Memnoch the Devil (The Vampire Chronicles 5)

I turned around. Armand had once again decked himself out in high-fashion velvet and embroidered lace, the kind of "romantic new look" one could find at any of the shops in the deep crevasse below us. His auburn hair was free and uncut and hung down in the way it used to do in ages long past, when as Satan's saint of the vampires of Paris, he would not have allowed himself the vanity to cut one lock of it. Only it was clean, shining clean, auburn in the light, and against the dark blood-red of his coat. And there were his sad and always youthful eyes looking at me, the smooth boyish cheeks, the angel's mouth. He sat at the table, reserved, filled with love and curiosity, and even a vague kind of humility which seemed to say:

Put aside all our disputes. I am here for you.

"Yes," I said aloud. "Thank you. "

David sat there, the robust brown-haired young Anglo-Indian, juicy and succulent to behold as he had been since the night I made him one of us. He wore his English tweed, with leather-patched elbows, and a vest as tightly buttoned as my own, and a cashmere scarf protecting his neck from the cold to which perhaps, for all his strength, he wasn't yet really accustomed.

It's strange how we feel cold. You can ignore it. And then very suddenly, you can take it personally.

My radiant Dora sat next, opposite Armand, and David sat facing me between them. This left me the chair with its back to the glass and the sky if I wanted it. I stared at it. Such a simple object, a black lacquered chair, Oriental design, vaguely Chinese, mostly functional, obviously expensive.

Dora rose, her legs seeming to unfold beneath her. She wore a thin, long gown of burgundy silk, just a simple dress, the artificial warmth surrounding her obviously and keeping her safe. Her arms were bare and white. Her face was filled with worry, her cap of shiny black hair making two points on either side of her face, mid-cheek, the fashionable bob of eighty years ago and of today. Her eyes were the owl eyes, and full of love.

"What happened, Lestat?" she said. "Oh, please, please tell us. "

"Where is the other eye?" asked Armand. It was just the sort of question he would ask. He had not risen to his feet. David, the Englishman, had risen, simply because Dora had risen, but Armand sat there looking up at me, asking the direct question. "What happened to it? Do you still have it?"

I looked at Dora. "They could have saved that eye," I said, quoting her story of Uncle Mickey and the gangsters and the eye, "if only those gangsters hadn't stepped on it!"

"What are you saying?" she said.

"I don't know if they stepped on my eye," I said, irritated by the tremour in my voice. The drama of my voice. "They weren't gangsters, they were ghosts, and I fled, and I left my eye. It was my only chance. I left it on the step. Maybe they smashed it flat, or smeared it like a blob of grease, I don't know. Was Uncle Mickey buried with his glass eye?"

"Yes, I think so," Dora said in a daze. "No one ever told me. "

I could sense the other two scanning her, Armand scanning me, their picking up the images of Uncle Mickey, kicked half to death in Corona's Bar on Magazine Street, and the gangster with the pointed shoe squashing Uncle Mickey's eye.

Dora gasped.

"What happened to you?"

"You've moved Roger's things?" I asked. "Almost all of them?"

"Yes, they're in the chapel at St. Elizabeth's, safe," Dora said. "St. Elizabeth's. " That was the name of the orphanage in its lifetime. I had never heard her say it before. "No one will even think to look for hem there. The press doesn't care about me anymore. His enemies circle h

is corporate connections like vultures; they zero in on his bank accounts and floating bank drafts, and safe-deposit boxes, murdering for this or that key. Among his intimates, his daughter has been declared incidental, unimportant, ruined. No matter. "

"Thank God for that," I said. "Did you tell them he was dead? Will it all end soon, his story, and what part you have to play in it?"

"They found his head," said Armand quietly.

In a muted voice he explained. Dogs had dragged the head from a heap of garbage, and were fighting over it beneath a bridge. For an hour, an old man watched, warming himself by a fire, and then gradually he realized it was a human head that the dogs were fighting over and gnawing at, and they brought the head to the proper authorities, and through the genetic testing of his hair and skin discovered that it was Roger. Dental plates didn't help. Roger's teeth had been perfect. All that remained was for Dora to identify it.

"He must have wanted it found," I said.

"What makes you say that?" asked David. "Where have you been?"

"I saw your mother," I said to Dora. "I saw her bottle-blond hair and her blue eyes. It won't be long before they're in Heaven. "

"What on earth are you saying, my darling?" she asked. "My angel? What are you telling me?"

"Sit down, all of you. I'll tell you the whole tale. Listen to everything

I say without interrupting. No, I don't want to sit, not with my back to the sky and the whirlwind and the snow and the church. No, I'll walk back and forth, listen to what I have to tell you.

"Remember this. Every word of this happened to me! I could have been tricked. I could have been deceived. But this is what I saw with my eyes, and heard with my ears!"

I told them everything, from the very, very beginning, some things each of them had already heard, but which all of them together had never heard¡ªfrom my first fatal glimpse of Roger and my love for his brazen white-toothed smile and guilty, gleaming black eyes¡ªall the way to the moment I had pitched myself through the door of the flat last night.