Something touched my hand. I could hear people moving. I felt a hand on my right arm. The pain continued, throbbing, as it seemed to swell behind my forehead and behind my eyes, and then I felt something being put in my hand. It was a pen.

Someone was putting my fingers around the pen, while at the same time lifting my hand, and then putting it down on paper. My left hand was covering my face. I could hear the scratch marks as my right hand wrote or drew with the pen.

Stop the pain, stop it, do you hear me, stop it!

When it did stop, I was seated in the chair, and Marius was standing behind me and holding my shoulders in a way that was protective and comforting.

The pad of paper was lying there in front of me. And just before Fareed took it and put it in front of Kapetria, I saw pictographs on it, crude, squiggly pictographs.

Kapetria looked for a long moment at the paper and then up at me rather helplessly. “I never learned to read them!” she said. She seemed crestfallen.

I heard a long painful sigh come from Amel.

“Tell her she is not looking in the right place for the formula for luracastria. She should look inside herself.”

Marius surely had heard this. They all had. Armand sent a swift telepathic negation. If the others wanted to stop me from blurting it out, they might have said something. They didn’t.

I repeated Amel’s words precisely as he had said them in my head.

“Ah,” she said. She sat back in her chair as if this were a eureka moment.

A little tumult in my head. “I didn’t mean to hurt you!” Amel said. Highly emotional. “I didn’t!”

“All right, I understand,” I said aloud. “And we can write. But we ought to find a way to write that doesn’t cause me pain!”

I was exhausted as if I’d been running and running and had to fall down on the ground. And then I felt the moisture, which had to be blood in my eyes.

Kapetria was staring at me in alarm.

Marius offered me a handkerchief before I could find mine. And there was blood on it as I blotted my eyes.

“Amel, don’t do this again!” Kapetria said. “You are in a parasitical relationship with Lestat’s brain, Amel. You can injure it.”

“Laughter,” I said. “He’s laughing.” Then he let loose with a long stream of the ancient language, the language we’d heard ourselves on Benji’s broadcast. “Stop,” I said. “I can’t repeat it this fast. Stop!”

Now we’re great mimics, all of us, and have savant abilities when it comes to singing and replicating music, so I tried to give in to these talents and began speaking the strange syllables he was speaking, punctuating what he was saying to me with my repetitions, until finally he began to pause at the right moments. Suddenly he ran on with such fury I simply couldn’t follow.