And finally, in the great music halls, he heard applause for the songs he wrote on the spot, and his dizzying improvisations. He was back in the world again. He was loving it. Dressed like a dandy, he put pomade in his dark hair, clenched a small cheroot between his teeth, and lost himself in the ivory keys, intoxicated by the adulation all around him.

But other vampires crept into his bloody paradise—the first he’d seen since Lestat set sail from the New Orleans docks.

Powerful males, clad in brocade vests and fancy frock coats, obviously using their skills to cheat at cards and dazzle their victims, cast a cold eye on him and threatened him before fleeing themselves. In the dark streets of Chinatown he ran up against a Chinese blood drinker in a long dark coat and black hat who threatened him with a hatchet.

Though he longed desperately to know these vampire strangers—though he longed to trust them, talk with them, share the story of his journey with them—he left San Francisco in terror.

He left behind the pretty waiter girls and courtesans who’d sustained him with their sweet friendship and the easy pickings of the drunken men.

From city to city he’d moved, playing in the small raucous orchestras of theaters wherever he got work. It never lasted very long. He was a vampire after all; he merely looked human; and a vampire cannot pass indefinitely as human in the same close group of humans. They begin to stare, to ask questions, then to veer away, and finally there is some fatal aversion as if they’ve discovered a leper in their midst.

But his many mortal acquaintances continued to warm his soul. No vampire can live on blood and killing; all vampires need human warmth, or so he thought. He made deep friends now and then, those who allowed it and never questioned his eccentricities, his habits, his icy skin.

The old century died; the new century was born, and he shied away from the electric lights, keeping to the back alleys in blessed darkness. He was completely healed now; there was no sign of his old wounds at all, and indeed, it seemed he’d grown stronger over the years. Yet he felt ugly, loathsome, unfit to live, existing from moment to moment like an addict. He gravitated to the crippled, the diseased, the bohemian, and the downtrodden when he wanted an evening of conversation, just a little cerebral companionship. It kept him from weeping. It kept him from killing too brutally and indiscriminately.

He slept in graveyards when he could find a large and secret crypt, or in coffins in cellars, and now and then almost trapped by the sun he dug straight down into the moist Mother Earth, uttering a prayer that he would die there.

Fear and music and blood and pain. That was still his existence.