“Lestat, I helped you against Raglan! I helped you recover this body, and what was your pledge to me of loyalty! What were your words?”

“I lied to you, David. I lie to myself and to others. That’s what my little excursion in the flesh taught me. I lie. You surprise me, David. You’re angry, so very angry, but you’re not afraid. You’re like me, David—you and Claudia—the only ones who really have my strength.”

“Claudia,” he said, with a little nod. “Ah, yes, Claudia. I have something for you, my dear friend.” He moved away, deliberately turning his back on me, letting me see the fearlessness of this gesture, and he went slowly, refusing to hurry, to the chest beside the bed. When he turned around again he had a small locket in his hands. “From the Motherhouse. The locket you described to me.”

“Oh, yes, the locket. Give it to me.”

Only now did I see how his hands shook as he struggled with the little oval gold case. And the fingers, he did not know them so very well, did he? At last he had it opened and he thrust it at me, and I looked down at the painted miniature—her face, her eyes, her golden curls. A child staring back at me out of the mask of innocence. Or was this a mask?

And slowly, out of the vast dim vortex of memory, came the moment when I had first laid eyes upon that trinket and upon its golden chain … when in the dark muddy street, I had happened upon the plague-ridden hovel where her mother lay dead, and the mortal child herself had become food for the vampire, a tiny white body shivering helplessly in Louis’s arms.

How I’d laughed at him, how I’d pointed my finger, and then snatched up from the stinking bed the body of the dead woman—Claudia’s mother—and danced with it round and round the room. And there gleaming on her throat had been the golden chain and the locket, for not even the boldest thief would have entered that hovel to steal the bauble from the very maw of the plague.

With my left hand I’d caught it, just as I let the poor body drop. The clasp had broken, and I’d swung the chain over my head as if waving a little trophy of the moment and then dropped it in my pocket as I stepped over the body of the dying Claudia and ran after Louis through the street.

It had been months after that I’d found it in that same pocket, and I’d held it to the light. The living child she’d been when that portrait was painted, but the Dark Blood had given her the very saccharine perfection of the artist. It was my Claudia, and in a trunk I’d left it, and how it came to be with the Talamasca, or anywhere, I did not know.

I held it in my hands. I looked up. It was as though I’d just been there, back in that ruined place, and now I was here, and staring at him. He’d been speaking to me but I hadn’t heard him, and now his voice came clear: