Her body had gone limp in my arms, but I wouldn’t let it go. I held fast, drawing on the blood, drawing on the gusher of tissue, drawing and drawing and hearing the beat of her heart swell to deafening volume and then stop. I swallowed again and again until nothing but blood was in my mouth. My own heart exploded.

I felt her body fall to the floor but I saw nothing. Blackness again. Blackness. Disaster. And then the light, the blinding light.

I lay on the floor my arms and legs outstretched, and a great searing current was moving through my limbs, through my organs, through the chambers of my heart. It pervaded every cell of my skin, all over my body, my arms, my legs, my face, my head. Like electricity it burned through every circuit of my being. The light flashed and brightened. My arms and legs were flopping and I couldn’t control them but the sensations were orgasmic and they had become my body, all heavy tissue and bone suddenly gathered up into this weightless yet glorious thing that I was.

My body had become this light, this throbbing, pulsing, shivering light, this simmering light. And I felt as if it were pouring out of me through my fingers and my toes, through my cock, through my skull. I could feel it generated and regenerated inside me, inside my pounding heart and pouring out so that I seemed immense, immense beyond all imagining, expanding in a void of light, light that was blinding, light that was beautiful, light that was perfect.

I cried out again. I heard it but never meant to do it. I heard it.

Then the light flashed as if to blind me forever, and I saw the ceiling above me, and I saw the circle of the chandelier—the flashing prismatic colors of that chandelier. The room came down around me as if descending from Heaven and I was not on the floor at all. I was standing on my feet.

Never in all my existence had I felt so powerful. Not even ascending with the Cloud Gift had I ever known such fearlessness, such buoyancy, such limitless and utterly sublime strength. I was climbing to the stars yet I had not left the room.

I stared down at Mekare. She was dead. She had sunk to her knees and then fallen on her right side, her blighted eye socket hidden, her left profile perfect as she lay there staring forward with one half-lidded blue eye as if she were asleep. How beautiful she looked, how complete, how like a flower fallen there on the gravel path of a garden, how destined for this fragile moment.

The sound of wind filled my ears, wind and singing as if I’d passed into realms of angels, and then voices assailed me, voices from everywhere, rising and falling in waves, relentless voices, voices in splashes, as if someone were splashing the very walls of my entire universe with great splashes of molten gold paint.

“Are you with me?” I whispered.

“I am with you,” he said clearly, distinctly in my brain.

“Do you see what I see?”

“It’s magnificent.”

“Do you hear what I hear?”

“It’s magnificent.”

“I see as never before,” I said.

“As do I.”

We were wrapped in a cloud of sound together, immense, unending, and symphonic sound.

I looked down at my hands. They were throbbing as was all my body, as was the whole brilliant world. Never had they seemed such a miracle of texture and perfection.

“Are these your hands?” I asked.

“They are mine,” he said calmly.

I turned to the mirror.

“Are these your eyes?” I asked, staring into my own.

“They are mine.”

I gave a long low sigh.

“We are beautiful, you and I,” he said.

Behind me in the glass, behind my still awestruck face, I saw them all. They had all come into the room.

I turned to face them. Every single one of them was gathered here now from right to left. They were astonished. They looked at me, not a single one speaking, not a single one looking with surprise or horror at the body of Mekare on the floor.

They had seen it! They had seen it in their minds. They’d seen it, and they knew. I had not shed her precious blood. I had not done her violence. I had accepted her invitation. All of them knew what had happened. They’d felt it, inescapably, just as I’d felt it on that long-ago day when Mekare took the Core from Akasha.

Never had they or any gathering of persons looked so very distinct to me, each individual there radiant with a subtle power, each stamped with a signature of distinct and defining energy, each marked with a unique gift.

I couldn’t stop looking at them, marveling at the details of their faces, at their delicate flashing expressions playing over eyes and lips.

“Well, Prince Lestat,” cried Benji. “It is done.”

“You are our prince,” said Seth.

“You are anointed now,” said Sevraine.

“You were chosen,” said Gregory, “by him and by her, by him who animates all of us, and by the one who was our Queen of the Damned.”

Amel laughed softly inside me. “You are my beloved,” he whispered.

I stood silent, feeling a slow subtle movement inside of my body, as if some fine tangle of tendrils were moving purposefully out of my brain and down the length of my spine and then out again through my limbs. I could see this as I felt it, see its subtle golden electric pulse.

Out of the depths of my soul, my soul that was the sad and struggling sum of all I’d ever known, I felt my own voice yearning to say, And I will never be alone again.

“No, you will never,” said the Voice, “you will never be alone again.”

I looked at the others once more, all gathered there so expectantly and in awe. I could see the muted wonder in Marius, and the quiet sad trust in Louis, and the childlike amazement in Armand. I saw their doubts, their suspicions, their questions all so uneasily subsumed in the moment by wonder. I knew.

And how could I ever explain how I had reached this moment, I who had been Born to Darkness of rape, and sought for redemption in a borrowed mortal body, and followed spirits yet unexplained to realms of inexplicable Heaven and nightmarish Hell, only to fall back again to the brutal Earth, broken, and battered, and defeated? How to explain why this, this alone, was the bold and terrifying alliance that would give me the passion to travel the road of the centuries, of the millennia, of the aeons of uncharted and unimagined time?

“I will not be the Prince of the Damned,” I said. “I give no power to that old poetry! No. Never. We claim now the Devil’s Road as our road, and we will rename it for ourselves and our tribe and our journey. We are reborn!”

“Prince Lestat,” said Benji again, and then Sybelle echoed it, and then Antoine and Louis and Armand and Marius and Gregory, Seth, Fareed, Rhoshamandes, Everard, Benedict, Sevraine, Bianca, Notker, all of them echoed it, and on the words kept coming from those for whom as yet I had no names.