“Amel could be inside you right now looking at me for all I know,” I said. “What does it matter? One minute he swears he’ll never let her harm me, and the next he’s as grim as I am, speaking of Kapetria as a parent bound to rescue a child against the child’s will.”

Of course I’d told him all about the phone incident.

“I don’t think that’s possible,” Louis said. His voice was even and soft. “That he’s inside me, I mean, but let me get back to that. I’ve been thinking a lot about the matter of tentacles binding us and what Kapetria said, that this was a failed attempt at procreation or propagation. It makes me think of the silver cord.”

“What silver cord?”

“The silver cord was what the old nineteenth-century parapsychologists called it,” said Louis. “An invisible connection between body and soul. When a man astral projects, goes up and out of his body and into another body as you did with the Body Thief, the silver cord is what connects him to his biological body, and if the silver cord breaks, the man dies.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” I said.

“Oh, yes, you do,” he said. “That etheric body that is traveling on the astral plane or hooked inside another body—the way David Talbot’s etheric body was hooked into the old body of the Body Thief—the etheric body is free only once the silver cord is cut.”

“Well, that’s sweet and poetic and charming,” I said. “But likely there is no real silver cord. Just old poetry, poetry of the British spiritualists and psychics. I don’t remember seeing any silver cord when I switched bodies with the Body Thief. Likely it’s something imaginary that helped astral travelers to visualize what is going on.”

“Is it?” Louis asked. “I’m not so sure.”

“Are you serious with all this?” I asked.

“What if it is the very same silver cord which in our case remains connected—connecting each new etheric body developed by Amel in a host—to his etheric body, when it should, as Kapetria suggested, snap so that the new vampire can be free?”

“Louis, honestly. The silver cord connects a biological body to an etheric body. Amel is an etheric body, isn’t he? And his etheric body is connected to the etheric bodies in each of us.”

“Well, we know now, don’t we, that they are likely both biological, right? They are two kinds of biological body—the gross biological body and the etheric biological body made of cells we can’t see. And in his case those etheric cells are expressions of what he was when he was alive.”

I sighed. “It hurts my head to keep talking about cells we can’t see.”