“But what are your suspicions?” demanded Jesse. “You can’t think Mekare has the cunning to do all this.…”
“No, not Mekare. I suspect Mekare is holding the Voice back.”
“But how could she do that?” Jesse pressed. “She’s only the host of the Core.”
I didn’t answer. I marveled that she hadn’t guessed it. I wondered how many others really hadn’t guessed it. Or was everyone out there—Benji and all those calling him—afraid to say the obvious?
“I want you to come with us to New York,” said David. “I hope many others are already there.”
“What if that is exactly what the Voice wants?” I sighed. “What if it’s becoming ever more clever at controlling others like Khayman and enlisting them in its pogroms? We all gather in New York, and the Voice brings a cabal of monsters against us? Seems foolish to make it so easy for the Voice.”
But I didn’t say this with much conviction.
“Then what is your plan?” asked David.
“I told you. I need time to think on it.”
“But who is this Voice?” Jesse pleaded.
“Darling,” said David in a low and reverent voice as he embraced her. “The Voice is Amel, the spirit inside Mekare, and he can hear all that we’re saying to one another right now.”
A look of unspeakable horror swept over her face, and then a sudden collapse into deep quiet. She sat staring in front of her, eyes narrowing and then widening very slowly with her thoughts.
“But the spirit is unconscious,” she whispered, pondering it, her soft golden eyebrows knitting. “For millennia it’s been unconscious. The spirits said, ‘Amel is no more.’ ”
“And what is six thousand years to a spirit?” I asked. “It’s come to consciousness and it’s talking and it’s lonely and it’s vindictive and it’s confused and damned incapable, it seems, of really getting whatever it wants. Maybe it doesn’t even know what it wants.”
I could see David flinching, see his right hand rising just a little, and pleading with me to take the edge off, not to push it.
I stood stock-still looking out into the night, waiting, waiting for the Voice to speak, but the Voice didn’t speak.
“Go on to New York,” I said. “As long as it can rouse and control others, no place is safe. Maybe Seth and Fareed are headed there. Surely they know what’s happening. Get on the radio with Benji and call to Seth. Figure some way to disguise your meaning. You’re good at that. Call to any old ones who might help us. If there are old ones out there who can be roused to burn, there are others who can be roused to fight. And we do have some time after all.”
“Time? What makes you say that?” asked David.
“I just explained it,” I said. “It hasn’t figured out yet how to get what it wants. It may not even know yet how to articulate its own ambitions, plans, desires.”
I left them there.
It was day now on the European continent, but I didn’t want to stay in that wild, primitive, and devouring place. It made me bloody furious that I couldn’t get back home.
I went north towards Florida and made it to a fine Miami hotel before dawn. I rented a suite on a high floor with a balcony looking out over warm, sweet Biscayne Bay, and I sat out there, my foot on the ledge, loving the moist tender breeze, and looking at the huge ghostly clouds of the deep Miami sky and thinking about it.
What if I was wrong? What if it wasn’t Amel? But then I thought back, back to those first murmurings, “beauty … love.” It had been trying to tell me something momentous about itself and I had dismissed it. I had had no patience with its ravings, its desperate efforts. You don’t know what I suffer.
“I was wrong,” I said now, watching these huge tumbling clouds shift and drift past me. “I should have paid more attention to what you were trying to say. I should have talked to you. I wish I had. Is it too late?”
Silence.
“You too have your story,” I said. “I was cruel not to realize it. I was cruel not to think of your capacity for suffering.”
Silence.
I got up and paced the dark thick carpet, then I went back out on the balcony and looked at the lightening sky. Sunrise coming. Relentless implacable sunrise. So comforting to the world of mortal beings and animal things, and the plants breaking through the soil everywhere, and the trees sighing through a billion leaves. And so deadly to us.
“Voice, I am sorry,” I said.
I saw Pacaya volcano again, that image that had flashed repeatedly through Maharet’s mind, that fiery image. I saw in terror her carrying her sister upwards, like an angel with a child in its arms, until she was above that horrid gaping mouth of fire.
Suddenly I felt the presence of the other.
“No,” said the Voice. “It’s not too late. We’ll talk, you and I. When the time comes.”
“Then you do have a plan?” I asked. “You aren’t just slaughtering all your own progeny.”
“Progeny?” He laughed. “Imagine your every limb hung with chains, your fingers bound with weights, your feet connected by a thousand roots to others. Progeny, be damned.”
The sun was indeed rising. It was rising for the Voice too in that jungle. If he was in that jungle.
I closed up the room, pulled the draperies shut, went into the spacious walk-in closet, and lay down to sleep, furious that I wouldn’t be able to head for home until the inevitable sunset.
Two nights later, it hit Paris.
The Voice hadn’t spoken a word to me in the interim. And then it hit Paris.
By the time I got there it was over.
The little hotel in the Rue Saint-Jacques was burnt to the ground and the firefighters were dousing the blackened ruins with water, the smoke and steam rising between the narrow intact buildings on either side of it.
There were no voices here in the heart of Paris now. Those who had escaped had fled to the countryside and they were still pleading with others to follow their example.
I passed slowly, unnoticed, through the sidewalk spectators—just a flashy young man in violet sunglasses and a worn leather coat with unruly long blond hair, secretly carrying a deadly ax with him.
But I was sure I’d heard one plea, stronger than many of the others, when the Burning had started, when those first howls had drifted over the wind, a woman pleading in Italian for me to come. I was certain I’d heard a sobbing entreaty, “I am Bianca Solderini.”
Well, if I’d heard it, it was silent now. It was gone.
I walked along, noting the stains of black grease on the pavements. In one doorway, unmarked as yet, lay a black slimy hulk of burnt bones and shapeless globs of tissue. Could there have been life in that still? How old was that? Was that the beautiful legendary Bianca Solderini?
My soul shriveled. I sauntered closer to it. No one passing me noticed. I touched this mass of steaming blood and guts with my boot. It was melting, the bones losing their shape, the whole little heap melting on the stones. There could be nothing alive there.
“You proud of yourself, Voice?” I asked.
But he wasn’t there. Not there at all. I would have known if he was there.
He hadn’t spoken to me again since Miami, not in spite of all my pleas, my questions, my long confessions of respect, interest, immense desire to understand.
“Amel, Amel, talk to me,” I’d said over and over again. Had it found others to love, others infinitely more malleable and useful?
And more to the point, what was I going to do? What did I have to offer all those who seemed to think, for the most foolish reasons, that I could somehow solve all this?
Meanwhile coven houses and young ones had perished. And now this in Paris.
For hours I searched the Quartier Latin. I searched all of central Paris, walking the banks of the Seine and homing as I always did to Notre Dame. Nothing. Not a single preternatural voice left in Paris.
All those paparazzi gone.
It was almost like those olden nights when I thought I was the only vampire in the world, and I’d walked these streets alone, longing for the voices of others.
And all the time those other blood drinkers, those evil blood drinkers led by Armand, had been hiding under the cemetery of Les Innocents.
I saw bones in stacks, skulls, rotting bones. But this was no image of the old catacombs of those Children of Satan in the eighteenth century. These were images of the catacombs under Paris today where all the bones of the old cemetery had been moved long after the Children of Satan had been dissolved into ruin.
Catacombs. Images of bones. I heard a female blood drinker crying. Two creatures. And one speaking very rapidly in a low whisper. I knew that timbre. That was the voice I’d heard earlier this night. I left the ?le de la Cité, and started for the catacombs.
In a flash I caught a vision of two women together weeping, the elder a white skeletal monster with a hag’s hair. Horrid, like something painted by Goya. Then it was gone, and I couldn’t home in on it again.
“Bianca!” I said. “Bianca!”
I picked up speed. I knew where those tunnels were, those deep dark ugly tunnels beneath the city whose walls are packed with the disintegrating bones of centuries of dead Parisians. The public was admitted to those underground passages. I knew the public entrance. I was racing towards the Place Denfert-Rochereau, and had almost reached the spot, when a strange sight stopped me.
It was a brilliant flash at the entrance to the tunnel, as if a flame had erupted from the mouth of the charnel house. The dark wooden pedimented building that sheltered the entrance exploded and fell to pieces with a loud clatter.
I saw a female blood drinker with long blond hair, white, immensely powerful, rising from the pavement, and in her arms two other figures, both clinging to her, one with a skeletal white arm and hag hair buried against her bosom, the other, auburn haired and shaking with sobs.
For me, for my eyes, this mysterious being slowed her ascent, and we gazed for one split second at one another.
I will see you again, brave one.
Then she was gone.
I felt a blast of air against my face.
I was sitting on the pavement when I came to my senses.
Sevraine.
That was the name imprinted on my mind. Sevraine. But who was this Sevraine?
I was still sitting there staring at the entrance to the tunnel when I heard fast crisp steps approaching, someone walking steadily, heavily and fast.
“Get up, Lestat.”
I turned and looked up into the face of my mother.
There she was after all these years in her old khaki safari jacket and faded jeans, her hair in a braid over her shoulder, her pale face like a porcelain mask.
“Come on, stand up!” she said, those cold blue eyes flashing in the lights of the burning building at the mouth of the tunnel.
And in that moment as love and resentment clashed with humbling fury, I was back at home hundreds of years ago, walking with her in those cold barren fields, with her haranguing me in that impatient voice. “Get up. Move. Come on.”
“What are you going to do if I don’t?” I snarled. “Slap me?”
And that’s what she did. She slapped me. “Get up quickly,” she said. “Take me to that glorified shelter you’ve made for yourself in the old castle. We must talk. Tomorrow night, I’ll take you to Sevraine.”