“I don’t like it,” said Jesse softly. She appeared to shiver. She rubbed the backs of her arms with her long white fingers. “I don’t like it at all.”

“Has Maharet ever told you anything about the Talamasca, anything entirely personal that she alone knew?” asked David.

“You know she hasn’t,” Jesse responded. “She knows all about them; she thinks they’re benign. But no, she’s confided nothing. She’s not terribly interested in the Talamasca. She never has been. You know that. David, you asked her these questions yourself.”

“There were legends,” said David, “legends we never discussed. That we were founded to track the vampires of the Earth, and all the rest of the research was essentially unimportant, that the Elders themselves were vampires.”

“I don’t believe that,” I said, “but then you lived with all the talk, I didn’t.”

“It used to be said that when you died within the Order, the Elders came to you right before death and revealed themselves. But who started that old tale I never knew. And as I kept watch with one dying colleague after another in my time, I came to know this wasn’t true. People died with many unresolved questions about their life’s work, and its value.” David looked at me. “When we first met, Lestat, I was a disillusioned and burnt-out old man. You remember that. I wasn’t sure all my work studying the supernatural had come to anything.”

“Whatever the case, the mystery remains unresolved,” I said. “And maybe I should try to find the answer. Because I think this new development does have something to do with the crisis our kind is facing.” But I broke off, uncertain of what more I could say.

They sat there in silence.

“If it’s all connected, I don’t like it,” I muttered. “All this is too apocalyptic,” I said. “I can live with the notion that this world is a Savage Garden, that things are born and die for random reasons, that suffering is irrelevant to the great brutal cycle of life. I can live with all that. But I don’t think I can live with great overarching connections between things as enduring as the Great Family and the Talamasca and the evolution of our tribe.…”

Fact was, I simply couldn’t put it all together. So why act like the idea of it was frightening me? I wanted to put it all together, didn’t I?

“Oh, well, then you do admit there is a crisis,” David said with a trace of a smile.