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.

“They’re there. You can easily find them. In fact, they would be overjoyed if you would come to see them.”

The night was rolling to an end. The paparazzi had retreated to their coffins and lairs. I told David he could keep my suite at the hotel as long as he liked, and I had to head home soon.

But not quite yet. We’d been walking in the Grand Couvert of the Tuileries—in tree-shrouded darkness. “I’m thirsting,” I said aloud. At once he suggested where we might hunt.

“No, for your blood,” I said, pushing him backwards against the slender but firm trunk of a tree.

“You damnable brat,” he seethed.

“Oh, yes, despise me, please,” I said as I closed in. I pushed his face to one side, kissing his throat first, and then sinking my fangs very slowly, my tongue ready for those first radiant drops. I think I heard him say the single word, “Caution,” but once the blood struck the roof of my mouth, I wasn’t hearing clearly or seeing clearly and didn’t care.

I had to force myself to pull back. I held a mouthful of blood as long as I could until it seemed to be absorbed without my swallowing, and I let those last ripples of warmth pass through my fingers and toes.

“And you?” I asked. He was slumped there against the tree, obviously dizzy. I went to take him in my arms.

“Get away from me,” he growled. And started off walking, fast away from me. “Stick your filthy droit du seigneur right through your greedy heart.”

But I caught up with him and he didn’t resist when I put my arm around him and we walked on together like that.

“Now, that’s an idea,” I said, kissing him quickly though he stared forward and continued to ignore me. “If I was ‘King of the Vampires,’ I’d make it the right of every maker to drink from his fledgling anytime he chose. Maybe it would be good to be king. Didn’t Mel Brooks say, ‘It’s good to be the king’?”

And then in his droll cultured British voice he said with uncharacteristic brashness, “Kindly shut up.”

Seems I heard other voices in Paris; seems I sensed things. Seems I might have paid a little more attention, and not so cavalierly lumped all intrusions on my mind with the paparazzi vampires.

There was a point right after that when we were walking near the old catacombs, where the bones of the old eighteenth-century cemetery, Les Innocents, had been gathered, that I heard something, something distinct and plaintive, the voice of an old immortal singing, laughing, murmuring, “Ah, young one, you are riding the Devil’s Road in such glory.” I knew that voice, knew that timbre, that slow lilting tone. “And with your venerable battle-ax beneath your splendid raiment.” But I closed my ears. I wanted to be with David just then, and only David. We made our way back to the Tuileries. I didn’t want complications, or new discoveries. I wasn’t ready yet to be open as I’d once been to the mysteries surrounding me. And so I ignored that strange rumbling song. I never even knew if David could hear it.

And finally I told David I had to go back now into exile, I had no choice. I assured him that I was not in danger of trying to “end it,” just not ready at all to come together with others or to think about the horrific possibilities that had alarmed Jesse. He was all mollified by then and didn’t want me to vanish on him.

Yes, I have a safe refuge, I insisted. A good refuge. Be assured. Yes, I will use the iPhone magic to communicate.

I had turned to leave him when he took hold of me. His teeth went into the artery before I could think what was happening, and his arms went tight around my chest.

His pull was so strong that I swooned. Seems I turned and put my arms around him, catching his head in my left hand, and struggled with him, but the visions had opened up, and I didn’t know one realm from the other for a moment, and the manicured paths and trees of the Tuileries had become the Savage Garden of all the world. I’d fallen into a divine surrender, with his heart pounding against my heart. There was no restraint in him, no caution such as I’d shown in feeding on him.