Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [236]
In shock I stared at this spectacle! Who could have done such a thing, who could have drained him of every drop of blood, who could have destroyed him!
And where was my Queen, had she met the same fate, had the whole legend of Those Who Must Be Kept been a deception from the beginning?
I knew that it was not a lie, and I knew the one being who could have visited this fate upon Enkil, the only being in all the world who had such cunning, such intimacy, such knowledge and such power.
Within seconds, I turned from the fallen husk of Enkil to discover her standing not three inches from me. Her black eyes were narrowed and quickened with life. Her royal raiment was the clothing I had placed upon her. Her red lips formed a mocking smile, and then there came from her a wicked laughter.
I hated her for that laughter.
I feared her and hated her that she laughed at me.
All my sense of possession came to the fore, that she was mine and that she now dared to turn on me.
Where was the sweetness of which I had dreamt? I stood in the midst of a nightmare.
“My dear servant,” she said, “you have never had the power to stop me!”
It was inconceivable that this creature whom I had so protected throughout time could turn on me. It was inconceivable that this one whom I so completely adored now taunted me.
Something hasty and pathetic came from my lips:
“But what do you want?” I asked, as I tried to grasp what was taking place. “What do you mean to do?”
It was a wonder that she even gave some mocking answer to me.
It was lost in the sound of the television screen exploding, in the sound of metal ripping, in the sound of the ice falling.
With incalculable power she rose from the depths of the house, sending its walls, its ceilings, and its surrounding ice down upon me.
I found myself buried, calling for help.
And the reign of the Queen of the Damned had commenced, though she had never taken that name for herself.
You saw her as she moved through the world. You saw her as she slew blood drinkers all around her, you saw her as she slew blood drinkers who would not serve her purpose.
Did you see her as she took Lestat as her lover? Did you see her as she sought to frighten mortals with her petty displays of old-fashioned power?
And all the while I lay crushed beneath the ice—spared for what purpose I could not imagine—sending out my warning to Lestat that he was in danger, sending out my warning to all that they were in danger. And pleading as well with any Child of the Millennia who might come to help me rise from the crevasse in which I’d been buried.
Even as I called in my powerful voice I healed. I began to move the ice around me.
But at last two blood drinkers came to assist me. I caught the image of one in the mind of the other. And it seemed impossible to me, but the one whom I saw so radiantly in the other’s vision was none other than my Pandora.
At last, with their help, I broke the ice that kept me from the surface, and I climbed free under the arctic sky, taking Pandora’s hand, and then gathering her in my arms, refusing for a moment to think of anything, even of my savage Queen and her deadly rampage.
There were no words now, no vows, no denials. I held Pandora in love and she knew it, and when I looked up, when I cleared my eyes of pain and love and fear, I realized that the blood drinker who had come North with her, he who had answered my summons, was none other than Santino.
For a moment, I was filled with such hatred I meant to destroy him completely.
“No,” Pandora said, “Marius, you can’t. All of us are needed now. And why do you think he has come if not to repay you?”
He stood there in the snow in his fine black garments, the wind whipping his black hair and I could see he was consumed with fear, but he would not confess it.
“This is no repayment for what you did to me,” I said to him. “But I know Pandora is right, we’re all needed, and for that reason, I spare you.”
I looked at my beloved Pandora.
“There is a council forming now,” I said. “It’s in a great house in the coastal forest,