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"Yes, my friend," said Seth. "We drank from the Mother. Those who drink from the Mother possess a power like no other."

And the Vampire Lestat drank from the Mother as well, thought Gregory to himself. And so had Marius, the wanderer. The fledglings of Marius, Pandora, and Bianca, had drunk from the Mother. And so had Gregory's own Avicus and Zenobia, yes. And Khayman, poor Khayman, was he really a simpleton under the protection of the twins? He had drunk from the Mother as well. How many others had drunk directly from the Mother?

Back in the luxurious bedroom of Fareed's high-rise living quarters and clinic, Gregory had taken this brilliant doctor into his arms and sunk his needlelike teeth into the man's soul and his dreams. I shall take your blood and you will drink of my blood and we will know each other and love each other and be brothers now for all time. Blood Kin.

A beautiful being was Fareed. Like many a blood drinker, his morals had been forged in the crucible of his human experience, and they would not give way now to the blandishments of the Blood. He would be forever a servant of vampires, yes, but respecting of all living things, and never engage in that which would harm anyone unless somehow that being had fallen beneath the bar of his concern by being an unspeakable monster of some sort.

What this meant was that Fareed could do no evil, not to vampires or to human beings. Whatever the course of his scientific discoveries they would never be perverted or abused.

But of incorrigible, inveterate, unredeemable evildoers he had had enough in his life, and therefore he could and would pluck from the rampant vampire herd a real bad, no-count, filthy, degenerate bully from whom he could take a leg for Flavius to have grafted on as his own. Indeed, he had taken more than one such vampire body for his experiments. He was candid about that. No, he would never do this to a human, but to a cruel and relentlessly destructive vampire, yes, he could do it. And he did it to get Flavius the leg. A true and living leg that became part of Flavius's immortal body!

Ah brave new world ...

Those nights with Fareed and Seth had been like nothing Gregory had ever experienced, given over to endless scientific talks and visions and experiments. "If either of you gentleman wants to feel the passion of biological men once more, I can arrange this simply with hormonal injections," said Fareed, "and indeed would like very much if you would yield to me in this and allow me to harvest the seed from the experiments."

"Are you saying that a living seed can come forth from us again?" asked Flavius.

"Yes," answered Fareed. "I have achieved this in one case, but the case was not ordinary." He had indeed infused an eighteenth-century vampire with these powerful hormones and the vampire's seed had indeed fathered a son. But it had not been simple. Indeed the magic connection had been made in a dish, and the son was more a clone than an offspring, birthed through a biological mother.

Gregory was stunned. So was Flavius.

But what shocked Gregory to the core was not that this had worked, this bit of cellular razzle-dazzle, but that it had worked with a vampire that Gregory had been stalking the world over. Fareed struggled to keep the vampire's identity secret. But when next Gregory drew the doctor to himself to drink his blood and give his own in return, he reached for deeply buried images and answers and brought them to himself.

Yes, the great rock singer-poet Lestat de Lioncourt had fathered a son.

Then on a bright screen in a dark room Fareed finally revealed to him images of this young human boy, the "spitting image" of his father down to the smallest particular, containing the full packet of his father's DNA.

"And Lestat knows this?" asked Gregory. "And he has acknowledged this boy?" He realized how ridiculous these words sounded as soon as he'd uttered them, and he knew the answer as well.

Lestat, wherever he was, knew nothing of the existence of young Viktor.

"I don't think Lestat guessed for a moment," said Fareed, "that I would attempt such a thing."

Seth sat in the shadows beside his beloved Fareed as all this was discussed, his narrow angular face impassive, but surely he and Gregory were thinking the same thing. Seth, the Mother's human son, had once been the most sought-after hostage by her enemies; that's why the great Queen had sent for him and given him the Blood, to keep him from her enemies who might have tortured him unendingly to demand concessions or surrender from her.

Could not this same fate befall this human boy?

"But what if his enemies have already destroyed Lestat?" asked Flavius. "No one has heard one word from him for so long."

"He's alive, I know he is," said Gregory. Fareed and Seth had not responded.

That had been years ago, that meeting.

The boy must now be eighteen or nineteen years old, a man for all practical purposes, and nearly the same age his father had been when Magnus raped him and made him a vampire.

Before Gregory and Flavius had taken their leave, Seth had assured them both that he had no ancient grudge against the twins for the slaying of his mother.

"The twins know we're here," said Seth. "They have to know. And they don't care. That's the secret of the reigning Queen of the Damned. She does not care and her sister does not care. Well, I care. I care about everything under the sun and the moon, and that's why I made Fareed. But I don't care about revenge against the twins or about ever seeing them eye to eye. This is of no importance to me."

Seth had been right of course that Maharet knew, but Gregory had not known it at the time. He had not learned it until much later. And Seth had been merely speculating then. He and Fareed and Maharet had not yet met.

"I understand, I so understand," said Gregory softly. "But have you never wanted, yourself, to take the demon out of Mekare and into your own body? Have you never felt that simple urge, to dispatch her in exactly the same way that she dispatched the Mother?"

"You mean my mother," said S

eth. "And no. Why would I want the demon in me? What, you think as her son, I see myself as Akasha's heir to this demon?" He was plainly disgusted.

"Not so much that," said Gregory, politely backing off. "But so that the threat of our annihilation doesn't belong to another. So that you have the fount safe within yourself."