She looked down. The rolling smoking darkness was evaporating and disappearing. The dark river of blood was gone. The world sparkled beneath the mist with thousands and thousands of tiny lights, and above them was the firmament—all around them was the firmament and the galaxies of song and story and the music, the music of the spheres.

“My beloved Rose, you are with us now,” said Uncle Lestan. With her now, with us, said the other voice, the echoing voice.

The words flowed into her on the blood that throbbed in her arms and legs, burned in her skin. Marius whispered into her ear that she was theirs now, and Pandora’s lips touched her forehead, and Viktor, Viktor held her even as Uncle Lestan held her, My bride.

“You’ve always been mine,” Lestat said. “For this you were born. My brave Rose. And you are with us and one of us, and we are the people of the moon and the stars.”

Chapter 32

Louis

“Its Hour Come at Last”

TRINITY GATE WAS QUIET tonight, except for Sybelle and Antoine playing a duet in the drawing room and Benji upstairs talking confidentially to his best friend who just happened to be the whole world.

Rhoshamandes and Benedict had gone to the opera with Allesandra. Armand and Daniel Malloy were out hunting alone in the gentle warm rain.

Flavius, Avicus, Zenobia, and Davis had gone home to Geneva, along with an eager, desperate blood drinker named Killer who had shown up at the door, in Old West garb of dungarees and a shaggy-sleeved buckskin jacket begging to be allowed in. Friend of Davis, the beloved of Gregory. They’d welcomed him at once.

Jesse and David were in the Amazon at Maharet’s old sanctuary with Seth and Fareed.

Sevraine and her family had also gone home, and so had Notker and the musicians and singers from the Alps.

Marius remained, working in the Tudor library, on the rules he would present to Lestat in time. Everard de Landen remained with him, poring over an old book of Elizabethan poetry, interrupting Marius softly now and then to ask the meaning of a phrase or a word.

And Lestat was gone, gone with Gabrielle and with Rose and Viktor, and with Pandora and Arjun, and Bianca Solderini, and Flavius, and with Gregory and Chrysanthe—to his castle in the mountains of the Massif Central to prepare for the first great reception of the new court to which they would all come. How fine and perfect Viktor and Rose were. And how they loved each other still, and how they’d welcomed their new vision, their new powers, their new hopes. Ah, just brave fledglings.

Only a little rain fell on this garden bench behind the townhouse, tucked as it was beneath the largest of the oaks, the raindrops singing in the leaves overhead.