“Lestat,” he said. “I want you please to bear with me. Look at me. Pay attention. Listen to me for a change.” He smiled to soften this and laid his hand on mine. “Come on, Lestat, listen.”

I growled deep in my throat. “All right, I’m listening,” I said. “I read all that foolishness when it was published. I read every word of Madame Blavatsky. I’ve read the later books. Remember, I am the one who has switched bodies, after all.”

“What happens to make the silver cord snap and let loose the etheric body from the biological body?” he asked.

“You just said it; the biological body dies.”

“Yes, if the biological body dies the cord snaps, freeing the etheric body,” he said.

“And?”

“But that’s just it. We never actually die when we’re made into vampires. Oh, we all speak of dying, and I had to go out into the swamps and rid my body of all the waste and excess fluids, and I did that. But I never actually died.”

“So how can this lead to a solution?”

He sat there for a long moment, looking out over the snowy fields that lay between us and the road. Then he stood up and walked back and forth before turning to me again.

“I want to go to Paris,” he said. “I want to talk to Fareed and the doctors.”

“Louis, they’ve likely read all those British books by the Golden Dawn people. That is what you’re talking about, right, the Theosophists and Swedenborg and Sylvan Muldoon and Oliver Fox, and even Robert Monroe in the twentieth century. Seriously? The silver cord?”

“I want to go to Paris now and I want you to come with me,” Louis said.

“What you mean is you want me to take you,” I said.

“That’s right,” he responded, “and we should bring Viktor with us.”

“Unlike you, Viktor has the skill and the nerve to take to the air on his own.”

I removed my iPhone from my pocket. I had come to hate it more than ever since Amel had figured how to use it, but I hit the number for my son.

Turns out he was in Paris already, hunting the back streets with Rose.

“I want you to go to Fareed at his laboratory,” I said, “and tell him I’m coming, and I want you to meet me there.”

One very endearing thing about my son: I never had to explain an order to him. He simply did whatever I asked.

“David, too,” said Louis. “Please call David. I think David will understand this better than I do.”