Jody looked up to see a grizzled old man in an overcoat coming toward her wearing a saucepan on his head and carrying a wickedly pointed wooden sword. A golden retriever trotted along beside him, a smaller saucepan strapped to his head and two garbage-can lids strapped to his sides, giving the impression of a compact furry Viking ship.

"b.u.mmer, come back here."

The little dog backed away a few more steps, then turned and ran back to the man. Jody noticed that the little dog had a miniature pie pan strapped over his ears with a rubber band.

The old man picked up the terrier in his free hand and trotted up to Jody. "I'm very sorry," he said. "The troops are girded for battle, but I fear they are a bit too eager to engage. Are you all right?"

Jody smiled. "I'm fine. Just a little startled."

The old man bowed. "Allow me to introduce myself..."

"You're the Emperor, aren't you?" Jody had been in the City for five years. She'd heard about the Emperor, but she'd only seen him from a distance.

"At your service," said the Emperor. The terrier growled suspiciously and the Emperor shoved the little dog, head first, into the oversized pocket of his overcoat, then b.u.t.toned the flap. m.u.f.fled growls emanated from the pocket.

"I apologize for my charge. He's long on courage, but rather short on manners. This is Lazarus."

Jody nodded to the retriever, who let out a slight growl and backed away a step. The garbage-can lids rattled on the sidewalk.

"Hi. I'm Jody. Pleased to meet you."

"I hope you will forgive my presumption," the Emperor said, "but I don't think it's safe for a young woman to be out on the street at night. Particularly in this neighborhood."

"Why this neighborhood?"

The Emperor moved closer and whispered. "I'm sure that you've noticed that the men and I are dressed for battle. We are hunting a vicious, murdering fiend that has been stalking the City. I don't mean to alarm you, but we last saw him on this very street. In fact, he killed a friend of mine right across the street not two nights ago."

"You saw him?" Jody asked. "Did you call the police?"

"The police will be of no help," the Emperor said. "This is not the run-of-the-mill scoundrel that we are used to in the City. He's a vampire." The Emperor lifted his wooden sword and tested the point against the tip of his finger.

Jody was shaken. She tried to calm herself, but the fear showed on her face.

"I've frightened you," the Emperor said.

"No no, I'm fine. It's just... Your Majesty, there are no such things as vampires."

"As you wish," the Emperor said. "But I think it would be prudent for you to wait until daylight to do your business."

"I need to do my laundry or I won't have any clean clothes for tomorrow."

"Then allow us to escort you."

"No, really, Your Majesty, I'll be fine. By the way, where is the nearest Laundromat?"

"There is one not far from here, but it's in the Tenderloin. Even during the day you wouldn't be safe alone. I really must insist that you wait, my dear. Perhaps by then we will have exterminated the fiend."

"Well," Jody said, "if you insist. This is my apartment, right here." She dug the key out of her jeans and opened the door. She turned back to the Emperor. "Thank you."

"Safety first," the Emperor said. "Sleep well." The little dog growled in his pocket.

Jody went inside and closed the door, then waited until she heard the Emperor walk away. She waited another five minutes and went back onto the street.

She shouldered the laundry and headed toward the Tenderloin, thinking, This is great. How long before the police actually listen to the Emperor? Tommy and I are going to have to move and we haven't even decorated yet. And I hate doing laundry. I hate it. I'm sending our laundry out if Tommy won't do it. And we're going to have a cleaning lady some nice, dependable woman who will come in after dark. And I'm not buying toilet paper. I don't use it and I'm not going to buy it. And something has to be done about this a.s.shole vampire. G.o.d, I hate doing laundry.

She had gone two blocks when a man stepped out of a doorway in front of her. "Hey momma, you need some help."

She jumped in his face and shouted, "f.u.c.k off, horndog!" with such viciousness that he screamed and leaped back into the doorway, then meekly called "Sorry" after her as she pa.s.sed.

She thought, I'm not sorting. It all goes in warm. I don't care if the whites do go gray; I'm not sorting. And how do I know how to get out bloodstains? Who am I? Miss Household Hints? G.o.d, I hate laundry.

The clothes jumped and played and dived over each other like fabric dolphins. Jody sat on a folding table across from the dryer watching the show and thinking about the Emperor's warning. He'd said, "I don't think it's safe for a young woman to be out on the street at night." Jody agreed. Not long ago she would have been terrified if she'd found herself in the Tenderloin at night. She couldn't even remember coming down here during the day. Where had that fear gone? What had happened to her that she could face off with a vampire, bite off his fingers, and carry a dead body up a flight of stairs and shove it under the bed without even a flinch? Where was the fear and loathing? She didn't miss it, she just wondered what had happened to it.

It wasn't as if she were without fear. She was afraid of daylight, afraid of the police discovering her, and of Tommy rejecting her and leaving her alone. New fears and familiar fears, but there was nothing in the dark that frightened her, not the future, not even the old vampire and she knew now, having tasted his blood, that he was old, very old. She saw him as an enemy, and her mind casted for strategies to defeat him, but she was not really afraid of him anymore: curious, but not afraid.

The dryer stopped-fabric dolphins dropped and died as if caught in tuna nets. Jody jumped off the table, opened the dryer, and was feeling the clothes for dampness when she heard footsteps on the sidewalk outside the Laundromat. She turned to see the tall black man she had chased into the doorway coming into the Laundromat, followed by two shorter men. All three wore silver L.A. Raiders jackets, high-top shoes, and evil grins.

Jody turned back to the dryer and started stuffing her clothes into the trash bag. She thought, I should be folding these.

"Yo, b.i.t.c.h," the tall man said.

Jody looked to the back of the Laundromat. The only door was in the front, behind the three men. She turned and looked up at them. "How about those Raiders?" she said with a smile. She felt a pressure in the roof of her mouth: the fangs extending.

The three men split up and moved around the folding table to surround her. In another life, this had been her worst nightmare. In this life she just smiled as two of them grabbed her arms from behind.

She saw a bead of sweat on the tall man's temple as he approached her and reached out to tear the front of her shirt. She ripped her right arm loose and caught the tall man's wrist as the sweat bead began to drip. She snapped his forearm and bones splintered though skin and muscle as she swung him, headfirst, through the gla.s.s door of the dryer. She reached over her shoulder and grabbed one of the Raider fans by the hair and smashed his face into the floor, then wheeled on her last attacker and shoved him back into the edge of the folding table, snapping his spine just above the hips and sending him spinning backward over a deck of washing machines. The bead of sweat hit the floor near the man with the smashed face.

Amid the hum of fluorescent lights and the moans of the man with the broken back, Jody loaded the rest of her laundry into the trash bag. She thought, This stuff is going to be nothing but wrinkles by the time I get home. Tommy's doing the laundry next time.

As she reached the door she ran her tongue over her teeth and was relieved to find her fangs had retracted. She looked over her shoulder at the carnage and shouted, "Forty-f.u.c.king-Niners!"

The man with the broken back moaned.

Chapter 19 Judy's Delicate.

Condition For the first few weeks Tommy was uncomfortable having a dead guy in the freezer, but after a while the dead guy became a fixture, a familiar frosty face with every TV dinner. Tommy named him Peary after another arctic explorer.

During the day, after he came home from work and before he crawled into bed with Jody, Tommy puttered around the loft talking first to himself, then, when he became comfortable with the idea, to Peary.

"You know, Peary," Tommy said one morning after he had pounded out two pages of a short story on his typewriter, "I am having a little trouble finding my voice in this story. When I write about the little farm girl in Georgia walking barefoot to school on the dirt road, I sound like Harper Lee, but when I write about her poor father, unjustly sentenced to a chain gang for stealing bread for his family, I start to sound a little like Mark Twain. But when the little girl grows up to become a Mafia don, I'm falling into more of a Sydney Collins Krantz style. What should I do?"

Peary, safe with his lid closed and his light off, did not answer.

"And how am I supposed to concentrate on literature when I'm reading all these vampire books for Jody? She doesn't understand that a writer is a special creature that I'm different from everyone else. I'm not saying I'm superior to other people, just more sensitive, I guess. And did you notice that she never does any of the shopping? What does she do all night while I'm at work?"

Tommy was making an effort to understand Jody's situation, and had even devised a series of experiments from his reading to try and discover the limitations of her new situation. In the evening when they woke, after they shared a shower and a tumble or two, the scientific process would begin.

"Go ahead, honey, give it a try," Tommy said, shortly after he'd read Dracula Dracula.

"I am trying," Jody said. "I don't know what I'm supposed to try to do."

"Concentrate," Tommy said. "Push."

"What do you mean, push? I'm not giving birth, Tommy. What am I supposed to push on?"

"Try to grow fur. Try to make your arms change into wings."

Jody closed her eyes and concentrated strained, even and Tommy thought a little color came into her face.

Finally she said, "This is ridiculous." And it was determined that Jody could not turn into a bat.

"Mist," Tommy said. "Try to turn into mist. If you forget your key sometime, you can just ooze under the door to get in."

"It's not working."

"Keep trying. You know how your hair gathers in the shower drain? Well, if it gets clogged, you can just flow down there and dig out the clog."

"There's some motivation."

"Give it a try."

She tried and failed and the next day Tommy brought some Drano home from the store instead.

"But I could take you to the park and throw a Frisbee for you."

"I know, but I can't."

"I'll buy you all kinds of chew toys a squeaky duck if you want."

"I'm sorry, Tommy, but I can't turn into a wolf."

"In the book, Dracula climbs down the castle wall face down."

"Good for him."

"You could try it on our building. It's only three stories."

"That's still a long way to fall."

"You won't fall. He doesn't fall in the book."

"And he levitates in the book, doesn't he?"

"Yeah."

"And we tried that, didn't we?"

"Well, yeah."

"Then I'd say that the book is fiction, wouldn't you?"

"Let's try something else; I'll get the list."

"Mind reading. Project your thoughts into my mind."

"Okay, I'm projecting. What am I thinking?"

"I can tell by the look on your face."

"You might be wrong, what am I thinking?"

"You'd like me to stop badgering you with these experiments."

"And?"

"You want me to take our clothes to the Laundromat."

"And?"

"That's all I'm getting."

"I want you to stop rubbing garlic on me while I'm sleeping."

"You can read thoughts!"

"No, Tommy, but I woke up this evening smelling like a pizza joint. Stop it with the garlic."

"So you don't know about the crucifix?"

"You touched me with a crucifix?"

"You weren't in any danger. I had a fire extinguisher right there in case you burst into flames."

"I don't think it's very nice of you to experiment on me while I'm sleeping. How would you feel if I rubbed stuff on you while you were sleeping?"

"Well, it depends. What are we talking about?"

"Just don't touch me while I'm sleeping, okay? A relationship is based on mutual trust and respect."

"So I guess the mallet and the stake are out of the question?"

"Tommy!"