THIRTY-SEVEN

As the sun began to lower over Caldwell and early rush-hour traffic flooded the downtown streets and highway ramps, Jo Early sat at her desk at the Caldwell Courier Journal with her aching head cradled between her thumbs and forefingers.

Rather like you might ever so carefully keep a bomb with an impact detonator cushioned from any possible impact.

She had been getting headaches over the last few weeks, and they were growing more intense. This one, in fact, was presenting her with a new level of agony, the light-sensitivity, pressure at the base of her neck, and roiling nausea a triple threat she could totally do without.

Closing her eyes, she came to a conclusion: As much as she prided herself on being a logical person, it was very clear she had a tumor.

Or, as Arnold Schwarzenegger called it in Kindergarten Cop, a toomah.

Kidding aside, maybe it was an eyestrain thing. Ever since she’d taken this job as online content editor for the CCJ, she’d been spending long periods of time in front of a computer screen. Back when she’d been a receptionist for that real estate office, she’d done scheduling and stuff on them, but this new position was exclusively computer work—

“Do you need some Motrin?”

As a familiar male voice pierced into her ear as if it were an ice pick, she almost told the man who had gotten her this job to pipe down there, Pavarotti. But she had a feeling it was her, not him.

Opening her eyes, she stared up at Bill Elliot’s earnest, hipster face. “I swear, I cannot shake this migraine.”

“Do you need to get your eye prescription checked?”

“I don’t have glasses.”

“Maybe you need them?”

Yup, Bill was the reason she had gotten this job, and he and his wife, Lydia, had opened themselves and their home up to Jo even though they were only in their mid-thirties. Then again, marriage and a mortgage were far greater separators between age groups than a couple of calendar years here or there.

It was like the difference between an eleven-year-old who hadn’t yet gone through puberty and someone who was fourteen and going on their first date.

A lifetime.

“I’ll make an appointment.” She sat back and rolled her shoulders. “You leaving for the day?”

“Almost. Do you want to go check out that warehouse with me tonight or no?”

“I would love to.” She looked at her monitor—and then promptly glanced down at her desk as the thumper in her skull got worse. “But I’m in no shape to go anywhere.”

“Troy might come.”

“I wish I could.”

Bill pulled on a coat and then tied a red scarf around his neck. “Let me know if I can get you anything?”

“I will. And if you find something at that site, call me.”

“You got it.” He smiled. “I hope you feel better.”

As the guy walked off, Jo got to her feet and looked around. The open newsroom was nearly empty, phones no longer ringing, people gone from their cubicles, everything grinding down.

How had the day passed so fast? she marveled as she headed for the ladies’ room in the far corner.

The Caldwell Courier Journal’s headquarters had recently gone through an extensive remodel—or so she had been told by every single reporter she’d met on her first day on the job. The multi-storied brick building, which had housed the paper since 1902, had had a total redo, although not for any good reason as far as the staff felt.

Like a lot of dailies in medium cities, the CCJ was dying, its page count and ad revenue getting smaller, its stories growing shorter, its middle section now USA Today instead of any content generated in Caldwell itself. In the previous year alone, two senior editors, seven reporters, and all three proofreaders had been let go, and the renovations had been done so that the footprint of the newsroom could be shrunk accordingly, with the freed-up space being rented out to—surprise!—a technology start-up.

The mood around the place was grim, and the fact that Jo had been hired at all had been a miracle. Still, they had wanted someone cheap and young to take care of their online stuff, and she fit the bill. Her degree in English Lit from Williams had been a nice little bonus for them, something her superiors might have boasted about if anyone had cared what newspaper people thought anymore. Which they evidently did not.

As she went across the newsroom, she decided that at least the decorators could have chosen a different color than gray. Sure, that was the hue of the decade, but with the layoffs and the one-foot-in-the-grave-other-on-a-banana-peel vibe, being surrounded by carpeting the color of asphalt, cubicles done in old porridge, and walls that matched a corpse left in the cold was only adding to the depression.

In the bathroom, which was done—surprise!—in gray, she splashed her face with lukewarm water and couldn’t decide whether it was a good or a bad decision. After she dried the water off, she looked at herself in the mirror, half expecting one of her pupils to be dilated. Or half her mouth to be on a droop. Or maybe some kind of twitch to be working out an eyebrow.

Nope. She was the same as she always had been with her red hair and her green eyes and her pale skin. But she felt wrong. She felt all…wrong.

Over the past few weeks, her body had started to betray her on all kinds of levels. Night sweats. These headaches that made her flinch at light and sound. Hunger for weird things at strange times, like bacon and chocolate at three a.m.

Of course, the good news was that she lived with a bunch of stoners, so not only did they have Oscar Mayer and Hershey’s Syrup on lock, but they thought the combo was an inspired idea.

Underneath all of the odd symptoms, though, what troubled Jo most was a growing restlessness, a gnawing, tied-to-nothing, but totally imperative metronome of can’t-keep-still.

Looking back on how she’d quit her job at the real estate company, she saw that that had been an expression of the impotent urgency. And maybe all the stuff with Bill and the vampires, too—

A sharp shooter went through her frontal lobe and made her gasp.

Cursing, she wobbled her way out of the loo and returned to her desk. Logging off her computer, she put her coat on, said goodbye to Tony, who was her next-door neighbor, and headed out the back to the dark parking lot. Her VW Golf was parked close to the exit because she tried to get to work early every day, and as she got in, she hoped she was going to be able to drive.

It was tough. Once she was on the road, the headlights of other cars were so bright, she had to put her sunglasses on and did not dare take the highway even though that cut about five minutes off her twenty-minute commute.

As she slowly progressed through the stop-and-go of the surface roads, she thought about Bill and that warehouse invite. The two of them had first bonded over a strange interest in vampires—

“Goddamn it,” she muttered as the pain ramped up on her again.

Shaking her head to try to clear it, she refused to be derailed, as if the agony were an obstacle. So yes, she and Bill had bonded over the vampire thing, the two of them visiting spots around Caldwell where rituals or fights had taken place. She’d even started a blog about—

For a moment, her thoughts trailed off into the pain. But she forced them back on track, the terror that she was losing her mind giving her a preternatural focus.

Anyway, for a while, she had reposted stuff online about bizarre happenings and sightings in the city that other people had been talking about, but she’d had to abandon that. For one, it was a waste of time—

No, it wasn’t, some part of her argued. It was not a waste of time.

“Whatever.”

She had given all that up, though. And kind of deserted Bill, as well. Not that she didn’t hang out with him and wasn’t grateful for the push he’d given her for her job. It was just vampires…didn’t hold much fascination for her anymore. Why should she worry about something that didn’t exist—especially when she felt like crap, had started a new position, and was confronting the reality that, as much as she loved Dougie and his boys, she was going to have to move out of that apartment of theirs.

They were still living the college life.

Whereas she was trying to get where Bill and Lydia were. Eventually.

As Jo came up to yet another red light—why were they all red tonight?—she thought about her parents. Make that “parents.” She was hard-pressed to imagine that she was going to be able to afford a place of her own on a salary like the one she had, but she would rather live around secondhand pot smoke for the rest of her life than go to Chance and Phillie Early for anything.

She had been adopted by them not as a child they’d wanted to raise, but more as if her mother had told her father she liked the little doggie in the window, and the pair had taken Jo home as they would have a new toy.

They’d have done better with something they could have put on a shelf in their mansion and pointed at when they’d wanted to show it off.

Real children didn’t work that way.

But it was all good. She’d gotten her college education paid for by them, and then she’d gone her own way, leaving all the money, pretension, and loneliness behind.

Better to be on your own than in bad company. Besides, she had never felt like she fit in with them. Actually, she had never fit in anywhere.

When Jo finally got to the converted house her apartment was in, she had to drive around the block a couple of times to get a space. And then the walk to the front door was an exercise in mind over snow matter.

Hell, at least the near-zero-degree weather helped numb things.

After checking their cheap mailbox, she hit the stairs to the second floor and opened the way into a mess that made her want to cry. The living room was awash in pizza boxes, bongs, and Mountain Dew, and Dougie was asleep sitting up on the brown padded sofa that she had always thought belonged in a Febreze commercial—as the before-treatment example. God only knew where the others were.

She didn’t leave the mail on the counter. That never went well. She took it to her bedroom with her, closed herself in, and went over to the bed. Her sit-down quickly became a fall-back, and then she stared at the ceiling.

As her head pounded and a sickly sweat broke out all over her body, Jo was more than scared. She was terrified.

Something was very, very wrong with her.