At last Antoine had the money to purchase a violin of good quality. He went into the countryside to play under the stars. He rushed into Stravinsky and Bartók, whose work he’d learned from recordings. His head teemed with the new dissonance and wailing of modern music. He understood this tonal language, this aesthetic. It spoke for the fear and the pain, the fear that had become terror, the pain that had become the very blood in his veins.
He had to reach Benji and Sybelle.
More than anything it was critical loneliness that drove Antoine. He knew he’d end up in the earth again if he didn’t find someone of his own kind to love. He dreamed of making music with Sybelle.
Am I an elder now? Or am I a maverick to be killed on sight?
One night Benji spoke of the hour, and of the weather, confirming surely that he was indeed broadcasting from the northern East Coast. Filling a leather backpack with his violin and his musical compositions, Antoine started north.
Just outside Philadelphia, he encountered another vagrant blood drinker. He almost fled. But the other came to him with open arms—a lean big-boned vampire with straggly hair and huge eyes, pleading with Antoine not to be frightened and not to hurt him, and they came together, all but sobbing in each other’s embrace.
The boy’s name was Killer and he was little more than a hundred years old. He’d been made, he said, in the very early days of the twentieth century in a backwater town in Texas by a wanderer like himself who charged Killer to bury his ashes after he’d burnt himself up.
“That’s the way a lot of them did it in those days,” said Killer, “like the way Lestat describes Magnus making him. They pick an heir when they’re sick of it all, give us the Dark Blood, and then we have to scatter the ashes when they’re gone. But what did I care? I was nineteen. I wanted to be immortal, and the world was big in 1910. You could go anywhere, do anything at all.”
In a cheap motel, by the glimmering light of the muted television, as if it were the flicker of a fireplace, they talked for hours.
Killer had survived the long-ago massacre of Akasha the great Queen. He’d made it all the way to San Francisco in 1985 to hear the Vampire Lestat onstage, only to see hundreds of blood drinkers immolated after the concert. He and his companion Davis had been fatally separated, and Killer, sneaking into the slums of San Francisco, had found himself the next night one of a tiny remnant fleeing the city, thankful to be alive. He never saw Davis again.
Davis was a beautiful black vampire, and Killer had loved him. They’d been members of the Fang Gang in those times. They even wore those letters on their leather jackets and they drove Harleys and they never spent more than two nights in any one place. All over, those times.
“The Burning now, it has to happen,” Killer told Antoine. “Things can’t go on the way they are. I tell you, before Lestat came on the scene in those days, it wasn’t like this. There just weren’t so many of us, and me and my friends, we roamed the country towns in peace. There were coven houses then, havens like, and vampire bars where anyone could enter, you know, safe refuge, but the Queen wiped all that away. And with it went the last of vampire law and order. And since those times, the tramps and the mavericks have bred everywhere, and group fights group. There’s no discipline, no rules. I tried to team up with the young ones in Philadelphia. They were like mad dogs.”
“I know that old story,” Antoine said, shivering, remembering those flames, those unspeakable flames. “But I have to reach Benji and Sybelle. I have to reach Lestat.”
In all these years, Antoine had never told the story of his own life to anyone. He had not even told it to himself. And now, with the lamp of the Vampire Chronicles illuminating his strange journey, he poured it out to Killer unstintingly. He feared derision, but none came.
“He was my friend, Lestat,” Antoine confessed. “He told me about his lover, Nicolas, who had been a violinist. He said he couldn’t speak his heart to his little family, to Louis or Claudia, that they would laugh at him. So he spoke his heart only to me.”
“You go to New York, my friend, and Armand will burn you to cinders,” said Killer. “Oh, not Benji or Sybelle, no, and maybe not even Louis … but Armand will do it and they won’t bat an eye. And they can do it too. They have Marius’s blood in their veins, those two. Even Louis’s powerful now, got the blood of the older ones in him. But Armand is the one who kills. There are eight million people in Manhattan and four members of the Undead. I warn you, Antoine, they won’t listen to you. They won’t care that Lestat made you. Least I don’t think they will. Hell, you won’t even have a chance to tell them. Armand will hear you coming. Then he’ll kill you on sight. You do know they have to see you to burn you up, don’t you? They can’t do it unless they can see you. But Armand will hunt you down and you won’t be able to hide.”
“But I have to go,” Antoine said. He burst into tears. He wrapped his arms tight around himself and rocked back and forth on the edge of the bed. His long black hair fell down over his face. “I have to get back to Lestat. I have to. And if anyone can help me find him, it’s Louis, isn’t it?”
“Hell, man,” said Killer. “Don’t you get it? Everybody’s looking for Lestat. And these Burnings are happening now. And they’re moving west. No one’s seen hide nor hair of Lestat in the last two years, man. And the last sighting in Paris could have been bogus. There’s lots of swaggering dudes walking around pretending to be Lestat. I was down in New Orleans last year and there were so many fake Lestats swaggering around in pirate shirts and cheap boots, you wouldn’t believe it. The place is overrun. They drove me out of the city after one night.”
“I can’t go on alone,” said Antoine. “I have to reach them. I have to play my violin for Sybelle. I have to be part of them.”
“Look, old buddy,” said Killer, softened and sympathetic and putting his arm around Antoine. “Why don’t you just come out west with me? We both rode out the last Burning, didn’t we? We’ll ride this one out too.”
Antoine couldn’t answer. He was in such pain. He saw the pain in bright explosive colors in his mind as he had when he was so badly burned years and years ago. Red and yellow and orange was this pain. He took up the violin and began to play it, softly, as softly as you can play a violin, and he let it mourn with him for all he’d ever been or might have been and then sing of his hopes and dreams.