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Never, under any circu" of one of these vampire individuals The parameters of va was certain: the beings could read s And there was considerable evidence that they were exceptionally strong Most certainly they could kill

Also some of them, without doubt, knew of the existence of the Talamasca Over the centuries, severalthis type of investigation

Jesse was to read the daily papers scrupulously The Talamasca had reason to believe that there were no va there But at any tiht appear If Jesse caet out of the city and not return

Jesse thought al! this was hilarious Even a handful of old itehten her After all, these people could have been the victims of a satanic cult And they were all too hunment On the way to the airport, David had asked her why "If you really can't accept what I' you,

then why do you want to investigate the book?"

She'd taken her ti obscene about this novel It s seehtet out of it Then all of a sudden you're coedy of Claudia isn't really a deterrent " "And?"

"I want to prove it's fiction," Jesse said That was good enough for the Talaator

But on the long flight to New York, Jesse had realized there was so she couldn't tell David She had only just faced it herself Intervieith the Vao suain she stopped her reading to think about that su back to her She was even dreaain Quite beside the point, she told herself Yet there was so to do with the atmosphere of the book, the mood, even the attitudes of the characters, and the whole s seemed one way and were really not that way at all But Jesse could not figure it out Her reason, like her memory, was curiously blocked

Jesse's first few days in New Orleans were the strangest in her entire psychic career

The city had a moist Caribbean beauty, and a tenacious colonial flavor that chars The entire place seemed haunted The awesoloomy Even the French Quarter streets, croith tourists, had a sensuous and sinister at out of her way or stopping for long periods to dream as she sat slumped on a bench in Jackson Square

She hated to leave the city at four o'clock The high-rise hole! in Baton Rouge provided a divine degree of Ah But the soft lazy a dimly aware that she'd dreamed of the vampire characters And of Maharet

Then, four days into her investigation, she made a series of discoveries that sent her directly to the phone There most certainly had been a Lestat de Lioncourt on the tax rolls in Louisiana In fact, in 1862 he had taken possession of a Royal Street town house from his business partner, Louis de Pointe du Lac Louis de Pointe du Lac had owned seven different pieces of Louisiana property, and one of them had been the plantation described in Intervieith the Vahted

But there were even more discoveries Somebody naht now And this person's signature, appearing in records dated 1895 and 1910, was identical to the eighteenth-century signatures

Oh, this was tooa wonderful time

At once she set out to photograph Lestat's properties Tere Garden Districtto ruin behind rusted gates But the rest, including the Royal Street town house-the very saency which made payment to an attorney in Paris