But not quite yet. We’d been walking in the Grand Couvert of the Tuileries—in tree-shrouded darkness. “I’m thirsting,” I said aloud. At once he suggested where we might hunt.
“No, for your blood,” I said, pushing him backwards against the slender but firm trunk of a tree.
“You damnable brat,” he seethed.
“Oh, yes, despise me, please,” I said as I closed in. I pushed his face to one side, kissing his throat first, and then sinking my fangs very slowly, my tongue ready for those first radiant drops. I think I heard him say the single word, “Caution,” but once the blood struck the roof of my mouth, I wasn’t hearing clearly or seeing clearly and didn’t care.
I had to force myself to pull back. I held a mouthful of blood as long as I could until it seemed to be absorbed without my swallowing, and I let those last ripples of warmth pass through my fingers and toes.
“And you?” I asked. He was slumped there against the tree, obviously dizzy. I went to take him in my arms.
“Get away from me,” he growled. And started off walking, fast away from me. “Stick your filthy droit du seigneur right through your greedy heart.”
But I caught up with him and he didn’t resist when I put my arm around him and we walked on together like that.
“Now, that’s an idea,” I said, kissing him quickly though he stared forward and continued to ignore me. “If I was ‘King of the Vampires,’ I’d make it the right of every maker to drink from his fledgling anytime he chose. Maybe it would be good to be king. Didn’t Mel Brooks say, ‘It’s good to be the king’?”
And then in his droll cultured British voice he said with uncharacteristic brashness, “Kindly shut up.”
Seems I heard other voices in Paris; seems I sensed things. Seems I might have paid a little more attention, and not so cavalierly lumped all intrusions on my mind with the paparazzi vampires.
There was a point right after that when we were walking near the old catacombs, where the bones of the old eighteenth-century cemetery, Les Innocents, had been gathered, that I heard something, something distinct and plaintive, the voice of an old immortal singing, laughing, murmuring, “Ah, young one, you are riding the Devil’s Road in such glory.” I knew that voice, knew that timbre, that slow lilting tone. “And with your venerable battle-ax beneath your splendid raiment.” But I closed my ears. I wanted to be with David just then, and only David. We made our way back to the Tuileries. I didn’t want complications, or new discoveries. I wasn’t ready yet to be open as I’d once been to the mysteries surrounding me. And so I ignored that strange rumbling song. I never even knew if David could hear it.
And finally I told David I had to go back now into exile, I had no choice. I assured him that I was not in danger of trying to “end it,” just not ready at all to come together with others or to think about the horrific possibilities that had alarmed Jesse. He was all mollified by then and didn’t want me to vanish on him.
Yes, I have a safe refuge, I insisted. A good refuge. Be assured. Yes, I will use the iPhone magic to communicate.
I had turned to leave him when he took hold of me. His teeth went into the artery before I could think what was happening, and his arms went tight around my chest.
His pull was so strong that I swooned. Seems I turned and put my arms around him, catching his head in my left hand, and struggled with him, but the visions had opened up, and I didn’t know one realm from the other for a moment, and the manicured paths and trees of the Tuileries had become the Savage Garden of all the world. I’d fallen into a divine surrender, with his heart pounding against my heart. There was no restraint in him, no caution such as I’d shown in feeding on him.
I came to myself on the ground, my back to the trunk of a young chestnut tree, and he was gone. And the mild balmy night had turned to a gray winter dawn.
Home I went—to my “undisclosed location,” only minutes away on the currents of the wind, to ponder what I’d learned from my friends because I couldn’t do anything else.
The next night on rising, I caught the scent of David on my jacket, even on my hands.
I fought off the desire for him and forced myself to relearn how to use my powerful computer, and to obtain yet another e-mail address through another service, and then I sent a long missive to Maharet. I asked if I might visit her, wherever she was, and if not, would she communicate with me in this way? I let her know that I was aware of how things were changing for us, and how Benji’s pleas for leadership on the part of the older ones echoed the feelings of many, but I myself did not know how to respond. I asked for her thoughts.
Her communication was brief. I must not try to find her. Under no circumstances approach her.
Of course I asked why.
She never replied.
And six months later, her numbers were disconnected. E-mail no longer valid.
And in time I forgot again how to use the computer. The little iPhone rang a number of times. It was David. We’d talk, it would be brief, and then I’d forget to recharge the little thing. He did tell me he’d found Marius in Brazil and he was heading there to talk with him. He told me that Daniel Malloy, Marius’s companion, was in very good spirits and that Daniel was taking him to Marius. But I didn’t hear from him again.
Truth was, I lost the little iPhone. And went back to calling my attorneys in Paris and New York now as I had always done, with an old-fashioned landline phone.
A year passed.
I was lodged now in my father’s chateau in the mountains of the Auvergne—in my special hiding place in “plain sight,” so to speak, and where no one thought to look for me—the renovations on it now almost complete.
And the Voice came again.
“Have you no desire to punish those fledglings in the capital?” he asked. “Those vermin who chased you out of Paris last time you were roaming there?”
“Ah, Voice, where have you been?” I asked. I was at my desk drawing up plans for the new rooms that would soon be added to this old chateau. “Have you been well?”
“Why did you not destroy them?” he asked. “Why do you not go there and destroy them now?”
“Not my style, Voice,” I said. “Too often in the past I’ve taken life, both human and preternatural. I have no interest now in doing such things.”
“They drove you out of your city!”
“No, they didn’t,” I said. “Goodbye, Voice. I have things to do.”
“I was afraid you would take this attitude,” he said. “I should have known.”
“Where are you, Voice? Who are you? Why do we always meet like this in audial encounters at odd moments? Aren’t we ever going to meet again face-to-face?”
Ah, what a blunder. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I looked to the great eighteenth-century mirror over the mantelpiece, and there he was of course in the guise of my reflection, down to the old bag-sleeve shirt I wore, and my loose hair, only he wasn’t reflecting me otherwise, but rather peered at me as if he were trapped in a glass box. Lestat’s face twisted with anger, almost petulant, childish.
I studied the image in the mirror for a moment and then I used my considerable powers to force it to disappear. That felt extremely good. Subtle and good. I could do that now. I knew. And though I could hear a low rumbling in my head, I was able to sink it down, down below the lovely music, the music of Sybelle playing the piano that came from my computer, Sybelle broadcasting from New York.
The simple fact was, I wasn’t interested in him anymore. I didn’t even bother to thank him for advising me to come home here, home to these stone rooms in which I’d been born, home to the quiet of this mountaintop. Why didn’t I do that? It was he who’d put the idea in my head, he who’d guided me back to the old fields and forests, to this sublime rural quiet, this breathtaking and familiar solitude where I felt so safe, so content.
I didn’t care enough to thank him.
Oh, it would have been nice to identify him before banishing him forever. But we don’t always get what we want.