Fareed knew when this was happening that Lestat was watching all of it with the same hard focus with which Fareed and Seth watched it. But what about the moments when Lestat didn’t want to give in to this interior command center? Did he really like waking up one night last week at sunset to discover the white marble walls of his vault covered in jagged and bizarre alphabetical writing in the ancient tongue?—all of this done apparently during daylight hours with a felt-tip pen that Amel had pilfered without Lestat’s knowledge yet obviously using Lestat’s left hand?

“That’s how he did it,” Lestat had said when he recounted the incident. “I was clamping down on my right hand so hard he couldn’t use it, and while he had me distracted like that, he used my left hand to slip that pen into my pocket, or so he has bragged. I suppose he’s ambidextrous. Likely they’re all ambidextrous. I should have known.”

“I think he’s furious,” said Marius when he and Fareed and Seth talked alone about it. “He wants freedom. He wants a biological body of his own. But he loves Lestat. He has no real concept of what it will be like to be on his own in a body again. But it’s a love-hate war they have going on. And Lestat knows that the final maneuvers won’t be his.”

“Of course Amel is furious,” Fareed murmured. Should Fareed bother to point out to the others that, since the Great Disconnection, Amel’s etheric body was now larger and stronger than ever? All those hundreds of disconnected tentacles had snapped back into the complex etheric entity that was Amel. Had they added to Amel’s measurable bulk? Something six thousand years ago had driven that spirit to want more vampires created; was it the sheer size of the spirit’s etheric body, being as it was infinitely more complex than the etheric body of a simple human being?

“Everyone is suffering,” said Rose. “No one can bear this waiting. There has to be something that we can do!”

But there was nothing anybody could do.

And it seemed to Fareed that those who suffered in the extreme were Gabrielle and Marius—and, of course, Louis, who never left the Prince’s side. Gabrielle was in the ballroom every night, often saying nothing, doing nothing—simply listening to the music and watching her son. Gabrielle wore her hair free and down and beautifully brushed back from her face. She wore women’s gowns of a simple and timeless cut, and double ropes of pearls around her neck.

Louis had been gravely hurt that Lestat had gone off to meet Rhoshamandes alone. So Lestat had promised never to do such a thing again.