Fareed—with or without their help—would find out everything.

Fareed laughed. He laughed easily and cheerfully with his entire face, his green eyes crinkled and his lips smiling. He’d been reading Gregory’s mind. “You are so right,” he said. “So very right. And some of those poor ostracized researchers, who scraped up the oily residue of mythic monsters from the asphalt, are working with me now in this very building. They make the most willing pupils of what Seth and I have to offer.”

Gregory smiled. “That’s not at all surprising.”

He had never thought to bring such creatures into the Blood.

On that long-ago night in San Francisco, when Lestat’s concert had ended in a flaming massacre, his one thought had been to rescue his precious Davis from the holocaust. Let the doctors of the human world do what they would with the bones and slime that dead blood drinkers had left behind.

He’d taken Davis in his arms, and gone up high into the Heavens before the Queen could fix him with her lethal eyes.

And only later had he returned, the boy safe now as the Queen had moved on, to watch from a distance those forensic workers gathering their “evidence.”

He had thought of Davis then as he sat with Fareed in Los Angeles, thought of Davis’s dark caramel skin and those thick black eyelashes, so common in males of African descent. Nearly twenty years had passed since the night of that concert, yet Davis was just now coming into himself, recovering from the deep wounds of his early exile in the Blood. He was again dancing as he had long ago in New York as a mortal boy—before intense anxiety had crushed his chances for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and sent him into the awful mental decline in which he’d been made a vampire.

Ah, well, that was another story. Davis had taught Gregory things about this age which Gregory could have never divined on his own. Davis had a soft silky voice that always made his simplest statements sound like the most hallowed confidences, and a touch that was eternally gentle. And the gentlest gaze. Davis had become a Blood Spouse to Gregory as surely as Chrysanthe, and she too loved Davis.

In the severe and modern drawing room in Los Angeles, with its Impressionist paintings and French fireplace, Fareed had sat quiet for a long time, thinking to himself, shielding his ruminations perfectly.

At last he’d said gently, “You must tell no one about Viktor.”

This was Lestat’s biological son.

“Of course not, but they will know. They will all eventually know. Surely the twins know now.”