The queen of the damned - Anne Rice [40]
“Come in, Daniel, sit down. I never expected you back so soon.”
“You son of a bitch,” Daniel would say. “You wanted me here, you summoned me. I couldn’t eat, sleep, nothing, just wander and think of you. You did it.”
Armand would smile, sometimes even laugh. Armand had a rich, beautiful laugh, always eloquent of gratitude as well as humor. He looked and sounded mortal when he laughed. “Calm yourself, Daniel. Your heart’s racing. It frightens me.” Small crease to the smooth forehead, the voice for a moment deepened by compassion. “Tell me what you want, Daniel, and I’ll get it for you. Why do you keep running away?”
“Lies, you bastard. Say that you wanted me. You’ll torment me forever, won’t you, and then you’ll watch me die, and you’ll find that interesting, won’t you? It was true what Louis said. You watch them die, your mortal slaves, they mean nothing to you. You’ll watch the colors change in my face as I die.”
“That’s Louis’s language,” Armand said patiently. “Please don’t quote that book to me. I’d rather die than see you die, Daniel.”
“Then give it to me! Damn you! Immortality that close, as close as your arms.”
“No, Daniel, because I’d rather die than do that, too.”
But even if Armand did not cause this madness that brought Daniel home, surely he always knew where Daniel was. He could hear Daniel’s call. The blood connected them, it had to—the precious tiny drinks of burning preternatural blood. Never enough to do more than awaken dreams in Daniel, and the thirst for eternity, to make the flowers in the wallpaper sing and dance. Whatever, Armand could always find him, of that he had no doubt.
IN THE early years, even before the blood exchange, Armand had pursued Daniel with the cunning of a harpy. There had been no place on earth that Daniel could hide.
Horrifying yet tantalizing, their beginning in New Orleans, twelve years ago when Daniel had entered a crumbling old house in the Garden District and known at once that it was the vampire Lestat’s lair.
Ten days before he’d left San Francisco after his night-long interview with the vampire Louis, suffering from the final confirmation of the frightening tale he had been told. In a sudden embrace, Louis had demonstrated his supernatural power to drain Daniel almost to the point of death. The puncture wounds had disappeared, but the memory had left Daniel near to madness. Feverish, sometimes delirious, he had traveled no more than a few hundred miles a day. In cheap roadside motels, where he forced himself to take nourishment, he had duplicated the tapes of the interview one by one, sending the copies off to a New York publisher, so that a book was in the making before he ever stood before Lestat’s gate.
But that had been secondary, the publication, an event connected with the values of a dimming and distant world.
He had to find the vampire Lestat. He had to unearth the immortal who had made Louis, the one who still survived somewhere in this damp, decadent, and beautiful old city, waiting perhaps for Daniel to awaken him, to bring him out into the century that had terrified him and driven him underground.
It was what Louis wanted, surely. Why else had he given this mortal emissary so many clues as to where Lestat could be found? Yet some of the details were misleading. Was this ambivalence on Louis’s part? It did not matter, finally. In the public records, Daniel had found the title to the property, and the street number, under the unmistakable name: Lestat de Lioncourt.
The iron gate had not even been locked, and once he’d hacked his way through the overgrown garden, he had managed easily to break the rusted lock on the front door.
Only a small pocket flash helped him as he entered. But the moon had been high, shining its full white light here and there through the oak branches. He had seen clearly the rows and rows of books stacked to the ceiling, making up the very walls of every room. No human could or would have done such a mad and methodical thing. And then in the upstairs bedroom, he had knelt down in the thick dust that covered