He leaned his elbow on the table and rested his chin in his hand. Was he glad they were gone? Or was he sorry?

Did he want to run after them and say, Don’t leave me here! Take me with you. I want to stay with you.

Yes and no.

He did want to do that, but he simply could not do it. He didn’t know how to do that, how to speak that honestly to them, how to implore them for their help or their companionship. He didn’t know how to be anything but what he was.

Suddenly the Voice was there. He heard it sigh.

“They can’t protect you from me,” said the Voice. “They’re devils.”

“They didn’t seem like devils to me,” said Everard testily.

“They and their laughable Talamasca!” said the Voice. “Be damned!”

“Talamasca,” whispered Everard in amazement. “Of course. Talamasca! That’s where I heard that name Raymond Gallant before. Why, that man was known to Marius. That man …” Died about five hundred years ago.

It was amusing to him suddenly, very amusing. He’d always known about the Talamasca, the old Order of scholars of the supernatural. Rhoshamandes had warned him about them, and their old monastery in southern France. Yet his maker had urged him to respect them and leave them alone. He’d loved them the way he’d loved Magnus.

“For they are gentle scholars,” he’d said in that deep seductive voice of his, “and they mean us no harm. Ah, but it is astonishing. They know as much of us as the Church of Rome, but they do not condemn us and they mean us no harm. They want to learn about us. Imagine it. They study us, and when have we ever studied ourselves? I rather like them for that. I do. You must never hurt them.”

And so their membership included humans and ghosts, did it? And blood drinkers. Raymond Gallant, Teskhamen, and Magnus.

Hmmm. Did all of their human members become ghosts when they died? Well, that would never have worked, surely. There’d be thousands of spectral members floating around by now. That was absurd.

No. It was fairly easy to figure that it was a rare occurrence to recruit a dying member from their ranks to remain with them “in spirit” simply because it was so very rare for any dying person’s spirit to remain behind. Oh, the planet had lots of ghosts, but they were an infinitesimal remnant of all those poor slobs who’d been born and died since the dawn of creation. But how blessed must be the ghosts inducted into the Talamasca with book-educated sorcerers to help them learn to materialize? That’s what Magnus had been driving at. No wonder they’d been so good at it, those two, with their warm ruddy complexions and their shining moist lips.