“So you’re telling me what?”

“The cat cloud won’t grow exponentially. And the only way it will pass to other species is if they bite their attacker during the attack and ingest vampire blood-that’s why you haven’t had any more human vampires.”

“Then why no dog vampires?” asked Cavuto.

“I’m guessing the cats tear them apart before they change,” said Foo. “I’m not a behavioral guy, but I’d guess there’s no brotherhood among vampires. If you’re a vampire cat, you’re essentially still a cat. If you’re a vampire dog, you’re still a dog.”

“Except for Chet,” said Rivera. “Who is kind of a cat plus something else.”

“Well, there are anomalies,” said Foo. “I told you, this is very fuzzy science. I don’t like it.”

Rivera’s phone chirped and he flipped it open and looked at the screen. “The Animals,” he said.

“And?” asked Cavuto.

“They’re at a butcher shop in Chinatown. They say they have a way to kill the vampires but they can’t find them.”

“We can take them Marvin. Tell them we’re on the way.”

Rivera held the phone like it was a foul dead thing. “I don’t know how.”

Foo snatched the phone out of Rivera’s hand, nine-keyed a message, hit SEND, and handed it back. “There, you’re on the way. I thought you said the only people who could fix this were in this room.”

“They are, and now they’re leaving.”

“Don’t forget your sun jackets,” said Jared. “We charged the batteries and everything. Do you think you’ll be able to turn them on, or should I come along to help?”

“He’s a kid.” Rivera grabbed Cavuto’s arm. “You can’t hit him.”

“That’s it, kid. You’re out of the tribe. If I hear you’ve touched a penis, even your own, I’m sending you to butch lesbian jail.”

“They have that?”

Rivera looked past his partner at Jared and nodded, slowly, seriously.

The burned-up white girl was not healing very quickly and Okata was running out of blood. All he seemed to do was watch her, sketch her, and squeeze his blood into her mouth. While her red hair had returned, and most of the ash had flaked away to reveal white skin underneath, she was still wraith-thin, and she only seemed to breathe two or three times an hour. During the day, she didn’t breathe at all, and he thought that she might be dead forever. She had not opened her eyes, and had made no sound except a low moan when he was feeding her, which subsided as soon as he stopped.

He was not feeling well himself, and on the second day he became light-headed and passed out on the mat beside her. If she did come alive as a demon, he’d be too weak to defend himself and she would drain the last drops of his life. Strangely, he was not okay with that. He needed to eat and recover and she needed more blood.

“We will have to find a balance,” he said to the white girl in Japanese. He had been talking to her more lately, and found that he no longer flinched at the sound of his voice inside the little apartment that had been without a human voice for so long. A balance.

When it was light and she had been still for an hour, he locked up his little apartment, took his sword, and walked into Chinatown, feeling ashamed of the little, old-man steps he was taking because he had become so weak. Perhaps he would actually go into a restaurant and have some tea and noodles, sit until his strength returned. Then he would find a better way to feed the burned-up white girl.

He only spoke a dozen words of Cantonese, despite having lived near Chinatown for forty years. They were the same dozen words he spoke in English. He told his students at the dojo it was because Bushido and the Japanese language were inseparable, but in fact, it was because he was stubborn and didn’t really like talking to people. His words were: hello, good-bye, yes, no, please, thank you, okay, sorry, and suck my dick. He made it a rule, however, to only say the last three in junction with please and/or thank you, and had only broken that rule once, when a thug in the Tenderloin tried to take his sword and Okata forgot to say please before fracturing the man’s skull with the sheathed katana. Sorry, he’d said.

It had been over a week since Okata had been to the dojo in Japantown. His students would think he was testing them, and when the time came to face them, he would say through his translator that they should learn to sit. Should learn patience. Should anticipate nothing. Anticipation was desire and didn’t the Buddha teach that desire was the cause of all suffering? Then he would proceed to trounce each and every one of them with the bamboo shinai as an object lesson in suffering. Thank you.

He didn’t care much for prepared Chinese food, but Japantown was too far to walk, and Japanese food in his neighborhood was too expensive. But noodles are noodles. He’d eat just enough to get his strength back, then he would buy a fish, maybe some beef to help replace his blood, and take them home and prepare them.

After he slurped down three bowls of soba and drank a pot of green tea at a restaurant named Soup, he made his way to the butcher. Near the old man who sat on a milk crate playing a Gaohu, a two-string, upright fiddle that approximated the sound of someone hurting a cat, the swordsman passed two policemen, who had paused as if considering whether they should give money to the old fiddler or whether it might not be better for everyone if they just Tased him. They smiled and nodded to Okata and he smiled back. They were mildly amused by the little man in the too-short plaid slacks, fluorescent orange socks, and an orange porkpie hat, who they had seen walking the City since they were boys. It never occurred to them that he was anything but an eccentric street person, or that the walking stick with which he measured his easy strolls, wasn’t a walking stick at all.

It took considerable pointing and pantomime to get the Chinese butcher to understand that he wanted to buy blood, but once he did, Okata was surprised to find out not only was it available, but it was available in flavors: pig, chicken, cow, and turtle. Turtle? Not for his burned-up white girl. How dare the butcher even suggest such a thing? She would have beef, and maybe a quart or two of pig, because Okata remembered reading once that human flesh was called “long pig” by Pacific island cannibals, so pig blood might be more to her liking.

The butcher taped the lids on eight, one-quart plastic containers containing all the nonturtle blood he had, then carefully stacked them in a shopping bag and handed them to a woman at the cash register. Okata paid her the amount on the register, picked up the bag, and was pocketing the change when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

He turned. No one there. Then he looked down: a tiny Chinese grandmother dressed in thug-wear that made her look vaguely like a hip-hop Yoda. She said something to him in Cantonese, then said something to the butcher, then to the woman behind the counter, who pointed at the shopping bag, then she said something else to Okata. Then she put a hand on his shopping bag.

“Thank you,” Okata said in Cantonese. He bowed slightly. She didn’t move.

Being confronted by a Chinese grandmother while shopping in Chinatown was not unusual. In fact, more than once he’d had to push through a dog pile of Sino-matrons to simply buy a decent cabbage, but this one seemed to want what Okata had clearly already purchased.

He smiled, bowed again, just slightly, said, “Good-bye,” and tried to push past her. She stepped in front of him, and he noticed, as he should have before, that a whole group of young men stepped in behind her; seven of them, Anglo, Hispanic, black, and Chinese, they all looked slightly stoned, but no less determined.

The old lady barked something at him in Cantonese and tried to grab his bag. Then the young men behind her stepped up.