On and on, David kept warning the young ones to stay out of the cities, to go into the countryside. He warned the old ones who might be hearing some anonymous command to destroy others: Don’t listen. Benji kept agreeing. Over and over again, David said, Stay out of cities like Lyon, or Berlin, or Florence, or Avignon, or Milan, or Avignon or Rome or Avignon … and so on it went as he named city after city, always throwing in Avignon, and saying that he was certain the great hero, Lestat, was not the one guilty of all this. He’d stake his eternal life on Lestat’s honor; Lestat’s loyalty to others; Lestat’s innate sense of goodness. Why, he, David, wished he had the authority of the pope, so that he could stand in the courtyard of the ruined Popes’ Palace at Avignon and declare for all the world that Lestat wasn’t guilty of these Burnings!

I burst out laughing.

I was listening in my drawing room in my father’s château not four hundred kilometers from the little city of Avignon. There had never been any vampires in Avignon! And no burnings either.

Every night, I’d been listening to Benji. I was sick with worry for those who were dying. It was not all fledglings and the misbegotten. Many of the three- and four-hundred-year-old Children of Darkness were being slaughtered. Perhaps some of those I had known and loved on my long journey had been slaughtered, lost to me and to everyone else forever. When Akasha had gone on her rampage, her great Burning, she’d spared those connected to me, out of favor, but this new Burning seemed infinitely more terrible, more random. And I could not guess, any more than anyone else, who or what lay behind the devastation.

Where was my beloved Gabrielle? And how long would it be before this thing attacked the house of Armand and Louis in New York? I wondered: whoever and whatever it was, did it like listening to Benji’s broadcasts, did it like hearing of all the misery it was creating?

“What do you think, Voice?” I asked.

No answer.

The Voice had long ago left me, hadn’t it? The Voice was behind this. Everyone knew that now, didn’t they? The Voice was rousing engines of murder from long slumber, urging them to use powers perhaps they’d never known they had.

“These old ones are being roused by this Voice,” David said. “There’s no doubt of this now. Witnesses have seen these old ones at the site of the massacres. So often it’s a ragged figure, sometimes a hideous wraith. Surely it is the Voice waking these people. Are not many of us hearing this Voice?”

“Who is the Voice?” Benji demanded over and over again. “Which of you out there has heard the Voice? Call us, talk to us.”