It lets you think that you’re okay, but it’s still there, hiding in your liver, waiting for the right moment to unleash its engines of destruction.
Clever, huh?
Chapter 19
VECTOR
I woke up in a foul mood, ready to kick some ass. I started with Chip in Records.
“Hey, Kid.”
“Okay, first thing: Don’t call me Kid!”
“Jeez, Cal.” Chip’s big brown eyes looked hurt. “What’s with you? Didn’t get enough sleep last night?”
“No, I didn’t. Something about Morgan Ryder living half a mile away kept me awake.”
He blinked. “You did what now?”
I sighed as I sat down in his visitor’s chair. I’d been practicing that dramatic line all the way here, and Chip was looking at me like I was speaking Middle Dutch. “Okay, Chip. Listen carefully. I found Morgan Ryder, my progenitor, the high-priority peep that you guys have been looking for since the day before yesterday. In the phone book!”
“Huh. Well, don’t look at me.”
“Um, Chip, I am looking at you.” It was true. I was looking at him. “This is Records, is it not? You guys do have phone books down here, don’t you?”
“Sure, but—”
“But you’ve been messing with me, haven’t you?”
He raised his hands. “No one’s messing with you, Cal.” Then he leaned forward, lowering his voice a bit. “At least, no one in Records is. I can tell you that.”
I stopped, mouth already loaded with my next sarcastic remark. It took me a moment to switch gears. “What do you mean, no one in Records?”
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 tunnel—sharing the hunting duties, talking to each other in the darkness. Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. They’re practically…” She trailed off.
“Sane?” I said softly.
“Yeah. Almost.”
“Um, except for the cannibals-living-in-a-tunnel part?”
Dr. Rat shook her head again. “We didn’t find any human remains in that tunnel, Cal. They were just eating pigeons. Come to think of it, those skulls in Sarah’s lair dated at more than six months old. That’s why it took so long to find her—she’d stopped preying on people, had switched over to eating rats.”
“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?”