Seth went quiet and still for a moment. But Fareed had heard it too, the thin wirelike voice of Benji emanating from some equipment somewhere in the compound.

“Be assured, the old ones are coming together. Be assured, Children of the Night, you are no longer alone. They are gathering. Meanwhile you must protect yourselves, wherever you are. Now the Voice is seeking to turn you against your fellow blood drinkers. We have reliable reports that that is what it is doing now, entering the minds of the youngest and driving them to fight their makers and their fellow fledglings. You must be on guard against the Voice. The Voice is a liar. Tonight young ones have been slain in Guadalajara and in Dallas. The attacks have slowed, but they are still happening.”

Slowed. What did this mean?

“Is there any estimate coming from anyone,” Viktor asked, “as to how many have been slain?”

“Roughly? Based on the report,” said Fareed bringing his fingers together. “I’d say thousands. But then we have no idea how many Children of the Night there were before these massacres started. You ask me, based on all I’ve read and pondered, well, I would say the population was at the most five thousand the world over before this started, and now it’s down below a thousand. As for the elders, the true Children of the Millennia who are impervious to these raids of fire, I calculate there are less than thirty and most descended from Queens Blood and not from First Brood. But no one can know. As for all those in between, the powerful and clever ones like Armand and Louis and Lestat himself, and who knows who else, well, what, maybe one hundred? No one can ever know. I don’t think the Voice knows.”

It hit him suddenly with dark force that indeed the species could die out without anyone ever documenting fully what had actually happened to it. Its history, its physical characteristics, its spiritual dimensions, its tragedies, the portal it had established between the world of the seen and the unseen—all might very well be swallowed by the same implacable physical death that had swallowed millions of other species on this planet since before recorded time. And all Fareed had sought to know and achieve would be lost, just as his own individual consciousness would be lost, just as he would be lost. He found himself breathless. Not even as a dying man in a hospital bed in Mumbai had he confronted his mortality so totally.

He found himself turning slowly in the chair, and reaching for the button that would shut down all his computers simultaneously.

And when the screens went dark, he was peering through the immaculate glass wall at the great sweep of stars that hung over the distant mountains.

Stars over the desert; how bright and magnificent they look.

The ancient Akasha had seen such stars. The young and impulsive vampire Lestat had seen them the night he’d staggered into the Gobi Desert hoping in vain for the rising sun to destroy him.

It seemed horrible to him suddenly that he, Fareed, in any form was on this tiny bit of burnt rock in a system so vast and indifferent to all suffering.

All you can do, he thought, is fight to stay alive, to stay conscious, to remain a witness and hope somehow there is a meaning to it.

And Viktor, Viktor standing behind him had just begun his optimistic and promising journey. How would he and Rose escape whatever was to happen?

He rose to his feet.

“It’s time,” he said. “Viktor, take leave of your mother.”

“I have,” said Viktor. “I’m ready.”

Fareed took a last look around the room, a last look at his own bookshelves, computers, papers strewn here and there, the tip of the iceberg of twenty years of research, and he realized coldly that he might never see this great research compound again, that he might not survive this crisis precipitated by the Voice, that perhaps he’d come too late with too little into this great realm where he had seen such wonder and promise.

But what was to be done?

He embraced Viktor now, holding him tight and close and listening to that marvelous young heart pounding away with such splendid vigor. He looked into Viktor’s clear blue eyes.

“I love you,” he said.

“And I love you,” Viktor answered without hesitation, holding him tightly with both arms. In his ear he whispered, “Father. Maker.”

17

Gregory

Trinity Gate

Shall We Dance?

“I KNOW,” said Armand. “But why would a creature of your age and power want Lestat to exert some kind of leadership?”

He was talking to Gregory Duff Collingsworth as they sat in the long rear salon of Trinity Gate on the Upper East Side—a glass porch that in fact united all three townhouses along the back like the service galleries of old in southern mansions—the glass wall beside them open to a magically illuminated garden of slender oaks and masses of night-blooming flowers. Paradise in New York if ever Gregory had beheld one.

“If I wanted to lead our tribe, as Benji calls it, I would have done something about it long ago,” said Gregory. “I would have come forward, identified myself, involved myself. It’s never been my inclination. Look, I’ve been transformed by the last two millennia. I’ve chronicled for myself that transformation. But in a very real way, I’m still the young man who once slept in Akasha’s bed fully expecting to be murdered at any time to satisfy the fears of her king, Enkil. I commanded blood drinkers later, yes, with the Queens Blood, but under her cruel hand. No, life has me at a fever pitch of involvement after all this time, and I cannot back away from the luxury of studying all this and take up the confines of leadership.”

“But you think that Lestat will?” asked Armand.

It was unnerving, Gregory thought—this boyish face confronting him, this near-cherubic face, with its warm brown eyes and the soft waving auburn hair, unnerving that all this belonged to an immortal of five hundred years in the Blood who himself had become a leader twice in his existence because of something iron hard and ruthless of which the face reflected nothing.

“I know that Lestat will and that he can,” said Gregory. “Lestat is the only blood drinker truly known, in one way or another, to the entire world of the Undead. The only one. If they haven’t read his books, they’ve seen his little films, or heard his songs. They know him, his face, his voice—they feel they know the charismatic being himself. As soon as the crisis of the Voice is past, he will lead. He must lead. Benjamin has been right since the beginning. Why should we continue leaderless and disunited when so much is to be gained by establishing a hierarchy and pooling our resources?”