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Human beings didn't buy all that old religious rot nowadays, did they? They didn't skulk about under the burden of Original Sin and concupiscence anymore, pleading for absolution for having bedded their wives the night before going to Holy Communion, cursing their anatomy for dooming them to Eternal Damnation, denouncing themselves as bags of stinking bones and flesh. No, quite the contrary. In this new century they were filled with hope and a new kind of innocence and strangely confident optimism that they could solve the problems confronting them, and cure all illness and feed the entire world. At least so it seemed in this clean and peaceful part of Europe which in the past had known so much suffering, so much misery, so much bloodshed and meaningless death.

What if such a bright and shining time had come for blood drinkers as well, even the most monstrous, as Everard had become? His thoughts drifted back in spite of himself to the last brother in the Blood he'd loved--such a fine, spirited young male vampire who, remembering little of his life before the Dark Gift, had seen life around him as miraculous, whispering of the Blood being a sacrament and singing long carefree songs of an evening to the moon and the stars.

But that one had been burnt to ashes by the great and terrible Queen Akasha when she passed over. Everard had seen that with his own eyes--all that sweet vitality extinguished in an instant, indifferently as fire engulfed the whole vampire hangout in Venice where so many others had perished as well. Why had Everard survived?

He shuddered. He didn't want to think of that. Best never to love another. Best to forget instantly those who winked out as if they'd never existed. Best to live for the pleasures of each night as they came.

But what if it were a time now for them all to come together, to be the tribe that Benji believed them to be, to approach others, old and young, without rage or fear?

Rhoshamandes had laughed at the very idea of the Children of Satan, and their sanctimonious ways. He used to say, "I was in the Blood before their god was even born."

Everard didn't want to think too much about all that either. Let it go. And never remember the satanic covens and their Sabbats. Forget forever those horrid hymns offered to the Prince of Darkness.

Ah, what if it were possible to come together, and worship not a Prince of Darkness but a prince of us?

He opened his iPhone and tapped the screen for the app that connected him directly to Benji's broadcast. The broadcast should be in full swing now in America.

Two hours before dawn.

He was dozing in his favorite leather chair, half dreaming.

Benji was still talking very low through the Bose speaker dock in which Everard had deposited his iPhone. But he was not hearing this.

The dream: Back in Rhoshamandes's castle in that big hollow hall with the fire blazing and Benedict, handsome Benedict with the pretty face, begging to make a vampire of the monk known as Notker the Wise, a creature of immense talent who wrote music night and day as one possessed, songs, motets, chants, and canticles. And Rhoshamandes considering it, nodding and moving his chess pieces about, and saying, "But you blood drinkers brought over from the Christian god, I simply do not know."

"Oh, but, Master, the only god Notker worships is music. Master, would that he could play his music forever."

"Shave off that monkly crown of hair from him first," Rhoshamandes had said, "and then you bring him over. Your blood, not my blood. But I will not have a tonsured blood drinker."

Benedict laughed. It was no secret that Rhoshamandes had locked Benedict up for months to allow his "monkly" hair to grow back all over his pretty head before he'd given him the Dark Blood, and Benedict had prepared for the Dark Gift as if it were a sacrament. Rhoshamandes demanded beauty in his fledglings.

Notker the Wise of Prum was famously beautiful.

A noise awakened Everard.

It drew him abruptly back from that familiar old hall with its soaring beams and stone pavers.

He heard the sharp strike of a match. Flare of flames against his eyelids. There were no matches in this house! He used the Fire Gift to light his fires.

He shot out of the leather easy chair and found himself facing two wild-eyed and disheveled young blood drinkers--a male and a female in the typical vagabond dress of denim and leather. They were setting fire to the draperies in this room.

"Burn, you devil, burn!" shouted the male in Italian.

With a roar, Everard hurled the female through the window, shattering the glass, and yanked down the burning drapery and threw it over the male as he dragged him roughly through the opening and out into the dark garden.

Both were cursing and snarling at him. The male rolled out from under the heap of smoldering velvet with a knife in his hand and ran at Everard.

Burn.

Everard collected the Fire Gift with all his strength in the center of his forehead, then sent the blast against the fool. Flames shot up out of the boy's body, enveloping his arms and head, and his gasping screams were silenced by the roar of the blaze, the Blood burning as if it were petrol. The female had fled.

But Everard caught her as she mounted the wall, dragging her backwards as he sank his fangs into her throat. She screamed as he tore open the artery, the blood squirting into his mouth, against the back of his mouth, inundating his tongue.

At once the flood of images drugged him, her pounding heart driving them as it drove the blood: the Voice, yes, the Voice telling her to kill, telling them both to kill, lovers made in a filthy back alley in Milan by a scrawny bearded blood drinker who pushed them out to kill and steal, twenty years in the Blood maybe, dying, and then it broke down into bits and pieces of childhood, her white First Communion dress, incense, the crowded Cathedral, "Ave Maria," a mother's smiling face, a dress of checkered cloth, apples on a plate, taste of apples, the inevitable peace. He drank deeper, drawing every last drop he could from her, on and on, till there was nothing and the heart had stopped gasping like an open-mouth fish.

From the garden shed, he took a spade and chopped her head from her body. Then he slurped what blood now oozed from the torn neck tissues, the emptying vessels. Shimmer of consciousness. Ghastly! He dropped her head and brushed his hands clean.

With a gentle blast of the Fire Gift he incinerated her remains, the sightless staring head with the long straggly locks of black hair caught in her white teeth, the limp body.