The real elders, the ones he was always taunting, insulting, and deriding, were the Children of the Millennia—the great immortals—Marius, and Pandora, and the ancient twins, of course, Mekare and Maharet, and their companion Khayman. Benji made that clear enough.
“How can this Mekare be the Queen of the Damned if she does not rule?” Benji would ask. “Does not her twin, Maharet, care for us as a great vampire family? And where is Khayman, old as the twins are, and why does he not care for us as we struggle through the world seeking for answers? How is it that Jesse, young Jesse of our world, does not urge these ancient ones to listen to our voices?”
All this was amazing to me and scary to me, as I’ve explained. But even if no one moved to silence Benjamin, was it going to come to anything? Was it going to make anything happen?
And all the while, other things were happening, bad things. Really bad things. And some good things too perhaps.
Benji was not the only vampire doing something entirely new under the stars of Heaven.
There was Fareed, who had come along well before Benji. And I hadn’t thought Fareed would last either.
3
Fareed and Seth
I MET FAREED AND SETH six years before the end of the last century. This was after I’d met the Body Thief but before I’d met Memnoch. And though I’d thought the encounter was an accident at the time, I realized later it most certainly was not, as they’d been searching for me.
It was in Los Angeles on a mild and lovely evening when I agreed to talk to them in a garden café not far from where they’d approached me on Sunset Boulevard—two powerful vampires, one ancient and one young who was fueled by the powerful blood of the other.
Seth was the ancient one, and as always with those great survivors, I knew him by his heartbeat long before I ever saw him. They can cloak their minds, these antique monsters, and they can pass for human, yes, no matter how old they are, and they do. But they can’t stop an immortal like me from hearing that heartbeat and along with it a faint sound like respiration. Only it sounds like an engine purring when it comes from them. And that’s the signal of course to run unless you want to be burnt to a fine black powder or a little grease spot on a pavement.
But I don’t run from anything, and I wasn’t very sure I wanted to be alive any longer back then. I’d lately burnt my skin to dark brown in the Gobi Desert in a failed attempt to end it all, and to say I had a devil-may-care attitude would have been an understatement.
Also I’d survived so much; well, wouldn’t I survive an encounter with another ancient one? I knew the twins firsthand, did I not? I knew the reigning Queen. Did I not have their protection?
But I had known something else as well back then, even then. And that was that my rock singing, my videos, and my waking of the Queen had waked a number of immortals around the globe, and who and what they were nobody really knew for certain. I just knew they were out there.
And so here I was walking down Sunset in the thick of the crowds, just loving it kind of, forgetting I was a monster, forgetting I was no longer a rock star, and pretending more or less to be the beautiful Jon Bon Jovi.
I’d just caught a Jon Bon Jovi concert a few months prior to this, and on my little Walkman, I was playing his songs over and over obsessively. And there I was, you know, strutting, flirting now and then, smiling at the pulchritudinous mortals drifting by, now and then lifting my rose-colored sunglasses to wink at this one or that, and letting my hair blow free in that eternal chilling West Coast breeze and just, well, having a good time and a bitter time, when there comes that heartbeat, that fatal heartbeat.
Well, Maharet and Mekare had not disappeared from the world entirely by that point, so I thought, What have I done now? And who’s going to bother me about it, when I spy coming towards me these two remarkable blood drinkers, the shorter one a good six feet in height with magnificent golden skin and blue-black curling hair around his handsome and inquisitive face and enormous green eyes and well-formed lips in an open smile, clothes natty, I suppose, an English bespoke suit, if I was any judge, and beautiful narrow tan bespoke shoes, too, and the taller one, the thin giant very dark of skin too, but burnt, I could tell that, and ancient, his black hair very short all over his well-shaped skull and with almond-shaped eyes, and his clothes eccentric for the streets of West Hollywood, though not perhaps for the city of Cairo or Jetta—a white ankle-length linen thawb and white pants with open sandals.
What a pair, and before I’m five feet away, the shorter man, the young one, new in the Blood, extended his hand in welcome. At once he started speaking with a fluid and resonant Anglo-Indian voice, and saying he was Dr. Fareed Bhansali, and this was his “mentor,” Seth, and they would so love to have the pleasure of my company at their favorite café nearby.
There surged in me some little excitement that almost brought me to tears, but I kept that locked away from them. I made my loneliness, didn’t I? I’d started all the way back then, so why all the emotion?
The café was beautiful with tables draped in blue linen that was almost the color of the night sky with the endless illumination of the great sprawling metropolis bouncing off the layer of moist cloud. And there was a thin, sweet sitar music playing with melodic threads lacing in and out of my thoughts as we sat there, each of us now playing with our food and now and then lifting a forkful of curry to savor the aroma. And the wine was bright and glistening in the sheer glass goblets.
And then they astonished me.
See that building across the street? No, no, that one, well, that was their building and it housed their laboratory, and they’d welcome my cooperation in offering them a few biopsies that would not cause the least pain—skin tissue, hair, blood, that kind of thing.
Then the story unraveled of how, in Mumbai last year, Seth had come into Fareed’s hospital room where Fareed lay dying, a brilliant research scientist and medical doctor in his prime, as the result of a plot on the part of his wife and a fellow medical researcher. Fareed, in a locked-in coma, had thought Seth a figment of his tortured imagination.
“And you know,” he told me in that rippling and exquisite Anglo-Indian accent, “I thought the first thing I would do was take revenge on my wife and her lover. They’d stolen everything from me, including my life. But I forgot those things almost instantly.”
Seth had been a healer in ancient times. When he spoke, his speech was accented too, but I couldn’t place it, and how could I, since he’d been brought into the Blood at the dawn of history?
He was what people call rawboned, with wondrously symmetrical bones to his face, and even his hands with their huge wristbones and knucklebones were interesting to me, as well as the fingernails, like glass of course, and then there was the way his cold face would fire with expression when he spoke, and the masklike smoothness imposed by the Blood would be banished.
“I brought Fareed into the Blood to be a physician,” Seth explained. “I can’t understand the science of these times. And I do not understand why there is no physician or scientific researcher amongst us.”
Now they had their laboratory complete with every conceivable machine that medical science had invented.
And I soon found myself in that building on those upper floors, following them through brightly lighted chamber after chamber, and marveling at the staff of young blood drinkers ready to make the MRI or the CAT scan, or draw my blood.
“But what are you going to do with this data?” I asked. “And how do you do all this, I mean, are you bringing over scientists into the Blood?”