“Okay, give me a dollar,” said the crackhead.

“Still don’t have any money,” Tommy said, turning his pants pockets inside out. A note from inspector 18 fluttered to the sidewalk. He heard movement above-claws on stone-and cringed. “Uh-oh.”

“Fifty cents,” said the crackhead. He put his hand in the pouch pocket of his hoody and pointed his finger like it was a gun. “I’ll shoot.”

“You have got to be the worst armed robber ever.”

The crackhead paused for a second and pulled his gun-posed hand out of his pocket. “I have my G.E.D.”

Tommy shook his head. He thought he’d left the cats behind, but the felines either still had some connection to him, or there were so many of them now that there was nowhere in the City you could go where they wouldn’t be hunting. He didn’t relish trying to explain the whole phenomenon to Jody. “What’s your name?” he said to the crackhead.

“I’m not telling you. You could turn me in.”

“Okay,” Tommy said. “I’ll call you Bob. Bob, have you ever seen a cat do that?” Tommy pointed up.

The crackhead looked up the side of the building to see a dozen cats coming down the bricks, face-down, toward him.

“No. Okay, I’m not robbing you anymore,” said the tweaker, his attention taken by the clutter of vampire cats descending on him. “Have a nice evening.”

“Sorry,” said Tommy, meaning it. He turned and jogged up the street to put some distance between himself and the screaming, which only lasted a few seconds. He looked back to see the crackhead gone. Well, not really gone, but reduced to a pile of gray powder amidst his empty clothing.

“It’s how he would have wanted to go,” Tommy said to himself.

He would have thought the cats would go for the two in the alley, but now they were taking the people right out on the open street. He was going to have to get Jody and talk her into leaving the City, like they should have in the first place.

He jogged the twelve blocks to the loft, careful not to run so fast that he might be noticed. He tried to look like a guy who was just late getting home to his girlfriend, which, in a way, he was. He waited outside the door for a moment before pushing the buzzer. What was he going to say? What if she didn’t want to see him? He didn’t have any experience to draw on. She’d been the first girl he’d had sex with while sober. She was the first girl he’d ever lived with. She was the first to take a shower with him, to drink his blood, to turn him into a vampire, and to throw him broken and naked through a second-story window. She was his first love, really. What if she sent him away?

He listened, looked at the plywood still over the windows, sniffed the air. He could hear people inside, at least two, but they weren’t talking. There were machines running, lights buzzing, the smell of blood and rat whiz wafting under the door. It really would have felt better if there were romance in the air, but, well, okay.

He ran his fingers through his hair, snatched away the last strands of fishing line trailing from his clothes like errant crystal pubes, and pushed the button.

Foo had just placed the vials of Abby’s blood in the centrifuge when the buzzer on the intercom went off. He flipped the switch, then looked over at Abby, lying on the bed. She looked so peaceful, undead and drugged and not talking. Almost happy, despite having a tail. But the police wouldn’t understand. He ran into the living room and shook Jared out of the game-induced trance he had entered on his game console. Foo could hear the death-metal sound track coming from Jared’s headphones, tinny screeching and tiny chainsaw rhythms, like angry chipmunks humping a kazoo inside a sealed mayonnaise jar.

“Whaaa?” said Jared, yanking out his earbuds.

“Someone’s at the door,” whispered Foo. “Hide Abby.”

“Hide her? Where? The closet is full of medical crap.”

“Between the mattress and the box springs. She’s skinny. You can mash her in there.”

“How will she breathe?”

“She doesn’t need to breathe.”

“Sweet.”

Jared went for the bedroom, Foo for the intercom.

“Who is it?” he said, keying the button. He really should have installed a camera. They were easy to wire and he got a discount at Stereo World. Stupid.

“Let me in, Steve. It’s Tommy.”

Foo thought for a second he might pee a little. He hadn’t finished building the high-intensity UV laser, and Abby hadn’t worn her sun jacket. He was defenseless.

“I can see why you might be mad,” said Foo, “but it was Abby’s idea. I wanted to turn you back to human, like you wanted.” Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. Tommy was going to kill him. It would be humiliating. The guy didn’t even have an undergrad degree. He was going to be murdered by an undead Anglo liberal-arts tard who quoted poetry.

The buzzer went off again. Foo jumped and keyed the intercom.

“I didn’t want to do it. I told her it was cruel to put you guys in there.”

“I’m not mad, Steve. I need to see Jody.”

“She’s not here.”

“I don’t believe you. Let me in.”

“I can’t, I have things to do. Scientific things that you wouldn’t understand. You have to go away.” Okay, now he was a tard.

“I can come in, Steve, under the door or through the cracks around the windows, but when I go back to solid, I’ll be naked. Nobody wants that.”

“You don’t know how to do that.”

“I learned.”

“Oh, that’s cool,” said Foo. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Could he get the door shut and duct taped before Tommy could ooze in. The great room was already taped up to contain the rat fog.

“Buzz me in, Foo. I have to see Jody and I have to feed. You still have some of those blood pouches, right?”

“Nope. Sorry, we’re all out. And Jody’s not here. And we’ve installed sunlamps all over the loft, Tommy. You’d be toast.” He did have some blood bags. In fact, he still had some of the ones with the sedative in it that he’d used to knock Abby out.

“Steve, please, I’m hungry and hurt and I’ve been living in a basement with a bunch of vampire cats and if I turn to mist my new outfit is going to get stolen while I’m up there snapping your neck with my junk hanging out.”

Foo was trying to think of a better bluff when a dark sleeve shot by him and he heard the door lock buzz downstairs. He looked up at Jared. “What the fuck have you done?”

“Hi,” Tommy said in Foo’s ear.

“He sounded so sad,” Jared said.

At sundown the three awoke inside a titanium vault under the main cabin and checked the monitors that were wired like a nervous system to every extremity of the black ship.

“Clear,” said the male. He was tall and blond and he’d been lean in life, so he remained so, would remain so, forever. He wore a black silk kimono.

The two females cranked open the hatch and climbed out into what appeared to be a walk-in refrigerator. The male closed the hatch, pushed a button concealed behind a shelf, and a stainless-steel panel slid across the hatch. They walked out of the fridge, into the empty galley.

“I hate this,” said the African female. She had been Ethiopian in life, descended from royalty, with a high forehead and wide eyes that slanted like a cat’s. “It was to this face that Solomon lost his heart,” Elijah had told her, holding her face in his hands as she died. And so he called her Makeda, after the legendary Queen of Sheba. She didn’t remember her real name, for she had worn it for only eighteen years, and she had been Makeda for seven centuries.

“It’s different,” said the other female, a dark-haired beauty who had been born on the island of Corsica a hundred years before Napoleon. Her name had been Isabella. Elijah had always called her Belladonna. She answered to Bella.

“It’s not that different,” said Makeda, leading the way up a flight of steps to the cockpit. “It seems like we just did this. We just did this-when?”