“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.

There came a blast of the pain again, and this time before it blinded me I saw what I hadn’t seen before—that it was hitting the youngest of us at the table, who was David, who’d been made less than thirty years ago by me. Then the pain took over. And realizing what must be happening to my Rose and to Viktor wherever they were and to Louis, and all the others who didn’t have thousands of years in the Blood, I collapsed.

I knew I was lying on the floor and I didn’t care.

Kapetria was talking, on and on, the same way he’d been talking, in that tongue. She was talking to him in me and he was answering but I couldn’t tell her the answers.

Suddenly he was screaming at me, screaming. And I was screaming back.

If you don’t stop, I can’t do anything! This pain is unendurable!

Gone. Merely the little convulsions behind my eyes and at the base of my neck. I stared up at the ceiling, at the brilliant painted images ringing the plaster medallion of the chandelier, at the gold-tinged clouds up there, and the smiling face of the putti gathered in the far corners. It seemed there was nothing to worry about, no need for haste or for alarm. Just this strange kind of bliss.

Her blood, her blood, open the channel and I can talk to her….

Marius helped me up. Seth was on the other side of me, his firm hand on the back of my neck. I stood on my feet. The lights seemed impossibly dim and I knew this was wrong, really wrong, no one had dimmed the lights. Yet the pulsing wreath of the chandelier, with its myriad baubles of crystal, was glowing through a cloud of golden vapor. Kapetria looked up at me. Her breasts were touching my chest. Not a female. Not a true female anything. But something free of male/female, something wondrous.

“Drink,” Amel said to me.