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Popular Culture Review
invaded the house of the steward of the Egyptian King and Queen, Enkil and Akasha,
and that Enkil endeavored to learn from the demon of its ways. Concerned with the
apparent physical and mental effects this learning was having on her husband, Akasha
locked herself in the house with Enkil where they were set upon by assassins whose
politics were at odds with King Enkil’s beliefs. The knife blows opened wounds in
both the King and Queen that allowed the demon to enter their bodies “...at the
point when mortal life itself was about to escape. But it was the blood that the
demon permeated in that twilight moment when the heart almost stopped (440).”
The story goes on to assert that the demon “...was in the blood, and the blood was
not merely the demon, or the blood of the King and Queen, but a combination of the
human and the demon which was an altogether different thing (440).”
As with Lestat earlier in the book, Enkil and Akasha discover both advantages
and disadvantages to their new state of being. “They could no longer eat food, or
grow, or die, or have children, yet they could feel with an intensity that terrified
them...But then came an even more dreadful discovery, that to keep their corpses
animate, the blood must be fed (440-41).” Thus, the couple became a new order of
being with