Prince Lestat

Oh, how much he wanted to discuss his views of things with Lestat. How must this be affecting the destiny of the world’s blood drinkers? And now that the internet had embraced the planet, wasn’t Benji Mahmoud’s radio broadcast out of his very own house just the beginning?

When would we see the data banks enabling blood drinkers everywhere, regardless of age and isolation, to find their lost ones, their loved ones, immortals who had been mere legend to them for too long?

And what about glass? Look at what had happened to the world through the invention, evolution, and perfection of glass? Spectacles, telescopes, microscopes, plate glass, walls of glass, palaces of glass, towers of glass! Why, the architecture of the modern world had been transformed by the use of glass. Science had advanced in dramatic and mysterious ways due to the availability and use of glass!

(It struck him as highly ironic and perhaps meaningful that the great Akasha had been decapitated because of a great sheet of broken glass. After all, a six-thousand-year-old immortal is a very strong and resilient creature, and Gregory was not sure that a simple ax could have decapitated the Queen, or that a simple ax could decapitate him. But an enormous shard of plate glass had been sharp enough and heavy enough to separate head from body so that Akasha’s death was in fact accomplished. An accident yes, but a very strange one, indeed.)

All right, so the “Coven of the Articulate” as they were called had not been made up of social or economic historians. But surely romantics as sensitive as Marius and Lestat would be interested in Gregory’s notions of progress, and particularly his theory that this was the Age of the Vampire, so to speak. This ought to be a Golden Time, to use Marius’s phrase, for all the Undead.

Oh, the time must come when he would meet them.

But even as he told himself that some of this longing and enthusiasm was childish and naïve and even ridiculous, Gregory was drawn almost obsessively to Louis and Lestat. Particularly Lestat.

Louis was a damaged pilgrim, and though he’d been recovering now for the last decade or so, Lestat was indeed the “lion heart” that Gregory wanted to know with his whole soul.

It seemed at times that Lestat was the immortal for whom Gregory had been waiting all this time, the one with whom he could discuss his myriad observations of the Undead and the human stream of history they had followed through six thousand years. Gregory actually fell in love with Lestat.

He knew that he had, and when Zenobia and Avicus teased him about this, or Flavius said it “worried” him, Gregory did not deny it. Nor did he seek to defend it. Chrysanthe understood. Chrysanthe always understood his obsessions. And Davis understood, Davis, his gentle black companion, rescued from the massacre following Lestat’s concert, Davis understood too.

“He was like a god on that stage,” said Davis of Lestat at the concert. “He was the one vampire we all loved! It was as if nothing could stop him, and nothing ever would.”

But something had stopped Lestat most definitely or certainly slowed him down. Demons of his own making perhaps or spiritual exhaustion. Gregory longed to know, longed to sympathize, longed to lend support.

Secretly, Gregory had searched the world for Lestat, and come very close to him many times, spying on him, and divining Lestat’s immense anger and great need to be alone. Always, Gregory had backed off, unable to force himself on the object of his obsession, retreating silently in disappointment and a kind of shame.

Two years ago in Paris, he had drawn close enough to see Lestat in the flesh, rushing there from Geneva at the first word of Lestat’s appearance, yet he had not dared to reveal himself. Only love could create such conflict, such longing, such fear.

Now Gregory felt the very same reluctance to make himself known to the New York coven of Trinity Gate. He could not make an overture. He could not yet extend himself and risk rebuff. No. These creatures meant too much to him. The time was not yet right, no.

Indeed, only one blood drinker in recent years had brought him out of anonymity and that had been Fareed Bhansali, the physician vampire in Los Angeles, who had sufficiently fascinated him to cause him to reveal himself, and this for very specific reasons. For this Fareed was as unique in his own way—if unique can be compared—as the romantic poet vampires Louis and Lestat, in that Fareed was the only modern blood drinker physician known to Gregory.

Oh, in the distant past there had been some, surely, but they were rudimentary healers and alchemists who when they came into the Blood lost all interest in their scientific explorations, and with reason, for there had been a limit for thousands of years to what could be known scientifically.

Magnus, the great Parisian alchemist, had been a perfect example. In his old age, stooped and deformed by the natural wasting of his bones, Magnus had been denied the Blood by the vain Rhoshamandes, who at that time quietly ruled the Undead of France, never allowing their numbers to become unmanageable. Bitter, angry, and not to be outdone, Magnus had managed to steal the Blood from a young acolyte of Rhoshamandes known as Benedict. Binding Benedict and draining his body of blood right at sunset, Magnus had become a full-fledged blood drinker lying stunned on the comatose body of his maker, who found himself upon waking too weak to break his bonds, too weak even to call for help. What shocks this clever theft of the Blood had sent through the entire Undead world. How many would dare to imitate the bold Magnus? Well, precious few ever did. Precious few blood drinkers were ever as careless or stupid as gentle Benedict had been, entrusting the location of his resting place to a mortal “friend.”

And then Magnus, this truly revolutionary thinker, had turned his back entirely on the medical and alchemical knowledge of his human life, holed himself up in a tower near Paris, and devoted himself to the most bitter reflections until he went mad in the end, his only real achievement being the capture and making of the Vampire Lestat. To Lestat, he bequeathed his blood, his property, and his wealth.

Ah, such dreadful failures.

And where was Rhoshamandes now? Where were his fine progeny—the beautiful Merovingian Allesandra, daughter of Dagobert the First, or the disgraced and ever contrite Benedict? Had Allesandra really immolated herself on a pyre in the catacombs under Les Innocents, only because the Vampire Lestat had come marching through her world and destroyed the old Children of Satan who had long kept her mind and her soul and her body prisoner? A pyre might have been enough to destroy the body of Magnus, yes; but Allesandra had been old before Magnus came into existence, though her own age and experience had been lost to her in madness more than once.