hours a day, and though he blew me off every time I tried to mention it, he clearly wasn’t eating well. I could see with my own two eyes that he was losing weight, his pants getting baggy even when he cinched his belt up tight.
Luke’s mom was on an almost permanent night shift at the hospital, so he spent more time at my house than at his own. On the rare nights when she was home, Bob and I went over there, keeping our safety in numbers.
Within the course of a week, living life under quarantine, under siege, had begun to feel almost normal. I no longer felt quite as awkward around Luke, though I was uncomfortably aware that my crush on him was not going away. If anything, it was growing worse as I got to know him better and realized that, aside from his good looks, he had a seemingly endless list of good qualities. Smart. Nice. Helpful. Uncomplaining. Funny.
You get the picture. I was crushing on him big time, but I wasn’t willing to do anything about it—even if I’d known how to let him know I liked him without embarrassing myself to death. Besides, I still held out hope that something would happen to turn all the Nightstruck—including Piper—back to their normal selves, in which case Luke was still taken.
Of course, one could argue that my hope of Piper returning to normal was more of a pipe dream than a true hope. Trailed by a group of other Nightstruck, most of whom looked like they might have been homeless before the night got its claws into them, she stopped by to torment us just about every night. Bob always gave us plenty of warning she was coming, and then she’d start knocking on the door and shouting, telling me to come out and join her. I felt no inclination to open the door for her again, so, like the unseen creature that had attacked the house while she and I were in it, she made a circuit, trying all of the windows. Every night she found them all locked, and even if she hadn’t she wouldn’t have been able to get in. The house had been broken into a couple of times when I was a kid, so Dad had had decorative iron grilles installed over all the first-floor windows. Even if someone broke out the glass, they would have no room to crawl in.
After the first couple of nights, Piper’s night friends got bored with the exercise and stopped coming, but Piper brought a new friend instead. A small bronze goat, about knee-high to her, which clip-clopped along by her side, metallic hooves giving off the occasional spark.
As with most of the city’s statues, Billy the goat didn’t look like his daytime self when he stepped off his plinth and started roaming the streets. Ordinarily he stood in a plaza in Rittenhouse Square, and my mom and dad have pictures of both me and Beth playing around his feet and even riding him like a horse when we were little. In the day, he was a perfectly ordinary goat, with a pair of small, almost harmless-looking horns. At night, when he went roaming, his horns doubled in length and came to insidiously sharp points. Curved, wicked-looking claws jutted out all around his hooves, and there was a ridge of spines down the center of his back. And his various horns, spines, and claws were almost always spotted with fresh blood.
Piper seemed to have adopted the damn thing as some kind of pet. More disturbing yet, she could get it to follow orders. Like the time she had it spend an hour repeatedly butting that metal head against our front door. I was afraid the door would come crashing down. I suspected the goat wouldn’t be able to come inside even if it broke the door, but I knew Bob would feel honor-bound to attack, and the goat would probably gut him. I also knew that there would be nothing keeping Piper from coming in, even if the goat didn’t. So I once again had Luke sit at the table with Bob straining at the end of his leash while I waited in agonized tension in front of the door, my gun at the ready. There was no way I would actually shoot Piper, but I hoped she wouldn’t know that and would keep her distance.
In the end, all my worries were for nothing. The