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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 Eugenie," 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 Theatre 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.

This was Eleni, and her companion Eugenie, fresh and perfumed and quietly resplendent in their simple silk garments. They were dark-eyed with soft almond-colored skin and dark hair loose over their shoulders. And I had thought them long gone from the Earth, gone in this or that catastrophe--a mere memory of the century of white-powdered wigs consumed by time and violence.

"Come, let's all sit down together," said Sevraine.

I looked around a bit dazed, a bit uncertain. I wanted somehow to sink into some shadowy corner and think about what was happening, absorb what was happening, but there was no time or place for this. I was shaken and at a loss. Indeed, I was overwhelmed when I contemplated how many other reunions and shocks awaited me, but how could I shrink from this? How could I resist it? Yet if this was what we all wanted, if this is what we dreamed of, in our grief and our loneliness--being reunited with those we'd lost--then why was I finding it so very hard?

The ghost, the puzzling ghost of the elderly man with the dark gray hair, had taken a seat beside Gremt, and he sent me a quick sharp telepathic introduction. Raymond Gallant. Did I know that name?

Eleni and Eugenie went around the table and sat beside Allesandra.

I saw a hearth now to the far left, well stacked with burning logs, though the light of the fire was lost in the great electric illumination of this golden room with its twinkling and flickering walls and ceiling. I saw a mult

itude of things--sconces, bronze sculptures, heavy carved chests. But nothing registered for the moment except that I was suffering a kind of paralysis. I worked against it. I had to look at the faces that surrounded me.

I took the empty high-backed chair opposite Sevraine. That's what she wanted. Gabrielle sat beside me. And it was quite impossible to ignore that I was the center of attention, that all these beings were connected by earlier encounters, or even long history, and that I had much to learn.

I found myself looking at this ghost, and then the name hit me. Raymond Gallant. Talamasca. A friend to Marius in the Renaissance years, before and after Marius had been attacked by the Children of Satan and his Venetian palazzo destroyed. A friend who had actually helped him, through the Talamasca, find his beloved Pandora, who'd been traveling Europe in those nights with an Indian blood drinker named Arjun. Raymond Gallant had died in very old age in an English castle belonging to the Talamasca, or so Marius had always believed.

The ghost was looking at me now with the most genial eyes, smiling eyes, friendly eyes. His clothes were the only decidedly Western garb in the room besides mine--a simple dark suit and tie, and yes, absolutely, they were real, these garments, not part of his complex and marvelously realized artificial body.

"Are you ready to join the others in New York?" asked Sevraine. She had a simplicity and directness that reminded me of my mother. And I could hear that powerful heart of hers beating, that ancient heart.

"And what good would that do?" I asked. "How can I affect what's happening?"

"Plenty," she said. "We must all go there. We must all come together. The Voice has contacted them. The Voice wants to join them."

I was shocked and skeptical. "How is that possible?"

"I don't know," she said. "And they don't know either. But the Voice has endorsed Trinity Gate in New York as the place for us to meet. We must go there."

"What about Maharet?" I asked. "And what about Khayman? How can the Voice ...?"

"I know what you're saying," said Sevraine, "and again I am saying that we must gather under Armand's roof. No one of us can stand against Maharet and Khayman. I've been to their encampment. I've tried to talk with Maharet. She would not admit me. She would not listen to me. And with Khayman beside her, I can't prevail against her. Not alone. Only with others. And the others are meeting in New York."

I bowed my head. I was shaken by what she was saying. Surely it wasn't coming to that, a battle of the ancients, a battle involving force, but then what other kind of battle would it be?

"Well, then let the great Children of the Millennia gather," I said. "But I'm no Child of the Millennia!"

"Oh, come now, Lestat," she answered. "You've drunk the Mother's blood in staggering amounts and you know it. You have an indomitable will that counts for a supernatural gift in itself."

"I was Akasha's dupe," I said. I sighed. "So much for will. I have indomitable emotions. That's not the same as having indomitable will."

"Now I know why they call you the Brat Prince," said Sevraine patiently. "You're going to New York and you know you are."