The elevator door had opened. My Victim and his daughter were rising floor after floor into the sky.

"He slips in and out of here when he wants. He's got bodyguards galore. She meets him on her own. I think they set it up by cellular phone. He's a computer cocaine giant, and she's one of his best-protected secret operations. His men are all over the lobby. If there'd been anyone nosing around, she would have left the restaurant alone first. But he's a wizard at things like that. There'll be warrants out for him in five states and he'll show up ringside for a heavyweight match in Atlantic City, right in front of the cameras. They'll never catch him. I'll catch him, the vampire who's just waiting to kill him. And isn't he beautiful?"

"Now, let me get this clear," David said. "You're being stalked by something, and it's got nothing to do with this victim, this, er, drug dealer, or whatever, or this televangelist girl. But something is following you, something frightening you, but not enough to make you Stop tracking this dark-skinned man who just got into the elevator?"

I nodded, but then I caught myself in a little doubt. No, there Couldn't be any connection.

Besides, this thing that had me rattled to the bone had started before I saw the Victim.

It had "happened" first in Rio, the stalker, not long after I'd left Louis and David and gone back to Rio to hunt.

I hadn't picked up this Victim until he'd walked across my path in own city of New Orleans. He'd come down there on a whim to Dora for twenty minutes; they'd met in a little French Quarter and I had been walking past and seen him, sparkling like a fire, her white face and large compassionate eyes, and wham! It was hunger.

"No, it's got nothing to do with him," I said. "What's stalking me started months before. He doesn't know I'm following him. I didn't catch on right away myself that I was being followed by this thing, this.. . ."

"This what?"

"Watching him and his daughter, it's like my miniseries, you know. He's so intricately evil."

"So you said, and what is stalking you? Is this a thing or a person or ...?"

"I'll get to that. This Victim, he has killed so many people. Drugs. Such people wallow in numbers. Kilos, kills, coded accounts. And the girl, the girl of course turned out not to be some dim-witted little miracle worker telling diabetics she can cure them with the laying on of hands."

"Lestat, your mind's wandering. What's the matter with you? Why are you afraid?

And why don't you kill this victim and get that part over?"

"You want to go back to Jesse and Maharet, don't you?" I asked suddenly, a feeling of hopelessness descending on me. "You want to study for the next hundred years, among all those tablets and scrolls, and look into Maharet's aching blue eyes, and hear her voice, I know you do. Does she still always choose blue eyes?"