The queen of the damned - Anne Rice [58]
But they didn’t know about the burnt-out coven houses! They didn’t know about the twins! About the cry of danger!
They were all in a crowded room, actually, inside the Villa, and Louis was leaning against the mantel in a frock coat. Everyone was there! Even the twins were there! “Thank God, you’ve come,” Daniel said. He kissed Louis on one cheek and then the other decorously. “Why, my skin is as pale as yours!”
He cried out suddenly as his heart was let go, and the air filled his lungs. The garden again. The grass was all around him. The garden grew up over his head. Don’t leave me here, not here against the earth.
“Drink, Daniel.” The priest said the Latin words as he poured the Holy Communion wine into his mouth. The red-haired twins took the sacred plates—the heart, the brain. “This the brain and the heart of my mother I devour with all respect for the spirit of my mother—”
“God, give it to me!” He’d knocked the chalice to the marble floor of the church, so clumsy, but God! The blood!
He sat up, crushing Armand to him, drawing it out of him, draught after draught. They had fallen over together in the soft bank of flowers. Armand lay beside him, and his mouth was open on Armand’s throat, and the blood was an unstoppable fount.
“Come into the Villa of the Mysteries,” said Louis to him. Louis was touching his shoulder. “We’re waiting.” The twins were embracing each other, stroking each other’s long curling red hair.
The kids were screaming outside the auditorium because there were no more tickets. They would camp in the parking lot until tomorrow night.
“Do we have tickets?” he asked. “Armand, the tickets!”
Danger. Ice. It’s coming from the one trapped beneath the ice!
Something hit him, hard. He was floating.
“Sleep, beloved.”
“I want to go back to the garden, the Villa.” He tried to open his eyes. His belly was hurting. Strangest pain, it seemed so far away.
“You know he’s buried under the ice?”
“Sleep,” Armand said, covering him with the blanket. “And when you wake, you’ll be just like me. Dead.”
SAN FRANCISCO. He knew he was there before he even opened his eyes. And such a ghastly dream, he was glad to leave it—suffocating, blackness, and riding the rough and terrifying current of the sea! But the dream was fading. A dream without sight, and only the sound of the water, the feel of the water! A dream of unspeakable fear. He’d been a woman in it, helpless, without a tongue to scream.
Let it go away.
Something about the wintry air on his face, a white freshness that he could almost taste. San Francisco, of course. The cold moved over him like a tight garment, yet inside he was deliciously warm.
Immortal. Forever.
He opened his eyes. Armand had put him here. Through the viscid darkness of the dream, he’d heard Armand telling him to remain. Armand had told him that here he would be safe.
Here.
The French doors stood open all along the far wall. And the room itself, opulent, cluttered, one of those splendid places that Armand so often found, so dearly loved.
Look at the sheer lace panel blown back from the French doors. Look at the white feathers curling and glowing in the Aubusson carpet. He climbed to his feet and went out through the open doors.
A great mesh of branches rose between him and the wet shining sky. Stiff foliage of the Monterey cypress. And down there, through the branches, against a velvet blackness, he saw the great burning arc of the Golden Gate Bridge. The fog poured like thick white smoke past the immense towers. In fits and gusts it tried to swallow the pylons, the cables, then vanished as if the bridge itself with its glittering stream of traffic burnt it away.
Too magnificent, this spectacle—and the deep dark outline of the distant hills beneath their mantle of warm lights. Ah, but to take one tiny detail—the damp rooftops spilling downhill away from him, or the gnarled branches rising in front of him. Like elephant hide, this bark, this living skin.
Immortal . . . forever.
He ran his hands back through his hair and a gentle