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"And did it say anything else?"

"It spoke mostly nonsense. Half the time I wasn't even sure it was speaking to me. I mean it could have been addressing anyone. It spoke of an optimum number of blood drinkers, considering the source of the power. It spoke of the power as the Sacred Core. I could hear the capital letters. It raved that the realm of the Undead was sunk now into depravity and madness. But it would go on and on around these ideas, often making little or no logical or sequential sense at all. It would even lapse into other languages and it would, well, it would make mistakes, mistakes in meaning, syntax. It was bizarre."

Jesse was staring at him as if all this was a surprise to her.

"To tell the truth," David explained, "I had no idea it was the Voice as people are saying now," said David. "I'm giving you the distilled version. It was mostly incoherent. I thought it was some old one. I mean, this happens, of course. Old ones shoot their messages to others. I found it tiresome. I tuned it out."

"And you, Jesse?" I asked.

"I've never heard it," she whispered. "I think that Thorne is the first to have spoken of it directly to me or Maharet."

"And what did she say?"

"She banished us both. She gave us infusions of her blood. She insisted on this. And then she told us we were not to come back. She'd already banished David." She glanced at him and then went on. "She said pretty much the same things to us she'd said to him. The time was past when she could extend hospitality any longer to others, that she and Mekare and Khayman must now be alone--."

"Khayman wasn't there at the time," David interjected. "Isn't that so?"

She nodded. "He'd been missing for a week at least." She went on with her story. "I begged her to let me remain. Thorne went down on his knees. But she was adamant. She said to leave then, not to wait on anything as cumbersome as regular transportation, but to take to the air and put as much distance between ourselves and her as we could. I went to England immediately to see David. I think Thorne actually went to New York. I think many are going to New York. I think he went to Benji and Armand and Louis, but I'm not sure. Thorne was in a fury. He so loves Maharet. But she warned him not to try to deceive her. She said she'd know if he lingered. She was agitated. More agitated than I'd ever seen her. She pressed on me some routine information about resources, money, but I reminded her she'd seen to that. I knew how to get along out here."

"The infusions of blood," I said, "what did you see in those infusions?"

This was a highly sensitive question to ask a blood drinker, and especially to ask this blood drinker who was the loyal biological descendant of Maharet. But even fledglings see images when they receive the blood of their makers; even they experience a telepathic connection in those moments that is otherwise closed. I stood firm.

Her face softened. She was sad, thoughtful. "Many things," she said, "as always. But this time, they were images of the mountain and the valley where the twins had been born. At least, I think that's what I was seeing, seeing them in their old village and seeing them when they were alive."

"So this is what was on her mind," I said. "Memories of her human past."

"I think so," said Jesse in a small voice. "There were other images, colliding, cascading, you know how it is, but again and again, it was those long-ago times. Sunshine. Sunshine in the valley ..."

David was giving me one of his subtle little gestures to be gentle, tread lightly.

But we both knew these visions or memories were like unto what mortals think about at the end of their lives, their earliest happiest memories.

"She's in the Amazon, isn't she?" I said. "Deep in the jungles."

"Yes," said Jesse. "She forbade me to tell anyone, and I'm breaking her confidence now. She's in uncharted jungle. The only tribe in the area fled after our arrival there."

"I'm going there," I said. "I want to see for myself what's happening. If we're all to perish because of this Voice, well, I want to hear from her what's going on."

"Lestat, she doesn't know what's going on," said Jesse. "That's what I'm trying to tell you."

"I know--."

"I think all this disgusts her. She wants to be left alone. I think this Voice may be driving her to think about destroying herself and Mekare and, well, all of us."

"I don't think the Voice wants us destroyed," I said.

"But she may be thinking of it," said Jesse sharply. "I'm only speculating," she confessed. "I know she's confused, angry, even bitter, and this from Maharet. Maharet of all immortals. Maharet."

"She's human still," David said softly. He stroked Jesse's arm. He kissed her hair. "We're all human no matter how long we go on."

He spoke with the easy authority of an old Talamasca scholar, but I actually agreed with him. "If you ask me," he said softly to Jesse, "finding her sister, being reunited with her sister, has destroyed Maharet."

Jesse wasn't surprised by this or jarred by it.

"She never leaves Mekare alone now," Jesse said. "And Khayman, well, Khayman is hopeless, roaming off for weeks at a time, and stumbling back in with no memory of where he's been."

"Well, surely he's not the source of the Voice," said David.