Bite Me

handed him a bottle of water. “Chill, Your Majesty, we’ve done this before.”
    “Not like this. Not like this,” said the Emperor. “It’s a storm of evil. Lock the door.”
    Lash rolled his eyes. They really had done this before, and the door being locked or unlocked wasn’t going to make much difference if a vampire was following the old man.
    “We got your back, Highness,” Lash said.
    “Lock the door,” the Emperor moaned, pointing through the window. A fog bank was moving across the parking lot, with rather more intent than one usually expects from a fog bank. A high, yowling screech seemed to come out of the fog in a stream, as if it had been sampled, amplified, and duplicated a thousand times.
    The Animals moved to the glass.
    “Lock the door, Lash,” Clint said. Clint never gave orders.
    The edge of the fog bank was boiling with shapes, claws, ears, eyes, teeth, tails—cats formed of fog, rolling in a wave over one another, some materializing partially, only to evaporate and roll back into the cloud, their red eyes moving through the cloud like embers out of a firestorm.
    “Whoa,” said Drew.
    “Whoa,” repeated the others.
    “Okay, that is different,” said Troy Lee.
    “My friends all over the City are missing,” the Emperor said. “Street people. They’re gone. Just their clothes and gray dust,” the Emperor said. “The cats are killing everything in their way.”
    “That is fucked up,” said Jeff.
    “Deeply, deeply fucked up,” said Barry, dragging one of the heavy wooden order dividers off the register and brandishing it like a club.
    “Lock the fucking door, Lash!” Clint screamed.
    “Jesus hates it when you use the f -word,” said Gustavo, the Mexican porter, who was Catholic and liked to remind Clint when his Jesus was slipping.
    The fog washed against the window and claw marks etched the Plexiglas instantly to frost, as if it had all been sanded. The noise was like, well, it was like a thousand vampire cats clawing on Plexiglas—it made their teeth hurt.
    “Did anyone bring weapons?” Troy Lee asked.
    “I brought some weed,” Drew said.
    A cat’s claw of fog crept under the door and raked the toe of Lash’s sneaker. He snapped the lock shut, pulled out the key, and backed away.
    “Okay, break time,” he said. “Crew meeting in the walk-in.”
    JARED
    Across town, in the bedroom of a fashionable loft, in the fashionable SOMA neighborhood, aspiring rat-shagger, Jared Whitewolf, looked up from rubbing his sore ankle to see a completely naked redhead walk into the room. Her hair hung to her waist in a great curling cape, framing her figure, which was perfect and as white as a marble statue. She held Jared’s double-edged dagger in her right hand.
    Jared backed up onto the bed in a reverse crab walk. “I, I, I, it, it, it—Abby made me—”
    “Chill, Scissorhands,” Jody said. “You’d better find some of those blood bags of Steve’s fast, unless you’d like to finish high school as a pile of greasy dust. Countess is thirsty.”

8
Being the Chronicles of Abby Normal, in the Double-doomed Doghouse of Despair
    D o the condemned in hell know the suffering that is a whole day of mom-guilt heaped like steaming piles of bat guano upon my spiky magenta coif? (I went with magenta spikes with electric violet tips to express my outrage at being dragged from my home and imprisoned with the cruel Mombot and my crapacious little sister, Ronnie.) Evidently, Mother feels that we were too young to move in together only a week after meeting, and live in a stolen apartment with two of the undead and their stupid amounts of cash. Although she doesn’t really know about the undead or the cash parts, but she made her point.
    ’Kayso, I had like put on my red tartan wedding gown with the black veil and resolved myself to an all-day power-pout in the corner of the living room, coming up only to text Foo messages of my agony of missing him and changethe channel and whatnot, when Jared called from the land-line at the love lair.
    So I’m all, “Speak, corpse-fluffer.”
    And Jared is all, “OMFG! The Countess is out, and she was naked, but now she’s not, and she totally got blood all over your leather corset, and you have to come right now because the rats are freaking out and we need a hacksaw and a file.”
    And I’m all, “Uh-oh.”
    And Jared is all, “I know. I know. OMG! OMG!”
    And I’m all, “Is she pissed?” Sounding way more chill than I felt.
    And