Jesse bowed her head. I saw the blood tears coming to her eyes. I saw David embrace her.

Pandora, who sat with her head bowed and her arm around her companion, Arjun, wiped the blood tears from her eyes.

Armand spoke up now, not bothering to stand or raise his own voice, but merely addressing the group in a way that forced them to focus more attentively on him. Excellent trick of those who whisper so you must move forward to hear them.

“What is the character of the Voice?” he asked. “It’s never spoken to me. What is the soul behind the Voice?”

“Well, you know damned good and well,” said Benji, “that it’s Amel, the spirit familiar of Mekare that went into Akasha and lost its mind for all this time, these aeons of time, these epochs, these millennia.”

“Yes, but what’s the character of the Voice?” asked Armand.

“Without morality of any kind,” said one of the younger ones who hadn’t uttered a word until now. This was a fashionable black-haired vampire in a rather snappy three-piece leather suit and a high-collared shirt with a raging red tie. He turned in his chair to face me. He said his name aloud for all, “Everard,” and then proceeded.

“It wants to destroy the young ones, it turns them against each other. It rouses the old. But all these things you know, all of you know this. It has no morality. No character. No love of its own tribe, as Benji says. It is a tribeless monster. It’s promised to destroy me.”

“And me as well,” said Davis, a stunning silky black blood drinker of staggering beauty. “And it could drive anyone out of his head, just out of his head.”

Arjun, the black-haired companion of Pandora, nodded. “Madness,” he whispered. “He is the breath of it in the brain.”