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

Gremt came up silently beside me.

"This is my fault, all of this," he said. I felt his arm on mine.

"I did scatter the ashes," I whispered. It sounded so stupid, so childlike. "I scattered them just as you told me to do," I said to Magnus. "I scattered them."

The figure's face was in shadow against the blaze, but I could see the expression softening.

"Oh, I know you did, young one," he said in a frayed and broken voice. "I remember, and I remember your tears and your terror." He appeared to sigh with his whole spectral body, and then to cover his face with his long spidery fingers, his tangled black-and-silver hair falling down over him like a veil. "How stupid I was. I thought if you were born in terror you'd be all the stronger for it. Child that I was of a cruel age, I respected cruelty. And now I deplore it more than any other thing under Heaven. Cruelty. If I could strip the earth of any one thing, it would be cruelty. I would give my soul to strip the earth of cruelty. I look at you and I see the son of my cruelty."

"What comfort can I give you, Magnus?" I said.

He threw back his head and lifted his hands. His fingers fluttered, white and pleading, and he prayed in Old French to God and the saints and the Virgin. Then his dark eyes fixed on me again.

"Child, I wanted to beg your forgiveness for all of it, casting you a vagabond on the Devil's Road without a word of instruction, making you the young and vulnerable heir to what I myself couldn't endure."

He sighed and turned away and made his way to his chair. He reached for the back of it. I could feel that white hand that closed on the wood, feel it as it had touched me all those long years ago:

But you can't leave me!...Not the fire. You can't go into the fire!

That was my voice, the voice of the boy I'd been

at twenty, immortal for less than an hour.

Oh, yes, I can. Yes, I can!...my brave Wolfkiller.

I couldn't bear the sight of him, bent, shuddering, seeming to lean for mortal support upon the chair. I couldn't bear the groan that came from him, or the way he stood upright and rocked back and forth as though interrogating Heaven with his hands raised again.

Gremt slipped his arm around my waist, warmly, and placed his hand on my arm. But it was the ghost who needed comforting. My heart was breaking.

Teskhamen was gone. I'd barely realized it, but he had slipped out of the room, leaving us alone here. And some part of my mind registered that he, a living being, as I was a living being, who had never known incorporeal consciousness could not share the pain that these two specters shared in these moments.

"This will pass," Gremt said under his breath. "It is my doing, all of it. We are wanderers. We have no Fareed and no Seth for spirits and phantoms. Fate is merciless to the living who lack flesh and blood."

"Not so," said Magnus. He turned and as he did so his figure appeared to toughen, to lose something of its brilliant shimmer. "It is not your fault." He looked at me with the same gaunt white face he'd had when he made me.

Again the phantom wavered, turning its back to us, and becoming transparent, the sound of its voice vaporous as it wept.

I couldn't watch and do nothing. I moved towards Magnus, reaching out for him, trying to enfold him in my arms, and wrapping myself around what seemed a vibrant invisible force that was nothing now but light and voice.

"I have no regrets now, none," I said. "You can't be weeping for me. Weep for yourself, yes, that's your right, but not for me."

Someone else entered the room, as softly as Teskhamen had left it. Had he gone to summon this one, to send him in? I heard the step of the other, and picked up the scent of a blood drinker. But I didn't detach myself from the weeping spirit and I didn't want to be detached.

It seemed the spirit was wrapping itself around me. I could feel the subtle throbbing presence enclosing my arms, my face, my heart. A swoon bound us together. Images of long ago flooded my senses, the dim hollow cloister in which beneath the purpling dusky sky the mortal alchemist Magnus had bound the tender vampiric prisoner whom I now knew to be Benedict, the Benedict of Rhoshamandes, from whom he bent to steal the precious Blood. Denied this Blood, cruelly denied this Blood, no matter what his brilliance, his wisdom, his worthiness, because he was not young, was not beautiful, was not pleasing to the eyes of those who safeguarded it from all but their favorites, Magnus at last feloniously and greedily drinking the Blood even as his own blood poured from his torn wrists, drinking and drinking the pure nectar, not intermingled with his own but undiluted and supremely powerful. Weeping, weeping.

A voice filled the illusion, an ominous and punishing and angry voice, the voice of Rhoshamandes.

"Cursed are you among all blood drinkers for what you've done. Abomination on the face of the earth! Blessed be the blood drinker who slays you."

I saw my old master rising in the air, rising as if to meet the stars tumbling in their purple mist, his eyes full of wonder. It is mine. It is in my veins. I am among the immortals.

And now he cried. He cried as miserably as I'd cried when as a boy blood drinker I'd seen him burned on the pyre. He swallowed and sought to muffle his cries, but the sound was all the worse for it.

Pain like this is unendurable.

Was that why Amel said nothing? Is that why he did not even seem to breathe inside me? Did he feel it because we felt it?

Somewhere near, a soft singing penetrated the swoon.