We were in the Chateau because no one wanted me to leave it, unless I positively had to, which I didn't, except to go to Armand's house for a brief visit, or hunt when I felt I had to, and all that I'd already done.
We were in the south tower, which was wholly new, and contained some of the most splendid rooms, reserved in theory for the most honored guests, and this meant we had a bedchamber parlor to ourselves, and it was a fine comfortable place to talk.
I'd had this apartment done all in shades of gold, magenta, and rose, with nineteenth-century flowered wallpaper and a nineteenth-century walnut bed and armoire and chests of drawers and chairs. It made me think of our flat in New Orleans and I found it comforting after all the brilliantly lighted baroque splendor of so many other rooms.
We sat at the small round table before the arched window, with the two leaded-glass sashes open wide to the night air. No need of a light as the moon was full. There were two decks of cards there, and I'd thought I might deal out a game of solitaire just to do something, anything, but I hadn't touched the cards. I love shiny new cards.
"For two nights now, Amel hasn't been with me," I said. "I don't know whether or not you can tell."
Louis was leaning on his elbows and looking at me.
He had taken off his black wool jacket and was dressed only in a gray cashmere sweater over his white shirt and black pants. He would never have done that on such a freezing night as this before he'd received all the powerful blood. I wonder if he ever thought of Merrick anymore, the unearthly sorceress who'd seduced him and spellbound him and pushed him, unwittingly, to expose his fragile vampiric body to the sun. Merrick had left us early of her own will. She'd been one of those powerful souls utterly convinced of an afterlife more interesting than this world. Maybe she was thriving in that afterlife, or lost in the upper air with the other spirits and ghosts in the confusing realm that Gremt had fled.
I'd been observing many small changes in Louis over the years due to the powerful blood. His eyes were certainly more iridescent and it irritated me that he would never wear sunglasses, even in the brightest rooms or on the brightest streets. But nothing changed the wall of telepathic silence that fell between master and fledgling. Yet I felt closer to him than to any other visible being in the world.
"What happens if you call to Amel and ask him to come back?" Louis asked.
"What would be the point?" I asked.
I was wearing my usual court finery, because I knew it comforted almost everyone. But it wasn't in keeping with my mood to be dressed in steel-blue brocade and linen frills, and for the first time, I envied Louis his simpler clothes.
"Amel could be inside you right now looking at me for all I know," I said. "What does it matter? One minute he swears he'll never let her harm me, and the next he's as grim as I am, speaking of Kapetria as a parent bound to rescue a child against the child's will."
Of course I'd told him all about the phone incident.
"I don't think that's possible," Louis said. His voice was even and soft. "That he's inside me, I mean, but let me get back to that. I've been thinking a lot about the matter of tentacles binding us and what Kapetria said, that this was a failed attempt at procreation or propagation. It makes me think of the silver cord."
"What silver cord?"
"The silver cord was what the old nineteenth-century parapsychologists called it," said Louis. "An invisible connection between body and soul. When a man astral projects, goes up and out of his body and into another body as you did with the Body Thief, the silver cord is what connects him to his biological body, and if the silver cord breaks, the man dies."
"I don't know what the hell you're talking about," I said.
"Oh, yes, you do," he said. "That etheric body that is traveling on the astral plane or hooked inside another body--the way David Talbot's etheric body was hooked into the old body of the Body Thief--the etheric body is free only once the silver cord is cut."
"Well, that's sweet and poetic and charming," I said. "But likely there is no real silver cord. Just old poetry, poetry of the British spiritualists and psychics. I don't remember seeing any silver cord when I switched bodies with the Body Thief. Likely it's something imaginary that helped astral travelers to visualize what is going on."
"Is it?" Louis asked. "I'm not so sure."
"Are you serious with all this?" I asked.
"What if it is the very same silver cord which in our case remains connected--connecting each new etheric body developed by Amel in a host--to his etheric body, when it should, as Kapetria suggested, snap so that the new vampire can be free?"
"Louis, honestly. The silver cord connects a biological body to an etheric body. Amel is an etheric body, isn't he? And his etheric body is connected to the etheric bodies in each of us."
"Well, we know now, don't we, that they are likely both biological, right? They are two kinds of biological body--the gross biological body and the etheric biological body made of cells we can't see. And in his case those etheric cells are expressions of what he was when he was alive."
I sighed. "It hurts my head to keep talking about cells we can't see."
"Lestat," he said. "I want you please to bear with me. Look at me. Pay attention. Listen to me for a change." He smiled to soften this and laid his hand on mine. "Come on, Lestat, listen."
I growled deep in my throat. "All right, I'm listening," I said. "I read all that foolishness when it was published. I read every word of Madame Blavatsky. I've read the later books. Remember, I am the one who has switched bodies, after all."
"What happens to make the silver cord snap and let loose the etheric body from the biological body?" he asked.
"You just said it; the biological body dies."
"Yes, if the biological body dies the cord snaps, freeing the etheric body," he said.