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"Well, yes, I think I've always understood that," said Gregory. "Now it needs more human blood to continue its work."

"And what's the goal of its work?" asked Flavius.

"To make us into perfect hosts for itself," said Fareed.

"And to drink blood, always to drink more blood," said Gregory. "To drive us to drink more blood. I remember how the Queen cried out in those early months. The thirst was unbearable. It wanted more blood. The red-haired witches told her that before they'd been given the Blood. 'It wants more blood.' "

"But I don't think that is its main goal," said Fareed. "Nor has it ever been. But I'm not sure that it is conscious of a goal! That is what I want to know more than anything. Is it self-conscious? Is it a conscious being living inside the body of Mekare?"

"But in the very beginning," Gregory said, "the spirits of the world told the twin witches that Amel, once fused with the Queen, was not conscious. They said, 'Amel is no more.' They said Amel was lost now inside the Mother."

Fareed laughed to himself and looked into the fire.

"I was there," said Gregory. "I remember it, when the twins said these things."

"Well, of course you were, but what amazes me is that after all the generations you've seen rise and fall, you still believe those spirits actually spoke to the witches."

"I know they did."

"Do you?" asked Fareed.

"Yes," said Gregory. "I do know."

"Well, you may be right and the spirits may be right, and the thing is mindless and subsumed, but I cannot help but wonder. I tell you, there are no discarnate entities. This thing, Amel, is not a discarnate entity but something of immense size and intricate organization, something that has now so thoroughly mutated its host and those connected to her...." And suddenly his language ascended again into a vocabulary as opaque to Gregory as the syllables uttered by dolphins or birds.

Gregory tried to pierce the language with the finest abilities of his own mind, to see the pictures, shapes behind it. Design. But he saw something that resembled the stars in the night sky and their infinite and purely accidental patterns.

Fareed continued.

"... I suspect these creatures, which we have for thousands of years called spirits or ghosts, these creatures draw their nourishment from the atmosphere, and just how they perceive us is impossible to know. There is a beauty to it, I suspect, a beauty as there is to all of nature, and they are part of nature...."

> "Beauty," Gregory said. "I believe there is beauty in all things. I believe that. But I must find the beauty and coherence in science or I'll never learn, never understand."

"Listen to me," said Fareed gently. "I was brought over because this is my field, my language, my realm, all this. You need not ever fully understand it. You can't understand any more than Lestat or Marius or Maharet can understand it, or millions of people out there who have no capacity to absorb scientific knowledge or use it any way other than the simplest and most practical...."

"I am that crippled here," said Gregory, nodding.

"But trust in me," said Fareed. "Trust in me that I study for us, what I can study that no human scientist can possibly study, and don't think they haven't tried, they have."

"Oh, I know," said Gregory. He thought back on those long-ago nights in 1985, after Lestat's famous San Francisco rock concert, of the scientists who gathered up what they could of those burnt remains all over the parking lots surrounding the concert hall.

He'd watched that with the coldest detachment.

But nothing, absolutely nothing, had come of it, any more than anything ever came of the vampires who were now and then captured by scientists, imprisoned in labs, and studied until they made their spectacular escapes, or were spectacularly rescued. Nothing came of it. Except that now the world was inhabited by some thirty or forty frantic men and women of science who claimed there were real vampires out there and they had seen them with their own eyes--outcasts from their profession whom the world branded lunatics.

Time was when Gregory left the security of his Geneva penthouse to rescue any misbegotten little vampire who'd ended up in a laboratory prison under fluorescent lights gazed on by government officials. He'd hastened to break them out, destroy whatever evidence had been collected. But now he scarcely bothered. It didn't matter.

Vampires didn't exist and everybody knew that. All the amusing popular novels, television series, and motion pictures about vampires served to reinforce the common wisdom.

Besides, captured vampires almost always escaped. They were plenty strong. If caught in confusion and weakness, they collected themselves, bided their time, seduced their captives with cooperative speech, then shattered skulls, burnt laboratories, and scampered back off into the great and unending shadow world of the Undead, leaving behind not a scintilla of evidence that they had ever been lab rats.

Didn't happen very often anyway.

Fareed was aware of all this. He had to be.

Fareed--with or without their help--would find out everything.

Fareed laughed. He laughed easily and cheerfully with his entire face, his green eyes crinkled and his lips smiling. He'd been reading Gregory's mind. "You are so right," he said. "So very right. And some of those poor ostracized researchers, who scraped up the oily residue of mythic monsters from the asphalt, are working with me now in this very building. They make the most willing pupils of what Seth and I have to offer."