The Vampire Armand (The Vampire Chronicles 6)

One evening, as my eyes actually opened, as the lids truly drew back over the orbs of my eyes so that I could see through the white cake of ice above me, I realized I was healing.

I tried to flex my arms. I could raise them ever so slightly, and the encasing ice shattered; what an extraordinary electric sound.

The sun simply couldn't reach me here, or not enough to work against the preternatural fury of the powerful blood my body contained. Ah, God, to think of it, five hundred years of growing ever stronger and stronger, and born from the blood of Marius in the first place, a monster from the start who never knew his own strength.

It seemed for a moment that my rage and despair could grow no greater. It seemed the fiery pain in all my body could be no worse.

Then Sybelle started to play. She began to play the Appassionata, and nothing else mattered.

It wouldn't matter again until her music had stopped. The night was warmer than usual; the snow had melted slightly. There seemed no immortals anywhere near. I knew that the Veil had been spirited away to the Vatican in Rome. No cause now, was there, for immortals to come here?

Poor Dora. The nightly news said that her prize had been taken from her. Rome must examine this Veil. Her tales of strange blond-haired angels were the stuff of tabloids, and she herself was no longer here.

In a moment of daring, I fastened my heart upon Sybelle's music, and with an aching straining head, sent out my telepathic vision as if it were a fleshly part of me, a tongue requiring stamina, to see through Benjamin's eyes, the room where they were both lodged.

In a lovely golden haze, I saw it, saw the walls covered with the heavy framed paintings, saw my beautiful one herself, in a fleecy white gown with worn slippers, her fingers hard at work. How grand the sweep of the music. And Benjamin, the little worrier, frowning, puffing on a black cigarette, with hands folded behind his back, pacing in his bare feet and shaking his head as he mumbled to himself.

"Angel, I have told you to come back!"

I smiled. The creases in my cheeks hurt as if someone had made them with the point of a sharp knife. I shut my telepathic eye. I let myself slumber in the rushing crescendos of the piano. Besides, Benjamin had sensed something; his mind, unwarped by Western sophistication, had picked up some glimmer of my prying. Enough.

Then another vision came to me, very sharp, very special and unusual, something that would not be ignored. I turned my head again and made the ice crackle. I held my eyes open. I could see a blur of lighted towers high above.

Some immortal down there in the city was thinking of me, someone far away, many blocks from the closed-up Cathedral. In fact, I sensed in an instant the distant presence of two powerful vampires, vampires I knew, and vampires who knew of my death and lamented it bitterly as they went about some important task.

Now there was a risk to this. Try to see them and they might catch much more than the glimmer of me which Benjamin had been so quick to catch. But the city was empty of blood drinkers save for them, for all I could figure, and I had to know what it was that caused them to move with such deliberation and such stealth.

An hour passed perhaps. Sybelle was silent. They, the powerful vampires, were still at their work. I decided to chance it.

I drew in close with my disincarnate vision, and quickly realized that I could see one through the eyes of the other, but that it did not work for me the other way around.

The reason was plain. I sharpened my sight. I was looking through the eyes of Santino, my old Roman Coven Master, Santino, and the other whom I saw was Marius, my Maker, whose mind was locked to me for all time.

It was a vast official building in which they made their careful progress, both dressed as gentlemen of the moment in trim dark blue clothes, even to starched white collars and thin silk ties. Both had trimmed their hair in deference to corporate fashion. But this was no corporation in which they prowled, clearly putting into harmless thrall any mortal who tried to disturb them. It was a medical building. And I soon guessed what their errand must be.

It was the forensics laboratory of the city through which they wandered. And though they had taken their time in gathering up documents for their heavy briefcases, they were quick now with agitation as they pulled from refrigerated compartments the remains of those vampires who, following my example, had turned themselves over to the mercy of the sun.

Of course, they were confiscating what the world now had on us. They were scooping up the remains. Into simple glistening plastic sacks they put the residue, out of coffinlike drawers and off shining steel trays. Whole bones, ashes, teeth, ah, yes, even teeth, they swept into their little sacks. And now from a series of filing cabinets they withdrew the plastic-wrapped samples of clothing that remained.

My heart quickened. I stirred in the ice and the ice spoke back to me again. Oh, heart be still. Let me see. It was my lace, my very lace, the thick Venetian Rose Point, burnt at the edges, and with it a few shredded rags of purple-red velvet! Yes, my pitiful clothes which they took from the labeled compartment of the filing drawer and slipped into their bags.

Marius stopped. I turned my head and my mind elsewhere. Do not see me. See me and come here, and I swear to God I will . . . I will what? I have no strength even to move. I have no strength to escape. Oh, Sybelle, please, play for me, I have to escape this.

But then, remembering that he was my Master, remembering that he could trace me only through the weaker more muddled mind of his companion, Santino, I felt my heart go quiet.

From the bank of recent memory, I took her music, I framed it with numbers and figures and dates, all the little detritus I had brought with me over the centuries to her: that Beethoven had written her sweet masterpiece, that it was Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Opus 57. Think on that. Think on Beethoven. Think on a make-believe night in cold Vienna, make-believe for I knew nothing really about it, think on him writing music with a noisy scratchy quill, which he himself perhaps could not hear. Think on him being paid in pittances. And think with a smile, yes, a painful cutting smile that makes your face bleed, of how they brought him piano after piano, so powerful was he, so demanding, so fiercely did he bang away.

And she, pretty Sybelle, what a fine daughter to him she wa

s, her powerful fingers striking the keys with terrifying power that would surely have delighted him had he ever seen in the distant future, amid all his frenzied students and worshipers, just this particular maniacal girl.

It was warmer tonight. The ice was melting. There was no denying it. I pressed my lips together and again lifted my right hand. A cavity existed now in which I could move my right fingers.

But I couldn't forget about them, the unlikely pair, the one who'd made me and the one who'd tried to destroy him, Marius and Santino. I had to check back. Cautiously I sent out my weak and tentative beam of probing thought. And in an instant, I'd fixed them.

They stood before an incinerator in the bowels of the building and heaved into a fiery mouth all the evidence which they had brought together, sack after sack curling and crackling in the flames.

How odd. Didn't they themselves want to look at these fragments under microscopes? But then surely others of our kind had done this, and why look at the bones and teeth of those who have been baked in Hell when you can carve pale white tissue from your own hand, and place this on the glass slide while your hand heals itself miraculously, as I was healing even now?