A shadow fell over his expression, but then he smiled again and he took her hand. “If Lestat can make it right, well, then, it will be made right,” he said. “For both of you. But there are other things happening just now, other things and no one is going to bring you into our world until those challenges have been met.”

“I know,” she said. “I know.”

She wanted to say more, that it was so kind of Louis to stay with them, to wait with them, when obviously it must have been difficult to leave the ever-growing crowds at Trinity Gate, but she’d said this over and over. And she knew that her thanks to anyone and everyone were becoming a kind of burden, and she left it where it was.

She got up and went to the great wall of glass to look out at the city, to let her eyes move through this glamorous wildwood in which life itself was teeming everywhere around her as surely as it did in faraway streets below, and only yards away it seemed there were darkened windows revealing smoky and ghostly offices and crowded bedrooms and living rooms, and rooftops lying before her with gleaming blue swimming pools and some with green gardens, perfect gardens like toy gardens, with toylike trees she felt she could reach out and pick up with her fingers, and all this stretching on towards the great distant shadow of Central Park.

I want to remember these nights always, she thought. I want to fix them forever in my memory. I want to lose nothing. When it’s done, when it’s decided and it’s over, I will write a memoir seeking to capture everything forever. When it’s happening it is too beautiful, too overwhelming, and you can feel it’s being lost with every breath you take.

Quite suddenly a deep dark mass appeared above her, something like a cloud forming and descending right before her eyes. In a split second it thickened and rose up in front of her virtually blinding her as she fell back away from the transparent wall.

A great boom sounded, a great terrible crashing roar and a clatter, and she felt herself falling and all around her came down a rain of broken glittering glass. Her head hit the hardwood floor. There were deafening noises, furniture being smashed, pictures and mirrors falling, and the loud cold wind was rushing through the room. Doors slammed. More glass was breaking. She rolled over on her side, her hair whipped against her face by the wind, her hands grasping for something, anything firm, to steady her when she saw the treacherous glass splinters all around her, and she began to scream.