“You were like a Cassandra in that doomed old coven,” I said. My words came in a rush. “Oh, you don’t know the sadness I felt when they told me you were dead. They said you’d gone into the flames. I tell you it was anguish I felt! I had so wanted to take you out of those catacombs and into the light. I had so wanted—.”

“Yes, young one. I remember. I remember all.” She sighed and lifted my fingers to her lips, kissing them as she went on. “If I was Cassandra in those nights, I was unheeded and unloved even by myself.”

“Oh, but I loved you!” I confessed. “And why did they say you’d gone into the fire?”

“Because I did, Lestat,” she said. “But the fire would not have me, did not kill me, and I tumbled down, and down amid smoking timbers and old bones as I wept, too weak to rise, and was finally entombed with the remains of the cemetery beneath Paris. I didn’t know my own age then, beloved. I didn’t know my gifts or my strength. It was the way then of the very ancient, to pass in and out of history, and in and out of lunacy, and I think there are others still in those tunnels beneath the city. Ah, what an agony that slumber amid whispers and howls. Your voice was the only voice that ever actually pierced my uneasy dreams.”

How lovely she was, the flower of the twisted old stem she’d been then.

I muttered something about how I’d longed even back then to see what she could have been. I stopped myself. It was so presumptuous and selfish. She was restored after all. She was here, vital, vibrant, part of this new and astonishing age. But she didn’t correct me. She didn’t shrink from me. She only smiled.

Sevraine was pleased with all this. And this woman who hardly seemed old at all now, nothing like the wretched hag she’d been in those eighteenth-century nights, was flushed with pleasure.

Finally I put my knee on the table and leaned forward and clasped Allesandra’s face in my hands and kissed her.

In those earlier times, she’d been doomed, a dead thing in medieval garb, even to a filthy and ragged veil and wimple. Now her healthy silvery ashen hair was free and came down in dark waves over her shoulders. The robe she wore was fresh and soft like that of Sevraine, only it was a pale green, a green like the grass of the world of the day, that bright and beautiful. Around her neck was a single bright ruby on a chain. Allesandra, daughter of Dagobert. Her lips were dark and red like that ruby.