Peeps (21 page)

“From what? Getting laid?”

I coughed, bits of bacon lodging in my throat, but I managed to swallow them. “Well, it has to do with the parasite.”

“Sure, it does, Cal.
Everything’s
about the parasite.”

“No, really. There’s this thing that happens to peeps: They hate all the stuff they used to love.”

She paused, a forkful of potato salad halfway to her mouth. “They do
what
?”

“Okay, let’s say you’re a peep. And before you got infected you loved chocolate—the parasite changes your brain chemistry so that you can’t even stand to look at a Hershey’s Kiss, the way movie vampires are afraid of crucifixes.”

“What the hell is that all about?”

“It’s an evolutionary strategy, so that peeps hide themselves. That’s why they live underground, to escape signs of humanity, and the sun too. A lot of them really do have cruciphobia—I mean, are afraid of crosses—because they used to be religious.”

“Okay, Cal.” She nodded slowly. “Now this is the part where you explain what this has to do with Garth Brooks.”

I grabbed a piece of bacon, which was starting to glisten as it cooled, and chewed quickly. “Records, the department that helps us with investigations, found out that some of the folks who lived on your floor were Garth Brooks fans. So they gave me this shirt in case there was an encounter underground. Which there was.”

Her eyes widened. “Dude! A peep did that to your face?”

“Yeah, this scratch here was a peep. But this one here was a cat—Morgan’s cat, probably—that sort of put up a fight.”

“Sort of? Looks like you lost.”

“Hey, I made it home tonight. The cat didn’t.”

Her expression froze. “Cal, you didn’t
kill
it, did you?”

“Of course not.” My hands went up in surrender. “I don’t kill when I can capture. No vampires were harmed in the making of this film, okay? Jeez, vegetarians.” I grabbed another strip from the plate.

“So this infected cat is where?” Lace glanced at the closet where PNS had spent the previous night.

“Elsewhere,” I said, chewing. “I left it with the experts; they’re testing to see if it can spread the disease to other cats or not. And the good news is that a Night Watch team is already cleaning up the rats under your building. It may take a few days to seal off that swimming pool, but then you can go home.”

“Really?”

“Yes. They’re professionals, since 1653.”

“So you found Morgan?”

“Well, not her. But you don’t have to worry about Morgan. She disappeared.”

Lace crossed her arms. “Sure, she did.”

I shrugged. “We can’t find her, okay?”

“And it’s really safe in my apartment? You’re not just saying that to get rid of me?”

“Of course not.” I paused. “I mean, of
course
it’ll be safe. And of course
not
on the getting-rid-of-you part, which I wouldn’t do. I mean, you can stay here as long as you want… which you won’t need to, of course, because it’s safe at home and everything.” I managed to shut up.

“That’s great.” Lace reached across the table and took my hand. The contact, the first since I’d pulled her over the balcony, sent an electric shock through me. She smiled at my expression. “Not that it’s been totally horrible, dude. Except for not having any of my stuff, commuting all the way from Brooklyn, and having your heavy-ass cat lie on me all night. Other than that, it’s been kind of … nice. So thanks.”

She let go of me, and I managed to smile back at her while scraping up the last shards of bacon from the plate. I could still feel where she’d touched me, like the flush of a sunburn coming up. “You’re welcome.”

Lace looked down at her potato salad unhappily. She dropped her fork. “You know what? This stuff sucks, and I’m still hungry.”

“Me too. Starving.”

“You want to go somewhere?”

“Absolutely.”

Lace waited for me to shower and change, then took me over to Boerum Hill, one of the original Brooklyn neighborhoods. The elegant old mansions had been split up into apartments, and the sidewalks were cracked by ancient tree roots pushing up beneath our feet, but there were still old-school touches. Instead of numbers, the streets had Dutch family names—Wyckoff and Bergen and Boerum.

“My sister lives pretty close,” Lace said. “I remember a couple of good places around here.”

She followed the street signs hesitantly, letting memories fall into place, but I didn’t mind wandering along beside her. Moonlight lanced through the dense cover of ancient trees, and the cold air was filled with the smell of leaves rotting on the earth. Lace and I walked close, the shoulders of our jackets touching sometimes, like animals sharing warmth. Out here in the open air it wasn’t so intense, being close to her.

We wound up at an Italian place, with white tablecloths and waiters wearing ties and aprons, candles on the tables. It smelled gorgeously of flesh, smoked and seared and hanging from the ceiling. Meat all over.

It was so much like a date, it was weird. Even before the parasite switched off my romantic life, taking women to fancy restaurants hadn’t been my thing. I found myself thinking about the fact that everyone who saw us would assume we were dating. I pretended for a while in my head that they were right, pushing the awful truth to the back of my mind.

When the waiter came around, I ordered a pile of spicy sausage, the perfect dish to beat my parasite into overfed submission. The night before it had taken forever, but I’d finally reached a deep sleep. Maybe tonight it would be easier.

“So, dude, aren’t you worried about that?” She was looking at my wounded cheek again. Dr. Rat’s bandage had slipped off in the shower, and I hadn’t bothered to replace it. The scar gave me a rakish doesn’t-know-how-to-shave look.

“It’s not bleeding, is it?” I dabbed the spot with a napkin.

“No, it doesn’t look bad. But what if it got … infected or something?”

“Oh, right,” I said. Lace, of course, didn’t know that I didn’t have to worry about the parasite, having already been there and done that. I shrugged. “You can’t get the disease from scratches. Only bites.” This was more or less true.

“But what if it was licking its paws?” she said, quite sensibly.

I shrugged again. “I’ve had worse.”

Lace didn’t look convinced. “I just don’t want you turning all vampire on me in the middle of the night… Okay, that sounded weird.” She looked down, her fingers realigning the silverware on the crisp white linen.

I laughed. “Don’t worry about that. It takes at least a few weeks to go killing-and-eating-people crazy. Most strains take a lot longer.”

She looked up again, narrowing her eyes. “You’ve seen it happen, haven’t you?”

I paused for a moment.

“Dude, no lying to me. Remember?”

“All right, Lace. Yes, I’ve seen someone change.”

“A friend?”

I nodded.

A satisfied expression crept onto Lace’s face. “That’s how you got into this Night Watch business, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. That’s right.” I looked at the other tables to see if anyone was listening, hoping that Lace didn’t go much further with this line of questioning. I could hardly tell her that my first peep experience had been with a lover; she knew the parasite was sexually transmitted. “A friend of mine got the disease. I saw her change.”

Oops. Should I have said
her
?

“So, it’s like you said when you were pretending to be a health guy—you’re following a chain of infection. You’re tracking down all the people who caught the disease from that friend of yours. Morgan was someone who slept with someone who slept with your friend who turned, right?”

Now I was playing with my own silverware. “More or less.”

“Makes sense,” she said softly. “Today I was thinking that some people must find out about the disease on their own, just by accident, like I did. So the Night Watch has to recruit them to keep the whole thing a secret. And that must be where you guys get new staff. It’s not like you can advertise in Help Wanted, after all.”

“No shit, Sherlock.” I tried to chuckle. “You’re not looking for a job, are you?”

She was silent for a moment, not answering my little jest, which made me extremely nervous. The waiter arrived with two steaming plates, uncovering them with a flourish. He hovered over us, grinding pepper onto Lace’s pasta and pouring me more water. The smell of sausage rose up from my plate, switching my still-hungry body into a higher gear. I dug in the moment the waiter left, the taste of cooked flesh and spices making me shudder with bliss.

Hopefully, the uncomfortable questions were done with. I watched as Lace wound a big gob of spaghetti onto her fork, a process that seemed to absorb all her concentration, and as the silence stretched out and the calories entered my bloodstream, I told myself to chill.

It wasn’t so surprising that Lace had spent a whole day thinking about my revelations of the night before. It was crazy to get all jumpy about a few obvious questions. As the sausage suffused my system, placating the parasite, I began to relax.

Then Lace spoke up again. “I mean, I wouldn’t want
your
job. Mucking around in tunnels and stuff. No way.”

I coughed into my fist. “Um, Lace…”

“But you’ve got those guys who gave you the building plans, right? Records, you called them? And you have to research the history of the sewers and subways and stuff. I was thinking about that today. That’s why I went into journalism, you know.”

“For the sewer research?”

“No, dude. To find out what’s really going on, to get behind the scenes. I mean, there’s this whole other world that no one knows about. How cool is that?”

I put my fork and knife down firmly. “Listen, Lace. I don’t know if you’re serious, but it’s out of the question. The people who work in Records come from old families; they grew up with this secret history. They can speak Middle English and Dutch and identify clerks who lived centuries ago by their handwriting. They’ve all known one another for generations. You can’t just show up and ask for a job.”

“That’s all very impressive,” she said, then smirked. “But they suck at finding people.”

“Pardon me?”

Lace’s grin grew wider as she wound another spindle of spaghetti onto her fork, then put it into her mouth, chewing slowly. Finally, she swallowed.

“I said they suck at finding people.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let me show you something, dude.” She pulled out a few folded photocopies from her inside jacket pocket and handed them to me. I pushed my empty plate aside and unfolded them on the white tablecloth.

They were the floor plans to a house, a big one. The labels were written by hand in a flowing script, and the photocopies had that gray tinge that meant the originals had been on old, yellowing paper.

“What is this?”

“That’s Morgan Ryder’s house.”

I blinked. “Her what?”

“Her family’s, actually, but she’s staying there now.”

“No way.”

“Way, dude.”

I shook my head. “Records would have found her already.”

Lace shrugged, her fork twirling, the last strands of spaghetti on her plate trailing like a satellite picture of a hurricane. “It wasn’t even that hard. All I had to do was go through the phonebook, calling all the Ryders, asking for Morgan. The first dozen said there was nobody there by that name. Then one of them got all paranoid and asked me who the hell I was.” She laughed. “I got nervous and hung up.”

“That doesn’t prove anything.”

Lace pointed at the papers in my hand. “That’s the place, according to the address in the phone book. It’s even in the historical register—belonged to the Ryders since it was built.”

I stared at the plans, shaking my head. There was no way this could have gotten past Records; the Mayor’s office would have checked with her family directly. “But she’s not there. She’s missing, like I said.”

“You said pale? Dark hair and kind of gothy?”

I opened my mouth, but it took a while for sound to come out. “You
went
there?”

Lace nodded, beginning to wind another spindle of pasta. “Of course, I didn’t knock on the door. I’m more into investigation than confrontation. But the house has these big bay windows. And the weirdest thing is, Morgan doesn’t look crazy at all. Just bored, sitting at the window and reading. Do peeps read, dude?”

I remembered the photos Chip had given me and pulled them from my jacket. Lace took one glance at Morgan’s and nodded. “That’s the girl.”

“It can’t be.” My head was swimming. The Night Watch couldn’t have screwed up like this. If Morgan was sitting around in plain view, someone would have spotted her. “Maybe she has a sister,” I muttered, but darker thoughts were already coursing through my mind. The Ryders were an old family. Maybe they were pulling strings, using their connections to keep her hidden. Or maybe Records was afraid to go after the Mayor’s old friends.

Or maybe I’d filled out the wrong damn form.

Whatever had happened, I felt like an idiot. Everyone always joked about how we hunters were too lazy to do our own research, waiting for Records or the Health and Mental moles to tell us where the peeps were. I’d never even thought to open a phone book and look for Morgan Ryder myself.

“Don’t look so bummed, dude,” Lace said. “Morgan might not be infected, after all. I mean, she looked all normal. I thought you said peeps were maniacs.”

Still dazed, I shook my head and answered, “Well, she could be a carrier.”

Too late, I bit my tongue.

“A carrier?” Lace asked.

“Um, yes. Carries the disease, but without the symptoms.”

She paused, spaghetti dangling from her fork. “You mean, like Typhoid Mary? Spreading typhus all over the place but never coming down with it?” Lace laughed at my expression. “Don’t look so surprised, dude. I’ve been reading about diseases all day.”

“Lace, you have to stop
doing
this!”

“What? Acting like I have a brain? Puh-lease.” She took a bite. “So there are people who just carry the parasite? Infected but not crazy?”

“Yes,” I said, swallowing. “But it’s very rare.”

“Huh. Well, there’s one way to find out. We should go over there.”