“Drink me in, baby, drink me all up-I made my blood all sweet and luscious, just for you, Jules baby…”

You canhavethe things you’ve always wanted, but to get them, you might have to look at them in a new way…that’s what Doodlebug had written him, and he believed it now. And what were the things he really wanted? Mouthwatering New Orleans food. Soul-warming New Orleans jazz. The sounds and tastes and smells of his city, and the peace to enjoy them.

And Maureen. But he couldn’t have Maureen.

“Oh baby, make me your queen-make me yourqueen, baby-we’re almost there-king and queen of the vampires forever…”

Maureen. She was his queen. No one else.

He forced himself to stop drinking. Jules pulled his lips away from her neck and crouched above her weakly twitching body. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. He’d almost lost control, almost gone all the way.

“… babe… baby, why’re you stopping? Don’t stop… don’t stop now… I’m almostthere, I can feel it… almost a vampire… finish… finish me off, Jules-”

Jules concentrated on tiny trains racing over tiny tracks for perhaps the final time. His great naked bulk began to shimmer.

“Jules!Finish meoff!”

Just before his lips melted, he said, “Fuck you and the bureaucrat you rode in on-”

The king-sized bed vanished beneath a cloud of oily mist. Veronika began to scream as multitudes of tiny, clawed feet materialized and ran across her prone body. She screamed louder and louder as the mist cleared and she saw who the feet belonged to.

Rats. White rats. Dozens and dozens of them; 187 in all. Seven hundred and forty-eight clawed feet scurried across her tummy, breasts, and legs on their way across the bed to the open window. Nearly two hundred pink, hairless tails twittered across her fingers, kneecaps, and nose before sliding from sight over the balcony.

Her screams were frenzied, but they couldn’t drown out the sweet music coming from Bourbon Street. The rats ran toward the sounds of the music. Toward the sanctuary of thousands and thousands of hidden, sunless crawl spaces within the walls and foundations of the ancient buildings of the Vieux Carrй. They skittered toward the music and darkness, and disappeared into obscurity.

And if the rats perked up their ears just right, they’d hear the mournful yet eternally optimistic notes of a jazz funeral circling the Quarter. And they’d hear Porkchop Chambonne’s trumpet lead the band into the opening bars of a new song of his own composition:

“The Fat White Vampire Blues.”