Pandora - By Anne Rice Page 0,63

must tell me everything,” I said.

I was amazed at the whiteness of his skin, its utter blemishless perfection. And once again the radiance of his eyes seemed almost impossible. Inhuman.

Only now did I see the full glory of his long hair. He did look like the Keltoi, who had been his ancestors. His hair touched his shoulders. It was a gleaming gold, overly bright, yellow as corn and full of soft curls.

“Look at you!” I whispered. “You’re not alive!”

“No, take your last look, for you are leaving here!”

“What?” I said. “Last look?” I repeated his words. “What are you talking about! I’ve only arrived, laid my plans, rid myself of my brother! I am not leaving here. Do you mean to say you are leaving me?”

There was a terrible anguish in his face, a courageous appeal that I had never seen in any man, not even in my Father, who had worked swiftly in those last fatal moments at home, as if he were merely intent on sending me on an important appointment.

Marius’s eyes were filmed with blood. He was crying, and his eyes were sore with the tears! No! These were tears like the tears of the magnificent Queen in the dream, who, bound to her throne, wept and stained her cheeks and her throat and her linen.

He wanted to deny it. He shook his head, but he knew I was quite convinced.

“Pandora, when I saw it was you,” he said, “when you came into the Temple and I saw it was you who had had these blood dreams, I was beside myself. I must get you far from this, far from all danger.”

I separated myself from his spell, from the aura of his beauty. I beheld him with a cold eye, and I listened as he went on, noting all about him, from the glitter of his eyes to the way that he gestured.

“You have to leave Antioch at once,” he said. “I will stay here the night with you. Then in the day, you pick up your faithful Flavius and your two girls, they are honest, and you take them with you. You put miles between you and this place by day, and this thing can’t follow you! Don’t tell me now where you mean to go. You can discuss all this at the docks in the morning. You have plenty of money.”

“You are the one who is dreaming now, Marius; I am not going. Who is it precisely that you want me to flee? The weeping Queen on her throne? Or the prowling, burnt one? The former reaches me over miles and miles of sea with her summons. She warns me against my evil brother. The other I can easily dispatch. I have no fear of him. I know what he is from the dreams, and I know how the sun has hurt him, and I will myself pin him to the wall in the sun.”

He was silent, biting his lip.

“I will do that for her, for the Queen in the dreams, to avenge her.”

“Pandora, I am begging you.”

“In vain,” I said. “Do you think I have come so far only to run again? And the woman’s voice—”

“How do you know it was this Queen of whom you dreamt? There could be other blood drinkers in this city. Men, women. They all want the same thing.”

“And you fear them?”

“Loathe them! And I must keep clear of them, not give them what they want! Never give them what they want.”

“Ah, I see it all,” I said.

“You do not!” he said, scowling down at me. So fierce, so perfect.

“You are one of them, Marius. You are whole. You are unburnt. They want your blood to heal themselves.”

“How could you think of such a thing?”

“In my dreams, they called the Queen ‘the Fount.’ ”

I flew at him and imprisoned him in my arms! He was powerfully strong, solid as a tree! I never felt such hardness of muscle in a man. I lay my head on his shoulder, and his cheek against the top of my head was cold!

But he enfolded me gently with both arms, stroking my hair, pulling it down out of all the pins and letting it flow down my back. I felt a rich tingling all over the surface of my skin.

Hard, so hard, yet with no pulse of life. No warmth of human blood in his gentle, sweet gestures.

“My darling,” he said, “I don’t know the source of your dreams, but I know this. You