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Derek reached out and clasped his son's face with both hands. He sat up and kissed his son on the lips and then broke down again as he always did, always, into tears.

And the new one, the new Derek, Derek's son, cried with him.

10

Lestat

I CLIMBED SWIFTLY UP the mountain until I was in the thick of the old forest that extended to the very end of my ancestral land, moving effortlessly through the snow that had so exhausted me when I was a boy and a young man. Many of the old trees I recalled were gone, and I was in a dense thicket of spruce and other fir trees when I came to the cement bench I had hauled to this high and deserted place when I'd first returned in the twentieth century.

It was a common kind of garden bench, curved about the bark of an immense tree, and deep enough for me to sit comfortably with my back against the tree to look down on the distant Chateau with her glorious lighted windows.

Oh, the cold winters I had spent under that roof, I thought, but only in passing. I was almost used to it now, the splendid palace that the old castle had become, and this sense of

ownership, of being the lord of this land, the lord who could walk out to the very boundaries, and gaze on all that he ruled. I shut out the sound of distant music, voices, laughter.

"We are alone now, you and I," I said, speaking aloud to Amel. "At least it seems so."

"We are," he said. His usual tone, distinct and clear.

"You have to tell me all you know of this now."

"That's just it, I have so little to tell you," he responded. "I know that this Garekyn knows me and speaks to me as if he knows me and spoke to me through Eleni when I was in her, and I saw him up close, and I tell you, he is the positive replica of a human male."

"And in the blood, what did you see?"

"I wasn't there when Armand drained him. I was there when he fought with Eleni. I gave her every assistance I could, but it came to nothing. I can't move limbs or stop them from moving. I can't increase or decrease the power of a blood drinker. I gave her courage, but it wasn't enough."

"That doesn't stop you from trying to move my limbs," I said.

"I admit that. Wouldn't you want to move limbs if you were me? Wouldn't you want to pilot the ship? Look, I don't know what the city is or what it means. But I do know this. I did once know all about it."

"How do you mean?"

"It has to do with me. I knew that the first night we dreamed of it. I thought the dream was coming from someone in the Blood, of course. But now I'm not so sure. I think the images came from deep inside me, and the images are from my past, and the images want me to remember that past."

"Then what Gremt said was true. You have lived before. You weren't always a spirit."

"I know that I lived before. I've always known! I told all those addlebrained spirits that I'd lived before, on Earth. Oh, you can't know how stupid and bumbling and hopeless spirits are! They are made of nothing and they are nothing!"

"That isn't entirely true," I said, "but you have a way of immediately revising your past to support whatever you've come to know in the present. Try to think when you first dreamed of the city."

"It was when you dreamed of it. What? A month ago? I think maybe I do know why I started to dream of it."

"Well, then?"

"It was when Fareed first happened on the face of that doctor in Gregory's company, the black woman who has vanished."

And indeed, Dr. Karen Rhinehart had vanished.

Gregory and Fareed had returned from Geneva to report that she'd hastily taken her exit not only from the company laboratories, but from her apartment on Lake Geneva as well--at about 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon, or scarcely an hour after a crack-of-dawn radio alert had gone out from New York as to the escaped Garekyn. Indeed, Benji had been frantically broadcasting in his low secret voice until sunup that the creature was escaping, issuing pictures of the creature to the website along with all the details he knew of the creature, including his London address.

Rental records and surveillance tape from Geneva had revealed Dr. Karen Rhinehart had been with a companion, another of the mysterious dark-skinned black-haired tribe with the telltale golden streak in his thick curly or wavy black hair.

Felix Welf was the official name of the male. Six feet or slightly less in height, strong heavy build, decidedly square face, and full beautifully shaped African mouth, a small somewhat delicate nose, and large dark curious eyes with prominent supraorbital ridges and thick well-defined eyebrows.

"That's the only moment I can pinpoint," said Amel. "I pass in and out of Fareed when I choose, of course. I've never trusted him, any more than I trust any of the others. You're the only one I love and trust. And at one point he was looking at pictures of that woman. He was trying to make up his mind to tell Seth and Gregory about her, or whether he was just being foolish. And perhaps something in that woman's face triggered for me the dream of the city falling into the sea, and I felt it the way you might feel a kick to your gut, and I hated it."

This was an amazingly coherent and straightforward confession for Amel, and I knew that he was leveling with me. I held back, hoping he would go on, which he did.