“Don’t be concerned,” he said. “Not likely to happen. I’m more than likely to remain locked into the blood as I’ve always been! There were moments of horror and despair when I tried with all my will to detach from Mekare. I could never do it. Now think on this.—Imagine if the body of Akasha had been frozen, or the body of Mekare. All the tribe might have been disconnected; but I’d have been locked inside her, unable to rise, until the host was unfrozen, and the heart started to beat again.”

“So that’s all it would have taken—ever—to disconnect the tribe from the host?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But who knew?”

28

Lestat

I AWOKE ABOUT A half hour before they came. Amel was with me, as far as I could tell. Soon I heard their voices. The doors of the vault were opened and Louis came with Fareed and Kapetria, the two scientists attired completely in white and with their valises, no doubt filled with marvelous medical gadgets and vials of chemical wonders. Both of them had stethoscopes around their necks. Seth was nearby.

Rose and Viktor were there too. This was Kapetria’s idea and Fareed had agreed.

It had been decided that if after my heart was stopped, either Rose or Viktor showed signs of actually “dying” in some way—shriveling, deteriorating, transforming in any way indicating irreversible death—then my heart would be restarted at once.

It had also been agreed that if all the vampires of the world merely remained unconscious for the duration, likely the “Great Disconnection” would be a failure, and they’d all still be connected when my heart was started again.

“The Great Disconnection,” I said. “I like it. I’ll love it, if it works.”

Rose and Viktor understood. They sat down to wait it out on the stairway outside the vault.

Louis closed the lid of my coffin and seated himself there. He was close enough to me that I could take his hand and I did.

A memory came back to me, a memory of the first time I ever saw him in New Orleans. He’d been staggering through the streets drunk, a rough-cut version of what he was now. Suddenly the veil collapsed between that time and this and it was all playing back for me as if someone else had a hand on the button and I saw him after the transformation standing in the swamp, the water almost up to his knees as he marveled at everything around him, including the moon snagged in the moss-hung branches of the cypress trees, and I could smell the fetid green water again.

I let out a long sigh.

“You’re here, aren’t you?” I asked Amel.

“Of course, I’m here and I’m not going anywhere,” he said.