“I will not be the Prince of the Damned,” I said. “I give no power to that old poetry! No. Never. We claim now the Devil’s Road as our road, and we will rename it for ourselves and our tribe and our journey. We are reborn!”

“Prince Lestat,” said Benji again, and then Sybelle echoed it, and then Antoine and Louis and Armand and Marius and Gregory, Seth, Fareed, Rhoshamandes, Everard, Benedict, Sevraine, Bianca, Notker, all of them echoed it, and on the words kept coming from those for whom as yet I had no names.

Viktor stood in the shadows with Rose, and Viktor said it and so did Rose, and Benji shouted it again, throwing up his hands and balling his fists.

“They are beautiful,” said Amel. “These children of me, these parts of me, this tribe of me.”

“Yes, beloved, they have always been that,” I answered. “That has always been true.”

“So beautiful,” he said again. “How can we not love them?”

“Oh, but we do,” I said. “We certainly do.”

Part IV

THE PRINCIPALITY
OF
DARKNESS

Chapter 28

Lestat

The Prince’s Speech

MY FIRST TRUE DECISION as monarch was that I wanted to go home to France. This monarch was going to rule from his ancestral Château de Lioncourt on one of the most isolated mountain plateaus of the Massif Central where he had been born. And it was also decided that Armand’s luxurious house in Saint-Germaine-de-Prés would hence forward be the Paris headquarters of the court.

Trinity Gate would be the royal residence in New York, and we would have the ceremony for Rose and Viktor tomorrow night at Trinity Gate as planned.

An hour after the transformation—when I was at last ready for it—we took the remains of Mekare from the library, and buried them in the rear garden in a spot surrounded by flowers and open to the sun in the day. We were all to a one gathered for this, including Rhoshamandes and Benedict.

Mekare’s body had turned to something resembling clear plastic, though I detest the crudeness of that word. What blood she’d retained had pooled as she lay on the floor and her remains were largely completely translucent by the time we carried her to her grave. Even her hair was becoming colorless, and breaking apart into myriad silver needlelike fragments. So Sevraine and my mother and the other women laid her out on a bier for the burial, placing the missing eye back into its socket, and covered her over with black velvet.