Yea gods, what blood, such rich, irresistible blood, with so many tiny hearts throbbing to make up the resounding throb of one heart that wasn’t a heart at all. I was bathed in the blood; the sweet blood was a fountain, and every cell in me was satisfied and upheld by the blood.

I awoke. Her friends held her as if she were the dead Christ in the arms of His Mother and John and Joseph of Arimathea, with the others from the wall like so many angels. She lay back upon this safety net of arms and hands.

“My coffin,” I said, “put me in my coffin!” When had I said those words before. “Put me in my coffin!” And Louis had not done it, and Claudia had not done it. In came the knife. Only this time I was being helped. Marius and David had ahold of me and were taking me out of the room.

“Rose, Viktor, what’s happened to them? Where is Louis?”

We hurried down the curving stone stairs, and through the broad passage towards yet another stairway, and into the bowels of the mountain. The music from the ballroom sounded like a Walpurgisnacht nightmare. I pictured monsters and demons and bats and witches colliding with one another. “Get me away from that music.”

Someone picked me up, lifting me so that I fell over his shoulder. When the doors of the crypt opened I smelled the incense and recognized the soothing light. Down, yes, down, into the silk, on the silken bed.

Fareed knelt beside me. He pinched the skin on the back of my left hand and plunged the long thin silver needle of a syringe into the pinched flesh. I didn’t feel it but then I felt the blood leaving me. Such remarkable blood.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked.

“Because I want her blood,” he said. “As much of it as I can get.”

He must have had more than one syringe. He turned my hand over and tapped on my wrist. I shut my eyes.

After a long moment, I opened my eyes.

I lay there like a dead man on display at a wake. Dim flickering light. Marble walls. A border of acanthus leaves running along the four sides of the rectangular ceiling of this little chamber. Stars painted in the deep blue of the ceiling.

Beside me sat Seth, still and quiet, on the long marble bench, his narrow dark face solemn as he regarded me.

“What have I done?” I whispered. “What have I revealed?”

“She was murmuring things, murmuring to them and to us,” said Fareed. “She said it was the luracastria which links us all, it’s a great web of subatomic luracastria but it’s alive….”

Quiet. Fareed was gone. They were all gone.

I lay alone in the semidarkness. A candle burned on the marble shelf by my coffin. I was dizzy and sick.