17
" Let me have the boy!”
“Beg pardon?”
“You mean to kill me, so do it. But let me have the boy. A kiss, Sir, that’s all I ask. A kiss, that is the world. I’m too drunk for anything else!”
“Please, Master, I can’t endure this,” I said.
“Then, how will you endure eternity, my child? Don’t you know that’s what I mean to give you? What power under God is there that can break me?” He threw a fierce glance at me, but it seemed more artifice than true emotion.
“I’ve learned my lessons,” I said. “I only hate to see him die.”
“Ah, yes, then you have learnt. Martino, kiss my child if he’ll allow it, and mark you, be gentle when you do.”
It was I who leant across the table now and planted my kiss on the man’s cheek. He turned and caught my mouth with his, hungry, sour with wine, but enticingly, electrically hot.
The tears sprang to my eyes. I opened my mouth to him and let his tongue come into me. And with my eyes shut, I felt it quiver and his lips become tight, as if they had been turned to hard metal clamped to me and unable to close.
My Master had him, had his throat, and the kiss was frozen, and I, weeping, put out my hand blindly to find the very place in his neck where my Master’s evil teeth had driven in. I felt my Master’s silky lips, I felt the hard teeth beneath them, I felt the tender neck.
I opened my eyes and pulled myself away. My doomed Martino sighed and moaned and closed his lips and sat back in my Master’s grip with his eyes half-mast.
He turned his head slowly towards my Master. In a small raw drunken voice, he spoke. “For Bianca…”
“For Bianca,” I said. I sobbed, muffling it with my hand.
My Master drew up. With his left hand, he smoothed back Martino’s damp and tangled hair. “For Bianca,” he said into his ear.
“Never…never should have let her live,” came the last sighing words from Martino. His head fell over my master’s right arm.
My Master kissed the back of his head, and let him slip down onto the table.
“Charming to the last,” said he. “Just a real poet to the bottom of his soul. "
― , The Vampire Armand (Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat #7)
