In the broadcast days, Benji had talked in a low voice, under Sybelle’s music, a voice that without specific enhancement couldn’t be heard by mortal ears, hoping that the vampires of the world would get the message. Trouble was, a lot of the vampires couldn’t hear him either. So when Benji went to internet radio he dropped that trick. He just talked, talked to Us and paid no attention whatsoever to the vampire-fiction enthusiasts or little Goths who called the show, weeding them out by the timbre of their voices easily enough to devote his on-air time to real Children of Darkness.

Sybelle’s exquisite piano music was a major part of the show, and sometimes they broadcast as much as five or six hours a night, and sometimes not at all. But Benji’s message was soon heard from one end of the Earth to the other:

We are a tribe; we want to survive; and the elders aren’t helping us.

Now when he first started to talk of this—of the parentless and the undefended haunting every city on Earth and the negligence and selfishness of the “elders,” I thought surely somebody would take offense, shut him down, or at least set him back in some dramatic way.

But Benji was right about things. I was not. Nobody bothered to stop him because in fact nobody cared. And Benji went on talking to the mavericks and rogues and orphans who called his line at night about how to be careful, how to persevere, how to feed on the evildoer, and cover up the kill, and remember always that the world belongs to humans.

Benji gave the Undead everywhere an argot as well, peppering his commentaries with terms from the Vampire Chronicles, including some I hadn’t used before, or ever heard perhaps, establishing a language for all to share. Interesting, that. Or at least I found it so.

A couple of times I went to New York just to spy on Benji. He’d developed a definite personal style by then. He wore expertly tailored three-piece suits, usually in gray- or brown-striped worsted wool, gorgeous pastel dress shirts, and flashing Brooks Brothers silk ties, and he always wore a black felt Italian-made fedora, the perfect gangster hat, and spick-and-span wing-tip shoes.