Beyond the banks of fresh and fragrant flowers in the lamp-lit shrine sat the immovable pair: Akasha and Enkil.

And around Marius there formed the gardens he had created for their walls, resplendent with lilies and roses and the twining of green vines.

The twining of vines.

“Come inside,” said Daniel gently, coaxingly. “It’s early. If you don’t want to go out again, there’s a film I want you to see tonight. Come on, let’s go in.”

Marius wanted to say yes, of course. He wanted to move. But he stood still at the railing staring out, this time trying to find the stars beyond the veil of the clouds. The flowers.

Another voice was talking from the laptop on the coffee table behind him, a young female blood drinker somewhere in the world pleading for reassurance over the wires or airwaves as she poured out her heart. “And they say it happened in Iran, a refuge there up in smoke, and nobody survived, nobody.”

“But then how do we know?” asked Benji Mahmoud.

“Because they found it like that the next night and all the others were gone, dead, burned. Benji, what can we do? Where are the old ones? Are they the ones doing this to us?”

9

The Story of Gregory

GREGORY DUFF COLLINGSWORTH STOOD watching and listening in Central Park. A tall male of compact and well-proportioned build, with very short black hair and black eyes, he stood in the deep fragrant darkness of a thicket of trees, listening with his powerful preternatural ears and seeing with his powerful preternatural eyes all that was taking place—with Antoine and Armand and Benji and Sybelle—inside of the Belle Époque mansion in which Armand’s family now lived.

In his English bespoke gray suit and brown shoes, and with his darkly tanned skin, Gregory looked very much like the corporate executive that he had been for decades. Indeed his pharmaceutical empire was one of the most successful in the international marketplace right now, and he was one of those immortals who had always been highly capable at managing wealth “in the real world.”

He had come from Switzerland not only to attend to business in his New York offices, but to spy upon the fabled coven of New York at close hand.

He’d picked up the raging emotions of the young blood drinker Antoine as the boy had driven into the city this evening, and if Armand had tried to destroy Antoine, Gregory would have intervened, instantly and effectively, and taken the boy away with him. This he would have done out of the goodness of his heart.

Decades ago, outside the Vampire Lestat’s one and only rock concert in San Francisco, Gregory had intervened to save a black blood drinker named Davis, carrying him up and away from the carnage wreaked upon his hapless cohorts by the Queen of Heaven, who gazed pitilessly upon the scene from a nearby hill.

In the case of this complex and interesting young blood drinker, Antoine, Gregory could easily have deflected any blast of the Fire Gift coming directly at the fledgling, especially from one so young and inexperienced as the notorious Armand.

Not that Gregory had anything against Armand. Quite the opposite. He was as eager to meet him in some ways as he was to meet any blood drinker on the planet, though in his heart of hearts he nourished the precious dream of meeting Lestat above all other hopes. Gregory had come here this very evening to spy on the Upper East Side vampires because he thought surely Lestat had come to join them by now. If Lestat had been there, which he was not, Gregory would have come knocking at the door.

Benji Mahmoud’s broadcasts had Gregory’s understanding and sympathy and he had wanted to assure himself once again that Benji was not the dupe of powerful brothers and sisters, but in fact an authentic soul putting forth the idea of a future for the blood drinker tribe. He had been assured. Indeed Benji was not only the genuine article but something of a rebel in the house, as arguments Gregory had overheard easily proved.

“Oh, brave new world that hath such blood drinkers in it,” Gregory sighed, pondering whether he should make himself known right now to the refined and erudite vampires of the residence in the middle of the block before him or hold back.

Whenever he did reveal himself, the secretive existence he’d guarded for well over a thousand years would be inalterably influenced, and he was not in fact ready for the measures that would have to be taken when that occurred.

No, best for now to hang back, to listen, to try to learn.

That had always been his way.

Gregory was six thousand years old. He’d been made by Queen Akasha and was very likely only the fourth blood drinker to be created by her, after the defection of her blood drinker steward Khayman and the accursed twins, Mekare and Maharet, who became the rebels of the First Brood.

Gregory had been in the royal palace the night that the vampire race was born. He hadn’t been called Gregory then, but Nebamun, and that was the name he’d used in the world until the third century after Christ—when he took the name of Gregory and began a new and enduring life.

Nebamun had been a lover of Akasha, chosen from the special guard she’d brought with her from the city of Nineveh into Egypt, and as such, Nebamun had not expected to live very long. He was nineteen years old, robust and healthy, when the Queen selected him for the bedchamber and just twenty years old the night the Queen became a blood drinker and brought King Enkil over with her into the curse.

He’d been hiding helpless inside a huge gold-plated chest, the lid propped so that he might see the full horror of the conspirators stabbing the King and the Queen on that night—unable to protect his sovereign. Then with fearful and horrified eyes, he’d seen a swirling cloud of blood particles above the dying Queen, and seen that cloud drawn down into her, seemingly through her many obviously fatal wounds. He’d seen her rise, eyes like the painted orbs of a statue, her skin flashing white in the lamplight. He’d seen her sink her teeth into the neck of the dying Enkil.

Those memories were as vivid to him now as ever—he felt the desert heat, the cooling breeze off the Nile. He heard the cries and whispers of the murderous conspirators. He saw those gold-threaded curtains tied back to the blue-painted columns, and he saw even the distant indifferent and brilliant stars in the black desert sky.

Like a loathsome thing she’d been when she crawled atop her husband’s body. To see him jerked into life by the mysterious blood as he drank from her wrist had been a frightful sight.

Nebamun might have gone mad after that, but he was too young, too strong, too optimistic by nature for madness. He had laid low, as they say now. He had survived.