The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [549]
Ah, my brothers and sisters, at last!
But it was hatred he felt around him. A rather dishonest hatred! They loved Lestat and condemned him simultaneously. They loved the very act of hating, punishing. Suddenly, he caught the eye of a powerful hulking creature with greasy black hair who bared his fangs in an ugly flash and then revealed the plan in stunning completeness. Beyond the prying eyes of mortals, they would hack Lestat’s limbs from his body; they would sever his head; then the remains would be burnt on a pyre by the sea. The end of the monster and his legend. Are you with us or against us?
Daniel laughed out loud. “You’ll never kill him,” Daniel said. Yet he gaped as he glimpsed the sharpened scythe the creature held against his chest inside his coat. Then the beast turned and vanished. Daniel gazed upwards through the smoky light. One of them now. Know all their secrets! He felt giddy, on the verge of madness.
Armand’s hand closed on his shoulder. They had come to the very center of the main floor. The crowd was getting denser by the second. Pretty girls in black silk gowns shoved and pushed against the crude bikers in their worn black leather. Soft feathers brushed his cheek; he saw a red devil with giant horns; a bony skeleton face topped with golden curls and pearl combs. Random cries rose in the bluish gloom. The bikers howled like wolves; someone shouted “Lestat” in a deafening voice, and others took up the call instantly.
Armand again had the lost expression, the expression that belonged to deep concentration, as if what he saw before him meant nothing at all.
“Thirty perhaps,” he whispered in Daniel’s ear, “no more than that, and one or two so old they could destroy the rest of us in an instant.”
“Where, tell me where?”
“Listen,” Armand said. “And see for yourself. There is no hiding from them.”
Khayman
AHARET’S child. Jessica. The thought caught Khayman off guard. Protect Maharet’s child. Somehow escape from here.
He roused himself, senses sharpened. He’d been listening to Marius again, Marius trying to reach the young untuned ears of the Vampire Lestat, who preened backstage, before a broken mirror. What could this mean, Maharet’s child, Jessica, and when the thoughts pertained, without doubt, to a mortal woman?
It came again, the unexpected communication of some strong yet unveiled mind: Take care of Jesse. Somehow stop the Mother.… But there were no words really—it was no more than a shining glimpse into another’s soul, a sparkling overflow.
Khayman’s eyes moved slowly over the balconies opposite, over the swarming main floor. Far away in some remote corner of the city, an old one wandered, full of fear of the Queen yet longing to look upon her face. He had come here to die, but to know her face in the final instant.
Khayman closed his eyes to shut this out.
Then he heard it again suddenly. Jessica, my Jessica. And behind the soulful call, the knowledge of Maharet! The sudden vision of Maharet, enshrined in love, and ancient and white as he himself was. It was a moment of stunning pain. He slumped back in the wooden seat and bowed his head just a little. Then he looked out again over the steel rafters, the ugly tangles of black wire and rusted cylindrical lights. Where are you?
There, far away against the opposite wall, he saw the figure from whom the thoughts were coming. Ah, the oldest he had seen so far. A giant Nordic blood drinker, seasoned and cunning, dressed in coarse brown rawhide garments, with flowing straw-colored hair, his heavy brows and small deep-set eyes giving him a brooding expression.
The being was tracking a small mortal woman who fought her way through the crowds of the main floor. Jesse, Maharet’s mortal daughter.
Maddened, disbelieving, Khayman focused tightly on the small woman. He felt his eyes mist with tears as he saw the astonishing