I was impressed. All this should have been obvious to me before now. I’d regarded every visit from the Voice as some sort of attempt at possession, but the visits had never been that. It could make hallucinations, yes, but it had been working on my brain when it did that. But it had never been able to manipulate me physically into anything. I was mulling over the many things the Voice had said.

“I don’t think it can control the host body at all,” I said. “The host body has atrophied. Too many centuries with no fresh human blood, no human or vampiric contact, too much darkness for too long.”

She nodded. She turned and rested her back against the mantel and folded her arms.

“Its first goal will be to get out of that body,” she said. “But then what will it do? It will depend on the new host body and its powers. If we could trick it into a young fledgling body, that might be a very good call.”

“Why do you say that?”

“If it’s an older body again, a truly old body, it can expose itself to the sun and kill off half the vampires of the world by doing this, just as it happened in ancient times. If it’s in a young body, it will destroy itself if it attempts this.”

“Mon Dieu, I never even thought of that!” I said.

“That’s why we have to come together, all of us,” she said. “And New York’s the place of course. But first we must enlist Sevraine.”

“You do realize that the Voice can hear us right now,” I said.

“Not unless it’s here, in one of us,” she said. “The Voice has visited me more than once, and I think it can only be in one place at a time. It hasn’t spoken to groups of blood drinkers simultaneously. No. It certainly can’t speak to everyone at the same moment. That is not remotely possible for it. No. If it’s temporarily anchored in you or in me, yes, it can hear what’s being said in this room. But not otherwise. And I don’t feel its presence. Do you?”

I was pondering. There was considerable evidence she was right. But I still couldn’t figure why. Why didn’t the Voice’s intelligence permeate all of its immense body, assuming it did have a body as we know the word? But then whose intelligence does permeate its entire body? That of an octopus perhaps? I thought of Mekare and Maharet long ago comparing these spirits to immense sea creatures.