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."
30
Cyril
The Silence Heard Round the World
HE 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.
A pretty mortal girl, puffing on a long pink cigarette, listened to Benji Mahmoud and laughed under her breath. She saw Cyril. Come here, big boy, just let me make you happy, come on, closer, closer. Daggers in the back room. Her skin was thick with tinted powder, her eyes rimmed in kohl. She had the red smile of a child witch.
He sat down beside her in the shadows. The stench of the place was vile, but he wouldn't be here very long. And the smell of her blood was pure. All lies die in the blood. All evil is purged in the blood.
"You know," she said to him in English, "he could make you want to be a real vampire." And she laughed again, a rich cynical ugly laugh, lifting her yellow drink and spilling it down the front of her dark dress.
"Never mind that," he said as he kissed her.
She pushed at him helplessly as he sank his teeth. Sold into it at twelve years old. Honey, tell me all about it! And the blood sang and sang its ancient and unchanging song.
He walked away from the city.
He walked away from the damp hazy air of the Mediterranean, inland to the everlasting sands. He would sleep here in the land of Egypt, maybe for years, he would sleep in the land of his birth. Why not?
Finally, he stood alone under the great dark sky, away from all human sounds and scents, with the cold desert wind washing him, cleansing away the filth that clung to him of foreign lands.
Then the Voice sighed inside his head.
"Oh, spare me!" Cyril cried. "Get away from me! Don't torment me here."
But the Voice spoke to him now with an inflection he'd never heard before, and with a deep resonance that was wholly new. It was beautiful. And yet it was the Vo
ice, and the Voice said,
"Cyril, come home. Come home to the tribe. At last we are one."
31
Rose
The People of the Moon and Stars
THE VOICE OF PANDORA called to her from far away: "Rose, drink!"
And she could hear Marius calling to her and Viktor, Viktor's desperate plea.
"Rose, drink."
The burning droplets hit her lips, trickled into her mouth. Poison. She couldn't move.
Gardner had ahold of her and was whispering in her ear, "Would you disappoint me yet again, Rose! Rose, how dare you do this to me!" To me, to me, to me. The echo faded into the roaring voice of the minister's wife, Mrs. Hayes, "And if you cannot convict yourself of sin, deeply convict yourself and admit your sin, and all the dreadful things you've done, and you know what you have done, you can never be saved!" Her grandmother was talking to them. She was in the little lawyer's office in Athens, Texas, but she was right there with Gardner. Don't want the child, really, don't know who the father was.
Gardner clung to her, his breath hot in her face, his fingers closing on her throat. How could that be true when her body was gone? She floated in this darkness, sinking ever deeper and deeper. The dark clouds rolled upwards, thick and swelling and blinding.
Viktor cried out, and Pandora and Marius called to her, but they were fading.
Oh, she'd seen such wondrous things when Pandora held her. She'd seen the Heavens, and she'd heard the music of the spheres. Never had anything been more grand.
Gardner's fingers bit into her neck. Her heart jumped and then slowed. It was so slow, the beat of her heart, and she was so weak, so dreadfully impossibly weak. Dying. Surely she was dying.
"Do you realize what this means, Rose, if you do this to me?" Gardner demanded. "You made a fool of me, Rose. You destroyed my life, my career, all my dreams, all my plans, ruined by you, Rose."
"If we knew who the child's father was," said the old woman in her slow Texas voice, "but you see, we had no contact with our daughter and, really, we just ..."
Don't want me and why should you? And whoever did, that wasn't paid to want me, paid to educate me, paid to take care of me, paid to love me. Why isn't it over? Why am I sinking farther and farther down?
Uncle Lestan came towards her. Uncle Lestan, shining, and striding towards her, in his red-velvet jacket and his black boots, coming on, unstoppable, fearless with his hands out.
"Rose!" he cried.
She screamed his name!
"Uncle Lestan, take me, please, don't let them ...! Help me."
Gardner choked the voice out of her.
But Uncle Lestan loomed over her, his face shimmering in the light of the candles, all those candles, candles and candles. "Help me!" she cried, and he bent to kiss her, and she felt those needles, those dreadful sharp needles in her neck.
"Not enough blood!" cried Marius.
"Just enough," said Uncle Lestan, "to let me in."
The blackness had weight and mass and thickened around them. They were all talking at once, Gardner, Mrs. Hayes, and her grandmother. "She's dying," said someone, and it was one of those girls at the school, the horrible school, but the other girls laughed and jeered. "She's faking, she's a liar, she's a slut!" Laughter, laughter rolling up into the blackness with Gardner chanting, "You're mine, Rose, I forgive you for what you did to me, you're mine."
Uncle Lestan grabbed Gardner by the throat and dragged him away from her. Gardner snarled and screamed and fought. He bit into Uncle Lestan's hand but Uncle Lestan tore Gardner's head from him, stretching his neck like a long wrinkled elastic stocking--she gasped, she screamed--and Gardner's head melted, mouth turning downwards, eyes bleeding downwards, black and fluid and ghastly, and his head flopped down at the end of the broken wrinkled neck, and the body dropped into a sea of blood. Beautiful blood.
"Rose, drink from me!" said Uncle Lestan. "I am the Blood. I am the life."
"Don't you do that, child!" screamed Mrs. Hayes.
She reached for Uncle Lestan's golden hair, reached for him, for his shining face.
Your blood.
It filled her mouth! A great moan broke from her. She became the moan. She swallowed over and over again. The blood of Heaven.
Gardner's body floated in a stream of blood, dark ruby-red and blackish blood, and the face of Mrs. Hayes expanded, grew immense, a gleaming white mask of wrath. Uncle Lestan snatched at it, tore it loose like a fragile veil, and her voice died as her face died, like a flag burning, and he sent it down into the dark blackish blood current. Her grandmother, the old Texas woman, was sliding downwards with her hands out, paling, disappearing into the river of blood too.
Like Dante's river of blood, flowing on, bubbling, crimson, black, beautiful.
"And Hell shall have no dominion," said Uncle Lestan.
"No, no dominion," she whispered, and they were rising upwards, rising the way they had from the Greek island that was breaking into pieces below them, pieces falling into the foaming blue sea.
"Blood child, blood flower, blood Rose," said Uncle Lestan.
She was safe in his arms. Her lips were open on his neck and his blood was pumping through her body, pumping into her skin, her tingling, prickling skin. She saw his heart, his blood-red heart, throbbing and brightening and the long lovely tendrils of his blood surrounding her heart and enclosing it and it seemed a great fire burned in his heart and her heart, too, and when he spoke, another immense voice echoed his words.
"Finest flower of the Savage Garden," he said. "Life everlasting."
She looked down. The rolling smoking darkness was evaporating and disappearing. The dark river of blood was gone. The world sparkled beneath the mist with thousands and thousands of tiny lights, and above them was the firmament--all around them was the firmament and the galaxies of song and story and the music, the music of the spheres.
"My beloved Rose, you are with us now," said Uncle Lestan. With her now, with us, said the other voice, the echoing voice.
The words flowed into her on the blood that throbbed in her arms and legs, burned in her skin. Marius whispered into her ear that she was theirs now, and Pandora's lips touched her forehead, and Viktor, Viktor held her even as Uncle Lestan held her, My bride.
"You've always been mine," Lestat said. "For this you were born. My brave Rose. And you are with us and one of us, and we are the people of the moon and the stars."
32
Louis
"Its Hour Come at Last"
TRINITY GATE WAS QUIET tonight, except for Sybelle and Antoine playing a duet in the drawing room and Benji upstairs talking confidentially to his best friend who just happened to be the whole world.
Rhoshamandes and Benedict had gone to the opera with Allesandra. Armand and Daniel Malloy were out hunting alone in the gentle warm rain.
Flavius, Avicus, Zenobia, and Davis had gone home to Geneva, along with an eager, desperate blood drinker named Killer who had shown up at the door, in Old West garb of dungarees and a shaggy-sleeved buckskin jacket begging to be allowed in. Friend of Davis, the beloved of Gregory. They'd welcomed him at once.
Jesse and David were in the Amazon at Maharet's old sanctuary with Seth and Fareed.
Sevraine and her family had also gone home, and so had Notker and the musicians and singers from the Alps.
Marius remained, working in the Tudor library, on the rules he would present to Lestat in time. Everard de Landen remained with him, poring over an old book of Elizabethan poetry, interrupting Marius softly now and then to ask the meaning of a phrase or a word.
And Lestat was gone, gone with Gabrielle and with Rose and Viktor, and with Pandora and Arjun, and Bianca Solderini, and Flavius, and with Gregory and Chrysanthe--to his castle in the mountains of the Massif Central to prepare for the first great reception of the new court to which they would all come. How fine and perfect Viktor and Rose were. And how they loved each other still, and how they'd welcomed their new vision, their new powers, their
new hopes. Ah, just brave fledglings.
Only a little rain fell on this garden bench behind the townhouse, tucked as it was beneath the largest of the oaks, the raindrops singing in the leaves overhead.
Louis sat there, back to the trunk of the tree, a copy of his memoir, Interview with the Vampire, the memoir that had sparked the Vampire Chronicles, open on his lap. He wore his favorite old dark coat, a little threadbare but so comfortable, and his favorite old flannel trousers and a fine white shirt Armand had forced upon him with buttons of pearl and outrageous lace. But Louis had never really minded lace.
Unseasonably warm for September. But he liked it. Liked the dampness in the air, liked the music of the rain, and loved the seamless and never-ending roar of the city, as much a part of it as the great river was a part of New Orleans, the innumerable population around him holding him safe in this tiny walled place that was their garden, where the lilies opened their white throats and powdery yellow tongues to the rain.
On the page, Louis read the words he'd spoken years ago to Daniel Malloy when Daniel had been an eager and enchanted human, listening to Louis so desperately, and his tape recorder had seemed such an exotic novelty, the two together in that bare dusty room on Divisadero Street in San Francisco, unnoticed by the Undead world.
" 'I wanted love and goodness in this which is living death. It was impossible from the beginning, because you cannot have love and goodness when you do what you know to be evil, what you know to be wrong.' "
With his whole being Louis had believed those words; and they had shaped the blood drinker that he was then, and the blood drinker he remained after for many a year.
And was that dark conviction not still inside him, under the veneer of the resigned and contented creature he appeared to be now?
He didn't honestly know. He remembered completely how he had spoken then of chasing "phantom goodness" in its human form. He looked down at the page.
" 'No one could in any guise convince me of what I myself knew to be true, that I was damned in my own mind and soul.' "
What had really changed? He'd learned once more somehow, after Lestat had shattered the Undead realm with his antics and his pronouncements, to live from night to night in a semblance of happiness, and to seek for grace once more in the music of operas, symphonies, and choruses, and in the splendor of paintings old and new, and in the simple miracle of human vitality all around him--with Armand and Benji and Sybelle at his side. He had learned his old theology was useless to him and perhaps always had been, an incurable canker inside him rather than a spark to kindle any kind of hope or faith.