“Lestat,” he said and made me an old-fashioned bow. “I’m glad you’ve come.” But something was wrong, and I felt I knew what it was.

He stepped aside for me to enter. The bodyguards approached, and I put out my hand with a forbidding gesture. And just to bring it home, I sent a quick telepathic blast to force the Range Rover backwards some ten feet, crunching and crashing through the overgrown gravel. They hated it, but they stood stock-still.

“Never mind them,” I said to Gremt. “They’ll wait outside.”

“They may come in if you wish,” he said, but he was distracted, conflicted, ill at ease. He struggled to appear friendly, gesturing again for me to enter.

“I don’t wish,” I replied. “But thank you, just the same. I can’t go anywhere without them, which I accept, but I don’t want them breathing down my neck.”

He shut the door behind me and led me through a hollow shadowy stone alcove into what might have been in ancient times a great hall. Now it was a great library, with a crude old fireplace on the long front wall, a giant gaping affair with carved lions’ heads, and a blazing fire. Sweet the smell of the oak burning. But I could also detect the distinct scent of natural gas mingled with it.

The air was amazingly warm for a place populated with spirits and an ancient vampire. Maybe their bodies did feel it. I liked it. I don’t need warmth, but I enjoy it. And I enjoyed this place a lot.

The bookshelves had been recently built, and smelled of fresh wood, turpentine, and wax. The books were orderly, and at opposite ends of the hall were large old Renaissance Revival–style desks, heaped with papers and old black telephones. There was a fancy harpsichord to the far left of the fireplace, obviously a new instrument but skillfully made to reproduce all the excellent engineering of the original instruments and carefully painted to resemble something from my time. I saw electric sconces on the walls, and a low-hanging iron chandelier with a tracery of electric wires stealthily following its chain from the arched ceiling, but nothing illuminated the room but the fire.

I’m a sucker for this sort of thing.

There were thick wool carpets everywhere on the stone floor, mostly Persian in design, worn, faded, but comfortable underfoot.

A grouping of large knobby Renaissance oak chairs was clustered before the hearth and there sat Teskhamen and Magnus. No one else about. But I could hear beings moving in the rooms above. Someone up in the ancient square tower. Scents of modern plasterwork and paint, of copper plumbing and electrical equipment in distant rooms giving off the inevitable soft hum. A place of divine atmosphere and every modern comfort.