I put on my favorite red velvet jacket, slipped on my black boots and my usual sunglasses, and went to Avignon immediately.

Lovely little city, Avignon, with winding cobblestone streets and countless cafés and those old broken-down ruins where once the Roman Catholic pontiffs had reigned in splendor.

And David was waiting for me, sure enough, along with Jesse, haunting the old ruin. Not a single other blood drinker in the city.

I came right down into the dark grassy high-walled courtyard. No mortal eyes to witness this. Just the dark empty broken archways in the stone cloister gazing on like so many black eyes.

“Brat Prince.” David rose from his seat on the grass and threw his arms around me. “I see you’re in fine form.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I mumbled. But it was so good to see him again, to see both of them. Jesse hovered against the old crumbling stone wall, wrapped in a heavy gray muffler.

“Do we have to stand out here in this desolate place, under the shadow of all this history?” I said testily, but I didn’t mean it. It was fine with me, this chilly September night with deep winter already in the air. I was embarrassingly glad that they’d forced me to this meeting.

“Of course not, Your Royal Highness,” said David. “There’s a fine little hotel in Lyon, the Villa Florentine, not far away at all”—he’s telling me? I was born here!—“and we have comfortable rooms there.” That sounded good enough.

Within fifteen minutes we’d made the little journey, and we entered the red-carpeted suite by the patio doors and were comfortably settled in the parlor. The hotel was above the town, on a hilltop with a pretty view, and I liked it just fine.

Jesse looked worn and miserably unhappy, dressed in a creased and cracked brown leather jacket and pants, her gray wool sweater high under her chin, muffler covering her mouth, hair the usual shimmering veil of copper waves. David was in his gray worsted wool with a nappy suede vest and flashing silk tie—all bespoke most likely. He was a good deal brighter in tone and expression than Jesse, but I knew the gravity of the situation.

“Benji doesn’t guess the half of it,” Jesse said, the words just pouring out of her. “And I don’t know what I can tell him or anyone else.” She sat on the foot of the bed, hands clasped between her knees. “Maharet’s banished me and Thorne forever. Forever.” She began to cry, but didn’t stop talking.

She explained that Thorne had been going and coming since the time Fareed had restored his eyes to him, and he, the great Viking warrior, wanted to stand with Maharet against any force that threatened her.

He’d heard the Voice. He’d heard it in Sweden and Norway, prompting him to clean out the riffraff, speaking of a great purpose. He’d found it easy to shut out.

“And you?” I asked, looking from Jesse to David. “Have either of you heard the Voice?”

Jesse shook her head no, but David nodded. “About a year ago, I started hearing it. About the most interesting words it ever uttered were in fact a question. It asked me whether or not we’d all been weakened by the proliferation of the power.”

“Remarkable,” I said under my breath. “What was your response?”

“I told it no. I said I was as powerful as I’d ever been, perhaps a little more powerful of late.”

“And did it say anything else?”

“It spoke mostly nonsense. Half the time I wasn’t even sure it was speaking to me. I mean it could have been addressing anyone. It spoke of an optimum number of blood drinkers, considering the source of the power. It spoke of the power as the Sacred Core. I could hear the capital letters. It raved that the realm of the Undead was sunk now into depravity and madness. But it would go on and on around these ideas, often making little or no logical or sequential sense at all. It would even lapse into other languages and it would, well, it would make mistakes, mistakes in meaning, syntax. It was bizarre.”

Jesse was staring at him as if all this was a surprise to her.

“To tell the truth,” David explained, “I had no idea it was the Voice as people are saying now,” said David. “I’m giving you the distilled version. It was mostly incoherent. I thought it was some old one. I mean, this happens, of course. Old ones shoot their messages to others. I found it tiresome. I tuned it out.”

“And you, Jesse?” I asked.

“I’ve never heard it,” she whispered. “I think that Thorne is the first to have spoken of it directly to me or Maharet.”

“And what did she say?”

“She banished us both. She gave us infusions of her blood. She insisted on this. And then she told us we were not to come back. She’d already banished David.” She glanced at him and then went on. “She said pretty much the same things to us she’d said to him. The time was past when she could extend hospitality any longer to others, that she and Mekare and Khayman must now be alone—.”

“Khayman wasn’t there at the time,” David interjected. “Isn’t that so?”

She nodded. “He’d been missing for a week at least.” She went on with her story. “I begged her to let me remain. Thorne went down on his knees. But she was adamant. She said to leave then, not to wait on anything as cumbersome as regular transportation, but to take to the air and put as much distance between ourselves and her as we could. I went to England immediately to see David. I think Thorne actually went to New York. I think many are going to New York. I think he went to Benji and Armand and Louis, but I’m not sure. Thorne was in a fury. He so loves Maharet. But she warned him not to try to deceive her. She said she’d know if he lingered. She was agitated. More agitated than I’d ever seen her. She pressed on me some routine information about resources, money, but I reminded her she’d seen to that. I knew how to get along out here.”

“The infusions of blood,” I said, “what did you see in those infusions?”

This was a highly sensitive question to ask a blood drinker, and especially to ask this blood drinker who was the loyal biological descendant of Maharet. But even fledglings see images when they receive the blood of their makers; even they experience a telepathic connection in those moments that is otherwise closed. I stood firm.

Her face softened. She was sad, thoughtful. “Many things,” she said, “as always. But this time, they were images of the mountain and the valley where the twins had been born. At least, I think that’s what I was seeing, seeing them in their old village and seeing them when they were alive.”