"I said a while," Lestat says, breezily, smoothing out some invisible wrinkle at his knee. "Not forever." Amusement, reaching his eyes. "Even if you asked nicely."

Daryl's poker face is good. Lestat's is—fine. That he catches a thought that is something he would very much like to sink his teeth into only flickers across his expression, a sharpening of his focus and the narrow lifting of the corner of his mouth at its scarred side, showing only the expected set of blunt white teeth.

Who's Rick?

"I say you can be useful to me, to this place. If I am wrong, then I've made a bad deal. I'll live with it."