I closed my eyes. Lace was infected. The parasite must have been working overtime, gathering reflective cells behind her corneas, readying her for a life of nocturnal hunting, of hiding from the sun.
“Who’s Linus?” Lace asked.
“Who knows? That’s been there for a while.”
“Oh. So what happens now?” she said. “I mean, Cal, did you bring me down here to … get rid of me or something?”
“Get rid—? Of course not!” I pulled the pills from my pocket. “Here, take two of these, right now.”
She shook out two and swallowed them, the pills catching for a moment in her dry throat. She coughed once, then said, “Is it really that dark down here? This isn’t some trick you’re pulling? I can really see in the dark?”
“Yeah, a normal person would be totally blind.”
“And I got this from your cat?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“You know, Cal, it’s not like I had sex with your cat either.”
“But he sat on your chest while you slept and … exchanged breath with you, or something. Apparently that’s the way the old strain spreads, but nobody ever told me about it. Things are really screwed up right now at the Watch. In fact, things are about to go nuts in general.” I turned her to face me. “We’ll have to get out of the city. There’s going to be a lot of trouble as the infections set in.”
“Like you said when you first told me about the Watch? Everyone biting one another, a total zombie movie? So why not give everyone the pills?”
I chewed my lip. “Because they want the disease to spread, for some reason. But maybe they’ll eventually use the pills, and things will settle down, but until then…”
She looked at the bottle, squinting at its label. “And these really work?”
“You saw Sarah—she’s normal now. When I captured her, she was eating rats and hiding from the sun and living in Hoboken.”
“Oh, great, dude,” Lace said. “So that’s what I have to look forward to?”
“I hope not,” I said softly, reaching for her hand. She didn’t pull away. “Sarah didn’t have any pills at first. Maybe you’ll just go straight to the superpowers. I mean, you’ll be really strong and have great hearing, and a great sense of smell, too.”
“But Cal, what about the Garth Brooks thing?”
“Garth Brooks? Oh, the anathema.”
“It makes you start hating your old life, right?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “But Sarah’s over that too. She was even wearing an Elvis armband.”
“Elvis? What is it with your girlfriends?” Lace sighed. “But the anathema won’t happen to me?”
I paused, realizing I didn’t know anything for sure. None of my classes had covered the cat-borne strain or the ancient garlic-and-mandrake cure—it had all been kept secret from me. I didn’t know what symptoms to look for, or how to adjust the dosage if Lace started to grow long black fingernails or fear her own reflection.
I cleared my throat. “Well, we’ll have to watch for symptoms. Is there anything in particular you really like? Potato salad?” I wracked my brain, realizing how little I knew about Lace. “Hip-hop? Heavy metal? Oh, yeah, the smell of bacon. Anything else I should worry about if you start despising it?”
She sighed. “I thought we covered this already.”
“What? Potato salad?”
“No, stupid.” And then she kissed me.
Her mouth was warm against mine, her heart still beating hard from our dash through the darkness, from the creepiness of the abandoned station, from the news that she would soon turn into a vampire. Or maybe just from kissing me—I could feel it pounding in her lips, full of blood. My own heartbeat seemed to rush into my head, strong enough to pulse red at the corners of my vision.
A predator’s kiss: endless, insistent, and my first in six long months.
When we finally parted, Lace whispered, “You feel like you’ve got a fever.”
Still dizzy, I smiled. “All the time. Supermetabolism.”
“And you’ve got supersmell too?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Dude.” She sniffed the air and frowned. “So what do I smell like?”
I inhaled softly, letting Lace’s scent claim me, the familiar jasmine of her shampoo somehow settling the chaos of the past twenty-four hours. We could kiss again, I realized, do anything we wanted. It was safe now, even with the parasite’s spores in my blood and saliva, because she was infected, just like me.
“Butterflies,” I said after a moment of thought.
“Butterflies?”
“Yeah. You use some kind of jasmine-scented shampoo, right? Smells like butterflies.”
“Wait a second. Butterflies have a smell? And it’s jasmine?”
My body was still humming from the kiss, my mind still reeling from all the revelations of the day, and there was something comforting about being asked a question I knew the answer to. I let the wonders of biology flow forth. “It’s the other way around. Flowers imitate insects—patterning their petals after wings, stealing their smells. Jasmine tricks butterflies into landing on it, so they carry pollen from one flower to another. That’s how jasmine flowers have sex with each other.”
“Dude. Jasmine has sex? Using butterflies?”
“Yeah. How about that?”
“Huh.” She was silent for a moment, still holding me, thinking about all those flowers having butterfly-mediated sex. Finally, she said, “So when butterflies land on my hair, do they think they’re having jasmine-sex with it?”
“Probably.” I leaned closer, burying my nose in her smell. Maybe the natural world wasn’t so jaw-droppingly horrible—appalling, nasty, vile. Sometimes nature could be quite sweet, really, as delicate as a confused and horny butterfly.
The subway platform trembled under us again, another train coming. Eventually, we’d have to return to the surface, to face the sunlight and the coming crumbling of civilization, to ride out whatever tumult the old carriers had planned now that the old strain was surging into daylight. But for the moment I was content to stand there, the thought of an apocalyptic future suddenly less panicking. I had something that I’d thought lost forever, another person warm in my arms. Whatever happened next seemed bearable.
“Will the disease make me hate you, Cal?” she asked again. “Even if I take the pills?”
I started to say I wasn’t sure, but in that moment the rumbling underfoot shifted, no longer building steadily. Then it shifted again, like something winding toward us, and among the false butterflies of Lace’s hair I caught another scent, ancient and dire.
“Cal?”
“Wait a second,” I said, and took a deeper breath.
The foul smell redoubled, sweeping over us like air pushed up through subway grates by a passing train. And I knew something as thoroughly as my ancestors had known the scents of lions and tigers and bears…
A bad thing was on its way.
Chapter 22
SNAKES ON A STICK
The next time you go to the doctor, check out the plaques on the wall. One of them, usually the biggest, will be decorated with an intriguing symboclass="underline" two snakes climbing up a winged staff.
Ask your doctor what this symbol means, and you’ll probably get this line: The staff is called the caduceus. It’s the sign of Hermes, god of alchemists, and the symbol of the American Medical Association.
But that is only half the truth.
Meet the guinea worm. It hangs around in ponds, too small to see with the naked eye. If you drink guinea-worm-infected water, one of these beasties may find its way into your stomach. From there, it will make its way to one of your legs, working chemical magic to hide from your immune system. It will grow much bigger, as long as two feet.