David described the new compound where Seth and Fareed were now, safe and secure in the wastes of the California desert, beyond the city of Palm Springs. Out there, they had built the perfect facilities for themselves—isolated and protected by two sets of high walls and mechanical gates, with tunnels for emergency evacuation and a heliport. They ran a small clinic for mortal incurables, but their real work took place in secure laboratories in sprawling three-story buildings. They were close enough to other medical facilities for their activities to attract little or no attention and far enough away from everything else to have the isolation and land they had needed but could not have in Los Angeles.

They’d welcomed David immediately. Indeed they’d been so hospitable that one could not imagine them being anything but that to everyone.

David had pressed Fareed on a very special issue: how was his mind and his soul anchored now in this body in which he had not been born, his own body being in a grave in England?

Fareed had done every conceivable test that he could on David. He could find no evidence that any “intelligence” existed inside him that was not generated by and expressed through his own brain. As far as he could see, David was David in this body. And his connection with it was utterly secure.

“Before you came into the Blood,” Fareed had told David, “very possibly you could have exited this body. You could have been some sort of discarnate entity, a ghost, in other words, capable of possessing other susceptible bodies. I don’t know. I can’t know. Because you are in the Blood now and very likely this Blood has more securely than ever bound you to your physicality.”

Speculation. But David had been comforted.

He too felt that Fareed and Seth would never seek to use their scientific knowledge against humans.

“But what about their underlings?” I asked. “They were already bringing doctors and scientists into the Blood when I met them.”

“Be assured. They pick and choose carefully. The vampire researchers I encountered were like idiot savants of their profession, obsessed, focused, completely devoid of any grand schemes, in love with studying our blood under microscopes.”

“And that is his central project, is it not?” I asked. “To study our blood, the Blood, so to speak?”

“It’s a frustrating proposition from what I understand, as whatever the Sacred Core is physically, we cannot see it. If it’s made of cells, the cells are infinitely smaller than the cells that we can see. So Fareed’s working with properties.”

David rambled on, but it was science poetry again, and I couldn’t absorb it.

“Do you think they’re still there, in that same location?”

“I know they are,” David said. “They tried a number of others first that did not work out.”

Perhaps that was when I was searching for them.