Free The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice Page A

heard something. Not a real sound, but the things that Killer had taught her to listen for. There was a Dead guy in there!
    She couldn’t believe her luck, and she didn’t give a damn what happened, she was going in there. Yeah, somebody in there. It was real faint. She went a few more feet, crunching real loud in the dead leaves. No light but something moving in there, and it knew she was coming. And as she stood there, heart hammering, afraid, and frantic to go in, somebody came out on the front porch, a Dead guy looking right at her.
    Praise the Lord, she whispered. And he wasn’t no jerkoff in a three-piece suit, either. No, he was a young kid, maybe no more than two years older than her when they did it to him, and he looked real special. Like he had silver hair for one thing, just real pretty short curly gray hair, and that always looked great on a young person. And he was tall too, about six feet, and skinny, a real elegant guy, the way she saw it. He had an icy look to his skin it was so white, and he wore a dark brown turtleneck shirt, real smooth across his chest, and a fancy cut brown leather jacket and pants, nothing at all like biker leather. Really boss, this guy, and cuter than any Dead guy in the Fang Gang.
    “Come inside!” he said in a hiss. “Hurry.”
    She like to flew up the steps. The air was still full of tiny ashes, and it hurt her eyes and made her cough. Half the porch had fallen in. Carefully she made her way into the hallway. Some of the stairs was left, but the roof way above was wide open. And the chandelier had fallen down, all crushed and full of soot. Real spooky, like a haunted house this place.
    The Dead guy was in the living room or what was left of it, kicking and picking through burnt-up stuff, furniture and things, sort of in a rage, it looked like.
    “Baby Jenks, is it?” he said, flashing her a weird fake smile, full of pearly teeth including his little fangs, and his gray eyes glittering kind of. “And you’re lost, aren’t you?”
    OK, another goddamn mind reader like Davis. And one with a foreign accent.
    “Yeah, so what?” she said. And real surprising, she caught his name like as if it was a ball and he’d tossed it to her: Laurent. Now that was a classy name, French sounding.
    “Stay right there, Baby Jenks,” he said. The accent was French too, probably. “There were three in this coven and two were incinerated. The police can’t detect the remains but you will know them if you step on them and you will not like it.”
    Christ! And he was telling her the truth, ’cause there was one of them right there, no jive, at the back of the hall, and it looked like a half-burnt suit of clothes lying there, kind of vaguely in the outline of a man, and sure thing, she could tell by the smell, there’d been a Dead guy in the clothes, and just the sleeves and the pant legs and shoes were left. In the middle of it all there was a kind of grayish messy stuff, looked more like grease and powder than ashes. Funny the way the shirt sleeve was still neatly sticking out of the coat sleeve. Now that had been a three-piece suit maybe.
    She was getting sick. Could you get sick when you were Dead? Shewanted to get out of here. What if whatever had done this was coming back? Immortal, tie a can to it!
    “Don’t move,” the Dead guy said to her, “and we’ll be leaving together just as soon as we can.”
    “Like now, OK!” she said. She was shaking, goddamn it. This is what they meant when they said cold sweat!
    He’d found a tin box and he was taking all the unburnt money out of it.
    “Hey, man, I’m splitting,” she said. She could feel something around here, and it had nothing to do with that grease spot on the floor. She was thinking of the burnt-up coven houses in Dallas and Oklahoma City, the way the Fang Gang had vanished on her. He got all that, she could tell. His face got soft, real cute again. He threw down the box and came towards her so fast it scared her