The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [342]
We laughed and we kissed one another as we walked through the ashes, my white brothers, their white wives, the ghostly children chattering together about victims, my blind father, who like a biblical figure had risen, crying:
“I CAN SEE!”
My oldest brother put his arm around me. He looked marvelous in decent clothes. I’d never seen him look so good, and the vampiric blood had made him so spare and so spiritual in expression.
“You know it’s a damn good thing you came when you did with all the Dark Gifts.” He laughed cheerfully.
“The Dark Tricks, dear, the Dark Tricks,” said his wife.
“Because if you hadn’t,” he continued, “why, we’d all be dead!”
5
HE house was empty. The trunks had been sent on. The ship would leave Alexandria in two nights. Only a small valise remained with me. On shipboard the son of the Marquis must now and then change his clothes. And, of course, the violin.
Gabrielle stood by the archway to the garden, slender, long-legged, beautifully angular in her white cotton garments, the hat on as always, her hair loose.
Was that for me, the long loose hair?
My grief was rising, a tide that included all the losses, the dead and the undead.
But it went away and the sense of sinking returned, the sense of the dream in which we navigate with or without will.
It struck me that her hair might have been described as a shower of gold, that all the old poetry makes sense when you look at one whom you have loved. Lovely the angles of her face, her implacable little mouth.
“Tell me what you need of me, Mother,” I said quietly. Civilized this room. Desk. Lamp. Chair. All my brilliantly colored birds given away, probably for sale in the bazaar. Gray African parrots that live to be as old as men. Nicki had lived to be thirty.
“Do you require money from me?”
Great beautiful flush to her face, eyes a flash of moving light—blue and violet. For a moment she looked human. We might as well have been standing in her room at home. Books, the damp walls, the fire. Was she human then?
The brim of the hat covered her face completely for an instant as she bowed her head. Inexplicably she asked:
“But where will you go?”
“To a little house in the rue Dumaine in the old French city of New Orleans,” I answered coldly, precisely. “And after he has died and is at rest, I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“You can’t mean this,” she said.
“I am booked on the next ship out of Alexandria,” I said. “I will go to Naples, then on to Barcelona. I will leave from Lisbon for the New World.”
Her face seemed to narrow, her features to sharpen. Her lips moved just a little but she didn’t say anything. And then I saw the tears rising in her eyes, and I felt her emotion as if it were reaching out to touch me. I looked away, busied myself with something on the desk, then simply held my hands very still so they wouldn’t tremble. I thought, I am glad Nicki took his hands with him into the fire, because if he had not, I would have to go back to Paris and get them before I could go on.
“But you can’t be going to him!” she whispered.
Him? Oh. My father.
“What does it matter? I am going!” I said.
She moved her head just a little in a negative gesture. She came near to the desk. Her step was lighter than Armand’s,
“Has any of our kind ever made such a crossing?” she asked under her breath.
“Not that I know of. In Rome they said no.”
“Perhaps it can’t be done, this crossing.”
“It can be done. You know it can.” We had sailed the seas before in our cork-lined coffins. Pity the leviathan who troubles me.
She came even nearer and looked down at me. And the pain in her face couldn’t be concealed anymore. Ravishing she was. Why had I ever dressed her in ball gowns or plumed hats or pearls?
“You know where to reach me,” I said, but the bitterness of my tone had no conviction to it. “The addresses of my banks