Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [219]
During this time, I wrote many times to the Talamasca. Raymond died at the age of eighty-nine, but I soon established a connection there with a young woman named Elizabeth Nollis who had for her personal review my letters to Raymond.
She confirmed for me that Pandora was still seen with her Asian companion. She begged to know what I might tell of my own powers and habits, but on this I was not too revealing. I spoke of mind reading and the defiance of gravity. But I drove her to distraction with my lack of specifics.
The greatest and most mysterious success of these letters was that she told me much of the Talamasca. They were rich beyond anyone’s dreams, she said, and this was the source of their immense freedom. They had recently set up a Motherhouse in Amsterdam, and also in the city of Rome.
I was quite surprised by all this, and warned her of Santino’s “coven.”
She then sent me a reply that astonished me.
“It seems now that those strange ladies and gentlemen of which we have written in the past are no longer within the city in which they dwelt with such obvious pleasure. Indeed it is very difficult for our Motherhouse there to find any reports of such activities as one might expect from these people.”
What did this mean? Had Santino abandoned his coven? Had they gone on to Paris en masse? And if so, why?
Without explaining myself to my quiet Bianca—who was more and more hunting on her own—I went off to explore the Holy City myself, coming upon it for the first time in two hundred years.
I was wary, in fact, a good deal more wary, than I should want to admit to anyone. Indeed, the fear of fire gripped me so dreadfully that when I arrived I could do nothing but keep to the very top of St. Peter’s Basilica and look out over Rome with cold, shame-filled eyes; unable for long moments to hear with my blood drinker’s ears no matter how I struggled to gain control of myself.
But I soon satisfied myself, through the Mind Gift, that there were only a few blood drinkers to be found in Rome, and these were lone hunters without the consolation of companions. They were also weak. And as I raped their minds, I realized they knew little of Santino!
How had this come about? How had this one who had destroyed so much of my life freed himself from his own miserable existence?
Full of rage, I drew close to one of these lone blood drinkers, and soon accosted him, terrifying him and with reason.
“What of Santino and the Roman coven?” I demanded.
“Gone, all gone,” he said, “years ago. Who are you that you know of such things?”
“Santino!” I said. “Where did he go! Tell me.”
“But no one knows the answer,” he said. “I never laid eyes on him.”
“But someone made you,” I said. “Tell me.”
“My maker lives in the catacombs still where the coven used to gather. He’s mad. He can’t help you.”
“Prepare to meet God or the Devil,” I said. And just that quick I put an end to him. I did it as mercifully as I could. And then he was no more but a spot of grease in the dirt and in this I rubbed my foot before I moved towards the catacombs.
He had spoken the truth.
There was but one blood drinker in this place, but I found it full of skulls just as it had been over a thousand years ago.
The blood drinker was a babbling fool, and when he saw me in my fine gentleman’s clothes, he stared at me and pointed his finger.
“The Devil comes in style,” he said.
“No, death has come,” I said. “Why did you make that other one whom I’ve destroyed this night?”
My confession made no impression on him.
“I make others to be my companions. But what good does it do? They turn on me.”
“Where is Santino?” I demanded.
“Long gone,” he said. “And who would have ever thought?”
I tried to read his mind, but he was too crazed and full of distracted thoughts. It was like chasing scattered mice.
“Look at me, when did you last see him!”
“Oh, decades ago,” he said. “I don