“Very much,” I managed to reply. “But I’ll never see her again. She’d know me for what I am the minute she looked at me. I avoided Rowan Mayfair desperately at the wake and the Mass. Her husband, Michael, too. They’re both what the Talamasca calls witches. And then there was the ghost of Julien Mayfair at the wake. Aunt Queen was his child. I’m his descendant.”

“You have Mayfair blood?” Merrick asked. “And you saw Julien?”

“My precious darling, I had hot cocoa with Oncle Julien in the days when I could drink it,” I said. “He served me animal crackers with it on a china plate, all of which later vanished just as he did.”

Very hastily I told her the whole tale, including the affair of the mask and the cape, and saw her lips spread in a generous and beautiful smile.

“Oh, our Oncle Julien,” she said with a winsome sigh. “The beds he left unmade and warm, what a man he was. It’s a wonder there’s anyone in the city of New Orleans who doesn’t share some genetic inheritance from him!” She beamed at me. “He came to my Great Nananne in a dream when I was eleven years old and told her to send me to the Talamasca. They were my salvation.”

“Oh, God in Heaven,” I declared. “You don’t know what I almost did to Stirling Oliver.”

“Forget that!” said Lestat. “I mean it! That’s over and done.” He raised his hand and made the Sign of the Cross. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, I absolve you from all sin. Stirling Oliver is alive! Now that matter’s closed as long as I’m Coven Master here.”

Merrick broke into a soft, sweet laugh. Her dark skin made her green eyes all the more brilliant.

“And you are the Coven Master, aren’t you?” she said, with a flirtatious flashing glance at Lestat. “You become that automatically wherever you go.”

Lestat shrugged. “But of course,” he said, exactly as if he meant it.

“We could argue about that, my magnificently feathered friend,” she replied, “but we need this time while Goblin is exhausted. And must get back to the matter at hand. So Goblin is your twin, Tarquin, and you were going to tell me what it’s like when the two of you are together now. Describe the fusion.”

“It’s positively electric,” I said. “It’s as if his particles, assuming he’s made of them—”

“He is,” she interjected.