“Nothing can be done until this is finished!” I said. I mounted the horse and reached for her hand.
“Injury only spurs you on, doesn’t it?” she asked. She was studying me. “It would only strengthen you, whatever they did or tried to do.”
“Now this is what I call mortal nonsense!” I said. “Come on!”
“Lestat,” she said soberly. “They put your stable boy in a gentleman’s frock coat after they killed him. Did you see the coat? Hadn’t you seen it before?”
That damned red velvet coat . . .
“I have seen it,” she said. “I had looked at it for hours at my bedside in Paris. It was Nicolas de Lenfent’s coat.”
I looked at her for a long moment. But I don’t think I saw her at all. The rage building in me was absolutely silent. It will be rage until I have proof that it must be grief, I thought. Then I wasn’t thinking.
Vaguely, I knew she had no notion yet how strong our passions could be, how they could paralyze us. I think I moved my lips, but nothing came out.
“I don’t think they’ve killed him, Lestat,” she said.
Again I tried to speak. I wanted to ask, Why do you say that, but I couldn’t. I was staring forward into the orchard.
“I think he is alive,” she said. “And that he is their prisoner. Otherwise they would have left his body there and never bothered with that stable boy.”
“Perhaps, perhaps not.” I had to force my mouth to form the words.
“The coat was a message.”
I couldn’t stand this any longer.
“I’m going after them,” I said. “Do you want to return to the tower? If I fail at this . . . ”
“I have no intention of leaving you,” she said.
* * *
THE rain was falling in earnest by the time we reached the boulevard du Temple, and the wet paving stones magnified a thousand lamps.
My thoughts had hardened into strategies that were more instinct than reason. And I was as ready for a fight as I have ever been. But we had to find out where we stood. How many of them were there? And what did they really want? Was it to capture and destroy us, or to frighten us and drive us off? I had to quell my rage, I had to remember they were childish, susperstitious, conceivably easy to scatter or scare.
As soon as we reached the high ancient tenements near Notre Dame, I heard them near us, the vibration coming as in a silver flash and vanishing as quickly again.
Gabrielle drew herself up, and I felt her left hand on my wrist. I saw her right hand on the hilt of her sword.
We had entered a crooked alleyway that turned blindly in the dark in front of us, the iron clatter of the horse’s shoes shattering the silence, and I struggled not to be unnerved by the sound itself.
It seemed we saw them at the same moment.
Gabrielle pressed back against me, and I swallowed the gasp that would have given an impression of fear.
High above us, on either side of the narrow thoroughfare, were their white faces just over the eaves of the tenements, a faint gleam against the lowering sky and the soundless drifts of silver rain.
I drove the horse forward in a rush of scraping and clattering. Above they streaked like rats over the roof. Their voices rose in a faint howling mortals could never have heard.
Gabrielle stifled a little cry as we saw their white arms and legs descending the walls ahead of us, and behind I heard the soft thud of their feet on the stones.
“Straight on,” I shouted, and drawing my sword, I drove right over the two ragged figures who’d dropped down in our path. “Damnable creatures, out of my way,” I shouted, hearing their screams underfoot.
I glimpsed anguished faces for a moment. Those above vanished and those behind us seemed to weaken and we bore ahead, putting yards between us and our pursuers as we came into the deserted place de Grève.
But they were regathering on the edges of the square, and this time I was hearing their distinct thoughts, one of them demanding what power was it we had, and why should they be frightened, and another insisting that they close in.
Some force surely came from Gabrielle at that moment because I could see them visibly fall back when she threw her glance in their direction and tightened her grip on the sword.