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At that moment, the door to the back stairway opened and Teskhamen and Gremt appeared. They wore long heavy coats, with cravats. And I could see at once that Teskhamen had brought Gremt here via the wind and they were both dusty and ruddy from the cold.

Gremt approached slowly as if he might be intruding and then he said in a soft voice to Fareed, "What is it I have to do? Can you give me precise instructions?"

We all went back to arguing, until quite suddenly Cyril stepped out of the shadows and cried, "Enough!"

Of course this commanded everyone's attention as the great hulking Egyptian stood there with an expression of pure exasperation on his face.

"You can't stop me!" I said.

"I don't want to stop you, boss," he said. "What I want is for somebody to stop my heart now and see if I can survive it. I volunteer. Stop my heart. Let it remain stopped for an hour, for all I care, then try to wake me up. If I can survive, can't you survive?"

"You're mixing everything up!" I protested. "One minute we're talking about me dying when my heart's stopped, and the next about all of you dying when my heart's stopped."

"No, best to do it to me," said Viktor. "You've got thousands of years in the Blood. I was born yesterday. Do it to me."

Rose immediately insisted that she must be the one for she was most certainly the weakest and everyone was quarreling again. But then Thorne protested that he was not even fifteen hundred years old, and he ought to be the one, and then David insisted he should be the one and so on it went.

They were confusing me mightily. But I might have been the only one to observe Fareed slipping away quietly, and disappearing into his laboratory amid the apparatuses and the machines.

Everyone was still arguing when Fareed returned. He had two syringes in his hand.

He gave one of these syringes to Seth as he whispered in Seth's ear. Then he plunged the other syringe into his chest and went down unconscious on the floor.

"He's done it," I said. "He's stopped his heart."

What followed was likely the longest half hour of my life.

No one spoke, but I think we were turning the idea round and round in our minds, trying to think of every conceivable possibility, as Fareed lay there on the tiled floor in his white coat and pants staring straight up into the ceiling lights.

At last Seth knelt down beside Fareed and plunged his syringe into Fareed's chest. A big hoarse breath came from Fareed. He blinked, and then closed his eyes. Then very slowly he sat up. He appeared shaky, and though Seth offered his hand, Fareed sat still for a moment with his own hand to his eyes.

Perhaps two minutes passed, and then Fareed rose to his feet.

"Well, I seem to be quite all right," he said. "Now let's take it a step further. I was hypersensitive to the pain Lestat felt when Amel convulsed or whatever it was that Amel did, so let's devise some reasonable pain test now to see if I am truly disconnected as well as perfectly all right."

Another heated argument started, with everyone talking at once. I tried to get a word in, that we might make it a mild experiment, but Seth was shouting at Fareed this time, and Flannery Gilman had come in and demanded to know what was going on.

I tried to answer her. But suddenly, without the slightest warning I f

elt a dreadful pain in the back of my neck. It grew so intense that I cried out and went down on my knees. I heard Rose scream. David fell to his knees with his hands to his head. I looked up at Fareed. Fareed was feeling nothing. Louis was right next to him and Louis was feeling nothing.

"Enough!" I shouted. And it was gone, just like that. No pain.

I looked around me as I rose to my feet. Everyone--but Gremt, Fareed, and Louis--was recovering more or less from the pain. I didn't have to ask whether Teskhamen or Seth had felt it. There was blood in Teskhamen's eyes and Seth was still holding his head with both hands, his eyebrows knitted, as if he was straining to remember just what he'd felt.

"Well, this is extremely helpful," said Fareed. "Because I didn't feel a thing."

Amel was still making himself known to me, but in the gentlest way.

"And what do you think, Amel?" I asked aloud so all could hear me. "Do you think this experiment will work?"

"You won't die and I won't die if your heart stops," Amel answered. "Do it for the same amount of time that Fareed did it. No more."

I sat down on the couch, still numb from the pain. Gremt sat beside me but said nothing.

Amel spoke. "I told you I could not go into Louis, did I not? And now I tell you, I cannot go into Fareed."

I looked up at Fareed, and then to Louis. "Well, you two will survive, whatever happens," I said. I wanted to weep with relief. "Look, we have to go ahead with this. But you do keep mixing up the matter of my heart and your individual hearts. Fledglings may die when my heart is stopped. Everybody but--. I'm sorry, I can't keep it straight."