Gregory tried to pierce the language with the finest abilities of his own mind, to see the pictures, shapes behind it. Design. But he saw something that resembled the stars in the night sky and their infinite and purely accidental patterns.

Fareed continued.

“… I suspect these creatures, which we have for thousands of years called spirits or ghosts, these creatures draw their nourishment from the atmosphere, and just how they perceive us is impossible to know. There is a beauty to it, I suspect, a beauty as there is to all of nature, and they are part of nature.…”

“Beauty,” Gregory said. “I believe there is beauty in all things. I believe that. But I must find the beauty and coherence in science or I’ll never learn, never understand.”

“Listen to me,” said Fareed gently. “I was brought over because this is my field, my language, my realm, all this. You need not ever fully understand it. You can’t understand any more than Lestat or Marius or Maharet can understand it, or millions of people out there who have no capacity to absorb scientific knowledge or use it any way other than the simplest and most practical.…”

“I am that crippled here,” said Gregory, nodding.

“But trust in me,” said Fareed. “Trust in me that I study for us, what I can study that no human scientist can possibly study, and don’t think they haven’t tried, they have.”

“Oh, I know,” said Gregory. He thought back on those long-ago nights in 1985, after Lestat’s famous San Francisco rock concert, of the scientists who gathered up what they could of those burnt remains all over the parking lots surrounding the concert hall.

He’d watched that with the coldest detachment.

But nothing, absolutely nothing, had come of it, any more than anything ever came of the vampires who were now and then captured by scientists, imprisoned in labs, and studied until they made their spectacular escapes, or were spectacularly rescued. Nothing came of it. Except that now the world was inhabited by some thirty or forty frantic men and women of science who claimed there were real vampires out there and they had seen them with their own eyes—outcasts from their profession whom the world branded lunatics.

Time was when Gregory left the security of his Geneva penthouse to rescue any misbegotten little vampire who’d ended up in a laboratory prison under fluorescent lights gazed on by government officials. He’d hastened to break them out, destroy whatever evidence had been collected. But now he scarcely bothered. It didn’t matter.

Vampires didn’t exist and everybody knew that. All the amusing popular novels, television series, and motion pictures about vampires served to reinforce the common wisdom.

Besides, captured vampires almost always escaped. They were plenty strong. If caught in confusion and weakness, they collected themselves, bided their time, seduced their captives with cooperative speech, then shattered skulls, burnt laboratories, and scampered back off into the great and unending shadow world of the Undead, leaving behind not a scintilla of evidence that they had ever been lab rats.

Didn’t happen very often anyway.

Fareed was aware of all this. He had to be.

Fareed—with or without their help—would find out everything.

Fareed laughed. He laughed easily and cheerfully with his entire face, his green eyes crinkled and his lips smiling. He’d been reading Gregory’s mind. “You are so right,” he said. “So very right. And some of those poor ostracized researchers, who scraped up the oily residue of mythic monsters from the asphalt, are working with me now in this very building. They make the most willing pupils of what Seth and I have to offer.”

Gregory smiled. “That’s not at all surprising.”

He had never thought to bring such creatures into the Blood.

On that long-ago night in San Francisco, when Lestat’s concert had ended in a flaming massacre, his one thought had been to rescue his precious Davis from the holocaust. Let the doctors of the human world do what they would with the bones and slime that dead blood drinkers had left behind.

He’d taken Davis in his arms, and gone up high into the Heavens before the Queen could fix him with her lethal eyes.

And only later had he returned, the boy safe now as the Queen had moved on, to watch from a distance those forensic workers gathering their “evidence.”

He had thought of Davis then as he sat with Fareed in Los Angeles, thought of Davis’s dark caramel skin and those thick black eyelashes, so common in males of African descent. Nearly twenty years had passed since the night of that concert, yet Davis was just now coming into himself, recovering from the deep wounds of his early exile in the Blood. He was again dancing as he had long ago in New York as a mortal boy—before intense anxiety had crushed his chances for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and sent him into the awful mental decline in which he’d been made a vampire.

Ah, well, that was another story. Davis had taught Gregory things about this age which Gregory could have never divined on his own. Davis had a soft silky voice that always made his simplest statements sound like the most hallowed confidences, and a touch that was eternally gentle. And the gentlest gaze. Davis had become a Blood Spouse to Gregory as surely as Chrysanthe, and she too loved Davis.

In the severe and modern drawing room in Los Angeles, with its Impressionist paintings and French fireplace, Fareed had sat quiet for a long time, thinking to himself, shielding his ruminations perfectly.

At last he’d said gently, “You must tell no one about Viktor.”

This was Lestat’s biological son.

“Of course not, but they will know. They will all eventually know. Surely the twins know now.”

“Perhaps they do,” said Seth. “Perhaps they don’t. Perhaps they are beyond caring what happens to us in this world.” His voice was not cold or hostile. He spoke evenly and politely. “Perhaps they have not come to us because they are indifferent to what we do here.”

“Whatever the case, you must keep the secret,” Fareed thought. “We will be moving soon from this building to a safer, more remote compound. It will be safer there for Viktor.”

“Has the boy no normal human life?” Gregory asked. “I don’t mean to challenge your judgment. I am only asking.”

“Actually much more than you might think. After all, by day he’s quite safe with the bodyguards we provide for him, is he not? And again, what would anyone gain from making him a hostage? Someone has to want something before he takes a hostage. What has Lestat to give but himself, and whatever that is, it cannot be extorted.” Gregory nodded, somewhat relieved when he considered it in that light. It would have been rude to push for more information. But of course there was a reason to take him hostage—to demand Lestat’s or Seth’s powerful Blood. Better not to point this out.