The Vampire Armand (The Vampire Chronicles 6)

She took the handle with both hands and brought it forth in a wide sure sweep. "I wish I had an enemy," she cried out, "who was ready to die. "

I looked at Marius. He looked at me. No, she couldn't be one of us.

"That would be too selfish," he whispered in my ear.

I couldn't help but wonder, if I had not been dying after my fight with the Englishman, if the sweating sickness had not taken me over, would he have ever made me a vampire?

The three of us hurried down the stone steps to the quay. There was our canopied gondola waiting. Marius gave the address.

"Are you sure you want to go there, Master?" asked the gondolier, shocked because he knew the district where the worst of the foreign seamen congregated and drank and fought.

"Most sure of it," he said.

As we moved off in the black waters, I put my arm around tender Bianca. Leaning back on the cushions, I felt invulnerable, immortal, certain that nothing would ever defeat me or Marius, and in our care Bianca would always be safe.

How very wrong I was.

Nine months perhaps we had together after our trip to Kiev. Nine or maybe ten, I cannot mark the climax by any exterior event. Let me say only, before I proceed to bloody disaster, that Bianca was always with us in those last months. When we were not spying upon the carousers, we were in our house, where Marius painted her portraits, devising her as this or that goddess, as the Biblical Judith with the head of the Florentine for her Holofernes, or as the Virgin Mary staring rapt at a tiny Christ child, as perfectly rendered by Marius as any image he ever made.

Those pictures-perhaps some of them endure to this very day.

One night, when all slept except for the three of us, Bianca, about to give up on a couch as Marius painted, sighed and said, "I like your company too much. I don't ever want to go home. "

Would that she had loved us less. Would that she had not been there on the fatal evening in 1499, just before the turn of the century, when the High Renaissance was in its glory, ever to be celebrated by artists and historians, would that she had been safe when our world went up in flames.

Chapter 14

14

IF YOU'VE READ The Vampire Lestat you know what happened, for I showed it all to Lestat in visions two hundred years ago. Lestat set down in writing the images I made known to him, the pain I shared with him. And though I now propose to relive these horrors, to flesh out the tale in my own words, there are points where I cannot improve on his words, and may from time to time freely call them up.

It began suddenly. I awoke to find that Marius had lifted back the gilded cover of the sarcophagus. A torch blazed behind him on the wall.

"Hurry, Amadeo, they're here. They mean to burn our house. "

"Who, Master? And why?"

He snatched me from the shining coffin box, and I rushed after him up the decaying stairs to the first floor of the ruined dwelling.

He wore his red cape and hood, and he moved so fast it took all my power to keep up with him.

"Is it Those Who Must Be Kept?" I asked. He slung his arm around me, and off we went to the rooftop of our own palazzo.

"No, child, it's a pack of foolish blood drinkers, bent on destroying all the work I've done. Bianca is there, at their mercy, and the boys too. "

We entered by the roof doors and went down the marble steps. Smoke rose from the lower floors.

"Master, the boys, they're screaming!" I shouted.

Bianca came running to the foot of the stairs far below.

"Marius! Marius, they are demons. Use your magic!" she cried out, her hair streaming from the couch, her garments undone. "Marius!" Her wail echoed up the three floors of the palazzo.

"Dear God, the rooms are everywhere on fire!" I cried out. "We must have water to put this out. Master, the paintings!"

Marius dropped down over the railing and appeared, suddenly below, at her side. As I ran to join him, I saw a crowd of black-robed figures close in on him, and to my horror, try to set his clothes afire with the torches they brandished, as they gave forth horrid shrieks and hissed curses from beneath their hoods.

From everywhere these demons came. The cries of the mortal apprentices were terrible.