Peeps

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.