“But why won’t she admit it?” he asked.

“They all thought that Goblin was bad for me, don’t you see? They all thought that they mustn’t encourage it, don’t you see? And that was why they didn’t want me talking with the Talamasca, because they thought that Stirling and the Talamasca would nurture this damnable ability in me, of seeing ghosts and spirits, and so, if any of them saw Goblin, if my grandparents Sweetheart and Pops ever saw him, they didn’t say.”

Lestat appeared to ponder this for a moment. And once again, I noticed that very slight difference between his eyes. I tried to shut it out of my thoughts, but one eye was ever so much brighter than the other, and definitely tinged with blood.

He said, “I think it’s time I read your letter to me, don’t you?”

“Perhaps so,” was all I could say.

He drew the envelope out of his inside coat pocket and he tore open the end of the envelope neatly, letting the onyx cameo slip out of it into his right hand, and then he smiled.

He looked rapidly several times from the deeply carved white image to me and back again, and then he rubbed the image very gently with his thumb.

“I may keep this?” he asked.

“It’s my gift to you, if you want it,” I said. “Yes, I meant it for you. It was when I thought we’d never meet face-to-face. But yes, keep it. It was made for Aunt Queen, let me confess it, but after the Dark Blood I didn’t want to give it to her. But I don’t know why I’m rambling on about such a point. I’m honored you ask to keep it. It’s yours.”

He slipped it into his side coat pocket, and then he opened the letter and read it carefully, or so it seemed to me.

There was my plea to help me destroy Goblin, and my begging for his patience that I dared to enter New Orleans in search of him, and my report of how I had known and loved the Talamasca, a confession that brought the blood teeming into my face when I thought of Stirling and what I had almost done this very night. There was my admission of how I loved Aunt Queen and how I wanted to take my leave of her, if Lestat chose to punish me by death for disobeying his only rules.

I realized now that much of the letter’s contents had been revealed to him in every other way, and that what he held was only a formal document of what he already knew.

Very respectfully he refolded the pages and doubled them over and put them back in his pocket as though he wanted to save the letter, though why I didn’t know. The envelope had been cast aside.

He regarded me for a long time in silence, his face rather open and generous, which seemed a natural expression for it, and then he spoke: