David rang off. The surviving fledglings were taking over the airwaves.

Benji had twenty phone lines now to receive those who were calling. Who staffed these lines? I didn’t know enough about radio stations, phones, monitors, etcetera to understand how it worked. But no mortal voice had ever been broadcast by Benji, not for any reason, and sometimes one mournful and miserable blood drinker calling in would take an hour to unfold a tale of desperation. Did the other calls pile up?

Whatever the case, I had to get to Avignon. David wanted me to meet him in Avignon, in the old ruined Palace of the Popes, that was plain enough.

Benji was now addressing the Voice. “Call us here, Voice,” he was saying in that chipper, confident manner of his. “Tell us what you want. Why are you trying to destroy us?”

I looked around my glorious digs here on the mountain. How I’d worked to reclaim this land of my father, how I’d worked to restore this château completely—and lately with my own hands, I’d dug out secret rooms beneath it. How I loved these old stone-walled chambers where I’d grown up, now transformed with every sweet amenity, and the view from these windows over the mountains and fields where I’d hunted as a boy. Why, why did I have to be drawn away from all this and into a battle I didn’t want?

Well, I wasn’t going to reveal this place to David or anybody else for that matter. If they didn’t have the sense to look for me at Château de Lioncourt in the Auvergne, that was their misfortune! After all, the place had been on all the maps.

I put on my favorite red velvet jacket, slipped on my black boots and my usual sunglasses, and went to Avignon immediately.

Lovely little city, Avignon, with winding cobblestone streets and countless cafés and those old broken-down ruins where once the Roman Catholic pontiffs had reigned in splendor.

And David was waiting for me, sure enough, along with Jesse, haunting the old ruin. Not a single other blood drinker in the city.

I came right down into the dark grassy high-walled courtyard. No mortal eyes to witness this. Just the dark empty broken archways in the stone cloister gazing on like so many black eyes.

“Brat Prince.” David rose from his seat on the grass and threw his arms around me. “I see you’re in fine form.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I mumbled. But it was so good to see him again, to see both of them. Jesse hovered against the old crumbling stone wall, wrapped in a heavy gray muffler.