“Lestat and Gabrielle,” she said as she drew near, her hands extended to include both of us. “I’m Bianca, Marius’s Bianca, from Venice.”

“Of course, I should have known you immediately,” I said. She felt soft and tender to me, remarkably so, in fact, considering she had five hundred years in the Blood and plenty of the blood of the Mother. All those years with Marius during which he protected the shrine of Those Who Must Be Kept, she’d drunk that precious blood. And she’d been made by Marius, and all those made by Marius had been well made, much better made than my fledglings.

I hadn’t known to take and give the Blood over and over as Marius had always done.

Bianca wore a simple black robe trimmed in gold, and her long hair was braided with what seemed a leafy vine of gold. And a delicate gold circlet around her head made me think of the painting the mortal painter Botticelli had done of her.

“You come with me, please, both of you,” she said.

We followed her down another corridor of splendid gold enameling, bordered in delicately wrought flowering trees with blossoms like jewels, and into another large and splendid chamber.

Behind a long heavy wooden table with carved legs sat Sevraine, who rose now to greet us. It had to be Sevraine. Indeed it was the same powerful and ancient immortal I’d seen rising out of the tunnel in Paris.

She was a strongly built figure with fine high breasts in what seemed a Roman gown of sheer rose fabric crisscrossed with gold ribbons and bound around the waist. With a mane of flowing light blond hair she looked Nordic, and her pale-blue eyes underscored the impression. She was big boned but beautifully shaped all over, down to her tapering fingers, and her lush naked arms.

But before I could fully absorb this miracle, this vision, this creature who was reaching across the table now and inviting us to sit down, I was distracted by two figures who flanked her—one a female blood drinker I knew but couldn’t place, a woman taken in her prime with remarkably long dark-ashen hair, hair that was almost a luminous gray, and clever vibrant eyes. And the other a spirit.

I knew at once it was a spirit, but it was not like any other spirit I’d seen up close before. It was a spirit clothing himself in actual physical particles, a body of particles that it had made up somehow and drawn to itself, out of dust, air, free-floating bits of matter, and it was so solidly put together, the physical vehicle of this spirit, that it was wearing actual clothes.