Defeated, I’d lain for years on the floor of a chapel in New Orleans in an old convent building, oblivious to the ever-shifting crowd of immortals around me—hearing them, wanting to respond, yet somehow never managing to meet a glance, answer a question, acknowledge a kiss or a whisper of affection.

And that’s when I first heard the Voice. Masculine, insistent, inside my brain.

Babbling, like I said. And I thought, Well, perhaps we blood drinkers can go mad like mortals, you know, and this is some artifact of my warped mind. Or maybe he is some massively crippled ancient one, slumbering somewhere nearby, and somehow I, telepathically, get to share in his misery.

There are physical limits to telepathy in our world. Of course. But then voices, pleas, messages, thoughts, can be relayed through other minds, and conceivably, this poor slob could be mumbling to himself on the other side of the planet.

As I said, he had babbled, mixing languages, ancient and modern, sometimes stringing a whole sentence out in Latin or Greek, and then lapsing into repetitions of modern voices … phrases from films and even songs. Over and over he begged for help, rather like the tiny human-headed fly at the end of the B-movie masterpiece, Help me, help me, as if he too were caught in a spiderweb and a giant spider were closing in on him. Okay, okay, what can I do, I’d ask, and he was quick to respond. Near at hand? Or just the best relay system in the Undead world?

“Hear me, come to me.” And he’d say that over and over again, night after night, until it was noise.

I have always been able to tune him out. No problem. Either you learn to tune out telepathic voices when you are a vampire or you go straight out of your mind. I can tune out the cries of the living just as easily. Have to. No other way to survive. Even the very ancient ones can tune out the voices. I’ve been in the Blood for over two hundred years. They’ve been in the Blood for six millennia.

Sometimes he simply went away.

Around the early years of the twenty-first century he began to speak in English.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you like it,” he said in that crisp masculine tone of his. Laughter. His laughter. “Everybody likes English. You must come to me when I call you,” he said. Then he was babbling again, in a mélange of languages, all about blindness, suffocation, paralysis, helplessness. And it devolved into “Help me” again with snatches of poetry in Latin and Greek and French and English.

This is interesting for maybe three-quarters of an hour. After that, it’s repetitious and a nuisance.

Of course I did not even bother to say no.