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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?

He was seeing it. I knew he was. And he had seen it when I dreamed of it.

After a while, he gave me the truth. I’d come to know the tone of his secret voice when he admitted the truth.

“I don’t know what it is,” he said. “I don’t know what it means.” His sigh again. “I don’t want to see it.”

The next night and the night after he was to say the same thing.

And when I look back on those dreams I wonder how long we might have gone on without ever knowing any of it.

Would we have been better off if we had never discovered the meaning of what we saw?

Would it have mattered?

Everything has changed for us, and yet nothing has changed at all, and the stars beyond the windows of my castle on the hill confide nothing. But then the stars never do, do they? It’s the doom of beings to read patterns in the stars, to give them names, to cherish their slowly shifting positions and clusters. But the stars never say a word.

He was telling the truth when he said he didn’t know. But the dream had struck a chord of fear in his heart. And the more I dreamed of that city falling into the sea, the more I was certain I heard his weeping.

In dreams and waking hours he and I were bound as no two others. I loved him and he loved me. And I knew then as I know now that love is the only defense we ever have against the cold meaninglessness around us—the Savage Garden with its cries and songs, and the sea, the eternal sea, ready as ever to swallow all the towers ever created by human beings to reach Heaven. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes for all things, endures all things, says the Apostle. “And the greatest of these is love…”

I believed it and I believe in the old commandment of the poet-saint who wrote hundreds of years after the Apostle: “Love and do what you will.”

Part I

SPIES

IN THE

SAVAGE GARDEN

1

Derek

THEY HAD BEEN talking up there for hours. If Derek lay very still he could hear them perfectly. At this hour, the Andrássy Út was noisy above him, with its cafés and bookstores, but this damp hidden mansion of cellar chambers was quiet. And what else did Derek have to do but listen?