And Jared’s all, “And we’ve been making sunlight jackets for those two cops, which takes like a million little wires.” And he, like, points to our coffee table, which is the only surface that doesn’t have cages full of dead rats, and there’s not even jackets there, just, like, jacket-shaped nets of wire with little glass beads all over them.
And I’m all, “Cops can’t wear those. They look like robot lingerie.”
And Jared is all, “Très cool, non?”
“No!” I go. “And do not further endorken the French language by wrapping your disgusting penis port around it. You’ll ruin the whole language before I even learn enough to express my deep despair and dark desires en français, you rat smasher.”
’Kay, I know that was a little harsh, but I was angry, and in my defense, I was grinding Foo’s leg a little when I said “dark desires,” so I said it with love.
Foo’s all, “We didn’t have time to actually get jackets. They need to be leather and they’re expensive.”
So it’s clear that despite his mad ninja science skills, even my beloved Foo cannot be left without female supervision. But he has been going home lately, and his parents are a bad influence on him.
So I’m like, “I got this. I’ll go see Lily.”
Lily is my backup BFF. She used to be my BFF, but at the same time I met Lord Flood and the Countess, Lily got a book in the mail at her work, which is Asher’s Secondhand, and it convinced her that she is Death, so I’m all, “Whatever, ho.”
And she was all, “Free to live my own nightmare, skank.”
So we were cool.
’Kayso, I took the 45 bus from the dead-ratted love lair to North Beach. Walking through Chinatown sort of creeps me out ’cause of all the Chinese grandmothers on the street, who I’m pretty sure are talking about me because they think I have ruined Foo with my Gothy-Anglo charms. Also, I get mad dim sum cravings for which I should someday seek treatment, or, like, snacks.
’Kayso, at Asher’s, Lily comes out from behind the counter and gives me a hug and a big kiss on my forehead (because she is taller than me in addition to having surplus boobage).
And I’m like, “There’s a big violet lip print on my forehead, huh?”
And Lily goes, “Kiss of Death-get used to it, beyotch-matches your hair tips, très cute.”
So I’m all, “’Kay.” It wasn’t really the kiss of Death, but it did match my tips. Then I was all, “Lils, I need men’s leather jackets in these sizes.” I gave her the note Foo wrote out with the sizes and cut and whatnot.
And she was all, “WTF, Abs? Fifty long? You buying a jacket for an orca?”
“Ginormous gay cop. You got it?”
“Yeah. You wanna smoke a clove?”
And I’m all, “Do you have enough violet lipstick?” Because smoking is, like, the worst for your lipstick and it did match my hair.
And she’s all, “Bitch, please.” Meaning, “Do I ever not have enough makeup?” Which is true, because Lily carries a PVC ROBOT PIRATES messenger bag you could hide a small kid in, only she carries beauty products.
So I was all, “’Kay.”
So Lily and I went out the back door and stared at the Dumpster like it was the very abyss of our despair while we smoked. And I’m just getting ready to tell her about the love lair, and Foo, and vampyre kitties and all, because I’ve sort of been in boyfriend mode, so, like, out of contact, which Lily totally gets.
And Lil’s like, “So, the big gay cop have a Hispanic partner?”
And I’m like, “Rivera and Cavuto. Crusty day dwellers, but Rivera kind of has a secret-agent vibe. You know them?”
And Lily is all, “Yeah, they were here yesterday. Rivera wears expensive suits. Smells good, too. I’d do him.”
And I’m like gagging. “Lils, he’s like a thousand years old, and a cop. The Motherbot was getting squishy over him. OMG! You’re disgusting!”
“Shut up, I’m not saying I’d do him normal. I mean like zombie Apocalypse trapped in the mall right before we have to shoot each other to keep them from eating our brains and turning us to the undead-then I’d do him.”
So I’m all, “Oh sure, then.” To make her feel better, because she doesn’t have a BF and often oversluts to compensate, but I still thought it was disgusting. But to change the subject, I was all, “So what did they want?”
“They were asking all kinds of irrelevant bullshit. Had I seen any strange cats, did I see the Emperor, or some redhead.”
And I’m all, Fucksocks! Fucksocks! Fucksocks! inside. But on the outside I’m all chill and I’m like, “So, you like didn’t know anything, right?”
“No, Asher said a hot redhead came into the store the other night, and then I was on the cable car last night, going down to Max’s Deli for a sammy, and I think I saw her going into the Fairmont Hotel. Like a crazy cape of long red curls I would slaughter puppies for.”
“Red leather jacket?”
“Sweet red leather jacket.”
“You didn’t tell them, did you?”
And Lil’s all, “Well, yeah.”
And I was all, “You traitorous whore!” And I punched her in the shoulder.
In my defense, you’re supposed to tell your ex-BFF when you get fresh ink, so the screaming was completely over the top. I had no way of knowing that she had a new tattoo on that shoulder, so her punching me in the boob was totally uncalled for.
So, I’m ouching très loud and this Russian lady from upstairs peeks her head out the window and she’s all, “Quiet please, is sounding like burning bear out there.”
’Kayso, Lils and I start to laugh and say, “Like bear,” over and over again until the Russian lady slams the window shut, like bear.
Then it comes back to me and I’m all, “Lils, I have to get those jackets and get to the Fairmont. I have to save the Countess.”
And Lily is like, “’Kay,” not even asking details, which is why I love her-she is so nihilist it’s, like, not funny.
’Kayso, I take the jackets and catch a cab to the Fairmont, which totally pisses off the cabbie because it’s only like six blocks, but when I get to the hotel I’m all, “Fucksocks!” because I’m too late.
JODY
Falling asleep was one of the things Jody missed about being human. She missed the satisfied, tired feeling of falling into bed and drifting off in a dreamy twilight sea of dreams. In fact, since she’d turned, unless she’d just gone too long without feeding, she never even felt tired. On most mornings, unless she and Tommy had been making love, and they went out in each other’s arms, she just found a relatively comfortable position and waited for the sun to rise and put her out. Maybe a flutter of an eyelid, lasting a second, then off like a light.
The closest thing to a dream state she’d experienced as a vampire was when she’d gone to mist inside the bronze statue, and even then, the door into dreamland slammed shut at dawn. The constant alertness of being a vampire was, well, it was a bit irritating. Especially since she’d been searching the City for Tommy for a week, pushing her jumped-up senses to their limits, and had to return to the hotel every morning with nothing. Apparently, Tommy had limped down an alley and vanished. She’d checked everyplace in the City that she’d ever taken him, every place he’d ever been, as far as she knew, and still there was no evidence of his having been there. She’d hoped she would have some special vampire “sixth sense” to help her find him, like the old vampire who had turned her seemed to have had, but no.
Now, she was returning to her room at the Fairmont for the seventh morning. And for the seventh morning she would put out the “Do Not Disturb” signs, lock the door, put on her sweats, drink a pouch of the blood she kept locked in a mini-cooler, brush her teeth, then crawl under the bed and go over a mental map of the City until dawn put her out. (Since she was technically dead at dawn, sleeping on top of a comfortable mattress was a dangerous luxury, and by climbing under the bed she put one more layer between her and sunlight, should a nosy maid somehow
find a way into her room.)
Part of her new pre-dawn ritual had been returning to the hotel a little later each morning; like the skydiver who will let himself fall closer and closer to earth before pulling the ripcord to boost the adrenaline rush just a little more. The last two mornings she’d just been entering the hotel when the alarm watch she wore, which was set to go off ten minutes before sunrise on any given day, based on an electronic almanac, had started beeping. She’d bought one for Tommy, too, and wondered if he was still wearing his. As she strode down California Street, she tried to remember if he’d been wearing it when they cut him out of the bronze shell.
Two blocks from the Fairmont her alarm watch went off and she couldn’t help but smile a little at the thrill. She picked up her pace, figuring that she’d still be safely inside her room with time to spare before sunup, but she might have to forgo the sweats and the blood snack.
As she came up the steps into the lobby she smelled cigar, and Aramis cologne, and the combination sent an electric chill of alarm up her spine before she could identify the danger. Cops. Rivera and Cavuto. Rivera smelled of Aramis, Cavuto of cigars. She stopped, her boot heels skidding a little on the marble steps.
There they were, both at the front desk, but a bellman was leading them to the elevator. He was taking them to her room.
How? she thought. Doesn’t matter. It was getting light. She checked her watch: three minutes to find shelter. She backed away from the door, out onto the sidewalk, then began to run.
Normally she would have paced herself so someone didn’t notice the redhead in boots and jeans running faster than an Olympic sprinter, but they’d just have to tell their friends and not be believed. She needed cover, now.
She was a block and a half down Mason Street when she came to an alley. She’d survived her first night as a vampire under a Dumpster. Maybe she could survive the day inside one. But there was someone down there, the kitchen crew of a restaurant, outside smoking. On she ran.
No alleys in the next two blocks, then a narrow space between buildings. Maybe she could shimmy down there and crawl in a basement window. She crawled on a narrow, plywood gate and had one foot down before a pit bull came storming down the corridor. She leapt out onto the sidewalk and started running again. What kind of psychopath uses a two-foot-wide space between buildings as a dog run? There should be laws.
This was Nob Hill, all open, with wide boulevard streets, a once-grand neighborhood now made incredibly irritating to a vampire in need of shelter. She rounded the corner at Jackson Street, snapping a heel off her right boot as she did. She should have worn sneakers, she knew, but wearing the high, expensive leather boots made her feel a little like a superhero. It turned out that turning your ankle hurts like hell, even if you’re a superhero.
She was up on her toes now, running, limping toward Jackson Square, the oldest neighborhood in San Francisco that had survived the great quake and fire of 1906. There were all kinds of little cubbyholes and basement shops in the old brick buildings down there. One building even had the ribs of a sailing ship in its basement, a remnant built over when the Gold Rush left so many ships abandoned at the waterfront that the City literally expanded over them.
One minute. The shadow of the Transamerica Pyramid was lying long across the neighborhood ahead like the needle of a deadly sundial. Jody did a final kick-sprint, snapping off her other boot heel as she did. She scanned the streets ahead for windows, doors, trying to sense movement inside, looking for stillness, privacy.
There! On the left, a door below street level, the stair-case hidden by a wrought-iron railing covered in jasmine. Ten more steps and I’m there, she thought. She saw herself jumping the rail, shouldering through the door, and diving under the first thing that would shelter her from the light.
She took the final three steps and leapt just as the sun broke the horizon. She went limp in the air, fell to the sidewalk, short of the stairwell, and skidded on her shoulder and face. As her eyes fluttered, the last thing she saw were a pair of orange socks right in front of her, then she went out and began to smolder in the sunlight.
12.Alchemy
The Chinese herb shop smelled like licorice and dried monkey butt. The Animals were piled into the narrow aisle between counters, trying to hide behind Troy Lee’s grandmother and failing spectacularly. Behind a glass case, the shopkeeper looked older and more spooky than Grandma Lee, which none of them thought possible until now. It was like he’d been carved from an apple, then left on the windowsill to dry for a hundred years.
The walls of the shop were lined, floor to ceiling, with little drawers of dark wood, each with a small bronze frame and a white card with Chinese characters written on it. The old man stood behind glass cases that held all manner of desiccated plant and animal bits, from whole sea horses and tiny birds, to shark parts and scorpion tails, to odd spiky bits that looked like they’d been flown in from another planet.
“What’s that?” Drew asked Troy Lee from under a veil of stringy blond hair. He pointed to a wrinkled black thing.
Troy Lee said something in Cantonese to Grandma, who said something to the shopkeeper, who barked something back.
“Bear penis,” said Troy Lee.
“Should we score some?” asked Drew.
“For what?” asked Troy.
“An emergency,” said Drew.
“Sure, okay,” said Troy Lee, then he said something to Grandma in Cantonese. There was an exchange with the shopkeeper, after which Troy said, “How much do you want? It’s fifty bucks a gram.”
“Whoa,” said Barry. “That’s expensive.”
“He says it’s the best dried bear penis you can buy,” said Troy Lee.
“Okay,” said Drew. “A gram.”
Troy passed the order through Grandma to the shopkeeper. He snipped a tip off a bear penis, weighed it, and placed it on the pile of herbs in the sheet of paper he had laid on the counter for Drew. Grandma’s paper was much larger, and the shopkeeper had been tottering around the shop for half an hour gathering the ingredients. At one point when the old man was up on the top of the ladder at the far back corner of the shop, the Animals had leapt the counter and laced their arms together as a human rescue net, which served only to scare the bejeezus out of the shopkeeper and set Grandma off in a tirade of Cantonese scolding, to which they all responded like dogs, paying her rapt attention and tilting their heads as if they actually had some idea of what the fuck she was talking about.
Lately the Animals had been all about saving lives. Most of the time, guys their age would be fairly convinced of their immortality, or at least oblivious of their mortality, but since being murdered by a blue hooker turned vampire, then resurrected as vampires, then restored to living by Foo Dog’s genetic alchemy, they had been feeling what they could only describe as Jesusy.
“I’m feeling extra Jesusy,” said Jeff, the tall jock.
“I always feel extra Jesusy,” said Clint, who always did.
“Yeah, extra Jesusy, bitches! Let’s go save some mother-fuckers!” Lash had shouted, which had sort of embarrassed everyone a little, since they had been sitting around a table in Starbucks at the time, discussing the attack of the cat cloud and the information they’d exchanged with the two homicide cops. “It’s up to us,” Lash added softly, sort of slinking into his hoody and putting on his shades.
Now they watched as the old shopkeeper folded up Grandma Lee’s bundle of ingredients and tucked in the paper so it was as tight as a toothpick spliff, then flipped the package over and wrote some Chinese characters on the back with a carpenter’s pencil.
“What’s it say?” Barry asked Troy Lee.
“It says, ‘vampire cat remedy.’”
“No shit?”
“Yeah. Then there’s a bunch of warnings about side effects.”
An hour later they were sitting around the Lee kitchen table, waiting for the big twenty-quart soup pot on the stove to come to a boil.
Grandma Lee rose from her ch
air and tottered over to the stove with her package of herbs. Troy Lee joined her, helped her unwrap the package, and held the paper away from the burner as she scooped handfuls of herbs and animal parts into the boiling water. Foul and magical fumes bubbled out of the kettle, like the flatulence of dragons on a demon-only diet.
“This really going to work, Grandma?” Troy Lee asked in Cantonese.
“Oh yeah. We used it when I was a girl in China and some vampire cats invaded the city.”
“And they still have the recipe in a shop down on Stockton Street?”
“It’s a good recipe.” She scooped the last of the package into the water.
“How do you use this stuff, anyway?”
“With firecrackers.”
“It’s wet, how are you going to use firecrackers?”
“I don’t know how, I just like firecrackers.”
The Animals covered their noses and started filing out of the kitchen. “That smells like fermented skunk ass,” said Jeff.
Grandma said something in Cantonese, followed by “My bitches,” pronounced in frighteningly accentless English.
“What? What’d she say?” asked Jeff.
“She says, ‘That’s how you know it’s a good recipe, gents,’” said Troy Lee.
THE EMPEROR
A dark basement. A thousand sleeping vampire cats. One formerly human vampire. One huge, shaved vampire-cat hybrid. Five matches left. No way out. A half hour, maybe less, until sundown.
The Emperor was not a man to use profanity, but after he assessed his situation and burned his fingers with his fourth to last match, he said, “Well, this blows.”
There was no helping it, sometimes a man, even a brave and noble man, must speak the harsh truth, and his situation, did, indeed, blow.
He’d tried everything he could think of to escape the basement, from building a stairway to the window with empty fifty-five-gallon drums, to screaming for help like a man on fire, but even on a platform of oil drums he couldn’t find the leverage or the strength to move the Dumpster away from the window.
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