Bite Me

to return to the hotel every morning with nothing. Apparently, Tommy had limped down an alley and vanished. She’d checked everyplace in the City that she’d ever taken him, every place he’d ever been, as far as she knew, and still there was no evidence of his having been there. She’d hoped she would have some special vampire “sixth sense” to help her find him, like the old vampire who had turned her seemed to have had, but no.
    Now, she was returning to her room at the Fairmont for the seventh morning. And for the seventh morning she would put out the “Do Not Disturb” signs, lock the door, put on her sweats, drink a pouch of the blood she kept locked in a mini-cooler, brush her teeth, then crawl under the bed and go over a mental map of the City until dawn put her out. (Since she was technically dead at dawn, sleeping on top of a comfortable mattress was a dangerous luxury, and by climbing under the bed she put one more layer between her and sunlight, should a nosy maid somehow find a way into her room.)
    Part of her new pre-dawn ritual had been returning to the hotel a little later each morning; like the skydiver who will let himself fall closer and closer to earth before pulling the ripcord to boost the adrenaline rush just a little more. The last two mornings she’d just been entering the hotel when the alarm watch she wore, which was set to go off ten minutes before sunrise on any given day, based on an electronic almanac, had started beeping. She’d bought one for Tommy, too, and wondered if he was still wearing his. As she strode down California Street, she tried to remember if he’d been wearing it when they cut him out of the bronze shell.
    Two blocks from the Fairmont her alarm watch went off and she couldn’t help but smile a little at the thrill. She picked up her pace, figuring that she’d still be safely inside her room with time to spare before sunup, but she might have to forgo the sweats and the blood snack.
    As she came up the steps into the lobby she smelled cigar, and Aramis cologne, and the combination sent an electric chill of alarm up her spine before she could identify the danger. Cops. Rivera and Cavuto. Rivera smelled of Aramis, Cavuto of cigars. She stopped, her boot heels skidding a little on the marble steps.
    There they were, both at the front desk, but a bellman was leading them to the elevator. He was taking them to her room.
    How? she thought. Doesn’t matter . It was getting light. She checked her watch: three minutes to find shelter. She backed away from the door, out onto the sidewalk, then began to run.
    Normally she would have paced herself so someone didn’t notice the redhead in boots and jeans running faster than an Olympic sprinter, but they’d just have to tell their friends and not be believed. She needed cover, now.
    She was a block and a half down Mason Street when she came to an alley. She’d survived her first night as a vampire under a Dumpster. Maybe she could survive the day inside one. But there was someone down there, the kitchen crew of a restaurant, outside smoking. On she ran.
    No alleys in the next two blocks, then a narrow space between buildings. Maybe she could shimmy down thereand crawl in a basement window. She crawled on a narrow, plywood gate and had one foot down before a pit bull came storming down the corridor. She leapt out onto the sidewalk and started running again. What kind of psychopath uses a two-foot-wide space between buildings as a dog run? There should be laws.
    This was Nob Hill, all open, with wide boulevard streets, a once-grand neighborhood now made incredibly irritating to a vampire in need of shelter. She rounded the corner at Jackson Street, snapping a heel off her right boot as she did. She should have worn sneakers, she knew, but wearing the high, expensive leather boots made her feel a little like a superhero. It turned out that turning your ankle hurts like hell, even if you’re a superhero.
    She was up on her toes now, running, limping toward Jackson Square, the oldest neighborhood in San Francisco that had survived the great quake and fire of 1906. There were all kinds of little cubbyholes and basement shops in the old brick buildings down there. One building even had the ribs of a sailing ship in its basement, a remnant built over when the Gold Rush left so many ships abandoned at the waterfront that the City literally expanded over them.
    One minute. The shadow of the Transamerica Pyramid was lying