“So she avoids the cameras,” he whispered, “and skillfully, and when she does work alone in the lab, she throws up tape loops, and she’s good at it, and nobody guesses.” He went on scanning, and was just about to give up when he came across footage of the mysterious woman at that same laboratory counter, again with pen in hand. In this footage she was talking on her iPhone and of course there was no audial feed, or was there? He slowed down, searched, picked up the audial feed, amplified it, and now he could hear her voice distinctly, speaking in soft slow Swiss French.

It was nothing consequential, a plan to meet someone for a meal later, remarks about weather—a rich, pretty voice, distinctly feminine, with an easy subtle laugh now and then.

And he was furious suddenly that he would have to put all this aside for now and go to the crypts beneath the house. But he was growing cold as he always did near sunrise, as they all did, and it was maddening to leave this….

Because it was not—he was certain of it—not a human voice.

What could this possibly mean? No matter what Gregory said, he had to get to Geneva tomorrow night and see this thing, this creature, this artificial human, up close.

He rose from the chair and was turning to go when an alert stopped him. It was from Dr. Flannery Gilman, his blood drinker assistant and confidante, mother of Lestat’s son, Viktor. It had to do with the woman’s DNA.

“I found a match all right,” wrote Flannery. “It’s for a woman living in Bolinas, California, manager of a bed-and-breakfast famous on the California coast. All the material is from this woman’s medical files in the Kaiser Permanente data banks. And the blood is definitely this Bolinas woman’s blood. Signing off for the night, obviously, and will look immediately for your reply when I wake. But do you want Collingsworth Pharmaceuticals alerted? This is serious fraud.”

“Get everything you can on this woman in Bolinas,” wrote Fareed. “And forget the corporation. The security breach is the least of our worries. I’m heading to Geneva at sunset to have a look at this woman for myself.”

The plain concrete-and-iron crypts beneath Armand’s Paris house were like all the crypts in which Fareed and his brothers and sisters slept. They were unimportant to Fareed, who had been Born to Darkness in the late twentieth century when the blood drinkers of the world no longer valued coffins and heavily carved sarcophagi, and legends had no meaning anymore. He cared only that in his own private place deep in the earth, he was safe.