“He’s getting better stuff than tea,” she said. “But he’s still in bad shape. It’s not pretty.”

I snorted. “I’ve been tied to a bed in a nuthouse, screaming and trying to bite my doctors’ fingers off. And then locked in my room for three months, hating myself and eating dead chickens raw. Don’t talk to me about pretty, Miss Lace-short-for-Lacey.”

The two of them looked at each other all seriously, then argued for a while longer, but I knew that eventually I’d get my way. They wanted to know about my songs real bad.

And like Astor Michaels always said, you had to keep the talent happy.

27. FAITHLESS

— PEARL-

The Night Watch stuck me, Zahler, and Alana Ray in one of their “guest rooms,” a little cluster of cabins at the forested edge of the compound. We were free to go where we wanted in the compound, except the hospital where Moz was, but outside our door a tall fence stretched in both directions. Razor wire coiled down its length, reminding us that we were prisoners; not because they wouldn’t let us out, but because outside was too deadly for us now. Special Guests all over again.

There wasn’t much to do except watch the world end on TV.

Thanks to jet planes, overcrowded schools, and the sheer six billion of us all crammed together, the disease was spinning out of control. It hit critical mass in New York City in that first week we were out in Jersey, spreading faster than anyone could contain, conceal, or comprehend what was happening. The talking heads all went lateral, of course, blaming terrorists or avian flu or the government or God. All nonsense, though at least they’d stopped pretending this was just a sanitation problem. But none of them seemed to get that the world was ending.

Sometimes they’d interview people in small towns, where everything was weirdly normal, the disease invisible so far. They were all smirking at New York, like we’d had it coming. But the boondocks wouldn’t be fun for very long. Credit cards, phones, and the Internet were already starting to fail. Hardly anyone was making contact lenses, movies, medicines, or refined gasoline anymore. Even in the smallest towns, they’d miss all that infrastructure when it was gone.

Ellen Bromowitz had been right: there weren’t going to be any symphony orchestras for a while. No celebrity interviews in magazines, no album cover photo shoots or music videos. And the biggest hit on local radio these days was “Where’s the National Guard Camp Nearest You?”

No way to get famous.

Of course, now that I knew the scale of what was happening, becoming a rock star seemed less important. In fact, it seemed just plain stupid, unbelievably self-centered, and nine kinds of deluded.

I’d seen this coming. Even back when all I’d had to go on was Min’s craziness and Luz’s strange tales, I’d understood somehow that the world was about to break. So what had I done? Tried to escape reality by becoming famous. As if the world couldn’t touch me then, as if bad things didn’t happen to people with record deals. As if I could just leave all the nonfamous people behind.

What a joke. A sad, demented joke.

So that was me now: depressed and deflated in New Jersey, shell-shocked that our first gig had turned into a bloodbath, that the world was crumbling, and that my lifelong dream had turned out to be the Taj Mahal of shallow.

I never wanted to go onstage again, never wanted to play another instrument… and just when I’d finally thought of a really fexcellent band name.

How’s that for annoying?

Every morning the Night Watch brought in truckloads of peeps—parasite positives—they’d captured the night before. They treated as many as would fit in their hospital, an empty elementary school they’d taken over. Hundreds of them, reborn as angels, trained on the assembly field every day. Their swords glittered like a host of flashbulbs popping in unison.

An army was building here.

Cal said that in all of human history, this was the fastest the infection had ever spread—those jet planes again. And what nobody but the Watch realized yet was that the worst part was yet to come. The creature that Min had summoned, the worm, was one of thousands rising up to attack humanity. Just like Luz had said, the sickness was merely a sign that a great struggle was about to begin.

When Cal visited to give us his geeky lectures, he’d offer the scientific version. It was all a chain reaction: the rising worms upset deep-dwelling rats, who carried the parasite to the surface; they infected felines, who gave it to their humans, who turned into peeps and spread it to still more humans. The disease made people stronger and faster, vicious and fearless—the perfect soldiers to fight the worms.

Through most of history, vampires were rare; but every few centuries, humanity needed tons of them. This epidemic was our species’ immune system gearing up, peeps like killer T-cells multiplying in our blood, getting ready to repel an invader. Of course, as Cal liked to point out, immune systems are dangerous things: lupus, arthritis, and even asthma are all caused by our own defenses. Fevers have to be controlled.

That’s where the Watch came in, to organize the peeps and keep them from doing too much damage. Like your mom bringing you aspirin and cold compresses and chicken soup—but with ninja uniforms.

Early one morning a week after we’d arrived, they finally let us see the others.

Moz was in a hospital bed, looking worse than I’d expected. His arms and legs were restrained, and long IV tubes snaked into both arms, dripping yellowish liquids into his bloodstream. Electronic monitors were taped all over his bare, pale chest. A plastic shunt jutted from his throat, so they could inject things without opening up a vein.

Moz’s eyes looked bruised, his skin stretched taut across his cheekbones. The room was dark and smelled vaguely like garlic and disinfectant.

Minerva sat silent beside him. The sight of her sent a tremor of rage through me: she’d done this to him, infected him with her kiss.

Cal said she’d been partly under the parasite’s control. Always trying to spread itself, it made its hosts horny, greedy, irrational. But I was still pissed off. Parasite-positive or not, you should never, ever hook up with anyone in your band.

Not twice in a row.

“Hey,” I said. They’d warned us not to say his name, because of the anathema. He’d only just recovered enough to look at our faces.

“Hey, man,” Zahler said. “How’s it going, Minerva?”

Minerva pointed to her own mouth, then made a key-turning gesture. My lips are sealed.

Of course… Moz had been in love with Min. Her sultry, beautiful voice would burn his ears. I noticed that he looked at Zahler and Alana Ray and me, but kept his gaze averted from Min.

Not that I could look at her myself.

“Hey,” Moz said hoarsely.

“You look like crap!” Zahler said.

“Feel like crap too.”

“At least you aren’t smashing things,” Alana Ray said. She tried to smile, but her head jerked to one side instead. Since the gig, she was twitchier than I’d ever seen her.

Moz winced, as if remembering the wreckage he’d left of the Strat. He must have loved the guitar more than Minerva, I realized, half smiling. He hadn’t smashed her to pieces, after all.

Small favors.

“Pretty intense gig, though, huh?” Moz said.

I nodded. “Yeah, fawesome. For most of one song anyway.”

“That crowd thought we were totally fool.” Zahler sighed. “Too bad about the, uh… giant worm, though.”

“Yeah. That part sucked,” Moz said.

We were all quiet for a while. The Watch hadn’t told us anything about that night, and the news had much bigger things to talk about, but we all were pretty sure that people had been killed. Of course, so had the beast we’d raised—one less underground monster.