Author's Note: I know this starts out sounding like a parallel to the prologue of The Vampire Lestat. I assure you that it is quite on purpose. This is the beginning of the first of several novel length fanfics I'm working on that take place in an AU (and EU) after the book Merrick. Please R&R.

THE DEVIL'S ROAD TO HEAVEN, by Lestat deLioncourt

Prologue

I am the vampire Lestat. I am immortal. I'm absolutely positive of that now. I am six feet tall and I used to look about twenty one years old. Now I don't really appear to have an age. I have curly blond hair and grey eyes, which often seem blue or purple since they very easily reflect these colors. As of late, they have also reflected my true age –which is five hundred and seven- much better than they used to. Maybe that's because my maturity has finally begun to reflect my age as well. Dubitable as it may sound, these past three hundred years in general and the past ten years in particular have taught me well. Though if you attempt to tell that to any vampire who knows me, and of course they all do, not a single one of them would doubt that you were insane. Then again, you would have to be rather insane to approach a vampire in the first place. Insane or in the Talamasca. Not that being in the Talamasca is such a far cry from being insane these days. Sorry, I'm getting off track. Hey, I said my maturity had improved, not my abilities of concentration.

Back to talking about the other vampires. This book tells the story of their lives from the ominous day, three hundred years ago, when to the knowledge of any living (or undead) creature, I, the vampire Lestat at last died. Obviously it didn't exactly work out the way it was supposed to, but they thought it had. And it hurt them more that I imagined it would. If I had known how much pain it would cause them, I might not have done what I did. I didn't do it to hurt anyone. I swear on my very soul –not that I think my soul is worth much- I didn't. But I just couldn't handle being part of the world anymore. It was too much for me and no one seemed willing to understand that. They thought that just because I had woken up from my coma, which by the way was not self-induced, I was automatically alright. Sure, I was physically in one piece and uninjured, but that hardly means I was well. My sanity was somehow holding itself together, but my grasp on it was very precarious. Once Louis, my beloved fledgling, my reason for living died, I had no purpose and I became empty inside, except for the pain. By the time David, Merrick, and I reached France, I was only a shell of my former self. A silent, unmoving statue. And that is where this story begins.