Prince Lestat Read Online Free PDF

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
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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 wasalmost 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