Maharet had been blind eyes torn out when she was made a vampire queen. She took eyes from her victims and wore them -until they could see no more, no matter how the vampiric blood tried to preserve them. That was her shocking feature the marble queen with the bleeding eyes. Why had she never wrung the neck of some vampire fledgling and stolen his or her eyes? It had never occurred to me before. Loyalty to our own kind? Maybe it wouldn't work. But she had her scruples, and they were as hard as she was. A woman that old remembers when there was no Moses and no Hammurabi's Code. When only the Pharaoh got to walk through the Valley of Death.... "Lestat," David said. "Pay attention. You must tell me what you are talking about. I've never heard you admit so readily that you were afraid. You did say afraid.

Forget about me for the moment. Forget that victim and the girl. What's up, my friend? Who's after you?" "I want to ask you some more questions first."

"No. Just tell me what's happened. You're in danger, aren't you? Or you think you are. You sent out the call for me to come to you here. It was an unabashed plea."

"Are those the words Armand used, 'unabashed plea'? I hate Armand."

David only smiled and made a quick impatient gesture with both hands. "You don't hate Armand and you know you don't." "Wanna bet?"

He looked at me sternly and reprimandingly. English schoolboy stuff probably.

"All right," I said. "I'll tell you. Now, first, I have to remind you of something. A conversation we had. It was when you were alive still, when we last talked together in your place in the Cotswolds, you know, when you were just a charming old gentleman, dying in despair—"

"I remember," he said patiently. "Before you went into the desert."

"No, right after, when we knew I couldn't die as easily I thought I could, when I'd come back burnt. You cared for me. Then you started talking about yourself, your life.

You said something about an experience you'd had before the war, you said, in a Paris cafe. You remember? You know what I'm talking about?"

"Yes. I do. I told you that when I was a young man I thought I'd seen a vision."

"Yes, something about the fabric of life ripping for a moment so you glimpsed things you shouldn't have seen."

He smiled. "You're the one who suggested that, that the fabric had ripped somehow and I'd seen through the rip accidentally. I thought then and I still think now that it was a vision I was meant to see. But fifty years have passed since then. And my memory, my memory is surprisingly dim of the whole affair."

"Well, that's to be expected. As a vampire, you will remember everything that happens to you from now on vividly, but the details of mortal life will slip rather fast, especially anything that had to do with the senses, you'll find yourself chasing after it what did wine taste like?"