This was Eleni, and her companion Eugénie, 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 Eugénie 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 multitude 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.”

I didn’t know what to say. What could it conceivably mean that the Voice meant to join a New York meeting if the Voice was emanating from Mekare? Would the Voice somehow through Khayman force the twins to travel to New York? I couldn’t figure it. And what of Maharet envisioning that volcano and their fiery finish? Did the others know about that? I didn’t dare to think of it in this company of minds that could rake mine with total ease.

“Believe me,” said Sevraine. “I offered my presence, my sympathy, and my strength to Maharet only nights ago and I was rebuffed. I have told her in plain words who the Voice is and she has refused to believe it. She insists the Voice cannot be what we know it is. Maharet is a bruised and broken soul now. Maharet cannot stop this thing. She can’t fathom that the Voice is coming from her own sister. Maharet is ruined.”

“I can’t give up on her that easily,” I said. “I understand what you’re saying. It’s true. I went there and tried to talk with her and she forced me to leave. She used her power to physically push me away. Quite literally. But I can’t give up on her as broken and bruised. That can’t be right. The last time, when we all faced annihilation, she and Mekare saved us! We would all have died if … Look, we ought to go to her now. You, me, Marius, whoever else we can find …”

“Say this to them when we meet, all of us, under Armand’s roof,” Sevraine said.

But I was horror-struck at the thought of what might be happening in that jungle compound now. What if the Voice through Khayman found some way to do away with Maharet? It was unthinkable to me, and equally unthinkable that I might stand by and let this happen.

“I know this,” said Sevraine. She was responding to my thoughts. “I am fully aware of it. But as I told you, this creature’s destiny has been fulfilled. Maharet’s found her twin, and in her twin she’s confronted the nothingness, the emptiness—the sheer meaninglessness of life—that all of us face sooner or later, and maybe more than once, and maybe even many times. Maharet has not survived this final encounter. She has divorced herself from her mortal family. She has nothing now to sustain her. The tragedy of her mindless sister, Mekare, has devoured her. She’s finished.”