Prince Lestat by Anne Rice Page B

life. He didn’t try again after the first three times.”
    “But he took her blood,” I said.
    “That he did before she quite realized what was happening,” said Jesse, “and of course Maharet was assisting and coaxing her and stroking her hair and kissing her and begging her permission in the ancient tongue. But Mekare didn’t like this. She stared at the vials with a kind of revulsion as if she were looking at a loathsome insect feeding on her. He managed to take scrapings of her skin, samples of her hair. I don’t know what else. He wanted everything. He asked us for everything. Saliva, biopsies of organs—biopsies he could take with needles, you understand—bone marrow, liver, pancreas, whatever he could get. I gave all that to him and so did Maharet.”
    “She liked him, respected him,” I said.
    “Yes, loves him,” she hastened to say, emphasizing the present tense, “respects him. He did provide the eyes of a blood drinker for her, and restore to Thorne his eyes, the eyes he’d given Maharet. He did all that, and took Thorne under his wing when he left, took Thorne with him. Thorne had been languishing in the compound for years, but Thorne had been slowly restored over that time. Thorne wanted to find Marius again and Daniel Malloy, and Fareed took Thorne away with him. But Maharet loved Fareed, and she loved Seth also. We all loved Seth.” She was rambling now, repeating herself, reliving it.
    “Seth had been there the night long ago in ancient Kemet when Akasha had condemned Mekare and Maharet to death,” Jesse said. She was picturing it. I was picturing it. “As a boy, he’d seen Mekare’s tongue torn out and seen Maharet blinded. But Seth and Maharet spoke together as if this old history had no claim on them. None whatsoever. They agreed on many things.”
    “Such as what?” I prodded.
    “Would you try to be polite, just try!” David whispered.
    But Jesse answered me without stopping.
    “They agreed that whatever they discovered on our behalf, they must never seek to interfere with human life in this world. That no matter what they achieved for us, they must never offer it to the human world. There might come a time, Maharet said, when a science of the vampires would be their greatest defense against persecution, but that time was in the remote future, and likely might never come at all. The human world must be respected. They agreed on all that. Fareed said he had no ambitions anymore in the realm of human beings, that we were his people. He called us that, his people.”
    “Benji would love him,” I remarked. But I was hugely relieved to hear all this. More relieved than I could say.
    “Yes,” Jesse said sadly. “Surely Benji would. Fareed had a way of referring to us as ‘the people’ and the ‘Blood People’ and ‘the People in the Blood.’ ”
    “Our people, our tribe,” I said, echoing Benji.
    “So what did happen, dearest,” asked David, “to make you all abandon the old compound?”
    “Well, it was like this. Seth told Maharet of other ancient ones. He told her what I’m sure won’t surprise anyone here, that there were ancient ones everywhere who’d survived Akasha’s Time of Burning, who’d observed it but never feared it. And then he told her of ancient ones roused by it as he’d been. Seth had been in the earth for a thousand years when he heard your music, Lestat, and when he heard his mother’s voice answering yours. Seth said that Maharet was not aware of how much Lestat’s rock music and the Mother’s rise had changed the vampiric world. She had no inkling of how these events had not only awakened old ones, but brought others to a global consciousness.”
    “
Mon Dieu
, a global consciousness,” I said. “So I’m going to be blamed one way or another for everything?”
    “Well, that may be the least important aspect of all this,” David said, reaching out and taking my hand. “Whether you’re blamed or not isn’t the point, is it?