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In a hushed voice, Gregory told him that his old compatriot, Killer of the Fang Gang, was alive, that the young musician Antoine had met him on his journey to New York. This assuaged an old guilt in Davis, guilt that he had been rescued from Akasha's massacre after Lestat's concert, leaving Killer to perish.

"Maybe somehow a great good will come out of this," Davis said, searching Gregory's face. "Maybe somehow Benji's dream is possible, do you think, that we could all come together? In the old days, it was every gang for itself, it was back alleys and gutters and graveyards...."

"I know," said Gregory. They had been over many times how the Undead had lived before Lestat had raised his voice and told them the story of their beginnings--vampire bars, swanky coven houses, and roving gangs, yes, all of that.

"Can there be a way for us to live in peace?" Davis asked. Obviously he felt so safe here under Gregory's watchful eye that the stories of the new Burnings did not frighten him, not at all, not the way they frightened Gregory. "Is it possible we could really embrace a future? You know, we never had a future in those nights. We just had the past and the now and then the outskirts of life."

"I know," said Gregory.

He kissed Davis and sent him away with only the gentlest warning. "Go nowhere without me, without Flavius, without one of us."

Davis, like all his little family, had never rebelled against him.

Gregory had only a few precious moments alone to look out on placid and lovely Lake Geneva, and the bright broad quay below, where early morning strollers were already out, and the vendors offering hot chocolate and coffee, and then to go upstairs as he did every morning to his own glass cell on the roof. Geneva was quiet. There had never been a coven house or refuge in Geneva. And as far as Gregory could tell, there were no Undead mavericks challenging him here. If there was a target for the Burning, however, it was this building where he and his beloved family lodged.

Tomorrow he'd strengthen all security systems, sprinklers, and examine the vaults to make certain that the thick stone-and-lead walls were unbreachable. He was no stranger to the Fire Gift. He knew what it could do and what it could not do. He'd foiled Akasha when she sought to burn Davis simply by carrying him upwards so swiftly her eyes could not follow the escape. And throughout the nighttime, from now on, he would keep the young and vulnerable Davis at his side.

Now he mounted the steel-lined stairway and pushed back the heavy-plated doors to his small open bedroom under the sky. In this roofless high-walled cell, under a high canopy of steel mesh, he would endure the paralysis of the daylight hours, exposing his six-thousand-year-old body to the burning rays of the sun.

When he woke each night, of course, he knew a slight discomfort from this exposure, but as the result of this process, his skin remained darkly tanned, helping him to pass for human, never to become the living white-marble statue that Khayman had become that would so frighten human beings.

As he lay down on his soft bed, the sky brightening above him, he picked up the book he'd been studying, Glass: A World History by Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin, and read for a few precious minutes from this engrossing text.

Some night soon, somehow he and Lestat would sit together somewhere, in a paneled library or a breezy open cafe, and they would talk together, talk and talk and talk, and Gregory would not be so alone.

Lestat would really understand. And Lestat would teach Gre

gory things! Yes. Surely that would happen, and that is what Gregory longed for more than anything else.

He was just sliding into unconsciousness when he heard dim telepathic cries from somewhere in the world. "The Burning." But that was someplace where the sun was not shining and the sun was indeed shining here and Gregory sank into sleep beneath its warm penetrating rays now because he could do nothing else.

10

Everard de Landen

HE WANTED no part of this, this "Voice" telling him to burn the young ones. He wanted no part of wars or factions or covens or books about vampires. And certainly he wanted nothing to do with any entity who said solemnly and telepathically, "I am the Voice. Do as I say."

The very idea. He had laughed!

"And why don't you want to slaughter them?" demanded the Voice. "Have they not driven you out of Rome?"

"No, they haven't. And I do wish you'd go away."

Everard knew from bad experience that it was not in the vampire nature to collect in groups except for evil, and that fighting other blood drinkers was a foolish enterprise that ended only in ruin for all involved. He had long chosen to survive alone. In the hills of Tuscany not far from Siena, he kept a small refurbished villa staffed by mortals, and in the evenings the rooms were his alone. He was coldly hospitable to the immortals who now and then called on him. But this Voice wanted it to begin all over again, and he would not listen. He went into Rome or Florence to hunt because they provided the only really safe and rich hunting grounds, but he would not go into Rome to burn.

Seven hundred years ago he'd been made in France by a great vampire named Rhoshamandes who had created a line of de Landen vampires, as he called them--Benedict, Allesandra, Eleni, Eugenie, Notker, and Everard--most of which had no doubt perished over the centuries, but Everard had survived. True he'd been captured by the coven of the Children of Satan, those infamous superstitious vampires who made of their miserable existence a religion, and he'd served them, but only after he'd been tortured and starved. Sometime in the Renaissance years, he couldn't remember precisely when, he'd been sent by the vicious little Parisian coven master Armand to the Children of Satan in Rome to find out how the coven fared. Well, the coven had been in ruins, and Santino the coven master had been living a blasphemous existence in worldly clothes and jewels flouting all the rules he'd forced on others. And Everard saw his chance. He escaped the Children of Satan, striking out on his own, remembering the things that the powerful Rhoshamandes had taught him long ago before the Children of Satan drove him from France.

Since then Everard had survived many an encounter with others more powerful than himself. He'd survived the terrible Burning when Akasha passed over the world striking down Children of Darkness everywhere without regard to character, courage, merit, or mercy.

He'd even survived a brief and insulting mention in one of the Vampire Chronicles by Marius, who'd described Everard without naming him as "gaunt and big boned" with dusty clothes and dirty lace.

Well, he could endure the "gaunt and big boned." That was true, and he thought himself quite beautiful in spite of it, but the dusty clothes and dirty lace? It infuriated him. He kept his shoulder-length black hair and his clothes immaculate. If he ever ran into Marius again, he intended to smack his face.

But that was all foolishness really. If he played his cards right, he'd never run into Marius or anyone else, except to exchange a few kind words and then move on. The point was Everard lived with other blood drinkers at peace.

And now this inane Voice, this Voice that came right into his head, bedeviled him nightly with commands to kill and to burn and to rampage. And he could not shut this Voice out.

Finally, he'd resorted to music. Everard had started purchasing excellent systems for amplified music since the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed the storerooms of his little villa were a veritable museum, as he hated to throw good things away. And so he had windup Victrolas, stacks of thick old black phonograph records that he had once played on them, as well as early electrical machines that had once given him "high fidelity" and "stereo" and now collected dust.