Why not? Why had the great Sevraine brought three ancient female blood drinkers who were off to the side against the wall of French doors, just watching us, but not the spirits and the ghosts of the Talamasca?

And why were they all looking at me, this august company?

“Now, listen to me,” I said. “I don’t have three hundred years in the Blood as you say it now. Why am I standing here? Marius, what do you expect of me? Sevraine, why aren’t you in this place? Or you?” I turned to one of the smoothest blood drinkers of the group. Gregory. “Yes, all right, Gregory,” I said. “Is there anyone who knows our world and their world out there better than you do, Gregory?”

He looked to me to be as old as Maharet or Khayman, and his demeanor was so human as to have convinced anyone. Polish and capability, and fathomless strength, that’s what I saw in him, clothed as he was in some of the fanciest duds the modern world has to offer, with a handmade shirt and a gold watch on his wrist that was worth as much as diamonds.

No one moved or spoke. Marius was regarding me with a faint smile. He wore a black suit, simple, with shirt and tie. Beside him, Daniel was similarly dressed, fully restored, this child who’d been so mad and lost after the last great debacle. And who were these others?

Suddenly the names were coming at me telepathically in a chorus of salutation: Davis, Avicus, Flavius, Arjun, Thorne, Notker, Everard—.

“Very well, stop, please,” I said, putting up my hand. “Look, I went outside and spoke to the crowd because somebody had to do it. But I can’t be the leader here.”

My mother, halfway down the table away from me on the left, started laughing. It was soft laughing but it made me positively furious.

David, who sat beside her, as always the British Oxford Don in his Harris tweed Norfolk jacket, suddenly rose to his feet.

“We want you to lead,” he said. “It’s that simple.”

“And you must lead,” said Marius who sat opposite him and had turned to me without rising, “because no one else feels he or she can effectively do it.”

“That’s absurd,” I said, but nobody heard it because I was drowned out by a chorus of exhortations and encouragements.

“Lestat, we don’t have time for this,” said Sevraine.

Another very commanding female blood drinker, who sat beside Gregory, echoed the same words. She told me in a quick telepathic burst that her name was Chrysanthe.

She stood now and said in a soft voice, “If anyone here had been willing to lead, well, it would have happened a long time ago. You’ve brought something entirely new to our history. I beg you now. Follow through.”

Others were nodding and whispering in agreement.