The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [325]
I gave an audible sigh of relief. Yet his tone was so changed, so strong, that it sounded a deep silent alarm in me. This was the coven master, surely, this quiet and forceful one, the one who would survive, no matter how the orphan in him wept.
But then he smiled slowly and gracefully, and there was something sad and endearing in his face. He became the da Vinci saint again, or more truly the little god from Caravaggio. And it seemed for a moment he couldn’t be anything evil or dangerous. He was too radiant, too full of all that was wise and good.
“Remember my warnings,” he said. “Not my curses.”
Gabrielle and I both nodded.
“And when you have need of me,” he said, “I will be here.”
Then Gabrielle did the totally surprising thing of embracing him and kissing him. And I did the same.
He was pliant and gentle and loving in our arms. And he let us know without words that he was going to the coven, and we could find him there tomorrow night.
The next moment he was gone, and Gabrielle and I were there alone together, as if he’d never been in the room. I could hear no sound anywhere in the tower. Nothing but the wind in the forest beyond.
And when I climbed the steps, I found the gate open and the fields stretching to the woods in unbroken quiet.
I loved him. I knew it, as incomprehensible to me as he was. But I was so glad it was finished. So glad that we could go on. Yet I held to the bars for a long time just looking at the distant woods, and the dim glow far beyond that the city made upon the lowering clouds.
And the grief I felt was not only for the loss of him, it was for Nicki, and for Paris, and for myself.
5
HEN I came back down to the crypt I saw her building up the fire again with the last of the wood. In a slow, weary fashion, she stoked the blaze, and the light was red on her profile and in her eyes.
I sat quietly on the bench watching her, watching the explosion of sparks against the blackened bricks.
“Did he give you what you wanted?” I asked.
“In his own way, yes,” she said. She put the poker aside and sat down opposite, her hair spilling down over her shoulders as she rested her hands beside her on the bench. “I tell you, I don’t care if I never look upon another one of our kind,” she said coldly. “I am done with their legends, their curses, their sorrows. And done with their insufferable humanity, which may be the most astonishing thing they’ve revealed. I’m ready for the world again, Lestat, as I was on the night I died.”
“But Marius—” I said excitedly. “Mother, there are ancient ones—ones who have used immortality in a wholly different way.”
“Are there?” she asked. “Lestat, you’re too generous with your imagination. The story of Marius has the quality of a fairy tale.” “No, that’s not true.”
“So the orphan demon claims descent not from the filthy peasant devils he resembles,” she said, “but from a lost lord, almost a god. I tell you any dirty-faced village child dreaming at the kitchen fire can tell you tales like that.”
“Mother, he couldn’t have invented Marius,” I said. “I may have a great deal of imagination, but he has almost none. He couldn’t have made up the images. I tell you he saw those things …”
“I hadn’t thought of it exactly that way,” she admitted with a little smile. “But he could well have borrowed Marius from the legends he heard …”
“No,” I said. “There was a Marius and there is a Marius still. And there are others like him. There are Children of the Millennia who have done better than these Children of Darkness with the gifts given them.”
“Lestat, what is important is that we do better,” she said. “All I learned from Armand, finally, was that immortals find death seductive and ultimately irresistible, that they fail to conquer death or humanity in their minds. Now I want to take that knowledge and wear it like armor as I move through the world. And luckily, I don’t mean the world of change which these creatures have found so dangerous.