The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [305]
I let him go, and I stood up and sheathed my sword.
I walked a few paces from him, and collapsed upon a wet stone bench.
Far away, busy figures labored about the shattered window of the palace.
But the night lay between us and those confused mortals, and I looked at him listlessly as he lay still.
His face was turned to me, but not by design, his hair a tangle of curls and blood. And with his eyes closed, and his hand open beside him, he appeared the abandoned offspring of time and supernatural accident, someone as miserable as myself.
What had he done to become what he was? Could one so young so long ago have guessed the meaning of any decision, let alone the vow to become this?
I rose, and walking slowly to him, I stood over him and looked at him, at the blood that soaked his lace shirt and stained his face.
It seemed he sighed, that I heard the passage of his breath.
He didn’t open his eyes, and to mortals perhaps there would have been no expression there. But I felt his sorrow. I felt its immensity, and I wished I didn’t feel it, and for one moment I understood the gulf that divided us, and the gulf that divided his attempt to overpower me from my rather simple defense of myself.
Desperately he had tried to vanquish what he did not comprehend.
And impulsively and almost effortlessly I had beaten him back.
All my pain with Nicolas came back to me and Gabrielle’s words and Nicolas’s denunciations. My anger was nothing to his misery, his despair.
And this perhaps was the reason that I reached down and gathered him up. And maybe I did it because he was so exquisitely beautiful and so lost, and we were after all of the same ilk.
Natural enough, wasn’t it, that one of his own should take him away from this place where mortals would sooner or later have approached him, driven him stumbling away.
He gave no resistance to me. In a moment he was standing on his own feet. And then he walked drowsily beside me, my arm about his shoulder, bolstering him and steadying him until we were moving away from the Palais Royal, towards the rue St.-Honoré.
I only half glanced at the figures passing us, until I saw a familiar shape under the trees, with no scent of mortality coming from it, and I realized that Gabrielle had been there for some time.
She came forward hesitantly and silently, her face stricken when she saw the blood-drenched lace and the lacerations on his white skin, and she reached out as if to help me with the burden of him though she did not seem to know how.
Somewhere far off in the darkened gardens, the others were near. I heard them before I saw them. Nicki was there too.
They had come as Gabrielle had come, drawn over the miles, it seemed, by the tumult, or what vague messages I could not imagine, and they merely waited and watched as we moved away.
2
E TOOK him with us to the livery stables, and there I put him on my mare. But he looked as if he would let himself fall off at any moment, and so I mounted behind him, and the three of us rode out.
All the way through the country, I wondered what I would do. I wondered what it meant to bring him to my lair. Gabrielle didn’t give any protest. Now and then she glanced over at him. I heard nothing from him, and he was small and self-contained as he sat in front of me, light as a child but not a child.
Surely he had always known where the tower was, but had its bars kept him out? Now I meant to take him inside it. And why didn’t Gabrielle say something to me? It was the meeting we had wanted, it was the thing for which we had waited, but surely she knew what he had just done.
When we finally dismounted, he walked ahead of me, and he waited for me to reach the gate. I had taken out the iron key to the lock and I studied him, wondering what promises one exacts from such a monster before opening one’s door. Did the ancient laws of hospitality mean anything to the creatures of the night?
His eyes were large and brown and defeated. Almost drowsy they seemed. He regarded me for a long silent moment and then he reached