Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis (The Vampire Chronicles 12)

"And?"

"But that's just it. We never actually die when we're made into vampires. Oh, we all speak of dying, and I had to go out into the swamps and rid my body of all the waste and excess fluids, and I did that. But I never actually died."

&n

bsp; "So how can this lead to a solution?"

He sat there for a long moment, looking out over the snowy fields that lay between us and the road. Then he stood up and walked back and forth before turning to me again.

"I want to go to Paris," he said. "I want to talk to Fareed and the doctors."

"Louis, they've likely read all those British books by the Golden Dawn people. That is what you're talking about, right, the Theosophists and Swedenborg and Sylvan Muldoon and Oliver Fox, and even Robert Monroe in the twentieth century. Seriously? The silver cord?"

"I want to go to Paris now and I want you to come with me," Louis said.

"What you mean is you want me to take you," I said.

"That's right," he responded, "and we should bring Viktor with us."

"Unlike you, Viktor has the skill and the nerve to take to the air on his own."

I removed my iPhone from my pocket. I had come to hate it more than ever since Amel had figured how to use it, but I hit the number for my son.

Turns out he was in Paris already, hunting the back streets with Rose.

"I want you to go to Fareed at his laboratory," I said, "and tell him I'm coming, and I want you to meet me there."

One very endearing thing about my son: I never had to explain an order to him. He simply did whatever I asked.

"David, too," said Louis. "Please call David. I think David will understand this better than I do."

I did as I was told. David was in the Chateau library, going through our own pages again as he'd been doing since Kapetria left, searching for some clue as to how the great connecting web might work. He said he would go to Paris now, if we wanted him to. He would do anything we wanted. I rang off.

"Don't you think you might call Fareed personally and tell him we're coming?" Louis asked. "That's my last request, I promise."

I didn't really need the phone for that. Fareed's telepathic antennae were as powerful as mine. I sent out the message that Louis and I would be joining him within minutes. Louis felt it was important. But then I heard the voice of Thorne in the shadows nearby.

"I've texted him," he said. "We are ready to go."

And so it was done. Louis was putting on his jacket and scarf. I was unhappy. I watched him pulling on his gloves. I couldn't imagine how this could end productively or happily. I didn't want Louis to be humiliated, but what could Fareed and Seth say to talk of the silver cord? If they became impatient and short with him, I'd be furious.

It was a matter of minutes to reach Paris.

I caught sight of the unmistakable light patterns of the roofs of Collingsworth Pharmaceuticals and within seconds we were on the tarmac surface and headed for "our door" that led directly to Fareed's secret quarters and work area, with Thorne and Cyril following.

These new facilities had been remodeled last fall especially for Fareed, and he had an immense glass-walled office which opened directly into a vast laboratory with tables, machines, sinks, cabinets, and apparatuses of ornate and baffling complexity that wandered on for half a city block.

The office itself was furnished, as all of Fareed's offices were, with a mixture of ornate antiques and comfortable modern couches and shapeless chairs.

There was the de rigueur marble Adam fireplace with its porcelain gas logs and the array of carefully modulated flames. There was the Louis XV desk for writing, and then there was the endless computer table with its five or six brilliantly illuminated monitors, and Fareed, in his white lab coat and white cotton pants, slumped in a great engulfing leather office chair replete with buttons and levers on the arms, and, opposite him as he turned to face us, the inevitable "conversation pit" of velvet recliners and a broad couch that ran on forever and the coffee table littered with medical journals and sketch pads filled with nightmarish drawings and diagrams--and Seth, in a white thawb, standing beside Fareed.

Viktor and Rose were already settled on the couch. And so was David. I took the recliner to the right. It pained me dreadfully to think Louis was about to be dismissed out of hand by the two scientific geniuses of the Blood, and that Viktor and Rose were here to witness his humiliation, but Louis seemed utterly undeterred.

Louis went right to it, standing off to Fareed's left so that his small audience had a clear view of Fareed.

"You know what the silver cord is," he said. He was rather deferential. "The old British psychics spoke of it, the cord that connects the astral body or etheric body to the biological body when a person astral projects."

"Yes, I'm familiar with it," said Fareed. "But I think of it as metaphorical."