How lovely she was, the flower of the twisted old stem she’d been then.
I muttered something about how I’d longed even back then to see what she could have been. I stopped myself. It was so presumptuous and selfish. She was restored after all. She was here, vital, vibrant, part of this new and astonishing age. But she didn’t correct me. She didn’t shrink from me. She only smiled.
Sevraine was pleased with all this. And this woman who hardly seemed old at all now, nothing like the wretched hag she’d been in those eighteenth-century nights, was flushed with pleasure.
Finally I put my knee on the table and leaned forward and clasped Allesandra’s face in my hands and kissed her.
In those earlier times, she’d been doomed, a dead thing in medieval garb, even to a filthy and ragged veil and wimple. Now her healthy silvery ashen hair was free and came down in dark waves over her shoulders. The robe she wore was fresh and soft like that of Sevraine, only it was a pale green, a green like the grass of the world of the day, that bright and beautiful. Around her neck was a single bright ruby on a chain. Allesandra, daughter of Dagobert. Her lips were dark and red like that ruby.
What a monster she’d appeared back in those nights, a face deformed by madness like the face of my maker, Magnus. But she was free now, freed by time, freed by survival to be something else, something entirely different and wondrous and sweet and vital.
“Yes, young one. Yes, and thanks to you, your voice, your videos and songs, your desperate revelations, I have slowly come back to myself. But I’ve been a pawn of this Voice. I have been the dupe of this Voice!” Her face darkened, and for a moment it seemed to crumple into that of the medieval horror she’d been before. “Only now I am in the helping hands of others.”
“Put that aside,” said Bianca. She was still beside me on my right, with Gabrielle on my left. “It is over,” said Bianca. “The Voice will not triumph.” But she was trembling with some sort of inner conflict, some battle between anguish and optimism.
Sevraine turned slowly to the spirit. He had stood quite still all this time regarding me with his bright but quiet blue eyes as if he could actually see through them, process through them all that lay before him. He wore a fancy, glittering decorative Indian garment called a sherwani, a kind of robe that went down to his ankles, I supposed, though I couldn’t see below the top of the table, and his skin was amazingly realistic, nothing as synthetic looking as our skin always looks, but natural-looking skin made up of tiny changing pores and the soft down that covers humans.
“Gremt Stryker Knollys,” he said, extending his hand. “But Gremt is my simple and true name. Gremt is my name for you and for all those I love.”
“And you love me? Why?” I asked. But it was thrilling to be talking to this spirit.
He laughed softly and politely, unshaken by my sharp question. “Doesn’t everyone love you?” he asked sincerely. It was as human a voice as I’d ever heard, tenor in pitch, even. “Isn’t everyone hoping for you to somehow lead the tribe when this present war has been brought to the finish?”
I looked at Sevraine. “Do you love me?” I asked. “Are you hoping for me to lead this tribe?”
“Yes,” she said with a radiant smile. “I am hoping and praying you will lead it. Surely you cannot expect me to lead it.”
I sighed.
I looked at my mother.
“We do not have to talk about this right now,” my mother said, but there was something about her remote half-lidded regard of me that chilled me. “Don’t worry,” she crooned with a cold ironic smile. “No one can crown you Prince of the Vampires against your will, can they?”
“Prince of the Vampires!” I scoffed. “I don’t know,” I said.
I looked back at the others. I wished I had a full night to take in all of these revelations, these new and startling encounters, just to try to fathom the limits of this splendid Sevraine, or why the tender Bianca was suffering so, because she couldn’t conceal the pain.
“But I’ll tell you that, why I am suffering,” Bianca said, drawing near but talking in a normal and not a confidential voice, her arm slipping around me. “I lost one I loved in the attack in Paris, a young one, one I’d made and lived with for decades. But this was the Voice at work, not the one he’d brought out of the earth to do his bidding.”
“And that was I,” said Allesandra, “roused by the Voice. And given the unholy strength by the Voice to climb out of that tomb of bones and filth. That sin lies on me.”
I saw it now in horrific flickering images, a wraith of a woman, a macabre skeleton of a creature with hag hair, sending a fatal jet of heat at the house in the Rue Saint-Jacques. And revenants rushing to their very doom as they fled the doors and windows right into the path of the murderous power. I saw Bianca down on her knees on the pavement wailing, hands pressed to the side of her head, face upturned. I saw the wraith approach and reach out for her, as if the very personification of Death had paused in its rounds to show compassion to one lone soul.
“Many have been duped by the Voice,” said Gabrielle. “And not so many have survived it and turned away with such immediate disgust. That counts for much as far I’m concerned.”
“It counts for everything,” said Bianca gravely.
Allesandra’s face was sad. She appeared to be dreaming, to have slipped away from the present time and back into a great limitless gulf of darkness. I wanted to reach out and take her hand, but it was Sevraine who did this.
All the while the spirit, Gremt Stryker Knollys, gazed on without a word. He was seated now as he had been before.
Others were coming into this large room.
For a moment I didn’t believe my eyes. There was a ghost there, surely it was a ghost, in the person of an elderly man with dark gray hair and skin that suggested mother-of-pearl to me. He was in a body as solid as the body of the spirit Gremt. And he too wore real clothes. Breathtaking.
And two exquisitely groomed and exquisitely dressed female blood drinkers were with him.
When I saw who they were, who they actually were, these two with their coiffed hair and soft silken robes, I started crying. They came at once to me, and both embraced me.
“Eleni and Eugénie,” I said. “Safe after all this time.” I could hardly speak.
Somewhere in a chest locked away, a chest that had survived neglect and fire, I still had in my possession all the letters once written to me from Paris by Eleni, the letters that had told me of the Théâtre des Vampires in the Boulevard du Temple that I had left behind in my wanderings, the letters that told me of its prosperity with the Paris audiences, of Armand’s governance, and of the death of my Nicolas, my second fledgling, my only mortal friend, and my greatest failure.