“No,” said Gremt. “He was wounded, suffering, rather like an earthbound ghost, blundering through the invisible in agony. But he was no simple ghost. He has the immense power of a spirit.”

“How so?”

“We are as different from ghosts as angels are from humans,” Gremt said. “Don’t think for a moment you know what he is. He has a cunning and an ambition which other spirits do not possess and never did. At least not as I have ever known them. I learned my cunning and ambition from watching him. And when he came into the flesh through Akasha, I came after him, but it took me thousands of years to achieve the concentration and strength sufficient for me to enter this physical world. Never for a moment think he is of the same ilk as me. Something different drives him and that something is rooted in experience and knowledge which I never possessed.”

“So you’re saying he is a ghost!”

“No.” He shook his head. He was defeated.

Shimmer. Flash. The city falling into the sea. The huge cry of thousands. Gone.

I’d lost the thread. I put my hand to my forehead, massaging my temples. “You’re saying he was flesh and blood before, that he’s a ghost.”

“He’s no ghost,” said Gremt. “I know ghosts.” He gestured to Magnus. “This is a ghost, fired with the urgency and moral concerns he learned before he died. No. He’s not a ghost.”

“I think what my friend means,” said Teskhamen, “is that you must not trust him, Lestat. Love him, yes, of course, and treat him with the immense concern you’ve always shown for him, but never trust him.”

I nodded, to acknowledge that I was listening, of course, but I did not really respond.

“You’ve loved him from the start of all this,” said Teskhamen. “You and you alone spoke up for him to the others who were seeking a way to dislocate him into some sort of secure trap where he might animate the vampire world for their sake. But you loved him. You saved him from that. You invited him into your own body.”

Did they know how little I ever stopped to consider for one split second anything that I had ever done? Likely they did. Likely they knew how I lived my life, riding wave after wave of instinct and emotion, driven by immense greed as well as generosity.

But that was not the point here. They were driving at something crucial about Amel himself.

“So what you’re saying,” I asked finally, “is that the realm of spirits is populated by ambitionless beings, largely benign, drifting, flighty, whatever—the way Maharet had once described them to us…childlike things…but that this spirit, Amel, is something else?”

“Benign?” asked Gremt. “Childlike? Lestat, have you forgotten Memnoch?”

Memnoch!

“What do you know about Memnoch?” I asked. I could hardly contain my excitement. “If you know anything of Memnoch, anything at all, you must tell me! Tell me now. What do you know of him?”