The queen of the damned - Anne Rice [108]
Maharet’s profile. Maharet’s skin, which had been so pale and almost luminous in life, so like the inner lining of a seashell.
In a sudden vivid memory, he saw Maharet’s skin through the mesh of his own dark fingers. As he had pushed her face to the side during the rape, his fingertips had touched the delicate folds of flesh over her eyes. Not till a year later had they plucked out her eyes and he had been there remembering the moment, the feel of the flesh. That is before he had picked up the eyes themselves and . . . .
He shuddered. He felt a sharp pain in his lungs. His memory wasn’t going to fail him. He would not slip away from this moment, the happy clown remembering nothing.
Maharet’s child, all right. But how? Through how many generations had these characteristics survived to flower again in this small female who appeared to be fighting her way towards the stage at the end of the hall?
It was not impossible, of course. He quickly realized it. Perhaps three hundred ancestors stood between this twentieth-century woman and the long ago afternoon when he had put on the King’s medallion and stepped down from the dais to commit the King’s rape. Maybe even less than that. A mere fraction of this crowd, to put it more neatly in perspective.
But more astonishing than this, that Maharet knew her own descendants. And know this woman Maharet did. The tall blood drinker’s mind yielded that fact immediately.
He scanned the tall Nordic one. Maharet, alive. Maharet, the guardian of her mortal family. Maharet, the embodiment of illimitable strength and will. Maharet who had given him, this blond servant, no explanation of the dreams of the twins, but had sent him here instead to do her bidding: save Jessica.
Ah, but she lives, Khayman thought. She lives, and if she lives then in a real way, they both live, the red-haired sisters!
Khayman studied the creature even more intently, probing even deeper. But all he caught now was the fierce protectiveness. Rescue Jesse, not merely from the danger of the Mother but from this place altogether, where Jesse’s eyes would see what no one could ever explain away.
And how he loathed the Mother, this tall, fair being with the posture of a warrior and a priest in one. He loathed that the Mother had disrupted the serenity of his timeless and melancholy existence; loathed that his sad, sweet love for this woman, Jessica, exacerbated the alarm he felt for himself. He knew the extent of the destruction too, that every blood drinker from one end of this continent to the other had been destroyed, save for a precious few, most of whom were under this roof, never dreaming of the fate that threatened them.
He knew as well of the dreams of the twins, but he did not understand them. After all, two redheaded sisters he had never known; only one red-haired beauty ruled his life. And once again Khayman saw Maharet’s face, a vagrant image of softened weary human eyes peering from a porcelain mask: Mael, do not ask me anything more. But do as I tell you.
Silence. The blood drinker was aware of the surveillance suddenly. With a little jerk of his head he looked around the hall, trying to spot the intruder.
The name had done it, as names so often do. The creature had felt himself known, recognized. And Khayman had recognized the name at once, connecting it with the Mael of Lestat’s pages. Undoubtedly they were one and the same—this was the Druid priest who had lured Marius into the sacred grove where the blood god had made him one of its own, and sent him off to Egypt to find the Mother and the Father.
Yes, this was the same Mael. And the creature felt himself recognized and hated it.
After the initial spasm of rage, all thought and emotion vanished. A rather dizzying display of strength, Khayman conceded. He relaxed in the chair. But the creature couldn’t find him. Two dozen other white faces he picked out of the crowd, but not Khayman.
Intrepid Jessica had meantime reached her destination. Ducking low, she’d slipped through the heavy-muscled motorcycle