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I got up and paced the dark thick carpet, then I went back out on the balcony and looked at the lightening sky. Sunrise coming. Relentless implacable sunrise. So comforting to the world of mortal beings and animal things, and the plants breaking through the soil everywhere, and the trees sighing through a billion leaves. And so deadly to us.
"Voice, I am sorry," I said.
I saw Pacaya volcano again, that image that had flashed repeatedly through Maharet's mind, that fiery image. I saw in terror her carrying her sister upwards, like an angel with a child in its arms, until she was above that horrid gaping mouth of fire.
Suddenly I felt the presence of the other.
"No," said the Voice. "It's not too late. We'll talk, you and I. When the time comes."
"Then you do have a plan?" I asked. "You aren't just slaughtering all your own progeny."
"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.
