"No, next to him. Look, look more deeply into the blackness. See, the figure of a 
woman, so white, so hard, she might as well be a statue in this place?
  
  "Maharet!" I said.
  
  "I am here, Lestat," she said.
  
  I laughed.
  
  "And wasn't that the answer of Isaiah when the Lord called? 'I am here, Lord'?"
  
  "Yes," she said. Her voice was barely audible, but clear and cleaned by time, all the 
thickness of the flesh long gone from it.
  
  I drew closer, moving out of the chapel proper and into the little vestibule. David 
stood beside her, like her anointed Second in Command, as if he would have done her will 
in an instant, and she the eldest, well, almost the eldest, the Eve of Us, the Mother of 
Us All, or the only Mother who remained, and now as I looked at her, I remembered the 
awful truth again, about her eyes, that when she was human, they had blinded her, and the 
eyes through which she looked now were always borrowed, human.
  
  Bleeding in her head, human eyes, lifted from someone dead or alive, I couldn't know, 
and put into her sockets to thrive on her vampiric blood as long as they could. But how 
weary they seemed in her beautiful face. What had Jesse said? She is made of alabaster. 
And alabaster is a stone through which light can pass.
  
  "I won't take a human eye," I said under my breath.
  
  She said nothing. She had not come to judge, to recommend.
  
  Why had she come? What did she want?
  
  "You want to hear the tale too?"
  
  "Your gentle English friend says that it happened as you described it. He says the 
songs they sing on the televisions are true; that you are the Angel of the Night, and you 
brought her the Veil, and that he was there, and he heard you tell."
  
  "I am no angel! I never meant to give her the Veil! I took the Veil as proof. I took 
the Veil because...."
  
  My voice had broken.
  
  "Because why?" she asked.
  
  "Because Christ gave it to me!" I whispered. "He said, 'Take it,' and I did."
  
  I wept. And she waited. Patient, solemn. Louis waited. David waited.
  
  Finally I stopped.
  
  "Write down every word, David, if you write it, every ambiguous word, you hear me? I 
won't write it myself. I won't. Well, maybe ...  if I don't think you're getting it 
exactly right, I'll write it, I'll write it one time through. What do you want? Why have 
you come? No, I won't write it. Why are you here, Maharet, why have you shown yourself to 
me? Why have you come to the Beast's new castle, for what? Answer me."
  
  She said nothing. Her long, pale-red hair went down to her waist.  She wore some simple 
fashion that could pass unnoticed in many lands, a long, loose coat, belted around her 
tiny waist, a skirt that covered the tops of her small boots. The blood scent of the 
human eyes in her head was strong. And blazing in her head, these dead eyes looked 
ghastly to me, unsupportable.
  
  "I won't take a human eye!" I said. But I had said that before. Was I being arrogant or 
insolent? She was so powerful. "I won't take a human life," I said. That had been what I 
meant. "I will never, never, never as long as I live and endure and starve and suffer, 
take a human life, nor raise my hand against a fellow creature, be he human or one of us, 
I do not care, I won't ... I am ... I will ...with my last strength, I won't...."
  
  "I'm going to keep you here," she said. "As a prisoner. For a while. Until you're 
quieter."
  
  "You're mad. You're not keeping me anywhere."
  
  "I have chains waiting for you. David, Louis-you will help me."
  
  "What is this? You two, you dare? Chains, we are talking about chains? What am I, 
Azazel cast into the pit? Memnoch would get a good laugh at this, if he hadn't turned his 
back on me forever!"
  
  But none of them had moved. They stood motionless, her immense reservoir of power 
totally disguised by her slender white form.
  
  And they were suffering. Oh, I could smell the suffering.
  
  "I have this for you," she said. She extended her hand. "And when you read it you will 
scream and you will weep, and we'll keep you here, safe and quiet, until such time as you 
stop. That's all. Under my protection. In this place. You will be my prisoner."
  
  "What! What is it?" I demanded.
  
  It was a crumpled piece of parchment.
  
  "What the hell is this!" I said. "Who gave you this?" I didn't want to touch it.
  
  She took my left hand with her absolutely irresistible strength, forcing me to drop the 
books in their sacks, and she placed the little crumpled bundle of parchment in my palm.
  
  "It was given to me for you," she said.