That night, when Benji began broadcasting from New York, he said that things could not continue like this. He urged the young ones to flee the cities. He begged once more for the elders of the tribe to step up.

I went to Anatolia to escape it all. I wanted to see Hagia Sophia again, to walk under those arches. I wanted to wander the ruins of Göbekli Tepe, the oldest Neolithic settlement ever discovered. To Hell with the problems of the tribe. Whatever gave Benji the idea that we were a tribe?

Chapter 2

Benji Mahmoud

I FIGURED THAT Benji Mahmoud was probably twelve years old when Marius made him a vampire, but no one knew for sure, including Benji. He’d been born in Israel to a Bedouin family, then hired and imported into the United States by the family of a young female piano player named Sybelle—who was clearly insane—so that he could be Sybelle’s companion. Both young people met the Vampire Armand in New York in the mid-1990s but weren’t inducted into the Blood till a little later, when Marius worked the Dark Trick on both of them as a gift to Armand. Of course Armand was furious, felt betrayed, deplored that the human lives of his charges had been cut short, etcetera, but Marius had done the only thing that could be done with two humans who were living for all practical purposes in Our World and fast losing taste for any other. Human wards like that are hostages to fortune. And Armand should have known that, that some vampire enemy or other was going to knock off one or the other or both of these two young people just to get at Armand. That’s the way such things can too easily go.

So Marius brought them over.

I was not myself in those days. I was battered and broken thanks to my adventures with Memnoch, a spirit who claimed to have been “the Devil” of the Christian belief system, and I scarcely noticed all this, only knowing that I loved the music that Sybelle made and little more.

By the time I took real notice of Benji Mahmoud, he was living in New York with Armand and Louis and Sybelle, and he had invented the radio station. As I mentioned earlier, it was broadcast at first, but Benji was far too inventive to put up with the mortal world’s constraints on him for long, and he soon operated the program as an internet radio stream out of the townhouse on the Upper East Side, often speaking to the Children of the Darkness nightly and inviting their phone calls from all over the world.