’Kayso, like the Terminator (the liquid one, not the one that was governor), I will rise from the wreckage of my own metallic spooge to conquer all who oppose me. I know what I have to do. When Foo is at work, and Jared is at school, I shall use the blood that is blessed with the dark gift and become nosferatu. So suck it, bitches!

’Kayso, at dawn, when all the rats stopped scrambling around in their little cages, I found one of the syringes that Tommy had gotten from the needle exchange program when he was pretending to be a junky, and I drew blood from the most healthy vamp rat we had. Then I had to decide to drink it or inject it, and after a while, I decided to inject it, which it turns out works just like in the movies and hurts way less than getting your eyebrow pierced.

So then I lay down and waited for the vamping to come on. I thought about Foo, riding the BART all the way back to his parents’ house in the Sunset instead of staying with me, and how that was kind of an assbag move on his part. And I thought of our time together, over six weeks, and how it would be hard on him when I was a superior creature of unspeakable evil and supernatural beauty. And I thought that maybe the Countess and Flood and I might have to live together in a ménage à trois, and Foo and Jared might have to be our bug-eating minions, like Renfield in Dracula, except Foo would still have his fly manga hair and I would do him occasionally out of pity.

And I cried a little, over the loss of my humanity and whatnot, because I realized that as soon as I was done saving Tommy and Jody, and enslaving Foo and Jared, I was going to sneak into Mr. Snavely’s living room one night-come in as mist under the door-then form into my most awesome alabaster naked badassness and freak him completely the fuck out for failing me in Biology, and that it would be kind of an inhuman thing to do. And as I grieved, I fell into the deep sleep of the undead.

I know. Très awesome.

But no! Now I’m awake, and it’s still light out, and the vamp rats are still out and I don’t have super powers and my evil is still totally speakable. Fucksocks! I forgot, I have to die before I change. I looked all over for that potassium chloride stuff that Foo said they killed the rats with, but all I found was the hammer, and I was all, “I don’t think so.” So I went up to Market Street and thought I’d throw myself in front of a bus, but then, what if they left my body out in the sun and I burned up? So that was out. So then I was like, “Oh, duh, cut your wrists?” But it hurt like holy fuck, so I only kind of cut one wrist a little bit, and I bled for like a half hour and I wasn’t even light-headed, so I was all, “Fuck this fun-free circus, I need an accomplice.”

So I called the suicide hotline.

And I’m all, “I need help.”

And the guy is all, “What’s your name?”

And I’m all, “You don’t have caller ID? What kind of lame hotline is this?”

And he’s all, “It says here that your name is Allison. Are you okay, Allison?”

And I’m all, “No, I’m not okay. I’m calling the suicide hotline.”

And he’s all, “You don’t want to commit suicide, Allison.”

And I’m all, “Exactly, doofasaurus, I need someone to take me out. I need it to be quick, private, painless, and it shouldn’t fuck up my hair too much.”

And he’s like, “But there’s so much to live for.”

So I’m like, “You’re burning my minutes, fuckstick. I need a number for a hit man or one of those Kevorkian doctors.”

And he’s all, “I can’t help you with that.”

So I’m all, “Loser!” And I offed my phone.

I can’t believe it, but it turns out that the Motherbot was right. Sometimes, the only people you can trust are family. (“’Scuse me, I barely suppressed a rainbow yawn when I typed that.) So here I am, waiting for my little sister, Ronnie, to get home from school so she can murder me, then hide my body under the bed until I return as the true Mistress of the Greater Bay Area Dark. This will be my last entry as a mortal. I have to go pick out an ensem for my death.

I wonder how she’ll do it? It better be painless or the first thing on my undead to-do list will be to open a bottle of Whoop-Ass P.M. on little sister.

Katusumi Okata had lived among the gaijin for forty years. An American art dealer, traveling through Hokkaido in search of woodblock prints from the Edo period, had come into Katusumi’s father’s workshop, seen the boy’s prints, and offered to bring Okata to San Francisco to create prints for his gallery on Jackson Street. The printmaker had lived in this same basement apartment since. He’d once had a wife, Yuriko, but she had been killed in front of him on the street when he was twenty-three, so now he lived alone.

The apartment had a concrete floor covered by two grass mats, a table that held his printmaking tools, a two-burner stove, an electric kettle, his swords, a futon, three sets of clothes, an old phonograph, and now, a burned-up white woman. She really didn’t go with anything else, no matter how he arranged her.

He thought he might make a series of prints of her-her blackened, skeletal form posed about the apartment like some demon wraith from a Shinto nightmare, but the composition wasn’t working. He walked up to Chinatown and bought a bouquet of red tulips and put them on the futon beside her, but even with the added color and design element, the picture wasn’t working. And she was making his futon smell like burned hair.

Okata was not used to company, and he wasn’t sure how to keep up his end of the conversation. He had once made friends with two rats who came out of a hole in the brick wall. He had talked to them and fed them on the condition that they not bring any friends, but they hadn’t listened and he was forced to mortar up the hole. He figured they didn’t speak Japanese.

To be fair, however, she wasn’t doing very well holding up her side of the conversation, either-lying there like a bog person dipped in creosote, her mouth open as if in a scream of agony. He sat on a stool next to the futon with his sketch pad and a pencil and began to sketch her for a print. He had very much admired the great cape of red curls that streamed out behind her when he’d seen her on the street, and he was sorry that all but a few strands had burned away in the sun. A shame. Perhaps he could draw the red curls in anyway. Make them swirl around the blackened rictus like one of Hokusai’s waves.

He knew what she was, of course. He was still healing from his encounter with the vampire cats, and it took no little bit of sketching to fill in the details, especially as her fangs were pointing prominently at his ceiling right now and they were far too long and sharp to be those of a normal burned-up white girl. He filled three pages with sketches, experimenting with angles and composition, but on the fourth page he found that a sadness had overcome him that he could not chase away with the moment created in making a drawing.

Katusumi retrieved his wakizashi short sword from the stand on his work table, unsheathed it, and knelt by the futon. He bowed deeply, then put the point of the sword on the pad of his left thumb and cut. He held his thumb over her open mouth and the dark blood dripped over her teeth and lips.

Would she be like the cats? Savage? A monster? He held the razor-edged wakizashi ready in his right hand, should a demon awake. But if he’d been able to raise his beloved Yuriko, even as a demon, wouldn’t he have? All the years that had passed, kendo training, drawing, carving, meditating, walking the streets unafraid, alone, hadn’t they all been about that? About making Yuriko live? Or not living without her?

When the burned-up girl jerked with a great, rasping intake of breath, cinders cracked off her ribs and peppered the yellow futon and water began to flow from the swordsman’s eyes.