Prince Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles 11)

Guards in the next-door apartment. Guards in the marble lobby downstairs, guards out on the narrow pavements of Fifty-Seventh Street. Guards in the apartment above and in the apartment below.

And Thorne here, the red-haired blood drinker, the Viking blood drinker, in a gray wool coat, standing like a sentinel beside the entrance to the hallway, his arms folded, staring out at the night. If he heard what they were saying to one another, he gave no sign of it. He'd been motionless since he'd arrived.

They sat across from one another--Louis and Rose--at a small round glass table with modern black-enameled Queen Anne chairs. He wore a long sweater of black wool that curled at the neck. His hair was as black as the sweater but it was glossy, and his eyes were shining like

the emerald ring he wore on his hand.

His face was so bright, it made her think of something D. H. Lawrence had written, a line from Sons and Lovers, about a man's face in his youth having been "the flower of his body." For the first time Rose sensed she knew now what Lawrence had meant.

Louis was saying in his patient tender voice,

"You think you know, but you can't know. Who wouldn't be blinded by the offer of eternal life?" He'd been there for hours, patiently answering Rose's questions, explaining things about his own point of view. "We don't have eternal life firmly within our grasp. We have to work at it to remain 'immortal.' All around us we see other blood drinkers perish--because they don't have the spiritual stamina for this, because they never transcend the first few years of shocks and revelations, or because they're killed by others, ripped right out of life by violence. We're only immortal in the sense that we don't age, that illness can't take us down, in that we have the potential to live forever, but most of us live very short lives indeed."

She nodded. "What you're trying to tell me is that it's a completely final decision," she said. "But I don't know if you can possibly understand how total my obsession with it has become."

He sighed. There was a sadness about him even in his brightest moments when he'd been talking of Lestat and Lestat's ebullience and refusal to accept defeat. He'd smiled then and it had been rare sunshine, that smile. But his charm was obviously wrapped up in melancholy and unshakable gloom.

Viktor came forward and for the first time in an hour took a chair between them. Faint scent of that Acqua di Gio that was now all over her pillow and her sheets, and all over her dreams.

"What Louis is saying," he said to Rose, "is that once we do pass that barrier we'll know things that we'll never be able to change or forget. Sure, we are obsessed now. We want it. How can we not want it? From our point of view, it's not discussable. But he's trying to warn us: once we cross we'll be obsessed by something totally different and that obsessive awareness--that we're not alive anymore, not human--that's never going to be undone. That's never going to go away. You follow me? What we're obsessed with now, that may go away."

"I understand," said Rose. "Believe me, I do."

Louis shook his head. He drew up his shoulders and then slowly relaxed again laying his right hand idly on the table. He was looking at the table but he was looking at his thoughts.

"When Lestat comes, it will be his decision, of course."

"I'm not so sure why that should be," said Viktor. "I'm not sure at all why I can't make the decision with the agreement of Fareed or Seth. Fareed brought me into this world, really. Not Lestat."

"But nobody's going to make the decision except Uncle Lestan," said Rose. "That's clear enough. No one is willing to make it. And frankly, well, this evening we've had a chance to speak our hearts about this, and I'm grateful. We've had a chance to say out loud what we want."

Viktor looked at Louis. "You say wait. You say 'take your time.' But what if we die while we're waiting? What then? What would you think? Would you regret our having waited? I don't know the point anymore of waiting."

"You die to become this," said Louis. "You can't grasp it. You die. You can't become what we are unless you die. I suppose finally I'm saying this. You think you are making what the world calls an informed decision, but you're not. You can't. You can't know what this is like, to be both alive and dead."

Viktor didn't answer. He didn't even seem overly concerned. He was so excited that they were here, so excited that they'd come this far. He was full of anticipation.

Rose looked away and then back at the pensive face of Louis, at his dark green eyes, and the set of his mouth. A handsome man of twenty-four maybe when he'd been brought over, and what a scathing portrait he'd given the world of Uncle Lestan, his maker, Lestat. But that didn't matter now, did it? No, not at all.

She thought of the others whom she'd glimpsed last night, coming into the rooftop ballroom of the huge house called Trinity Gate. She had become used to the preternatural glow of Fareed, even of the powerful Seth, who always stood away from the bright electric lamps when he'd come to her, who spoke from the shadows in a low secretive voice as if he were afraid of its volume, its vibrato. But nothing had prepared her for seeing them all in that huge ballroom at the top of the long flight of marble stairs.

Fareed had been uneasy with her being brought there. She knew it. Could feel it. It was Seth who'd made the decision for her and for Viktor, Seth who had said, "Why keep them locked away?"

As far as Rose could see, Seth's mind was made up.

Gilded tables and chairs had been scattered on the periphery all along both sides of the dance floor, against walls of French doors paneled in mirrored glass. Drowsy green palms and blue and pink and red flowers in bronze pots were placed every few feet in tasteful groupings.

And at the end stood the grand piano and the cluster of musicians and singers, blood drinkers all, who'd enchanted her with their physical beauty as well as the sounds they made--violinists, harpists, singers making a symphony of sorts that filled the immense glass-ceilinged room.

There had been bright unnatural faces everywhere under the three crystal chandeliers in the dreamy gloom. The names had passed her in a steady numbing current as she was introduced--Pandora, Arjun, Gregory, Zenobia, Davis, Avicus, Everard.... She couldn't remember them all, couldn't recall at will all the remarkable visages, the particularities that had enthralled her as she was brought from table to table across the dark polished floor.

And then the striking otherworldly musicians, the tall, baldheaded, and smiling Notker who bowed to her, and his violinists from the mountains and the young boys and women who'd been singing with such brilliant and throbbing soprano voices, and then Antoine, Antoine who looked like the impersonation of Paganini with his violin, and Sybelle, Sybelle in long black chiffon, her neck positively wrapped in diamonds, rising from the piano bench to take her hand.

Out of the pages she'd read, out of the fictions that had permeated her dreams, they'd come alive around her, along with a multitude of strangers, and she had found herself seeking desperately to engrave every moment on her quivering heart.

Viktor had been so very much more prepared for it, a human child brought up amongst blood drinkers, easily clasping hands and nodding and answering questions, though he had stayed right at Rose's side. He'd picked the long white silk dress for her out of her closet, and worn a black velvet jacket with a boiled shirt for the occasion, beaming down at her again and again as if he were proud to have her hand on his arm.

She'd felt certain the blood drinkers were all concealing their curiosity and amazement at seeing them, which was so funny because she was so very shocked at seeing all of them.