The queen of the damned - Anne Rice [125]
Santino cleaved to her, feeling only her strength, his heart shrunken and bruised from the distant yet inescapable cries of those whom the Queen had slaughtered. Feeling the soft brush of Khayman’s gaze, he pulled his black cloak tight around his face. Pandora took no notice whatsoever.
Khayman veered away. Softly, it hurt him to see them touch; it hurt him to see the two of them together.
In the mansion on the hill, Daniel slit the throat of a wriggling rat and let its blood flow into a crystal glass. “Lestat’s trick,” he said studying it in the light. Armand sat still by the fire, watching the red jewel of blood in the glass as Daniel lifted it to his lips lovingly.
Back into the night Khayman moved, wandering higher again, far from the city lights as if in a great orbit.
Mael, answer me. Let me know where you are. Had the Mother’s cold fiery beam struck him, too? Or did he mourn now so deeply for Jesse that he hearkened to nothing and no one? Poor Jesse, dazzled by miracles, struck down by a fledgling in the blink of an eye before anyone could prevent it.
Maharet’s child, my child!
Khayman was afraid of what he might see, afraid of what he dared not seek to alter. But maybe the Druid was simply too strong for him now; the Druid concealed himself and his charge from all eyes and all minds. Either that or the Queen had had her way and it was finished.
Jesse
SO QUIET here. She lay on a bed that was hard and soft, and her body felt floppy like that of a rag doll. She could lift her hand but then it would drop, and still she could not see, except in a vague ghostly way things that might have been an illusion.
For example lamps around her; ancient clay lamps shaped like fish and filled with oil. They gave a thick odoriferous perfume to the room. Was this a funeral parlor?
It came again, the fear that she was dead, locked in the flesh yet disconnected. She heard a curious sound; what was it? A scissors cutting. It was trimming the edges of her hair; the feel of it traveled to her scalp. She felt it even in her intestines.
A tiny vagrant hair was plucked suddenly from her face; one of those annoying hairs, quite out of place, which women so hate. She was being groomed for the coffin, wasn’t she? Who else would take such care, lifting her hand now, and inspecting her fingernails so carefully.
But the pain came again, an electric flash moving down her back and she screamed. She screamed aloud in this room where she’d been only hours before in this very bed with the chains creaking.
She heard a gasp from someone near her. She tried to see, but she only saw the lamps again. And some dim figure standing in the window. Miriam watching.
“Where?” he asked. He was startled, trying to see the vision. Hadn’t this happened before?
“Why can’t I open my eyes?” she asked. He could look forever and he would never see Miriam.
“Your eyes are open,” he said. How raw and tender his voice sounded. “I can’t give you any more unless I give it all. We are not healers. We are slayers. It’s time for you to tell me what you want. There is no one to help me.”
I don’t know what I want. All I know is I don’t want to die! I don’t want to stop living. What cowards we are, she thought, what liars. A great fatalistic sadness had accompanied her all the way to this night, yet there had been the secret hope of this always! Not merely to see, to know, but to be part of . . . .
She wanted to explain, to hone it carefully with audible words, but the pain came again. A fiery brand touched to her spine, the pain shooting into her legs. And then the blessed numbness. It seemed the room she couldn’t see grew dark and the flames of the ancient lamps sputtered. Outside the forest whispered. The forest writhed