Oh, this was the blood drinker of now, the vampire of now, for certain. Who else could better grasp that now was the Golden Time for all the Undead, transcending all ages past, and who else better to take the helm at this perfect moment? So what if it had taken this crisis to bring him to himself?

Beside Gregory, Zenobia, Avicus, and Flavius evinced the same complete admiration and fascination, Flavius laughing softly under his breath.

“He is all that anyone ever said he was,” he whispered to Gregory.

And Gregory felt that giddy ridiculous feeling so many mortals have described over the millennia—of utter devotion to another so well expressed in the old phrase “I’ll follow him anywhere!”

And Gregory did feel that. Yes, I would follow him in whatever he decides to do and put all my strength, all my gifts, at his disposal. But didn’t all the others feel precisely the same thing? Hadn’t all the arguments and uneasy conversations stopped? The whole house had assembled in the drawing room, the hallway, on the stairs. Weren’t all united? Didn’t even Gregory’s beloved Sevraine and the inscrutable and ever-diffident Notker the Wise stare at Lestat with the same complete submission? Even Lestat’s mother, slouching against the front door in her dusty khaki, was eyeing her son with a certain iron satisfaction, as if to say, Well now, maybe something will indeed happen.

Rose, poor Rose, poor mortal Rose, poor tender terrified Rose with her huge searching blue eyes and her thick blue-black curling hair. The sooner she was brought over the better. A mortal mind could be damaged beyond repair by what this girl had witnessed.

She was clinging to Lestat, like a shivering bride in her white silk dress, trying so desperately and selflessly to keep her weeping silent, and he, like a mighty bridegroom, held her in his arms, reassuring her once again as he gave her over to Louis. “Give me one precious moment, my dearest,” he said to her, “and I will be with you. You are safe now.”

Gregory stared astonished as Lestat gestured for his mother to step aside, and opened the front door. He went out onto the little portico and stared right at the young fledglings gathered three deep on the pavement in the deep shadows of the giant trees that crowded the narrow street, whose electric lamps had been mysteriously disengaged several nights ago.

A roar went up such as Gregory had never heard from assembled blood drinkers in all his life. Not even the old armies of the Queens Blood had ever roared in such support for a leader.