendos of Tchaikovsky, effortlessly inflating the music with their own madness and charm.

But the time would certainly come when they must all meet.

And how many would die by fire before such a gathering took place?

He turned and headed deeper into the darkness of Central Park, walking faster and faster, his thoughts crowding in on him as he pondered whether to stay in this city or go home.

He had spent last night in his penthouse apartment on Central Park South and assured himself all was in order should he have to bring his family there. He was the owner of the building, and his basement crypts were as safe as those of Louis and Armand. No need to go back there now. He longed for Geneva, for his own lair.

Suddenly, without the conscious decision, he was ascending, and so rapidly that no mortal eye could have followed his progress, rising ever higher and turning eastward as the city of New York receded below him yet remained a wondrous and endless carpet of brilliant and pulsing lights.

Oh, what do the great electrified cities of this world look like to Heaven? What do they look like to me?

Perhaps these urban galaxies of electric splendor offered to the endless Heavens an homage, a mirror image of the stars.

Cutting higher and higher, he fought the wind that would stop him, until he had broken into the thinnest air beneath the vast canopy of silent stars.

Home, he wanted to go home.

A vague panic seized him.

Even as he moved eastward and out over the cold black Atlantic, he heard the voice of Benji Mahmoud broadcasting again. His brief visit with Antoine had apparently been interrupted by frightening intelligence.

“It has happened now in Amman. The vampires of Amman have been massacred. It is the Burning, Children of the Night. We are now certain of it. But we have reports of massacres in other places, random places. We are trying to confirm now whether shelters in Bolivia have been attacked.”

Pushed to the limit of his strength, Gregory traveled faster towards the European continent, desperate suddenly to be at his own hearth. For the ancient ones, Chrysanthe, Flavius, Zenobia, and Avicus, he had little fear as Benji’s frantic appeals faded into the roar of the wind, but what about his beloved Davis? Could it possibly be that his beloved Davis would once again suffer the hot breath of the Burning which had so nearly taken him from the Earth once before?

All was well when he arrived, but it was almost dawn. He’d lost half the night in traveling east, and he was weary to the core of his soul. There was time to embrace Flavius and Davis, but Zenobia and Avicus had already gone to the vaults beneath the ten-story hotel.

How fresh and beautiful Davis looked to him with his shining dark skin and liquid eyes. He had hunted that night in Zurich with Flavius and they’d only just returned. Gregory caught the scent of the human blood in him.

“And all’s well with the people of Trinity Gate?” asked Davis. He was eager to return to New York, Gregory knew this, eager to revisit his old home in Harlem and the places where once as a young man he had sought to be a Broadway dancer. He was convinced the past could not hurt him now, but he wanted to put his hopes to the test.

In a hushed voice, Gregory told him that his old compatriot, Killer of the Fang Gang, was alive, that the young musician Antoine had met him on his journey to New York. This assuaged an old guilt in Davis, guilt that he had been rescued from Akasha’s massacre after Lestat’s concert, leaving Killer to perish.

“Maybe somehow a great good will come out of this,” Davis said,
searching Gregory’s face. “Maybe somehow Benji’s dream is possible, do you think, that we could all come together? In the old days, it was every gang for itself, it was back alleys and gutters and graveyards.…”

“I know,” said Gregory. They had been over many times how the Undead had lived before Lestat had raised his voice and told them the story of their beginnings—vampire bars, swanky coven houses, and roving gangs, yes, all of that.

“Can there be a way for us to live in peace?” Davis asked. Obviously he felt so safe here under Gregory’s watchful eye that the stories of the new Burnings did not frighten him, not at all, not the way they frightened Gregory. “Is it possible we could really embrace a future? You know, we never had a future in those nights. We just had the past and the now and then the outskirts of life.”

“I know,” said Gregory.

He kissed Davis and sent him away with only the gentlest warning. “Go nowhere without me, without Flavius, without one of us.”

Davis, like all his little family, had never rebelled against him.

Gregory had only a few precious moments alone to look out on placid and lovely Lake Geneva, and the bright broad quay below, where early morning strollers were already out, and the vendors offering hot chocolate and coffee, and then to go upstairs as he did every morning to his own glass cell on the roof. Geneva was quiet. There had never been a coven house or refuge in Geneva. And as far as Gregory could tell, there were no Undead mavericks challenging him here. If there was a target for the Burning, however, it was this building where he and his beloved family lodged.

Tomorrow he’d strengthen all security systems, sprinklers, and examine the vaults to make certain that the thick stone-and-lead walls were unbreachable. He was no stranger to the Fire Gift. He knew what it could do and what it could not do. He’d foiled Akasha when she sought to burn Davis simply by carrying him upwards so swiftly her eyes could not follow the escape. And throughout the nighttime, from now on, he would keep the young and vulnerable Davis at his side.

Now he mounted the steel-lined stairway and pushed back the heavy-plated doors to his small open bedroom under the sky. In this roofless high-walled cell, under a high canopy of steel mesh, he would endure the paralysis of the daylight hours, exposing his six-thousand-year-old body to the burning rays of the sun.

When he woke each night, of course, he knew a slight discomfort
from this exposure, but as the result of this process, his skin remained darkly tanned, helping him to pass for human, never to become the living white-marble statue that Khayman had become that would so frighten human beings.

As he lay down on his soft bed, the sky brightening above him, he picked up the book he’d been studying,
Glass: A World History
by Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin, and read for a few precious minutes from this engrossing text.

Some night soon, somehow he and Lestat would sit together somewhere, in a paneled library or a breezy open café, and they would talk together, talk and talk and talk, and Gregory would not be so alone.

Lestat would really understand. And Lestat would teach Gregory things! Yes. Surely that would happen, and that is what Gregory longed for more than anything else.

He was just sliding into unconsciousness when he heard dim telepathic cries from somewhere in the world. “The Burning.” But that was someplace where the sun was not shining and the sun was indeed shining here and Gregory sank into sleep beneath its warm penetrating rays now because he could do nothing else.

H
E WANTED
no part of this, this “Voice” telling him to burn the young ones. He wanted no part of wars or factions or covens or books about vampires. And certainly he wanted nothing to do with any entity who said solemnly and telepathically, “I am the Voice. Do as I say.”

The very idea. He had laughed!

“And why don’t you want to slaughter them?” demanded the Voice. “Have they not driven you out of Rome?”

“No, they haven’t. And I do wish you’d go away.”

Everard knew from bad experience that it was not in the vampire nature to collect in groups except for evil, and that fighting other blood drinkers was a foolish enterprise that ended only in ruin for all involved. He had long chosen to survive alone. In the hills of Tuscany not far from Siena, he kept a small refurbished villa staffed by mortals, and in the evenings the rooms were his alone. He was coldly hospitable to the immortals who now and then called on him. But this Voice wanted it to begin all over again, and he would not listen. He went into Rome or Florence to hunt because they provided the only really safe and rich hunting grounds, but he would not go into Rome to burn.

Seven hundred years ago he’d been made in France by a great vampire named Rhoshamandes who had created a line of de Landen vampires, as he called them—Benedict, Allesandra, Eleni, Eugénie, Notker, and Everard—most of which had no doubt perished over the centuries, but Everard had survived. True he’d been captured
by the coven of the Children of Satan, those infamous superstitious vampires who made of their miserable existence a religion, and he’d served them, but only after he’d been tortured and starved. Sometime in the Renaissance years, he couldn’t remember precisely when, he’d been sent by the vicious little Parisian coven master Armand to the Children of Satan in Rome to find out how the coven fared. Well, the coven had been in ruins, and Santino the coven master had been living a blasphemous existence in worldly clothes and jewels flouting all the rules he’d forced on others. And Everard saw his chance. He escaped the Children of Satan, striking out on his own, remembering the things that the powerful Rhoshamandes had taught him long ago before the Children of Satan drove him from France.

Since then Everard had survived many an encounter with others more powerful than himself. He’d survived the terrible Burning when Akasha passed over the world striking down Children of Darkness everywhere without regard to character, courage, merit, or mercy.

He’d even survived a brief and insulting mention in one of the Vampire Chronicles by Marius, who’d described Everard without naming him as “gaunt and big boned” with dusty clothes and dirty lace.

Well, he could endure the “gaunt and big boned.” That was true, and he thought himself quite beautiful in spite of it, but the dusty clothes and dirty lace? It infuriated him. He kept his shoulder-length black hair and his clothes immaculate. If he ever ran into Marius again, he intended to smack his face.

But that was all foolishness really. If he played his cards right, he’d never run into Marius or anyone else, except to exchange a few kind words and then move on. The point was Everard lived with other blood drinkers at peace.

And now this inane Voice, this Voice that came right into his head, bedeviled him nightly with commands to kill and to burn and to rampage. And he could not shut this Voice out.

Finally, he’d resorted to music. Everard had started purchasing excellent systems for amplified music since the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed the storerooms of his little villa were a veritable museum, as he hated to throw good things away. And so he had windup Victrolas, stacks of thick old black phonograph records that he had once played on them, as well as early electrical machines that had once given him “high fidelity” and “stereo” and now collected dust.

He’d moved on to compact discs, streaming, and the like and so forth, and so putting his iPhone into the little Bose dock that would amplify its music, he flooded the villa with the “Ride of the Valkyries” and prayed the Voice would go away.

No such luck. The imbecilic, bad-tempered, and childish little monster continued to invade his thoughts.

“You are not going to persuade me to burn anyone, you idiot!” Everard snarled with exasperation.

“I will punish you for this. You are young and weak and stupid,” said the Voice. “And when I do accomplish my purpose I will send an ancient one to destroy you for your disobedience.”

“Oh, stuff it up your chimney, you vain little nuisance,” said Everard. “If you are so high and mighty and capable of doing this, why are you talking to me at all? And why aren’t you blasting all the blood drinker tramps of Rome on your own?”

Who was this fool, some ancient one buried deep underground or walled up in some ruin somewhere desperately trying to control others and ultimately draw them to his prison? Well, he was doing a very bad job of it with all this incitement to war and idle threats.

“I shall make you suffer,” said the Voice, “and turn off that infernal music!”

Everard laughed. He turned the volume higher, took the iPhone out of the dock, put it in his pocket, connected the earpiece, and went out for a walk.

The Voice fumed but he could hardly hear it.

It was a lovely route he took downhill to the walled city of Siena. And how Everard loved the place, with its tiny winding medieval streets that made him feel safe, made him think of his Paris.

The Paris of today terrified him.

He even loved the bright-faced and gentle tourists who flooded Siena, pretty much enjoying what Everard enjoyed—wandering, gazing into shopwindows, and sitting in the wine bars.

Everard liked the shops and wished more were open after dark. He often sent his mortal servants down to purchase stationery for him, on which to write his occasional poems, which he then framed and hung on his walls. And he purchased scented candles and bright silk neckties.

Like many of the old ones made in the Middle Ages, he favored ornate and big-sleeved shirts, tight-fitting pants that were almost
like leggings, and fancy mostly velvet coats. And these things he ordered online with his big dazzling Mac computer. But the town had fine men’s gloves, and golden cuff links and such. Lots of glittering accoutrements.

He had a lot of money, accumulated over the centuries in many ways. He wasn’t hungry. He’d fed in Florence the night before, and it had been a long slow delicious feast.

And so on this cool and mild evening, under the Tuscan stars, he was happy even though the Voice grumbled in his ear.