“Has there been no change in her over these years?” I pushed.

Jesse didn’t respond. She looked at me in silence and then her face broke. I thought she’d break down completely but she pulled herself up.

She looked at David. David sat back on the sofa, and took a deep breath. “Mekare has never shown any sign of understanding what in fact happened to her,” David said. “Oh, in the beginning, Maharet had hopes.”

“If there’s a true mind there,” said Jesse, “no one can reach it. How long it took for my aunt to resign herself to this I can’t say.”

I wasn’t surprised, but I was horrified. And anytime in my life I’d been in contact with Mekare, I’d been uneasy, as if dealing with something that looked human but was in no way human anymore. Now, all blood drinkers truly are human; they never cease being human. They may talk of being more or less human, but they are human, with human thoughts, desires, human speech. Mekare’s face had never been more expressive than that of an animal, as mysterious and unreachable as the face of an animal, a thing that seems intelligent yet is not intelligent in the way we are at all.

“Oh, she knows she’s with her sister and she shows love to her sister,” said David, “but beyond that, if any thought, any coherent verbal thought, has ever emanated from Mekare, I’ve never heard it, and neither has Jesse. And neither has Maharet as far as I ever knew.”

“But she remains docile, manageable,” I said. “She always seemed that way, utterly compliant. Isn’t that so?”

Neither replied. Jesse was looking uneasily at David and then she turned to me as if just hearing my question. “It certainly did seem that way,” she said. “In the beginning, Maharet would spend nights, weeks even, talking with her, walking with her, taking her about the jungle compound. She sang to her, played music for her, sat her down before the television screens, playing films for her, brilliant colorful films full of sunlight. I don’t know if you remember how large it was, the compound with all those salons, or how much of an enclosed area it provided for solitary walks. They were always together. Maharet was obviously doing everything in her power to draw Mekare out.”

I did remember those massive overarching screened enclosures, with the jungle exploding against the steel mesh. Orchids, the wild screeching South American birds with their long blue and yellow feathers, the vines dripping pink or yellow blossoms. Had there not been tiny Brazilian monkeys chattering in the upper branches? Maharet had imported every small colorful tropical creature or plant imaginable. It had been marvelous to roam the paths discovering secretive and picturesque stone grottoes, streams, and little waterfalls—to be in the wilderness and yet somehow safe from it at the same time.

“But I knew early on,” said Jesse, “that Maharet was disappointed, almost brutally disappointed, only of course she’d never say. All those long centuries searching for Mekare, certain that Mekare could be alive somewhere, and then Mekare appearing to fulfill her curse against Akasha, and then this.”

“I can imagine it,” I said. I remembered Mekare’s masklike face, those eyes as empty as the paperweight eyes of a French doll.

Jesse went on, a frown creasing her smooth forehead, her reddish-blond eyebrows catching the light.

“There was never a mention, never a declaration or a decision. But the long hours of talking stopped. No more reading aloud, or music, or films. And after that there was simple physical affection, the two walking arm in arm, or Maharet at her reading with Mekare sitting motionless on a bench nearby.”

And of course, I thought to myself, the horrifying thought that this thing, this motionless, thoughtless being, contained the Sacred Core. But then was it so bad? Was it so bad for the host of the Sacred Core to be without thought, without dreams, without ambition, without designs?

Akasha, when she had risen from her throne, had been a monster. “I would be the Queen of Heaven,” she’d said to me as she slew mortals, and urged me to do the same. And I, the consort, had done her bidding all too easily, to my everlasting shame. What a price I’d paid for the powerful Blood she’d given me, and the instructions. No wonder I kept to my refuge now. When I looked back over my myriad adventures sometimes all I saw was shame.

Maharet had rightfully described her sister as the Queen of the Damned.

I stood up and went to the window. I had to stop. Too many voices out there in the night. Benji in faraway New York was already broadcasting of the appearance of Lestat in Paris, with David Talbot and Jesse Reeves. His amplified voice poured forth from countless devices out there, warning the fledglings: “Children of the Night, leave them alone. For your own safety, leave them alone. They will hear my voice. They will hear me begging them to speak to us. Give them time. For your own safety, leave them alone.”

I went back to the couch. David was patiently waiting, and so was Jesse. Surely their preternatural hearing was as acute as mine.

“And then there was the time when Marius came to her,” said Jesse, looking at me eagerly.

I nodded for her to continue.

“You know these things. Marius came wanting Maharet’s permission to put an end to Santino, the vampire who’d done so much to harm him over the centuries, the vampire who brought the Children of Satan against him in Venice.”

David nodded, and so did I. I shrugged.

“She had hated that she was asked to sit in judgment, that Marius wanted her to convene a court of sorts, to give permission for what he wanted to do. She refused permission to Marius to harm Santino, not because she didn’t believe he should but because she did not want to be the judge. And she did not want a murder beneath her roof.”

“That was clear,” said David.

Marius had recounted this story in his memoir. Or somebody had recounted it. The memoir might have been polished up by David for all I knew. Probably was. Pandora and Armand had been present for this court or tribunal when Marius had come before Maharet with his request, wanting vengeance on Santino but forswearing it if Maharet would not give her blessing. And somebody had brought Santino there, but who precisely had done that? Maharet?

It was Marius who’d said somebody has to rule. It was Marius who had raised the entire issue of authority. What were we to expect from someone who came into the Blood during the age of the great Pax Romana? Marius had forever been the rational Roman, the believer in reason and law and order.

And then it had been another blood drinker, Thorne, an ancient fledgling of Maharet, an old Norseman, red-haired, romantic, newly emerged from the blessed solitude of the earth, who had destroyed Santino for reasons of his own. An ugly violent scene it had been with Santino burnt by Thorne right before Maharet’s eyes. Maharet had wept. Her outrage had not been that of a queen so much as the mistress of a household defiled. And Thorne had followed this act of disobedience and defiance by offering Maharet a precious gift: his preternatural eyes.