I put my feet on the floor, stood up, and stretched. “Very well,” I said, “I rather like the prospect of holding you helpless in my arms as if I might drop you at any point into the sea.”

She snickered. Ugly word, but she was still irresistible and pretty when she did it.

“And if I did drop you, you’d realize quick enough you have the Cloud Gift as I said.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Why don’t we put off that experiment? Agreed?”

“All right. Give me five minutes to tell my architect that I won’t be here for a few nights. And where are we going?”

“Oh, that architect, what a nuisance! While you’re at it, drain him of every drop of blood in his system. A madman who spends his life restoring a remote château simply because he’s paid to do it is a dreary prospect indeed.”

“Stay away from him, Mother. He’s my trusted servant. And I like him. Now where exactly will we be going, if I may ask?”

“Fifteen hundred miles. To Cappadocia.”

Chapter 16

Fareed

Moment of Decision

FAREED SAT in the darkened study staring at the large glowing monitor before him, and at the great sprawling model he’d made of pixels and light of the supposed body of this entity, the Sacred Core, this Amel, this Voice, which was rousing old ones to destroy vampires everywhere.

On Fareed’s desk was a hardcover book, a novel. The Queen of the Damned. It was open to pages 366 and 367. Over and over again, Fareed read these pages in which Akasha, the original vampire parent, described the coming of the spirit Amel into her body.

Fareed was trying to envision some theoretical construct of this being, this spirit Amel. But he had come up against questions and mysteries he could not conquer. No instrument on Earth could detect the actual cells of this being, but Fareed had no doubt that it was cellular. And as always he wondered if it were not a remnant of a lost world that had existed on Earth before oxygen entered the atmosphere. Could it have been part of some thriving race eventually shut out of the visible biological world by the rise of those creatures that were not only not poisoned by oxygen but thrived on it? What had life been like for that race? Would they have been visible in some way to the human eye during those millions of years before the rise of oxygen? Did they swim the oxygen-free atmosphere of the world as octopuses swim the ocean? Did they love? Did they breed? Had they an organized society of which we know nothing? And what precisely had oxygen done to them? Were they remnants of their former selves—giant etheric bodies of infinitesimal cells which had once possessed a grosser form, struggling with senses so different from ours that we couldn’t imagine them?