“You won’t be here forever,” he thought to himself quietly. “Someday when these night monsters are slumbering and helpless, you’ll get out of here and you’ll find the others. If you are alive, they must be alive.” He closed his eyes and he looked at their faces as he remembered them. For most of the twentieth century, Derek had been searching for them. It was his third “life” wandering the earth, looking for the slightest trace of them. But this was a time like no other time and Derek had entered the twenty-first century with even-greater hope of finding the others, only to be snared by this blood-drinking monster.

He was weeping again now. No good. He couldn’t hear what they were saying above.

He took a deep easy breath. And once again he listened.

“The Prince,” whom Rhoshamandes hated, was a young undeserving maverick blood drinker named Lestat. Lestat had done an “unspeakable” thing to Rhoshamandes, cutting off his left hand and then his arm. They had been reattached, these limbs, as with blood drinkers that was possible, but Rhoshamandes could never forgive the injury, nor “the pardon.” For in spite of the pardon, everywhere he went now he bore the mark of Cain.

Derek knew what that was, the mark of Cain. When he had come awake in this time, it had been a poor priest in Peru who had educated him and taught him the ways of the world—in a farming village not unlike the one Derek had abandoned thousands of years before for the frozen caves of the mountain peaks. Derek had learned the man’s religion inside and out, and read the biblical scriptures in Spanish many a time. Derek had not gone down into the cities of South America until the very middle of the century, and it had taken him decades to learn the great literature of the current period in Spanish, Portuguese, and in English. English had proved the most useful language as Derek traveled through North America and Europe.

Roland had brought books down into this prison—books that Derek had read over and over again. Die Bibel nach Martin Luther; the Encyclopaedia Britannica; a German-English copy of Faust by Goethe; the works of Shakespeare in many small ragged volumes, some in German, some in English, some in other tongues; novels by Tolstoy in Russian; a French novel entitled Madame Bovary; and English “spy” stories in modern times.

Books on opera. Roland loved opera. That’s why he had made this refuge for himself blocks from the opera house. Books of opera stories, yes, he heaped them on the floor for Derek. But the music of these operas was all but forgotten by Derek, who had heard and seen only a handful of vivid and beautiful performances before Roland had lured him into this trap. Opera for Derek had been a late discovery, and one of the most exciting discoveries he had ever made.