Sweet Jaine.

In celebration of the upcoming papberback, here’s another excerpt. All you need to know to follow the scene is that by this point in time several of our Living friends knew what we were, I had been very seriously injured, and I was refusing blood.

I owe my survival to Jaine. She was four at the time. I hadn’t eaten in two months, and I was having this recurring dream (or hallucination, I’m not sure which). I sat at a small, round table while Kate McGovern pulled guts from my wound, and chewed on them. She never ate them. She just chewed, like I was made of gum. Young Gary stood nearby singing in a foreign language while Old Gary played the piano. Living People Crawled on all fours around us, and a pair of people-sized tabby cats waltzed around the room. I could hear bits of conversation as they danced, but not clearly enough to decipher the words. I couldn’t stand up. My arms could move, but they wouldn’t cooperate with me. No matter how loud I yelled, no one seemed to understand my distress. They looked at me, smiled, and went on about their business. I tried desperately to make one of the Garys realize what was going on, and it wasn’t just Kate chewing my guts that I wanted them to notice, either, there was something else, but I could never remember what it was once the dream ended. One day I woke from the dream to the sight of young Jaine struggling to hold onto a huge black and white cat while keeping the door kicked open long enough to scamper through it. I could barely see the curly puff of her hair over the expanse of wiggling cat she clutched desperately to her chest.

Oh, hell no!

“Jaine?” I muttered.

She finally managed to get through the doorway and ran to my bedside, holding the cat out in front of her. “It’s for you,” she said. “Drink up, it’s yummy.”

I was too delirious to understand what she meant. “Does your cat have a name?” I asked weakly.

“No, no!” Jaine whined, distraught. “She’s not my kitty, she’s to make you better! I heard my Daddy and my Bina talking, and you need to eat, Uncle Walter!” She thrust the animal into my face and shouted. “YOU EAT THE KITTY AND YOU GET BETTER OR MY MOMMY AND DADDY WILL BE SO MAD AT YOU, AND I WILL NOT LET YOU COME TO MY BIRTHDAY PARTY!” The kitty escaped from Jaine’s arms and quickly vanished under the bed. Jaine dissolved into frantic sobbing, which brought her Dad and Bina running in to see what was wrong.

Ezra went to his daughter and scooped her up.

Bina came to my bedside. “What’s wrong?” She asked.

“Nothing. Bring blood. I’ll eat.” I tried to lift my head enough to look directly at Jaine, but I couldn’t quite manage it. “I’ll do my best.”

“Honey, did you hear that?” asked Ezra as he smoothed his daughter’s hair. “Uncle Walter promised to eat again.”

She huffed and puffed to calm herself down. “Thank you Uncle Walter,” she croaked between diminishing sobs.

I forced myself to smile, and even managed a feeble thumbs up.

She smiled back, and wiped a generous blob of snot on Ezra’s shirt as he carried her out of the room.

The cat bolted out from under the bed and shot out of the room. Bina watched it go, confused. “I thought I smelled something. How the hell did that thing get in here? Sam,” she shouted, “you got felines in your house.” Then she shrugged it off and fetched me a drum barrel of lukewarm cow blood, which I sucked through a tube.