Ah, what if it were possible to come together, and worship not a Prince of Darkness but a prince of us?

He opened his iPhone and tapped the screen for the app that connected him directly to Benji’s broadcast. The broadcast should be in full swing now in America.

Two hours before dawn.

He was dozing in his favorite leather chair, half dreaming.

Benji was still talking very low through the Bose speaker dock in which Everard had deposited his iPhone. But he was not hearing this.

The dream: Back in Rhoshamandes’s castle in that big hollow hall with the fire blazing and Benedict, handsome Benedict with the pretty face, begging to make a vampire of the monk known as Notker the Wise, a creature of immense talent who wrote music night and day as one possessed, songs, motets, chants, and canticles. And Rhoshamandes considering it, nodding and moving his chess pieces about, and saying, “But you blood drinkers brought over from the Christian god, I simply do not know.”

“Oh, but, Master, the only god Notker worships is music. Master, would that he could play his music forever.”

“Shave off that monkly crown of hair from him first,” Rhoshamandes had said, “and then you bring him over. Your blood, not my blood. But I will not have a tonsured blood drinker.”

Benedict laughed. It was no secret that Rhoshamandes had locked Benedict up for months to allow his “monkly” hair to grow back all over his pretty head before he’d given him the Dark Blood, and Benedict had prepared for the Dark Gift as if it were a sacrament. Rhoshamandes demanded beauty in his fledglings.

Notker the Wise of Prüm was famously beautiful.

A noise awakened Everard.

It drew him abruptly back from that familiar old hall with its soaring beams and stone pavers.

He heard the sharp strike of a match. Flare of flames against his eyelids. There were no matches in this house! He used the Fire Gift to light his fires.

He shot out of the leather easy chair and found himself facing two wild-eyed and disheveled young blood drinkers—a male and a female in the typical vagabond dress of denim and leather. They were setting fire to the draperies in this room.

“Burn, you devil, burn!” shouted the male in Italian.

With a roar, Everard hurled the female through the window, shattering the glass, and yanked down the burning drapery and threw it over the male as he dragged him roughly through the opening and out into the dark garden.

Both were cursing and snarling at him. The male rolled out from under the heap of smoldering velvet with a knife in his hand and ran at Everard.

Burn.