“… I suspect these creatures, which we have for thousands of years called spirits or ghosts, these creatures draw their nourishment from the atmosphere, and just how they perceive us is impossible to know. There is a beauty to it, I suspect, a beauty as there is to all of nature, and they are part of nature.…”

“Beauty,” Gregory said. “I believe there is beauty in all things. I believe that. But I must find the beauty and coherence in science or I’ll never learn, never understand.”

“Listen to me,” said Fareed gently. “I was brought over because this is my field, my language, my realm, all this. You need not ever fully understand it. You can’t understand any more than Lestat or Marius or Maharet can understand it, or millions of people out there who have no capacity to absorb scientific knowledge or use it any way other than the simplest and most practical.…”

“I am that crippled here,” said Gregory, nodding.

“But trust in me,” said Fareed. “Trust in me that I study for us, what I can study that no human scientist can possibly study, and don’t think they haven’t tried, they have.”

“Oh, I know,” said Gregory. He thought back on those long-ago nights in 1985, after Lestat’s famous San Francisco rock concert, of the scientists who gathered up what they could of those burnt remains all over the parking lots surrounding the concert hall.

He’d watched that with the coldest detachment.

But nothing, absolutely nothing, had come of it, any more than anything ever came of the vampires who were now and then captured by scientists, imprisoned in labs, and studied until they made their spectacular escapes, or were spectacularly rescued. Nothing came of it. Except that now the world was inhabited by some thirty or forty frantic men and women of science who claimed there were real vampires out there and they had seen them with their own eyes—outcasts from their profession whom the world branded lunatics.

Time was when Gregory left the security of his Geneva penthouse to rescue any misbegotten little vampire who’d ended up in a laboratory prison under fluorescent lights gazed on by government officials. He’d hastened to break them out, destroy whatever evidence had been collected. But now he scarcely bothered. It didn’t matter.

Vampires didn’t exist and everybody knew that. All the amusing popular novels, television series, and motion pictures about vampires served to reinforce the common wisdom.

Besides, captured vampires almost always escaped. They were plenty strong. If caught in confusion and weakness, they collected themselves, bided their time, seduced their captives with cooperative speech, then shattered skulls, burnt laboratories, and scampered back off into the great and unending shadow world of the Undead, leaving behind not a scintilla of evidence that they had ever been lab rats.

Didn’t happen very often anyway.

Fareed was aware of all this. He had to be.