“Do you realize what this means, Rose, if you do this to me?” Gardner demanded. “You made a fool of me, Rose. You destroyed my life, my career, all my dreams, all my plans, ruined by you, Rose.”

“If we knew who the child’s father was,” said the old woman in her slow Texas voice, “but you see, we had no contact with our daughter and, really, we just …”

Don’t want me and why should you? And whoever did, that wasn’t paid to want me, paid to educate me, paid to take care of me, paid to love me. Why isn’t it over? Why am I sinking farther and farther down?

Uncle Lestan came towards her. Uncle Lestan, shining, and striding towards her, in his red-velvet jacket and his black boots, coming on, unstoppable, fearless with his hands out.

“Rose!” he cried.

She screamed his name!

“Uncle Lestan, take me, please, don’t let them …! Help me.”

Gardner choked the voice out of her.

But Uncle Lestan loomed over her, his face shimmering in the light of the candles, all those candles, candles and candles. “Help me!” she cried, and he bent to kiss her, and she felt those needles, those dreadful sharp needles in her neck.

“Not enough blood!” cried Marius.

“Just enough,” said Uncle Lestan, “to let me in.”

The blackness had weight and mass and thickened around them. They were all talking at once, Gardner, Mrs. Hayes, and her grandmother. “She’s dying,” said someone, and it was one of those girls at the school, the horrible school, but the other girls laughed and jeered. “She’s faking, she’s a liar, she’s a slut!” Laughter, laughter rolling up into the blackness with Gardner chanting, “You’re mine, Rose, I forgive you for what you did to me, you’re mine.”

Uncle Lestan grabbed Gardner by the throat and dragged him away from her. Gardner snarled and screamed and fought. He bit into Uncle Lestan’s hand but Uncle Lestan tore Gardner’s head from him, stretching his neck like a long wrinkled elastic stocking—she gasped, she screamed—and Gardner’s head melted, mouth turning downwards, eyes bleeding downwards, black and fluid and ghastly, and his head flopped down at the end of the broken wrinkled neck, and the body dropped into a sea of blood. Beautiful blood.

“Rose, drink from me!” said Uncle Lestan. “I am the Blood. I am the life.”

“Don’t you do that, child!” screamed Mrs. Hayes.

She reached for Uncle Lestan’s golden hair, reached for him, for his shining face.

Your blood.

It filled her mouth! A great moan broke from her. She became the moan. She swallowed over and over again. The blood of Heaven.

Gardner’s body floated in a stream of blood, dark ruby-red and blackish blood, and the face of Mrs. Hayes expanded, grew immense, a gleaming white mask of wrath. Uncle Lestan snatched at it, tore it loose like a fragile veil, and her voice died as her face died, like a flag burning, and he sent it down into the dark blackish blood current. Her grandmother, the old Texas woman, was sliding downwards with her hands out, paling, disappearing into the river of blood too.

Like Dante’s river of blood, flowing on, bubbling, crimson, black, beautiful.

“And Hell shall have no dominion,” said Uncle Lestan.

“No, no dominion,” she whispered, and they were rising upwards, rising the way they had from the Greek island that was breaking into pieces below them, pieces falling into the foaming blue sea.

“Blood child, blood flower, blood Rose,” said Uncle Lestan.

She was safe in his arms. Her lips were open on his neck and his blood was pumping through her body, pumping into her skin, her tingling, prickling skin. She saw his heart, his blood-red heart, throbbing and brightening and the long lovely tendrils of his blood surrounding her heart and enclosing it and it seemed a great fire burned in his heart and her heart, too, and when he spoke, another immense voice echoed his words.

“Finest flower of the Savage Garden,” he said. “Life everlasting.”

She looked down. The rolling smoking darkness was evaporating and disappearing. The dark river of blood was gone. The world sparkled beneath the mist with thousands and thousands of tiny lights, and above them was the firmament—all around them was the firmament and the galaxies of song and story and the music, the music of the spheres.

“My beloved Rose, you are with us now,” said Uncle Lestan. With her now, with us, said the other voice, the echoing voice.

The words flowed into her on the blood that throbbed in her arms and legs, burned in her skin. Marius whispered into her ear that she was theirs now, and Pandora’s lips touched her forehead, and Viktor, Viktor held her even as Uncle Lestan held her, My bride.

“You’ve always been mine,” Lestat said. “For this you were born. My brave Rose. And you are with us and one of us, and we are the people of the moon and the stars.”

32

Louis

“Its Hour Come at Last”

TRINITY GATE WAS QUIET tonight, except for Sybelle and Antoine playing a duet in the drawing room and Benji upstairs talking confidentially to his best friend who just happened to be the whole world.

Rhoshamandes and Benedict had gone to the opera with Allesandra. Armand and Daniel Malloy were out hunting alone in the gentle warm rain.

Flavius, Avicus, Zenobia, and Davis had gone home to Geneva, along with an eager, desperate blood drinker named Killer who had shown up at the door, in Old West garb of dungarees and a shaggy-sleeved buckskin jacket begging to be allowed in. Friend of Davis, the beloved of Gregory. They’d welcomed him at once.

Jesse and David were in the Amazon at Maharet’s old sanctuary with Seth and Fareed.

Sevraine and her family had also gone home, and so had Notker and the musicians and singers from the Alps.

Marius remained, working in the Tudor library, on the rules he would present to Lestat in time. Everard de Landen remained with him, poring over an old book of Elizabethan poetry, interrupting Marius softly now and then to ask the meaning of a phrase or a word.

And Lestat was gone, gone with Gabrielle and with Rose and Viktor, and with Pandora and Arjun, and Bianca Solderini, and Flavius, and with Gregory and Chrysanthe—to his castle in the mountains of the Massif Central to prepare for the first great reception of the new court to which they would all come. How fine and perfect Viktor and Rose were. And how they loved each other still, and how they’d welcomed their new vision, their new powers, their new hopes. Ah, just brave fledglings.

Only a little rain fell on this garden bench behind the townhouse, tucked as it was beneath the largest of the oaks, the raindrops singing in the leaves overhead.