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Chapter 3

ANATHEMA

Okay, let&039;s clear up some myths about va the V-word ht Watch, we prefer the term parasite-positives, or peeps, for short

The ic involved No flying Hus - the disease doesn&039;t change that No transfor into bats or rats either It&039;s i o?

On the other hand, I can see how people in centuries past got confused Hordes of rats, and so on peep leftovers Rodents e containers for the disease Rats give the parasite a place to hide in case the peep gets hunted down

Infected rats are devoted to their peeps, tracking them by smell The rat brood also serves as a handy food source for the peep when there aren&039;t humans around to hunt (Icky, I know But that&039;s nature for you)

Back to the myths:

Parasite-positives do appear in et real: Hoould the end also has a basis in fact As the parasite takes control, peeps begin to despise the sight of their own reflections They smash all their mirrors But if they&039;re so beautiful, why do they hate their own faces?

Well, it&039;s all about the anathema

The most fa beco that s, you This is how rabies reproduces; biting spreads the virus froo, the parasite was probably like rabies When people got infected, they had an overpowering urge to bite other humans So they bit theanized in ways that dogs and squirrels can&039;t We invented posses and lynch mobs, made up laws, and appointed law enforcers As a result, the bitingus tend to have fairly short careers The only peeps who survived were the ones who ran away and hid, sneaking back at night to feed their y to the extreenerations to transfor the pathways of the hu we once loved Peeps cohen confronted with their old obsessions, despise their loved ones, and flee fronifier of home

Love is easy to switch to hatred, it turns out The term for this is the anathema effect

The anathees and out into the wild, where they were safe froraphically Peeps moved to the next valley over, then the next country, pushed farther and farther by their hatred of everything faer lynch ies to stay hidden They learned to love the night and see in the dark, until the sun itself became anathema to them

But coht They just really, really hate it

The anatherew up in Europe in the Middle Ages, chances were you were a Christian You went to church at least twice a week, prayed three ti in every roon of the cross every tiood luck So it&039;s not surprising that most peeps back then had ht of a cross, just like in the es, the crucifix was the big anathema: Elvis and Manhattan and your boyfriend all rolled into one

Things were so much simpler back then

These days, we hunters have to do our hoo after a peep What were their favorite foods? What music did they like? What movie stars did they have crushes on? Sure, we still find a few cases of cruciphobia, especially down in the Bible Belt, but you&039;re much more likely to stop peeps with an iPod full of their favorite tunes (With certain geeky peeps, I&039;ve heard, the Apple logo alone does the trick)

That&039;s why new peep hunters like me start with people they used to know, so we don&039;t have to guess what their anathe the people who once loved us is as easy as it gets Our own faces work as a reminder of their former lives We are the anathe

I am parasite-positive, technically a peep, but I can still listen to Kill Fee and Deaths without howling Through some trick of evolution, I&039;enetic lottery Peeps like me are rarer than hens&039; teeth: Only one in every hundred victi and a great sense of s driven crazy by the anathema

We&039;re called carriers, because we have the disease without all the syh there is this one extra symptom that we do have: The disease makes us horny All the tio to waste, after all We can still spread the disease to other humans Like that of the maniacs, our saliva carries the parasite&039;s spores But we don&039;t bite; we kiss, the longer and harder the better

The parasite ry snail, except hungry for sex I&039;m constantly aroused, aware of every feo out and shag someone!

None of which uys, I suppose Except for one ses, my unlucky lovers become monsters, like Sarah did And this is not much fun to watch

Dr Rat showed up first, like she&039;d been waiting by the phone

Her footsteps echoed through the ferry ter noise I left Sarah&039;s side and went out to the balcony Dr Rat had a dozen folding cages strapped to her back, like sos, ready to trap some samples of Sarah&039;s brood

"Couldn&039;t wait, could you?" I called

"No," she yelled up "It&039;s a big one, isn&039;t it?"

"See to its sleeping mistress

She looked at the half-fallen staircase with annoyance "Did you do that?"

"Uet up there, Kid?"

I just shrugged I&039; fan of the nicknaht Watch, just because I&039;e is about a hundred and seventy-five All peep hunters are carriers Only carriers are fast and strong enough to hunt down our crazy, violent cousins

Dr Rat&039;s usually pretty cool, though She doesn&039;t mind her own nicknah she&039;s about sixty and wears enough hair-spray to stick a bear to the ceiling, she plays good alternative metal and lets me rip her CDs - Kill Fee hasn&039;t made a dime off me since I met Dr Rat And mercifully, she falls well off ht Watch classes she teaches (Rats 101, Peep Hunting 101, and Early Plagues and Pestilence)

Like ht Watch, she&039;s not parasite-positive She&039;s just a working stiff who loves her job You have to, working at the Night Watch The pay&039;s not great

With one last look at the cruan to set out her traps, then started laying out piles of poison

"Isn&039;t there enough of that stuff around already?" I asked

"Not like this So It&039;s marked with Essence of Cal Thompson A feabs of your sweat on each pile and they&039;ll eat hearty"

"My what?" I said "Where&039;d you get my sweat?"

"From a pencil I borrowed from you in Rats 101, after that pop quiz last week Did you know pop quizzes make you sweat, Cal?"

"Not thatwith some peanut butter"

I wiped my palms on reat se When they eat, they can detect one part of rat poison in a million And they can smell their peeps froenitor, my familiar smell would cover the taint of poison

I supposed it orth having my sweat stolen We had to kill off Sarah&039;s brood before it fell apart and scattered into the rest of Hoboken A hungry brood that has lost its peep can be dangerous, and the parasite occasionally spreads fro New Jersey needed was another peep

That&039;s the interesting thing about Dr Rat: She loves rats but also loves co ways to kill them Like I said, love and hatred aren&039;t that far apart

The transport squad arrived ten minutes later They didn&039;t wait for sunset, just cut the locks off the biggest set of doors and backed their garbage truck right up to theh the tere trucks are perfect for the transport squad They&039;re like the digestive system of the modern world - no one ever thinks twice about them They&039;re built like tanks and yet are coular business And if the guys who ride on theloves, well, nothing funny about that, is there? Garbage is dangerous stuff, after all

Rather than chance the ruined staircase, the transport guys reached into their truck for rope ladders with grappling hooks They cliround floor in a litter They always carry ear, it turns out

I watched the whole operation while I did my paperwork, then asked the transport boss if I could co in the truck with Sarah

He shook his head and said, "No rides, Kid Anyway, the Shrink wants to see you"

"Oh," I said

When the Shrink calls, you go

By the tiot back into Manhattan, darkness had fallen

In New York City, they grind up old glass, mix it into concrete, and make sidewalks out of it Glassphalt looks pretty, especially if you&039;ve got peep eyesight It sparkled underfoot as I walked, catching the orange glow of streetlights

Most i to look at besides the woers with chunky shoes and cool accessories, tourists looking around all wide-eyed and wanting to ask directions, NYU dance students in for about New York is that it&039;s full of beautiful wo with unthinkable thoughts

My senses were still at the pitch that hunting brings theh ht tiht the smells of perfume, body lotion, and scented sha sidewalk

I wasSarah on that bare and rickety bed, asking for one last gli, however painful

I&039;d always thought that once I found her, things would uncruain, but at least certain debts had been settled With her in recovery, my chain of the infection had been broken

But I still felt crappy

The Shrink alarned uilt It&039;s not an uplifting thing having turned lovers into monsters We feel bad that we haven&039;t turned into uilt, that&039;s called And we feel a bit stupid that we didn&039;t notice our own sy why the Atkins diet was givingto worry about

And there was the burning question: Why hadn&039;t I been irls I&039;d had a few dates with, and another I&039;d one crazy?

I&039;d just thought that was a New York thing

Visiting the Shrink makes my ears pop

She lives in the bowels of a Colonial-era town house, the original headquarters of the Night Watch, her office at the end of a long, narrow corridor A soft but steady breeze pushes you toward her, like a phantoic; it&039;s soative-pressure prophylaxis, which is basically a big condohout the house, a constant wind bloard the Shrink from all directions No stray microbes can escape from her out into the rest of the city, because all the air in the house ets assed, and roasted at about two hundred degrees Celsius before it pops out of the town house&039;s always-s chimney It&039;s the same setup they have at bioweapons factories, and at the lab in Atlanta where scientists keep smallpox virus in a locked freezer

The Shrink actually has smallpox, she once told me She&039;s a carrier, like us hunters, but she&039;s been alive a lot longer, even longer than the Night Mayor Old enough to have been around before inoculations were invented, back when measles and smallpox killed more people than war The parasite makes her immune fro it, and she carries bits and pieces of various hues to this day So they keep her in a bubble

And yes, we peeps can live a really long tioes back about three hundred and fifty years, a century and a half older than the United States of Aht Watch Authority may have split off from official City Hall a while back - like the peeps we hunt, we have to hide ourselves - but the Night Mayor was appointed for a lifelong term in 1687 It just so happens he&039;s still alive Thatthe Freeht Mayor was around to personally watch the witch trials of the 1690s He was here during the Revolutionary War, when the black rats who used to run the city got pushed out by the gray Norwegian ones who still do, and he was here for the attempted Illuminati takeover in 1794 We know this town

The shelves behind the Shrink&039;s desk were filled with her ancient doll collection, their cru hair made from horses&039;stiff, painted sine the sticky scent left by centuries of stroking kiddie fingers And the Shrink hadn&039;t bought therasp of a sleeping child, back in the days when they were new

Now that&039;s a weird kink, but it beats any fetishes that would spread the disease, I suppose So is just a way to keep the Shrink&039;s ancient and unfulfilled desires at bay Su a tank top or a sundress, I wish they&039;d lock me in a bubble so up from the papers on her desk

I frowned but could hardly co around five centuries, you can pretty much call everybody "Kid"

I took a seat, careful to stay well behind the red line painted on the floor If you step over it, the Shrink&039;sand burn it, and you have to go home in these penalty clothes that are too small, like the jacket and tie they force you to wear at fancy restaurants when you show up underdressed Everyone at the Watch remembers a carrier peep named Typhoid Mary, andered around too addled by the parasite to know that she was spreading typhus to everyone she slept with

"Good evening, Doctor Prolix," I said, careful not to raiseto other carriers The red line kept me and the Shrink about twenty feet apart, but we both had peep hearing, so it was rude to shout Social reflexes take a long time to catch up to superpowers

I closedto the weird sensation of a total absence of smell This doesn&039;t happen very often in New York City, and it never happens to me, except in the Shrink&039;s superclean office As an al, the acid tang of used AA batteries, and the es of an old book

The Shrink&039;s reading light buzzed, set so low that its filaet older, they begin to look auntly beautiful They don&039;t have enough flesh to get wrinkles; the parasite burns calories like running a marathon Even after ry myself

After a few ers, and peered at uess"

This was how Dr Prolix started every session, telling me as in my own head She wasn&039;t much for the so-how-does-that- I noticed that her voice had the sa leaves aoal," she said "And yet your long-sought redeht it would be"

I had to sigh The worst part of visiting the Shrink was being read like a book But I decided not to ed "I don&039;t know I had a long day drinking coffee and waiting for the clouds to clear And then Sarah put up a wicked fight"

"But the difficulty of a challenge usually , not less"