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

It was innocent blood with all its sweetness and freshness and illimitable power.

It was innocent blood and he was not dying as I took it.

Innocent blood.

The others had surrounded us. They were trying to come between us. I thought I'd die in agony when I drew back, but I didn't. I held him by the shoulders and looked into his eyes. The noise of the cafe and the boulevard assaulted me and I hated it, but I held him fast.

The women tugged at him, trying to pull him back. They'd assumed I was hurting him, but I hadn't hurt him. Undiminished, he stared at me through a veil of shimmering tears.

"Au revoir, Lestat," he said with another one of his brilliant irresistible smiles, and he was off, hurrying out of the cafe with the women, and waving as he climbed into the car. The car moved at a reckless speed, weaving dangerously through the traffic, and finally disappeared.

His blood was still ripping through me.

I was tempted to go up high in the air and follow the car, track it to wherever it might lead, and find out just exactly where they were hiding in plain sight.

Maybe another time I would do that. Maybe another time. Because I knew I would see him soon again and there was nothing they could do to stop it.

I stood still feeling the heat of his blood begin to fade inside me.

Louis came up finally, and took my arm and we began to walk together.

"You heard it all?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. "If you'd wanted me gone beyond hearing, of course, I would have gone."

"Not at all," I said. "You're the only one who really knows the full extent of it, of how much I love him."

"Yes," he said. "I know."

We headed for a dark deserted alleyway, far from human eyes. And then we headed for home.

It was midnight when I entered the ballroom to address the Court.

When I explained that he had survived, and that he was incarnated and alive, and that he was well, and he was splendid and was the self he'd been long centuries before he'd ever come down to Akasha, they all cheered.

Cheered and cheered. Some of them shed tears.

You would have thought they really loved him. But they did not fool me. They never knew him as I knew him. They never loved him at all. They feared him far too much to love him, and they would in time come to fear him again. They'd fear the very idea of him, and the idea of the Replimoids and what they might do.

They'd come to fear the Replimoids just as others in this world feared us.

And so we go on without him.

We go on without the mystery of Amel. Already it sinks into the past and becomes legend--the story of the Divine accident and the King and Queen who ruled in silence for thousands of years, and the story of those who took the Core into themselves and ultimately set the Core free. And as the legend grows, some will quickly forget, and others in ages to come will never even believe.

He walks the earth with the power to destroy it. But then so does the human race. And so do we.

But what endures is what has always mattered: love--that we love one another as surely as we are alive. And if there is any hope for us to ever really be good--that hope will be realized through love.

If they want to believe they loved him, so be it. Maybe they do love him now. Maybe they will love him in retrospe

ct. Maybe they will love him in the story of Atalantaya and how he died and how he survived and how he goes on now.

I love him without question, and he loves me. He knows how to love, as well as anyone I'd ever known, and Atalantaya with her shimmering towers was the greatest evidence of his fathomless love.

To love any one person or thing truly is the beginning of the wisdom to love all things. This has to be so. It has to be. I believe it and I don't really believe anything else.

1:50 p.m.