Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis (The Vampire Chronicles 12)

"I've seen the city," I said turning to him. "I've seen it in my dreams."

Silence all around.

"I've seen it too," said Sevraine.

I waited, looking from one to the other of them around the table.

"Well, this is clearly like the old telepathic images of the red-haired twins that were fired round the world when the Queen rose," said Marius. "Some have seen this, some haven't. That's the way it was then."

"Seems so," said Teskhamen. "But I too have seen it. I didn't think it important. I saw it perhaps twice." When no one spoke up he went on. "A great beautiful capital, replete with glassy towers sparkling in the sun; it was like a great forest of glass towers, yet they were all translucent or reflective and then quite suddenly it is night and then comes the fire; it's as if the city exploded from within."

"I too have seen it," said Louis in a small voice. He looked at me. "But I saw it only once, the night before I met you in New Orleans. I was still in New York. I thought I picked it up from others at Trinity Gate. A dreadful horror accompanied it, the cries of countless people perishing."

"Yes," I said. "You can hear people crying out to Heaven for help."

"And a wailing sound," said Armand. "As if of horrific grief."

Quite suddenly, I felt the telltale warmth at the base of my skull. I said nothing about it. I wasn't about to raise my hand and volunteer that Amel was back and breathing down my neck. It seemed too clumsy to do that, too mundane. I simply let it be known telepathically and the information was absorbed around the table within seconds.

Teskhamen whispered to Gremt that the spirit had returned, and I looked up to see Gremt staring intently at me.

"He doesn't know what the images of the falling city mean," I said defensively, as though I were defending Amel's honor. "I've asked him. He knows nothing of it. He sees the same images when I see them. He feels them. But he knows nothing."

Then without moving my lips I spoke to Amel. I knew when I did this that the others could hear me, except for Louis whom I'd made.

"You have to tell me if you understand all this," I said.

In a strong clear masculine tone, audible telepathically to the others, Amel answered: "I do not know." Then he went on.

"Fareed and Seth found nothing in Geneva. The woman's laboratories were empty, and her apartment vacated. The non-human female has fled."

"He's probably lying to you," said Teskhamen in a gentle voice. "He knows what it means." Gremt nodded to this. And so did Raymond Gallant. But Marius said nothing. Gregory said nothing.

"We can't jump to that conclusion," I replied. I tried not to become angry. "Why would Amel lie?"

I felt a great dejected gloom in Amel, a dark oppressive feeling radiating through my limbs.

"If only I did know," Amel whispered. "If I had a heart that wasn't your heart or some other blood drinker's heart, if I had a heart that was my very own heart, I think it would tell me never never to find out."

9

Derek

DEMONS, THERE WAS no other name for them. Demons, all of them, his captors, wrapping him in suffocating wool blankets and carrying him out of that dismal horrid room in Budapest, only to take him riding into the clouds on the freezing wind and down now into this, yet another dungeon, deeper, more spacious, more remote from all the world.

"There's no one on this island to hear you scream," said Rhoshamandes standing over him, a monk from Hell in his long gray habit. "You are in the Outer Hebrides in the North Sea, and in a castle built for me a thousand years ago so that I might be forever safe! And you are in my power." He pounded his chest as he said those words, "my power."

How proud and haughty the being looked, striding back and forth, his leather sandals slapping the stone floor, his white face grimacing with feeling like that of a nightmare haunt one minute and curiously blank and cold the next, as if it were made of alabaster.

Even Arion and Roland, in their pedestrian street garments, standing well behind him, gazed on Rhoshamandes with something akin to fear. And the deep-voiced female, Allesandra, in the long red gown, a figure as otherworldly as Rhoshamandes, sought again and again to quiet his fury.

Derek sat in the farthest corner of the vast room, his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms holding tight to his legs. He struggled to keep his bitter joy locked in his heart. Garekyn lives! Garekyn has survived! Garekyn is alive and he will come for me! Garekyn will find me.

The demons had revealed this to him as soon as they'd come to bring him to this new prison. Garekyn was alive.

He was shivering violently, oh, so cold from the icy wind whipping through the high naked window. The fire blazing in the blackened hollow cavern of a fireplace was too far away from him to provide anything but light. Uneven light. Lurid light. Light that played on the long dark gray robes of this striding giant as he issued his threats.

A solitary candle burned on the crude mantelshelf that was no more than a long horizontal slot in the plastered wall. Sooner or later the wet wind from the high small open window would extinguish it.