The Night 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’s desk were filled with her ancient doll collection, their crumbling heads sprouting hair made from horses’ manes and hand-spun flax. They sat in the dim light wearing stiff, painted smiles. I could imagine the sticky scent left by centuries of stroking kiddie fingers. And the Shrink hadn’t bought them as antiques; she’d lifted every one from the grasp of a sleeping child, back in the days when they were new.
Now that’s a weird kink, but it beats any fetishes that would spread the disease, I suppose. Sometimes I wonder if the whole living-in-a-bubble thing is just a way to keep the Shrink’s ancient and unfulfilled desires at bay. Summer days in Manhattan, when every woman in town is wearing a tank top or a sundress, I wish they’d lock me in a bubble somewhere.
“Hey, Kid,” she said, looking up from the papers on her desk.
I frowned but could hardly complain. After being 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’s minders take everything you’re wearing and 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, who wandered 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 raise my voice. It’s always weird talking to 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 closed my eyes, adjusting to the weird sensation of a total absence of smell. This doesn’t happen very often in New York City, and it never happens to me, except in the Shrink’s superclean office. As an almost-predator, I can smell the salt when someone’s crying, the acid tang of used AA batteries, and the mold living between the pages of an old book.
The Shrink’s reading light buzzed, set so low that its filament barely glowed, softening her features. As carriers get older, they begin to look more like full-blown peeps—wiry, wide-eyed, and gauntly beautiful. They don’t have enough flesh to get wrinkles; the parasite burns calories like running a marathon. Even after my afternoon at the diner, I was a little hungry myself.
After a few moments, she took her hands from the papers, steepled her fingers, and peered at me. “So, let me guess…”
This was how Dr. Prolix started every session, telling me what was in my own head. She wasn’t much for the so-how-does-that-make-you-feel school of head-shrinking. I noticed that her voice had the same dry timbre as Sarah’s, with a hint of dead, rustling leaves among her words.
“You have finally reached your goal,” she said. “And yet your long-sought redemption isn’t what you thought 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 make things too easy for her and just shrugged. “I don’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 makes its accomplishment more satisfying, not less.”
“Easy for you to say.” The bruises on my chest were still throbbing, and my ribs were knitting back together in an itchy way. “But it wasn’t really the fight. The messed-up thing was that Sarah recognized me. She said my name.”
Dr. Prolix’s Botoxed eyes widened even farther. “When you captured your other girlfriends, they didn’t speak to you, did they?”
“No. Just screamed when they saw my face.”
She smiled gently. “That means they loved you.”
“I doubt it. None of them knew me that well.” Other than Sarah, who I’d met before I turned contagious, every woman I’d ever started a relationship with had begun to change in a matter of weeks.
“But they must have felt something for you, or the anathema wouldn’t have taken hold.” She smiled. “You’re a very attractive boy, Cal.”
I cleared my throat. A compliment from a five-hundred-year-old is like when your aunt says you’re cute. Not helpful in any way.
“How’s that going anyway?” she added.
“What? The enforced celibacy? Just great. Loving it.”
“Did you try the rubber band trick?”
I held up my wrist. The Shrink had suggested I wear a rubber band there and ping myself with it every time I had a sexual thought. Negative reinforcement, like swatting your dog with a rolled-up newspaper.
“Mmm. A bit raw, isn’t it?” she said.
I glanced down at my wrist, which looked like I’d been wearing a razor-wire bracelet. “Evolution versus a rubber band. Which would you bet on?”
She nodded sympathetically. “Shall we turn back to Sarah?”
“Please. At least I know she really loved me; she almost killed me.” I stretched in the chair, my still-tender ribs creaking. “Here’s the funny thing, though. She was nested upstairs, with these big-ass windows looking out over the river. You could see Manhattan perfectly.”
“What’s so strange about that, Cal?”
I glanced away from her gaze, but the blank eyes of the dolls weren’t much better. Finally, I stared at the floor, where a tiny tumbleweed of dust was being sucked toward Dr. Prolix. Inescapably.
“Sarah was in love with Manhattan. The streets, the parks, everything about it. She owned all these New York photo books, knew the histories of buildings. How could she stand to look at the skyline?” I glanced up at Dr. Prolix. “Could her anathema be, like, broken somehow?”
The Shrink’s fingers steepled again as she shook her head. “Not broken, exactly. The anathema can work in mysterious ways. My patients and the legends both report similar obsessions. I believe your generation calls it stalking.”
“Um, maybe. How do you mean?”
“The anathema creates a great hatred for beloved things. But that doesn’t mean that the love itself is entirely extinguished.”
I frowned. “But I thought that was the point. Getting you to reject your old life.”
“Yes, but the human heart is a strange vessel. Love and hatred can exist side by side.” Dr. Prolix leaned back in her chair. “You’re nineteen, Cal. Haven’t you ever known someone rejected by a lover, who, consumed by rage and jealousy, never lets go? They look on from a distance, unseen but boiling inside. The emotion never seems to tire, this hatred mixed with intense obsession, even with a kind of twisted love.”
“Uh, yeah. That would pretty much be stalking.” I nodded. “Kind of a fatal attraction thing?”
“Yes, fatal is an apt word. It happens among the undead as well.”
A little shiver went through me. Only the really old hunters use the word undead, but you have to admit it has a certain ring to it.
“There are legends,” she said, “and modern case studies in my files. Some of the undead find a balancing point between the attraction of their old obsessions and the revulsion of the anathema. They live on this knife’s edge, always pushed and pulled.”