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This was no longer the childish spirit baiting me and telling me he loved me one moment while calling me a fool the next. This was Amel who knew things that I would never know, no matter how long I walked the earth, knew possibilities and probabilities of which we blood drinkers simply never conceived--but Amel who could not think how to save us from destruction, and swore again and again that he would never allow such a thing to come about.

"Why don't we go into Paris?" I suggested more than once. "Why don't we just talk with Fareed and Seth and maybe you can figure how to sever the connection so that the others don't have to die?"

Weeping. I heard him weeping. "Don't you think I've tried?"

"I don't know. I wonder. You built Atalantaya," I said. I couldn't get used to calling it Atlantis. "Surely you can bring your extraordinary mind to bear on this problem and come up with something, there has to be something."

This was torture for him. I knew it. But I was desperate.

"I won't let her do it!" Amel protested. "Don't you understand? You think she can do this without my cooperation? You think I can't use the power inside you to incinerate her? She knows I can and I will."

And on he'd go, weeping, and avowing that we are one, and you are me and I am you. "Go look in a mirror. Find a mirror. There are mirrors all over this castle. I want you to look in a mirror. I want to see you in the mirror."

And so I stood in front of a mirror from time to time and let him look at me, remembering Kapetria's description of him with his green eyes and red hair. Could have been your brother or your cousin, is that what she said?

"When I first saw you standing before Akasha," he said, "I saw me."

If I slept, we dreamed, and we were in Atalantaya and the language was all around me. We walked the gleaming streets together, as people came out to greet him, touch his hand. It was balmy and sweet there like it is in New Orleans in springtime and the banana trees were vastly bigger and primal sending their knifelike leaves sky-high over us. The buildings did shine with the luster of pearls. But these dreams faded fast when I opened my eyes.

One night I dreamed a man and a woman were talking together in the ancient language. I couldn't see them, but I was hearing them, hearing her voice and his voice; it seemed they'd been talking forever, and I had the distinct impression that if I did listen with the utmost focus, that I could crack the language. The secret lay in the repetitions. I felt I knew now the word for "behold," the word they said so often--lalakate.

Then it was morning. I woke up, found I wasn't in my coffin, that I had fallen asleep on the marble bench beside it. I'd done that often lately, fallen asleep on the hard cold marble, not bothering with the comfort of the coffin as though I were a monk sentenced for his sins to sleep on a hard pallet. I saw my phone lying on the floor. Out of the charger. No battery. I remembered that I'd put it in the charger, then put my right hand under my head and gone to sleep as the world sang Lauds above.

I stared at the phone.

"It was you talking to her!"

No answer.

I sat up and picked up the phone. I checked back and there were the calls. All day long, calls one after another, until the battery had gone out, seven distinct calls.

"Don't bother," he said. Anguish. "She has no solution for the severing of the ties. She is working on 'what she has to work on now,' she says."

"How did you do it?"

"She'd given me the number when we were together in the blood," he said. "I hadn't realized what it was. I had to think about it. You know how hard it is for m

e to think of any one thing without so many other things. She'd talked of ghosts using phones and radios and radio waves. And the phone was right by your head. More and more often you were sleeping like that on the bench and the phone was right by your head. But it doesn't matter. She doesn't know anything. She's working on 'what she has to work on.' She's like a parent determined to rescue a child against the child's will."

He didn't speak for the rest of the night.

But I was shaken.

I told the ancient ones what he'd done, managing to connect through the phone while I slept. We'd all suspected long ago that he wasn't paralyzed as we were by the sun, but it was, like so much else, just a mystery that Fareed could not explain with all the abstract medical terms in the world. I told him of all the times that Amel had tried to force me to move against my will, of the times he'd made my hand jump or cramp.

I left the phone and the charger upstairs in my bedchamber after that. If they needed me during those hours when I was down there waiting for sleep, they'd have to knock at the door of the vault.

Amel didn't seem to care. And he wasn't trying to make my limbs move anymore anyway. At least not most of the time.

26

Lestat

I TOLD LOUIS EVERYTHING. Ten nights had passed during which I sought to protect him from the extent of my fear. Of course he knew absolutely everything that had been going on; he was always with me, and we'd managed to get away to hunt in Paris twice.

But this was different. I poured it all out. I confided all my fears that there was nothing I could do to stop the inevitable, and I talked about severing the tentacles and how Fareed and Seth were working on that now, marshaling every bit of research they had on us to try to figure a way.

"And what are the chances of Fareed figuring out this mystery, as to how we're all connected?" I asked. "As Fareed himself put it, how can he disconnect something that he cannot see?"