What a monster she’d appeared back in those nights, a face deformed by madness like the face of my maker, Magnus. But she was free now, freed by time, freed by survival to be something else, something entirely different and wondrous and sweet and vital.

“Yes, young one. Yes, and thanks to you, your voice, your videos and songs, your desperate revelations, I have slowly come back to myself. But I’ve been a pawn of this Voice. I have been the dupe of this Voice!” Her face darkened, and for a moment it seemed to crumple into that of the medieval horror she’d been before. “Only now I am in the helping hands of others.”

“Put that aside,” said Bianca. She was still beside me on my right, with Gabrielle on my left. “It is over,” said Bianca. “The Voice will not triumph.” But she was trembling with some sort of inner conflict, some battle between anguish and optimism.

Sevraine turned slowly to the spirit. He had stood quite still all this time regarding me with his bright but quiet blue eyes as if he could actually see through them, process through them all that lay before him. He wore a fancy, glittering decorative Indian garment called a sherwani, a kind of robe that went down to his ankles, I supposed, though I couldn’t see below the top of the table, and his skin was amazingly realistic, nothing as synthetic looking as our skin always looks, but natural-looking skin made up of tiny changing pores and the soft down that covers humans.

“Gremt Stryker Knollys,” he said, extending his hand. “But Gremt is my simple and true name. Gremt is my name for you and for all those I love.”

“And you love me? Why?” I asked. But it was thrilling to be talking to this spirit.

He laughed softly and politely, unshaken by my sharp question. “Doesn’t everyone love you?” he asked sincerely. It was as human a voice as I’d ever heard, tenor in pitch, even. “Isn’t everyone hoping for you to somehow lead the tribe when this present war has been brought to the finish?”

I looked at Sevraine. “Do you love me?” I asked. “Are you hoping for me to lead this tribe?”

“Yes,” she said with a radiant smile. “I am hoping and praying you will lead it. Surely you cannot expect me to lead it.”

I sighed.

I looked at my mother.

“We do not have to talk about this right now,” my mother said, but there was something about her remote half-lidded regard of me that chilled me. “Don’t worry,” she crooned with a cold ironic smile. “No one can crown you Prince of the Vampires against your will, can they?”

“Prince of the Vampires!” I scoffed. “I don’t know,” I said.