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Chapter 1

STAY AWAY, JOE

After a year of hunting, I finally caught up with Sarah

It turned out she&039;d been hiding in New Jersey, which broke my heart I mean, Hoboken? Sarah was always head-over-heels in love with Manhattan For her, New York was like another Elvis, the King reranite The rest of the world was a vast extension of her parents&039; basement, the last place she wanted to wind up

No wonder she&039;d had to leave when the disease took hold of her s they used to love

Still, I shook my head when I found out where she was The old Sarah wouldn&039;t have been caught dead in Hoboken And yet here I was, finishinglot of the old ferry terminal, armed only with my wits and a backpack full of Elvis memorabilia In the black ray sky tre of my heart

It was late afternoon I&039;d spent the day in a nearby diner, workingfor the clouds to clear, praying that the bored and very cute waitress wouldn&039;t start talking to me If that happened, I&039;d have to leave and wander around the docks all day

I was nervous - the usual tension ofa maniacal cannibal - and the hours stretched out torturously But finally a few shafts of sun had broken through, bright enough to trap Sarah inside the terht

It had been raining a lot that week, and green weeds pushed up through the asphalt, cracking the old parking lot like soplace, no doubt drawn here by the spiking rat population Predators and prey and ruin - it&039;s a how quickly nature consumes hury thing

According to the Night Watch&039;s crins of a predator No transit workers gonepsychotically violent But every ti, the hordes of rats just reappeared, despite the fact that there wasn&039;t e to eat in this deserted part of town The only explanation was a resident peep When the Night Watch had tested one of the rats, it had turned out to be of my bloodline, once removed

That could only irl I&039;d ever kissed was already locked up tight (And Morgan, I was certain, was not hiding out in an old ferry ter yellow stickers plastered the ter of rat poison, but it looked like the guys at pest control were starting to get spooked They&039;d dropped off their little packets of death, slapped up a fearning stickers, and then gotten the heck out of there

Good for theh to deal with peeps

Of course, neither do I, despite the excellent health benefits But I had a certain responsibility here Sarah wasn&039;t just the first of irlfriend

My only real girlfriend, if youday of classes - fresh argument about free will and predetermination The discussion spilled out of class, into a caf¨¦, and all the way back to her rooht Sarah was very into free will I was very into Sarah

The arguured "free will"you what to do, thebut was actually the dance of little gears - neurons and hor up into decisions like clockwork You don&039;t use your body; it uses you

Guess I won that one

There were signs of Sarah everywhere All the s at eye level were smashed, every expanse of reflectiveworse

And of course there were rats Lots of them I could hear that even from outside

I squeezed between the loosely padlocked doors, then stood waiting for my vision to adjust to the darkness The sound of little feet skittered along the glooes of the vast interior space My entrance had the effect of a stone landing in a still pond: The rippling rats took a while to settle

I listened for lass and thearoundthe fa if I was part of the faement with the disease, you see They don&039;t suffer fros aren&039;t so lucky Even people likethey love - we suffer too Exquisitely

I droppedit and taping it to the inside of the door

I stepped back, and the King sainst black velvet No way could Sarah get past those piercing green eyes and that radiant saze, Ibenches lined the floor like church pews, and the faded sers had once sat here to await the next ferry to Manhattan There were a few beds of newspaper where homeless people had slept, but my nose informed me that they&039;d lain empty for weeks

Since the predator had arrived

The hordes of tiny footsteps followed me warily, still unsure of what I was

I taped a black-velvet Elvis poster onto each exit froy yellow of the rat-poison warnings Then I postered the broken s, plastering every ainst one wall, I found pieces of a shredded shirt Stained with fresh-s aside like a discarded candy wrapper I had to remind myself that this creature wasn&039;t really Sarah, full of free will and tidbits of Elvis trivia This was a cold-blooded killer

Before I zipped the backpack closed, I pulled out an eight-inch &039;68 Coure and put it in my pocket I hoped my familiar face would protect me, but it never hurts to have a trusty anathe from above, where the old ferry administration offices jutted out fro rooh places

There was only one set of stairs, the steps sagging like a flat tire in the ht pressed into the first one, it creaked unhappily

The noise didn&039;t matter - Sarah had to know already so the staircase&039;s sway settle between every step The guys in Records had warned me that this place had been condee of the slow ascent to leave a few items from my backpack on the stairs A sequined cape, a s Gospel

From the top of the stairs, a row of skulls looked down at me

I&039;d seen lairsto other predators to stay away - and partly the sort of thing that peeps justliked Not free will but those che aesthetic responses, as predictable as aa red sports car

More tiny feet skittered when I kicked one of the skulls into the gloo, asymmetrical ka-thump, ka-thump across the floor As the echoes died away, I heard so But she didn&039;t show herself, didn&039;t attack I wondered if she recognized my smell

"It&039;sany response

"Cal?"

I froze, not believing irls I&039;d ever dated had spoken at all when I&039;d tracked thenized Sarah&039;s voice Even raspy and desiccated, as dry and brittle as a lost contact lens, it was her I heard her dry throat s

"I&039;m here to help you," I said

There was no answer, nohad stopped Peeps can do that, subsist on pockets of oxygen stored in the parasite&039;s cysts

The balcony stretched beforeto abandoned offices I took a few steps and glanced into the first one It was stripped of furniture, but I could see the outlines of tiny cubicles iray industrial carpet Not a terrible place to work, though: Iron-franificent, even though the glass was broken and smeared

Manhattan lay across the river, the don spires lighting up as the sun went down, painting the glass towers orange Strange that Sarah would stay here, in sight of the island she&039;d loved How could she stand it?

Maybe she was different

Old clothes and a couple of crack vials littered the floor, along withand how the Watch hadabout predators: They leave a huge statistical footprint on any ecosysteest city and the homicides show up like a house on fire The disease has spent the last thousand years evolving to conceal itself, but it gets tougher and tougher for s are prey with cell phones, after all

I stepped back into the hall and closed

When I opened them, Sarah stood before me

I sucked in a breath and the ht Her wiry body als she wore, like a child in borrowed, grown-up clothes As alhen running into an ex after a long ti a once-faends call theht there on the surface, like heroin chic without the bad skin And a peep&039;s gaze is so intense Adapted to the darkness, their irises and pupils are huge, the skin around the orbitals pulled back in a predatory facelift, revealing more of the eyeballs Like Botoxed movie stars, they always look surprised and almost never blink

For a brief and horrible ain But it was just the insatiable parasite inside me

"Sarah," I breathed out

She hissed Peeps hate the sound of their own naled channels of their brains just like an anathema But she&039;d said, "Cal"

"Go away," caer in her eyes - peeps are always hungry - but she didn&039;t want an to swirl aroundI stamped one ofSarah bared her teeth at the noise and my stomach clenched I had to remind myself that she wouldn&039;t eat me, couldn&039;t eat me

"I have to take you out of here," I said, ure in ht, but Sarah was ht , her open pal upside my head, a slap that felt like it had burst , andthe breath froht onfull of pissed-off snakes, her smell thick inbehind her Botoxed eyes Her love for me? Or just the anatheinal, First Avenue and Eighth Street," I said quickly, invoking her favorite pizza place "Vanilla vodka on the rocks Viva Las Vegas" That last one scored, so I added, "His mother&039;s middle name was Love"

At this second Elvis reference, Sarah hissed like a snake, one hand curling into a claw The fingernails, like a corpse&039;s, keep growing as everything else is eaten away, and hers were as gnarled and black as dried beetle husks

I stopped her with the password for our shared video store account, then rattled off her old cell-phone nuoldfish she&039;d left behind Sarah flinched, battered by these old, fanifiers Then she let out a howl, her ain A dark claw raised up