Prince Lestat by Anne Rice

always that Jesse and David were fast companions, still studying together in the ancient archives of Maharet’s secret jungle compound, which she shared with her twin sister in Indonesia. It had been years since I’d visited the compound, but I had had it in my mind to go there sometime soon due to the troubles I was suffering in my heart, and my general doubts about my own stamina to survive the misery I was now enduring. Also, I’d been very concerned that Benji’s persistent broadcasts to “the vampire world” might eventually rile Maharet and draw her out of her retreat to punish Benji. Maharet could be provoked. I knew that firsthand. After my encounter with Memnoch, I’dprovoked her and drawn her out. I worried about that more than I cared to admit to myself. Benji, the nuisance.
    And now this, David searching for Jesse as if he hadn’t seen her in years, as if he no longer knew where Maharet or Mekare could be found.
    I had half a mind to go looking for the twins first. And finally I did.
    I took to the skies easily enough and went south, discovering the spot and discovering that it had long been abandoned.
    It was chilling to walk through the ruins. Maharet had once had many stone rooms here, gated gardens, screened-in areas where she and her sister could roam in solitude. There had been a bevy of native mortal servants, generators, satellite dishes, and even cooling machines, and all the comforts the modern world could provide in such a remote spot. And David had told me of the libraries, of the shelves of ancient scrolls and tablets, of his hours of speaking to Maharet about the worlds she’d witnessed.
    Well, it was ruined and overgrown, and some of the rooms had been intentionally knocked down, and there were old tunnels down into the earth which were now half caved in with rocks and dirt, and the jungle had swallowed a wilderness of rusted electrical equipment. All traces of human or vampiric habitation had been obliterated.
    So that meant the twins had vanished from here and not even David Talbot knew where they were, David, who had been so fascinated and fearless with the twins, so eager to learn what they had to teach.
    And now David was calling to Jesse Reeves and begging for a meeting in Paris.
    Red-haired confidante, I must see you, I must discover why it is I cannot find you
.
    Now understand I made David a vampire, so I can’t hear his telepathic messages directly, no, but I caught them from other minds as so often happens.
    As for Jesse, she was a fledgling vampire, yes, made the night of my travesty of a rock concert in San Francisco some decades before. But she’d been made by her beloved aunt Maharet, a true ancestor of hers, and a vampiric guardian, whom as I’ve explained had some of the oldest and most potent Blood in the world. So Jesse was no ordinary fledgling by any means.
    David’s call was going out over and over again, with the intelligence that he’d haunt the Left Bank till Jesse showed up there.
    Well, I decided I’d haunt it too until I found David or both of them.
    I headed for Paris to a suite I’d maintained for years, in the gorgeous Hôtel Plaza Athénée in the Avenue Montaigne, the closets stocked with a splendid wardrobe (as if that was going to hide the crumbling ruin which I had become), and I prepared to stay in residence and search until David and Jesse appeared. The safe in that suite held all the usual papers, plastic bank cards, and currency I’d need for a comfortable stay in the capital. And I brought with me a cell phone I’d recently had my attorneys obtain for me. I didn’t want to greet Jesse or David as the ragged, dusty, windblown suicidal vagabond. I really was no longer that in spirit, and though I had scant interest in all things material, I felt more at ease in the capital as a member of human society.
    It was good to be back in Paris, better than I expected, with all that dizzying life around me, and the magnificent lights of the