Bite Me

long across the neighborhood ahead like the needle of a deadly sundial. Jody did a final kick-sprint, snapping off her other boot heel as she did. She scanned the streets ahead for windows, doors, trying to sense movement inside, looking for stillness, privacy.
    There! On the left, a door below street level, the stair-case hidden by a wrought-iron railing covered in jasmine. Ten more steps and I’m there, she thought. She saw herself jumping the rail, shouldering through the door, and diving under the first thing that would shelter her from the light.
    She took the final three steps and leapt just as the sun broke the horizon. She went limp in the air, fell to the sidewalk, short of the stairwell, and skidded on her shoulder and face. As her eyes fluttered, the last thing she saw were a pair of orange socks right in front of her, then she went out and began to smolder in the sunlight.

12
Alchemy
    T he Chinese herb shop smelled like licorice and dried monkey butt. The Animals were piled into the narrow aisle between counters, trying to hide behind Troy Lee’s grandmother and failing spectacularly. Behind a glass case, the shopkeeper looked older and more spooky than Grandma Lee, which none of them thought possible until now. It was like he’d been carved from an apple, then left on the windowsill to dry for a hundred years.
    The walls of the shop were lined, floor to ceiling, with little drawers of dark wood, each with a small bronze frame and a white card with Chinese characters written on it. The old man stood behind glass cases that held all manner of desiccated plant and animal bits, from whole sea horses and tiny birds, to shark parts and scorpion tails, to odd spiky bits that looked like they’d been flown in from another planet.
    “What’s that?” Drew asked Troy Lee from under a veil of stringy blond hair. He pointed to a wrinkled black thing.
    Troy Lee said something in Cantonese to Grandma, who said something to the shopkeeper, who barked something back.
    “Bear penis,” said Troy Lee.
    “Should we score some?” asked Drew.
    “For what?” asked Troy.
    “An emergency,” said Drew.
    “Sure, okay,” said Troy Lee, then he said something to Grandma in Cantonese. There was an exchange with the shopkeeper, after which Troy said, “How much do you want? It’s fifty bucks a gram.”
    “Whoa,” said Barry. “That’s expensive.”
    “He says it’s the best dried bear penis you can buy,” said Troy Lee.
    “Okay,” said Drew. “A gram.”
    Troy passed the order through Grandma to the shopkeeper. He snipped a tip off a bear penis, weighed it, and placed it on the pile of herbs in the sheet of paper he had laid on the counter for Drew. Grandma’s paper was much larger, and the shopkeeper had been tottering around the shop for half an hour gathering the ingredients. At one point when the old man was up on the top of the ladder at the far back corner of the shop, the Animals had leapt the counter and laced their arms together as a human rescue net, which served only to scare the bejeezus out of the shopkeeper andset Grandma off in a tirade of Cantonese scolding, to which they all responded like dogs, paying her rapt attention and tilting their heads as if they actually had some idea of what the fuck she was talking about.
    Lately the Animals had been all about saving lives. Most of the time, guys their age would be fairly convinced of their immortality, or at least oblivious of their mortality, but since being murdered by a blue hooker turned vampire, then resurrected as vampires, then restored to living by Foo Dog’s genetic alchemy, they had been feeling what they could only describe as Jesusy.
    “I’m feeling extra Jesusy,” said Jeff, the tall jock.
    “I always feel extra Jesusy,” said Clint, who always did.
    “Yeah, extra Jesusy, bitches! Let’s go save some mother-fuckers!” Lash had shouted, which had sort of embarrassed everyone a little, since they had been sitting around a table in Starbucks at the time, discussing the attack of the cat cloud and the information they’d exchanged with the two homicide cops. “It’s up to us,” Lash added softly, sort of slinking into his hoody and putting on his shades.
    Now they watched as the old shopkeeper folded up Grandma Lee’s bundle of ingredients and tucked in the paper so it was as tight as a toothpick spliff, then flipped the package over and wrote some Chinese characters on the back with a carpenter’s pencil.
    “What’s