“Know this,” he said taking my hands in his hands. “I will love you forever! Were it not for you, I would never have survived.”

“Nonsense, you would have gone into one of the others sooner or later.”

“No,” he said. “Wasn’t working. It was your courage the first time and the last time. It was always your courage, and your patience and your insistence that solutions could be found, that great conflicting forces could somehow be reconciled.”

“You’re giving me way too much credit,” I said. “But we have a destiny, you and I!” I started to weep again. I wiped angrily at my eyes and put the violet sunglasses back on. “I can’t think of anything else right now but you and what you’re experiencing, what the future holds for you.”

He sat silent, gazing at me.

“Give my love to them, even the ones that hate me,” he said. “What did you do to Rhoshamandes for what he did in helping Kapetria?”

“What do you think?” I said. “I did nothing, of course.”

He laughed softly under his breath. He shook his head. “Lestat, you know,” he said, “that Rhoshamandes is a danger to you.”

“So everyone says,” I replied, “but I’ve lived with danger for so long. I don’t want to talk about him now. I don’t want to waste a moment here even thinking about him.”

A silence fell between us, and then I said,

“You know the kind of power you have.” I spoke hesitantly. “You know what you and the other Replimoids could do to this world.” I gestured to the street, to the buildings, to the people, with my right hand. “You know what you could do for the earthbound dead and the spirits—.”

“We are the People of the Purpose!” he said. “You must remember this always. And the purpose is never to harm life in any way. Now there is not a creature on this planet who ever really lives such a purpose, no, we know that. But we will try! We will try as surely as any colony of people dedicated to the support of life has ever tried.”

It must have been a full hour that we talked.