her arms, again she howled.
"Damn you," I said. I picked up Gabrielle and Nicki and carried them backwards towards the doors. "You're in hell already," I said, "and I intend to leave you in hell now."
I took Nicolas out of Gabrielle's arms and we ran through the catacomb towards the stairs.
The old queen was in a frenzy of keening laughter behind us.
And human as Orpheus perhaps, I stopped and glanced back.
"Lestat, hurry!" Nicolas whispered in my ear. And Gabrielle gave a desperate gesture for me to come.
Armand had not moved, and the old woman stood beside him laughing still.
"Good-bye, brave child," she cried. "Ride the Devil's Road bravely. Ride the Devil's Road as long as you can."
The coven scattered like frightened ghosts in the cold rain as we burst out of the sepulcher. And baffled, they watched as we sped out of les Innocents into the crowded Paris streets.
Within moments we had stolen a carriage and were on our way out of the city into the countryside.
I drove the team on relentlessly. Yet I was so mortally tired that preternatural strength seemed purely an idea. At every thicket and turn of the road I expected to see the filthy demons surrounding us again.
But somehow I managed to get from a country inn the food and drink Nicolas would need, and the blankets to keep him warm.
He was unconscious long before we reached the tower, and I carried him up the stairs to that high cell where Magnus had first kept me.
His throat was still swollen and bruised from their feasting on him. And though he slept deeply as I laid him on the straw bed, I could feel the thirst in him, the awful craving that I'd felt after Magnus had drunk from me.
Well, there was plenty of wine for him when he awakened, and plenty of food. And I knew -- though how I couldn't tell that he wouldn't die.
What his daylight hours would be like, I could hardly imagine. But he would be safe once I turned the key in the lock. And no matter what he had been to me, or what he stood to be in the future, no mortal could wander free in my lair while I slept.
Beyond that I couldn't reason. I felt like a mortal walking in his sleep.
I was still staring down at him, hearing his vague jumbled dreams -- dreams of the horrors of les Innocents -- when Gabrielle came in. She had finished burying the poor unfortunate stable boy, and she looked like a dusty angel again, her hair stiff and tangled and full of delicate fractured light.
She looked down at Nicki for a long moment and then she drew me out of the room. After I had locked the door, she led me down to the lower crypt. There she put her arms tightly around me and held me, as if she too were worn almost to collapse.
"Listen to me," she said finally, drawing back and putting her hands up to hold my face. "We'll get him out of France as soon as we rise. No one will ever believe his mad tales."
I didn't answer. I could scarce understand her, her reasoning or her intentions. My head swam.
"You can play the puppeteer with him," she said, "as you did with Renaud's actors. You can send him off to the New World."
"Sleep," I whispered. I kissed her open mouth. I held her with my eyes closed. I saw the crypt again, heard their strange, inhuman voices. All this would not stop.
"After he's gone, then we can talk about these others," she said calmly. "Whether to leave Paris altogether for a while.. ."
I let her go, and I turned away from her and I went to the sarcophagus and rested for a moment against the stone lid. For the first time in my immortal life I wanted the silence of the tomb, the feeling that all things were out of my hands.
It seemed she said something else then.
Do not do this thing.
Part IV The Children Of Darkness Chapter 4
4
When I awoke, I heard his cries. He was beating on the oaken door, cursing me for keeping him prisoner. The sound filled the tower, and the scent of him came through the stone walls: succulent, oh so succulent, smell of living flesh and blood, his flesh and blood.
She slept still.
Do not do this thing.
Symphony of malice, symphony of madness coming through the walls, straining to contain the ghastly images, the torture, to