The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [306]
I stared helplessly as with a loud grinding noise the gate started to rip loose from the stone. But he stopped and contented himself with merely bending the iron bar a little. The point had been made. He could have entered this tower anytime that he wished.
I examined the iron bar that he’d twisted. I had beaten him. Could I do what he had just done? I didn’t know. And unable to calculate my own powers, how could I ever calculate his?
“Come,” Gabrielle said a little impatiently. And she led the way down the stairs to the dungeon crypt.
It was cold here as always, the fresh spring air never touching the place. She made a big fire in the old hearth while I lighted the candles. And as he sat on the stone bench watching us, I saw the effect of the warmth on him, the way that his body seemed to grow slightly larger, the way that he breathed it in.
As he looked about, it was as if he were absorbing the light. His gaze was clear.
Impossible to overestimate the effect of warmth and light on vampires. Yet the old coven had forsworn both.
I settled on another bench, and I let my eyes roam about the broad low chamber as his eyes roamed.
Gabrielle had been standing all this while. And now she approached him. She had taken out a handkerchief and she touched this to his face.
He stared at her in the same way that he stared at the fire and the candles, and the shadows leaping on the curved ceiling. This seemed to interest him as simply as anything else.
And I felt a shudder when I realized the bruises on his face were now almost gone! The bones were whole again, the shape of the face having been fully restored, and he was only a little gaunt from the blood he had lost.
My heart expanded slightly, against my will, as it had on the battlements when I had heard his voice.
I thought of the pain only half an hour ago in the Palais when the lie had broken with the stab of his fangs into my neck.
I hated him.
But I couldn’t stop looking at him. Gabrielle combed his hair for him. She took his hands and wiped the blood from them. And he seemed helpless as all this was done. And she had not so much the expression of a ministering angel as an expression of curiosity, a desire to be near him and to touch him and examine him. In the quavering illumination they looked at one another.
He hunched forward a little, eyes darkening and full of expression now as they turned again to the grate. Had it not been for the blood on his lace ruff, he might have looked human. Might …
“What will you do now?” I asked. I spoke to make it clear to Gabrielle. “Will you remain in Paris and let Eleni and the others go on?”
No answer from him. He was studying me, studying the stone benches, the sarcophagi. Three sarcophagi.
“Surely you know what they’re doing,” I said. “Will you leave Paris or remain?”
It seemed he wanted to tell me again the magnitude of what I had done to him and the others, but this faded away. For one moment his face was wretched. It was defeated and warm and full of human misery. How old was he, I wondered. How long ago had he been a human who looked like that?
He heard me. But he didn’t give an answer. He looked to Gabrielle, who stood near the fire, and then to me. And silently, he said, Love me. You have destroyed everything! But if you love me, it can all be restored in a new form. Love me.
This silent entreaty had an eloquence, however, that I can’t put into words.
“What can I do to make you love me?” he whispered. “What can I give? The knowledge of all I have witnessed, the secrets of our powers, the mystery of what I am?”
It seemed blasphemous to answer. And as I had on the battlements, I found myself on the edge of tears. For all the purity of his silent communications, his voice gave a lovely resonance to his sentiments when he actually spoke.
It occurred to me as it had in Notre Dame that he spoke the way angels must speak, if they exist.
But I was awakened from this irrelevant thought, this obviating thought, by the