The cold had begun to annoy me. To be almost humanly painful.

I wanted to go inside.

Chapter Three

I walked on only a few steps, saw revolving doors, pushed into the lobby of someplace or other, a restaurant I think, and found myself sitting at the bar. Just what I wanted, half empty, very dark, too warm, bottles glittering in the center of the circular counter. Some comforting noise from the diners beyond the open doors.

I put my elbows on the bar, my heels hooked on the brass rail. I sat there on die stool shivering, listening to mortals talk, listening to nothing, listening to the inevitable sloth and stupidity of a bar, head down, sunglasses gone—damn, I had lost my violet glasses!—yes, nice and dark here, very, very dark, a kind of late-night languor lying over everything, a club of some sort? I didn't know, didn't care. "Drink, sir?" Lazy, arrogant face.

I named a mineral water. And as soon as he set down the glass, I dipped my fingers into it and washed them. He was gone already. Wouldn't have cared if I had started baptizing babies with the water. Other customers were scattered at tables in the darkness ... a woman crying in some far-off corner and a man telling her harshly that she was attracting attention. She wasn't. Nobody gave a damn. I washed my mouth off with the napkin and water.

"More water," I said. I pushed the polluted glass away from me.

Sluggishly, he acknowledged my request, young blood, bland personality, ambitionless life, then drifted off.

I heard a little laugh nearby ...the man to my right, two stools away, perhaps, who'd been there when I came in, youngish, scentless. Utterly scentless, which was most strange.

In annoyance I turned and looked at him.

"Going to run again?" he whispered. It was the Victim.

It was Roger, sitting there on the stool.

He wasn't broken or battered or dead. He was complete with his head and his hands.

He wasn't there. He only appeared to be there, very solid and very quiet, and he smiled at me, thrilled by my terror. "What's the matter, Lestat?" he asked in that voice I so loved after six months of listening to it. "No one in all these centuries has ever come back to haunt you?"

I said nothing. Not there. No, not there. Material, but not the same material as anything else. David's word. Different fabric. I stiffened. That's a pathetic understatement. I was rigid with incredulity and rage.

He got up and moved over onto the stool close to me. He was getting more distinct and detailed by the second. Now I could catch something like a sound coming from him, a sound of something alive, or organized, but certainly no breathing human being.

"And in a few minutes more I'll be strong enough perhaps to ask for a cigarette or a glass of wine," he said.

He reached into his coat, a favorite coat, not the one in which I'd killed him, another coat made for him in Paris, that he liked, and he drew out his flashy little gold lighter and made the flame shoot up, very blue and dangerous, butane.