Peeps

He looked over his shoulder. “No one in Records is messing with you.”

The ceiling fan squeaked overhead.

“Who?” I whispered.

Chip took a breath and gestured me closer. “All I can say is, that case got lifted from us.”

“Define lifted.”

“Transferred to a higher level. High priority, like you said. After you found out her last name, certain individuals told us to track down the other three missing persons but to leave Morgan Ryder alone. They wanted to handle her special.”

A little shudder went through me. “The Mayor’s office?”

Chip said nothing, which said everything.

“Um, does that happen a lot?”

Chip shrugged unconvincingly. “Well…” He chewed his lower lip. “Actually, it doesn’t happen that much. Especially not this way.”

“Which way?”

He leaned even closer, his whisper barely audible above the squeaking of the ceiling fan. “With no one telling you about it, Cal. You see, we were supposed to be copied on any info that the Mayor’s office found and then pass it along to you. But you weren’t supposed to know that we’d been pulled off the case. And I’m not supposed to be telling you this now, in case you haven’t figured that out yet.”

“Oh.” I leaned back heavily in Chip’s spare chair, my righteous anger turning to mush. Yelling at Chip was one thing, but busting in to raise hell with the Night Mayor was something I couldn’t visualize. Four-hundred-year-old vampires have that effect on me.

So this was a conspiracy. But the Night Mayor? He was the head guy, the big cheese. Who would he even be conspiring against?

All of us? The whole Night Watch?

Humanity?

I leaned over the desk again. “Um, Chip? Seeing as how you weren’t supposed to tell me this, maybe we should pretend that you didn’t?”

Chip didn’t say a word, just pointed to the biggest of the many signs on his bulletin board—even bigger than the We Do Not Have Pens sign—and I knew absolutely that our secret was safe.

In large block letters were the words When in Doubt, Cover Your Ass.

Next, I went to see Dr. Rat.

If I could trust anyone at the Watch, it would be her. Unlike the Shrink and the Mayor, she wasn’t a carrier. She hadn’t been alive for centuries and didn’t give a rat’s ass about the old families. She was a scientist—her only loyalty was to the truth.

Still, I decided to proceed a little more cautiously than I had with Chip.

“ ‘Morning, Dr. Rat.”

“ ‘Morning, Kid!” She smiled. “Just the guy I wanted to see.”

“Oh, yeah?” I forced a smile onto my face. “Why’s that?”

She leaned back in her chair. “Those peeps you brought in yesterday—did you know they can talk?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Sure, of course. Patricia Moore spoke to me.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“What about Sarah? She talked to me.”

Dr. Rat shook her head. “No, Cal, this is different. I mean, a lot of peeps become lucid for a few moments after you hit them with knockout drugs. But those two you caught yesterday have been having flat-out conversations.”

I sat down heavily. “But they’re husband and wife. What about the anathema? Shouldn’t they start screaming at the mere thought of each other?”

“That’s what you’d think.” She shrugged. “But they’ve been calling from one holding pen to another. As long as they don’t actually see each other, they’re fine.”

“Is it the drugs?”

Dr. Rat pursed her lips. “After one night? No way. And as far as I can tell, this isn’t the first time they’ve had these conversations. I think they were living together down in that tu

“Sane?” I said softly.

“Yeah. Almost.”

“Um, except for the ca

Dr. Rat shook her head again. “We didn’t find any human remains in that tu

“Eww. Ex-boyfriend sitting right here.”

She flashed her don’t-be-a-wuss look at me. “Yeah, well, rat consumption is a lot better than eating people. I think your strain is … different.”

“What about, ‘So pretty I had to eat him’?”

Dr. Rat sat back down at her desk, spreading her hands. “Well, maybe the onset symptoms of the strain are just as bad as a normal peep’s. But eventually the parasite settles down. It doesn’t seem to turn people into raving monsters … not forever anyway.”

I nodded. That theory fit with what I’d seen of Morgan and Angela Dreyfus the night before.

“Maybe we caused this,” Dr. Rat said softly.

“Huh? We who?”

“The Night Watch. It’s hard for crazed peeps to run amok in a modern city, especially with us on the case. So this could be an adaptation to the Night Watch. Maybe you’re part of a whole new strain, Cal, one that has a lower level of optimum virulence—the peeps are less violent and insane, the transmission usually sexual. It’s more likely to survive in a city organized to catch maniacs.”

“So more than one in a hundred people would be immune?”

“Sure.” Dr. Rat nodded slowly. “Makes sense, really. Except for the cat-worshipping.” She noticed the change in my expression and frowned. “You okay, Cal?”

“Um, I’m great. But did you just say ‘cat-worshipping’?”

“Yeah, I did.” Dr. Rat smiled and rolled her eyes. “Those two you caught yesterday will not shut up about the peep cat. Is kitty okay? Can they see it? Is it getting enough food?” She laughed. “It’s like the anathema in reverse; like maybe they used to hate cats and now they love them—I don’t know. Weird mutation, huh?”

“Mutation? A cat-worshipping mutation? One that appears at exactly the same time as a cat-infecting mutation?” I groaned. “Doesn’t that seem like too much of a coincidence to you, Doctor?”

“But it’s still just a coincidence, Kid.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because the peep cat isn’t viable.” She stood and walked to the far wall, where a pile of cages were filled with various cats, all of whom had the scruffy, streetwise look of strays. “See these little guys? Since yesterday I’ve been trying to produce transmission from the peep cat to one of them … and nothing. Doesn’t matter if they lick each other, eat from the same bowl. Zilch. It’s like trying to force two mosquitoes to give each other malaria; it’s hopeless.”

“But what about transmission through rats?”

She shook her head. “I’ve been testing that too. I’ve tried biting, ingestion, even blood transfusion, and I haven’t gotten the parasite to move to a single rat, much less from rat to cat. That peep cat is a dead end.”

I had to bite my lip to keep from arguing. The peep cat wasn’t a dead end; I knew about a dozen others. But how could I explain about them to Dr. Rat without telling her everything I’d seen the night before? If I told her about Ryder House, I’d have to mention Morgan and Angela, and how I’d found them … which would mean bringing up what Chip had told me about the Mayor’s office. And once I admitted my suspicions about the Night Mayor, I’d have to start my own counterconspiracy.

Suddenly my racing mind was halted by the smell of Dr. Rat’s lair, a scent that had been conspicuously absent the night before: rats. Ryder House had been so clean. No piles of garbage, no reeking decay. No sign at all of a brood of rodents.

“What if rats don’t matter?” I said softly.

She snorted. “You found a huge brood down in the tu

“No, that’s not what I mean. Those rats carry the parasite, sure. They were the reservoir. But what if they weren’t the vector for the peep cat getting infected?”