I sized up the situation easily enough and obviously so did Louis.
When the woman started to cry, the man hastily took his leave, but not before receiving an envelope from the woman, which he slipped into his inner coat pocket without so much as a glance at it. He was gone, off fast, towards Jackson Square, and then she sat there brooding, crying, refused another drink from the waiter, insisting to herself that she had to get her husband out of her life, and this was the way to do it and that no one would ever understand the miserable life she'd lived. Then, leaving a bill on the table, she went out. It was done and couldn't be undone. She was hungry; she would have a good dinner and get drunk at her hotel.
Louis went after her.
I went ahead and drifted around to the Rue Royale entrance of Pirates Alley as she came walking towards me, weeping again, head bowed, shoulder bag clasped to her side, her handkerchief twisted in the other hand.
The huge silent cathedral rose to my right like a great shadow. Tourists trickled by, jostling one another; and she came on, with Louis behind her silently, his face like a pale flame in the half-light as he drew up to her and placed his hand, the hand with the emerald ring, on her left shoulder. He turned her as gently as a lover and tenderly pressed her head to the stone wall.
I stood watching as he drank from her, slipping into her mind now to find him and what he was feeling as all that sweet salty blood flooded his mouth and his senses, as the heart of the woman weakened and slowed. He paced himself, letting her recover ever so slightly--the inevitable images of childhood, fetched in desperation as the body realizes that it is losing its vitality, her head drowsing to her right and his fingers holding her chin firmly--and passersby thinking them lovers, and the voices of the city humming and rustling and the scent of rain coming on the breeze.
Suddenly he collected her in both arms and ascended, vanishing so quickly the tourists walking to and fro never saw it happen, only felt the faintest disturbance in the air. Wasn't there someone there a moment ago? Gone. Gone the scent of blood and death.
And so he was using all his faculties now, his new gifts, the gifts of the powerful blood, gifts he wouldn't have come by in the regular scheme of things for maybe another century or maybe never, ascending to the clouds or just up and up into the darkness until he could find a place to deposit her remains on some remote rooftop, tucked between a chimney and a parapet, perhaps, who knew.
Well, if someone did not dispose of the assassin in the subtle disguise, the murder of her husband would take place as usual though all the reasons for it were gone.
But a distant blast of intelligence let me know that Cyril had taken care of the rascal, feasting on him quickly, and then depositing him in the river, while Thorne had hung back to remain with me. Bodyguards have to feed.
Amel was still gone, after all that talk of wanting to see Louis through my eyes, and I'd closed my mind to telepathic voices, and Louis was gone, and I was hungry and tired from riding the wind, and sick at heart. Innocent blood. I wanted innocent blood, not minds and hearts like sewers, but innocent blood. Well, I wasn't going to drink innocent blood. Not while preaching to so many others that they couldn't drink innocent blood. No. I could not.
I walked down Pirates Alley in the direction of the river, and then along under the porches opposite Jackson Square. The shops were closed up. And it seemed a shame. There were crowds close to the river, and I heard the calliope of the tourist steamboat, and for a moment nothing in the whole world seemed changed from when I'd lived and loved here before.
The streets might as well have been mud, and the gas lamps dim and grimy, and the barrooms packed with deliciously filthy riverboat men and the sound of dice and billiard balls, and carriages might have been crowded in the Rue Saint Peter with people coming from the old French Opera on Bourbon at Toulouse. And it might as well have been the night, long after Louis and Claudia had left me after trying to kill me, that Antoine, my fledgling musician, and I had gone to see the premiere of a French opera called Mignon. I'd been scarred and broken and crushed in soul, led as if blind by Antoine, as people scurried out of our path to get away from the burnt one, yet I'd allowed him to bully me to sit there in the dark with him and hear that lustrous clarinet or oboe begin the overture. Music like that could make you feel that you were alive. It could even make you feel like all the pain in the world was headed someplace glorious that could be shared by the simplest of the beings around you.
Well, what did it matter now?
Rain, light rain.
Dampening the spirits of the line outside the Cafe du Monde. But I loved it, and loved the scent of the dust rising from the wet street.
I moved to the head of the line, and dazzled the waiter in charge to believe I had some special right to a table now, a simple little trick of words and charm and soon I was seated in the midst of the throng, and with my hand locked on a hot mug of cafe au lait. The place was packed and noisy with chatter, and waiters coming and going with trays of mugs and plates of sugar-covered beignets. And the open air moved sluggishly in the wet breeze. I looked up at the slowly churning overhead fans, descended on long rods from the dark wood-paneled ceiling, and I fastened on the blades of the nearest fan and felt myself drifting away from memory and reason and just thinking, I am alone, I am alone, I am alone. Amel is with me night and day, yet I am alone. I am a prince and live in a chateau with hundreds under my roof nightly, yet I am alone. I am in a crowded cafe filled with beating hearts and laughter and the sweetest most innocent merriment and I am alone. I stared at the marble top of the table, at the white powdered sugar heaped on the hot doughnuts, and felt the coffee mug growing colder and colder by the second, and remembered from long ago, my father, my old blind father, sitting up in his wretched bed, hung with all the mended mosquito netting, being fed by a sweet lovely servant girl, and complaining, Nothing is hot enough, nothing is hot enough anymore.
King David dying in the Bible, begging for warmth...and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat....
Terrible thing to be cold and alone. The cup was cold. The marble top of the table was cold, and the wind was cold now thanks to the rain, and the fans were churning the cold air so slowly. I thought of King David lying there, as they brought the damsel to him to keep him warm. And the damsel was very fair, and cherished the king, and ministered to him; but the king knew her not.
Why didn't I hunt for the one thing that could make me warm, the blood of a victim coursing through my veins, a soul breathing its last in my arms? Because it wouldn't have made me any more warm than the damsel made King David. And I could not claim to have killed a single Goliath in my life, or...
A shadow fell over the table, over the bright white sugar on the beignets, and the white marble. Louis was sitting there. Calm, and collected, as they say, arms folded on his chest, very much clear of the sticky marble table, and his mellow green eyes fixed on me.
"Now why the Hell do you want me, of all people," he asked, "to come with you to France?"
Vaguely, I was aware that Thorne wanted me, that moving about restlessly in the crowd beyond the cafe he was signaling to me, something important, something, please attend now. I shut him out.
I looked squarely at Louis, who looked as splendidly human as he ever had. A rage of jealousy exploded in me against the blood in his veins that wasn't mine.
"You know why," I said turning my head and looking at the nearby crowds. Street performers were out there, dancing, singing, bringing big soft explosions of approval from the crowds. "You know damned good and well why. Because you were there when I was just Born to Darkness. You were there when I stumbled onto these shores and sought to find a companion, and found you; and you were there when we lived all those decades together, you and me and Claudia, and you are the only one living who remembers the sound of her happy voice, her young voice, or the ring of her laugh. And you were there when I almost died at her hands, and when the pair of you fought me again and left me in the flames. And
you were there when I was humiliated and ruined at the Theatre des Vampires, and they murdered her due to my crimes, my weakness, my blunder, my ignorance, my failure to steer one fragile little bark in the right direction, and you were there when I rose from the dead and had my shabby little moment of triumph on the rock music stage, my cheap little hour as Freddie Mercury before the footlights, you were there. You came. You were there. And you were there when I took the spirit of Amel into me, and when all around me were telling me I had to be the Prince whether I wanted to be or not, you were there. You were there when all these streets ran with mud and river water, and when you and I went to see Macbeth onstage, and I couldn't stop dancing under the streetlamps afterwards reciting the words, 'Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,' and Claudia thought I was so handsome and so witty and so clever, and we would all of us always be safe, you were there."
Silence, or the inevitable silence one enjoys in a crowded noisy cafe where someone is screaming with laughter at a nearby table, and someone else is arguing with the man beside him over who should pay the check.
I didn't dare to look at Louis. I shut my eyes and tried to listen to the river itself, the great broad Mississippi River only a matter of yards from us, running past the city of New Orleans and so deep that no one would ever find all the bodies committed to its depths, the great broad river that might swallow the city one night for reasons no one would ever be able to explain, and carry every particle of the city south into the Gulf of Mexico and the great ocean beyond...all that wallpaper, all those gas lamps, all the laughter and the purple flagstones and the shimmering green banana leaves like blades of a knife.
I could hear the water, hear the earth itself shifting and softening, and the plants themselves growing, and Thorne, Thorne insisting that I come out, that I talk to him, that I was needed, always needed, and Cyril saying, "Ah, leave the son of a bitch alone."
Now that's my kind of bodyguard! Leave the son of a bitch alone indeed.
I turned to see Louis was looking at me. The old familiar green eyes and the faint smile. Is Amel inside you? Is it you, Amel, looking through Louis's eyes?
"Very well," Louis said.
"What do you mean?"
He shrugged and smiled.
"I'll come if you want me. I'll come and I'll stay and I'll be your companion if you want. I don't know why you want this or how long you'll want it, or what it's going to be like, being with you and watching all your antics up close, and trying to be of help and not knowing how to be of help, but I'll come. I'm tired of fighting it; I give up; I'll come."
I couldn't believe I'd heard right. I stared at him as helplessly as I had in the hallway of the townhouse when I'd first seen him, trying to grasp what he had said.
He leaned close to me, and he put his hand on my arm. " 'Wither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people'; and because I have no other god and never will, you shall be my god."
Was it Amel speaking these words through him? Was it Amel touching my arm through his hand? Had Amel lied about not being able to find Louis? When I looked into these green eyes, I saw only Louis, and the words echoing in my mind were Louis's words.
"I know what you need," he said. "You need one person who is always on your side. Well, I'm ready to be that one now. I don't know why I tormented you, made you pay for asking, made you come all this way. I always knew I was going to come. Maybe I thought you'd lose interest because I never really understood why you wanted me in the first place. But you're not losing interest, not even with the whole Court, and so I'll come. And when you tire of me and want me gone, I'll hate you, of course."
"Trust me," I whispered. He was cutting me to the heart and making me happy, and this was pain.
"I do," he said.
"It's you, you saying these things, isn't it?"
"And who else would it be?" he asked.
"I don't know," I said. I sat back and looked around the cafe. The lights were too bright here and people were staring at the strange men with the luminescent skin. The violet sunglasses always distracted people, and helped to cover a face that was too white and eyes that were too bright. But it was never enough. And Louis had no such glasses. Time to move on.
"You'll enjoy the Court," I said. "There are beautiful things to hear and see."
5
Fareed
THEY WERE SEATED together in the "blue" salon of Armand's house in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, in the suite that Armand had given to Fareed for his private use. Fareed was at his desk, and Gregory sat opposite at a round table on which he had spread out a game of solitaire with gilt-edged playing cards.
Fareed was staring at the material on his computer screen.
"I understand what you're saying," he said to Gregory. "You don't hands-on manage Collingsworth Pharmaceuticals. But there's a reason I'm asking about this particular project."
"I'm happy to tell you anything I know," said Gregory. "It's just that I'm not likely to know the slightest thing." He sat back in the gilded armchair and looked at the unyielding cards. "There must be a more amusing game than this," he said under his breath.
"It's the doctor involved--a woman."
"I wouldn't know a thing about her," said Gregory absently. "Others vetted her, hired her, approved her projects, not me." He turned up another card and looked at it with disappointment. "Maybe I should start devising our own card games, card games for us."
"Sounds like a stroke of genius," said Fareed, his eyes still on the screen. "Solitaire for blood drinkers. Perhaps you could devise a new deck of cards."
"Now that's a thought, or possibly an exquisite deck with face cards that have special meaning for us. Would our beloved Prince be the jack of diamonds? If so, who would be the king?"
"It's too early to be talking treason," Fareed murmured, eyes on the central monitor before him. There were three monitors, all the same size, and a couple of small monitors, dedicated to specific purposes, off to each side.
It was near 4:30 a.m. and there was little noise coming from the narrow streets that surrounded the immense nineteenth-century townhouse. The restaurants and cafes of the famous district were far away.
"Bear with me," said Fareed. "This doctor's reports to her superiors have been brilliant; but she's not who or what she claims to be. And her projects all have to do with cloning. You know this, of course."
"Cloning?" asked Gregory as he dealt out a new table of cards. "I know nothing about it, but it doesn't surprise me that people in my company are working on human cloning. It's illegal, isn't it? But I have never believed for a minute that the mortal doctors of the world could resist something so exciting as human cloning. There are times when I've encountered mortals in Geneva whom I suspected of having been genetically engineered. But then I know so little about it."
Fareed sat quietly absorbing all this.
"Collingsworth Pharmaceuticals has nothing official to do with cloning," said Gregory. "We have a policy against it. We have a policy against fetal tissue research."
"That's amusing," said Fareed. "Because your laboratories are engaged in a great deal of research involving fetal tissue."
"Hmmm..." Gregory was studying the cards closely. "I would love to design cards specifically for the Court. I think Lestat would have to be the king, though he eschews that title, and I think Gabrielle might be a magnificent queen. The jack could be Benjamin Mahmoud."
Fareed smiled.
"But then perhaps each suit could be different. Marius might be the king of clubs, and I might be the king of diamonds, and Seth might be the king of spades."
Fareed laughed. He said, "Collingsworth Pharmaceuticals has been working on the cloning of human beings covertly for twenty years."
Gregory sat back again and looked at Fareed. "Very well. This offends you in some way? You think it's dangerous? You think I should stop it?"
"You could stop it in your own company but could never stop it worldwide."
"So what do
you want of me here?"
"Just to listen to me for a little while," Fareed said.
Gregory smiled. "Of course." He went back to lining up the cards in suits.
What a charming, genial individual Gregory was, Fareed thought, and it was extremely difficult to realize that he was likely the oldest blood drinker now in existence. With Khayman and the twins gone, he was almost surely the oldest. He had been made before Akasha's son, Seth, Fareed's master, mentor, and lover, but not by much.
Everything about the tall, lean, and often silent person of Seth suggested great antiquity--including his eccentric mode of dress--a taste for sandals and custom-made floor-length robes of linen--and his slow and often unusual speech. That he now understood almost every current Indo-European language was plain enough, but he chose his words with extreme care and favored a stripped-down vocabulary which suggested a preference for concepts formed in his mind long before a plethora of adjectives and adverbs had been developed in any tongue to nuance them or sharpen them. And even the look in Seth's deep-set eyes was chilling and remote. Often his expression seemed to say: "Do not seek to understand me or the time from which I came. You cannot."
Seth had gone out hunting the dark corners of Paris tonight, a willowy white-clad wraith decked out in antique Egyptian bracelets and rings, likely to attract predatory mortals by his sheer peculiarity and seemingly defenseless reserve.
Gregory Duff Collingsworth on the other hand was thoroughly fortified by a modern demeanor in all respects. He moved with the easy grace of twenty-first-century men of power, comfortable on escalators and in elevators, in high-rise towers or cavernous shopping malls, and before television news cameras and human interrogators--an impeccably groomed and conservatively dressed "man of business," who spoke to one and all with an effortless courtesy that was both formal and warm.
Even here in this vast rococo drawing room, Gregory had the manicured gloss of a male of these times. He wore a "casual" belted gray suede jacket, with a pale-blue-checkered shirt under it and denim slacks. He wore his usual gold-banded wristwatch, and a pair of soft brown calf-leather pull-tab boots. All the immortals who took to the air wore boots.