She shrugged. “They ought to be.”

I had to confess I listened to Benji, but seldom to the others, except in snatches.

“Surely this entire body feels,” I said, “as I can feel pain in my hand and in my foot.”

“Yes, but you don’t have independent consciousness in your head or your foot. Look, what do I know? This Voice comes to me, rattles off some nonsense or other, and then it’s gone. It flatters me, exhorts me to destroy others, tells me I am the one and only one that it wants. Others have disappointed it. On and on. I suspect it’s saying the very same thing to any number of us, but I’m speculating. It’s crude, childlike, then wondrously clever and intimate. But look, I’m speculating, as I said.” She shrugged. “It’s time to go to Sevraine,” she said. “You have to take us there.”

“I have to take us?”

“Come on, don’t be coy, Brat Prince—.”

“You know, I could kill Marius for coining that term.”

“No, you couldn’t. You love it. And yes, you have to take us there. I don’t have the Cloud Gift, Son. I never drank the Mother’s blood or Marius’s blood.”

“But you’ve drunk from Sevraine, haven’t you?” I knew she had. I could see subtle differences in her that were not simply the work of time. But I wasn’t certain. “Mother, you have the Cloud Gift and you don’t know it.”

She didn’t answer.

“All of us must come together,” she said, “and we don’t have time for all this. I want you to take us to Sevraine.”

I put my feet on the floor, stood up, and stretched. “Very well,” I said, “I rather like the prospect of holding you helpless in my arms as if I might drop you at any point into the sea.”

She snickered. Ugly word, but she was still irresistible and pretty when she did it.

“And if I did drop you, you’d realize quick enough you have the Cloud Gift as I said.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Why don’t we put off that experiment? Agreed?”

“All right. Give me five minutes to tell my architect that I won’t be here for a few nights. And where are we going?”

“Oh, that architect, what a nuisance! While you’re at it, drain him of every drop of blood in his system. A madman who spends his life restoring a remote château simply because he’s paid to do it is a dreary prospect indeed.”

“Stay away from him, Mother. He’s my trusted servant. And I like him. Now where exactly will we be going, if I may ask?”

“Fifteen hundred miles. To Cappadocia.”

16

Fareed

Moment of Decision

FAREED SAT in the darkened study staring at the large glowing monitor before him, and at the great sprawling model he’d made of pixels and light of the supposed body of this entity, the Sacred Core, this Amel, this Voice, which was rousing old ones to destroy vampires everywhere.

On Fareed’s desk was a hardcover book, a novel. The Queen of the Damned. It was open to pages 366 and 367. Over and over again, Fareed read these pages in which Akasha, the original vampire parent, described the coming of the spirit Amel into her body.

Fareed was trying to envision some theoretical construct of this being, this spirit Amel. But he had come up against questions and mysteries he could not conquer. No instrument on Earth could detect the actual cells of this being, but Fareed had no doubt that it was cellular. And as always he wondered if it were not a remnant of a lost world that had existed on Earth before oxygen entered the atmosphere. Could it have been part of some thriving race eventually shut out of the visible biological world by the rise of those creatures that were not only not poisoned by oxygen but thrived on it? What had life been like for that race? Would they have been visible in some way to the human eye during those millions of years before the rise of oxygen? Did they swim the oxygen-free atmosphere of the world as octopuses swim the ocean? Did they love? Did they breed? Had they an organized society of which we know nothing? And what precisely had oxygen done to them? Were they remnants of their former selves—giant etheric bodies of infinitesimal cells which had once possessed a grosser form, struggling with senses so different from ours that we couldn’t imagine them?

There was little doubt that at death, the human body set free some sort of etheric “self” that ascended, poetically speaking, to some other realm, and that some of these etheric bodies remained here on Earth—earthbound ghosts. Fareed had seen such ghosts since he’d come into the Blood. They were rare, but he had seen them. Indeed he had glimpsed ghosts who had organized around the etheric body a physical appearance of being human that was made up entirely of particles which they drew to themselves through some sort of magnetism.

What relationship did such ghosts have to these spirits of which Amel was one? Did their “subtle” bodies have something in common?

Fareed would go mad if he didn’t find the answers. He and Flannery Gilman, the most brilliant doctor he’d brought over into the Blood—the biological mother of Lestat’s son, Viktor—had discussed all this innumerable times searching for the great breakthrough which would bring all the disparate information to order.

Perhaps the ultimate key to Amel would be one of those savvy, clever ghosts who passed for real every day in Los Angeles. Seth had said once when they’d spotted such a ghost walking boldly on the street with palpable footsteps that the ghosts of the world were evolving, that they were growing better and better at entering the physical, at making these biological bodies for themselves. Oh, if only Fareed could speak with one of these ghosts, but every time he’d tried to approach such a specter, the specter had fled. One time it had dissolved right before his eyes leaving behind its clothes. Another ghost had dissolved clothes and all because its garments, obviously, had also been illusory, part of its particle body.

Oh, if there were only time, time to study, to think, to learn. If only the Voice had not precipitated this awful crisis. If only the Voice were not Hell-bent on destruction of the Undead. If only the Voice were not an adversary of its own kind. But there was no evidence the Voice felt that the blood drinkers of the world were its own kind. In fact, there was evidence to the contrary, that it saw itself held hostage in some form which it could not make its own. Did that mean that it wanted to be free again, free to ascend to some atmospheric paradise whence it came? Not likely. No. It had to have a very different ambition, an ambition more compatible with the daring that had driven it down into the body of Akasha in the first place.