For thirty mortal years, he’d lived like a monster, hideous, scarred, preying on the weakest of mortals, hunting in the crowded Irish immigrant slums for his meals. He could make his music without ever touching the keys of a piano. He heard the music in his head, heard it surge and climb as he moved his fingers in the air. The mingled noises of the rat-infested slums, the roaring laughter from a stevedore’s tavern, became a new music to him, caught in the low rumble of voices to the right and to the left, or the cries of his victims. Blood. Give me blood. Music I will possess forever.

Lestat had gone to Europe, chasing after them, those two, Claudia and Louis, who had been his family, his friends, his lovers.

But he had been terrified to attempt such a journey. And he had left Lestat at the docks. “Goodbye to you, Antoine.” Lestat had kissed him. “Maybe you will have a life here in the New World, the life I wanted.” Gold and gold and gold. “Keep the rooms, keep the things I’ve given you.”

But he hadn’t been clever like Lestat. He’d had no skill for living like a mortal among mortals. Not with these songs in his head, these symphonies, and the blood ever beckoning. His own legacy he’d squandered, and Lestat’s gold was gone too at last, though where or how he could never remember. He had left New Orleans, journeying north, sleeping in the cemeteries as he made his way.

In St. Louis he’d begun to actually play again. It was the strangest thing. Most of his scars were gone by then. He no longer looked infected and contagious with some disfiguring disease.

It was as if he’d waked from a dream, and for years the violin was his instrument, and he even played for money at mortal gatherings, and managed to become a gentleman again, with clean linen and a small apartment with paintings, a brass clock, and a wooden closet of fine clothes. But all that had come to nothing. He felt loneliness, despair. The world seemed empty of monsters like himself.

He’d wandered out west, why he didn’t know. By the 1880s, he’d been playing the piano in the Barbary Coast vice dens of San Francisco and hunting the seamen for blood. He worked his way up from the sailors’ saloons to the fancy melodeons and the French and Chinese parlor houses, glutting himself on the riffraff in dark streets where murder was rampant.

Gradually he came to realize the quality parlor houses loved him, even the finest of them, and he was soon surrounded by admiring ladies of the evening, who were a comfort to him, and therefore immune from his murderous thirst.

In the Chinatown brothels, he fell in love with the sweet tender exotic slave girls who delighted in his music.