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Pound Outlet. Buy one, get one free at Pounds-n-Stuff.
    I know. WTF? Privacy much? Pounding on the love lair.
    JODY
    It was like perpetual “not quite lunchtime” in her cubicle at the insurance company, back in ancient history, three months ago, before she was a vampire. Every sundown, for about fifteen seconds, Jody awoke and panicked overthe hunger and constraint until she was able to will herself into mist and float in what she thought of as the blood dream, a pleasant, ethereal haze that lasted until sunup, when her body went solid inside the brass shell and for all practical purposes, she became dead meat until sundown came round again. But sometime around the end of the first week of freakouts, she realized that she was touching Tommy. That he was in the bronze shell with her, and unlike her, he couldn’t go to mist. She should have taught him, she knew, just as the old vampyre had taught her, but now it was too late. Maybe, since she couldn’t move enough to tap a message with her finger in Morse code, let alone talk, she could reach out to him, somehow connect with him telepathically. Who knew what kind of powers she might have that the old vampyre had forgotten to tell her about. She concentrated, pushed, even tried to send some sort of pulse to the places where their skin touched, but all she got back was an extended, jagged, electric panic.
    Poor Tommy. He was there all right. Alive and mercilessly aware. She tried to reach him until she could bear the weight of her own hunger and panic no longer. “Abby, if I ever get out of here, your narrow ass is mine,” she thought before fading to mist and blissful escape.
    INSPECTOR RIVERA
    It wasn’t a homicide, strictly speaking, because there was no body, but there was a traffic enforcement officer missingin action, and it had involved the Emperor and a certain block of light industry buildings and artist lofts south of Market Street that Rivera had flagged for notice if anything happened there. And something had definitely happened here, but what?
    He lifted the collar of the empty traffic officer’s uniform with the tip of his pen to confirm that the fine gray ash was not on the sidewalk underneath, and it wasn’t. Inside the uniform, on the sidewalk at the cuffs and collar of the uniform, yes, but not on the sidewalk under the uniform.
    “I don’t see a crime,” said Nick Cavuto, Rivera’s partner, who, if he’d been a flavor of ice cream, would have been Gay Linebacker Crunch. “Sure, something happened here, but it could have just been kids. The Emperor is clearly nuts. Totally unreliable.”
    Rivera stood up and looked around at the blood-soaked street, the ashes, the still-flashing light on the parking cart, and then at the Emperor and his dogs, who had their noses pressed to the back window of their brown, unmarked Ford sedan. Rivera’s flavor was Low-fat Spanish Cynic in an Armani cone. “He said cats did this.”
    “Well there you go, an Animal Control issue. I’ll call them.” Cavuto made a great show of flipping open his mobile and punching at the numbers with his thick sausage fingers.
    Rivera shook his head and crouched over the empty uniform again. He knew what the powder was, and Cavuto knew what the powder was. Sure, it had taken thema couple of months, and a lot of unsolved murders, and watching the old vampire take enough gunfire to kill a platoon of men, only to survive to kill a half-dozen more people, but they had finally caught on.
    “It wasn’t cats,” Rivera said.
    “They promised to leave,” Cavuto said, pausing in his display of percussive dialing. “The creepy girl said they left town.” They, meaning Jody and Tommy, who had promised to leave town and never return. “The Emperor said he saw the old vampire get on a ship—a whole bunch of them sail away.”
    “But he’s totally unreliable,” Rivera said.
    “Most of the time. This is not—”
    Rivera held up a finger to stop him. They had agreed never to use the