“My answer was to raid every flower shop in New Orleans, sending sprays and baskets and vases of flowers with notes that pledged my undying love, notes which I could dictate over the phone. I didn’t dare to send anything touched by my own hands. Mona could lay her hands on such a note and sense the evil in me. Just couldn’t take such a risk.

“As it stands now, I still send the flowers almost daily. Now and then I break down and call. It’s always the same. Mona can’t see anyone just now. Mona is holding her own.

“I think I actually dread the moment when they might say, ‘Come see her.’ I’m afraid I won’t be able to resist it and I won’t be able to fool Mona, and in those precious moments, perhaps our last precious moments, Mona’s mind will be clouded with some dim fear of what I’ve become. At the very least I’ll seem cold and passionless though my heart’s breaking. I dread it. I dread it with my whole soul.

“But more than anything I dread the final call—the message that Mona has lost the fight, the word that Mona is gone.”

Lestat nodded. He leaned on his elbow, his hair somewhat mussed, his large blue eyes looking at me compassionately as they had throughout the long hours of my storytelling.

“What do you think is the point of the tale you’ve told?” he asked. “Aside from the fact that we must protect Aunt Queen from all harmful knowledge of what’s happened to you, and we must destroy Goblin?”

“That I had a rich life,” I said. “As Petronia herself said it. And she didn’t care about that life. She took it capriciously and viciously.”

Again he nodded. “But Quinn, immortality, no matter how one comes by it, is a gift, and you must lose your hatred of her. It poisons you.”

“It’s like my hatred of Patsy,” I said quietly. “I need to lose my hatred of both of them. I need to lose all hatred, but right now it’s Goblin who needs destroying, and I’ve tried, out of fairness to him, to make it plain to you how much I’m responsible for what he is, and even for the vengeance he wishes on me.”