“This Voice moves along its own etheric anatomy,” Gabrielle said, “and I use that word simply because I don’t know any other to describe it, but I bet your learned friends Fareed and Seth would verify what I’m saying. It moves through its various extremities and cannot be in any two places at once. We must meet with them, Lestat. We must get to New York, and before that we must go to Sevraine. Sevraine should come with us. Sevraine’s powerful, perhaps as powerful as the host body.”

“How do you know about Seth and Fareed?” I asked.

“From the blood drinkers calling Benji Mahmoud in New York. Don’t you listen to them? You with your rock videos and sometime e-mail, I thought you’d be on top of all this technology. I listen to the tramps calling in and talking all about the benign vampire scientist of the West Coast who offers them cash for samples of their blood and tissue. They refer to Seth, his maker, as if he were a god.”

“And they’re headed to New York?”

She shrugged. “They ought to be.”

I had to confess I listened to Benji, but seldom to the others, except in snatches.

“Surely this entire body feels,” I said, “as I can feel pain in my hand and in my foot.”

“Yes, but you don’t have independent consciousness in your head or your foot. Look, what do I know? This Voice comes to me, rattles off some nonsense or other, and then it’s gone. It flatters me, exhorts me to destroy others, tells me I am the one and only one that it wants. Others have disappointed it. On and on. I suspect it’s saying the very same thing to any number of us, but I’m speculating. It’s crude, childlike, then wondrously clever and intimate. But look, I’m speculating, as I said.” She shrugged. “It’s time to go to Sevraine,” she said. “You have to take us there.”

“I have to take us?”

“Come on, don’t be coy, Brat Prince—.”

“You know, I could kill Marius for coining that term.”

“No, you couldn’t. You love it. And yes, you have to take us there. I don’t have the Cloud Gift, Son. I never drank the Mother’s blood or Marius’s blood.”

“But you’ve drunk from Sevraine, haven’t you?” I knew she had. I could see subtle differences in her that were not simply the work of time. But I wasn’t certain. “Mother, you have the Cloud Gift and you don’t know it.”

She didn’t answer.

“All of us must come together,” she said, “and we don’t have time for all this. I want you to take us to Sevraine.”