Thief. And I don't think you know quite how you alarmed them, and how much they love you."
  
  This was a kindly reference to the last adventure which had brought us together, and 
driven me to make him one of us. At the time, he had not sung my praises to Heaven for 
any part of it.
  
  "They love me, do they?" I said of the others, the remnants of our revenant species 
around the world. "I know they didn't try to help me." I thought of the defeated Body 
Thief.
  
  Without David's help, I might never have won that battle. I could not think of 
something that terrible. But I certainly didn't want to think of all my brilliant and 
gifted vampiric cohorts and how they'd watched from afar and done nothing.
  
  The Body Thief himself was in Hell. And the body in question was opposite me with David 
inside it.
  
  "All right, I'm glad to hear I had them a little worried," I said.  "But the point is, 
I'm being followed again, and this time it's no scheming mortal who knows the trick of 
astral projection and how to take possession of someone else's body. I'm being stalked."
  
  He studied me, not so much incredulous as striving perhaps to grasp the implications.
  
  "Being stalked," he repeated thoughtfully.
  
  "Absolutely." I nodded. "David, I'm frightened. I'm actually frightened. If I told you 
what I think this thing is, this thing that's stalking me, you'd laugh."
  
  "Would I?"
  
  The waiter had set down the hot drinks, and the steam did feel glorious. The piano 
played Satie ever so softly. Life was almost worth living, even for a son of a bitch of a 
monster like myself. Something crossed my mind.
  
  In this very bar, I'd heard my victim say to his daughter two nights ago, "You know I 
sold my soul for places just like this."
  
  I'd been yards away, quite beyond mortal hearing, yet hearing every word that fell from 
my Victim's lips, and I was enthralled with the daughter. Dora, that was her name. Dora. 
She was the one thing this strange and succulently alluring Victim truly loved, his only 
child, his daughter.
  
  I realized David was watching me.
  
  "Just thinking about the victim who brought me here," I said.  "And his daughter. 
They're not going out tonight. The snow's too deep and the wind too cruel. He'll take her 
back up to their suite, and she'll look down on the towers of St. Patrick's. I want to 
keep my victim in my sights, you know."
  
  "Good heavens, have you fallen in love with a couple of mortals?"
  
  "No. Not at all. Just a new way of hunting. The man's unique, a blaze of individual 
traits. I adore him. I was going to feed on him the first time I saw him, but he 
continues to surprise me. I've been following him around for half a year."
  
  I flashed back on them. Yes, they were going upstairs, just as I thought. They had just 
left their table in the restaurant. The night was too wretched even for Dora, though she 
wanted to go to the church and to pray for her father, and beg him to stay there and pray 
too. Some memory played between them, in their thoughts and fragmentary words. Dora had 
been a little girl when my Victim had first brought her to that cathedral.
  
  He didn't believe in anything. She was some sort of religious leader. Theodora. She 
preached to television audiences on the seriousness of values and nourishment of the 
soul. And her father? Ah, well, I'd kill him before I learnt too much more, or end up 
losing this big trophy buck just for Dora's sake.
  
  I looked back at David, who was watching me eagerly, shoulder resting against the dark 
satin-covered wall. In this light, no one could have known he wasn't human. Even one of 
us might have missed it.  As for me, I probably looked like a mad rock star who wanted 
all the world's attention to crush him slowly to death.
  
  "The victim's got nothing to do with it," I said. "I'll tell you all that another time. 
It's just we're in this hotel because I followed him here. You know my games, my hunts. I 
don't need blood any more than Maharet does, but I can't stand the thought of not having 
it!"
  
  "And so what is this new sort of game?" he said politely in British.
  
  "I don't look so much for simple, evil people, murderers, you know so much as a more 
sophisticated kind of criminal, someone with the mentality of an Iago. This one's a drag 
dealer. Highly eccentric. Brilliant. An art collector. He loves to have people shot, 
loves to make billions in a week off cocaine through one gateway and heroin through 
another. And then he loves his daughter. And she, she has a televangelist church."
  
  "You're really enthralled with these mortals."
  
  "Look right now, past me, over my shoulder. See the two people in the lobby moving 
towards the elevators?" I asked.
  
  "Yes." He stared at them fixedly. Perhaps they'd paused in just the right spot. I could 
feel, hear, and smell both of them, but I couldn't know precisely where they were unless 
I turned around. But they were there, the dark smiling man with his pale-faced eager and 
innocent little girl, who was a woman-child of twenty-five if I had reckoned correctly.
  
  "I know that man's face," said David. "He's big time. International. They keep trying 
to bring him up on some charges. He pulled off an extraordinary assassination, where was 
it?" "The Bahamas."
  
  "My God, how did you happen on him? Did you really see him in person somewhere, you 
know, like a shell you found on the beach, or did you see him in the papers and the