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"COME ON, LET ME HEAR YOU! YOU LOVE ME!" I shouted suddenly, without deciding to do it. Everywhere people were stomping. They were stomping not only on the concrete floors but on the wooden seats.

"HOW MANY OF YOU WOULD BE VAMPIRES?"

The roar became a thunder. Several people were trying to scramble up onto the front of the stage, the bodyguards pulling them off. One of the big dark shaggy-haired bikers was jumping straight up and down, a beer can in each hand.

The lights went brighter like the glare of an explosion. And there rose fro

m the speakers and equipment behind me the fullthroated engine of a locomotive at stultifying volume as if the train were racing onto the stage.

Every other sound in the auditorium was swallowed by it. In blaring silence the crowd danced and bobbed before me. Then came the piercing, twanging fury of the electrical guitar. The drums boomed into a marching cadence, and the grinding locomotive sound of the synthesizer crested, then broke into a bubbling caldron of noise in time with the march. It was time to begin the chant in the minor key, its puerile lyrics leaping over the accompaniment:

I AM THE VAMPIRE LESTAT YOU ARE HERE FOR THE GRAND SABBAT BUT I PITY YOU YOUR LOT

I grabbed the microphone from the stand and ran to one side of the stage and then to the other, the cape flaring out behind me:

YOU CAN'T RESIST THE LORDS OF NIGHT THEY HAVE NO MERCY ON YOUR PLIGHT IN YOUR FEAR THEY TAKE DELIGHT

They were reaching out for my ankles, throwing kisses, girls lifted by their male companions to touch my cape as it swirled over their heads.

YET IN LOVE, WE WILL TAKE YOU,

AND IN RAPTURE, WE'LL BREAK YOU AND IN DEATH WE'LL RELEASE YOU

NO ONE CAN SAY

YOU WERE NOT WARNED.

Tough Cookie, strumming furiously, danced up beside me, gyrating wildly, the music peaking in a shrill glissando, drums and cymbals crashing, the bubbling caldron of the synthesizer rising again.

I felt the music come up into my bones. Not even at the old Roman Sabbat had it taken hold of me like this.

I pitched myself into the dance, swinging my hips elastically, then pumping them as the two of us moved towards the edge of the stage. We were performing the free and erotic contortions of Punchinello and Harlequin and all the old commedia players improvising now as they had done, the instruments cutting loose from the thin melody, then finding it again, as we urged each other on with our dancing, nothing rehearsed, everything within character, everything utterly new.

The guards shoved people back roughly as they tried to join us. Yet we danced over the edge of the platform as if taunting them, whipping our hair around our faces, turning round to see ourselves above in an impossible hallucination on the giant screens. The sound traveled up through my body as I turned back to the crowd. It traveled like a steel ball finding one pocket after another in my hips, my shoulders, until I knew I was rising off the floor in a great slow leap, and then descending silently again, the black cape flaring, my mouth open to reveal the fang teeth.

Euphoria. Deafening applause.

And everywhere I saw pale mortal throats bared, boys and girls shoving their collars down and stretching their necks. And they were gesturing to me to come and take them, inviting me and begging me, and some of the girls were crying.

The blood scent was thick as the smoke in the air. Flesh and flesh and flesh. And yet everywhere the canny innocence, the unfathomable trust that it was art, nothing but art! No one would be hurt. It was safe, this splendid hysteria.

When I screamed, they thought it was the sound system. When I leapt, they thought it was a trick. And why not, when magic was blaring at them from all sides and they could forsake our flesh and blood for the great glowing giants on the screens above us?

Marius, I wish you could behold this! Gabrielle, where are you?

The lyrics poured out, sung by the whole band again in unison, Tough Cookie's lovely soprano soaring over the others, before she wrung her head round and round in a circle, her hair flopping down to touch the boards in front of her feet, her guitar jerking lasciviously like a giant phallus, thousands and thousands stamping and clapping in unison.

"I AM TELLING YOU I AM A VAMPIRE!" I screamed suddenly.

Ecstasy, delirium.

"I AM EVIL! EVIL!"

"Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, YES, YES, YES. "

I threw out my arms, my hands curved upwards:

"I WANT TO DRINK UP YOUR SOULS!"