9
The Story of Gregory
GREGORY DUFF COLLINGSWORTH STOOD watching and listening in Central Park. A tall male of compact and well-proportioned build, with very short black hair and black eyes, he stood in the deep fragrant darkness of a thicket of trees, listening with his powerful preternatural ears and seeing with his powerful preternatural eyes all that was taking place—with Antoine and Armand and Benji and Sybelle—inside of the Belle époque mansion in which Armand’s family now lived.
In his English bespoke gray suit and brown shoes, and with his darkly tanned skin, Gregory looked very much like the corporate executive that he had been for decades. Indeed his pharmaceutical empire was one of the most successful in the international marketplace right now, and he was one of those immortals who had always been highly capable at managing wealth “in the real world.”
He had come from Switzerland not only to attend to business in his New York offices, but to spy upon the fabled coven of New York at close hand.
He’d picked up the raging emotions of the young blood drinker Antoine as the boy had driven into the city this evening, and if Armand had tried to destroy Antoine, Gregory would have intervened, instantly and effectively, and taken the boy away with him. This he would have done out of the goodness of his heart.
Decades ago, outside the Vampire Lestat’s one and only rock concert in San Francisco, Gregory had intervened to save a black blood drinker named Davis, carrying him up and away from the carnage wreaked upon his hapless cohorts by the Queen of Heaven, who gazed pitilessly upon the scene from a nearby hill.
In the case of this complex and interesting young blood drinker, Antoine, Gregory could easily have deflected any blast of the Fire Gift coming directly at the fledgling, especially from one so young and inexperienced as the notorious Armand.
Not that Gregory had anything against Armand. Quite the opposite. He was as eager to meet him in some ways as he was to meet any blood drinker on the planet, though in his heart of hearts he nourished the precious dream of meeting Lestat above all other hopes. Gregory had come here this very evening to spy on the Upper East Side vampires because he thought surely Lestat had come to join them by now. If Lestat had been there, which he was not, Gregory would have come knocking at the door.
Benji Mahmoud’s broadcasts had Gregory’s understanding and sympathy and he had wanted to assure himself once again that Benji was not the dupe of powerful brothers and sisters, but in fact an authentic soul putting forth the idea of a future for the blood drinker tribe. He had been assured. Indeed Benji was not only the genuine article but something of a rebel in the house, as arguments Gregory had overheard easily proved.
“Oh, brave new world that hath such blood drinkers in it,” Gregory sighed, pondering whether he should make himself known right now to the refined and erudite vampires of the residence in the middle of the block before him or hold back.
Whenever he did reveal himself, the secretive existence he’d guarded for well over a thousand years would be inalterably influenced, and he was not in fact ready for the measures that would have to be taken when that occurred.
No, best for now to hang back, to listen, to try to learn.
That had always been his way.
Gregory was six thousand years old. He’d been made by Queen Akasha and was very likely only the fourth blood drinker to be created by her, after the defection of her blood drinker steward Khayman and the accursed twins, Mekare and Maharet, who became the rebels of the First Brood.
Gregory had been in the royal palace the night that the vampire race was born. He hadn’t been called Gregory then, but Nebamun, and that was the name he’d used in the world until the third century after Christ—when he took the name of Gregory and began a new and enduring life.
Nebamun had been a lover of Akasha, chosen from the special guard she’d brought with her from the city of Nineveh into Egypt, and as such, Nebamun had not expected to live very long. He was nineteen years old, robust and healthy, when the Queen selected him for the bedchamber and just twenty years old the night the Queen became a blood drinker and brought King Enkil over with her into the curse.
He’d been hiding helpless inside a huge gold-plated chest, the lid propped so that he might see the full horror of the conspirators stabbing the King and the Queen on that night—unable to protect his sovereign. Then with fearful and horrified eyes, he’d seen a swirling cloud of blood particles above the dying Queen, and seen that cloud drawn down into her, seemingly through her many obviously fatal wounds. He’d seen her rise, eyes like the painted orbs of a statue, her skin flashing white in the lamplight. He’d seen her sink her teeth into the neck of the dying Enkil.
Those memories were as vivid to him now as ever—he felt the desert heat, the cooling breeze off the Nile. He heard the cries and whispers of the murderous conspirators. He saw those gold-threaded curtains tied back to the blue-painted columns, and he saw even the distant indifferent and brilliant stars in the black desert sky.
Like a loathsome thing she’d been when she crawled atop her husband’s body. To see him jerked into life by the mysterious blood as he drank from her wrist had been a frightful sight.
Nebamun might have gone mad after that, but he was too young, too strong, too optimistic by nature for madness. He had laid low, as they say now. He had survived.
But he’d been living with a death sentence for quite some time. Everyone knew that to please her jealous King Enkil, Akasha did away with her lovers in a matter of months. The King was said not to mind a steady stream of consorts in and out of his Queen’s bedroom in the cool of the evening, but he feared any one rising in power, and though Nebamun had been reassured a hundred times by Akasha’s affectionate whispers that he was not to be put to death anytime soon, Nebamun knew otherwise, and he had lost all skill at pleasing her, and spent many hours merely thinking about his life, and the meaning of life in general, and getting drunk. He’d had a great passion for life ever since he could remember, and did not want to die.
Once the Queen and King had been infected by the demon Amel, the Queen seemed utterly to have forgotten about Nebamun.
He’d gone back into the guard, defending the palace against those who called the King and Queen monsters. He told no one what he had witnessed. Again and again, he pondered that eerie cloud of bloody particles, that living swirling mass of tiny gnatlike points that had been sucked into the Queen as if by an intake of breath. She’d tried to make a new cult of it, believing firmly that she was now a goddess, and the “will of the gods” had subjected her to this divine violence because of her innate virtue and the needs of the land she ruled.
Well, that was, as they say these days, a load of bunk. Yes, Nebamun had believed in magic, and yes, he’d believed in gods and demons, but he had always been practical in a ruthless way, like many of his time. Besides, gods even if they did exist could be capricious and evil. And when the captive witches Mekare and Maharet explained how this seeming “miracle” had happened, that it was no more than the caprice of a vagrant spirit, Nebamun had smiled.
Once the rebels were born under the rule of the renegade blood drinker Khayman, with Mekare and Maharet to spread “The Divine Blood” with them, Nebamun had been called back into the Queen’s presence, and made into a blood drinker without explanation or ceremony until he’d risen thirsting and half mad, and dreaming only of draining human victims of all the life and blood they contained.
“You are now the head of my blood army,” the Queen had explained. “You will be called the ‘Guard of the Queens Blood,’ and you will hunt down the rebels of the First Brood as they dare to call themselves and all the misbegotten blood drinkers made by them who have dared to rebel against me and my King and my laws.”
Blood drinkers were gods, the Queen had told Nebamun. Now he too was a god. And at that point, he’d actually started to believe it. How else to explain what he saw now with the new vision of the Blood? His heightened senses bedeviled and tantalized him. He fell in love with the song of the wind, with the rich colors that pulsed all around him in the flowers and drowsy palm trees of the palace gardens, with the chanting pulse of those succulent humans upon whom he fed.
For a thousand years he’d been the dupe of superstition. The world had seemed a grim and unchangeable place to him, full of folly and misery and injustice, and blood drinker fighting blood drinker as incessantly as human fought human, when he’d finally sought the refuge of Mother Earth as so many others had done.
He knew with an aching heart what young Antoine had suffered. Only one blood drinker in existence claimed to have never known such burial and rebirth, and that was the great indominable Maharet.
Well, maybe the time had come for him to make himself known to Maharet, and to talk of those olden times. You’ve always known that it was I, Captain of the Queen’s soldiers, who separated you aeons ago from your sister—who put the two of you in coffins, and sent you off on rafts in different seas.
Was not the world of the Undead poised for destruction if old secrets and old horrors were not confronted and examined by those who knew the stories from the earliest nights?
In truth, Gregory was no longer the Captain of the hated “Queens Blood” who had done those things. He remembered those times, yes, but not the force of personality or attitude behind the memories, or the means by which he’d survived those endless nights of war and bloodshed. Who was Maharet? He did not really know.
When he rose in the third century of the Common Era, a new life for him had begun. Gregory was the name he’d chosen for himself in those nights, and he had been Gregory ever since, acquiring names and wealth over the millennia as he needed them, never again resorting to madness, or the earth, but slowly building a realm for himself with wealth and love. The wealth was easy to acquire, so easy in fact that he marveled at beggar mavericks like Antoine and Killer—and his beloved Davis—who tramped through eternity, and the love of other blood drinkers had been easy to acquire as well.
His Blood Wife of all these centuries was named Chrysanthe, and it was she who’d educated him in the ways of the Christian era and the waning Roman Empire when he’d brought her from the great Arab Christian city of Hira—a shining capital on the Euphrates—to Carthage in North Africa, where they’d lived for many years. There she’d taught him Greek and Latin, offering the poetry, the histories, and the philosophies of cultures unknown to him when he’d gone into the earth.
There she explained to him the marvels he’d embraced the moment he’d risen, and how the world had actually changed, changed when he had thought the world unchanging, as did all those with whom he had once shared humanity and the Blood.
He came to love Chrysanthe as he had once loved his first Blood Wife of long ago, the lost pale-eyed and yellow-haired Sevraine.
Ah, such wonders he’d discovered in those early years as the great Roman Empire came tumbling down around him—a world of metals, monuments, and art that had been inconceivable to his Egyptian mind.
And ever since the world had been changing, each new miracle and invention, each new attitude, ever more astonishing than those which had come before.
He had been on an upwards trajectory ever since those early centuries. And he held close to him the very same companions he’d acquired in those first few hundred years.
Very soon after he and Chrysanthe had taken up residence in their palace by the sea in Carthage, they’d been joined by a comely and dignified one-legged Greek named Flavius who told of being made by a powerful and wise female blood drinker named Pandora, consort of a Roman blood drinker, Marius, the keeper of the King and Queen.
Flavius had fled the household of Marius because Marius had never consented to his making, and when he’d come upon the household of Chrysanthe and Gregory in Carthage, he’d thrown himself on their mercy, and they had gladly taken him in—worthy to be Blood Kin. He’d lived in Athens as well as Antioch, in Ephesus and in Alexandria, and had visited Rome. He knew the mathematics of Euclid and the Hebrew scriptures in their Greek translation, and spoke of Socrates and Plato and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the natural history of Pliny and the satire of Juvenal and Petronius, and the writings of Tertullian and Augustine of Hippo who had only lately died.
What a marvel Flavius had been.
No one in the courts of the old Queen would have dared to give the Blood to one marked with deformity. Not even to the ugly or the badly proportioned was the Blood given. Indeed every human offered to the remorseless appetite of the spirit of Amel had been a lamb without blemish and indeed with beauty and gifts of strength and talent that his maker must witness and approve.
Yet here was Flavius crippled in his mortal years but burning brightly with the Blood, a meditative and well-spoken Athenian reciting the tales of Homer by memory as he played his lute, a poet and a philosopher who’d understood law courts and judgments, and who had memorized whole histories of peoples of the Earth he’d never known or seen. Gregory had imbibed so much from Flavius, sitting at his feet by the hour, prodding him with questions, committing to memory the stories and songs that came from his lips. And how grateful had been this honorable scholar. “You have my loyalty for all time,” he’d said to Gregory and Chrysanthe, “as you have loved me for what I am.”
And to think, this gracious blood drinker knew the very location of the Mother and the Father. He had seen them in the eyes of Pandora who made him; he had lived beneath the very roof of Marius and Pandora where the Divine Pair were kept.
How amazed Gregory—Nebamun of old—had been by Flavius’s stories of King Enkil and Akasha, now mute and blind living statues who never showed the slightest sign of sentience as they sat on a throne above banks of flowers and fragrant lamps in a gilded shrine. And it was Marius, the Roman, who had stolen the unresisting King and Queen out of Egypt, from the old blood drinker priesthood that had thrived there for four thousand years. The elders of the priesthood had sought to destroy the Mother and the Father, as they had come to be called, by placing them in the killing rays of the sun. And indeed—as the King and Queen had suffered this blasphemous indignity—countless blood drinkers around the world had perished in flames. But the oldest had been doomed to continue, though their skin was darkened, even blackened, and their every breath was taken in pain. Akasha and Enkil had only been bronzed by this foolish attempt at immolation and indeed the elder himself had survived to share the torture of those he had hoped would all be burnt to death.
But priceless as this history was to Gregory—that his old sovereign endured without power—it was not the Blood history that mattered to him, but the new Roman world.
“Teach me, teach me everything,” Gregory had said over and over again to Flavius and to Chrysanthe, and wandering the busy streets of Carthage, filled now with a mélange of Romans and Greeks and Vandals, he struggled to explain to his two devoted teachers how astonishing was the wealth of this world which they took for granted, where common people had gold in their pockets, and plenty to eat on their tables, and spoke of “eternal salvation” as belonging to the most humbly born.
In his time, so very long ago, only the royal court and a handful of nobles had lived in rooms with floors. Eternity had been the property of only that same handful of persons living and breathing under the stars.
But what did it matter? He didn’t expect Chrysanthe and Flavius to understand him. He wanted to understand them. And as always he drew knowledge from his victims, feeding on their minds as surely as he fed on their blood. What a vast world the common people inhabited, and how small and arid had been that geography belonging to him so very long ago.
Less than two hundred years had passed before two more blood drinkers joined his Blood Kindred at Gregory’s invitation. Carthage was no more. He and his family lived then in the Italian city of Venice. These newcomers had also known the infamous Marius, keeper of the King and Queen, as had Flavius. Their names were Avicus and Zenobia and they came from the city of Byzantium and were glad of Gregory’s invitation to find safety and hospitality beneath his roof.
Avicus had been a blood god of Egypt same as Gregory, and indeed Avicus had been told tales of the great Nebamun and how he’d led the Queens Blood to drive the First Brood from Egypt, and they had much to talk about of those dark and dreary times and the torture of being blood gods encased within stone shrines, forced to dream and starve between great feast days when the faithful would bring them blood sacrifice and ask them to look into hearts and judge the innocent from the guilty with their blood drinker minds. How could the Queen have doomed so many to such misery and drudgery, such wretched heartbreaking isolation? Nebanum had had his own taste of that “Divine Service” in the end.
No wonder Marius, forced into the priesthood, had stolen the Mother and the Father—rejecting out of hand the ancient superstition—and returned to a willful, rational Roman life of his own.
Avicus was Egyptian, tall, dark skinned, and half mad still after a thousand years of serving the old blood cult. He had been a slave to the old religion right into the Common Era, whereas Nebamun had fled it thousands of years before. His Blood Wife, Zenobia, was a delicately built female with voluminous black hair and exquisite features; she brought into the house a universe of new learning, having been brought up in the palace of the Emperor of the East before being brought into the Blood by a wicked female named Eudoxia who had made war on Marius and ultimately lost.
Zenobia had been left to the mercy of Marius, but he’d loved her, making her Blood Kin, and he had taught her how to survive on her own. He had approved her love for Avicus.
Zenobia cut her long hair nightly, and went forth in the garb of a man. Only in the quiet sanctuary of the home did she revert to female garments and let her black hair flow over her shoulders.
Both would never lift a finger against Marius, or so they told their new mentor. Marius was the sworn protector of the Mother and the Father. He maintained them in a magnificent shrine, filled with flowers, and lamps, its walls painted with verdant gardens.
“Yes, he’s the clever and educated Roman all right,” said Flavius. “And a philosopher of sorts, and every ounce the patrician. But he has done all in his power to make existence bearable for the Divine Parents.”
“Yes, I have come to understand all this,” Gregory had told them. “The story of this Marius becomes ever more clear. Nothing evil must ever befall him. Not while he protects the Divine Parents. But one thing I vow, my friends, and do listen. I will never ask that you bring harm to any blood drinker, unless that blood drinker seeks to bring direct harm to us. We hunt the evildoer, and we seek to feed as well upon the beauty we see all around us, the marvels we are privileged to witness, don’t you understand?”
It took years for them to fully comprehend Gregory’s approach to life and how little it mattered to him, the wars of blood drinkers against one another.
But he loved his only family, his own Blood Kin.
Century after century, they had remained together, sustaining one another on wondrous tales and shared learning and unquestioned loyalty and love, Gregory’s ancient blood giving strength to those under his wing. From time to time other blood drinkers did join them but only for a while and never to be Blood Kindred. Yet they generally came and went in peace.
After Venice, they had moved by the year 800 into northern Europe, and finally into the area now known as Switzerland. They continued to greet others with kindness, making war on them only in defense of themselves.
By then, Gregory had become a great scholar of the Undead, writing down many theories of blood drinkers and how they changed over time. The changes in himself, both great and small, he chronicled meticulously, and he observed also the sometime pain and alienation of his companions, their reasons for wandering, or drifting away for a spell, and the reasons why they always came home. Why did the ancient ones so avoid the company of other ancient ones and seek to learn from the much-younger children of different eras, and why did a creature such as himself not set out to find those he remembered from those grim times when he knew that surely some of them had persevered? These questions obsessed him. He filled leather-covered journals with his thoughts.
The Vampire Chronicles and the happenings in the vampire world from 1985 when Lestat woke Queen Akasha until now had deeply fascinated Gregory, and he had pored over the pages of the books, forever interested in the deep current of psychological observation that united these works. Never in all these centuries had he encountered poetic souls among the Undead such as Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestat de Lioncourt, or even Marius whose own memoir reeked of the same profound romanticism and melancholy as their works. Patrician Roman he might have been, Gregory mused, but he was certainly the embodiment of the Romantic Man of Sensibility now finding solace in his inner strength and attachment to his own values.
Of course this thing called romanticism was nothing new, but Gregory thought he understood why the world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had defined and explored it so thoroughly, thereby shaping generations of sensitive human beings to believe quite fully in themselves in a way no human or vampire had before.
But Gregory had existed since the beginning of recorded human history and he knew full well that “romantic souls” had always existed as well and were but one kind of soul among many. In sum, there have always been romantics, poets, outsiders, outcasts, those who sang of alienation whether they had a clever word for it or not.
What had really given birth to the Romantic Movement in the history of human ideas was affluence—an increase in the number of people who had plenty enough to eat, enough education to read and write, and time to ruminate on their own personal emotions.
Why others did not see this, Gregory could not quite grasp.
He had seen the growth of affluence since the dawn of the Christian era. Even coming out of the Egyptian desert, a ragged half-crazed remnant, he’d been astonished at the abundance of the people of the Roman Empire—that common soldiers rode horses in battle (an unthinkable advantage for a being of Gregory’s time), that Indian and Egyptian fabrics were sold over the whole known world, that female peasants had their own great looms, and that solid Roman roads bound together the empire, replete with caravansaries for travelers every few miles, and plenty to eat for everyone. Why, these enterprising Romans had actually invented a liquid stone with which they built not only roads but aqueducts to carry water over miles to their ever-growing cities. Exquisitely made pots, jugs, amphora were imported to the remotest towns for sale to the common people. In fact all manner of practical and fancy goods traveled Roman roads and waterways from roof tiles to popular books.
Yes, there had been great setbacks. But despite the wholesale collapse of the Roman Empire, Gregory had seen nothing but “progress” ever since with the early inventions of the Middle Ages—the barrel, the mill wheel, the stirrup, the new harnesses that did not choke the oxen in the fields, the ever-spreading taste for ornate and beautiful clothes, and the building of soaring cathedrals in which the common people could worship right along with the richest and most privileged among them.
What a far cry from the great churches of Rheims or Amiens were the crude temples of ancient Egypt reserved entirely for their gods and a handful of priests and rulers.
Yet it fascinated him and intrigued him that it had taken the romantic era to produce vampires bound and determined to make themselves known to history and in such melancholy and philosophical literature as those books.
There was another key aspect to this that greatly puzzled Gregory as well. He felt with all his soul that this was the greatest age for the Undead that he had ever known. And he did not understand why the poetic authors of the Vampire Chronicles never addressed this obvious fact.
Ever since public lighting had been introduced into the cities of Europe and America, the world had gotten better and better for the Undead. Did they not grasp the miracle of the gas lamps of Paris, the arc lighting that could bring virtual daylight to a park or plaza anywhere in the world, the miracle of electricity that penetrated homes as well as public places bringing the brilliance of the sun into cottages and palaces alike? Did they have no inkling of how the advances in lighting had affected the behavior and the minds of people, what it meant for the tiniest hamlet to have its brilliantly lighted drugstores and supermarkets, and for people to wander at eight o’clock of an evening with the same energetic curiosity and eagerness for work and experience that they enjoyed during the sunlight hours?
The planet had been transformed by lighting and by the sheer magic of television and computers, leveling the playing field for blood drinkers as never before.
Well, he could understand if Lestat and Louis took such things for granted; they’d been born during the Industrial Revolution whether they knew it or not. But what about the great Marius? Why didn’t he go into raptures about the brightly lighted modern world? Why didn’t he cherish the huge upsurge in human freedom and physical and social mobility in modern times?
Why, these times were perfect for the Undead. Nothing was denied to them. They could be privy to every aspect of daylight and daylight activity through television and film. They were no longer really Children of Darkness at all. Darkness had been essentially banished from the Earth. It had become a choice.
Oh, how much he wanted to discuss his views of things with Lestat. How must this be affecting the destiny of the world’s blood drinkers? And now that the internet had embraced the planet, wasn’t Benji Mahmoud’s radio broadcast out of his very own house just the beginning?
When would we see the data banks enabling blood drinkers everywhere, regardless of age and isolation, to find their lost ones, their loved ones, immortals who had been mere legend to them for too long?
And what about glass? Look at what had happened to the world through the invention, evolution, and perfection of glass? Spectacles, telescopes, microscopes, plate glass, walls of glass, palaces of glass, towers of glass! Why, the architecture of the modern world had been transformed by the use of glass. Science had advanced in dramatic and mysterious ways due to the availability and use of glass!
(It struck him as highly ironic and perhaps meaningful that the great Akasha had been decapitated because of a great sheet of broken glass. After all, a six-thousand-year-old immortal is a very strong and resilient creature, and Gregory was not sure that a simple ax could have decapitated the Queen, or that a simple ax could decapitate him. But an enormous shard of plate glass had been sharp enough and heavy enough to separate head from body so that Akasha’s death was in fact accomplished. An accident yes, but a very strange one, indeed.)
All right, so the “Coven of the Articulate” as they were called had not been made up of social or economic historians. But surely romantics as sensitive as Marius and Lestat would be interested in Gregory’s notions of progress, and particularly his theory that this was the Age of the Vampire, so to speak. This ought to be a Golden Time, to use Marius’s phrase, for all the Undead.
Oh, the time must come when he would meet them.
But even as he told himself that some of this longing and enthusiasm was childish and na?ve and even ridiculous, Gregory was drawn almost obsessively to Louis and Lestat. Particularly Lestat.
Louis was a damaged pilgrim, and though he’d been recovering now for the last decade or so, Lestat was indeed the “lion heart” that Gregory wanted to know with his whole soul.
It seemed at times that Lestat was the immortal for whom Gregory had been waiting all this time, the one with whom he could discuss his myriad observations of the Undead and the human stream of history they had followed through six thousand years. Gregory actually fell in love with Lestat.
He knew that he had, and when Zenobia and Avicus teased him about this, or Flavius said it “worried” him, Gregory did not deny it. Nor did he seek to defend it. Chrysanthe understood. Chrysanthe always understood his obsessions. And Davis understood, Davis, his gentle black companion, rescued from the massacre following Lestat’s concert, Davis understood too.
“He was like a god on that stage,” said Davis of Lestat at the concert. “He was the one vampire we all loved! It was as if nothing could stop him, and nothing ever would.”
But something had stopped Lestat most definitely or certainly slowed him down. Demons of his own making perhaps or spiritual exhaustion. Gregory longed to know, longed to sympathize, longed to lend support.
Secretly, Gregory had searched the world for Lestat, and come very close to him many times, spying on him, and divining Lestat’s immense anger and great need to be alone. Always, Gregory had backed off, unable to force himself on the object of his obsession, retreating silently in disappointment and a kind of shame.
Two years ago in Paris, he had drawn close enough to see Lestat in the flesh, rushing there from Geneva at the first word of Lestat’s appearance, yet he had not dared to reveal himself. Only love could create such conflict, such longing, such fear.
Now Gregory felt the very same reluctance to make himself known to the New York coven of Trinity Gate. He could not make an overture. He could not yet extend himself and risk rebuff. No. These creatures meant too much to him. The time was not yet right, no.
Indeed, only one blood drinker in recent years had brought him out of anonymity and that had been Fareed Bhansali, the physician vampire in Los Angeles, who had sufficiently fascinated him to cause him to reveal himself, and this for very specific reasons. For this Fareed was as unique in his own way—if unique can be compared—as the romantic poet vampires Louis and Lestat, in that Fareed was the only modern blood drinker physician known to Gregory.
Oh, in the distant past there had been some, surely, but they were rudimentary healers and alchemists who when they came into the Blood lost all interest in their scientific explorations, and with reason, for there had been a limit for thousands of years to what could be known scientifically.
Magnus, the great Parisian alchemist, had been a perfect example. In his old age, stooped and deformed by the natural wasting of his bones, Magnus had been denied the Blood by the vain Rhoshamandes, who at that time quietly ruled the Undead of France, never allowing their numbers to become unmanageable. Bitter, angry, and not to be outdone, Magnus had managed to steal the Blood from a young acolyte of Rhoshamandes known as Benedict. Binding Benedict and draining his body of blood right at sunset, Magnus had become a full-fledged blood drinker lying stunned on the comatose body of his maker, who found himself upon waking too weak to break his bonds, too weak even to call for help. What shocks this clever theft of the Blood had sent through the entire Undead world. How many would dare to imitate the bold Magnus? Well, precious few ever did. Precious few blood drinkers were ever as careless or stupid as gentle Benedict had been, entrusting the location of his resting place to a mortal “friend.”
And then Magnus, this truly revolutionary thinker, had turned his back entirely on the medical and alchemical knowledge of his human life, holed himself up in a tower near Paris, and devoted himself to the most bitter reflections until he went mad in the end, his only real achievement being the capture and making of the Vampire Lestat. To Lestat, he bequeathed his blood, his property, and his wealth.
Ah, such dreadful failures.
And where was Rhoshamandes now? Where were his fine progeny—the beautiful Merovingian Allesandra, daughter of Dagobert the First, or the disgraced and ever contrite Benedict? Had Allesandra really immolated herself on a pyre in the catacombs under Les Innocents, only because the Vampire Lestat had come marching through her world and destroyed the old Children of Satan who had long kept her mind and her soul and her body prisoner? A pyre might have been enough to destroy the body of Magnus, yes; but Allesandra had been old before Magnus came into existence, though her own age and experience had been lost to her in madness more than once.
Gregory had known little of Rhoshamandes during those centuries but he’d observed much from afar. And why not? Hadn’t Rhoshamandes been his own fledgling? Well, no. The Mother had made Rhoshamandes for the Queens Blood, then given him to Gregory (her devoted Nebamun) to instruct and train.
There were many he hoped to find in the future, including his long-lost Blood Wife, Sevraine. She’d come as a slave into Egypt thousands of years ago, her hair and eyes as fair as those of the red-haired witches, and he, Gregory or Nebamun, Captain of the Queens Blood, had so loved her that he’d brought her over without the Queen’s blessing and almost paid for this the ultimate price. Somewhere out there in the great bright world, Sevraine lived. Gregory was sure of it. And perhaps one dark side of all this misery of late was that the old ones would come together. Even Rhoshamandes would surface, and some of his strong progeny like Eleni and Eugénie, once captives of the Paris Children of Satan. And where was Hesketh? Gregory could not forget about her.
The tragic Hesketh had been the most malformed blood drinker that Gregory had ever encountered, made and loved by the old renegade blood god Teskhamen, who had escaped the Druids who’d worshipped him and sought to put an end to him on their pyre. Gregory had encountered Hesketh and Teskhamen in the wilds of France in the 700s of the Common Era when Rhoshamandes had still ruled in those parts, and later in the far north. Teskhamen had tales to tell, but didn’t they all? Surely those as wise and hearty as Hesketh and Teskhamen still survived.
But the point was, this Fareed Bhansali, a physician vampire, had fascinated Gregory enough to cause him to reveal himself. This Fareed Bhansali appeared unique.
And as word had spread through the world that a blood drinker doctor had indeed appeared “on the scene” in Los Angeles and in fact set up an entire clinic in a medical office tower for the study of the Undead, and that this doctor was powerful and brilliant and had been an accomplished Mumbai surgeon and researcher before being Born to Darkness, Gregory set out to observe this man at close hand.
Indeed, he hurried. He feared that the awful twins—Mekare and Maharet—who now had control of the spirit Amel and the primal fount of the Blood, might burn to ashes this upstart, and Gregory wanted to be there to stop it and whisk away the bold Fareed Bhansali to safety in his own house in Geneva.
Why this doctor did not do anything to hide himself, Gregory couldn’t understand. But Fareed didn’t. Indeed there were times when he seemed positively eager to advertise his presence, seeking mavericks and riffraff everywhere for his research.
But Gregory had another motive for finding Fareed.
For the first time in seventeen hundred years, Gregory was wondering: could Flavius’s missing leg be somehow replaced by some clever device of plastic and steel such as the humans of this age had perfected? Now there was a vampire doctor to provide the answer.
It took some persuading to get Flavius to agree to this experiment, or even to the idea of making the crossing from Europe to America, but when that was finished, Gregory found Fareed at once.
As soon as Gregory came upon Fareed walking in the tree-darkened streets of West Hollywood on a radiant summer evening, Gregory realized his worries for Fareed’s safety had been in vain. Beside him walked a vampire nearly as old as Gregory, and indeed this one was none other than Seth, the son of the ancient Mother.
How strange to see him here, removed by aeons from that long-ago time, this one, standing on the pavements of this modern city, lean and tall as he had always been with powerful shoulders and slender fingers, and a large well-shaped head and those dark almond-shaped eyes. His dark skin had faded over the aeons and he had a pale Oriental cast to him with short black hair and the courtly demeanor of olden times.
The old crown prince.
Seth had been a boy when his mother, Queen Akasha, had been infected with the demon blood, and sent away for his own safety to Nineveh, but as the wars between Queens Blood and First Brood had raged on, the Mother out of concern for him, lest he fall into the wrong hands, had sent for him and brought him over as a young man into the Blood.
Now this Seth had been a healer, true, though Gregory had forgotten it, or so the old stories of those times went. He had been a dreamer and a wanderer who traveled the cities of the two rivers searching for other healers from whom he sought to increase his knowledge, and he had not wanted to return to his mother’s mystery-shrouded court in Egypt. Far from it. He’d been brought by force.
Akasha had given Seth the Blood in a great and pompous ceremony within the royal palace. He must become for her, she said, the greatest leader the Queens Blood had ever known. But Seth had disappointed his mother and his sovereign, and had disappeared into the sands of the desert and the sands of oblivion never to be heard of by anyone ever again.
Now it was Seth—Seth the healer—who walked with Fareed. It was Seth’s powerful ancient blood that fired the veins of Fareed. Of course. The ancient healer had made the vampire doctor.
Fareed was almost as tall as his maker and guardian, with flawless honey-brown skin and ink-black wavy hair. His eyes were green. Something like an Indian Bollywood idol, thought Gregory to himself, with that luxuriant hair and those glittering green eyes. Green eyes had been so very rare in ancient times. One could live a human lifetime back then and never gaze on a being who had blue or green eyes. Their pale-red hair and blue eyes had rendered the witches Mekare and Maharet all the more suspicious and fearsome to the Egyptians, and the beautiful northern slave, Gregory’s beloved Sevraine, had been feared.
As late as the Common Era, when Flavius, a Greek, had come to him, Gregory had been dazzled by the seeming miracle of that golden hair and those blue eyes.
How formally, how courteously, Gregory and Seth had greeted one another. Why, Seth, my friend, it has been six thousand years!
Even the Mother, Mekare, who now housed the demon, could not have burnt or destroyed this powerful doctor as long as Seth was at his side. And each night of their lives—Gregory came to know—Seth gave more of his ancient blood to Fareed.
“Give yours to him and we will gladly do anything to help Flavius,” said Seth, “for yours is pure as well.”
“Is it so very pure?” Gregory asked as he marveled.
“Yes, my friend,” said Seth. “We drank from the Mother. Those who drink from the Mother possess a power like no other.”
And the Vampire Lestat drank from the Mother as well, thought Gregory to himself. And so had Marius, the wanderer. The fledglings of Marius, Pandora, and Bianca, had drunk from the Mother. And so had Gregory’s own Avicus and Zenobia, yes. And Khayman, poor Khayman, was he really a simpleton under the protection of the twins? He had drunk from the Mother as well. How many others had drunk directly from the Mother?
Back in the luxurious bedroom of Fareed’s high-rise living quarters and clinic, Gregory had taken this brilliant doctor into his arms and sunk his needlelike teeth into the man’s soul and his dreams. I shall take your blood and you will drink of my blood and we will know each other and love each other and be brothers now for all time. Blood Kin.
A beautiful being was Fareed. Like many a blood drinker, his morals had been forged in the crucible of his human experience, and they would not give way now to the blandishments of the Blood. He would be forever a servant of vampires, yes, but respecting of all living things, and never engage in that which would harm anyone unless somehow that being had fallen beneath the bar of his concern by being an unspeakable monster of some sort.
What this meant was that Fareed could do no evil, not to vampires or to human beings. Whatever the course of his scientific discoveries they would never be perverted or abused.
But of incorrigible, inveterate, unredeemable evildoers he had had enough in his life, and therefore he could and would pluck from the rampant vampire herd a real bad, no-count, filthy, degenerate bully from whom he could take a leg for Flavius to have grafted on as his own. Indeed, he had taken more than one such vampire body for his experiments. He was candid about that. No, he would never do this to a human, but to a cruel and relentlessly destructive vampire, yes, he could do it. And he did it to get Flavius the leg. A true and living leg that became part of Flavius’s immortal body!
Ah brave new world …
Those nights with Fareed and Seth had been like nothing Gregory had ever experienced, given over to endless scientific talks and visions and experiments. “If either of you gentleman wants to feel the passion of biological men once more, I can arrange this simply with hormonal injections,” said Fareed, “and indeed would like very much if you would yield to me in this and allow me to harvest the seed from the experiments.”
“Are you saying that a living seed can come forth from us again?” asked Flavius.
“Yes,” answered Fareed. “I have achieved this in one case, but the case was not ordinary.” He had indeed infused an eighteenth-century vampire with these powerful hormones and the vampire’s seed had indeed fathered a son. But it had not been simple. Indeed the magic connection had been made in a dish, and the son was more a clone than an offspring, birthed through a biological mother.
Gregory was stunned. So was Flavius.
But what shocked Gregory to the core was not that this had worked, this bit of cellular razzle-dazzle, but that it had worked with a vampire that Gregory had been stalking the world over. Fareed struggled to keep the vampire’s identity secret. But when next Gregory drew the doctor to himself to drink his blood and give his own in return, he reached for deeply buried images and answers and brought them to himself.
Yes, the great rock singer–poet Lestat de Lioncourt had fathered a son.
Then on a bright screen in a dark room Fareed finally revealed to him images of this young human boy, the “spitting image” of his father down to the smallest particular, containing the full packet of his father’s DNA.
“And Lestat knows this?” asked Gregory. “And he has acknowledged this boy?” He realized how ridiculous these words sounded as soon as he’d uttered them, and he knew the answer as well.
Lestat, wherever he was, knew nothing of the existence of young Viktor.
“I don’t think Lestat guessed for a moment,” said Fareed, “that I would attempt such a thing.”
Seth sat in the shadows beside his beloved Fareed as all this was discussed, his narrow angular face impassive, but surely he and Gregory were thinking the same thing. Seth, the Mother’s human son, had once been the most sought-after hostage by her enemies; that’s why the great Queen had sent for him and given him the Blood, to keep him from her enemies who might have tortured him unendingly to demand concessions or surrender from her.
Could not this same fate befall this human boy?
“But what if his enemies have already destroyed Lestat?” asked Flavius. “No one has heard one word from him for so long.”
“He’s alive, I know he is,” said Gregory. Fareed and Seth had not responded.
That had been years ago, that meeting.
The boy must now be eighteen or nineteen years old, a man for all practical purposes, and nearly the same age his father had been when Magnus raped him and made him a vampire.
Before Gregory and Flavius had taken their leave, Seth had assured them both that he had no ancient grudge against the twins for the slaying of his mother.
“The twins know we’re here,” said Seth. “They have to know. And they don’t care. That’s the secret of the reigning Queen of the Damned. She does not care and her sister does not care. Well, I care. I care about everything under the sun and the moon, and that’s why I made Fareed. But I don’t care about revenge against the twins or about ever seeing them eye to eye. This is of no importance to me.”
Seth had been right of course that Maharet knew, but Gregory had not known it at the time. He had not learned it until much later. And Seth had been merely speculating then. He and Fareed and Maharet had not yet met.
“I understand, I so understand,” said Gregory softly. “But have you never wanted, yourself, to take the demon out of Mekare and into your own body? Have you never felt that simple urge, to dispatch her in exactly the same way that she dispatched the Mother?”
“You mean my mother,” said Seth. “And no. Why would I want the demon in me? What, you think as her son, I see myself as Akasha’s heir to this demon?” He was plainly disgusted.
“Not so much that,” said Gregory, politely backing off. “But so that the threat of our annihilation doesn’t belong to another. So that you have the fount safe within yourself.”
“And why would it be safer with me than anyone else?” asked Seth. “Have you ever wanted to take the Sacred Core into your body?”
They had been in the large drawing room of Fareed’s personal quarters when they had this last discussion. The chill Los Angeles night had warranted a fire, and they were gathered by the hearth in leather chairs. Flavius had this new and functioning leg laid across a leather ottoman, gazing at it from time to time in wonder. Beneath his gray wool trousers, only his sock-covered foot was visible. From time to time he flexed the toes as if to convince himself he possessed this limb fully and completely.
Gregory pondered that question.
“Until the night Mekare slew the Queen I had no idea any force on Earth could take the Sacred Core from Akasha and move it into anyone,” he confessed.
“But now you do know,” said Seth. “Have you, yourself, thought of trying to steal it?”
Gregory had to confess the thought had never occurred to him, not in any form. Indeed, when he reviewed the scene in his mind—which he had not witnessed, which he had seen only in telepathic flashes from remote points, which he had read described in Lestat’s books—he saw it as mythic.
“I still don’t know how they achieved it,” he said. “And no, I would never attempt such a thing and I would not want to have the Sacred Core within me.”
He thought for a long moment, allowing his thoughts to be totally readable by the others, though only Fareed and Flavius, it seemed, could read them.
He was a mystery to Seth, and Seth was a mystery to him—common enough to the early generation.
“Why would anyone want to be the host of the Sacred Core?” Gregory asked.
Seth didn’t immediately answer. Then in a quiet distinct voice he spoke.