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Marius had embraced her, the only one to do it, and whispered poetry to her: " 'Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night Like a rich jewel ...' "

He'd kissed Viktor also. "Such a gift you are for your father," he had said. And Viktor had smiled.

She had known Viktor was on the edge of tears that Lestat had not come yet. But Lestat was on his way. That was now certain. He'd gone south on an errand to the Amazon that could not wait. But he was coming, most definitely coming. Seth assured them of this himself. He claimed to have heard it from an unimpeachable source, Lestat's own mother.

And Rose had been on the edge of breaking down at that news. But all this had made the suspense not only endurable but engulfing. Surely, Seth wouldn't have revealed the full depth of their world to her if Uncle Lestan--if Lestat was not to give both of them the Dark Gift.

"The Dark Gift." She liked to whisper those words.

There had come a moment last night when it seemed the entire company was on the dance floor, and some of the blood drinkers were singing softly with the musicians and the entire ballroom was wrapped in a cloud of golden light.

She had been dancing with Viktor, and he had bent and kissed her lips.

"I love you, Rose," he had said. And she'd dug deep down into her soul at that moment and asked herself could they turn away from this, actually turn away from it, and go to some other place, some safe place where their natural love for each other would be enough to dim the memories of this? She and Viktor had known surely the most tantalizing intimacy, the sweetest affection, the purest lovemaking she had ever imagined. It had erased for her all the ugliness and horror of what had happened with Gardner, all the shame and the crushing disappointment. By day when blood drinkers slept and their mysteries were gone along with them, she'd held Viktor against her heart and he'd held her, and that had been its own miracle, its own sacrament, its own gift.

She shuddered.

She realized now that Louis was looking at her and so was Viktor. Louis very likely had been reading her thoughts. Had he seen those images of her with Viktor, together? She blushed.

"I think Seth has made the decision," said Louis, speaking to her very thoughts. "Otherwise he would have never brought you to Trinity Gate last night. No. He's only waiting for Lestat to ratify it. He's made up his mind."

Rose smiled, but felt the sting of tears in her eyes.

"He'll come tonight, I know he will," said Louis.

"Fareed places a high value on human life, human experience," said Viktor. "Maybe my father does too. I think that Seth cares nothing for human experience much at all."

Rose knew that Viktor was right. She remembered too vividly the first time she'd ever laid eyes on Seth. It had been in the small hours, and she'd been in pain. Needles, tape, monitors all around her. Viktor wasn't coming back until morning, and Dr. Gilman could not be found.

Seth had come to her, a dark-eyed man in the ubiquitous white scrubs of the hospital, who stood at a remove from her bed, talking to her in a low voice.

He'd told her the pain would vanish if she would listen to him, just follow his words, and sure enough as he talked to her about the pain, as he asked her to describe it in colors, and to picture it, and to say what and where she felt it, the pain had melted away.

She'd cried. She'd told him about Uncle Lestan and how he'd wanted her to be a happy healthy young woman and how she'd ruined it again and again. Maybe she'd never been good enough, she'd said, for life.

A soft cold laugh had come from Seth. He'd explained with great authority that she had ruined nothing, that life

was in charge of life, that pain was everywhere, that it was as much a part of the process of life as birth and death. "But joy, the joy you've known, the love you've known, that is what matters, and we, the conscious ones, the ones who can grieve, only we can know joy."

It had been a strange meeting. And she hadn't seen him again till she was much better, and she'd been certain then that he was no more human than Uncle Lestan was human, and she'd known by then too that Fareed wasn't human and Dr. Gilman wasn't human either, and that Viktor knew all this with a far greater understanding than she could possibly have. She'd been wrestling with it, pacing the floor of her room in the desert hospital, interrogating her own senses, her own sense of normality, and Seth had appeared and said: "Don't let us drive you mad." He'd moved out of the shadows and taken her hands in his. "I am just what you think and what you fear," he'd told her. "Why shouldn't you know? Why shouldn't you understand?"

The effect of those nighttime conversations had been incalculable, and the first time that she and Viktor had been intimate, she'd said in his ear, "Don't be afraid for me. I do know what they are. I know all about it. I understand."

"Thank Heaven," Viktor had replied. They had snuggled together spoon fashion and he had kissed her hair. "Because I can't lie about it anymore. I can keep secrets. But I can't tell lies."

She looked at him now, looked at the manner in which he sat there in the chair, looking at the far glass wall and the vibrant cityscape beyond it. And she felt such love for him, such love and trust.

She looked at Louis, Louis who was watching her again as if reading her thoughts.

"You've been more than kind," she said, "but if we're cast out of all this, if that's what ultimately happens, I don't know what future there can be for us."

She looked at Viktor. His expression told her nothing, except that he loved her, and that he had a patience with this that she didn't have.

She tried to imagine it, them together, married, with children, their very own rosy-cheeked children, little children, drifting through the world on the magic carpet of the wealth bequeathed to them by beings of a secret and unknown realm. She couldn't imagine it, couldn't.

But surely somehow it would never come to that. This would not all be consigned to miraculous memory meant to fade with every passing year.

She looked at Louis.