By mid-June, I was walking about Paris all the time and Louis invariably accompanied me. Soon we had our favorite streets, and our favorite bookshops, and our favorite cafés. We saw films together, and occasional plays. We haunted the Louvre and the Centre Georges Pompidou. But mostly we roamed.

So it was that on a particularly beautiful and warm Saturday night we found ourselves in Paris, talking softly about how miraculously changed our world was from the times in which vampires believed themselves to be sinister supernatural beings endowed with myriad mysterious characteristics by someone’s deliberate design.

Louis spoke of having recovered Paris from the pain of the loss of Claudia, and of loving the modern city more than he had ever thought he could.

Well before midnight, we came to the Quartier Latin and settled in a spacious outdoor café, one of our favorites, a tourist mecca now, but as genuine and vital a place as one could desire.

We took a table on the very outside of the flagstone sidewalk to sit and talk some more and watch the passersby. I was thirsting. And once again, I kept thinking of innocent blood.

But there is a lot to be said about spending most of the night thirsting, when one’s senses are sharpened by the thirst and colors are more vivid and sounds more piercing and sweet. So I ignored the thirst, and certainly I ignored the temptation to seek innocent blood.

We ordered enough of everything—wine, sandwiches, coffee, pastries—so that the waiter, to whom we slipped a large bill, would leave us alone for a long time.

Louis went off at one point to find a newspaper, and I was sitting there alone, hoping that no wandering members of the Undead would recognize me or seize on this moment to “talk.”

The world seemed splendid and I was as in love with Paris as I’d ever been.

But I soon realized that someone was watching me. A still figure at the next table, practically opposite me, had fixed its gaze on me with a little too much concentration to be welcome. I didn’t look at the figure. I scanned the crowds for images of him in the eyes of others and when I realized what I was seeing, I turned and confronted him at once.

He was a young male, perhaps in his twenties, and he had handsomely suntanned skin and long deep-red hair to his shoulders and bright green eyes. When he smiled at me, my heart stopped.

He got up from the table and came over to me. He looked fine in his jeans and blue-and-white seersucker jacket and stiff white shirt open at the neck. He sat down opposite and leaned in close, forearms on the table, long slender fingers reaching out and covering my right hand.

“Lestat,” he whispered.