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

"Rose, Viktor, what's happened to them? Where is Louis?"

We hurried down the curving stone stairs, and through the broad passage towards yet another stairway, and into the bowels of the mountain. The music from the ballroom sounded like a Walpurgisnacht nightmare. I pictured monsters and demons and bats and witches colliding with one another. "Get me away from that music."

Someone picked me up, lifting me so that I fell over his shoulder. When the doors of the crypt opened I smelled the incense and recognized the soothing light. Down, yes, down, into the silk, on the silken bed.

Fareed knelt beside me. He pinched the skin on the back of my left hand and plunged the long thin silver needle of a syringe into the pinched flesh. I didn't feel it but then I felt the blood leaving me. Such remarkable blood.

"Why are you doing that?" I asked.

"Because I want her blood," he said. "As much of it as I can get."

He must have had more than one syringe. He turned my hand over and tapped on my wrist. I shut my eyes.

After a long moment, I opened my eyes.

I lay there like a dead man on display at a wake. Dim flickering light. Marble walls. A border of acanthus leaves running along the four sides of the rectangular ceiling of this little chamber. Stars painted in the deep blue of the ceiling.

Beside me sat Seth, still and quiet, on the long marble bench, his narrow dark face solemn as he regarded me.

"What have I done?" I whispered. "What have I revealed?"

"She was murmuring things, murmurin

g to them and to us," said Fareed. "She said it was the luracastria which links us all, it's a great web of subatomic luracastria but it's alive...."

Quiet. Fareed was gone. They were all gone.

I lay alone in the semidarkness. A candle burned on the marble shelf by my coffin. I was dizzy and sick.

"...and so it comes," I said, "from inside his brain, and the soul, the astral self of him that survives is the subtle form--nano-particles of luracastria--of that immortal brain of his, and nano-luracastria is its single most important surviving ingredient or element."

Yes. Yes, that's it. To alter me and to make me immortal as a Replimoid they used a string of synthesized elements which I extracted and studied and reworked and finally saw and knew and broke down and made into luracastria, all these elements originally of Earth, made by me into luracastria, behold the chemicals, behold luracastria, beautiful luracastria, injected back into myself, luracastria, into me, behold luracastria, sing the song of luracastria in me, a new synthesis, and when the chemical stores in the Creative Tower went up in flames and smoke, behold the flames and smoke, when the rolling explosions went off one after another and the walls poured down like syrup into the flaming water, I went up in flames, broken apart...hands, arms, and legs and head all blasted apart, I could still see it, behold all the parts of me swallowed by flames, the tiniest parts of me sizzling and turning black and my torso blown into fragments, engulfed in flames, but the "I" of me went up and up and up and when my skull exploded "I" was free.

21

Lestat

I WAS REMEMBERING THE way that Marius had described to me the emptied body of King Enkil after Queen Akasha had awakened and drained him of all blood, that the body had lain there like something made of glass, empty and translucent. And that is what Mekare's body had become, something translucent like plastic.

And so is this what is happening to us, that this subatomic luracastria is slowly invading and transforming every cell in our bodies while those cells retain their self-replicating nature and we are slowly becoming luracastria?

The sun had set two hours ago. I sat in my private bedchamber with Rose in my arms, Rose with her drowsy head against my chest. And Viktor my son beside me. Rose was so new she looked human in all respects, even to her ruddy skin, and she felt soft all over, soft and sweet, as she lay against me, her raven hair veiling her face, and her long soft gown of burgundy silk cleaving to her beautifully shaped limbs. My son was worn and weary from last night's pain. He sat erect, his arms clasped between his knees, his blue eyes fixed on some faraway point, his short clipped yellow hair shimmering in the light of the wall sconces, regal even in his dark olive cargo shirt and pants, his face so like mine yet wholly different, more finely proportioned, his mouth smooth though his eyes were narrow and his expression was one of anger.

They had both suffered the unspeakable assault. And Louis, too, must have experienced it, though he said not a word about it. Indeed, all the Undead throughout the Chateau had known some version of it. Or so it seemed. David had lost consciousness at one point. So had Rose. Viktor had stubbornly clung to consciousness determined to observe it.

"I made it into colors," Viktor said to me now. "I saw the pain in red and yellow, and when it was at its worst, it was pure white. I couldn't imagine what had happened. I couldn't. And no one came out of the Council Chamber to tell us. And we didn't dare move. Louis was holding Rose when it all happened. I wanted to hold her. I couldn't hold her."

Louis sat in a chair nearby, quietly resplendent in his Lestat-chosen clothes, the inevitable dark blue velvet jacket and the layers of tiny, subtle lace at his throat, and the emerald shining on his finger. His boots looked like onyx.

Inside me, Amel said: "I didn't mean to make the pain, I didn't mean for there to be any pain; I couldn't stop the pain. The pain was never the point."

This was the first time he'd spoken to me since I had awakened. He hadn't been there for the first hour while I lay obediently in my coffin bed of satin, unable to risk the last rays of the sun above.

I spoke to him silently. "What do you want now?" I asked.

"Want?" The long sigh, a sigh so distinctly his I would have known it was his sigh if I'd heard it amid a multitude of sighs. "Want." Not a question. Just a remark. Silence. The fire crackling behind the brass fireplace screen.

The room swam in my sight. A chamber fit for a prince.