“The Voice,” Benedict stammered. “The Voice, it said such strange things. I heard it myself two nights ago, urging me to do it. I told you. It wanted me and I laughed at it. I told them then it was going to find someone to do its dirty work. I warned everyone. A lot of them left then, but I think they’re dead, all those who left. I think it found someone else and that someone else was out there waiting. It’s not true about Paris, is it? They were all talking about Paris before this happened—.”

“Yes, it’s true about Paris,” Rhoshamandes replied. “But the massacre was interrupted. Someone or something intervened, stopped it. Blood drinkers did escape. I have a feeling I know what happened there.” But he fell silent again. There was no point in disclosing all this to Benedict. There never had been.

Rhoshamandes rose to his feet. He began to pace, his narrow hands together as if in prayer, making a slow leisurely circle in the old stone room, gradually coming up behind Benedict and putting a reassuring hand on his head. He bent and kissed Benedict’s head. He stroked his cheek with his thumb.

“There, there now, you are here,” he murmured. He drew away and stood before the twin arches of the windows.

Rhoshamandes had built this castle in the French Gothic style when he had first come north to England, and he still loved these narrow pointed arches. The dawn of the truly delicate and ornate Gothic style had thrilled him to his heart. Even now he could be reduced to weeping when he wandered the great cathedrals.

Benedict had no idea how often Rhoshamandes went on his own to walk in the cathedrals of Rheims or Autun or Chartres. Some things could be shared with Benedict and some could not. Benedict never stepped inside a great cathedral without experiencing a crisis of cosmic proportions and weeping in grief for his lost faith.

It occurred to Rhosh idly that the notorious Vampire Lestat would understand, Lestat who worshipped nothing and no one but beauty—but then it was easy to love celebrities like Lestat, wasn’t it, to imagine them perfect companions.

Later additions to this castle, Rhosh had designed in the High Gothic style for his own pleasure, and his heart was warmed when those mortals who occasionally stumbled on this place thought it was a triumph.

How he loathed being disturbed here by all this. How much other immortals must loathe it, those who’d made sanctuaries like this so they could have some peace.

He’d never modernized the place. It was as cold and severe as it had been five hundred years ago, a castle appearing to grow out of rocky cliffs on the western coast of a steep, inaccessible, and untamable island.