“It’ll be all right,” she whispers to me, and I wonder if that’s true.

Behind us, Bee and Jane are still arguing.

“I didn’t know,” Jane’s saying.

“You didn’t know what?” Bee’s voice, sharp as barbed wire. “That you shouldn’t conjure a vampire back from the dead?”

I struggle ahead, trying to outpace them, the street reeking of exhaust. There are people everywhere, kids walking past us, frayed sandals on their feet, rolled-up sleeping bags on their shoulders.

There are tourists too, some of them behind the windows of chartered buses, others free-range on the sidewalk, all of them openly gawking at us. They snap quick pictures on their Polaroids and their Dianas, the flashbulbs so bright in the dark they nearly blind you, and when they’re sure they’ve got the shot, they give us smug smiles, daring us to do anything about it. I imagine what they’ll say when they retreat home to their precious picket fences in Iowa or Indiana or the rolling plains of Texas.

“Hippies in their natural environment,” they’ll tell the blue-haired ladies at Sunday school, as they pass around the pictures of us like contraband.

If only they knew what we really are.

We’re out of the Haight now, passing over trolley tracks, headed toward the bay, Daisy narrating merrily as we go.

“I used to stay at a place right over there on Larkin for a while,” she says, “but then it became a bad scene.”

I shake my head. “Isn’t everywhere with people a bad scene?” I ask, and all at once, my legs give out, and I nearly crumple to the pavement.

Michael catches my arm just in time. “You all right?”

“Sure,” I say, but we both know it isn’t true. The decay stirs within me, stronger than before. It sits in my belly like lead, it pools beneath my fingernails, black as a malignant growth. My hunger’s taking me over from the inside, hollowing me out, and it won’t stop. It’ll keep gnawing away until there’s no more me left.

We lose the girls in the crowd and find them again a block later, though they’re always just out of reach. I don’t know their names, but even if I did, it wouldn’t do any good to call out to them. They’re not going to do the polite thing and bring back the urn.

At a dusty corner, a streetcar whizzes past us, and I turn to Daisy. “Did you know they had one of the urns upstairs?”

She shrugs. “Sure,” she says. “I thought you left it behind for them. Like a souvenir or something.”

I gape at her. “Why would I do that?”