Did Louis and Armand know these were ghosts? Did they know this Gremt was a spirit? And who was this Teskhamen, a blood drinker who knew these ghosts obviously, but hadn’t made himself known to us until now?

After a moment’s hesitation, Louis left the company and Armand stepped back into the shadows. Sevraine gave a warm embrace to the blood drinker, and then took her leave as well.

The clock was chiming the half hour. I had only thirty minutes to be with Rose and Viktor.

I approached Gremt. I realized that the first time I’d encountered this spirit I’d found him intimidating. I hadn’t admitted it to myself. But I knew it now because I was not in any way afraid of him. And a certain definite liking of him arose in me, a certain warming to him because I had seen emotions in him that I understood. He wasn’t without emotion now.

“You know what’s happened,” I said. He was staring at me intently, staring, and perhaps staring through me, and through my eyes at Amel. I couldn’t know. But Amel was quiet. Amel was there as he always would be, but not a sound came from him.

And not a sound came from Gremt either. That this being was in fact a spirit and not some species of biological immortal was almost impossible to grasp as I looked at him. He appeared so very vital, and so complex and obviously filled with feeling. He was not at ease.

“Soon,” I said, “I want to talk to you, to sit down with you, if you will, and talk—with you and Magnus here and all of your little company. I’m going home as soon as I can to my father’s house in France, in the country where I was born. Will you come to us there?”

Again, no response and then Gremt seemed to pull himself up, to force himself to be alert, and he gave a little shiver, and then spoke.

“Yes,” said Gremt. “Yes, thank you, most definitely. We want very much to do that. Forgive us for interrupting you without warning. I realize that you’re expected elsewhere. It’s only that we could not stay away.”

The blood drinker, Teskhamen, a spare white-haired being of considerable elegance, stepped forward. He introduced himself again with a soft agreeable voice. “Yes, you will forgive us, I hope, for coming to you so unexpectedly. But you see we are so eager for a meeting, and simply could not, after what has happened, remain away.”

What did they know of what had happened? But then of course they knew. How could they not? Ghosts, spirits, what limits were there to what they could know? For all I knew they’d been in the house, present invisibly when I had taken Amel into me.

But it did seem this Teskhamen wanted to put me at ease.

“Lestat,” he said warmly. “We are the ancient Elders of the Talamasca. You’ve been told this. We are the founders of the Order. In a sense, we are the real Talamasca and the enduring Talamasca—no longer in need of the mortal Order that survives—and we want to talk with you very much.”

Armand standing silently against the wall said and did nothing.

“Well, I couldn’t be more eager to talk to you myself,” I said. “And I understand why you came. And I suspect I understand why you’ve cut loose your mortal scholars. I think I do, at any rate. But I need time to prepare my home in France, before I see you. And I ask that you come to me there, and soon.”

“My name is Hesketh,” said the woman, “and we are so longing for this meeting. We can’t tell you how very much we want it.” She had her smooth blond hair swept back from her face in rather beautiful waves, held in place by bits of pearl and platinum and then flowing over her shoulders in a timeless fashion.

She extended to me a gloved hand, a hand covered in soft gray kid leather, and of course it felt as vital as a human hand. I could feel the deceptive pulse in it. Why did they make themselves so perfectly physical? Her eyes were arresting, not only because they were such a dark shade of gray but because they were a little wider apart than most people’s eyes, and that gave her face a certain mystery. All the details of her, eyelashes, eyebrows, succulent lips—were exquisitely convincing and fetching. I had to wonder precisely what accounted for this and the other gorgeous illusions I was seeing here. Was it skill, magnetism, aesthetic depth, genius? Was it the soul?

The other ghosts hung back. And one of them, a very personable young male, rather husky, with dark olive skin and curling black hair, appeared to have been weeping. I couldn’t help notice that Armand was almost directly behind him and rather close to him. But there was no time for me to be noticing all these things, or puzzling over them.

“What makes us the physical beings we are? It is all of those things,” said Gremt responding directly to my thoughts and of course reminding me that he could do this. “Oh, we have so much to tell you, so much to … And we will come to you in France as soon as you tell us to come. We have a house there not very far at all from yours, a very old house that goes back to our earliest times together.” He was cheerful suddenly and almost excited. “This has been our wish for so long.” He stopped as if he’d said too much but his expression never really changed.

The ghost of Magnus, as solid as before, hung back, but there came from his face a look of love, of doting love.

This caught me off guard.

“Listen, my friends,” I said. “There are important things happening under this roof tonight and I cannot invite you to remain and to sit down with us just now. You must trust me, and trust in my goodwill. But soon, under my roof in France, it’s agreed, we will indeed come together.” We were repeating ourselves, weren’t we? This was like a dance.

“Yes,” said Gremt, but his eyes were almost glazed, as though his physicality was as much at the mercy of his emotions and obsessions as that of a human.

Yet he didn’t move to take his leave. None of them did. And suddenly I caught on. They were deliberately biding their time, drawing out the essentially formal and meaningless conversation because they were studying me at close hand. They were likely monitoring countless aspects of my physicality of which I was totally unaware.

They knew Amel was inside me. They knew that Amel and I were one. They knew that Amel was studying them, too, just as I was studying them, and as they were studying me.

I think something dark and slightly ominous must have appeared in my expression or my demeanor because all at once they seemed to react, to gather themselves up, to exchange infinitesimal signals and to look to Teskhamen for a decisive gesture or word.

“You will excuse me now, won’t you?” I said, striving to be gracious, as gracious as I could. “There are others waiting for me. I’m leaving for home in a matter of nights to prepare a place for a wholly new—.” I stopped. A wholly new what?