“No need,” said Lestat. “He gave her what she needed to know last night. I saw him do it. I saw it in the blood when I was holding her in my arms. I saw it all.” Back and forth he walked.

“And you’re going to let her leave here?” asked Flannery.

Fareed looked at Seth. Seth stood back away from the computer table, his eyes still fixed on the screen. Flannery had paused the image of Kapetria at the table, with her hand lifted to her hair.

“Flannery, my darling,” said Lestat. “There is simply nothing we can do.” He stopped and looked up and flashed one of his finest smiles on Flannery. “Whatever will happen…will happen.”

“Not if you stop them!” cried Flannery. “Not if you lock them up. Why, you have more than enough help here to lock them up no matter if there are twenty of them now or twenty-four or thirty!”

“Darling,” said Lestat. “What good would it do? And how would we live with it, a colony of Replimoids in our cellars forever, multiplying unceasingly, and never allowed to see the light of day again? Or do we chain them to the walls so they don’t multiply? Didn’t we execute Roland for just such a crime?”

“There has to be something we can do.”

“There isn’t, and we can’t, and we won’t,” said Lestat. He stood there, hands still clasped behind his back, and his face went blank again, and then assumed its regular meditative expression, his eyes moving almost aimlessly over the walls of the room.

“Has Amel translated the message for you?” Seth asked.

Lestat nodded.

He looked directly at Seth but he was speaking to them all.

“This is the message,” Lestat said. “ ‘You cannot hurt him. I love him. You cannot hurt them. I love them. You must find a way to do it without hurting him or them. Or it will not be done.’ ”

Fareed took a deep breath.

“That is exactly the message,” Lestat said. He appeared so marvelously calm, so astonishingly calm.

“Maybe there’s some way,” said Seth. But then he stopped.

No one knew or understood better than Seth just where they were in their research and what they could or could not do.

“There has to be some way to reason with her,” said Flannery. “To slow her down, to force her to realize that this cannot be attempted without guarantees….”

“She’ll do what she can to set him free,” said Lestat. “And she’ll do everything that she can to abide by his wishes. I know, because if I were her, that’s what I would do, but if I couldn’t abide by his wishes, I’d still do everything in my power to incarnate him and re-create him and set him free.”