On the phone, the callers spilled their woe. They were anxious and afraid; they deplored the brawls happening all over; and they were scared to death of the ancient ones who would burn you up on sight. In vain they searched for the great Lestat, the great Marius, the great Pandora, on and on and on.

Over and over Benji commiserated, advised, and sometimes just shared their grief. “They don’t help us, do they?” Benji would declare. “Why did Lestat write his books! Where is the great scholar David Talbot, and what of the great Jesse Reeves, Born to Darkness in the arms of the ancient Maharet? What a selfish, self-centered, and self-obsessed bunch they are!”

And then he’d start with his “Lestat, where are you?”

Like I’m one of the elders? Come on, now, seriously!

Well, in terms of influence, yes. Of course. I wrote my autobiography. I became the famous rock star, like for five minutes! I wrote the story of how Akasha was destroyed and how the fount of power was taken out of her and into the vampire Mekare. I admit. I did all that. I wrote and published my account of the Body Thief and of Memnoch. Okay, okay. And yes, if my rock music and rock videos hadn’t been loosed into the world, the old queen Akasha might never have risen from her throne and worked the Great Burning, in which vampires all over the planet were turned to ashes. My fault, okay, I admit it.

But I have what?—two hundred and thirty-three years in the Blood? Something like that. As I said before, I’m a brat by anybody’s standards, a reckless kid!

The real elders, the ones he was always taunting, insulting, and deriding, were the Children of the Millennia—the great immortals—Marius, and Pandora, and the ancient twins, of course, Mekare and Maharet, and their companion Khayman. Benji made that clear enough.

“How can this Mekare be the Queen of the Damned if she does not rule?” Benji would ask. “Does not her twin, Maharet, care for us as a great vampire family? And where is Khayman, old as the twins are, and why does he not care for us as we struggle through the world seeking for answers? How is it that Jesse, young Jesse of our world, does not urge these ancient ones to listen to our voices?”

All this was amazing to me and scary to me, as I’ve explained. But even if no one moved to silence Benjamin, was it going to come to anything? Was it going to make anything happen?

And all the while, other things were happening, bad things. Really bad things. And some good things too perhaps.

Benji was not the only vampire doing something entirely new under the stars of Heaven.

There was Fareed, who had come along well before Benji. And I hadn’t thought Fareed would last either.

Chapter 3

Fareed and Seth