But he was spent, dangerously spent—more spent than he could ever have imagined by this—and he couldn’t bear the sweetness, the joy, of having her in his arms.

“Forgive me,” he whispered. He wiped foolishly at the tears on his face.

“Talk with us, stay with us here,” she said imploringly. And Arjun uttered the same invitation.

But Gremt did the only thing he could do with his waning strength. He moved away fast, leaving the garden behind him and the lights of the bungalow lost in the forest of bamboo and mango trees.

She could have pursued him. If she did try to pursue, he would have no choice but to vanish, and that he did not want to do. He wanted to remain in this body as long as possible. That was always his choice.

But she didn’t pursue him. She accepted his exit. And he knew he’d see her soon again. He’d see them all soon. And he would tell her and all of the others everything.

He followed the road for a long time, gradually regaining his strength, his body hardening once more, his pulse steady, the tears gone and his vision clear.

Headlights now and then picked him out of the darkness as cars swept by, leaving him once more in silence.

So he had told her. He had confided the great secret of the Talamasca to her first of all, before all others, and very soon he would make it known to the entire tribe of blood drinkers.

Never to those mortal Talamasca members who struggled as they always did to continue their studies. No. They would be left in peace to continue with the fables of the Order’s origins.

But he would tell it to all of them, the great supernatural beings whom the Talamasca had studied from its very beginnings.

And maybe they would understand as she understood, and maybe they would accept as she had accepted. And maybe they would not fail him in those moments of connection he so badly needed with them.

Whatever the case, it was time, was it not, to help them directly, to reach out, to give them what he could as they confronted the greatest challenge in their history. Who better to help them solve the mystery of the Voice than Gremt Stryker Knollys?

12

Lestat

The Jungles of the Amazon

DAVID HAD DRAWN me out. Clever David. He’d called Benji’s line in New York, chatting away with Benji on the broadcast about the crisis. He never gave his name. Didn’t have to. Benji knew and I knew, and probably a lot of other blood drinkers knew, that cultured British voice.

On and on, David kept warning the young ones to stay out of the cities, to go into the countryside. He warned the old ones who might be hearing some anonymous command to destroy others: Don’t listen. Benji kept agreeing. Over and over again, David said, Stay out of cities like Lyon, or Berlin, or Florence, or Avignon, or Milan, or Avignon or Rome or Avignon … and so on it went as he named city after city, always throwing in Avignon, and saying that he was certain the great hero, Lestat, was not the one guilty of all this. He’d stake his eternal life on Lestat’s honor; Lestat’s loyalty to others; Lestat’s innate sense of goodness. Why, he, David, wished he had the authority of the pope, so that he could stand in the courtyard of the ruined Popes’ Palace at Avignon and declare for all the world that Lestat wasn’t guilty of these Burnings!

I burst out laughing.

I was listening in my drawing room in my father’s château not four hundred kilometers from the little city of Avignon. There had never been any vampires in Avignon! And no burnings either.

Every night, I’d been listening to Benji. I was sick with worry for those who were dying. It was not all fledglings and the misbegotten. Many of the three- and four-hundred-year-old Children of Darkness were being slaughtered. Perhaps some of those I had known and loved on my long journey had been slaughtered, lost to me and to everyone else forever. When Akasha had gone on her rampage, her great Burning, she’d spared those connected to me, out of favor, but this new Burning seemed infinitely more terrible, more random. And I could not guess, any more than anyone else, who or what lay behind the devastation.

Where was my beloved Gabrielle? And how long would it be before this thing attacked the house of Armand and Louis in New York? I wondered: whoever and whatever it was, did it like listening to Benji’s broadcasts, did it like hearing of all the misery it was creating?

“What do you think, Voice?” I asked.

No answer.

The Voice had long ago left me, hadn’t it? The Voice was behind this. Everyone knew that now, didn’t they? The Voice was rousing engines of murder from long slumber, urging them to use powers perhaps they’d never known they had.

“These old ones are being roused by this Voice,” David said. “There’s no doubt of this now. Witnesses have seen these old ones at the site of the massacres. So often it’s a ragged figure, sometimes a hideous wraith. Surely it is the Voice waking these people. Are not many of us hearing this Voice?”

“Who is the Voice?” Benji demanded over and over again. “Which of you out there has heard the Voice? Call us, talk to us.”

David rang off. The surviving fledglings were taking over the airwaves.

Benji had twenty phone lines now to receive those who were calling. Who staffed these lines? I didn’t know enough about radio stations, phones, monitors, etcetera to understand how it worked. But no mortal voice had ever been broadcast by Benji, not for any reason, and sometimes one mournful and miserable blood drinker calling in would take an hour to unfold a tale of desperation. Did the other calls pile up?

Whatever the case, I had to get to Avignon. David wanted me to meet him in Avignon, in the old ruined Palace of the Popes, that was plain enough.

Benji was now addressing the Voice. “Call us here, Voice,” he was saying in that chipper, confident manner of his. “Tell us what you want. Why are you trying to destroy us?”

I looked around my glorious digs here on the mountain. How I’d worked to reclaim this land of my father, how I’d worked to restore this château completely—and lately with my own hands, I’d dug out secret rooms beneath it. How I loved these old stone-walled chambers where I’d grown up, now transformed with every sweet amenity, and the view from these windows over the mountains and fields where I’d hunted as a boy. Why, why did I have to be drawn away from all this and into a battle I didn’t want?

Well, I wasn’t going to reveal this place to David or anybody else for that matter. If they didn’t have the sense to look for me at Château de Lioncourt in the Auvergne, that was their misfortune! After all, the place had been on all the maps.