Seven hundred years ago he’d been made in France by a great vampire named Rhoshamandes who had created a line of de Landen vampires, as he called them—Benedict, Allesandra, Eleni, Eugénie, Notker, and Everard—most of which had no doubt perished over the centuries, but Everard had survived. True he’d been captured by the coven of the Children of Satan, those infamous superstitious vampires who made of their miserable existence a religion, and he’d served them, but only after he’d been tortured and starved. Sometime in the Renaissance years, he couldn’t remember precisely when, he’d been sent by the vicious little Parisian coven master Armand to the Children of Satan in Rome to find out how the coven fared. Well, the coven had been in ruins, and Santino the coven master had been living a blasphemous existence in worldly clothes and jewels flouting all the rules he’d forced on others. And Everard saw his chance. He escaped the Children of Satan, striking out on his own, remembering the things that the powerful Rhoshamandes had taught him long ago before the Children of Satan drove him from France.

Since then Everard had survived many an encounter with others more powerful than himself. He’d survived the terrible Burning when Akasha passed over the world striking down Children of Darkness everywhere without regard to character, courage, merit, or mercy.

He’d even survived a brief and insulting mention in one of the Vampire Chronicles by Marius, who’d described Everard without naming him as “gaunt and big boned” with dusty clothes and dirty lace.

Well, he could endure the “gaunt and big boned.” That was true, and he thought himself quite beautiful in spite of it, but the dusty clothes and dirty lace? It infuriated him. He kept his shoulder-length black hair and his clothes immaculate. If he ever ran into Marius again, he intended to smack his face.

But that was all foolishness really. If he played his cards right, he’d never run into Marius or anyone else, except to exchange a few kind words and then move on. The point was Everard lived with other blood drinkers at peace.

And now this inane Voice, this Voice that came right into his head, bedeviled him nightly with commands to kill and to burn and to rampage. And he could not shut this Voice out.

Finally, he’d resorted to music. Everard had started purchasing excellent systems for amplified music since the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed the storerooms of his little villa were a veritable museum, as he hated to throw good things away. And so he had windup Victrolas, stacks of thick old black phonograph records that he had once played on them, as well as early electrical machines that had once given him “high fidelity” and “stereo” and now collected dust.