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Chapters (48)
  1. Cover
  2. ALSO BY ANNE RICE
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Epigraph
  7. A Brief History of the Vampires
  8. Blood Argot
  9. Proem
  10. Part I
  11. 1
  12. 2
  13. 3
  14. 4
  15. 5
  16. 6
  17. 7
  18. 8
  19. 9
  20. 10
  21. 11
  22. 12
  23. 13
  24. 14
  25. 15
  26. 16
  27. 17
  28. 18
  29. Part II
  30. 19
  31. 20
  32. 21
  33. 22
  34. 23
  35. 24
  36. Part III
  37. 25
  38. 26
  39. 27
  40. 28
  41. 29
  42. 30
  43. 31
  44. 32
  45. 33
  46. Appendix 1
  47. Appendix 2
  48. What’s next onyour reading list?

I couldn’t mention his name. I couldn’t. I couldn’t say his name and it seemed they sensed it and they didn’t say it either. They didn’t ask, Is he here? Is he gone?

Only when at last it was over—all the festivities, and the questions, and my repeated answers—only when I went down into the crypt did I sit alone in the dark and say, “Amel. Amel, where are you? Are you flesh and blood? Are you safe?”

The blood tears ran down my face the way they’d run down Louis’s face until the shirt and coat were ruined, and then I wept like a child.

32

Lestat

THE NEXT NIGHT I made about the best speech I had ever delivered to my kindred in the Blood. I didn’t write it or plan it or think it through. I stood on the small conductor’s podium and addressed the hundreds crowded into the room, and the hundreds listening from other rooms.

I told them first off that Amel was indeed gone.

That was all I said of him or what had happened.

Then I told them that we had to make our way of life sacred, that we had to see ourselves as sacred, and we had to see our journey through the world as sacred whether anybody else ever did.

I told them—in so many words—that no confraternity or sodality had ever been made sacred except by the faith of those who formed it, as there was no known power beyond this world or in it that could make anything sacred except the power we claimed for ourselves. I told them all that we were children of the universe no matter who thought otherwise, that we lived and breathed and thought and dreamed as do all sentient beings, and no one had a right to condemn us or deny us the right to love and to live.

Yes, the rules were being written, and yes, the history of the tribe was being written, and yes, we would seek a consensus before we went forward. But the thing to remember was this: the Devil’s Road had never been easy or simple, and those who traveled it for more than a century did so because they had cared about something greater than themselves and their endless appetite for human blood. They had wanted to be part of something immensely bigger than they were, and they had rebelled in their own way against the inevitable isolation that closes around us all; they had survived because the beauty of life wouldn’t let them leave it; and a thirst for knowledge had been born in them—a thirst for new ages and new forms and new expressions of art and love—even as they saw everything they had cherished crumbling and fading away.