The ancient ones discussed it amongst themselves endlessly, except for Fareed, Seth, and Flannery, who went off to Paris to work ceaselessly to find some solution to the problems we faced. Fareed was of the opinion that my precious evil twin, Amel, could be removed some night somehow into a neutral container of some sort, a tank of ever-circulating vampiric blood, until such time as the Replimoids surfaced again. But he admitted that as of now, he was utterly incapable of achieving this feat.

And what good would that do anyway when Kapetria sought to put the brain inside a Replimoid body, a body of flesh and blood that could walk in the light of the sun? Wouldn’t the mysterious nano-particle tentacles be severed then? Or would we all burn up, even the eldest of us, within a space of weeks as the mysterious engine that animated us exercised its new prerogatives? And what was to stop him, except our keeping him a prisoner forever in some chemical device?

Again and again, the ancient ones sought to calm the young ones, and all who came from far and wide to find out what was truly happening or not happening, and what they might do.

One thing was now achieved. We had a fairly good fix on our numbers. It was merely an estimate but I thought it was a sound estimate. We could not be more than about two thousand worldwide. Such a small tribe. Fareed had completed the calculations that he had begun last year—putting together all accounts of the infamous Burnings when Amel was on the rampage, and calculations as to how many any one coven house had claimed as occupants, and calculations as to how many coven houses there had been in the world. He had recorded the identity and particulars of each new blood drinker arriving among us. And he had taken the blood of the blood drinker too for his laboratory. And he had questioned each blood drinker as to what other blood drinkers he’d encountered throughout his life.

It was over my head, the graphs and the mathematical talk. But I sensed the figure itself was accurate, and now we were seeing not a flood of new faces at Court but the same people coming back who’d been here when we’d first opened our doors.

But what did it matter if two thousand of us perished or fifteen thousand? Were we soon to be a legend and nothing else? Would the human Talamasca, now severed from Gremt and Teskhamen and Hesketh, ever know what became of the fabled vampires they’d studied for centuries?—ever know why they perished or that a new tribe of immortals had now come together, the Replimoids, to increase exponentially if they chose?

And that exponential increase is what we tried to explain to those who kept saying, Destroy them! Burn them. Wipe them out.