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When it did stop, I was seated in the chair, and Marius was standing behind me and holding my shoulders in a way that was protective and comforting.

The pad of paper was lying there in front of me. And just before Fareed took it and put it in front of Kapetria, I saw pictographs on it, crude, squiggly pictographs.

Kapetria looked for a long moment at the paper and then up at me rather helplessly. "I never learned to read them!" she said. She seemed crestfallen.

I heard a long painful sigh come from Amel.

"Tell her she is not looking in the right place for the formula for luracastria. She should look inside herself."

Marius surely had heard this. They all had. Armand sent a swift telepathic negation. If the others wanted to stop me from blurting it out, they might have said something. They didn't.

I repeated Amel's words precisely as he had said them in my head.

"Ah," she said. She sat back in her chair as if this were a eureka moment.

A little tumult in my head. "I didn't mean to hurt you!" Amel said. Highly emotional. "I didn't!"

"All right, I understand," I said aloud. "And we can write. But we ought to find a way to write that doesn't cause me pain!"

I was exhausted as if I'd been running and running and had to fall down on the ground. And then I felt the moisture, which had to be blood in my eyes.

Kapetria was staring at me in alarm.

Marius offered me a handkerchief before I could find mine. And there was blood on it as I blotted my eyes.

"Amel, don't do this again!" Kapetria said. "You are in a parasitical relationship with Lestat's brain, Amel. You can injure it."

"Laughter," I said. "He's laughing." Then he let loose with a long stream of the ancient language, the language we'd heard ourselves on Benji's broadcast. "Stop," I said. "I can't repeat it this fast. Stop!"

Now we're great mimics, all of us, and have savant abilities when it comes to singing and replicating music, so I tried to give in to these talents and began speaking the strange syllables he was speaking, punctuating what he was saying to me with my repetitions, until finally he began to pause at the right moments. Suddenly he ran on with such fury I simply couldn't follow.

There came a blast of the pain again, and this time before it blinded me I saw what I hadn't seen before--that it was hitting the youngest of us at the table, who was David, who'd been made less than thirty years ago by me. Then the pain took over. And realizing what must be happening to my Rose and to Viktor wherever they were and to Louis, and all the others who didn't have thousands of years in the Blood, I collapsed.

I knew I was lying on the floor and I didn't care.

Kapetria was talking, on and on, the same way he'd been talking, in that tongue. She was talking to him in me and he was answering but I couldn't tell her the answers.

Suddenly he was screaming at me, screaming. And I was screaming back.

If you don't stop, I can't do anything! This pain is unendurable!

Gone. Merely the little convulsions behind my eyes and at the base of my neck. I stared up at the ceiling, at the brilliant painted images ringing the plaster medallion of the chandelier, at the gold-tinged clouds up there, and the smiling face of the putti gathered in the far corners. It seemed there was nothing to worry about, no need for haste or for alarm. Just this strange kind of bliss.

Her blood, her blood, open the channel and I can talk to her....

Marius helped me up. Seth was on the other side of me, his firm hand on the back of my neck. I stood on my feet. The lights seemed impossibly dim and I knew this was wrong, really wrong, no one had dimmed the lights. Yet the pulsing wreath of the chandelier, with its myriad baubles of crystal, was glowing through a cloud of golden vapor. Kapetria looked up at me. Her breasts were touching my chest. Not a female. Not a true female anything. But something free of male/female, something wondrous.

"Drink," Amel said to me.

I took her in my arms and turned her so that my back was to the long table, though I knew my mother was behind Kapetria and she saw this seemingly obscene intimacy as I touched Kapetria's throat with my fangs and then let them push through her soft hot skin, such beautiful dark bronze skin, and I felt the blood fill my mouth--extraordinary blood.

Atalantaya. High noon. A sky as endlessly blue as the sea and Amel talking to Kapetria as they walked together, this evil twin of mine, with his shoulder-length red hair and green eyes and supple smile, the musical ancient tongue running on, and now its words were shining with meaning, from your own skin and your own blood, these elements, without which, impossible, every Replimoid, this synthesis, accelerating the protein and strengthening and locking in the properties of--. The two in a great airy laboratory together, and something sparkling and marvelous as liquid glass sprouting and growing from a tiny egg in Amel's cupped hands, and stretching its shining tentacles up and up in the light that streamed in through the clear windows...chain reaction inevitable, invasion and transformation of the substance and...A body on an oval bed, a body like the body of a human being only smaller. The precise chemical balance, nutrients, out of my body, out of those enhancements of me...He held her in his arms, his red hair falling in his face as he kissed her, his fingers tightening on her arms....

Yea gods, what blood, such rich, irresistible blood, with so many tiny hearts throbbing to make up the resounding throb of one heart that wasn't a heart at all. I was bathed in the blood; the sweet blood was a fountain, and every cell in me was satisfied and upheld by the blood.

I awoke. Her friends held her as if she were the dead Christ in the arms of His Mother and John and Joseph of Arimathea, with the others from the wall like so many angels. She lay back upon this safety net of arms and hands.

"My coffin," I said, "put me in my coffin!" When had I said those words before. "Put me in my coffin!" And Louis had not done it, and Claudia had not done it. In came the knife. Only this time I was being helped. Marius and David had ahold of me and were taking me out of the room.