“Precisely,” said Merrick. “He might well let you go on and remain here to plague someone else. After all, he chose to be with you because you were his brother. But he could move to someone else. As you told Lestat, he’s very cunning and he learns quickly.”

Lestat said,

“I don’t want you to die, Little Brother.”

Merrick smiled. She said,

“The Coven Master won’t let you die, Little Brother.”

“So what do we do?” I asked. I sighed. “What is to be the fate of Little Brother’s Little Brother?”

“In a moment I’ll explain that,” she said, “but let me explain what is happening now when you fuse with him. He is binding not just with you but with the spirit of the vampire inside you. Now, you know the old tales, that we are all the descendants of one parent in whom a pure spirit fused with a mortal, and that all of us to this very day are part of that one pure spirit, carrying in our preternatural bodies the immortal spirit which animates us and gives us our thirst for blood and our ability to live on it.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, your demon brother, being a ghost himself, is very like a spirit, and when he fuses with you now, he fuses with that spirit in you, and he knows a pleasure far greater than any he knew when you were mortal.”

“Ah, I see,” I said. “Of course.”

“He doesn’t understand it. He only knows it’s like a sweet drug to him, and he drinks of the vampiric blood to experience the supernatural as long and as completely as he can, and only when his endurance is at an end does he release you and vanish into invisibility and weakness again, lulled and dreaming with the blood he’s taken.”

“Where does he go?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. He spreads out, losing his shape and his organization. Compare him to a great sea creature who is composed largely of seawater, only with him it’s air, and he enjoys the blood as best he can until his energy burns it off, and he must wait for another opportunity, and all this takes time for him, just as appearances and communication have always taken time, as is so with all spirits.”

She stopped for a moment and watched me closely, as if to see if I understood. Then she continued.

“The better you understand him, the better it will be for us when I try to send him out of the Earthly Realm, because I can’t do it, I don’t think, without your full cooperation.”

“You have my cooperation,” I said. “As for my understanding, I’m trying.”

“Are you ready to let him go?” she asked.