The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice Page B

wherever she’d been hiding by daylight.
    Killer and Davis would understand. They’d know if it meant something. They wanted to teach her everything.
    When they first hit St. Louis on their way south, the Fang Gang had headed off the boulevard into one of those big dark streets with iron gates that they call “a private place” in St. Louis. It was the Central West End down here, they said. Baby Jenks had liked those big trees. There just aren’t enough big trees in south Texas. There wasn’t much of nothing in south Texas. And here the trees were so big their branches made a roof over your head. And the streets were full of noisy rustling leaves and the houses were big, with peaked roofs and the lights buried deep inside them. The coven house was made of brick and had what Killer called Moorish arches.
    “Don’t go any closer,” Davis had said. Killer just laughed. Killer wasn’t scared of the big city Dead. Killer had been made sixty years ago, he was old. He knew everything.
    “But they will try to hurt you, Baby Jenks,” he said, walking his Harley just a little farther up the street. He had a lean long face, wore a gold earring in his ear, and his eyes were small, kind of thoughtful. “See, this one’s an old coven, been in St. Louis since the turn of the century.”
    “But why would they want to hurt us?” Baby Jenks had asked. She was real curious about that house. What did the Dead do who lived in houses? What kind of furniture did they have? Who paid the bills, for God’s sakes?
    Seems like she could see a chandelier in one of those front rooms, through the curtains. A big fancy chandelier. Man! Now that’s living.
    “Oh, they got all that down,” said Davis, reading her mind. “You don’t think the neighbors think they’re real people? Look at that car in the drive, you know what that is? That’s a Bugatti, baby. And the other one beside it, a Mercedes-Benz.”
    What the hell was wrong with a pink Cadillac? That’s what she’d like to have, a big gas-guzzling convertible that she could push to a hundred andtwenty on the open stretch. And that’s what had got her into trouble, got her to Detroit, an asshole with a Cadillac convertible. But just ’cause you were Dead didn’t mean you had to drive a Harley and sleep in the dirt every day, did it?
    “We’re free, darlin’,” Davis said, reading her thoughts. “Don’t you see? There’s a lotta baggage goes with this big city life. Tell her, Killer. And you ain’t getting me in no house like that, sleeping in a box under the floorboards.”
    He broke up. Killer broke up. She broke up too. But what the hell was it like in there? Did they turn on the late show and watch the vampire movies? Davis was really rolling on the ground.
    “The fact is, Baby Jenks,” Killer said, “we’re rogues to them, they wanna run everything. Like they don’t think we have a right to be Dead. Like when they make a new vampire as they call it, it’s a big ceremony.”
    “Like what happens, like a wedding or something you mean?”
    More laughter from those two.
    “Not exactly,” Killer said, “more like a funeral!”
    They were making too much noise. Surely those Dead guys in the house were going to hear them. But Baby Jenks wasn’t afraid if Killer wasn’t afraid. Where were Russ and Tim, gone off hunting?
    “But the point is, Baby Jenks,” said Killer, “they have all these rules, and I’ll tell you what, they’re spreading it all over that they’re going to get the Vampire Lestat the night of his concert, but you know what, they’re reading his book like it was the Bible. They’re using all that language he used, Dark Gift, Dark Trick, I tell you it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen, they’re going to burn the guy at the stake and then use his book like it was Emily Post or Miss Manners—”
    “They’ll never get Lestat,” Davis had sneered. “No way, man. You can’t kill the Vampire Lestat, that is flat out impossible. It