“You suspect me of conniving, don’t you? You think our work here is reducible to some simple plot to gain power over the source.”
“No, that’s not true,” Gregory said. He’d been astonished. He might have been insulted, but it wasn’t his way ever to be insulted.
Seth was staring at him, staring at him as if he loathed Gregory. And Gregory realized that he was at a significant turning point.
He could loathe Seth now as well, if he chose to do it. He could fear him, give in to jealousy of his age and power.
He didn’t want to do this.
He had thought sadly then of how he had dreamed of encounters such as this, dreaming of making himself known to the great Maharet simply to talk to her, talk and talk and talk, the way he was always talking to his beloved little family who never really understood what he was talking about.
He had looked away.
He would not despise Seth. And he would not seek to intimidate him. If he had learned one thing from his long time in this world, it was that he could intimidate others beyond his wildest intentions to do it.
When a statue talks to you, a statue that can breathe and move, it’s faintly horrible.
But with Fareed and Seth, Gregory had wanted something warm, something vital.
“I want us to be brothers,” he had said to Seth in a low voice. “I wish there were a good word for brothers and sisters the world over, something more specific than ‘kindred.’ But you are my kindred, both of you. I’ve exchanged blood with you, and that makes you my special kindred. But we are all kindred.”
He had stared helplessly at the ornamental fireplace. Black-veined marble. French gilt. Flashing gold andirons. He let his preternatural hearing rise; he heard the voices beyond the glass, the voices of millions, in soft undulating waves, punctuated by the music of cries, prayers, laughter.
Fareed began to talk then, talk of his immediate work and how Flavius would now have to use this “living” leg he had affixed so skillfully. And on he went about the fine points of the long surgery during which the leg had been attached, about the nature of the Blood, how it behaved so distinctly from human blood.
He used a multitude of Latin words which Gregory could not understand.
“But what is this thing, Amel?” Gregory said suddenly. “Oh, forgive me that I don’t know what all these words mean. But what is this animating force inside us? How has it changed the blood to the Blood?”
Fareed seemed enjoyably absorbed in the question as he responded.
“This thing, this monster, Amel … it’s made up of nanoparticles, how can I describe it, made up of cells infinitely smaller than the tiniest eukaryote cells known to us, but cells, you understand—it has a cellular life, dimensions, boundaries, some sort of nervous system, a brain or nucleus of some sort that governs its physicality and its etheric properties. It once had intelligence if we are to believe the witches. It once possessed a voice.”
“You mean you can see these cells under a microscope?” Gregory asked.
“Not at all,” said Fareed. “I can’t. I know its properties by how they behave. When a creature is made into a vampire, it’s as if a tentacle of this monster invades the new organism, hooking itself into the brain of the human being and then slowly beginning to transform it. Senescence is stopped forever. And then the alchemical blood of the creature works on the human blood, slowly absorbing it and then transforming what it does not absorb. It works on all the biological tissue; it becomes the sole source of cell development and change within the host. Are you following me?”
“Well, yes, I think I’ve always understood that,” said Gregory. “Now it needs more human blood to continue its work.”
“And what’s the goal of its work?” asked Flavius.
“To make us into perfect hosts for itself,” said Fareed.
“And to drink blood, always to drink more blood,” said Gregory. “To drive us to drink more blood. I remember how the Queen cried out in those early months. The thirst was unbearable. It wanted more blood. The red-haired witches told her that before they’d been given the Blood. ‘It wants more blood.’ ”
“But I don’t think that is its main goal,” said Fareed. “Nor has it ever been. But I’m not sure that it is conscious of a goal! That is what I want to know more than anything. Is it self-conscious? Is it a conscious being living inside the body of Mekare?”
“But in the very beginning,” Gregory said, “the spirits of the world told the twin witches that Amel, once fused with the Queen, was not conscious. They said, ‘Amel is no more.’ They said Amel was lost now inside the Mother.”
Fareed laughed to himself and looked into the fire.
“I was there,” said Gregory. “I remember it, when the twins said these things.”
“Well, of course you were, but what amazes me is that after all the generations you’ve seen rise and fall, you still believe those spirits actually spoke to the witches.”
“I know they did.”
“Do you?” asked Fareed.
“Yes,” said Gregory. “I do know.”
“Well, you may be right and the spirits may be right, and the thing is mindless and subsumed, but I cannot help but wonder. I tell you, there are no discarnate entities. This thing, Amel, is not a discarnate entity but something of immense size and intricate organization, something that has now so thoroughly mutated its host and those connected to her.…” And suddenly his language ascended again into a vocabulary as opaque to Gregory as the syllables uttered by dolphins or birds.
Gregory tried to pierce the language with the finest abilities of his own mind, to see the pictures, shapes behind it. Design. But he saw something that resembled the stars in the night sky and their infinite and purely accidental patterns.
Fareed continued.
“… I suspect these creatures, which we have for thousands of years called spirits or ghosts, these creatures draw their nourishment from the atmosphere, and just how they perceive us is impossible to know. There is a beauty to it, I suspect, a beauty as there is to all of nature, and they are part of nature.…”
“Beauty,” Gregory said. “I believe there is beauty in all things. I believe that. But I must find the beauty and coherence in science or I’ll never learn, never understand.”
“Listen to me,” said Fareed gently. “I was brought over because this is my field, my language, my realm, all this. You need not ever fully understand it. You can’t understand any more than Lestat or Marius or Maharet can understand it, or millions of people out there who have no capacity to absorb scientific knowledge or use it any way other than the simplest and most practical.…”
“I am that crippled here,” said Gregory, nodding.
“But trust in me,” said Fareed. “Trust in me that I study for us, what I can study that no human scientist can possibly study, and don’t think they haven’t tried, they have.”
“Oh, I know,” said Gregory. He thought back on those long-ago nights in 1985, after Lestat’s famous San Francisco rock concert, of the scientists who gathered up what they could of those burnt remains all over the parking lots surrounding the concert hall.
He’d watched that with the coldest detachment.
But nothing, absolutely nothing, had come of it, any more than anything ever came of the vampires who were now and then captured by scientists, imprisoned in labs, and studied until they made their spectacular escapes, or were spectacularly rescued. Nothing came of it. Except that now the world was inhabited by some thirty or forty frantic men and women of science who claimed there were real vampires out there and they had seen them with their own eyes—outcasts from their profession whom the world branded lunatics.
Time was when Gregory left the security of his Geneva penthouse to rescue any misbegotten little vampire who’d ended up in a laboratory prison under fluorescent lights gazed on by government officials. He’d hastened to break them out, destroy whatever evidence had been collected. But now he scarcely bothered. It didn’t matter.
Vampires didn’t exist and everybody knew that. All the amusing popular novels, television series, and motion pictures about vampires served to reinforce the common wisdom.
Besides, captured vampires almost always escaped. They were plenty strong. If caught in confusion and weakness, they collected themselves, bided their time, seduced their captives with cooperative speech, then shattered skulls, burnt laboratories, and scampered back off into the great and unending shadow world of the Undead, leaving behind not a scintilla of evidence that they had ever been lab rats.
Didn’t happen very often anyway.
Fareed was aware of all this. He had to be.
Fareed—with or without their help—would find out everything.
Fareed laughed. He laughed easily and cheerfully with his entire face, his green eyes crinkled and his lips smiling. He’d been reading Gregory’s mind. “You are so right,” he said. “So very right. And some of those poor ostracized researchers, who scraped up the oily residue of mythic monsters from the asphalt, are working with me now in this very building. They make the most willing pupils of what Seth and I have to offer.”
Gregory smiled. “That’s not at all surprising.”
He had never thought to bring such creatures into the Blood.
On that long-ago night in San Francisco, when Lestat’s concert had ended in a flaming massacre, his one thought had been to rescue his precious Davis from the holocaust. Let the doctors of the human world do what they would with the bones and slime that dead blood drinkers had left behind.
He’d taken Davis in his arms, and gone up high into the Heavens before the Queen could fix him with her lethal eyes.
And only later had he returned, the boy safe now as the Queen had moved on, to watch from a distance those forensic workers gathering their “evidence.”
He had thought of Davis then as he sat with Fareed in Los Angeles, thought of Davis’s dark caramel skin and those thick black eyelashes, so common in males of African descent. Nearly twenty years had passed since the night of that concert, yet Davis was just now coming into himself, recovering from the deep wounds of his early exile in the Blood. He was again dancing as he had long ago in New York as a mortal boy—before intense anxiety had crushed his chances for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and sent him into the awful mental decline in which he’d been made a vampire.
Ah, well, that was another story. Davis had taught Gregory things about this age which Gregory could have never divined on his own. Davis had a soft silky voice that always made his simplest statements sound like the most hallowed confidences, and a touch that was eternally gentle. And the gentlest gaze. Davis had become a Blood Spouse to Gregory as surely as Chrysanthe, and she too loved Davis.
In the severe and modern drawing room in Los Angeles, with its Impressionist paintings and French fireplace, Fareed had sat quiet for a long time, thinking to himself, shielding his ruminations perfectly.
At last he’d said gently, “You must tell no one about Viktor.”
This was Lestat’s biological son.
“Of course not, but they will know. They will all eventually know. Surely the twins know now.”
“Perhaps they do,” said Seth. “Perhaps they don’t. Perhaps they are beyond caring what happens to us in this world.” His voice was not cold or hostile. He spoke evenly and politely. “Perhaps they have not come to us because they are indifferent to what we do here.”
“Whatever the case, you must keep the secret,” Fareed thought. “We will be moving soon from this building to a safer, more remote compound. It will be safer there for Viktor.”
“Has the boy no normal human life?” Gregory asked. “I don’t mean to challenge your judgment. I am only asking.”
“Actually much more than you might think. After all, by day he’s quite safe with the bodyguards we provide for him, is he not? And again, what would anyone gain from making him a hostage? Someone has to want something before he takes a hostage. What has Lestat to give but himself, and whatever that is, it cannot be extorted.” Gregory nodded, somewhat relieved when he considered it in that light. It would have been rude to push for more information. But of course there was a reason to take him hostage—to demand Lestat’s or Seth’s powerful Blood. Better not to point this out.
He had to leave this mystery in their hands.
But he secretly wondered if Lestat de Lioncourt wouldn’t be furious when he discovered the existence of Viktor. Lestat was known for having a temper almost as extreme as his sense of humor.
Before that night was finished, Fareed had made a few more statements about vampiric nature.
“Oh, if only I knew,” he said, “whether that thing is truly unconscious, or whether it retains an autonomous life and whether or not it wants something. All life wants something. All life moves towards something.…”
“And what are we then?” Gregory had asked.
“We are mutants,” Fareed answered. “We are a fusion of unrelated species, and the force in us which turns our human blood into vampire blood is making of us something perfect, but what that is, what that will be, what that must be, I do not know.”
“He wanted to be physical,” said Seth. “That was well known in olden times. Amel wanted to be flesh and blood. And he got what he wanted, and he lost himself in the process.”
“Perhaps,” said Fareed. “But does anyone really want to be mortal flesh and blood? What all beings want is to be immortal flesh and blood. And this monster has come closer to that perhaps than any spirit who temporarily possesses a child or a nun or a psychic.”
“Not if he’s lost himself in the process,” said Seth.
“You speak as if Akasha possessed him,” said Fareed. “But it was his goal to possess her, remember.”
This had frightened Gregory and it had taught him something.
For all his protests of wanting to learn about all things, for loving and embracing the ever-evolving world, well, he was frightened of this new knowledge that Fareed was acquiring. Truly frightened of it. For the first time, he knew well why religious humans so feared scientific advances. And he discovered the heart of superstition in himself.
Well, he would suppress this fear; he would annihilate this superstition in himself and work diligently on his old faith.
The next night, they had embraced for the final time right after sunset.
Gregory had been surprised when Seth came forward and took Gregory in his arms. “I am your brother,” he whispered, but this he said in the ancient tongue, the ancient tongue no longer spoken anywhere under the moon or the sun. “Forgive me that I’ve been cold to you. I feared you.”
“And I feared you,” Gregory confessed, the old language coming back to him in a flood of sorrow. “My brother.” Queens Blood and Blood Kindred. No, something greater, infinitely greater. And brother does not betray brother.
“You are too much alike, you two,” said Fareed gently. “You even resemble each other—same high cheekbones, same slightly slanted eyes, same jet-black hair. Oh, some night in the far future I will complete a DNA study of every immortal on the planet, and what will that tell us about our human ancestors as well as our Blood ancestors?”
Seth had embraced Gregory all the more warmly after that, and Gregory had returned the affection with all his heart.
Back in Geneva, he kept the secret of Viktor even from Chrysanthe. He kept it as well from Davis, Zenobia, and Avicus. Flavius kept the secret as well. Flavius learned to trust his new and perfect limb over the coming months until it was truly part of him.
Years had passed since then.
The Undead world knew nothing of Viktor. And Fareed had told no one of Gregory Duff Collingsworth or his preternatural clan.
And two years ago—when Gregory came to spy on Lestat with David and Jesse in Paris—he’d realized that Lestat still had no inkling of Viktor’s existence. He’d also learned, as he eavesdropped on the three in their hotel-room confab, that Fareed and Seth were still thriving, though now in a new compound in the California desert, and that Maharet herself had gone to Fareed for his skills.
That had reassured him greatly. He did not want to think of the twins as creatures of ambition. He dreaded the very possibility. And it had greatly comforted him to learn that Fareed’s scans and imaging equipment had detected no mind in the mute Mekare. Yes, that was better than a host of Akasha’s ambitions and ultimate dreams.
But it had tormented him that night in Paris—as he eavesdropped—to hear Jesse Reeves talk of the little massacre in the library archive of Maharet’s household, and of Khayman’s confusion and pain. Khayman had always been on the edge of madness as far as Gregory was concerned. Every time Khayman had ever come across Gregory’s path, he had been more or less out of his mind. In the age of Rhoshamandes, he’d been Benjamin the Devil, and eventually the Talamasca had studied him under that name. But then Gregory considered the Talamasca to be harmless as Khayman was harmless. He was the perfect vampire for their treatises. Imbeciles like Benjamin the Devil and fast talkers like Lestat kept them believing the Undead were harmless and more interesting alive than dead.
And to think, before that horrid massacre in Maharet’s compound, the great one had actually been spying on him, on Gregory, in Geneva, and she had been contemplating a meeting involving them all! That intelligence, too, had deepened Gregory’s excitement and his dread. How he would love to talk to Maharet now, if only … but his nerve had failed him two years ago when he had first heard of these things in his spying on Jesse Reeves, and his nerve failed him now.
Now, in the year 2013—as Gregory stood in Central Park in this warm September night, watching, listening, as inside the house called Trinity Gate, Armand and Louis and Sybelle and Benji gathered around their new companion, Antoine—all of this weighed on Gregory’s heart.
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.