“Come home now,” he said. “I’ll meet you there.”

He stood stranded in the room for a moment, looking at the long spread of color and figure that he had created in this anonymous and unimportant place. Then he snuffed out the lantern and left it behind.

In less than an hour, he walked into his penthouse suite at the Copacabana Hotel to find Daniel lying on the moss-green velvet couch, ankles crossed, head propped on the arm. The windows were open to the white balustraded veranda, and beyond sang the shining ocean.

The room was dark, illuminated only by the bright night sky over the beach and an open laptop computer on the polished coffee table from which the voice of Benji Mahmoud was holding forth on the sorrows of the Undead around the planet.

“What’s the matter?” Daniel said, at once getting to his feet.

For a moment, Marius couldn’t answer. He was staring at the bright, youthful, and sensitive face, at the appealing eyes, and the fresh young preternatural skin, and he could hear nothing but the beating of Daniel’s heart.

Slowly the voice of Benji Mahmoud penetrated. “… reports of young vampires immolated in Shanghai, and in Taiwan, in Delhi …”

Respectfully, patiently, Daniel waited.

Marius moved past him in silence and went through the open doors to the white railing and let the ocean breeze wash over him as he looked up at the pale and luminous Heavens. Below, the beach was white beyond the traffic moving on the avenue.

Burn them! How can you look at him and think of their hurting him? Burn them, I tell you. Destroy that house. Destroy them all. Hunt them down.…

“Stop it,” he whispered, his words lost in the breeze. “Tell me who you are.”

Low laughter rolling into silence. And then the Voice was against his ear again. “I would never hurt him or you, don’t you know that? But what are they to you but an offense? Were you not glad, secretly, when Akasha hunted them down in the streets and the back alleys and in the woods and in the swamps? Were you not exultant to have stepped forth on Mount Ararat above the world, unharmed, with your mighty friends?”

“You’re wasting my time,” said Marius, “if you don’t identify yourself.”

“In time, beautiful Marius,” said the Voice. “In time, and oh, I have always so loved the flowers.…”

Laughter.

The flowers. There flashed into his mind the flowers he’d painted tonight on the cracked and chipped wall of the abandoned house. But what could this mean? What could this conceivably mean?

Daniel was standing next to him.

“I don’t want you to leave me again,” Marius said under his breath, still staring out at the shining horizon. “Not just now, not tomorrow, not for I don’t know how many nights. I want you at my side. Do you hear me?”

“Very well,” Daniel said agreeably.