Tony teaches a one o'clock biology class. I waited for him outside his classroom, and at 1:50 the doors opened and the students began filing out. I stood on the grass in the rain, waiting, and I must have been something to see because they all froze in place as they were leaving, staring, and only moving when the students behind them pushed their way out. I stood there in my wet duster, black jeans and boots, hair soaked down onto my skull, hands deep in the duster's pockets, staring back at them with my sunglasses. I heard Tony's voice, loud and almost cheerful, following his students out to see what they were looking at, and he choked off whatever it was he was saying and went as utterly pale as I have ever seen an adult Los Angelean white man get; it looked like he didn't even have a tan. For a moment I thought he would faint, and then the moment passed. One of his students, a big blond kid, got in my way when I stepped forward, and with one hand I bounced him away from me. He ended up in the grass twenty feet away, moaning slightly.

"Tony," I said softly, "my man." He stood motionless in the doorway to his classroom, and I smiled at him. "Did I get the day wrong? I thought we were supposed to have lunch."

It took him close to two hours to calm down. We spent most of it in his office with the windows shades closed and the door shut.

"How am I?"

"Deathly sick. Or else a vampire."

"I don't mean the obvious stuff."

He spoke precisely. "Your heart is beating very slowly, about twenty beats per minute. Your blood pressure is extremely low. I've had the blood sample you gave me on Tuesday extensively analyzed. You are HIV negative, but your red blood cells are about twice the size they should be and there are only about two thirds as many as there should be, and they do appear to have acquired a nucleus. They're replicating, which red blood cells don't do. There are virtually no lymphocytes in your blood; those are the white blood cells primarily concerned with fighting infection. There should be about 1,500 of them per cubic millimeter of blood; you had about 200 per cubic millimeter in Tuesday's sample; a T-cell count below 200 is the working definition of AIDS. And--" He hesitated. "One slide seemed to show a red blood cell--well, one of the things that used to be a red blood cell--eating one of the lymphocytes. We could take another sample, Tom, but I think it would show that your lymphocyte count is, today, zero. Your granulocytes are virtually untouched; those are the white blood cells that eat bacteria."

"Anything else?"

"You're highly sensitized to sunlight, but not to artificial light; we could analyze sunlight until we find whatever it is that's bothering you. But direct sunlight is out--"

"In other words," I interrupted, "my tan is doomed."

"Tans are bad for you," Doctor Bonforte muttered. "They damage your skin and cause wrinkles and, and stuff like that, in old age."

"Great," I sneered. It was the good one, too, my Elvis sneer. "So I'm going to be seventy with good skin, when no one will care."

"How do you feel?"

I let the sneer drop; it was a sincere question. "Odd. I haven't eaten anything in three days, and I'm really hungry--but aside from that, I'm holding up. I've been drinking a lot of beer; it's about all I can keep down."

"Lost any weight?"

"Not much."

He nodded thoughtfully. "That's interesting." He hesitated, and then got this weird smile when he asked it: "Any desire to suck blood?"

I yelled at him. "I'm a vegetarian!"

--and then had to wait for the twisted son of a bitch to stop laughing at me.

We had late lunch at an Italian restaurant about ten minutes walk from his offices on campus. A little place toward the north end of Westwood, near the Bruin theater. We walked, in the rain, sharing Tony's umbrella.

"How come she has a tan?" I demanded.

He shook his head. "I don't know, Tom. Maybe the sensitivity to daylight only happens during the early stages. You seem to be getting by--"

"I've never seen her except at night. I don't think she goes out except at night."

He shrugged. "Maybe the condition--" He paused, and looked at me, and then laughed again. "Oh, come on. You know how she does it! It's so obvious!"

I stared at him; we'd reached the entrance to the restaurant, and stood there in the doorway looking at each other through our sunglasses. "Oh, Jesus. Of course."

He nodded and held the door open for me. "Tanning parlor."

I borrowed his cellular phone to call Doctor Death. Her answering machine picked up. I waited until it beeped: "Hi, Doctor Death, this is Thomas. I was just wondering--"

She picked up. She sounded drowsy. "Hey."

"Get the number?" (It wasn't that I didn't want to talk to Lila . . . just that I wanted to do it on my terms. Someplace safe. Early in the morning, so if I had to jump in my car to run away, she might think twice about following me.)

Doctor Death said, "Nope. Not yet. You?"

"Nope . . . I'm eating some spaghetti marinara."

Her voice took on an optimistic note. "And?"

"Haven't thrown it up yet."

"Keep it up," she said encouragingly. "You can do it."

"I've been trying to think up a way to treat you," Tony said as I hung up the phone and handed it back to him. "One of the treatments they tried for AIDS patients was whole body blood replacement. I doubt it'd work, though. Didn't work against the HIV virus, though it showed some temporary improvement in some patients. Your new and improved red blood cells are damned aggressive; I suspect that we couldn't pump the blood through you fast enough to keep them from replicating. Might kill you to try, the state your immune system's in." He took a bite of his chicken parmiagan. "Another possibility would be to do it in two stages--pump you clean with false blood, pure oxygen-transporting plasma. The shit's wickedly expensive, but it's not blood--the stuff in your veins couldn't replicate in it for sure. Once you're clean, we pump you with good blood, and hope your bone marrow remembers how to make its own."

It sounded good to me. "Downside?"

"I doubt that'll work, either. My guess is we'd need to clean you out--every artery, every capillary in your body. If we could double it up with a drug that would kill the mutant red blood cells in your veins, without killing you, we might stand a chance--"

"What you're saying is, the odds suck."

He took another bite of his chicken and didn't look at me. "Big time."

It was almost dark when we left the restaurant; the rain pounded down on us, heavy and brutal, and the sky had grown dark. I felt comfortable, for the first time that day moving around without the needles jabbing into my exposed skin.

We reached Tony's office as his belt phone rang again. He flipped it open. "Doctor Bonforte here. Yes . . . no, I'm not. What's her name?"

I stood in the doorway of his office, watching him talk. "Who is it?"

He waved a hand at me. "No, send her away. I don't want . . . she does?" Tony paused just a second, and then said so quietly even I could barely hear him, "Does she have a really great tan?"

The expression on his face was answer enough.

I turned and sprinted for the Sports Satellite.

I zoomed east down Sunset in the, you know, driving rain, windshield wipers pumping on high, wishing I'd changed the rubber on them last winter like I'd meant to.

She came after me in a Corvette convertible with the top up. I couldn't fault her taste, it was a '77 or '78 white Stingray, gorgeous car. Decent handling, decent pickup, I have no real complaints except they have a plastic body that crumples in accidents.

It was dark enough that I took my sunglasses off. Fifty miles an hour, and then sixty: we tore down the wet streets at suicidal high speed, across the twisting, serpentine surface of Sunset in west-end Beverly Hills, weaving in and out of rush hour Friday-night traffic. She stayed on my tail as I ran a red light, horn blaring, leaving a multi-car pileup in the intersection behind us after we were through it.

Damn, that vampire chick could drive. It filled me with lust to watch it, and for just a moment I wondered what I was running from: best oral sex I'd ever had, and she could drive.

Neon appeared on the road ahead of me, the outskirts of Hollywood.

I held the horn down with one hand and drove with the other, leaning out the window to scream at people to get out of my way. I side-swiped a squad car, and its bubble lights lit up, but there was no time to worry about that, I had serious business going down. The cop pulled out into traffic to follow us, and that was good, maybe Lila would get scared and pull off.

Nope. I could see her in my rear-view mirror, grinning at me as I fought my way through the clogged rush hour traffic--

We hit La Cienega. I took the Sports Satellite up on the sidewalk, ripped a postal box out of the concrete, and went roaring down the big hill, gaining speed, finally going against traffic, everybody else leaving the city and going north up to Sunset. I dropped the accelerator to the floor, the huge 440cc engine kicking in and dragging the big old piece of American steel through the streets at high speed, horn blaring. I could feel my lips pulling back, thinking even if I die, what a great way to go: we slammed into the intersection of Santa Monica and La Cienega together, on the yellow, and I hammered the brakes down and fishtailed the car around, through a full three-sixty, and then a one-eighty, hitting three or four cars while I spun, came out of it and stomped the accelerator again. The tires flogged the wet pavement and then grabbed, and the Sports Satellite surged forward, and I went barreling off west down Santa Monica Boulevard, and something was wrong with the car, a high-pitched whine coming from the engine, and steam billowing up off the hood; I looked into my rear view mirror and there she was, in the Corvette, not as pretty as it had been a while ago, but still running, still coming after me--

--and I had no time left. The Excelsior Hotel was up ahead, and on the left; I'd staked someone out there once, a couple years back, and I knew it well, and if I couldn't lose her in the car, maybe I could do it on foot. I pushed the poor beast, and it strained, hit sixty miles an hour for me and then hung there, shaking with pain as we sideswiped one car and then another, the Corvette weaving in and out of the messes I left behind me on the road, going up onto the grass divider once to do it--

We were at the hotel. I gave it until the last possible moment, and then stomped the brakes hard, turning into a slide, and feeding gas to the pedal. A late model Mercedes was trying to turn into the hotel parking lot when I needed to use the entrance, and I slammed broadside into it, the classic American steel in the Sports Satellite shrieking with pain as it tangled with the ugly German. We slid into the parking lot together, twins joined at the hip, and crashed to a stop doing maybe twenty miles an hour, tangling up in a long line of parked cars. The steering wheel came up and smacked me in the face.

I popped the driver's side door open and staggered out into the rain, went to one knee and made it back up again. A hotel employee in a red coat ran to me through the rain, yelling at me, "Oh, my God, are you all right, you're bleeding, you better sit down--"

I made it to my feet and grinned at him with bloody teeth, and yelled at him. "I've never had so much fun in my entire fucking life!" I pointed at the brave wrecked piece of Americana that had brought me there: "Park that bitch!"

I pulled my .38 from the duster coat pocket, tucked it into my sleeve, and ran toward the hotel entrance.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I wouldn't have tried to stop someone who looked like me.

A kid at the door did. "You must buy a ticket to enter."

I came to a slow stop. At first my mind refused to assimilate what my lying eyes were telling it. A pale, pimply teenager in some kind of odd uniform, with long pointy ears, sat behind a long table, a roll of pre-printed tickets next to him, and a small metal box to keep the receipts. "What?"

"You have to buy a ticket. For the entire convention it is $55. It is $25 for one day." He looked at me. "Hey, you are bleeding."

I looked back at the entrance to the hotel; hotel employees were helping the driver of the Mercedes out of his car--

--and the white Corvette was pulling into the parking lot's entrance.

"We have a first aid station," the kid was saying when I turned back. "I can not let you enter like--"

"Why do you keep talking without contractions?" I screamed at him.

He jumped backward about half a foot. "I . . . I . . . I am a Vulcan," he stammered.

"And I'm a fucking vampire," I snarled, and headed inside, and he tried to stop me, so I threw him screaming into the bushes at the edge of the parking lot and went in anyway.

There were more Vulcans inside. And blue skinned people, and people with wicked ugly plastic ridges molded all over their heads, most of them wearing some variation on the uniform the kid outside had been wearing. I had a momentary wild idea--knock one of them out, take the uniform and hide out as one of them. I dropped the idea almost instantly, though; apparently the makeup they used caused acne, and they were all either overweight or under-muscled; I didn't see a single one with a costume that would have fit an adult man in decent shape.

I ran toward the south wing; there are half a dozen exits in the south wing, leading into two different parking lots, one leading directly to the street outside. I could hear disturbances behind me, but I was getting used to that. I ran down the corridor leading to the Mezzanine Room, turned right, and ran into Doctor Death and Kathy.

Knocked them right off their feet.

The sign they were attempting to post in the corridor came fluttering to the ground and landed on the ground near them. I stood in the corridor with the gun in my hand, dripping blood down my cheek onto my coat, and looking at Doctor Death and Kathy.

They looked back at me. They were not dressed like the others; a leather mini-skirt, in Doctor Death's case, and a black leather bra with a white silk blouse over it, and wrap-around black sunglasses. Kathy doesn't wear leather; she was dressed in black jeans and Reeboks, and a tight black t-shirt with a purplish tie-died vest over it. They both looked very good, though Doctor Death's panties were blue and didn't match the rest of her ensemble.

My eyes drifted down to the sign on the floor:

I said softly, "Doctor Death?"

She reached up, and I helped her to her feet, and Kathy.

"What are you doing here?"

Kathy thrust her chin out. "We're--"

"It's missionary work," Doctor Death babbled, "yeah, that's it, that's the ticket. We're here doing missionary work among the unwashed, spreading the good news about--"

"Patrick Stewart is here," Kathy said. "He's really hot. I want to have his baby."

I stared back and forth between the two of them. "Uhm . . ." My brain wouldn't function. My thoughts moved sluggishly, turning over and over in the same rut. "It's just--"

And then in the corridor behind me, I heard Lila Macauley, the vampire, say, "We really need to talk, Thomas."

I turned around and pulled the trigger twice.

We went up to Doctor Death's hotel room together. Why Doctor Death had a hotel room when she lived twenty minutes drive away from this, this whatever-it-was, was beyond me. I wasn't sure I wanted to know, either.

From the window I could see police at the entrance to the parking lot, taking statements. Eventually they'd come inside the hotel and start asking questions--

She sat on the bed behind me, with my gun in her lap, looking at me. I could feel her gaze on the back of my head. "Why do you keep running away?"

I turned away from the window and looked at her, sitting there with my gun in her lap. She hadn't broken my wrist, quite. "I have a better question. Why are you doing this to me?"

She shook her head, long blonde hair moving . . . I had to drag my attention back to what she was saying. "I'm not. I've bitten two or three hundred people, I've lost track. Men, women, old people, young people--well, mostly young ones," she conceded. "But I don't usually go back, either." She shrugged. "You tasted really good. But even that wasn't it, that second time. I've had a couple dozen that I've gone back to three or four times, and one girl I spent most of a year with. None of them Changed."

"Why me?"

"I don't know, Thomas. All I know for sure is that if you keep calling attention to yourself, someone older and meaner and a lot scarier than I am is going to come and make sure you stop. And I mean permanently."

She sat there watching me with those pale blue eyes. The only thing I could think of to say was, "I don't want this."

"You don't get a choice. None of us did." She stood up and came toward me. "How do you feel?"

"Oh, God," I whispered. "I'm so hungry."

The last thing I remember her saying was, "Let me show you how."

Some time around midnight I woke up in the hotel bed. Lila was gone.

I'd never felt so good, so perfectly healthy, in my life.

There are advantages to losing the day. I laid in bed and thought about what Lila had told me.

Never get sick. Never get old. We heal faster and we move faster and we're a lot stronger than you are. Our sex drive is no different from yours, and once the real hunger is satisfied, we eat just like everyone else--

I got out of bed and got dressed and headed downstairs, to the back entrance, thinking to myself that I was going to have to do something about the Sports Satellite; they'd trace the registration to me, and charge me with who knows what sort of vehicular insanity. But I could deal with that, as long as I didn't end up in jail. Not that it would be fatal--there's no direct sunlight in jail cells. But it would be bad.

I got down to the main hallway, and found things quieted down slightly, fewer of the strange people in strange uniforms, and most of those apparently making their way from one party to the next. I ignored an invitation to join one party, and headed down the corridor to the south exit, passing, as I left, a sign that must have been Doctor Death's work, a banner twenty feet long, that said, Some people bathe every day.