Even here the voice of Benji Mahmoud continued but it was recorded now. “It is a new era. It is a new time. We are the People of Darkness, we are the People of Everlasting Life. The Prince has spoken. The Prince rules.”

The Prince? He couldn’t fathom it. Who was the Prince?

He walked through a narrow street, listening for that recorded broadcast, until he came upon a small dark tavern filled with drunk lazy mortals on whom he might easily feed. Skins of all nations here. That pulsing twanging music he hated. And in the corner on a filthy little table against a wall covered with a beaded curtain stood the computer through which Benji Mahmoud addressed the world.

A pretty mortal girl, puffing on a long pink cigarette, listened to Benji Mahmoud and laughed under her breath. She saw Cyril. Come here, big boy, just let me make you happy, come on, closer, closer. Daggers in the back room. Her skin was thick with tinted powder, her eyes rimmed in kohl. She had the red smile of a child witch.

He sat down beside her in the shadows. The stench of the place was vile, but he wouldn’t be here very long. And the smell of her blood was pure. All lies die in the blood. All evil is purged in the blood.

“You know,” she said to him in English, “he could make you want to be a real vampire.” And she laughed again, a rich cynical ugly laugh, lifting her yellow drink and spilling it down the front of her dark dress.

“Never mind that,” he said as he kissed her.

She pushed at him helplessly as he sank his teeth. Sold into it at twelve years old. Honey, tell me all about it! And the blood sang and sang its ancient and unchanging song.

He walked away from the city.

He walked away from the damp hazy air of the Mediterranean, inland to the everlasting sands. He would sleep here in the land of Egypt, maybe for years, he would sleep in the land of his birth. Why not?

Finally, he stood alone under the great dark sky, away from all human sounds and scents, with the cold desert wind washing him, cleansing away the filth that clung to him of foreign lands.

Then the Voice sighed inside his head.

“Oh, spare me!” Cyril cried. “Get away from me! Don’t torment me here.”

But the Voice spoke to him now with an inflection he’d never heard before, and with a deep resonance that was wholly new. It was beautiful. And yet it was the Voice, and the Voice said,

“Cyril, come home. Come home to the tribe. At last we are one.”

Chapter 31

Rose

The People of the Moon and Stars

THE VOICE OF PANDORA called to her from far away: “Rose, drink!”

And she could hear Marius calling to her and Viktor, Viktor’s desperate plea.

“Rose, drink.”