Bite Me

pencil and began to sketch her for a print. He had very much admired the great cape of red curls that streamed out behind her when he’d seen her on the street, and he was sorry that all but a few strands had burned away in the sun. A shame. Perhaps he could draw the red curls in anyway. Make them swirl around the blackened rictus like one of Hokusai’s waves.
    He knew what she was, of course. He was still healing from his encounter with the vampire cats, and it took no little bit of sketching to fill in the details, especially as her fangs were pointing prominently at his ceiling rightnow and they were far too long and sharp to be those of a normal burned-up white girl. He filled three pages with sketches, experimenting with angles and composition, but on the fourth page he found that a sadness had overcome him that he could not chase away with the moment created in making a drawing.
    Katusumi retrieved his wakizashi short sword from the stand on his work table, unsheathed it, and knelt by the futon. He bowed deeply, then put the point of the sword on the pad of his left thumb and cut. He held his thumb over her open mouth and the dark blood dripped over her teeth and lips.
    Would she be like the cats? Savage? A monster? He held the razor-edged wakizashi ready in his right hand, should a demon awake. But if he’d been able to raise his beloved Yuriko, even as a demon, wouldn’t he have? All the years that had passed, kendo training, drawing, carving, meditating, walking the streets unafraid, alone, hadn’t they all been about that? About making Yuriko live? Or not living without her?
    When the burned-up girl jerked with a great, rasping intake of breath, cinders cracked off her ribs and peppered the yellow futon and water began to flow from the swordsman’s eyes.
    RIVERA AND CAVUTO
    Marvin the cadaver dog took them to the Wine Country. There they found Bummer and Lazarus, the Emperor’sdogs, guarding a Dumpster in an alley behind an abandoned building. Marvin pawed the Dumpster, and tried to stay on task while the Boston terrier sniffed his junk and the golden retriever looked around, a little embarrassed.
    Nick Cavuto held the lid, ready to lift it. “Maybe we should call the Wong kid and see if our sunlight jackets are done, then open it.”
    “It’s daylight,” said Rivera. “Even if there are, uh, creatures in there, they’ll be immobile.” Rivera still had a very difficult time saying the word “vampires” out loud. “Marvin says there’s a body in there, we need to look.”
    Cavuto shrugged, lifted the lid of the Dumpster and braced himself for a wave of rotten meat smell, but there was none.
    “Empty.”
    Bummer barked. Marvin pawed at the side of the Dumpster. Lazarus chuffed, which was dog for, “Duh. Look behind it.”
    Rivera looked in. Other than a couple of broken wine bottles and the rice part of a taco combo plate, there was nothing in the Dumpster, yet Marvin still pawed at the steel, which was the signal he had been trained to give when he’d found a corpse.
    “Maybe we should give Marvin a biscuit to reset him or something,” said Rivera.
    “No corpse, no biscuit, that’s the rule,” said Cavuto. “We all have to live by it.”
    At the mention of a biscuit both Bummer and Marvin stopped what they were doing, sat, looked dutiful andcontrite, and gave Rivera the “I need and deeply deserve a biscuit” look. Frustrated with what biscuit whores his cohorts were, Lazarus went to the side of the Dumpster and started pawing the space between it and the wall, then tried to stuff his muzzle in behind it.
    Cavuto shrugged, pulled on a pair of form-fitting mechanics gloves from his jacket pocket, and pulled the cement blocks from under the Dumpster’s wheels. Rivera watched in horror as the realization hit that he was probably going to get Dumpster schmutz, or worse, on his expensive Italian suit.
    “Man up, Rivera,” Cavuto said. “There’s police work to be done.”
    “Shouldn’t we call some uniforms in to do it? I mean, we’re detectives.”
    Cavuto stood up and looked at his partner. “You really believe the movies when James Bond kills thirty guys hand to hand, blows up the secret lair, gets set on fire, then escapes under water and his tux doesn’t even get wrinkled, don’t you?”
    “You can’t just buy one of those off the rack,” Rivera said. “It’s a high-tech fabric.”
    “Just give me a hand with this thing, would you?”
    Once the Dumpster was in