I caught my breath. My heart was hurting me, it was beating so fast, no mean feat for a vampiric heart. I rested back against the wall, let my eyes range over the bar—

middle-aged mortals mostly, ladies in old-style fur coats, balding men just drunk enough to be loud and careless and almost young.

The pianist had moved on into something popular, from the Broadway stage, I think.

It was sad and sweet, and one of the old women in the bar was rocking slowly to the music, and mouthing the words with her rouged lips as she puffed on a cigarette. She was from that generation that had smoked so much that stopping now was out of the question. She had skin like a lizard. But she was a harmless and beautiful being. All of them were harmless and beautiful beings.

My victim? I could hear him upstairs. He was still talking with his daughter. Would she not take just one more of his gifts? It was a picture, a painting perhaps.

He would move mountains for his daughter, this victim, but she didn't want his gift, and she wasn't going to save his soul.

I found myself wondering how late St. Patrick's stayed open. She wanted so badly to go there. She was, as always, refusing his money. It's "unclean," she said to him now.

"Roge, I want your soul. I can't take the money for the church! It comes from crime.

It's filthy."

The snow fell outside. The piano music grew more rapid and urgent.

Andrew Lloyd Webber at his best, I thought. Something from Phantom of the Opera.

There was that noise again out in the lobby, and I turned abruptly in my chair and looked over my shoulder, and then back at David. I listened. I thought I heard it again, like a footstep, an echoing footstep, a deliberately terrifying footstep. I did hear it. I knew I was trembling. But then it was gone, over. There came no voice in my ear.

I looked at David.

"Lestat, you're petrified, aren't you?" he asked, very sympathetically.

"David, I think the Devil's come for me. I think I'm going to Hell."

He was speechless/After all, what could he say? What does a vampire say to another vampire on such subjects? What would I have said if Armand, three hundred years older than me, and far more wicked, had said the Devil was coming for him? I would have laughed at him. I would have made some cruel joke about his fully deserving it and how he'd meet so many of our kind down there, subject to a special sort of vampiric torment, far worse than mere damned mortals ever experienced. I shuddered.

"Good God," I said under my breath.

"You said you've seen it?"

"Not quite. I was ... somewhere, it's not important. I think New York again, yes, back here with him—"

"The victim."

"Yes, following him. He had some transaction at an art gallery. Midtown. He's quite a smuggler. It's all part of his peculiar personality, that he loves beautiful and ancient objects, the sort of tilling you love, David. I mean, when I finally do make a meal of him, I might bring you one of his treasures."