“I hurt my ankles,” whined Jared.

Foo nodded. “We’ve had a few rough days.”

“I gathered,” said Rivera. “Where’s your creepy girlfriend?”

“She’s not creepy,” said Jared. “She’s complex.”

“Home,” said Foo.

“As was agreed in her black covenant with you,” said Jared, as ominously as he could manage.

“Did you get an English accent all of a sudden?” asked Cavuto.

“He does that when he wants to sound more Gothic,” said Foo. He was trying to stand in front of the ruins of the bronze statue of Jody and Tommy, but since it was twice his size, he only drew attention to it.

Rivera pulled a pen from his jacket and ran it over the sawed edges of the bronze shell and pulled it back with the red-brown clot on it. “Mr. Wong, what the hell happened here?”

“Nothing,” said Jared, without an English accent.

Foo looked from one inspector to the other, hoping they would see how hopelessly smarter he was than them, and give up, but they wouldn’t look away. They just kept looking at him like he was in trouble. He went to the futon that served as their couch, pushed a bunch of boxes of undead rats to the floor, sat down, and cradled his face in his hands.

“I thought I’d found some kind of scientific bonanza, a new species, a new way for a species to reproduce-hell, maybe I have, but everything’s so out of control. The fucking magic!”

Rivera and Cavuto moved to the middle of the room, and stood over Foo. Rivera reached down and squeezed his shoulder. “Focus, Stephen. What happened here? Why is there blood all over that statue?”

“They were in there. Tommy and Jody. Abby and I had them bronzed when they were out during the day.”

“Then they never left town like you said?” asked Cavuto.

“No, they had been in there all the time. Abby said that it wouldn’t be bad for them, that when they were in mist form it was like they were dreaming. Mist form! What the hell is that? It’s not possible.”

“And you felt bad so you cut them out?” said Rivera.

“No, Jared let Jody out.”

“Totally by accident,” said Jared. “She was kind of a bitch about it, too.”

Foo explained about Jared releasing Jody, Abby and Jody releasing Tommy, Jody throwing Tommy through the windows, and Tommy running off into the night, naked.

“So he’s out there,” Foo said. “They’re both out there.”

“We know,” said Cavuto.

“You do?” Foo looked up for the first time. “You knew?”

“She was seen at the Fairmont Hotel, and we found bags of blood in a room there. We’ll find her. But the Emperor saw Tommy Flood, naked, sleeping with all the vampire cats. He said that the one cat, Chet, isn’t really a cat anymore. Explain that, science boy.”

Foo nodded. “I figured something like that might happen. The rats are smarter.”

“That helps,” said Cavuto.

“No, what I’ve found is that the vampire blood carries characteristics of the host species. The further from the prime vampire, the old vampire that turned Jody, or that’s who we think is the prime vampire, the less change takes place. Abby said that Chet was turned by the prime vampire, so he’s picking up human characteristics. He’s going to be stronger, bigger, smarter than any of the cat vampires. He’s turning into something new.”

“Something new?”

“Yeah. We found it with the rats. The first ones I turned from Jody’s blood are smarter than the ones I turned from those rats’ blood. Each generation away from her is less and less intelligent. I mean, we haven’t had time to really test them, but in just the amount of time it takes them to learn the mazes, it’s clear that the innate intelligence is higher in those closer to the human vampire sire. And they’re stronger, because Jody was only one generation from the prime vampire. I thought I’d figured an algorithm that described it, but then they all turned to mist and merged and fucked up everything.”

“Sure,” said Cavuto, “we’ll nod and act like we have some idea of what you’re talking about until you tell us what the hell you’re actually talking about.”

Foo got up and waved for them to follow him into the bedroom. There was a plywood maze that covered the entire bed, with small blue LEDs dimly lighting every intersection. A sheet of Plexiglas covered the top.

“The UV LEDs are to keep them from turning to mist and escaping the maze,” Foo said. “It’s not enough to hurt them, just keep them solid.”

“Oh good, a toy city,” said Cavuto. “We have time for this.”

Foo ignored him. “The rats who were turned from Jody’s blood learned the maze more quickly, and remembered it faster than the ones turned from rat blood. It was consistent, until they all got loose and merged into a single cloud. After that, they all knew the maze, even if we had never put them in it.”

Rivera bent down and pretended to be examining the maze. “What are you saying, Stephen?”

“I think that they share a consciousness when they are together in mist form. What one knows, the others know. After they had merged, they all knew the maze.”

Rivera looked at Cavuto and raised his eyebrows. “The Emperor thought that Tommy Flood was in the same cloud as the vampire cats.”

“We’re fucked,” said Cavuto.

Rivera looked at Foo for confirmation. “Are we fucked?”

Foo shrugged, “Well, from what I could tell, Tommy wasn’t really that bright.”

Rivera nodded. “Uh-huh, and if your girlfriend didn’t have a crush on him, would we be fucked?”

Foo flinched a little, then recovered. “I think they’d be limited by the brain capacity of the species, so the vampire cats would be still be cats, but they’d be very smart. Chet, on the other hand-”

“We’re fucked,” said Cavuto. “Say it.”

“Scientifically speaking, yes,” said Jared, who stood in the doorway of the bedroom.

“How do we stop them?” asked Rivera.

“Sunlight. UV light will do it,” said Foo. “You have to find them while they’re dormant or they’ll just run away. They’re not invulnerable to physical damage. If they’re dismembered or decapitated it will kill them.”

“You did experiments on that?” asked Cavuto.

Foo shook his head. “We had some accidents when we were trying to get them back in their cages, but I’m basing that hypothesis on Abby’s description of the swordsman who showed up in the street.”

“He sounds badass,” said Jared. “Did you find him?”

Cavuto took Jared by a hair spike, steered him into the corner, faced him there, then turned back to Foo. “So, these jackets you made us, they’ll take them out?”

“If you’re close enough. I’d say they’re lethal to about twelve feet. I suppose I can rig something higher intensity, like a high-capacity UV laser flashlight. You could cut them down from a distance with something like that.”

“Light sabers!” said Jared, his voice going up. He hopped around in excitement, then winced at the pain in his ankles. “Ouch.”

“That’s it,” said Cavuto. “You’re too much of a nerd to be gay. I’m contacting the committee. They’ll revoke your rainbow flag and you will not be permitted anywhere near the parade.”

“There’s a committee?”

“No,” said Rivera. “He’s fucking with you.” Rivera turned back to Foo. “What about something that will work on a wider basis-like a vaccine or something?”

Foo thought for a second. “Sure, what is it, Tuesday? I’m curing Ebola in the morning, but I can work on your vampire vaccine after lunch.”

Rivera smiled. “People are dying, Steve. Lots of people. And the only people who have a chance to stop it are in this room.”

“Not you,” Cavuto said to Jared.

“Bitch,” Jared replied.

“I’ll work on it,” said Foo. “But it’s not as bad as you think it is.”

“Brighten our day, kid,” said Cavuto.

“They can’t all handle it. Four out of every ten animals that are turned vampire don’t survive to the second night. They either just break down on the spot-sort of decay from the inside, or they go crazy-it’s like the heightened senses overwhelm them and they just have sort of a seizure that scrambles their brains and they end up with no survival instincts. They don’t feed or hide from the light. The first sunrise after they’re turned burns them up. It’s like accelerated evolution, taking out the weak the very first day.”