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With the two machetes, they hacked at his powerful neck from both sides, almost instantly decapitating him.

No words came from him, and when his head fell, his black eyes were wide with astonishment.

Rhosh picked up the head and drank from the neck.

He held it with both hands as he drank, and though his vision misted and his heart beat in his eyes and in his ears, he could see the headless body dying as he pulled the blood from the brain--this powerful, thick blood, this viscid delicious ancient blood.

Never could he have drunk a drop from Maharet. Never. The mere thought of it revolted him. And indeed he did not think of it. But now he thought only, This is a warrior as I was a warrior, this is the leader of the First Brood who fought Queens Blood, and he is in my hands now, Khayman, the defeated leader--and Rhosh drank and drank the blood, and the images poured forth into him, the portal between First Brood and Queens Blood opened, images of this being when he had been young, vital, and human. No. Rhosh dropped the head. He didn't want those images. He didn't want to know Khayman. He didn't want those images inside his brain.

He burnt the body and the head.

There was a fountain in the garden outside, a Grecian fountain. When it was all finished and the body was buried, he went there and washed his hands, and his face, and rinsed out his mouth and spit the water down on the earth.

Benedict did the same.

"And what will you do now?" asked the Voice. "This thing in which I am entombed will seek shelter from the sun soon, for that is absolutely all that she knows, the sum total of all her discernment and all her millennia."

The Voice laughed. He laughed and laughed like a mortal on the verge of madness. He laughed a high-pitched and genuine laugh as if he simply couldn't help himself.

The jungle around them was waking. The morning air had come, that air that all blood drinkers know when the hour of dawn is approaching, when the morning birds sing, when the sun is nearing the horizon.

Mekare moved slowly as a great reptile across the garden and into the room and across the mud floor and through a doorway to an inner chamber.

Rhosh would not remain in this place, no. He wanted to be gone now. He felt sick remaining in this room.

"And so we shall seek shelter at the hotel tonight," said Rhosh. "And then we will think what to do, how to get that Fareed to assist us."

"Well, I can give you a little assistance, my timid charge," said the Voice bitterly. He had finally exhausted himself with his laughing. He had an anguished tone Rhosh had never heard before. "I will tell you precisely how to enlist the cooperation of Fareed. I would have told you long before now if I'd known you were such a miserable coward, such a bumbler! Remember these names: Rose and Viktor. For Rose alone, Fareed may not do your bidding. For Viktor, he will do anything, and so will the elite of the tribe, the entire blessed elite of the tribe now gathering under the roof of this house in New York called Trinity Gate."

He began to laugh again, wildly, uncontrollably, a laugh more filled with pain than any Rhosh had ever imagined. "And Lestat will do your bidding too, I'm certain of it. Oh, yes. You coward. You can make them cooperate, for the love of Viktor!"

He went on laughing.

"This Viktor is Lestat's son, the son of his body and blood, the son of his genes, his human offspring. You get hold of this son and you will be the victor, and so shall I. Get that boy in your hands, in your power, do you hear me? And we will triumph together. And once I am inside you, they will not dare to anger you. You and I shall rule them together."

Part III

RAGNAROK

IN THE

CAPITAL OF THE

WORLD

20

Rose

In the Topless Towers of Midtown

HE WAS IRRESISTIBLE. Rose had been listening to him for hours. She could have listened forever to his faintly sonorous voice. Viktor too had been listening, standing quietly by the open kitchen door. Viktor in his jeans and white polo shirt with that loving smile playing on his lips distracted her by his sheer presence. She wanted to be in his arms again, alone, soon, in the bedroom down the hall.

But right now she was listening to Louis.

Louis shied away from bright electric lights, a soul of the nineteenth century, he confessed, preferring these old-fashioned candles and especially here in this high glass apartment with the brightness of Midtown all around them providing all the nighttime illumination that they might ever need.

Indeed, the sky was never black above the great sharp gleaming silver point of the art deco Chrysler Building, and the countless towers crowding it, in this safe weald of myriad lighted windows that seemed to hold them here more securely in space than the steel girders of this skyscraper whose elevators had brought them to this carpeted haven on the sixty-third floor.