I went on talking again. I spoke of many things. I spoke softly into the microphone and spoke into a great silence—I spoke of the Little Drink and the art of it, to feed without taking life, I spoke of the elegance of compassion, to feed without cruelty. “Even mortals follow such rules when they hunt game,” I said. “Are we not better than they are?” I spoke of territories where the evildoers still congregated, places of violence and want where humans were driven to cruelty and murder. I spoke of great communities devoid of such desperate villains, which could not become the hunting grounds of the Undead.

“This is the beginning,” I said. “We will survive; we will define ourselves.”

A deep conviction of all this had rooted itself in me. Or rather I was finding it within me, because perhaps it had always been there. “We will not behave as things to be despised simply because we are despised!” I said. “We must emerge from this crisis with a new will to prosper.” I paused. Then I repeated the word “prosper.” And I said again, because I couldn’t stop myself. “Hell shall have no dominion over us. Hell shall have no dominion.”

There came again that low rumbling explosion of applause and cheering from the streets around us, like a great sigh as it expanded and then began to die away.

I pushed the microphone back and in a silent passion left the studio as Benji began to answer the calls.

When I came down into the drawing room on the first floor, I saw that Rhoshamandes and Benedict were there surrounded by Sevraine, Gregory, Seth, and Fareed and others, and they were all in fast conversation with one another. Nobody, not even Rhoshamandes or Benedict themselves, asked if they might now be released.

There was so much more to be done, to be decided, so much more that the blood drinkers around the world could not fully understand. But for now, all was well under this roof. I sensed this. I felt it.

Rhoshamandes, dressed in fresh clothes, his arm and hand restored to him, was actually telling Eleni and Eugénie and Allesandra about his life after he’d left France centuries ago, and Gregory was asking him small rather interesting questions, and this proceeded, all of this, as if we’d never been at war the night before, and I’d never acted like the monster I was. And it was certainly proceeding as if he’d never murdered the great Maharet.