Allesandra rose to her feet. “It came into me,” she said. “It drew me out of the earth. It has great powers of persuasion.” Allesandra’s voluminous hair made a frame for her long oval face, her narrow almond-shaped eyes. What a beauty she was now, even more powerful than she’d been two nights ago, with absolutely nothing left of that mad queen of old under Les Innocents. But she still had that regal bearing, and that stentorian voice. “It convinced me that I could free myself from a grave in which I’d lain for over two hundred years; it brought my mind back to me and then set me against the others of Paris. It spoke intimately to me. It knew my suffering, and told me of its own. It must not get into Rhoshamandes.” She paused now looking to Eleni and Eugénie and to Bianca. “Rhoshamandes has no true moral strength of his own,” she said. “He never did. When we his fledglings were captured by the old Children of Satan, he never rescued us. He shrank from war with those monsters. He left us to our doom.”

There were many nods and affirmation around the table, though obviously Eleni was uncertain on this, but didn’t care to speak.

“No, he’s peace loving by nature, but not weak,” said Gregory. “You’re not seeing him in the proper light. He’s never cared to be a warrior. The life never satisfied him but that does not mean he is weak.”

“But the point she makes,” said Sevraine, raising her voice, “is that he is too weak to battle the will of the Voice.”

“And he’s old enough,” said Seth coldly, “to take the Voice into him, burn himself in the sun, and kill scores of younger blood drinkers, and that’s precisely what the Voice wants. I tell you again, he is not spiritually strong.”

“But why?” asked Louis. “What so offends the Voice about the young ones?”