Armand and Louis had been right to paint the ceilings of their digs in New York. I hated to admit it, but glimpsing that baroque splendor through their windows had inspired me to give the order for these ceilings here. I resolved never to tell them that. Ah, pang of missing Louis, of wanting so to talk to Louis, pang of gratitude that Louis was with Armand.

“You’re yourself again at long last,” she said. “I am glad. I am truly glad.”

“Why? Our world may shortly end. What does it matter?” But this was dishonest. I didn’t think our world was going to end. I wouldn’t let it end. I’d fight it ending with every breath in my unwholesome immortal frame.

“Oh, it won’t end,” she said with a shrug. “Not if we all act together again as we did last time, if we put away our differences as the world is always saying and unite. We can defeat this thing, this raging spirit who thinks his every emotion is unique and momentous as if consciousness itself had just been discovered for his benefit and for his personal use!”

Ah, so she knew all about it. She hadn’t been holed up in some North American forest watching the snow fall. She’d been with us all along. And what she’d just said had meaning.

“He does behave that way, doesn’t he?” I said. “You put that exactly right.”

She leaned against the mantel nearest me, her elbow just able to manage it, and succeeded in looking like a thin graceful boy in that posture, her eyes positively glowing as she smiled at me.

“I love you, you know.”

“You could have fooled me on that one,” I said. “Hmmm. Well.” I shrugged. “Seems lots of people love me, mortal and immortal. Can’t help it. I’m just the most dazzling vampire on the planet, though why I’ll never know. Weren’t you lucky to have me for a son, the wolf killer who stumbled onto the stage in Paris and caught the fancy of a monster.” This was dishonest too. Why did I feel I had to keep her at a remove?

“Seriously, you look splendid,” she said. “Your hair’s whiter. Why is that?”

“Apparently it comes from having been burned. Repeatedly burned. But it’s yellow enough still to keep me happy. You look rather splendid yourself. What do you know about all this, what’s happening?”

She was silent for a moment. Then she spoke. “Never think they really love you, or love you for yourself,” she said.

“Thanks, Mother.”

“Seriously. I mean it. Don’t ever think … Love doesn’t really ever function like that. You’re the only name and face they all know.”

I regarded this thoughtfully, then replied, “I know.”

“Let’s talk of the Voice,” she said, leaping right into the subject without preamble. “It can’t manipulate the physical. Apparently it can only incite the minds of those it visits. He can’t possess the bodies at all. And I suspect it cannot do anything with the host body, but then I have seen the host body less often than you have, and for much less time.”

The host body was Mekare. I did not think of Mekare in those terms, but that is what she was.

I was impressed. All this should have been obvious to me before now. I’d regarded every visit from the Voice as some sort of attempt at possession, but the visits had never been that. It could make hallucinations, yes, but it had been working on my brain when it did that. But it had never been able to manipulate me physically into anything. I was mulling over the many things the Voice had said.

“I don’t think it can control the host body at all,” I said. “The host body has atrophied. Too many centuries with no fresh human blood, no human or vampiric contact, too much darkness for too long.”

She nodded. She turned and rested her back against the mantel and folded her arms.

“Its first goal will be to get out of that body,” she said. “But then what will it do? It will depend on the new host body and its powers. If we could trick it into a young fledgling body, that might be a very good call.”

“Why do you say that?”

“If it’s an older body again, a truly old body, it can expose itself to the sun and kill off half the vampires of the world by doing this, just as it happened in ancient times. If it’s in a young body, it will destroy itself if it attempts this.”

“Mon Dieu, I never even thought of that!” I said.

“That’s why we have to come together, all of us,” she said. “And New York’s the place of course. But first we must enlist Sevraine.”

“You do realize that the Voice can hear us right now,” I said.

“Not unless it’s here, in one of us,” she said. “The Voice has visited me more than once, and I think it can only be in one place at a time. It hasn’t spoken to groups of blood drinkers simultaneously. No. It certainly can’t speak to everyone at the same moment. That is not remotely possible for it. No. If it’s temporarily anchored in you or in me, yes, it can hear what’s being said in this room. But not otherwise. And I don’t feel its presence. Do you?”

I was pondering. There was considerable evidence she was right. But I still couldn’t figure why. Why didn’t the Voice’s intelligence permeate all of its immense body, assuming it did have a body as we know the word? But then whose intelligence does permeate its entire body? That of an octopus perhaps? I thought of Mekare and Maharet long ago comparing these spirits to immense sea creatures.

“This Voice moves along its own etheric anatomy,” Gabrielle said, “and I use that word simply because I don’t know any other to describe it, but I bet your learned friends Fareed and Seth would verify what I’m saying. It moves through its various extremities and cannot be in any two places at once. We must meet with them, Lestat. We must get to New York, and before that we must go to Sevraine. Sevraine should come with us. Sevraine’s powerful, perhaps as powerful as the host body.”

“How do you know about Seth and Fareed?” I asked.

“From the blood drinkers calling Benji Mahmoud in New York. Don’t you listen to them? You with your rock videos and sometime e-mail, I thought you’d be on top of all this technology. I listen to the tramps calling in and talking all about the benign vampire scientist of the West Coast who offers them cash for samples of their blood and tissue. They refer to Seth, his maker, as if he were a god.”

“And they’re headed to New York?”