“Until the night Mekare slew the Queen I had no idea any force on Earth could take the Sacred Core from Akasha and move it into anyone,” he confessed.

“But now you do know,” said Seth. “Have you, yourself, thought of trying to steal it?”

Gregory had to confess the thought had never occurred to him, not in any form. Indeed, when he reviewed the scene in his mind—which he had not witnessed, which he had seen only in telepathic flashes from remote points, which he had read described in Lestat’s books—he saw it as mythic.

“I still don’t know how they achieved it,” he said. “And no, I would never attempt such a thing and I would not want to have the Sacred Core within me.”

He thought for a long moment, allowing his thoughts to be totally readable by the others, though only Fareed and Flavius, it seemed, could read them.

He was a mystery to Seth, and Seth was a mystery to him—common enough to the early generation.

“Why would anyone want to be the host of the Sacred Core?” Gregory asked.

Seth didn’t immediately answer. Then in a quiet distinct voice he spoke.

“You suspect me of conniving, don’t you? You think our work here is reducible to some simple plot to gain power over the source.”

“No, that’s not true,” Gregory said. He’d been astonished. He might have been insulted, but it wasn’t his way ever to be insulted.

Seth was staring at him, staring at him as if he loathed Gregory. And Gregory realized that he was at a significant turning point.

He could loathe Seth now as well, if he chose to do it. He could fear him, give in to jealousy of his age and power.

He didn’t want to do this.

He had thought sadly then of how he had dreamed of encounters such as this, dreaming of making himself known to the great Maharet simply to talk to her, talk and talk and talk, the way he was always talking to his beloved little family who never really understood what he was talking about.

He had looked away.

He would not despise Seth. And he would not seek to intimidate him. If he had learned one thing from his long time in this world, it was that he could intimidate others beyond his wildest intentions to do it.

When a statue talks to you, a statue that can breathe and move, it’s faintly horrible.

But with Fareed and Seth, Gregory had wanted something warm, something vital.

“I want us to be brothers,” he had said to Seth in a low voice. “I wish there were a good word for brothers and sisters the world over, something more specific than ‘kindred.’ But you are my kindred, both of you. I’ve exchanged blood with you, and that makes you my special kindred. But we are all kindred.”

He had stared helplessly at the ornamental fireplace. Black-veined marble. French gilt. Flashing gold andirons. He let his preternatural hearing rise; he heard the voices beyond the glass, the voices of millions, in soft undulating waves, punctuated by the music of cries, prayers, laughter.

Fareed began to talk then, talk of his immediate work and how Flavius would now have to use this “living” leg he had affixed so skillfully. And on he went about the fine points of the long surgery during which the leg had been attached, about the nature of the Blood, how it behaved so distinctly from human blood.

He used a multitude of Latin words which Gregory could not understand.

“But what is this thing, Amel?” Gregory said suddenly. “Oh, forgive me that I don’t know what all these words mean. But what is this animating force inside us? How has it changed the blood to the Blood?”

Fareed seemed enjoyably absorbed in the question as he responded.

“This thing, this monster, Amel … it’s made up of nanoparticles, how can I describe it, made up of cells infinitely smaller than the tiniest eukaryote cells known to us, but cells, you understand—it has a cellular life, dimensions, boundaries, some sort of nervous system, a brain or nucleus of some sort that governs its physicality and its etheric properties. It once had intelligence if we are to believe the witches. It once possessed a voice.”

“You mean you can see these cells under a microscope?” Gregory asked.

“Not at all,” said Fareed. “I can’t. I know its properties by how they behave. When a creature is made into a vampire, it’s as if a tentacle of this monster invades the new organism, hooking itself into the brain of the human being and then slowly beginning to transform it. Senescence is stopped forever. And then the alchemical blood of the creature works on the human blood, slowly absorbing it and then transforming what it does not absorb. It works on all the biological tissue; it becomes the sole source of cell development and change within the host. Are you following me?”

“Well, yes, I think I’ve always understood that,” said Gregory. “Now it needs more human blood to continue its work.”

“And what’s the goal of its work?” asked Flavius.

“To make us into perfect hosts for itself,” said Fareed.

“And to drink blood, always to drink more blood,” said Gregory. “To drive us to drink more blood. I remember how the Queen cried out in those early months. The thirst was unbearable. It wanted more blood. The red-haired witches told her that before they’d been given the Blood. ‘It wants more blood.’ ”

“But I don’t think that is its main goal,” said Fareed. “Nor has it ever been. But I’m not sure that it is conscious of a goal! That is what I want to know more than anything. Is it self-conscious? Is it a conscious being living inside the body of Mekare?”

“But in the very beginning,” Gregory said, “the spirits of the world told the twin witches that Amel, once fused with the Queen, was not conscious. They said, ‘Amel is no more.’ They said Amel was lost now inside the Mother.”

Fareed laughed to himself and looked into the fire.

“I was there,” said Gregory. “I remember it, when the twins said these things.”

“Well, of course you were, but what amazes me is that after all the generations you’ve seen rise and fall, you still believe those spirits actually spoke to the witches.”

“I know they did.”

“Do you?” asked Fareed.

“Yes,” said Gregory. “I do know.”

“Well, you may be right and the spirits may be right, and the thing is mindless and subsumed, but I cannot help but wonder. I tell you, there are no discarnate entities. This thing, Amel, is not a discarnate entity but something of immense size and intricate organization, something that has now so thoroughly mutated its host and those connected to her.…” And suddenly his language ascended again into a vocabulary as opaque to Gregory as the syllables uttered by dolphins or birds.