The queen of the damned - Anne Rice [243]
I could feel her collecting her powers; I could see it, her body tensing, breasts thrust forward, her hands rising as if reflexively, fingers curled.
The woman was struck by it, shoved backwards, but instantly resisted. And then she too straightened, her eyes widening, and she rushed forward so swiftly I couldn’t follow it, her hands out for the Queen.
I saw her fingers, caked with mud, streaking towards Akasha; I saw Akasha’s face as she was caught by her long black hair. I heard her scream. Then I saw her profile, as her head struck the western window and shattered it, the glass crashing down in great dagged shards.
A violent shock passed through me; I could neither breathe nor move. I was falling to the floor. I couldn’t control my limbs. Akasha’s headless body was sliding down the fractured glass wall, the shards still falling around it. Blood streamed down the broken glass behind her. And the woman held Akasha’s severed head by the hair!
Akasha’s black eyes blinked, widened. Her mouth opened as if to scream again.
And then the light was going out all around me; it was as if the fire had been extinguished, only it hadn’t, and as I rolled over on the carpet, crying, my hand clawing at it involuntarily, I saw the distant flames through a dark rosy haze.
I tried to lift my weight. I couldn’t. I could hear Marius calling to me, Marius silently calling only my name.
Then I was rising, just a little, and all my weight pressed against my aching arms and hands.
Akasha’s eyes were fixed on me. Her head was lying there almost within my reach, and the body lay on its back, blood gushing from the stump of the neck. Suddenly the right arm quivered; it was lifted, then it flopped back down to the floor. Then it rose again, the hand dangling. It was reaching for the head!
I could help it! I could use the powers she’d given me to try to move it, to help it reach the head. And as I struggled to see in the dimming light, the body lurched, shivered, and flopped down closer to the head.
But the twins! They were beside the head and the body. Mekare, staring at the head dully, with those vacant red-rimmed eyes. And Maharet, as if with the last breath in her, kneeling now beside her sister, over the body of the Mother, as the room grew darker and colder, and Akasha’s face began to grow pale and ghostly white as if all the light inside were going out.
I should have been afraid; I should have been in terror, the cold was creeping over me, and I could hear my own choking sobs. But the strangest elation overcame me; I realized suddenly what I was seeing:
“It’s the dream,” I said. Far away I could hear my own voice. “The twins and the body of the Mother, do you see it! The image from the dream!”
Blood spread out from Akasha’s head into the weave of the carpet; Maharet was sinking down, her hands out flat, and Mekare too had weakened and bent down over the body, but it was still the same image, and I knew why I’d seen it now, I knew what it meant!
“The funeral feast!” Marius cried. “The heart and the brain, one of you—take them into yourself. It is the only chance.”
Yes, that was it. And they knew! No one had to tell them. They knew!
That was the meaning! And they’d all seen it, and they all knew. Even as my eyes were closing, I realized it; and this lovely feeling deepened, this sense of completeness, of something finished at last. Of something known!
Then I was floating, floating in the ice cold darkness again as if I were in Akasha’s arms, and we were rising into the stars.
A sharp crackling sound brought me back. Not dead yet, but dying. And where are those I love?
Fighting for life still, I tried to open my eyes; it seemed impossible. But then I saw them in the thickening gloom—the two of them, their red hair catching the hazy glow of the fire; the one holding the bloody brain in her mud-covered fingers, and the other, the dripping heart. All but dead they were, their own eyes glassy, their limbs moving as if through water. And Akasha stared forward still, her mouth open, the blood gushing