The Great War began. The world as he’d known it was coming to an end.

He couldn’t clearly remember coming to Boston, only that it had been a long journey and he’d forgotten why he had ever chosen that city. And there for the first time, he’d gone underground for the long sleep. Surely he would die in the earth, buried as he was, week after week, month after month with only the memory of blood bringing him back now and then to uneasy consciousness. Surely this would be the finish. And the inevitable and total darkness would swallow mercilessly any question or passion that had ever obsessed him.

Well, he didn’t die, obviously.

Half a century passed before he rose again, hungry, emaciated, desperate, but surprisingly strong. And it was music that brought him forth, but not the music he had so loved.

It was the music of the Vampire Lestat—his old maker—now a rock-star sensation, with music carried on airwaves, blasted from television screens, music seeping from tiny transmitters no bigger than a pack of playing cards to which people listened through plugs in their ears.

Oh, what sweet glory to see Lestat so splendidly restored! How his heart ached to reach him.

The Undead were everywhere now on the new continent. Maybe they had always been here, spreading, breeding, creating fledglings as he’d been created. He couldn’t guess. He only knew his powers were greater now; he could read the minds of mortals, hear their thoughts when he didn’t want to hear them, and he could hear that relentless music, and those strange eerie stories that Lestat told in his little video films.

We had come from ancient parents out of darkest Egypt: Akasha and Enkil. Kill the Mother and the Father and we all die, or so the songs said. What did the Vampire Lestat want with this mortal persona: rock star, outcast, monster, gathering mortals to a concert in San Francisco, gathering the Undead?

Antoine would have gone out west to see Lestat on the stage. But he was still struggling with the simplest difficulties of life in the late twentieth century when the massacres began.

All over the world, it seemed, the Undead were being slaughtered, as coven houses and vampire taverns were burnt to cinders. Fledglings and old ones were immolated as they fled.

All this Antoine learned from the telepathic cries of brothers and sisters whom he’d never known in places he’d never been.

“Flee, go to the Vampire Lestat, he will save us!”

Antoine could not fathom it. He played for coins in the subways of New York, and once set upon by a gang of mortal cutthroats for his earnings, he slew them all and fled the city making his way south.