“She’s never been a stranger to phones, computers, mobiles, whatever,” said Jesse. “Remember she was my aunt Maharet in the world before I ever knew her true secret. She was the mentor of the Great Family for centuries. She’s always functioned well in the world.”
I nodded.
“Turns out she loved this ancient one in Geneva, loved the life he’d built for himself and for those under his care. She did not reveal herself to him. She was spying upon him, through the minds of his loved ones. But she loved him. When she called me, she wouldn’t disclose his name or location by phone for obvious reasons, but all her reports were jubilant. This blood drinker had been brought over by Akasha to fight rebels like Maharet and Mekare and Khayman. Where they were called the First Brood, this vampire had been the Captain of the Queens Blood. But none of the old hatred mattered anymore to her, or so she said. And several times over the phone she told me that observing this creature had taught her all sorts of things, that his enthusiasm for life was contagious. I assumed all this was good for her.”
I could see David knew nothing of this being either and he was fascinated.
“And this is only one of a number of immortals of which we don’t know?” he asked gently.
Jesse nodded. “She said further that this Geneva blood drinker was tragically in love with Lestat.” She looked at me. “In love with your music, your writings, your musings—tragically convinced that if he could talk with you about all the ideas in his head, he would find a soul mate in you. Apparently, he loves his devoted family of blood drinkers—but they tire of his relentless passion for life and his endless speculations on the tribe and the changes we experience. He feels you’d understand him. She never said whether she agreed with him on that or not. She wanted to approach the being. She was strongly considering it. It seemed to me that she wanted to bring you all together with him at some point. But she left without approaching him. And what she had wanted, well, all this soon changed.”
“So what happened? Why didn’t she do this?” I pressed. I’d never doubted that Maharet could find me wherever I was. I figured this great and powerful blood drinker in Geneva could find me too. I mean I’m not all that hard to find, really.
“Oh, yes, you are,” Jesse said in answer to my thoughts. “You’re very well hidden.”
“Well, so what!”
“But back to the story, please,” said David.
“It’s what happened at the compound while she was gone,” said Jesse. “I’d remained behind with Khayman and Mekare, and several young blood drinkers who’d been studying in the archives. I’m not sure who these young ones were. Maharet had brought them there before leaving, and all I knew was that she had approved of each of them and given them access to the old records. Well, Khayman and I shared the responsibility of maintaining the hearth, as you might say. And for two nights I went into Jakarta to hunt and left things to Khayman.
“When I came back, I discovered that half the compound had been burnt down, some of the young ones—maybe all of them—had obviously been immolated, and Khayman was in a state of confusion. Maharet had also returned. Some instinct had told her to return. The devastation was horrific. Many of the screened courtyards were burnt out, and some of the libraries burnt to the ground. Old scrolls, tablets, had been lost, but the truly hideous sight was the remains of those who’d apparently been burnt to death.”
“Who were they?” I demanded.
“I honestly don’t know,” Jesse said. “Maharet never told me.”
“But hadn’t you met these young blood drinkers?” I pushed. “Surely you remember something about them.”
“I’m sorry, Lestat,” she said. “I don’t remember them, except to say that I didn’t know them by name or appearance. They were young, very young. There were always young ones coming and going. Maharet would bring them there. I don’t know who perished. I simply don’t know.”
David was clearly shocked. He’d seen the ruins just as I’d seen the ruins but hearing about it had a fresh effect.
“What did Khayman have to say about all this?” David asked.
“That’s just it. He couldn’t remember what had happened. He couldn’t remember where he’d been or what he’d done or what he’d seen during my absence. He was complaining of confusion and physical pain, actually physical pain in his head, and worse, he was drifting in and out of consciousness right in front of us, sometimes talking in the ancient tongue, and sometimes talking in other tongues I’d never heard before. He was babbling. And at times he seemed to be talking to someone inside his head.”
I noted this and locked my mind like a vault.
“He was obviously suffering,” Jesse said. “He asked Maharet what he could do for the pain. He appealed to her as a witch to heal the pain as if they were in ancient Egypt again. He said something was in his head hurting him. He wanted someone to take it out. He asked if that vampire doctor, Fareed, could open up his head and take this thing out. He kept reverting to the ancient tongue. I caught the most unbelievable and vivid cascade of images. And sometimes I think he did think they were back in those times. He was injured, crazy.”
“And Mekare?”
“Almost the same as ever. But not quite.” Jesse stopped.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She wiped the images from her mind before I could catch them. She went for words.
“There’s always been a demeanor to Mekare,” said Jesse. “But when I first entered the compound, when I first saw all the burnt timber and the collapsed roofing, well, I came on Mekare standing in one of the passageways, and she was so altered, so different, that for a moment I felt I was looking at a stranger.” Again she paused, looking away and then back to us. “I can’t explain it. She was standing there, arms at her sides, and leaning against the wall. And she was looking at me.”
Now the image did blaze up. I saw it. Surely David saw it.
“Now I know that doesn’t sound remarkable at all,” said Jesse, her voice having dropped to a murmur. “But I tell you, I’d never seen her look at me in that way before, as if suddenly she knew me, recognized me, as if some intelligence had flared in her. It was like encountering a stranger.”
I could see it, all right. I’m sure David could too. But it was subtle.
“Well, I was afraid of her,” said Jesse. “Very afraid. I don’t fear other blood drinkers for obvious reasons. But in that moment I feared her. The expression on her face was so uncharacteristic. At the same time she was merely staring at me. I was petrified. I thought, This creature has powers enough to have done this, burned this place, burned those young ones. This creature can burn me. But then of course Khayman had that power too, and I didn’t know yet that he couldn’t remember anything.
“Maharet appeared, and she put her arm around Mekare, and then it seemed Mekare was Mekare again, drifting, eyes serene, eyes almost blind, standing upright and softening all over, and resuming her old characteristic grace—walking with the old simple movements, her skirts flowing around her, her head slightly bowed, and when she looked at me again her eyes were empty. Empty. But they were her eyes, if you follow me.”
I said nothing. The image continued to blaze in my mind. I felt a chill all over.
David wasn’t speaking. I wasn’t speaking.
“And Maharet dismantled the compound and we left there,” said Jesse. “And she never left Mekare alone after that, not for very long. No young ones were ever invited again to visit with us. No one was ever invited. In fact, she told me we must seal ourselves off from the world. And as far as I know she never contacted the Geneva blood drinker, though I can’t be too sure of that.
“When we established our new refuge she set up more technical equipment than in the past, and she used the computers regularly for all manner of things. I thought she went into a new level of involvement with the age. But now I wonder. Maybe she simply didn’t want to leave again. She had to communicate by computer. I don’t know. I can’t telepathically read my maker. And Maharet can’t read Khayman or Mekare. The First Brood can’t read each other. All too close. She told me she couldn’t read this Geneva blood drinker either. Queens Blood or First Brood, the really old ones can’t read each other’s thoughts. I suppose technically that Seth is Queens Blood. Queens Blood were the true heirs of Akasha’s blood drinker religion. First Brood remained the rebels, and First Brood gave the Blood without rules or codes to those they enlisted over the centuries. If one could trace the lineage of most of the blood drinkers of this era, I suspect they’d go back to First Brood.”
“Probably right,” I said.
“What happened with Khayman?” asked David. “How is it with Khayman?”
“Something is very wrong with him,” said Jesse. “Wrong with him to this very moment. He disappears for nights on end. He doesn’t remember where he goes or what he does. Most of the time he sits silent staring at old movies on the flat screens in the compound. Sometimes he listens to music all night. He says that music helps the pain. He watches your old rock videos, Lestat. He turns them on for Mekare and he watches and I suppose in some way she watches them too. Other times he doesn’t do much of anything. But he always comes back to the pain in his head.”
“But what about Fareed, what does Fareed say about this pain?” I asked.
“That’s just it, Maharet has never invited Fareed again to visit us. She’s never invited anyone, as I’ve said. If she e-mails Fareed, I know nothing of it. Her involvement with the computer is actually part of her withdrawal if you follow me. I’ve come here to tell you these things because I think you should know, both of you. And you should share this with Marius, and with the others, however you want to do it.” She sat back. She gave a long sigh as if to say to herself, Well, now it is done, you’ve confided and it cannot be undone.
“She’s protecting all the others from Mekare now,” David said in a soft voice. “That’s why she’s hidden herself.”
“Yes. And there is no connection at all anymore with her human family as I’ve said. We live from night to night in peace and contentment. She does not ask where I go when I leave, or where I’ve been when I come back. She advises me in a multitude of small things, just as she’s always done. But she doesn’t confide in me about the deepest things! To tell the truth, she behaves like someone who’s being watched, monitored, spied upon.”
Neither David nor I spoke, but I knew perfectly well what she meant. I pondered. I was not prepared to share with them any of my vague and troubling suspicions as to what was happening. Not at all prepared. I was not sharing my suspicions with myself.
“But still,” said David, “it might have been Khayman who burnt the archives and destroyed the young ones.”
“It might have been, yes,” Jesse said.
“If she really thought it was Khayman, she’d do something,” I said. “She’d destroy him if she felt she had to. No, it’s Mekare.”
“But how can she destroy Khayman? Khayman’s as strong as she is,” David said.
“Nonsense. She could get the jump on him,” I said. “Any immortal can be decapitated. We saw that with Akasha. She was decapitated by a heavy jagged piece of glass.”
“That’s true,” Jesse said. “Maharet herself told me this when she first brought me into the Blood. She said I’d grow so strong in the future that fire couldn’t destroy me and the sun couldn’t destroy me. But the sure way to murder any immortal was to separate the head from the heart and let the head and the body bleed out. She told me that even before Akasha came to the Sonoma compound with you. And then that’s just what happened with Akasha, only Mekare took Akasha’s brain and devoured it before the head or the heart bled out.”
We all reflected for a long time in silence.
“Again, there’s never been the slightest sign,” said David gently, “that Mekare knows her own powers.”
“Correct,” said Jesse.
“But if she did this, she must know her own powers,” David continued. “And Maharet is there to be a check upon her every waking moment.”
“Perhaps.”
“So where is all this going?” I asked. I tried not to sound exasperated. I loved Maharet.
“I don’t think she will ever destroy herself and Mekare,” said Jesse. “But I don’t know. I do know she listens all the time to Benji’s broadcasts out of New York. She listens to them on her computer. She sits back and listens for hours. She listens to all those young blood drinkers who call Benji. She listens to everything that they have to say. If she were going to bring the tribe to an end, I think she would warn me. I simply don’t think she means to do it. But I think she agrees entirely with Benjamin. Things are in a very bad way. Things have changed. It wasn’t only your music, Lestat, or Akasha rising. It’s the age itself, it’s the accelerated rate of technological advancement. She said once, as I believe I told you, that all institutions which depended upon secrecy are now threatened. She said that no system based on arcana or esoteric knowledge would survive this age. No new revealed religion could take hold in it. And no group that depended upon occult purpose could endure. She predicted that there would be changes in the Talamasca. ‘Human beings won’t fundamentally change,’ she said. ‘They’ll adapt. And as they adapt they’ll explore all mysteries relentlessly until they have found the fundamentals behind each and every one.’ ”
“My thoughts on the matter exactly,” I offered.
“Well, she’s right,” said David. “There have been changes in the Talamasca, and that’s what I wanted to tell you. That’s why I sent out the call for you. I wouldn’t have dared to disturb Maharet when she obviously did not want to be disturbed, but I have to confess I was hoping for news of her when you surfaced, and now I’m a bit stunned. What’s been happening with the Talamasca of late doesn’t mean so very much.”
“Well, what has been happening?” I asked. I wondered if I was becoming a nuisance. But without my goading them, these two would have lapsed into long periods of silence and meaningful stares, and frankly, I wanted information.
Information age. I guess I’m part of it, even if I can’t remember how to use my iPhone from week to week, and have to learn how to send e-mails all over again every couple of years, and can’t retain any profound technological knowledge about the computers I sometimes use.
“Well, the answer to all that,” Jesse said, responding to my thoughts, “is to use the technology regularly. Because we know now that our preternatural minds don’t give us any superior gift for all knowledge, only the same kinds of knowledge we understood when we were human.”
“Yes, right. That is certainly true,” I confessed. “I’d thought it was different, because I’d learned Latin and Greek so easily in the Blood. But you’re absolutely right. So on to the Talamasca. I assume they’ve digitized all their records by now?”
“Yes, they completed that process several years back,” said David. “Everything’s digitalized; and relics are in museum-quality environments under the Motherhouses in Amsterdam and in London. Every single relic has been photographed, recorded on video, described, studied, classified, etcetera. They had begun all that years ago when I was still Superior General.”
“Are you talking to them directly?” asked Jesse. She herself had never wanted to do that. Since she came into the Blood, she’d never sought to contact her old friends there. I’d brought David over. She had not. For a while, I’d harassed the Talamasca, baited them, engaged now and then with their members, but that was now a long time ago.
“No,” said David. “I don’t disturb them. But I have occasionally visited those old friends of mine on their deathbeds. I have felt an obligation to do that. And it’s simple enough for me to get into the Motherhouses and get into those sickrooms. I do that because I want to say goodbye to those old mortal friends, and also I know what they’re experiencing. Dying without so many answers. Dying without ever having learned anything through the Talamasca that was transformative or transcendent. What I know now of the present state of the Talamasca I know from those encounters and from watching, simply watching and listening and prowling about, and picking at the thoughts of those who know someone is listening, but not who or what.” He sighed. He looked weary suddenly. His dark eyes were puckered and there was a tremor in his lips.
I saw his soul so clearly now in the new youthful body that it was as if the old David and the new David had completely fused for me. And indeed his old persona did shape the expression of his youthful face. A multitude of facial expressions had reshaped the piercing black eyes of this face. Even his old voice sounded now through the newer vocal cords as if he had retuned them and refined them merely by using them for all those softly spoken, unfailingly polite words.
“What’s happened,” he said, “is that the mystery of the Elders and the origins of the Order have been buried in a new way.”
“What do you mean?” asked Jesse.
David looked at me. “You’re familiar with this. We never knew our origins really. You know that. We always knew the Order had been founded in the mid–eighth century, and we knew there was unaccountable wealth somewhere which financed our existence and our research. We knew the Elders governed the Order but we didn’t know who they were or where they were. We had our hard-and-fast rules: observe but do not interfere, study but do not ever seek to use the power of a witch or a vampire for one’s own gain, that sort of thing.”
“And this is changing?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “The Order’s as healthy and virtuous as ever. If anything they’re thriving. There are more young scholars coming in today who know Latin and Greek than before, more young archaeologists—like Jesse—who are finding the Order attractive. The secrecy has been preserved, in spite of your charming books, Lestat, and all the publicity you so generously heaped on the Talamasca, and as far as I know there have been few scandals in recent years. In fact none whatsoever.”
“So what’s the big problem?”
“Well, I wouldn’t call it a problem,” said David. “I’d call it a deepening of the secrecy in a new and interesting way. Sometime in the last six months newly appointed Elders started introducing themselves to their colleagues and welcoming communication with them.”
“You mean Elders actually chosen from the ranks,” said Jesse with a bit of an ironic smile.
“Precisely.
“Now in the past,” David went on, “we were always told that the Elders came from the ranks, but once they were chosen they became anonymous except to other Elders, and their location was never revealed to anyone. In olden times they communicated by letter, sending their own couriers to deliver and retrieve all correspondence. In the twentieth century, they moved to fax communication and computer communication, but again, they themselves remained anonymous and their location unknown.
“Of course the mystery was this; no one ever knew personally any member called to be an Elder. No one ever encountered personally anyone who claimed to be an Elder. So it was strictly a matter of faith that the Elders were chosen from the ranks, and as early as the Renaissance, as you know, members of the Talamasca had suspicions about the Elders, and were profoundly uncomfortable with not knowing who they really were or how they passed their power on to succeeding generations.”
“Yes, I remember all this,” I said. “Of course. Marius talked about it in his memoir. Even Raymond Gallant, his friend in the Talamasca, had asked Marius what he knew about the origins of the Talamasca, as if he, Raymond, were uneasy with not knowing more.”
“Correct,” said Jesse.
“Well, now it seems everybody knows who the new Elders are,” said David, “and where their meetings will take place, and all are invited to communicate with these new Elders on a daily basis. But obviously, the mystery of the Elders before this time remains. Who were they? How were they chosen? Where did they reside? And why are they handing off power now to known members?”
“Sounds like what Maharet’s done with the Great Family,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“But you never seriously thought they were immortals, did you?” asked Jesse. “I never did. I simply accepted the need for secrecy. I was told the Talamasca was an authoritarian order when I joined. I was told it was like the Church of Rome, in that its authority was absolute. Never expect to know who the Elders are or where they are or how they know what they know.”
“I’ve always thought they were immortals,” said David.
Jesse was shocked and a little amused. “David, you’re serious?”
“Yes,” said David. “I’ve thought all my life that immortals founded the Order to spy on and record the goings-on of other immortals—spirits, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, whatever. And of course we were to spy on all those mortals who can communicate with immortals.”
I was reflecting. “So the Order’s collected all this data over the centuries, while the central mystery—the origins—remains unexplored.”
“Exactly. And if anything this change moves us farther away from the central mystery,” said David. “Within a few generations the entire mystery might well be forgotten. Our shadowy past will be no more intriguing than the shadowy past of any other ancient institution.”
“That does seem to be what they want,” I said. “They’re bowing out before any serious investigation is mounted, either within or without the Order, to find out who they are. Another decision prompted by the information age? Maharet was right.”
“What if there’s a deeper reason?” David asked. “What if the Order was indeed founded by immortals, and what if these immortals are no longer interested in pursuing the knowledge they wanted so badly? What if they’ve abandoned their quest? Or what if they’ve found out what they wanted to know all along?”
“What could that possibly be?” Jesse asked. “Why, we know no more about ghosts, witches, and vampires than we ever did.”
“That’s not true,” David said. “What have we been discussing here? Think.”
“Too many unknowns,” I said. “Too many suppositions. The Talamasca has an amazing history, no doubt about that, but I don’t see why it couldn’t have been founded by scholars and maintained by them, and what any of this proves. On the surface of it, the Elders have simply changed their method of interacting with the members.”
“I don’t like it,” said Jesse softly. She appeared to shiver. She rubbed the backs of her arms with her long white fingers. “I don’t like it at all.”
“Has Maharet ever told you anything about the Talamasca, anything entirely personal that she alone knew?” asked David.
“You know she hasn’t,” Jesse responded. “She knows all about them; she thinks they’re benign. But no, she’s confided nothing. She’s not terribly interested in the Talamasca. She never has been. You know that. David, you asked her these questions yourself.”
“There were legends,” said David, “legends we never discussed. That we were founded to track the vampires of the Earth, and all the rest of the research was essentially unimportant, that the Elders themselves were vampires.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said, “but then you lived with all the talk, I didn’t.”
“It used to be said that when you died within the Order, the Elders came to you right before death and revealed themselves. But who started that old tale I never knew. And as I kept watch with one dying colleague after another in my time, I came to know this wasn’t true. People died with many unresolved questions about their life’s work, and its value.” David looked at me. “When we first met, Lestat, I was a disillusioned and burnt-out old man. You remember that. I wasn’t sure all my work studying the supernatural had come to anything.”
“Whatever the case, the mystery remains unresolved,” I said. “And maybe I should try to find the answer. Because I think this new development does have something to do with the crisis our kind is facing.” But I broke off, uncertain of what more I could say.
They sat there in silence.
“If it’s all connected, I don’t like it,” I muttered. “All this is too apocalyptic,” I said. “I can live with the notion that this world is a Savage Garden, that things are born and die for random reasons, that suffering is irrelevant to the great brutal cycle of life. I can live with all that. But I don’t think I can live with great overarching connections between things as enduring as the Great Family and the Talamasca and the evolution of our tribe.…”
Fact was, I simply couldn’t put it all together. So why act like the idea of it was frightening me? I wanted to put it all together, didn’t I?
“Oh, well, then you do admit there is a crisis,” David said with a trace of a smile.
I sighed. “All right. There’s a crisis. What I don’t understand is why, exactly. Oh, I know, I know. I woke up the Undead world with my songs and videos. And Akasha awoke and went on a rampage. All right. I get it. But why are all those mavericks everywhere now? They weren’t before. And what’s the impact of these ancient ones rising, and why do we need a Queen of the Damned in the first place? So Mekare and Maharet don’t care to rule. So what? Akasha never ruled. Why didn’t things simply lapse back to the way they’d always been?”
“Because the whole world was changing,” said David impatiently. “Lestat, don’t you see, what you did in ‘coming out’ as a vampire to the public was part of the zeitgeist. No, it didn’t change the mortal world in any way, of course not, but how can you underestimate the effects of your books, your words, all of it on all the blood drinkers in existence? You gave the inchoate masses out there an origin story, a terminology, and a personal poetry! Of course this waked old ones. Of course this invigorated and charged apathetic ones. Of course this roused from torpor wanderers who’d given up on their own kind. Of course this emboldened mavericks to make other mavericks using the famous Dark Trick, Dark Gift, Dark Blood, etcetera!”
None of this was said with contempt, no, but it was said with a kind of scholar’s fury.
“And yes, I did my part, I know that,” David continued. “I published the stories of Armand, Pandora, and finally Marius. But the point I’m trying to make is this: you gave a legacy and a definition to a population of shrinking, self-loathing predators who had never dared to claim any such collective identity for themselves. So yes, it changed everything. It had to.”
“And then the human world gave them computers,” said Jesse, “and more and better planes, trains, and automobiles, and their numbers have grown exponentially and their voices have become a chorus heard by all from sea to shining sea.”
I got up off the couch and went to the windows. I didn’t bother to pull back the loose filmy curtains that covered them. The lights of all the surrounding towers were magnificently beautiful through this cloud of white gauze. And I could hear the fledglings out there, milling, pondering, covering the various entrances of the hotel, and reporting to one another, variations of “No action here. Keep watching.”
“You know why this disconcerts you so very much?” David said. He drew up beside me. He was angry. I could feel the heat coming off him. In this strong, stout-chested young body he was my height, and those intense black eyes fixed me with David’s soul. “I’ll tell you why!” he said. “Because you never admitted to yourself that what you did in writing your books, in writing your songs, in singing your songs … you never admitted that it was all for us. You always pretended it was some great gesture to humankind and for their benefit. ‘Wipe us out.’ Really! You never admitted that you were one of us, talking to the rest of us, and what you did, you did as part of us!”
I was suddenly furious. “It was for me that I did it!” I said. “All right. I admit it. It was a disaster, but it was for me that I did it. There was no ‘us.’ I didn’t want the human race to wipe us out, that was a lie, I admit it. I wanted to see what would happen, who would show up for that rock concert. I wanted to find all those I’d lost … Louis, and Gabrielle, and Armand and Marius, maybe Marius most of all. That’s why I did it. Okay. I was alone! I didn’t have any grand reason! I admit it. And so goddamned what!”
“Exactly,” he said. “And you affected the entire tribe and you never took one ounce of responsibility for having done so.”
“Oh, for the love of Hell, are you going to preach vampire ethics from a pulpit?” I said.
“We can have ethics and we can have honor and we can have loyalty,” he insisted, “and every other key virtue we learned as humans.” He was roaring at me under his breath, as the British so often do it, with a veneer of silvery politeness.
“Oh, preach it in the streets,” I said disgustedly. “Go on Benji’s radio show. Call in and tell him and all of them out there. And you wonder why I go into exile?”
“Gentlemen, please,” said Jesse. She sat there still in her armchair looking small, fragile, shaken, shoulders hunched as if against the blast of our argument.
“Sorry, dearest,” said David. He returned to his chair beside her.
“Look, I need the remaining time before dawn,” she said. “Lestat, I want you to give me your iPhone, and you, David, let me give you all the numbers too. E-mail, mobile numbers, everything. We can stay connected with one another. You can e-mail Maharet and me. You can call us. Please, let’s share all our numbers now.”
“So what, the reigning Queen in hiding is willing to share her mobile number?” I asked. “And e-mails?”
“Yes,” said Jesse. David had complied with her request and she was tapping away on the shiny little device, fingers fluttering over it with such speed they were a bit of a blur.
I came back, flopped heavily on the sofa, and threw down my iPhone as if it were a gauntlet on the coffee table. “Take that!”
“Now, please, share with me all the information you’re willing to share,” she said.
I told her again what I’d told Maharet years ago. Contact my attorneys in Paris. As for my e-mails, well, I changed them all the time as I forgot how to use them and tried to learn all over again with some new and superior service. And I always forgot or lost the old devices or the old computers and then had to begin again.
“All the info’s in the phone,” I said. I unlocked it for her and gave it to her.
I watched as she brought the devices up to date. I watched as she shared my information with David, and David’s information with me, and I was ashamed to admit that I was glad I had these ephemeral numbers. I’d shoot a record of all this to my attorney and he’d keep it through thick and thin, even when I’d forgotten how to access it online myself.
“Now, please,” Jesse said finally. “Spread the word. Express my concerns to Marius, to Armand, to Louis, to Benji, to everyone.”
“It will drive Benji out of his gourd to have ‘secret intelligence’ about the twins perhaps immolating themselves,” David said. “That I will not do. But I will indeed try to find Marius.”
“Surely there are old ones in Paris,” I said, “old enough to have spied on us here tonight.” I wasn’t speaking of the riffraff.
Yet I had the feeling Jesse didn’t care. Let the riffraff hear it, for all Jesse cared. Let the old ones hear it. Jesse was frayed from conflict and anxiety. And even confiding in us had not eased her pain.
“Were you ever happy in the Blood?” I asked suddenly.
She was startled. “What do you mean?”
“In the beginning, during those first years. Were you happy?”
“Yes,” she said. “And, I know that I will be happy again. Life is a gift. Immortality is a precious gift. It shouldn’t be called the Dark Gift. That’s not fair.”
“I want to see Maharet in person,” said David. “I want to go with you home.”
Jesse shook her head. “She won’t allow it, David. She knew what I meant to say when I found you. She allowed this. But she will not receive anyone now at home.”
“Do you still trust in her?” asked David.
“In Maharet?” Jesse asked. “Always. Yes, in Maharet.”
That was significant. She didn’t trust the other two.
She was backing away from us towards the double doors to the hallway.
“I’ve given you what I have to give for now,” she said.
“And what if I want to find that vampire in Geneva?” I asked.
“That would be your decision. He’s in love with you. I can’t imagine him hurting you. Does anyone ever try to hurt you?”
“Are you joking?” I asked bitterly. Then I shrugged again. “No, I don’t guess anyone ever does anymore.”
“You’re the one they look to …,” she said.
“So Benji says!” I muttered under my breath. “Well, there’s no reason for them to look to me. I may have started it but I sure as Hell can’t finish it.”
She didn’t answer.
David sprang up suddenly and went to her and took her in his arms. They held each other silently for a moment and then he went with her to the doors.
I knew she was as good at the Cloud Gift as I was, what with all that ancient blood. She’d leave the hotel by the roof so fast she might as well have been invisible.
David closed the doors behind her.
“I want to go walking,” I said. My voice was thick, and suddenly I realized I was weeping. “I want to see that old district where the markets used to be, and the old church. Haven’t been there since … Will you come with me?” I had half a mind to flee now, just go. But I didn’t.
He nodded. He knew what I wanted. I wanted to see the area of Paris where once les Innocents, the ancient cemetery, had existed—beneath which, in torch-lit catacombs, Armand and his Children of Satan coven had held court. It was there that, orphaned by my maker, I’d discovered with shock the others of our kind.
He embraced me and kissed me. This was David whom I knew intimately in this body. This was David’s powerful heart against me. His skin was silken and fragrant with some subtle male perfume, and his fingers were thrilling me vaguely as he took my hand. Blood of my Blood.
“Why do people want me to do something about all this?” I asked. “I don’t know what to do?”
“You’re a star in our world,” he said. “You made yourself that. And before you say anything rash or angry, remember. That’s what you wanted to be.”
We spent hours together.
We moved over the rooftops far too fast for the fledglings below to track us.
We drifted through the streets of les Halles, and through the darkened interior of the great old church of Saint-Eustache with its paintings by Rubens. We sought out the little Fontaine des Innocents in the Rue Saint-Denis—a tiny relic of the olden times—which had once stood beside the wall of the vanished cemetery.
This made my heart both glad and anguished. And I let the memories come back to me of my battles with Armand and his followers who believed so fervently we were anointed servants of the Devil. Such superstition. Such rot.
Eventually some of the paparazzi vampires found us. They were persistent. But they kept their distance. We didn’t have much time.
Pain, pain, and more pain.
No trace remained of the old Théatre des Vampires or where it had once stood. Of course I’d known that but had to visit the old geography anyway, confirm that the old filthy world of my time had been paved over.
Armand’s magnificent nineteenth-century house—which he’d built in Saint-Germaine-de-Prés—was shut up and maintained by unwitting mortals, full of murals, carpets, and antique furniture covered in white sheets.
He’d refurbished that house for Louis right before the dawn of the twentieth century, but I don’t think Louis had ever been at home in it. In Interview with the Vampire he did not so much as even mention it. The fin de siècle with its glorious painters, actors, and composers had meant nothing to Louis, for all his pretensions to sensitivity. Ah, but I couldn’t blame Louis for shunning Paris. He’d lost his beloved Claudia—our beloved Claudia—in Paris. How could he be expected ever to forget that? And he’d known Armand was a jungle wildcat among revenants, hadn’t he?
Still … Paris … I’d suffered here too, had I not? But not at the hands of Paris, no. Paris had always fulfilled my dreams and expectations. Paris, my eternal city, my home.
Ah, but Notre Dame, the great vast cathedral of Notre Dame was as always Notre Dame, and there we spent hours together, safe in the cold shadows in that great forest grove of arches and columns where I’d come more than two hundred years ago to weep over my transformation, and was in some way weeping over it even now.
David and I walked the narrow quiet streets of the ?le Saint-Louis talking together. The fledgling paparazzi were within blocks of us but dared not come closer. The grand townhouse in which I’d made my mother, Gabrielle, into a Child of Darkness was still there.
Gradually we fell to talking again, naturally. I asked David how he had come to know Fareed.
“I sought out Fareed,” David said. “I’d heard plenty of whispers of this mad vampire scientist and his ancient guardian angel, and their ‘evil’ experiments, you know, the gossip of the misbegotten. So I went to the West Coast and looked for him till I found him.”
David described the new compound where Seth and Fareed were now, safe and secure in the wastes of the California desert, beyond the city of Palm Springs. Out there, they had built the perfect facilities for themselves—isolated and protected by two sets of high walls and mechanical gates, with tunnels for emergency evacuation and a heliport. They ran a small clinic for mortal incurables, but their real work took place in secure laboratories in sprawling three-story buildings. They were close enough to other medical facilities for their activities to attract little or no attention and far enough away from everything else to have the isolation and land they had needed but could not have in Los Angeles.
They’d welcomed David immediately. Indeed they’d been so hospitable that one could not imagine them being anything but that to everyone.
David had pressed Fareed on a very special issue: how was his mind and his soul anchored now in this body in which he had not been born, his own body being in a grave in England?
Fareed had done every conceivable test that he could on David. He could find no evidence that any “intelligence” existed inside him that was not generated by and expressed through his own brain. As far as he could see, David was David in this body. And his connection with it was utterly secure.
“Before you came into the Blood,” Fareed had told David, “very possibly you could have exited this body. You could have been some sort of discarnate entity, a ghost, in other words, capable of possessing other susceptible bodies. I don’t know. I can’t know. Because you are in the Blood now and very likely this Blood has more securely than ever bound you to your physicality.”
Speculation. But David had been comforted.
He too felt that Fareed and Seth would never seek to use their scientific knowledge against humans.
“But what about their underlings?” I asked. “They were already bringing doctors and scientists into the Blood when I met them.”
“Be assured. They pick and choose carefully. The vampire researchers I encountered were like idiot savants of their profession, obsessed, focused, completely devoid of any grand schemes, in love with studying our blood under microscopes.”
“And that is his central project, is it not?” I asked. “To study our blood, the Blood, so to speak?”
“It’s a frustrating proposition from what I understand, as whatever the Sacred Core is physically, we cannot see it. If it’s made of cells, the cells are infinitely smaller than the cells that we can see. So Fareed’s working with properties.”
David rambled on, but it was science poetry again, and I couldn’t absorb it.
“Do you think they’re still there, in that same location?”
“I know they are,” David said. “They tried a number of others first that did not work out.”
Perhaps that was when I was searching for them.
“They’re there. You can easily find them. In fact, they would be overjoyed if you would come to see them.”
The night was rolling to an end. The paparazzi had retreated to their coffins and lairs. I told David he could keep my suite at the hotel as long as he liked, and I had to head home soon.