“Progeny?” He laughed. “Imagine your every limb hung with chains, your fingers bound with weights, your feet connected by a thousand roots to others. Progeny, be damned.”

The sun was indeed rising. It was rising for the Voice too in that jungle. If he was in that jungle.

I closed up the room, pulled the draperies shut, went into the spacious walk-in closet, and lay down to sleep, furious that I wouldn’t be able to head for home until the inevitable sunset.

Two nights later, it hit Paris.

The Voice hadn’t spoken a word to me in the interim. And then it hit Paris.

By the time I got there it was over.

The little hotel in the Rue Saint-Jacques was burnt to the ground and the firefighters were dousing the blackened ruins with water, the smoke and steam rising between the narrow intact buildings on either side of it.

There were no voices here in the heart of Paris now. Those who had escaped had fled to the countryside and they were still pleading with others to follow their example.

I passed slowly, unnoticed, through the sidewalk spectators—just a flashy young man in violet sunglasses and a worn leather coat with unruly long blond hair, secretly carrying a deadly ax with him.

But I was sure I’d heard one plea, stronger than many of the others, when the Burning had started, when those first howls had drifted over the wind, a woman pleading in Italian for me to come. I was certain I’d heard a sobbing entreaty, “I am Bianca Solderini.”

Well, if I’d heard it, it was silent now. It was gone.

I walked along, noting the stains of black grease on the pavements. In one doorway, unmarked as yet, lay a black slimy hulk of burnt bones and shapeless globs of tissue. Could there have been life in that still? How old was that? Was that the beautiful legendary Bianca Solderini?

My soul shriveled. I sauntered closer to it. No one passing me noticed. I touched this mass of steaming blood and guts with my boot. It was melting, the bones losing their shape, the whole little heap melting on the stones. There could be nothing alive there.

“You proud of yourself, Voice?” I asked.

But he wasn’t there. Not there at all. I would have known if he was there.

He hadn’t spoken to me again since Miami, not in spite of all my pleas, my questions, my long confessions of respect, interest, immense desire to understand.

“Amel, Amel, talk to me,” I’d said over and over again. Had it found others to love, others infinitely more malleable and useful?

And more to the point, what was I going to do? What did I have to offer all those who seemed to think, for the most foolish reasons, that I could somehow solve all this?

Meanwhile coven houses and young ones had perished. And now this in Paris.

For hours I searched the Quartier Latin. I searched all of central Paris, walking the banks of the Seine and homing as I always did to Notre Dame. Nothing. Not a single preternatural voice left in Paris.

All those paparazzi gone.

It was almost like those olden nights when I thought I was the only vampire in the world, and I’d walked these streets alone, longing for the voices of others.

And all the time those other blood drinkers, those evil blood drinkers led by Armand, had been hiding under the cemetery of Les Innocents.

I saw bones in stacks, skulls, rotting bones. But this was no image of the old catacombs of those Children of Satan in the eighteenth century. These were images of the catacombs under Paris today where all the bones of the old cemetery had been moved long after the Children of Satan had been dissolved into ruin.

Catacombs. Images of bones. I heard a female blood drinker crying. Two creatures. And one speaking very rapidly in a low whisper. I knew that timbre. That was the voice I’d heard earlier this night. I left the Île de la Cité, and started for the catacombs.

In a flash I caught a vision of two women together weeping, the elder a white skeletal monster with a hag’s hair. Horrid, like something painted by Goya. Then it was gone, and I couldn’t home in on it again.

“Bianca!” I said. “Bianca!”

I picked up speed. I knew where those tunnels were, those deep dark ugly tunnels beneath the city whose walls are packed with the disintegrating bones of centuries of dead Parisians. The public was admitted to those underground passages. I knew the public entrance. I was racing towards the Place Denfert-Rochereau, and had almost reached the spot, when a strange sight stopped me.

It was a brilliant flash at the entrance to the tunnel, as if a flame had erupted from the mouth of the charnel house. The dark wooden pedimented building that sheltered the entrance exploded and fell to pieces with a loud clatter.

I saw a female blood drinker with long blond hair, white, immensely powerful, rising from the pavement, and in her arms two other figures, both clinging to her, one with a skeletal white arm and hag hair buried against her bosom, the other, auburn haired and shaking with sobs.

For me, for my eyes, this mysterious being slowed her ascent, and we gazed for one split second at one another.

I will see you again, brave one.

Then she was gone.

I felt a blast of air against my face.

I was sitting on the pavement when I came to my senses.

Sevraine.

That was the name imprinted on my mind. Sevraine. But who was this Sevraine?

I was still sitting there staring at the entrance to the tunnel when I heard fast crisp steps approaching, someone walking steadily, heavily and fast.

“Get up, Lestat.”

I turned and looked up into the face of my mother.

There she was after all these years in her old khaki safari jacket and faded jeans, her hair in a braid over her shoulder, her pale face like a porcelain mask.

“Come on, stand up!” she said, those cold blue eyes flashing in the lights of the burning building at the mouth of the tunnel.

And in that moment as love and resentment clashed with humbling fury, I was back at home hundreds of years ago, walking with her in those cold barren fields, with her haranguing me in that impatient voice. “Get up. Move. Come on.”

“What are you going to do if I don’t?” I snarled. “Slap me?”

And that’s what she did. She slapped me. “Get up quickly,” she said. “Take me to that glorified shelter you’ve made for yourself in the old castle. We must talk. Tomorrow night, I’ll take you to Sevraine.”

13

Marius

Reunion on the Brazilian Shore

IT SEEMED the Voice woke him each evening, telling him to go out and cleanse the country around him of mavericks, that he would be infinitely more content if he did this. The Voice took a gentle tack with him.