The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice Page A

the hood of a car, it was fantastic. And she hadn’t had the damn dream then, the dream that had started up in Gun Barrel City—with those redheaded twins and that woman’s body lying on an altar.
What were they doing?
    What would she do now if she couldn’t find the Fang Gang? Out in California the Vampire Lestat was going on stage two nights from now. And every Dead guy in creation would be there, leastways that’s how shefigured it, and that’s how the Fang Gang had figured it and they were all supposed to be together. So what the hell was she doing lost from the Fang Gang and headed for a jerkwater city like St. Louis?
    All she wanted was for everything to be like it had been before, goddamn it. Oh, the blood was good, yum, it was so good, even now that she was alone and had to work up her nerve, the way it had been this evening, to pull into a gas station and lure the old guy out back. Oh, yeah, snap, when she’d gotten her hands on his neck, and the blood came, it had been just fine, it was hamburgers and french fries and strawberry shakes, it was beer and chocolate sundaes. It was mainline, and coke and hash. It was better than screwing! It was all of it.
    But everything had been better when the Fang Gang was with her. And they had understood when she got tired of the chewed-up old guys and said she wanted to taste something young and tender. No problem. Hey, it was a nice little runaway kid she needed, Killer said. Just close your eyes and wish. And sure enough, like that, they found him hitchhiking on the main road, just five miles out of some town in northern Missouri, name of Parker. Real pretty boy with long shaggy black hair, just twelve years old, but real tall for his age, with some beard on his chin, and trying to pass for sixteen. He’d climbed on her bike and they’d taken him into the woods. Then Baby Jenks laid down with him, real gentle like, and slurp, that was it for Parker.
    It was delicious all right, juicy was the word. But she didn’t know really whether it was any better than the mean old guys when you got down to it. And with them it was more sport. Good ole boy blood, Davis called it.
    Davis was a black Dead guy and one damned good-looking black Dead guy, as Baby Jenks saw it. His skin had a gold glow to it, the Dead glow which in the case of white Dead guys made them look like they were standing in a fluorescent light all the time. Davis had beautiful eyelashes too, just damn near unbelievably long and thick, and he decked himself out in all the gold he could find. He stole the gold rings and watches and chains and things off the victims.
    Davis loved to dance. They all loved to dance. But Davis could outdance any of them. They’d go to the graveyards to dance, maybe round three a.m., after they’d all fed and buried the dead and all that jazz. They’d set the ghetto blaster radio on a tombstone and turn it way up, with the Vampire Lestat roaring. “The Grand Sabbat” song, that was the one that was good for dancing. And oh, man, how good it felt, twisting and turning and leaping in the air, or just watching Davis move and Killer move and Russ spinning in circles till he fell down. Now that was real Dead guy dancing.
    Now if those big city bloodsuckers weren’t hip to that, they were crazy.
    God, she wished now that she could tell Davis about this dream she’d been having since Gun Barrel City. How it had come to her in her mom’s trailer, zap, the first time when she’d been sitting waiting. It was so clear for a dream, those two women with the red hair, and the body lying there with its skin all black and crackled like. And what the hell was that on the plates in the dream? Yeah, it had been a heart on one plate and a brain on the other. Christ. All those people kneeling around that body and those plates. It was creepy. And she’d had it over and over again since then. Why, she was having it every goddamn time she shut her eyes and again right before she dug her way out of