“Yes, it was all true,” I said. “And they are out there, those two, and they are of the retiring kind, I assure you, and if they think we have any right to exist as a species, they’ve never made it known to the rest of us. If they find out about this laboratory they will destroy it—perhaps.”

I hastened to add that I wasn’t certain about that at all.

“Why would they do that when we can offer them so much?” asked Fareed. “For I can fashion immortal eyes for Maharet, the blind one, so that she no longer must use human eyes, ever changing them as they die in her eye sockets? It is a very simple matter to me to make these immortal eyes with the proper blood protocols. And the mute Mekare, I could determine whether there is any brain left to her which will ever fully awaken.”

I must have smiled bitterly. “What a vision.”

“Lestat, don’t you want to know what your cells are made of?” he asked. “Don’t you want to know what chemicals are in the blood that’s keeping senescence in your body completely at bay?”

“Senescence?” I didn’t know quite what the word meant. We are dead things, I was thinking. You are a physician for the dead.

“Ah, but Lestat,” Fareed said. “We’re not dead things. That’s poetry, and it’s old poetry, and it will not endure. Only good poetry endures. We’re very much alive, all of us. Your body’s a complex organism playing host to another predatory organism that is somehow transforming it little by little year by year for some distinct evolutionary purpose. Don’t you want to know what that is?”

These words changed everything for me. They were light dawning, because I saw then a whole realm of possibility that I’d never seen before. Of course he might do things like that. Of course.

He talked on and on then, scientifically and I suppose brilliantly, but his terminology became thicker and more foreign. Try as I might, I’d never been able to fathom modern science at all. No amount of preternatural intelligence allowed me to really absorb medical texts. I had only the layman’s smattering of the words he was using—DNA, mitochondria, viruses, eukaryotic cell tissue, senescence, genome, atoms, quarks, whatever. I pored over the books of those who wrote for the popular audience, and retained little or nothing but respect and humility and a deepening sense of my own wretchedness at being outside of life when life itself involved such magnificent revelations.

He sensed it was useless.

“Come, let me show you a very small part of what I can do,” said Fareed.

And down we went into the laboratories again. Almost all the blood drinkers were gone, but I caught the faint scent of a human. Maybe more than one human.