So that meant the twins had vanished from here and not even David Talbot knew where they were, David, who had been so fascinated and fearless with the twins, so eager to learn what they had to teach.

And now David was calling to Jesse Reeves and begging for a meeting in Paris.

Red-haired confidante, I must see you, I must discover why it is I cannot find you.

Now understand I made David a vampire, so I can’t hear his telepathic messages directly, no, but I caught them from other minds as so often happens.

As for Jesse, she was a fledgling vampire, yes, made the night of my travesty of a rock concert in San Francisco some decades before. But she’d been made by her beloved aunt Maharet, a true ancestor of hers, and a vampiric guardian, whom as I’ve explained had some of the oldest and most potent Blood in the world. So Jesse was no ordinary fledgling by any means.

David’s call was going out over and over again, with the intelligence that he’d haunt the Left Bank till Jesse showed up there.

Well, I decided I’d haunt it too until I found David or both of them.

I headed for Paris to a suite I’d maintained for years, in the gorgeous Hôtel Plaza Athénée in the Avenue Montaigne, the closets stocked with a splendid wardrobe (as if that was going to hide the crumbling ruin which I had become), and I prepared to stay in residence and search until David and Jesse appeared. The safe in that suite held all the usual papers, plastic bank cards, and currency I’d need for a comfortable stay in the capital. And I brought with me a cell phone I’d recently had my attorneys obtain for me. I didn’t want to greet Jesse or David as the ragged, dusty, windblown suicidal vagabond. I really was no longer that in spirit, and though I had scant interest in all things material, I felt more at ease in the capital as a member of human society.

It was good to be back in Paris, better than I expected, with all that dizzying life around me, and the magnificent lights of the Champs-Élysées, to be drifting through the galleries of the Louvre again in the early hours of the morning, or haunting the Pompidou or just walking the old streets of the Marais. I spent hours in Sainte-Chappelle, and in the Musée de Cluny loving the old medieval walls of the place, so like the buildings I had known when I was a living boy.

Over and over I heard the misbegotten blood drinkers near at hand, warring with one another, playing cat and mouse in the alleyways, harassing and torturing their mortal victims with a viciousness that astonished me.