“There were early signs,” Jesse said hesitatingly, “but I didn’t notice them. Only in retrospect did I come to realize what was going on. You both know what the Great Family meant to Maharet. Lestat, you weren’t with us when she told the story, but you knew and you wrote the entire account of this accurately. David, you know all of this as well. My aunt’s human descendants have kept her alive through the millennia. In every generation she reinvented a human persona for herself so that she might care for the Great Family, care for the genealogical records, distribute the grants and the trusts, keep branches and clans in touch with one another. I grew up in this family. Long before I ever dreamed there was any secret surrounding my aunt Maharet, I knew what it was like to be part of it, the beauty of it, the richness of the heritage. And I knew even then what it meant to her. And I know well enough now that this was the vocation that maintained her sanity when everything else failed.

“Well, sometime before we left the Java compound, she’d succeeded in making the Great Family entirely independent of herself. She confessed to me that the process had taken years. The family’s huge; branches exist in almost every country in the world; she’d spent most of the first decade of the new millennium sitting in law offices and bank offices and building libraries and archives so that the family would survive without her.”

“But all this is quite understandable,” said David. “She’s tired, perhaps. Perhaps she wants a rest. And the world itself has changed so dramatically in the last thirty years, Jesse. What with computers now it is entirely possible to unite and strengthen the Great Family in a way that simply wasn’t possible before.”

“All that’s true, David, but let’s not forget what the Great Family meant to her. I didn’t like to see the weariness. I didn’t like to hear it in her voice. I asked her many times if she would keep watch as she’d always done, even though she no longer had to play an official role.”

“Surely she will,” David offered.

“She said no,” Jesse responded. “She said that her time with the Great Family was over. And she reminded me that it was her interfering in my life, as she called it, her coming to me as my beloved aunt Maharet, that eventually resulted in my being inducted, as she put it, into our world.”

All this was true obviously. It had been Maharet’s custom to visit many of her mortal descendants. And she’d been particularly drawn to the young Jesse. And the young Jesse had been kept too long in the company of blood drinkers not to realize that something profoundly mysterious set these “people” apart from others. So Maharet was right.