I looked back at the others. I wished I had a full night to take in all of these revelations, these new and startling encounters, just to try to fathom the limits of this splendid Sevraine, or why the tender Bianca was suffering so, because she couldn’t conceal the pain.

“But I’ll tell you that, why I am suffering,” Bianca said, drawing near but talking in a normal and not a confidential voice, her arm slipping around me. “I lost one I loved in the attack in Paris, a young one, one I’d made and lived with for decades. But this was the Voice at work, not the one he’d brought out of the earth to do his bidding.”

“And that was I,” said Allesandra, “roused by the Voice. And given the unholy strength by the Voice to climb out of that tomb of bones and filth. That sin lies on me.”

I saw it now in horrific flickering images, a wraith of a woman, a macabre skeleton of a creature with hag hair, sending a fatal jet of heat at the house in the Rue Saint-Jacques. And revenants rushing to their very doom as they fled the doors and windows right into the path of the murderous power. I saw Bianca down on her knees on the pavement wailing, hands pressed to the side of her head, face upturned. I saw the wraith approach and reach out for her, as if the very personification of Death had paused in its rounds to show compassion to one lone soul.

“Many have been duped by the Voice,” said Gabrielle. “And not so many have survived it and turned away with such immediate disgust. That counts for much as far I’m concerned.”

“It counts for everything,” said Bianca gravely.

Allesandra’s face was sad. She appeared to be dreaming, to have slipped away from the present time and back into a great limitless gulf of darkness. I wanted to reach out and take her hand, but it was Sevraine who did this.

All the while the spirit, Gremt Stryker Knollys, gazed on without a word. He was seated now as he had been before.

Others were coming into this large room.

For a moment I didn’t believe my eyes. There was a ghost there, surely it was a ghost, in the person of an elderly man with dark gray hair and skin that suggested mother-of-pearl to me. He was in a body as solid as the body of the spirit Gremt. And he too wore real clothes. Breathtaking.

And two exquisitely groomed and exquisitely dressed female blood drinkers were with him.

When I saw who they were, who they actually were, these two with their coiffed hair and soft silken robes, I started crying. They came at once to me, and both embraced me.

“Eleni and Eugénie,” I said. “Safe after all this time.” I could hardly speak.