IT HAD WORKED, and for nine nights, Fareed had been writing, writing endlessly as to how and why it had worked, and how it had affected the tribe worldwide. The first panicked calls proved false alarms. No one now disconnected from the Core was in fact aging or falling to pieces, and none of the elders had lost the Cloud Gift, or the Fire Gift, or the Mind Gift, or any other gift. And the vast majority of the Undead could still read the minds of others and the minds of mortals. And finally early in the morning on this very night, a new fledgling had been made securely by a vampire in Oxford, England—an old coven master willing to attempt the step with one he’d loved for a long time—and it had worked. Was the fledgling somehow connected to the master, as all the tribe had once been connected to Amel? No.

But this was just the beginning. Fareed would be gathering data on an infinite number of aspects of each and every individual whose nightly progress he followed—for years to come. Flannery Gilman, who worked at his side for hours without speaking, would keep feeding the data into the computers. And vampires of all ages would be hard put not to keep imagining things in the wake of the Great Disconnection, and it might be years before anything like a full picture of properties and probabilities and expectations could be made.

The bottom line? Nothing had changed. Nothing, that is, except that each and every one of them was now a discrete entity. Or as Louis described it, each and every one had his or her own etheric body with its etheric brain—the etheric brain collected, formed, and developed in the biological brain of the fledgling when the vampiric blood of the master had first gone into it, and the etheric body that had developed from that etheric brain all through the biological body of the fledgling as the vampiric blood circulated through the biological body driven by the biological heart.

Louis’s simple explanation became the explanation that most could understand.

And Fareed had acknowledged more than once that Louis’s simple understanding of old-fashioned Theosophical rhetoric had led them in the right way.

But Louis took no pleasure in his triumph. He received acknowledgments with sad eyes and bitter smiles. Fareed understood this only too well.

As for the Prince, Fareed couldn’t imagine what life was really like for him now, and the Prince obviously didn’t care to share.

They all knew that Amel could no longer travel into the minds of others, no longer be heard in other brains as a separate and distinct entity, but everyone had expected as much. Was Amel unhappy with this development? Had Amel’s thirst become an agony because he was confined to one vampiric body? Lestat never said.