"To The Vampire Lestat," we all sang in the moonlight. It was to be the new name of the 
band, of the book I'd write. Tough Cookie threw her succulent little arms around me. We 
kissed tenderly amid the laughter and the reek of wine. Ah, the smell of innocent blood!
  
  AND WHEN THEY HAD GONE OFF IN THE VELVET-LINED MOTOR coach, I moved alone through the 
balmy night towards St. Charles Avenue, and thought about the danger facing them, my 
little mortal friends.
  
  It didn't come from me, of course. But when the long period of secrecy was ended, they 
would stand innocently and ignorantly in the international limelight with their sinister 
and reckless star. Well, I would surround them with bodyguards and hangers-on for every 
conceivable purpose. I would protect them from other immortals as best I could. And if 
the immortals were anything like they used to be in the old days, they'd never risk a 
vulgar struggle with a human force like that.
  
  AS I WALKED UP TO THE BUSY AVENUE, I COVERED MY EYES with mirrored sunglasses. I rode 
the rickety old St. Charles streetcar downtown.
  
  And through the early evening crowd I wandered into the elegant double-decker bookstore 
called de Ville Books, and there stared at the small paperback of Interview with the 
Vampire on the shelf.
  
  I wondered how many of our kind had "noticed" the book. Never mind for the moment the 
mortals who thought it was fiction. What about other vampires? Because if there is one 
law that all vampires hold sacred it is that you do not tell mortals about us.
  
  You never pass on our "secrets" to humans unless you mean to bequeath the Dark Gift of 
our powers to them. You never name other immortals. You never tell where their lairs 
might be.
  
  My beloved Louis, the narrator of Interview with the Vampire, had done all this. He had 
gone far beyond my secret little disclosure to my rock singers. He had told hundreds of 
thousands of readers. He had all but drawn them a map and placed an X on the very spot in 
New Orleans where I slumbered, though what he really knew about that, and what his 
intentions were, was not clear.
  
  Regardless, for what he'd done, others would surely hunt him down. And there are very 
simple ways to destroy vampires, especially now. If he was still in existence, he was an 
outcast and lived in a danger from our kind that no mortal could ever pose.
  
  All the more reason far me to bring the book and the band called The Vampire Lestat to 
fame as quickly as possible. I had to find Louis. I had to talk to him. In fact, after 
reading his account of things, I ached for him, ached for his romantic illusions, and 
even his dishonesty. I ached even for his gentlemanly malice and his physical presence, 
the deceptively soft sound of his voice.
  
  Of course I hated him for the lies he told about me. But the love was far greater than 
the hate. He had shared the dark and romantic years of the nineteenth century with me, he 
was my companion as no other immortal had ever been.
  
  And I ached to write my story for him, not an answer to his malice in Interview with 
the Vampire, but the tale of all the things I'd seen and learned before I came to him, 
the story I could not tell him before.
  
  Old rules didn't matter to me now, either.
  
  I wanted to break every one of them. And I wanted my band and my book to draw out not 
only Louis but all the other demons that I had ever known and loved. I wanted to find my 
lost ones, awaken those who slept as I had slept.
  
  Fledglings and ancient ones, beautiful and evil and mad and heartless -- they'd all 
come after me when they saw those video clips and heard those records, when they saw the 
book in the windows of the bookstores, and they'd know exactly where to find me. I'd be 
Lestat, the rock superstar. Just come to San Francisco for my first live performance. 
I'll be there.
  
  But there was another reason for the whole adventure -- a reason even more dangerous 
and delicious and mad.
  
  And I knew Louis would understand. It must have been behind his interview, his 
confessions. I wanted mortals to know about us. I wanted to proclaim it to the world the 
way I'd told it to Alex and Larry and Tough Cookie, and my sweet lawyer, Christine.
  
  And it didn't matter that they didn't believe it. It didn't matter that they thought it 
was art. The fact was that, after two centuries of concealment, I was visible to mortals! 
I spoke my name aloud. I told my nature. I was there!
  
  But again, I was going farther than Louis. His story, for all its peculiarities, had 
passed for fiction. In the mortal world, it was as safe as the tableaux of the old 
Theater of the Vampires in the Paris where the fiends had pretended to be actors 
pretending to be fiends on a remote and gas lighted stage.
  
  I'd step into the solar lights before the cameras, I'd reach out and touch with my icy 
fingers a thousand warm and grasping hands. I'd scare the hell out of them if it was 
possible, and charm them and lead them into the truth of it if I could.
  
  And suppose -- just suppose -- that when the corpses began to turn up in ever greater 
numbers, that when those closest to me began to hearken to their inevitable suspicions -- 
just suppose that the art ceased to be art and became real!
  
  I mean what if they really believed it, really understood that this world still 
harbored the Old World demon thing, the vampire -- oh, what a great and glorious war we 
might have then!
  
  We would be known, and we would be hunted, and we would be fought in this glittering 
urban wilderness as no mythic monster has ever been fought by man before.
  
  How could I not love it, the mere idea of it? How could it not be worth the greatest 
danger, the greatest and most ghastly defeat? Even at the moment of destruction, I would 
be alive as I have never been.