I want to remember these nights always, she thought. I want to fix them forever in my memory. I want to lose nothing. When it’s done, when it’s decided and it’s over, I will write a memoir seeking to capture everything forever. When it’s happening it is too beautiful, too overwhelming, and you can feel it’s being lost with every breath you take.

Quite suddenly a deep dark mass appeared above her, something like a cloud forming and descending right before her eyes. In a split second it thickened and rose up in front of her virtually blinding her as she fell back away from the transparent wall.

A great boom sounded, a great terrible crashing roar and a clatter, and she felt herself falling and all around her came down a rain of broken glittering glass. Her head hit the hardwood floor. There were deafening noises, furniture being smashed, pictures and mirrors falling, and the loud cold wind was rushing through the room. Doors slammed. More glass was breaking. She rolled over on her side, her hair whipped against her face by the wind, her hands grasping for something, anything firm, to steady her when she saw the treacherous glass splinters all around her, and she began to scream.

She saw Thorne fly at a brown-haired figure clothed all in black who stood before the overturned and broken table. But the figure slammed Thorne away with such force he appeared to fly across the length of the room. Louis lay sprawled on the floor in a pool of blood.

Viktor came rushing towards Rose.

The brown-haired figure snatched up Viktor in one arm though Viktor was fighting against him with all his strength, and as Thorne rushed at the figure again, he grabbed Thorne’s hair with one hand and hurled him away once more.

For a moment this tall creature who held Viktor effortlessly in the grip of his left arm looked down at Rose and came towards her, but Louis rose up behind him like a great shadow and the stranger veered, spinning backwards and smashing Louis with his right fist.

Again and again, Rose screamed.

The figure rose off the floor, wrapping both arms around Viktor, and it went out through the great jagged hole in the glass wall. It went out and upwards and vanished into the sky. And she knew where that brown-haired one had taken Viktor, she knew—up and up, faster than the wind and towards the stars. Powerful as Uncle Lestan, unstoppable as Uncle Lestan, who’d rescued her from that little island in the Mediterranean so very long ago.

Viktor was gone!

Rose couldn’t stop screaming. She crawled on her knees through the broken glass. Thorne lay to the far right, his face and head covered in blood. Louis crawled towards Rose.

Suddenly Louis was on his feet. He lifted her in his arms and carried her out of the room, out of the cold lashing wind. Thorne was staggering right behind him, hitting the walls on both sides like a drunken man, blood pouring down into his eyes.

Louis rushed with her down the long hallway. She clung to him crying, as he carried her into the bedroom that was hers in this place and put her down gently, gently as if she’d break on the white bed.

Thorne clung to the sides of the doorway as if he might fall.

There were voices in the hallway, feet pounding, shouts.

“Tell them all to get out,” said Louis. “Call the house. We’re going there now.”

She tried to stop crying. She was choking. She couldn’t breathe.

“But who was it, who took him, who did it?” she sobbed. Again, she began to scream.

“I don’t know,” Louis said.

Louis wrapped her up in the white cover of the bed, cradling her, rocking her, kissing her until she went quiet.

Then he carried her out of the apartment and held her tight against him in the elevator as they went down to the underground garage.

Finally, when they were in the car moving uptown sluggishly on Madison Avenue, with Thorne in the front seat beside the driver, she’d been able to stop crying altogether as she leaned against Louis’s chest.

“But why did he take Viktor, why, where has he taken him?” She couldn’t stop asking, couldn’t stop.

She could hear Thorne in a low voice talking to Louis.

She felt Louis’s right hand around her forehead, turning her face towards him, and his left hand lightly touching her waist. He bent his head and pressed his ear against her neck. His skin was silky, just like Uncle Lestan’s skin had always been, cold, but like silk.

“Rose, Lestat’s come. He’s at the house. He’s waiting for you. You’re safe. You’re all right.”

She stopped sobbing only when she saw him.

He stood in the front hallway with his arms out, her uncle Lestan, her beloved uncle Lestan, an angel to her, timeless, unchanged, forever beautiful.

“My Rose,” he whispered. “My darling Rose.”

“They took Viktor, Uncle Lestan,” she sobbed. “Someone took him!” The tears ran down her face as she looked up at him. “Uncle Lestan, he’s gone.”

“I know, my darling. And we will get him back. Now come to me,” he said, his powerful arms closing around her. “You are my daughter.”

21

Rhoshamandes

The Devil’s Gambit

HE WAS in a rage. But then he’d been in a rage since he’d struck down Maharet, since he’d doubled over with the machete in his hands, confronted with what he’d done, and the ghastly realization that he could not possibly undo it.

And now that he had Viktor in his hands, which the Voice had so furiously urged him to achieve, he was more than ever boiling with rage, against the Voice, against himself, against the wide world in which he’d survived for so long and in which he now found himself trapped and certain of nothing except that he had not wanted this! He personally had never wanted it.

He stood on the broad wooden deck of this house in Montauk on the shore of Long Island—staring out over the cold glassy Atlantic. What in the name of Hell was he to do now? How could he possibly achieve what the Voice insisted he must achieve?

The word had gone out over the airwaves immediately that Viktor had been kidnapped. Benji Mahmoud had been cagey and brilliant: an ancient immortal had committed a dastardly deed (yes, the vile little vampiric Edward R. Murrow had used that term) in kidnapping “one cherished by all the elders of the tribe” and he had called to the Children of the Night throughout the world to listen for the malignant heart and mind of this ancient one, to discover this one’s evil designs and to call the numbers at Trinity Gate in New York as soon as the monster and his helpless victim were discovered!

Benedict sat in the spacious barren all-too-modern “living room” of this glorified peasants’ hut on this expensive coast only hours by car from New York staring at the screen of the laptop as he listened to Benji’s reports.