Blood And Gold (The Vampire Chronicles 8)

I was amazed and defeated. My eyes are playing tricks on me, I thought. I wiped them, actually wiped them as a mortal might do, to see all the better and looked again. No. It was Pandora, rendered beautifully everywhere that I looked. Dresses changed and style of hair, yes, and other adornments but these creatures were all Pandora, and I had not seen it until now.

Of course the never ending garden looked familiar. Never mind that. Pandora had little or nothing to do with those feelings. Pandora was inescapable and came from some different fount of sensations. Pandora would never leave me. That was the curse.

I concealed all my paints and brushes behind the Divine Parents as I always did¡ªit would have been an insult to the Father and Mother to leave them¡ªand I went back to Rome.

I had before me several hours before dawn in which to suffer, in which to think of Pandora as never before.

The drunken party was winding down a bit as it always did in the small hours, with a few guests asleep in the grass outside, and others singing together in a small group, and no one took notice of me as I went into my library, and sat at my desk.

Through the open doors I looked out at the dark trees and wished that my life were at an end.

It seemed I lacked the courage to go on in the existence which I'd made for myself, and then I turned and decided¡ªsimply out of desperation¡ªto look at the paintings on the walls of the room. I had of course approved these paintings and paid to have them refreshed and changed many a time.

But now I took stock of them from my point of view not as Marius the rich man who can have whatever he wishes, but as Marius the monster painter who had rendered Pandora twenty-one times on the four walls of Akasha's shrine.

I saw suddenly how inferior were these paintings, how rigid and pallid the goddesses and nymphs who peopled this world of my study, a

nd quickly I woke my day slaves and told them that they must have everything covered over with fresh paint the following day. Also an entire supply of the best paints must be purchased and brought to the house. Never mind how the walls were to be redecorated. Leave that to me. Cover up all that was there.

They were used to my eccentricities, and after making certain that they understood me, they went back to their sleep.

I didn't know what I meant to do, except I felt driven to make pictures, and I felt if I can cling to that, if I can do that, then I can go on.

My misery deepened.

I laid out vellum for an entry in my erstwhile journal and began to describe the experience of discovering my beloved everywhere around me, and how it seemed to contain an element of sorcery when suddenly I heard an unmistakable sound.

Avicus was at my gate. Indeed he was asking me with a strong current of the Mind Gift whether or not he might come over the wall and in to visit me.

He was leery of the mortals in my banquet room and in my garden. But might he come in?

At once I gave my silent answer that he could.

It had been years since I had so much as glimpsed him in the back streets, and I was not entirely surprised to see him dressed as a Roman soldier, and to see that he had taken to carrying a dagger and a sword.

He glanced fretfully at the door to the banquet room, but I gestured that he must pay the guests no attention at all.

His rich curling dark hair was well groomed and clean and he had about him an attitude of prosperity and well-being, except that his clothes were dreadfully stained with blood. It was not human blood. I would have smelled human blood. He soon gave me to know by a simple facial expression that he was in dire distress.

"What is it? What can I do for you?" I asked. I tried to cloak my pure loneliness, my pure need to touch his hand.

You are a creature like me, I wanted to say. We are monsters and we can put our arms around each other. What are they, my guests, but tender things? But I said nothing at all.

It was Avicus who spoke.

"Something dreadful has happened. I don't know how to correct it, or even if it can be corrected. I beg you to come. "

"Come where, tell me," I said sympathetically.

"It's Mael. He's been grievously wounded and I don't know if the damage can be repaired. "

We went out at once.

I followed him into a very crowded quarter of Rome where the newer buildings faced one another sometimes with no more than two feet in between. At last we came to a substantial new house on the outskirts, a rich dwelling, with a heavy gate, and he took me inside, through the entranceway and into the broad beautiful atrium or courtyard within the house.

Let me note here that he was not using his full strength during this little journey, but I did not want to point this out to him, and so at his slow pace, I had followed his lead.

Now, through the atrium, we passed into the main room of the house, the room where mortals would have dined, and there by the light of one lamp, I saw Mael lying in seeming helplessness on the tiled floor.