Memnoch the Devil (The Vampire Chronicles 5)

"No, it's got nothing to do with him," I said. "What's stalking me started months before. He doesn't know I'm following him. I didn't catch on right away myself that I was being followed by this thing, this. . . . "

"This what?"

"Watching him and his daughter, it's like my miniseries, you know. He's so intricately evil. "

"So you said, and what is stalking you? Is this a thing or a person or . . . ?"

"I'll get to that. This Victim, he has killed so many people. Drugs. Such people wallow in numbers. Kilos, kills, coded accounts. And the girl, the girl of course turned out not to be some dim-witted little miracle worker telling diabetics she can cure them with the laying on of hands. "

"Lestat, your mind's wandering. What's the matter with you? Why are you afraid? And why don't you kill this victim and get that part over?"

"You want to go back to Jesse and Maharet, don't you?" I asked suddenly, a feeling of hopelessness descending on me. "You want to study for the next hundred years, among all those tablets and scrolls, and look into Maharet's aching blue eyes, and hear her voice, I know you do. Does she still always choose blue eyes?"

Maharet had been blind eyes torn out when she was made a vampire queen. She took eyes from her victims and wore them -until they could see no more, no matter how the vampiric blood tried to preserve them. That was her shocking feature the marble queen with the bleeding eyes. Why had she never wrung the neck of some vampire fledgling and stolen his or her eyes? It had never occurred to me before. Loyalty to our own kind? Maybe it wouldn't work. But she had her scruples, and they were as hard as she was. A woman that old remembers when there was no Moses and no Hammurabi's Code. When only the Pharaoh got to walk through the Valley of Death. . . . "Lestat," David said. "Pay attention. You must tell me what you are talking about. I've never heard you admit so readily that you were afraid. You did say afraid. Forget about me for the moment. Forget that victim and the girl. What's up, my friend? Who's after you?" "I want to ask you some more questions first. "

"No. Just tell me what's happened. You're in danger, aren't you? Or you think you are. You sent out the call for me to come to you here. It was an unabashed plea. "

"Are those the words Armand used, 'unabashed plea'? I hate Armand. "

David only smiled and made a quick impatient gesture with both hands. "You don't hate Armand and you know you don't. " "Wanna bet?"

He looked at me sternly and reprimandingly. English schoolboy stuff probably.

"All right," I said. "I'll tell you. Now, first, I have to remind you of something. A conversation we had. It was when you were alive still, when we last talked together in your place in the Cotswolds, you know, when you were just a charming old gentleman, dying in despair¡ª"

"I remember," he said patiently. "Before you went into the desert. "

"No, right after, when we knew I couldn't die as easily I thought I could, when I'd come back burnt. You cared for me. Then you started talking about yourself, your life. You said something about an experience you'd had before the war, you said, in a Paris cafe. You remember? You know what I'm talking about?"

"Yes. I do. I told you that when I was a young man I thought I'd seen a vision. "

"Yes, something about the fabric of life ripping for a moment so you glimpsed things you shouldn't have seen. "

He smiled. "You're the one who suggested that, that the fabric had ripped somehow and I'd seen through the rip accidentally. I thought then and I still think now that it was a vision I was meant to see. But fifty years have passed since then. And my memory, my memory is surprisingly dim of the whole affair. "

"Well, that's to be expected. As a vampire, you will remember everything that happens to you from now on vividly, but the details of mortal life will slip rather fast, especially anything that had to do with the senses, you'll find yourself chasing after it what did wine taste like?"

He motioned for me to be quiet. I was making him unhappy. I hadn't meant to do this.

I picked up my drink, savored the fragrance. It was some sort of not Christmas punch. I think they called it wassail in England. I set down the glass. My hands and face were still dark from that excursion o the desert, that little attempt to fly into the face of the sun. That helped me pass for human. What an irony. And it made my hand a little more sensitive to the warmth.

A ripple of pleasure ran through me. Warmth! Sometimes I think I get my money out of everything! There's no way to cheat a sensualist like me, somebody who can die laughing for hours over the pattern of the carpet in a hotel lobby.

I became aware again of his watching me

.

He seemed to have collected himself somewhat or forgiven me for the one thousandth time for having put his soul into a vampire's body without his permission, indeed against his will. He looked at me, almost lovingly suddenly, as if I needed that reassurance.

I took it. I did.

"In this Paris cafe, you heard two beings talking to each other," I said, going back to his vision of years before. "You were a young man. It all happened gradually. But you realized they weren't 'really' there, the two, in a material sense, and the language they were speaking was understandable to you even though you didn't know what it was. "

He nodded. "That's correct. And it sounded precisely like God and the Devil talking to each other. "

I nodded. "And when I left you in the jungles last year, you said I wasn't to worry, that you weren't going off on any religious quest to find God and the Devil in a Paris cafe. You said you'd spent your mortal life looking for such things in the Talamasca. And now you would take a different turn. "

"Yes, that's what I said," he admitted agreeably. "The vision's dimmer now than it was when I told you. But I remember it. I still remember it, and I still believe I saw and heard something, and I'm as resigned as ever that I'll never know what it was. "