Bite Me

noob. You need to grow into your powers.”
    “Ha,” said Abby. “You speak like a mortal who can’t possibly grasp the depth of the dark gift. I jumped over a car on the way here. And I totally ran faster than the F train. My Chucks are still warm with residual speediness. Go ahead, feel them. Lick them, if you must. Even now I can see this aura thing around you, which is like bright pink, and doesn’t go with your fly hair and manly bulge.”
    Foo looked down. Yes, his bulge was betraying him. He said, “You should take it slow, Abby.”
    “Oh yeah, watch this!” In an instant she was across the loft at the kitchen counter, and in another instant she had shot back across the living room and hit the plywood covering the windows.
    There was nothing Foo could do. She might have lifted the couch, leapt up fifteen feet, and grabbed the open ceiling beams, or even turned to mist, if she’d figured out how to do that, but what she had decided to do to show her powers was blast through the quarter-inch plywood and land catlike on the street below. And that would have been badass, to be sure.
    What Abby didn’t know was that while she’d been gone, the window guy had called, and he wouldn’t be able to come out to fix the windows for two weeks, so Foo had replaced the quarter-inch plywood with three-quarter-inch plywood, and instead of it just being tacked at the corners with small nails, he had screwed it down with stainless-steel screws, so as not to leave any vapor gaps for the rats to make an escape.
    Foo cringed and covered his eyes.
    She was fast, and preternaturally strong, but ninety pounds of vampire is still only ninety pounds.
    Did she hit the plywood Wile E. Coyote style, then slide down? Wah-wah-wah. Oh no.
    She hit the plywood, which bent precipitously, then splintered a bit before springing back and rocketing her all the way across the loft to the back wall, and there, she made a petite Goth girl impression in the sheet rock before falling forward, flat on her face, and saying, “Fucksocks,” into the rug.
    “You okay?” asked Foo.
    “Broken,” said Abby into the rug.
    He knelt over her, afraid to turn her head to see what damage she might have done. “What’s broken?”
    “Everything.”
    “I’ll get you some blood out of the fridge. You should heal pretty fast.”
    “’Kay,” said Abby, still face-down, not having moved since the initial impact. “Don’t look at me, okay?”
    “No way,” said Foo, already in the kitchen. He took one of the plastic pouches of blood from the fridge and worked it back and forth. “Just a second. Don’t move, Abs, you might have broken bones.” He quick-stepped into the bedroom, grabbed a capped syringe off the cabinet where he kept the chemicals, flipped off the cap, and injected the sedative into the bag.
    “Here you go, baby. Just drink this and you’ll be fine.”
    Ten minutes later he heard someone coming up the stairs and realized that Abby had forgotten to lock the door.
    Jared bounded into the loft, stopped when he saw Foo kneeling over the prostrate Abby, who had a sizable pool of blood around her head, and began screaming.
    “Stop screaming!” barked Foo. “It’s not her blood.”
    Jared stopped screaming. “What did you do to her?”
    “Nothing, she’s fine. Would you move the maze off the bed and help me get her in there?”
    Sometime during the debacle, Abby’s skirt had flipped up and Jared pointed at an oblong lump that ran across her bottom and partly down her leg under the black leotard.
    “What’s that? Did she poop herself?”
    “No,” said Foo, wishing he didn’t know what it was, but he had already checked for himself. “It’s a tail.”
    “Whoa. Weird.”
    “Yeah,” said Foo.

17
Wide Awake in Sucker-Free
    O kata scraped the last few drops of blood from the container into the burned-up white girl’s mouth. He’d managed to save two of the eight quart containers, but it wasn’t going to be enough, he could tell, and after the fight at the butcher shop and his escape, he knew he wasn’t strong enough to give her any more of his own blood. She’d need more, and he was going to have to start thinking of her as something besides the “burned-up white girl.” She was starting to resemble a real person now, more than a person-shaped cinder. A very old, very scary dead person, to be sure, but a person nonetheless. Her red hair nearly covered the pillow now, and she’d moved, if only a little, closing her