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cropped, black leather bomber jacket, and a black turtleneck sweater. Her black suede boots ended at her thighs and seemed to be molded in such a way that they had no proper heel at all, requiring her to balance delicately on the balls of her feet, leaning slightly forward as she made her way down Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard like she belonged there. Which she most certainly did not.
    When she stopped for the light at the corner across from the MARTA train station and tossed back her long dark hair, the incense and T-shirt vendors, who were never at a loss for words, juststood unblinking until she was too far away to hear them, not a single one able to gather his wits about him and offer the usual spiel. Somehow, they seemed to know she was out of their league and they let her glide by without so much as a, “Good mornin’, sistah! You’re lookin’ lovely today, mah queen!”
    Blue sighed as she turned out of sight. Everywhere he looked these days, he was confronted with glamorous images of ghostly vamps mingling with humans in New York and certain neighborhoods in L.A., like there was nothing strange about it at all. Vamps is what he called them and vamps is what they were. Lean, mean, sexy girls, pale as the belly of a bigmouth bass. Slim hipped and staring with what would have been soulful eyes, except these lithe creatures had no souls. That was the whole point. They were the undead and now they were roaming around Atlanta like it was suddenly a suburb of Beverly Hills.
    It was only a matter of time before one of them strolled into the West End News, looking for a cappuccino. The problem was, nobody suspected that their sudden ubiquity was anything more than the latest craze of a death-obsessed culture. Nobody thought they were real. Nobody except Blue. He knew that these girls—and the real ones were all girls—were here for a reason. But what was it?
    Sometimes Blue missed the old days when the gangstas and the crackheads were as deep as it got. He had known how to deal with them, and West End had become an oasis of peace and civility even as things continued to spiral out of control all over the country and all over the world. The West End News carried papers from everywhere, but Blue hardly spent the time it took to read the front pages anymore. The stories were all the same. War, disease, famine, rape, genocide, and territorial disputes over water and oil and drugs and whatever else somebody thought they needed bad enough to take somebody’s life for it.
    Blue was different. The people he had eliminated from West End over the years had been guilty of such heinous crimes that no one could argue that justice had not been served. Prostituting children.Torturing women. Raping mothers in front of their sons. When the guys responsible for those crimes disappeared from the scene, nobody was sorry. Even their mothers were relieved as they closed their eyes and clasped their hands and said a little prayer for the souls of their babies gone bad. But these vampires were a whole other thing. Slinking around in their tight black clothes and their bright red lips, they had no one to pray for them, which probably suited them just fine. How do you pray for something that has no soul?
    Blue stepped out of the car and looked around at his neighborhood on its way to work. Everybody worked in West End. If you couldn’t find a job, Blue found one for you. Of course if you wanted to spend your time hustling dope, pimping women, or watching porno in your grandmomma’s basement, you had every right to do that. You just couldn’t do it in West End.
    “Hey, Mr. Blue!” a woman called as she headed over to the twenty-four-hour beauty salon. “Why you gotta be so sharp this early in the morning?”
    Blue smiled and touched his fingertips lightly to the front of his perfectly blocked Homburg. He was aware that it gave him an immediate visual advantage to appear on the streets of West End dressed in the manner made famous by