You Suck: A Love Story

cut now. Even the tattoos she’d had done in her early days in Vegas were gone.
    I’m alive, she thought. Then: And I’m going to be alive forever. Then: And I’m going to need some fucking money.
    She ran to Lash’s bedroom to where she’d left her makeup case. It was gone. Her money was gone!
    She ran out of the apartment and down the steps like she might see a green trail of bills blowing in the wind in the direction her money had escaped, but once on the street, she headed for the only place she knew, toward the Marina Safeway. She got half a block before the Mercedes pulled up and the electric window rolled down.
    “Hey, you need a ride? It’s a little chilly out here for that outfit.”
    His name had been David, and he did something that had to do with moving money around. What ever it was, it must have paid well. He was wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit and his pent house apartment on Russian Hill looked out onGolden GateBridge and the massive dome at thePalaceofFine Arts.
    He’d given her his coat to wear up in the elevator. It was in the elevator that the hunger had come upon her. Poor David. They hadn’t even talked price before she’d had him bent over the green glass vanity in the bathroom, drinking his life away.
    “Oops.” The difference, she realized, between what had happened to her and what had happened to David had been the bloody kiss she’d taken from Tommy. But for a kiss, she, too, would be a pile of dust. There should be a song like that, she thought. At least she’d learned before she took her victims.
    Now she swept the last of David into the corner, then scraped him up with a piece of cardboard from his shirt drawer and dumped him into the wastebasket. Then she slipped into the tub full of bubbles and began to scrub off her charred skin.
    She wouldn’t be able to stay long. David had been married or had a girlfriend. Blue had found a whole closet full of women’s clothes-expensive clothes, and the woman would probably be back. Of course, this would make a great base of operations, maybe she could just wait for the wife to return and sweep her into the wastebasket with David.
    Blue leaned back and closed her eyes, listened to the bubbles popping, the wires humming through the building, the traffic out on the streets, to fishing boats leaving the wharf-then a sudden intake of breath from the living room, then another, deeper gasp as the second one found life, then a long man-scream.
    The dead Animals she’d collected were coming back to life.
    “Sit tight, boys,” Blue said. “Mama’s just going to get cleaned up and put on a new dress, then we’ll go get you something to eat and pick up my money.”
    She ran a sponge over her arm and smiled. She really could be Snow White now. One dwarf at a time, she thought.
    E lijah Ben Sapir had roamed the planet for eight hundred and seventeen years. In that time he had seen empires rise and fall, miracles and massacres, ages of ignorance and ages of enlightenment: the full spectrum of mankind’s cruelty and kindness. He had seen all manner of freakishness, from the perversions of nature to the perversions of mind, twisted, beautiful, terrifying: he thought he had seen it all.
    But for all of his years, and all the acuity of perception enabled by his vampire senses, he had never seen a huge shaved cat in a red sweater, and sitting there in his newly washed yellow tracksuit, still warm from the dryer and smelling of soap and fabric softener, he smiled.
    “Hey, kitty,” the old vampire said.
    The huge cat eyed him suspiciously from across the loft. The cat could sense that he was a predator, just as Elijah could sense that the cat had been prey to a vampire. Kitty treat.
    “I’m not going to eat you, kitty. I’ve fed quite enough.”
    It was true. Elijah was feeling a little bloated from trying to keep the body count up. Perhaps he should just kill the next few, not feed. But no, the police wouldn’t know it was a vampire then, and there’d be no joy in terrorizing the fledgling. He just wasn’t ready to feed yet. There was someone in the stairwell right now, he could hear her breathing and smell patchouli and clove cigarette odor wafting under the door.
    Soon enough, he thought.
    “Perhaps we’ll find something for you to eat, hey, kitty?”
    Elijah vaulted off the bar stool and began opening cupboards. In the third one he found pouches of Tender Vittles. He took a bowl from the cupboard that looked as if it had never