Читать книгу The Night Eternal - Чак Хоган, Гильермо дель Торо, Chuck Hogan - Страница 7

Kelton Street, Woodside, Queens

A SCREAM PEALED in the distance, and Dr. Ephraim Goodweather startled awake. He thrashed on the sofa, flipping onto his back and sitting up, and—in one fluid, violent motion—gripped the worn leather sword handle jutting out of the pack on the floor at his side and slashed the air with a blade of singing silver.

His battle cry, hoarse and garbled, a fugitive from his nightmares, stopped short. His blade quivered, unmet.

He was alone.

Kelly’s house. Her sofa. Familiar things.

His ex-wife’s living room. The scream was a far-off siren, converted into a human shriek by his sleeping mind.

He had been dreaming again. Of fire and shapes—indefinable but vaguely humanoid—made of blinding light. A flashpoint. He was in the dream and these shapes wrestled with him right before the light consumed it all. He always awoke agitated and exhausted, as if he had physically grappled with an opponent. The dream came out of nowhere. He could be having the most domestic kind of reverie—a picnic, a traffic jam, a day at the office—and then the light would grow and consume it all, and the silvery figures emerged.

He blindly groped for his weapon bag—a modified baseball gear bag, looted many months before off the high rack of a ransacked Modell’s on Flatbush Avenue.

He was in Queens. Okay. Okay. Everything coming back to him now—accompanied by the first pangs of a jaw-clenching hangover. He had blacked out again. Another dangerous binge. He returned the sword to his weapons bag, then rolled back, holding his head in his hands like a cracked crystal sphere he had delicately picked up off the floor. His hair felt wiry and strange, his head throbbing.

Hell on earth. Right. Land of the damned.

Reality was an ornery bitch. He had awoken to a nightmare. He was still alive—and still human—which wasn’t much, but it was the best he could expect.

Just another day in hell.

The last thing he remembered from sleep, the fragment of the dream that clung to his consciousness like sticky afterbirth, was an image of Zack bathed in searing silver light. It was out of his shape that the flashpoint had occurred this time.

“Dad—” Zack said, and his eyes locked with Eph’s—and then the light consumed it all.

The remembrance of it raised chills. Why couldn’t he find some respite from this hell in his dreams? Wasn’t that the way it was supposed to work? To balance out a horrible existence with dreams of flight and escape? What he wouldn’t have given for a reverie of pure sentimentality, a spoonful of sugar for his mind.

Eph and Kelly fresh out of college, ambling hand-in-hand through a flea market, looking for cheap furniture and knickknacks for their first apartment . . .

Zack as a toddler, stomping fat-footed around the house, a little boss in diapers . . .

Eph and Kelly and Zack at the dinner table, sitting with hands folded before full plates, waiting for Z to plow through his obsessively thorough saying of grace . . .

Instead, Eph’s dreams were like badly recorded snuff films. Familiar faces from his past—enemies, acquaintances, and friends alike—being stalked and taken while he watched, unable to reach them, to help them, or even to turn away.

He sat up, steadying himself and rising, one hand on the back of the sofa. He left the living area and walked to the window overlooking the backyard. LaGuardia Airport was not far away. The sight of an airplane, the distant sound of a jet engine, was cause for wonder now. No lights circled the sky. He remembered September 11, 2001, and how the emptiness of the sky had seemed so surreal back then, and what a strange relief it was when the planes returned a week later. Now there was no relief. No getting back to normal.

Eph wondered what time it was. Sometime o’clock in the morning, he figured, judging by his own failing circadian rhythm. It was summer—at least according to the old calendar—and so the sun should have been high and hot in the sky.

Instead, darkness prevailed. The natural order of night and day had been shattered, presumably forever. The sun was obliterated by a murky veil of ash floating in the sky. The new atmosphere was comprised of the detritus of nuclear explosions and volcanic eruptions distributed around the globe, a ball of blue-green candy wrapped inside a crust of poisonous chocolate. It had cured into a thick, insulating cowl, sealing in darkness and cold and sealing out the sun.

Perennial nightfall. The planet turned into a pale, rotting netherworld of rime and torment.

The perfect ecology for vampires.

According to the last live news reports, long since censored but traded like porn on Internet boards, these post-cataclysm conditions were much the same around the world. Eyewitness accounts of the darkening sky, of black rain, of ominous clouds knitting together and never breaking apart. Given the planet’s rotation and wind patterns, the poles—the frozen north and south—were theoretically the only locations on Earth still receiving regular seasonal sunlight . . . though nobody knew this for certain.

The residual radiation hazard from the nuclear explosions and the plant meltdowns had been intense at first, catastrophically so at the various ground zeros. Eph and the others had spent nearly two months belowground, in a train tunnel beneath the Hudson River, and so were spared the short-term fallout. Extreme meteorological conditions and atmospheric winds spread the damage over large areas, which may have aided in dispersing the radioactivity; the fallout was expelled by the hard rainstorms created by the violent changes to the ecosystem, further diffusing the radiation. Fallout decays exponentially, and in the short term, areas without direct-impact exposure became safe for travel and decontamination within approximately six weeks.

The long-term effects were yet to come. Questions as to human fertility, genetic mutations, and increased carcinogenesis would not be answered for some time. But these very real concerns were overshadowed by the current situation: two years following the nuclear disasters and the vampiric takeover of the world, all fears were immediate.

The pealing siren went quiet. These warning systems, meant to repel human intruders and attract assistance, still went off from time to time—though much less frequently than in the early months, when the alarms wailed constantly, persistently, like the agonal screams of a dying race. Another vestige of civilization fading away.

In the absence of the alarm, Eph listened for intruders. Through windows, rising from dank cellars, descending from dusty attics—vampires entered through any opening, and nowhere was safe. Even the few hours of sunlight each day—a dim, dusky light, haven taken on a sickly amber hue—still offered many hazards. Daylight was human curfew time. The best time for Eph and the others to move—safe from direct confrontation by strigoi—was also one of the most dangerous, due to surveillance and the prying eyes of human sympathizers looking to improve their lot.

Eph leaned his forehead against the window. The coolness of the glass was a pleasant sensation against his warm skin and the throbbing inside his skull.

Knowing was the worst part. Awareness of insanity does not make one any less insane. Awareness of drowning does not make one any less of a drowning person—it only adds the burden of panic. Fear of the future, and the memory of a better, brighter past, were as much a source of Eph’s suffering as the vampire plague itself.

He needed food, he needed protein. Nothing in this house; he had cleaned it out of food—and alcohol—many months ago. Even found a secret stash of Butterfingers in Matt’s closet.

He backed off from the window, turning to face the room and the kitchen area beyond. He tried to remember how he got here and why. He saw slash marks in the wall where, using a kitchen knife, he had released his ex-wife’s boyfriend, decapitating the recently turned creature. That was back in the early days of slaying, when killing vampires was nearly as frightening as the notion of being turned by one. Even when the vampire in question had been his ex-wife’s boyfriend, a man poised to assume Eph’s place as the most important male figure in Zack’s life.

But that gag reflex of human morality was long gone now. This was a changed world, and Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, once a prominent epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was a changed man. The virus of vampirism had colonized the human race. The plague had routed civilization in a coup d’état of astonishing virulence and violence. Insurgents—the willful, the powerful, and the strong—had all largely been destroyed or turned, leaving the meek, the defeated, and the fearful to do the Master’s bidding.

Eph returned to his weapon bag. From a narrow, zippered pocket meant for batting gloves or sweatbands, he pulled out his creased Moleskine notebook. These days he remembered nothing without writing it down in his tattered diary. Everything went in there, from the transcendental to the banal. Everything must be recorded. This was his compulsion. His diary was essentially a long letter to his son, Zack. Leaving a record of his search for his only boy. Noting his observations and theories involving the vampire menace. And, as a scientist, simply recording data and phenomena.

At the same time, it was also a helpful exercise for retaining some semblance of sanity.

His handwriting had grown so cramped over the past two years, he could barely read his own entries. He recorded the date each day, because it was the only reliable method of tracking time without a proper calendar. Not that it mattered much—except for today.

He scribbled down the date, and then his heart pushed a double beat. Of course. That was it. Why he was back here yet again.

Today was Zack’s thirteenth birthday.

YOU MAY NOT LIVE BEYOND THIS POINT warned the sign affixed to the upstairs door, written in Magic Marker, illustrated with gravestones and skeletons and crosses. It was drawn in a younger hand, done when Zack was seven or eight. Zack’s bedroom had been left essentially unchanged since the last time he’d occupied it, the same as the bedrooms of missing kids everywhere, a symbol of the stopping of time in the hearts of their parents.

Eph kept returning to the bedroom like a diver returning again and again to a sunken shipwreck. A secret museum; a world preserved exactly as it had once been. A window directly into the past.

Eph sat on the bed, feeling the mattress’s familiar give, hearing its reassuring creak. He had been through everything in this room, everything his boy used to touch in the life he used to lead. He curated this room now; he knew every toy, every figurine, every coin and shoestring, every T-shirt and book. He rejected the notion that he was wallowing. People don’t attend church or synagogue or mosque to wallow; they attend regularly as a gesture of faith. Zack’s bedroom was a temple now. Here, and here alone, Eph felt a sense of peace and an affirmation of inner resolve.

Zack was still alive.

This was not speculation. This was not blind hope.

Eph knew that Zack was still alive and that his boy had not yet been turned.

In past times—the way the world used to work—the parent of a missing child had resources to turn to. They had the comfort of the police investigative process, and the knowledge that hundreds, if not thousands, of people identified and sympathized with their plight and were actively assisting in the search.

This abduction had occurred in a world without police, without human law. And Eph knew the identity of the being that had abducted Zack. The creature that was once his mother—yes. She committed the abduction. But her action was compelled by a larger entity.

The king vampire, the Master.

But Eph did not know why Zack had been taken. To hurt Eph, of course. And to satisfy his undead mother’s drive to revisit her “Dear Ones,” the beings she had loved in life. The insidious epidemiology of the virus spread in a vampiric perversion of human love. Turning them into fellow strigoi locked them to you forever, to an existence beyond the trials and tribulations of being human, devolving into only primal needs such as feeding, spreading, survival.

That was why Kelly (the thing that was once Kelly) had become so psychically fixated on their boy, and how, despite Eph’s best efforts, she had been able to spirit him away.

And it was precisely this same syndrome, this same obsessive passion for turning those closest to them, that confirmed to Eph that Zack had not been turned. For if the Master or Kelly had drunk the boy, then Zack would surely have returned for Eph as a vampire. Eph’s dread of this very occurrence—of having to face his undead son—had haunted him for two years now, at times sending him into a downward spiral of despair.

But why? Why hadn’t the Master turned Zack? What was it holding him for? As a potential marker to be played against Eph and the resistance effort he was part of? Or for some other more sinister reason that Eph could not—dared not—fathom?

Eph shuddered at the dilemma this would present to him. Where his son was concerned, he was vulnerable. Eph’s weakness was equal to his strength: he could not let go of his boy.

Where was Zack at that very moment? Was he being held somewhere? Being tormented as his father’s proxy? Thoughts like these clawed at Eph’s mind.

It was not knowing that unsettled him the most. The others—Fet, Nora, Gus—were able to commit fully to the resistance, all their energy and their focus, precisely because they had no hostages in this war.

Visiting this room usually helped Eph feel less alone in this accursed world. But today it had the opposite effect. He had never felt so acutely alone as he felt right here, at this very moment.

Eph thought again about Matt, his ex-wife’s boyfriend—the one he had slain downstairs—and how he used to obsess over that man’s growing influence on Zack’s upbringing. Now he had to think—daily, hourly—about what sort of hell his boy must be living in, under the rule of this actual monster . . .

Overcome, feeling nauseous and sweaty, Eph dug out his diary and scratched down the same question that appeared throughout the notebook, like a koan:

Where is Zack?

As was his habit, he flipped back through the most recent entries. He spied a note about Nora and tried to make out his penmanship.

“Morgue.” “Rendezvous.” “Move at sunlight.”

Eph squinted, trying to remember—as a sense of anxiety spread through him.

He was supposed to meet Nora and Mrs. Martinez at the old Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In Manhattan. Today.

Shit.

Eph grabbed his bag with a clank of the silver blades, throwing the straps over his back, sword handles behind his shoulders like leather-wrapped antennae. He looked around quickly on his way out, spying an old Transformers toy next to the CD player on Zack’s bureau. Sideswipe, if Eph remembered correctly from reading Zack’s books outlining the Autobots’ specs. A birthday present from Eph to Zack, just a few years before. One of Sideswipe’s legs dangled, snapped from overuse. Eph manipulated the arms, remembering the way Zack used to effortlessly “transform” the toy from car to robot and back again like a Rubik’s Cube grand master.

“Happy birthday, Z,” whispered Eph before stuffing the busted toy into his weapons bag and heading for the door.

Woodside

THE FORMER KELLY Goodweather arrived outside her former residence on Kelton Street just minutes after Eph’s departure. She had been tracking the human—her Dear One—since picking up his bloodbeat some fifteen hours before. But when the sky had brightened for the meridiem—the two to three hours of dull yet hazardous sunlight that filtered through the thick cloud cover each planetary rotation—she’d had to retire underground, losing time. Now she was close.

Two black-eyed feelers accompanied her—children blinded by the solar occlusion that coincided with the Master’s arrival in New York City, who were subsequently turned by the Master itself and now gifted with the enhanced perception of second sight—small and fast, skittering along the sidewalk and over abandoned cars like hungry spiders, seeing nothing and sensing everything.

Normally, Kelly’s innate attraction to her Dear One would have been sufficient for her to track and locate her ex-husband. But Eph’s signal was weakened and distorted by the effects of ethanol, stimulants, and sedatives on his nervous and circulatory systems. Intoxication confused the synapses in a human brain, slowing its transfer rate and serving to cloak its signal, like interference over a radio channel.

The Master had taken a peculiar interest in Ephraim Goodweather, specifically in monitoring his movement throughout the city. That was why the feelers—formerly a brother and sister, now nearly identical, having shed their hair, genitals, and other human gender markers—had been sent by the Master to assist Kelly in her pursuit. Here, they began racing back and forth along the short fence in front of the house, waiting for Kelly to catch up to them.

She opened the gate and entered the property, walking once around the house, wary of traps. Once satisfied, she rammed the heel of her hand through a double windowpane, shattering glass as she reached up and unfastened the lock, raising the sash.

The feelers leaped inside, Kelly following, lifting one bare, dirty leg through, then bending and easily contorting her body to enter the three-foot-square opening. The feelers climbed all over the sofa, indicating it like trained police canines. Kelly stood very still for a long moment, opening her senses to the interior of the dwelling. She confirmed that they were alone and thus too late. But she sensed Eph’s recent presence. Maybe there was more to be learned.

The feelers scooted across the floor to a north-facing window, touching the glass as though absorbing a recent, lingering sensation—then at once scrambled up the stairs. Kelly followed them, allowing them to scent and indicate. When she came upon them they were leaping around a bedroom, their psychic senses agitated by the urgency of Eph’s recent occupation, like animals driven wild by some overwhelming but little-understood impulse.

Kelly stood in the center of the room, arms at her sides. The heat of her vampiric body, her blazing metabolism, instantly raised the temperature of the cool room a few degrees. Unlike Eph, Kelly suffered no form of human nostalgia. She felt no affinity for her former domicile, no pangs of regret or loss as she stood in her son’s room. She no longer felt any connection to this place, just as she no longer felt any connection to her pitiable human past. The butterfly does not look back upon its caterpillar self, either fondly or wistfully; it simply flies on.

A hum entered her being, a presence inside her head and a quickening throughout her body. The Master, looking through her. Seeing with her eyes. Observing their near miss.

A moment of great honor and privilege . . .

Then, just as suddenly, the humming presence was gone. Kelly felt no reproach from the Master for having fallen short of capturing Eph. She felt only useful. Of all the others that served it, throughout this world, Kelly had two things the Master greatly valued. The first was a direct link to Ephraim Goodweather.

The second was Zachary.

Still, Kelly felt the ache of wanting—of needing—to turn her dear son. The urge had subsided but never vanished. She felt it all the time, an incomplete part of herself, an emptiness. It went against her vampire nature. But she bore this agony for one reason only: because the Master demanded it. Its immaculate will alone held Kelly’s longing at bay. And so the boy remained human. Remained undelivered, unfinished. There was indeed a purpose to the Master’s demand. In that, she trusted without any uncertainty. For the motive had not been revealed to her, because it was not for her to know yet.

For now it was quite enough to see the boy sitting at the Master’s side.

The feelers leaped around her as Kelly descended the staircase. She crossed to the raised window and exited through it as she had entered, almost without breaking stride. The rains had started again, fat, black drops pelting her hot scalp and shoulders, disappearing in wisps of steam. Standing out on the center yellow line of the street, she sensed Eph’s trail anew, his bloodbeat growing stronger as he became more sober.

With the feelers racing back and forth, she strode through the falling rain, leaving a faint trail of steam in her wake. She neared a rapid-transit station and felt her psychic link to him beginning to fade. This was due to the growing distance between them. He had boarded a subway train.

No disappointment clouded her thoughts. Kelly would continue to pursue Eph until they were reunited once and for all. She communicated her report back to the Master before following the feelers into the station.

Eph was returning to Manhattan.

The Farrell

THE HORSE CHARGED. In its wake was a plume of thick black smoke and orange flame.

The horse was on fire.

Fully consumed, the proud beast galloped with an urgency born not of pain but of desire. At night, visible from a mile away, the horse without rider or saddle raced through the flat, barren countryside, toward the village. Toward the watcher.

Fet stood transfixed by the sight. Knowing it was coming for him. He anticipated it. Expected it.

Entering the outskirts of the village, bearing down on him with the velocity of a flaming arrow, the galloping horse spoke—naturally, in a dream, it spoke—saying, I live.

Fet howled as the flaming horse overtook him—and he awoke.

He was on his side, lying on a fold-down bed in the crew bunk beneath the foredeck of a rocking ship. The vessel pitched and swayed, and he pitched and swayed with it, the possessions around him netted and tied down tight. The other beds were folded up to the wall. He was the only one currently bunking.

The dream—always essentially the same—had haunted him since his youth. The flaming horse with burning hooves racing at him out of the dark night, awakening him just before impact. The fear he felt upon waking was deep and rich, a child’s fear.

He reached for his pack beneath the bunk. The bag was damp—everything on the ship was damp—but its top knot was tight, its contents secure.

The ship was the Farrell, a large fishing boat used for smuggling marijuana, which, yes, was still a profitable black-market business. This was the final leg of a return trip from Iceland. Fet had hired the boat for the price of a dozen small arms and plenty of ammunition to keep them running pot for years to come. The sea was one of the few areas left on the planet that was essentially beyond the vampires’ reach. Illicit drugs had become incredibly scarce under the new prohibition, the trade confined to homegrown and home-brewed narcotics such as marijuana and pockets of methamphetamine. They operated a smaller sideline business smuggling moonshine—and, on this trip, a few cases of fine Icelandic and Russian vodka.

Fet’s mission to Iceland was twofold. His first order of business was to travel to the University of Reykjavik. In the weeks and months following the vampire cataclysm, while still holed up inside the train tunnel beneath the Hudson River, waiting for the surface air to become habitable once again, Fet constantly paged through the book Professor Abraham Setrakian had died for, the book the Holocaust survivor–turned–vampire hunter had entrusted explicitly and exclusively to Fet’s possession.

It was the Occido Lumen, loosely translated as “The Fallen Light.” Four hundred eighty-nine folios, handwritten on parchment, with twenty illuminated pages, bound in leather and faced with plates of pure vampire-repelling silver. The Lumen was an account of the rise of the strigoi, based upon a collection of ancient clay tablets dating back to Mesopotamian times, discovered inside a cave in the Zagros Mountains in 1508. Written in Sumerian and extremely fragile, the tablets survived over a century until they fell into the hands of a French rabbi who was committed to deciphering them—more than two centuries before Sumerian was widely translated—in secret. The rabbi eventually presented his illuminated manuscript to King Louis XIV as a gift—and was immediately imprisoned for his effort.

The original tablets were pulverized upon royal order and the manuscript believed destroyed or lost. The king’s mistress, a dabbler in the occult, retrieved the Lumen from a palace vault in 1671, and from there it changed hands many times in obscurity, acquiring its reputation as a cursed text. The Lumen resurfaced briefly in 1823 and again in 1911, each time coinciding with mysterious outbreaks of disease, before disappearing again. The text was offered for auction at Sotheby’s in Manhattan no fewer than ten days following the Master’s arrival and the start of the vampire plague—and was won, after great effort, by Setrakian with the backing of the Ancients and their accumulated wealth.

Setrakian, the university professor who shunned normal society following the turning of his beloved wife, becoming obsessed with hunting and destroying the virus-bred strigoi, had considered the Lumen the authoritative text on the conspiracy of vampires that had plagued the earth for most of the history of mankind. Publicly, his station in life had fallen to that of a lowly pawnbroker in an economically depressed section of Manhattan; yet in the bowels of his shop he had maintained an armory of vampire-fighting weapons and a library of ancient accounts and manuals regarding the dread race, accumulated from all corners of the globe throughout decades of pursuit. But such was his desire to reveal the secrets contained within the Occido Lumen that he ultimately gave his life so that it would fall into Fet’s hands.

It had occurred to Fet, during those long, dark nights in the tunnel beneath the Hudson River, that the Lumen had to have been offered up for auction by someone. Someone had possessed the cursed book—but who? Fet thought that perhaps the seller had some further knowledge of its power and its contents. In the time since they surfaced, Fet had been diligently going through the tome with a Latin dictionary, doing the tedious work of translating the lexicon as best he could. On an excursion inside the vacated Sotheby’s building on the Upper East Side, Fet discovered that the University of Reykjavik was to be the anonymous beneficiary of the proceeds from the sale of the extraordinarily rare book. With Nora he weighed the pros and cons of undertaking this journey, and together they decided that this lengthy voyage to Iceland was their only chance of uncovering who had actually put the book up for auction.

However, the university, as he discovered upon arrival, was a warren of vampires. Fet had hoped that Iceland might have gone the way of the United Kingdom, which had reacted swiftly to the plague, blowing up the Chunnel and hunting down strigoi after the initial outbreak. The islands remained nearly vampire-free, and their people, though completely isolated from the rest of the infected globe, remained human.

Fet had waited until daylight to search the ransacked administrative offices in hopes of tracing the book’s provenance. He learned that the university trust itself had offered the book for auction, not a scholar employed there or a specific benefactor, as Fet had hoped. As the campus itself was deserted, this was a long way to travel to find a dead end. But it was not a total waste. For on a shelf in the Egyptology department, Fet had found a most curious text: an old, leather-bound book, printed in French in 1920. On its cover were the words Sadum et Amurah. The very last words that Setrakian had asked Fet to remember.

He took the text with him. Even though he spoke not a single word of French.

The second part of his mission proved to be much more productive. At some point early on in his association with these pot smugglers, after learning how wide their reach was, Fet challenged them to connect him with a nuclear weapon. This request was not as far-fetched as one might think. In the Soviet Union especially, where the strigoi enjoyed total control, many so-called suitcase nukes had been purloined by ex-KGB officers and were rumored to be available—in less-than-mint condition—on the black markets of Eastern Europe. The Master’s drive to purge the world of these weapons—in order that they could not be used to destroy its site of origin, as the Master had itself destroyed the six Ancients—proved to Fet and the others that the Master was indeed vulnerable. Much like the Ancients, the Master’s site of origin, the very key to its destruction, was encrypted within the pages of the Lumen. Fet offered the right price and had the silver to back it up.

This crew of smugglers put out feelers among their maritime compatriots, with the promise of a silver bounty. Fet was skeptical when the smugglers told him they had a surprise for him, but the desperate will believe in almost anything. They rendezvoused on a small volcanic island south of Iceland with a Ukrainian crew of seven aboard a junked-out yacht with six different outboard engines off the stern. The captain of the crew was young, in his midtwenties, and essentially one-handed, his left arm withered and ending in an unsightly claw.

The device was not a suitcase at all. It resembled a small keg or trash can wrapped in a black tarpaulin and netting, with buckled green straps around its sides and over its lid. Roughly three feet tall by two feet wide. Fet tried lifting it gently. It weighed over one hundred pounds.

“You sure this works?” he asked.

The captain scratched his copper beard with his good hand. He spoke broken English with a Russian accent. “I am told it does. Only one way to find out. It misses one part.”

“One part is missing?” said Fet. “Let me guess. Plutonium. U-233.”

“No. Fuel is in the core. One-kiloton capability. It misses the detonator.” He pointed to a thatch of wires on the top and shrugged. “Everything else good.”

The explosive force of a one-kiloton nuke equaled one thousand tons of TNT. A half-mile shockwave of steel-bending destruction. “I’d love to know how you came across this,” said Fet.

“I’d like to know what you want it for,” said the captain. “Best if we all keep our secrets.”

“Fair enough.”

The captain had another crewman help Fet load the bomb onto the smugglers’ boat. Fet opened the hold beneath the steel floor where the cache of silver lay. The strigoi were bent on collecting every piece of silver in the same manner as they were collecting and disarming nukes. As such, the value of this vampire-killing substance rose exponentially.

Once the deal was consummated, including a side transaction between crews of bottles of vodka for pouches of rolling tobacco, drinks were poured into shot glasses.

“You Ukraine?” the captain asked Fet after downing the firewater.

Fet nodded. “You can tell?”

“Look like people from my village, before it disappear.”

“Disappear?” said Fet.

The young captain nodded. “Chernobyl,” he explained, raising his shriveled arm.

Fet now looked at the nuke, bungee-corded to the wall. No glow, no tick-tick-tick. A drone weapon awaiting activation. Had he bartered for a barrel full of junk? Fet did not think so. He trusted the Ukrainian smuggler to vet his own suppliers, and also the fact that he had to continue doing business with the pot smugglers.

Fet was excited, even confident. This was like holding a loaded gun, only without a trigger. All he needed was a detonator.

Fet had seen, with his own eyes, a crew of vampires excavating sites around a geologically active area of hot springs outside Reykjavik, known as Black Pool. This proved that the Master did not know the exact location of its own site of origin—not the Master’s birthplace, but the earthen site where it had first arisen in vampiric form.

The secret to its location was contained in the Occido Lumen. All Fet had to do was what he as of yet had failed to accomplish: decode the work and discover the location of the site of origin himself. Were the Lumen more like a straightforward manual for exterminating vampires, Fet would have been able to follow its instructions—but instead, the Lumen was full of wild imagery, strange allegories, and dubious pronouncements. It charted a backward path throughout the course of human history, steered not by the hand of fate but by the supernatural grip of the Ancients. The text confounded him, as it did the others. Fet lacked faith in his own scholarship. Here, he missed most the old professor’s reassuring wealth of knowledge. Without him, the Lumen was as useful to them as the nuclear device was without a detonator.

Still, this was progress. Fet’s restless enthusiasm brought him topside. He gripped the rail and looked out over the turbulent ocean. A harsh, briny mist but no heavy rain tonight. The changed atmosphere made boating more dangerous, the marine weather more unpredictable. Their boat was moving through a swarm of jellyfish, a species that had taken over much of the open seas, feeding on fish eggs and blocking what little daily sun reached the ocean—at times in floating patches several miles wide, coating the surface of the water like pudding skin.

They were passing within ten miles of the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts, which put Fet in mind of one of the more interesting accounts contained in Setrakian’s work papers, the pages he had compiled to leave behind alongside the Lumen. In them, the old professor related an account of the Winthrop Fleet of 1630, which made the Atlantic voyage ten years after the Mayflower, transporting a second wave of Pilgrims to the New World. One of the fleet’s ships, the Hopewell, had transported three pieces of unidentified cargo contained in crates of handsome and ornately carved wood. Upon landing in Salem, Massachusetts, and resettling in Boston (due to its abundance of freshwater) thereafter, conditions among the Pilgrims turned brutal. Two hundred settlers were lost in the first year, their deaths attributed to illness rather than the true cause: they had been prey for the Ancients, after having unwittingly conveyed the strigoi to the New World.

Setrakian’s death had left a great void in Fet. He dearly missed the wise man’s counsel as well as his company, but most acutely he missed his intellect. The old man’s demise wasn’t merely a death but—and this was not an overstatement—a critical blow to the future of humankind. At great risk to himself, he had delivered into their hands this sacred book, the Occido Lumen—though not the means to decipher it. Fet had also made himself a student of the pages and leather-bound notebooks containing the deep, hermetic ruminations of the old man, but sometimes filed away side by side with small domestic observations, grocery lists, financial calculations.

He cracked open the French book and, not surprisingly, couldn’t make heads or tails of it either. However, some beautiful engravings proved quite illuminating: in a full-page illustration, Fet saw the image of an old man and his wife, fleeing a city, burning in a holy flash of fire—the wife turning to dust. Even he knew that tale . . . “Lot . . . ,” he said. A few pages before he saw another illustration: the old man shielding two painfully beautiful winged creatures—archangels sent by the Lord. Quickly Fet slammed the book shut and looked at the cover. Sadum et Amurah.

“Sodom and Gomorrah . . . ,” he said. “Sadum and Amurah are Sodom and Gomorrah . . .” And suddenly he felt fluent in French. He remembered an illustration in the Lumen, almost identical to the one in the French book. Not in style or sophistication but in content. Lot shielding the archangels from the men seeking congress with them.

The clues were there, but Fet was mostly unable to put any of this to good use. Even his hands, coarse and big as baseball mitts, seemed entirely unsuited for handling the Lumen. Why had Setrakian chosen him over Eph to guard the book? Eph was smarter, no doubt, much better-read. Hell, he probably spoke fucking French. But Setrakian knew that Fet would die before allowing the book to fall into the Master’s hands. Setrakian knew Fet well. And loved him well—with the patience and the care of an old father. Firm but compassionate, Setrakian never made Fet feel too slow or uninformed; quite to the contrary, he explained every matter with great care and patience and made Fet feel included. He made him belong.

The emotional void in Fet’s life had been filled by a most unsuspected source. When Eph grew increasingly erratic and obsessive, beginning in the earliest days inside the train tunnel but magnifying once they surfaced, Nora had come to lean more on Fet, to confide in him and to give and to seek comfort. Over time, Fet had learned how to respond. He had come to admire Nora’s tenacity in the face of such overwhelming despair; so many others had succumbed to either hopelessness or insanity, or else, like Eph, had allowed their despair to change them. Nora Martinez evidently saw something in Fet—maybe the same thing the old professor had seen in him—a primal nobility, more akin to a beast of burden than a man, and something Fet himself had been unaware of until recently. And if this quality that he possessed—steadfastness, determination, ruthlessness, whatever it was—made him somehow more attractive to her under these extreme circumstances, then he was the better for it.

Out of respect for Eph, he had resisted this entanglement, denying his own feelings as well as Nora’s. But their mutual attraction was more evident now. On the last day before his departure, Fet had rested his leg against Nora’s. A casual gesture by any measure, except for someone like Fet. He was a large man but incredibly conscious of his personal space, neither seeking nor allowing any violation of it. He kept his distance, ultimately uncomfortable with most human contact—but Nora’s knee was pressed against his, and his heart was racing. Racing with hope as the notion dawned on him: She’s holding. She is not moving away . . .

She had asked him to be careful, to take care of himself, and in her eyes were tears. Genuine tears as she saw him leave.

No one had ever cried for Fet before.

Manhattan

EPH RODE THE 7 express inbound, clinging fast to the exterior of the subway train. He gripped the rear left corner of the last car, his right boot perched on the rear step, fingertips dug into the window frames, rocking with the motion of the train over the elevated track. The wind and the black rain whipped at the tails of his charcoal-gray raincoat, his hooded face turned in toward the shoulder straps of his weapon pack.

It used to be that the vampires had to ride on the outside of the trains, shuttling around the underground of Manhattan in order to avoid discovery. Through the window, whose dented frame he had pried his fingers under, he saw humans sitting and rocking with the motion of the train. The distant stares, the expressionless faces: a perfectly orderly scene. He did not look for long, for if there were any strigoi riding, their heat-registering night vision would have spotted him, resulting in a very unpleasant welcoming party at the next stop. Eph was still a fugitive, his likeness hanging in post offices and police stations throughout the city, the news stories concerning his successful assassination of Eldritch Palmer—cleverly edited from his unsuccessful attempt—still replayed on television every week or so, keeping his name and face foremost in the minds of the watchful citizenry.

Riding the trains required skills that Eph had developed through time and necessity. The tunnels were invariably wet—smelling of burned ozone and old grease—and Eph’s ragged, smeared clothes acted as perfect camouflage, both visual and olfactory. Hooking up to the rear of the train—that required timing and precision. But Eph had it down. As a kid in San Francisco, he had routinely used the back of streetcars to hitch a ride to school. And you had to board them just in time. Too early and you would be discovered. Too late and you would be dragged and take a bad tumble.

And in the subway, he had taken some tumbles—usually due to drink. Once, as the train took a curve under Tremont Avenue, he had lost his footing as he calculated his landing jump and trailed on the back of the train, legs hopping frantically, bouncing against the tracks until he rolled on his side, cracking two ribs and dislocating his right shoulder—the bone popping softly as it hit the steel rails on the other side of the line. He barely avoided being hit by an oncoming train. Seeking refuge in a maintenance alcove saturated in human urine and old newspapers, he had popped the shoulder back in—but it bothered him every other night. If he rolled on it in his sleep he would wake up in agony.

But now, through practice, he had learned to seek the footholds and the crevices in the rear structure of the train cars. He knew every train, every car—and he had even fashioned two short grappling hooks to grab on to the loose steel panels in a matter of seconds. They were hammered out of the good silver set at the Goodweather household and, now and then, served as a short-range weapon with the strigoi.

The hooks were attached to wooden handles, made from the legs of a mahogany table Kelly’s mother had given them as a wedding present. If she only knew . . . She had never liked Eph—not good enough for her Kelly—and now she would like him even less.

Eph turned his head, shaking off some of the wetness in order to look out through the black rain to the city blocks on either side of the concrete viaduct high above Queens Boulevard. Some blocks remained ravaged, razed by fires during the takeover, or else looted and long since emptied. Patches of the city appeared as though they had been destroyed in a war—and, indeed, they had.

Others were lit by artificial light, city zones rebuilt by humans overseen by the Stoneheart Foundation, at the direction of the Master: light was critical for work in a world that was dark for as many as twenty-two hours each calendar day. Power grids all across the globe had collapsed following initial electromagnetic pulses that were the result of multiple nuclear detonations. Voltage overruns had burned out electrical conductors, plunging much of the world into vampire-friendly darkness. People very quickly came to the realization—terrifying and brutal in its impact—that a creature race of superior strength had seized control of the planet and that man had been supplanted at the top of the food chain by beings whose own biological needs demanded a diet of human blood. Panic and despair swept the continents. Infected armies fell silent. In the time of consolidation following Night Zero, as the new, poisonous atmosphere continued to roil and cure overhead, so did the vampires establish a new order.

The subway train slowed as it approached Queensboro Plaza. Eph lifted his foot from the rear step, hanging from the blind side of the car so as not to be seen from the platform. The heavy, constant rain was good for one thing only: obscuring him from the vampires’ watchful, blood-red eyes.

He heard the doors slide open, people shuffling in and out. The automated track announcements droned from overhead speakers. The doors closed and the train began moving again. Eph regripped the window frame with his sore fingers and watched the dim platform recede from his vision, sliding away down the line like the world of the past, shrinking, fading, swallowed up by the polluted rain and the night.

The subway train soon dipped underground, out of the driving rain. After two more stops, it entered the Steinway Tunnel, beneath the East River. It was modern conveniences such as this—the amazing ability to travel beneath a swift river—that contributed to the human race’s undoing. Vampires, forbidden by nature from crossing a body of moving water under their own power, were able to circumvent such obstacles by the use of tunnels, long-distance aircraft, and other rapid-transit alternatives.

The train slowed, approaching Grand Central Station—and just in time. Eph readjusted his grip on the subway car’s exterior, fighting fatigue, tenaciously holding on to his homemade hooks. He was malnourished, as thin now as he had been as a freshman in high school. He had grown accustomed to the persistent, gnawing emptiness in the pit of his belly; he knew that protein and vitamin deficiencies affected not only his bones and muscles but also his mind.

Eph hopped off before it came to a full stop, stumbling to the rock bed between the tracks. He rolled on his left shoulder, landing like an expert. He flexed his fingers, unlocking the arthritis-like paralysis of his knuckles, putting away the hooks. The train’s rear light shrank up ahead, and he heard the grating of steel wheels braking against steel rails, a metallic shriek his ears never got used to.

He turned and hobbled off the other way, deeper into the tunnel. He had traveled this route enough times that he did not need his night scope to reach the next platform. The third rail was not a concern, covered with wood casing, in fact making for a convenient step up onto the abandoned platform.

Construction materials remained on the tile floor, a renovation interrupted at its earliest stage: scaffolding, a stack of pipe sections, bales of tubing wrapped in plastic. Eph pushed back his wet hood and reached into his pack for his night-vision scope, strapping it over his head, the lens fitting in front of his right eye. Satisfied that nothing had been disturbed since his last visit, he moved toward the unmarked door.

At its pre-vampire peak, half a million people daily crossed the polished Tennessee marble of the Grand Concourse floor somewhere above him. Eph could not risk entering the main terminal—the half-acre concourse afforded few places to hide—but he had been up on the catwalks on the roof. There, he had looked at the monuments to a lost age: landmark skyscrapers such as the MetLife Building and the Chrysler Building, dark and silent against the night. He had climbed above the two-story-high air-conditioning units on the terminal roof, standing on the pediment facing Forty-second Street and Park Avenue, among colossal statues of the Roman gods Minerva, Hercules, and Mercury above the great clock of Tiffany glass. On the central section of the roof, he had looked down more than a hundred feet to the cathedral-like Grand Concourse. That was as close as he had gotten.

Eph eased open the door, his scope seeing into the total darkness beyond. He climbed two long flights of stairs, then went through another unlocked door into a long corridor. Thick steam pipes ran the length of it, still functioning, groaning with heat. By the time he reached the next door, he was dripping with sweat.

He slid a small silver knife from his backpack, needing to be careful here. The cement-walled emergency exit was no place to get cornered. Black-tinged groundwater had seeped into the floor, pollution from the sky having become a permanent part of the ecosystem. This section of the underground was once regularly patrolled by maintenance workers, rooting out the homeless, the curious, the vandals. Then the strigoi briefly assumed control of the underworld of the city, hiding, feeding, spreading. Now that the Master had reconfigured the planet’s atmosphere in order to free vampires from the threat of the sun’s virus-killing ultraviolet rays, they had risen from this labyrinthine netherworld and claimed the surface for themselves.

The last door was plastered with a white-and-red sign: EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY—ALARM WILL SOUND. Eph returned his blade and his night-vision scope to his backpack, then pushed the pressure bar, the alarm wires having been snipped long ago.

A foul breeze from the stringy black rain exhaled into his face. He pulled up his damp hood and started walking east on Forty-fifth Street. He watched his feet splashing on the sidewalk, walking as he was with his head down. Many of the wrecked or abandoned cars from the initial days remained shoved to the curbs, making most of the streets one-way paths for work vans or supply trucks operated by the vampires and the Stoneheart humans. Eph’s eyes remained low but vigilantly searched either side of the street. He had learned never to look around conspicuously; the city had too many windows, too many pairs of vampire eyes. If you looked suspicious, you were suspicious. Eph went out of his way to avoid any interaction with strigoi. On the streets, as everywhere, humans were second-class citizens, subject to search or any kind of abuse. A sort of creature apartheid existed. Eph could not risk exposure.

He hurried over to First Avenue, to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, quickly ducking down the ramp reserved for ambulances and hearses. He squeezed behind stretchers and a rolling wardrobe they had set there in order to obscure the basement entrance, and entered the unlocked door to the city morgue.

Inside, he stood a few moments in the dim silence, listening. This room, with its stainless steel autopsy tables and numerous sinks, was where the first group of passengers from doomed Regis Air Flight 753 had been brought two years before. Where Eph had first examined the needle-like breach in the necks of the seemingly dead passengers, exposing a puncture wound that extended to the common carotid artery—which they would soon discover had been caused by the vampires’ stingers. Where he had also first been shown the strange antemortem augmentation of the vestibular folds around the vocal cords, later determined to be the preliminary stage of the development of the creatures’ fleshy stingers. And where he had first witnessed the transformation of the victims’ blood from healthy red to oily white.

Also, just outside on the sidewalk was where Eph and Nora first encountered the elderly pawnbroker Abraham Setrakian. Everything Eph knew about the vampire breed—from the killing properties of silver and ultraviolet light, to the existence of the Ancients and their role in the shaping of human civilization since the earliest times, to the rogue Ancient known as the Master whose journey to the New World aboard Flight 753 marked the beginning of the end—he had learned from this tenacious old man.

The building had remained uninhabited since the takeover. The morgue was not part of the infrastructure of a city administered by vampires, because death was no longer the necessary end point of human existence. As such, the end-of-life rituals of mourning and corpse preparation and burial were no longer needed and rarely observed.

For Eph, this building was his unofficial base of operations. He started up the stairs to the upper floors, ready to hear it from Nora: how his despair over Zack’s absence was interfering with their resistance work. Dr. Nora Martinez had been Eph’s number two in the Canary Project at the CDC. In the midst of all the stress and chaos of the rise of the vampires, their long-simmering relationship had gone from professional to personal. Eph had attempted to deliver Nora and Zack to safety, out of the city, back when the trains were still running beneath Penn Station. But Eph’s worst fears were realized when Kelly, drawn to her Dear One, led a swarm of strigoi into the tunnels beneath the Hudson River, derailing the train and laying waste to the rest of the passengers—and Kelly attacked Nora and spirited his son away.

Zack’s capture—for which Eph in no way held Nora accountable—had nonetheless driven a wedge between them, just as it had driven a wedge between Eph and everything. Eph felt disconnected from himself. He felt fractured and fragmented and knew that this was all he had to offer Nora now.

Nora had her own concerns: chiefly her mother, Mariela Martinez, her mind crippled by Alzheimer’s disease. The OCME building was large enough that Nora’s mother could roam the upper floors, strapped into her wheelchair, creeping down the hallway by the grip socks on her feet, conversing with people no longer present or alive. A wretched existence, but, in reality, not so far removed from that of the rest of the surviving human race. Perhaps better: Mrs. Martinez’s mind had taken refuge in the past and thus could avoid the horror of the present.

The first sign Eph found that something was amiss was the overturned wheelchair, lying on its side near the door off the fourth-floor stairway, strap belts lying on the floor. Then the ammonia scent hit him, the telltale odor of vampire presence. Eph drew his sword, his pace quickening down the corridor, a sick feeling rising from his gut. The medical examiner’s building had limited electricity, but Eph could not use lamps or light fixtures that would be visible from the street, so he proceeded down the dim corridor in a defensive crouch, mindful of doors and corners and other potential hiding places.

He passed a fallen partition. A ransacked cubicle. An overturned chair. “Nora!” he called. An incautious act, but if there were still any strigoi present, he wanted to draw them out now.

On the floor in a corner office, he discovered Nora’s travel backpack. It had been ripped open, her clothes and personal items flung around the room. Her Luma lamp sat in the corner, plugged into its charger. Her clothes were one thing, but Eph knew that Nora would never go anywhere without her UV lamp, unless she had no choice. He did not see her weapon pack anywhere.

He picked up the handheld lamp, switching on the black light. It revealed swirling bursts of bright color on the carpet and against the side of the desk: vampire excrement stains.

Strigoi had marauded here; that was obvious. Eph tried to remain focused and calm. He thought he was alone, at least on this floor: no vampires, which was good, but no Nora, or her mother, which was devastating.

Had there been a fight? He tried to read the room, its swirling stains and overturned chair. He didn’t think so. He roamed the hall looking for more evidence of violence beyond property damage but found none. Combat would have been her last resort, and had she made a stand here, the building would certainly be under the control of vampires now. This, to Eph’s eye, looked more akin to a house raid.

While examining the desk, he found Nora’s weapon bag stowed beneath it, her sword still inside. So evidently she had been surprised. If there was no battle—no silver-to-vampire contact—then her chances of meeting a violent end decreased exponentially. The strigoi weren’t interested in victims. They were intent on filling their camps.

Had she been captured? It was a possibility, but Eph knew Nora, and she would never go without a battle—and he just didn’t see any evidence of that. Unless they had captured her mother first. Nora might have acquiesced then out of fear for Mrs. Martinez’s safety.

If so, it was unlikely that Nora would have been turned. The strigoi, under the Master’s command, were reluctant to add to their ranks: drinking a human’s blood and infecting them with the vampiric viral strain only created another vampire to feed. No, it was more likely that Nora would have been transported to a detention camp outside the city. From there, she could be assigned work or further disciplined. Not much was known about the camps; some of those who went in never reemerged. Mrs. Martinez, having lived well beyond her productivity years, would meet a more certain end.

Eph looked around, becoming frantic, trying to figure out what to do. This appeared to be a random incident—but was it? At times, Eph had to keep his distance from the others and carefully monitor his comings and goings from the OCME, because of Kelly’s tireless pursuit of him. His discovery could lead the Master right to the heart of their resistance. Had something gone wrong? Was Fet compromised as well? Had the Master somehow gotten onto their entire cell?

Eph went to the laptop computer on the desk, opening it. It was still powered on, and he struck the space bar to wake up the screen. Workstation computers in the ME’s building were hardwired to a still-functioning network server. The Internet was heavily damaged in spots and generally unreliable. One was more likely to receive an error message than a page load. Unrecognized and unauthorized Internet protocol addresses were particularly susceptible to worms and viruses, and many computers in the building had become either locked up due to hard-drive-damaging malware or slowed to an unusable crawl by corrupted operating systems. Mobile phone technology was no longer in existence, either for telecommunication or for Internet access. Why allow the human underclass access to a communications network capable of spanning the globe—something the vampires possessed telepathically?

Eph and the others operated under the assumption that all Internet activity was vampire-monitored. The page he was now looking at—that Nora had apparently abandoned suddenly, without time to shut down the hard drive—was some sort of personal message exchange, a two-party chat conducted in shorthand.

“NMart” was obviously Nora Martinez. Her partner in conversation, “VFet,” was Vasiliy Fet, the former New York City exterminator. Fet had joined their fight early, by way of an invasion of rats prompted by the arrival of the strigoi. He had proven himself invaluable to the cause, for both his vermin-killing techniques and his knowledge of the city, in particular the boroughs’ subterranean passageways. He had become as much of a disciple of the late Setrakian as Eph was, coming into his own as a New World vampire hunter. Currently, he was on a freighter somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean, returning from Iceland on a very important errand.

This thread, full of Fet’s grammatical idiosyncrasies, had started the day before, and it was mainly about Eph. He read words he was never meant to see:

NMart: E not here—missed rendezvous. You were right. I shouldn’t have relied on him. Now all I can do is wait . . .

VFet: Don’t wait there. Keep moving. Return to Roosvlt.

NMart: Can’t—my mother is worse. Will try to stay another day at most. TRULY cannot take this anymore. He’s dangerous. He’s becoming a risk to us all. Just a matter of time before bitch-vamp Kelly catches up with him or he leads her back here.

VFet: I hear you. But w need him. Most keep hm close.

NMart: He goes out on his own. Doesn’t care about anything else.

VFet: He’s 2 important. 2 them. 2 the M. 2 us.

NMart: I know it . . . it’s just that I can’t trust him anymore. I don’t even know who he is . . .

VFet: We all just have to keep him from sinking all to the deep end. You especially. Keep him afloat. He dsn’t know where the book is. That’s our double blind. He can’t hurt us that way.

NMart: He’s at K’s house again. I know it. Raiding it for memories of Z. Like stealing from a dream.

And then:

NMart: You know I miss you. How much longer?

VFet: Returning now. Missing you too.

Eph shrugged off his weapon pack, resheathing his sword, and dropped down into the office chair.

He stared at the most recent exchange, reading it again and again, hearing Nora’s voice, then Fet’s Brooklyn accent.

Missing you too.

He felt weightless, reading it—as though the force of gravity had been removed from his body. And yet, here he sat, still.

He should have felt more anger. More righteous fury. Betrayal. A jealous frenzy.

And he did feel all these things. But not deeply. Not acutely. They were there, and he acknowledged them, but it amounted to . . . more of the same. His malaise was so overwhelming that no other flavor, no matter how sour, could change his emotional palate.

How had this happened? At times, over these past two years, Eph had consciously kept his distance from Nora. He had done so to protect her, to protect them all . . . or so he said to himself, justifying plain abandonment.

Still—he couldn’t understand it. He reread the other part. So he was a “risk.” He was “dangerous.” Unreliable. They seemed to think that they were carrying him. Part of him felt relief. Relief for Nora—Good for her—but most of him just throbbed with mounting rage. What was this? Was he jealous just because he couldn’t hold her anymore? God knew he was not exactly minding the store; was he angry because someone else had found his forgotten toy and now he wanted it back? He knew himself so little . . . Kelly’s mother used to tell him he was always ten minutes too late to all the major milestones of his life. Late for Zack’s birth, late for the wedding, late to save his marriage from falling apart. God knew he was late to save Zack or save the world, and now—now this . . .

Nora? With Fet?

She was gone. Why didn’t he do something before? Strangely, amid the pain and the sense of loss he also felt relief. He didn’t need to worry anymore—he didn’t need to compensate for his shortcomings, explain his absence, mollify Nora. But as that tenuous wave of relief was about to kick in, he turned around and caught himself in a mirror.

He looked older. Much older than he should have. And dirty, almost like a hobo. His hair was plastered against his sweaty forehead and his clothes were layered with months of grime. His eyes were sunk and his cheeks jutted out, pulling the taut, thin skin surrounding them. No wonder, he thought. No wonder.

He pulled himself back out of the chair in a daze. He walked down four flights of stairs and out of the medical examiner’s building through the pissing black rain to nearby Bellevue Hospital. He climbed in through a broken window and walked the dark and deserted halls, following signs for the emergency room. Bellevue’s ER was once a Level 1 trauma center, meaning it had housed a full range of specialists providing access to the best facilities.

As well as the best drugs.

He arrived at the nurses’ station and found the drug cabinet door torn off. The locked refrigerator had also been pried open and ransacked. No Percs, no Vikes, no Demerol. He pocketed some oxycodone and antianxiety meds in blister packs—self-diagnosing and self-medicating—tossing empty cartons over his shoulder. He popped two white oxys and dry-swallowed them—then froze.

He had been moving so quickly and making so much noise that he had not heard the bare feet approaching. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement from across the nurses’ station and stood.

Two strigoi, staring at him. Fully formed vampires, hairless and pale, unclothed. He saw the thickened arteries bulging through their necks, running down over their clavicles into their chests like throbbing tree roots. One had once been a male human (larger body) and the other had been a female (breasts shriveled and pale).

The other distinguishing trait of these matured vampires was their loose, floppy wattle. Disgusting, stretched-out flesh that hung like a turkey neck, pale red when in need of nourishment, flushing crimson after feeding. The wattles of these strigoi hung pale and scrotumlike, swaying with a turn of their heads. A sign of rank, and the mark of an experienced hunter.

Were these the same two that had accosted Nora and her mother or otherwise rousted them from the OCME? There was no way to confirm it, but something told Eph this was the case—which, if true, meant that Nora might have gotten away clean after all.

He saw what he thought was a glimmer of recognition in their otherwise blank, red eyes. Normally there was no spark or hint of a brain at work behind a vampire’s gaze—but Eph had seen this look before and knew that he had been recognized and identified. Their surrogate eyes had communicated their find to the Master, whose presence came flooding into their brains with the force of possession. The horde would be there in a matter of minutes.

“Doctor Goodweather . . . ,” both the creatures said at the same time, their voices chirping in eerie synchrony. Their bodies rose like twin marionettes controlled by the same invisible string. The Master.

Eph observed, both fascinated and repulsed, how their blank stare gave way to the intelligence, the poise of the superior creature—undulating, snapping to attention, like a leather glove snapping into shape as the hand fills it with form and intention.

The pale, elongated faces of the creatures morphed as the will of the Master overtook the flaccid mouths and the vacant eyes . . .

“You look . . . quite tired . . . ,” the twin marionettes said, their bodies moving in unison. “I think you should rest . . . don’t you think? Join us. Give in. I will procure for you. Anything you want . . .”

The monster was right: he was tired—oh, so very, very tired—and yes, he would’ve liked to give in. Can I? he thought. Please? Give in?

His eyes brimmed with tears and he felt his knees give—just a little—like a man about to sit down. “The people you love—the ones you miss—they live in my embrace . . . ,” the twin messengers said, their message worded so carefully. So inviting, so ambiguous . . .

Eph’s hands trembled as he reached back over each shoulder, gripping the worn leather handles of his two long swords. He drew them out straight so as not to slice his weapon pack. Maybe it was the opioid kicking in, but something clicked deep inside his brain, something that made him associate these two monstrosities, female and male, with Nora and Fet. His lover and his trusted friend, now conspiring against him. It was as though they themselves had come upon Eph here, rummaging through the drug cabinet like a junkie, witnessing him at his lowest moment—for which they were directly responsible.

“No,” he said, renouncing the Master with a broken whimper, his voice breaking even in that single syllable. And rather than push his emotions aside, Eph brought them to the fore, molded them into rage.

“As you wish,” the Master said. “I will see you again . . . soon . . .”

And then, the will gave way to the hunters. Snorting, huffing, the beasts came back, leaving behind the poised, erect stance and landing on all fours, ready to circle their prey. Eph did not give the vampires a chance to flank him. He rushed straight at the male first, both swords at the ready. The vamp leaped away from him at the last moment—they were agile and fast—but not before Eph’s sword tip caught it across the side of its torso. The slash was deep enough to make the vampire land off-balance, the wound leaking white blood. Strigoi rarely felt any bodily pain, but they felt it when the weapon was silver. The creature twisted and gripped its side.

In that moment of hesitation and inattention, Eph spun and brought his other sword across at shoulder height. One slice removed the head from the neck and shoulders, severing it just beneath the jaw. The vampire’s arms went up in a reflex of self-protection before its trunk and limbs collapsed.

Eph turned again just as the female was in the air. It had vaulted the counter, springing at him with its twin taloned middle fingers poised to cut at his face—but Eph was just able to deflect its arms with his own as the vampire flew past, landing hard against the wall, slumping to the floor. Eph lost both his swords in the process. His hands were so weak. Oh, yes, yes, please—I want to give up.

The strigoi quickly sprang onto all fours, facing Eph from a crouch. Its eyes bore into him, surrogates of the Master, the evil presence that had taken everything from him. Eph’s rage flared anew. He swiftly produced his grappling hooks and braced for impact. The vampire charged and Eph went for it—the vampire wattle dangling beneath its chin made for a perfect target. He had done this move hundreds of times—like a worker in a fish plant scaling a big tuna. One hook connected with the throat behind the wattle, sinking quickly and jamming behind the cartilaginous tube that housed the larynx and launched the stinger. Pulling down on it—hard—he blocked the stinger and forced the creature to genuflect with a piglike squeal. The other hook connected to the eye socket, and Eph’s thumb jammed under the jaw, locking the mouth shut. One summer, a long, long time ago, his father had shown him that move when catching snakes on a small river up north. “Clamp the jaw,” he had said, “lock the mouth—so they can’t bite.” Not many snakes were poisonous but a lot of them had a nasty bite and enough bacteria in their mouth to cause a lot of pain. Turned out that Eph—city boy Eph—was good at catching snakes. A natural. He had even been able to show off one good day, catching a snake in the driveway at home when Zack was still a child. He felt superior—a hero. But that was a long time ago. A zillion years BC.

Now Eph, weak and infirm, was hooking up a powerful, undead creature so hot to the touch, all angry energy and thirst. He was not knee-deep in a cool California stream or climbing out of his minivan to catch a city snake. He was in real danger. He could feel his muscles give. His strength was fading. Yes . . . yes—I would like to give in . . .

And his weakness made him angry. And he thought of everything he had lost—Kelly, Nora, Zack, the world—and he yanked hard, with a primal scream, ripping the trachial tube and snapping the tense cartilage. The jaw snapped and dislocated under his grimy thumb at the very same time. A surge of blood and worms sprang forth and Eph danced backward, avoiding them studiously, weaving like a boxer out of the reach of his opponent.

The vampire sprang to its feet, sliding along the wall, howling, wattle and neck torn and flapping, gushing. Eph feigned a strike, the vamp retreating a few steps, wheezing and wailing, an awkward, wet little sound—almost like a duck call. He feinted again, and the vamp didn’t buy it at all this time. Eph had it lulled into a rhythm when the vamp stiffened, then ran off.

If Eph could ever put together a list of rules of engagement, near the top would have been Never follow a fleeing vampire. Nothing good could come from it. There was no strategic advantage to running down a strigoi. Its clairvoyant alert had already gone out. The vampires had developed coordinated attack strategies over the past two years. Running was either a stalling tactic or an outright ruse.

And yet, Eph, in his anger, did what he knew not to do. He picked up his swords and pursued it, down the hallway to a door marked STAIRS. Anger and a weird desire for proxy revenge made him hit the door and run up two flights. The female then left the stairwell, and Eph followed it out, the vampire loping down the corridor, Eph chasing after it with a long sword in each hand. The vamp turned right and then left, entering another stairwell, racing up one flight.

As Eph tired, common sense returned. He saw the female at the far end of the corridor and sensed that it had slowed, that it was waiting for him, making sure that Eph could see it rounding the corner.

He stopped. It couldn’t be a trap. He had just shown up in the hospital; there was no time. So the only other reason for the vampire to lead him on what amounted to a wild goose chase was . . .

Eph walked into the nearest patient room, crossing to the windows. The glass was streaked with oily black rain, the city below obscured by ripples of dirty water washing down the glass. Eph strained to see the streets, his forehead against the glass.

He saw dark forms, identifiable as bodies, racing out onto the sidewalks from facing buildings, flooding the street below. More and more, from around corners and out of doors, like firemen answering a six-alarm call, moving to the hospital entrance.

Eph backed away. The psychic call had indeed gone out. One of the architects of the human resistance, Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, was trapped inside Bellevue Hospital.

Twenty-eighth Street Subway

NORA STOOD AT the corner of Park and Twenty-eighth, rain rapping on the hood of her slicker. She knew she needed to keep moving, but she also needed to know she was not being followed. Otherwise, escaping into the subway system would instead be like walking into a trap.

Vampires had eyes all over the city. She had to appear like any other human on her way to work or home. The problem with that was her mother.

“I told you to call the landlord!” said her mother, pulling back her hood to feel the rain on her face.

“Mama,” said Nora, pushing the hood back over her head.

“Fix this broken shower!”

“Shhh! Quiet!”

Nora had to keep moving. Hard as it was for her mother, walking kept her quiet. Nora gripped her around her lower back, holding her close as she stepped to the curb, just as an army truck approached the intersection. Nora stepped back again, head lowered, watching the vehicle pass. The truck was driven by a strigoi. Nora held her mother tightly, stopping her from wandering into the street.

“When I see that landlord, he’s going to be sorry he crossed us.”

Thank goodness for the rain. Because rain meant raincoats, and raincoats meant hoods. The old and infirm had been rounded up long ago. The unproductive had no place in the new society. Nora would never take a risk such as this—venturing out in public with her mother—were there any other choice.

“Mama, can we play the quiet game again?”

“I’m tired of all that. This goddamn leaky ceiling.”

“Who can be quietest the longest? Me or you?”

Nora started her across the street. Ahead, hanging from the pole that supported the street sign and the traffic signal, hung a dead body. Exhibition corpses were commonplace, especially along Park Avenue. A squirrel on the dead man’s slumped shoulder was battling two pigeons for rights to the corpse’s cheeks.

Nora would have steered her mother away from the sight, but her mother didn’t even look up. They turned and started down the slick stairs into the subway station, the steps oily from the filthy rain. Once underground, Nora’s mother again tried to remove her hood, which Nora quickly replaced, scolding her.

The turnstiles were gone. One old MetroCard machine remained for no reason. But the IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING signs remained. Nora caught a break: the only two vampires were at the other end of the entrance, not even looking her way. She walked her mother down to the uptown platform, hoping a 4 5 6 train would arrive quickly. She was holding down her mother’s arms and trying to make the embrace appear natural.

Commuters stood around them as they had in the old days. Some read books. A few listened to music on portable music players. All that was missing were the phones and the newspapers.

On one of the poles people leaned against was an old police flier featuring Eph’s face: a copy of his old work ID photograph. Nora closed her eyes, cursing him silently. It was he whom they had been waiting for at the morgue. Nora didn’t like it there, not because she was squeamish—she was anything but—but because it was too open. Gus—the former gangbanger who, following a life-changing encounter with Setrakian, had become a trusted comrade in arms—had carved out space for himself underground. Fet had Roosevelt Island—where she was headed now.

Typical Eph. A genius, and a good man, but always a few minutes behind. Always rushing to catch up at the end.

Because of him she had stayed there that extra day. Out of misplaced loyalty—and, yes, maybe guilt—she wanted to connect with him, to check up on him, to make sure he was okay. The strigoi had entered the morgue at street level; Nora had been typing into one of the computers when she heard the glass break. She had just enough time to find her mother, asleep in her wheelchair. Nora could have killed the vampires, but doing so would have given away her position, and the location of Eph’s hideout, to the Master. And unlike Eph, she was too considerate to risk betraying their alliance.

Betraying it to the Master, that is. She had already betrayed Eph with Fet. Betrayed him within their alliance. Which she felt particularly guilty about, but again, Eph was always a few minutes late. This proved it. She had been so patient with him—too patient, especially with his drinking—and now she was living fully for herself.

And her mother. She felt the old woman pulling at her grip and opened her eyes.

“There’s a hair in my face,” said her mother, trying to swipe it away.

Nora examined her quickly. Nothing. But she pretended to see a single strand and released her mother’s arm momentarily to pluck it away. “Got it,” she said. “All set now.”

But she could tell from her mother’s fidgeting that her ploy had not worked. Her mother tried blowing at it. “Tickles. Let me go!”

Nora felt a head or two turn. She released her mother’s arm. The old woman brushed at her face, then tried to remove her hood.

Nora forced it back on over her head, but not before a shock of unkempt silver-gray was briefly visible.

She heard someone gasp near her. Nora fought the urge to look, trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible. She heard whispering, or else imagined she did.

She leaned toward the yellow line, hoping to see train headlights.

“There he is!” shouted her mother. “Rodrigo! I see you. Don’t pretend!”

She was yelling the name of their landlord from when Nora was a child. A rail-thin man, Nora recalled, with a great mop of black hair and hips so narrow he carried his tool belt rather than wore it. The man she was calling to now—dark-haired, but no double for the Rodrigo of thirty years ago—looked over attentively.

Nora turned her mother away, trying to shush her. But her mother twisted back around, her hood slipping back from her face as she tried to call to the phantom landlord.

“Mama,” implored Nora. “Please. Look at me. Silence.”

“He’s always there to flirt with me, but when there is work to be done . . .”

Nora wanted to clamp her hand over her mother’s mouth. She fixed the hood and walked her away down the platform, only drawing more attention in the process. “Mama, please. We will be discovered.”

“Lazy bastard, he is!”

Even if her mother was mistaken for a drunk, there would be trouble. Alcohol was prohibited, both because it affected the blood and because it promoted antisocial behavior.

Nora turned, thinking about fleeing the station—and saw headlights brightening the tunnel. “Mama, our train. Shhhh. Here we go.”

It pulled in. Nora waited at the first car. A few passengers disembarked before Nora rushed her mother inside, finding a pair of seats together. The 6 train would get them to Fifty-ninth Street in a matter of minutes. She fixed her mother’s hood back on her head and waited for the doors to close.

Nora noticed that no one else sat near them. She looked down the length of the car in time to see the other entering passengers look quickly away. Then she looked out onto the platform and saw a young couple out standing with two Transit Authority cops—humans—pointing at the first subway car. Pointing at Nora.

Close the doors, she pled silently.

And they did. With the same random efficiency the New York transit system had always exhibited, the doors slid shut. Nora waited for the familiar lurch, looking forward to getting back over to vampire-free Roosevelt Island and waiting there for Fet’s return.

But the car did not start forward. She waited for it, one eye on her fellow passengers at the other end of the car, the other on the transit cops walking toward the car. Behind them now were the two vampires, red eyes fixed on Nora. Behind them stood the concerned couple who had pointed out Nora and her mother.

The couple had thought they were doing the right thing, following the new laws. Or perhaps they were spiteful; everyone else had to abandon their elders to the master race.

The doors opened and the human transit cops boarded first. Even if she could murder two of her own kind and release the two strigoi and escape from the underground station, she would have to do so alone. There was no way she could do so without sacrificing her mother, either to capture or to death.

One of the cops reached over and pulled back Nora’s mother’s hood, revealing her head. “Ladies,” he said, “you have to come with us.” When Nora did not stand right away, he placed his hand on her shoulder and squeezed tightly. “Now.”

Bellevue Hospital

EPH BACKED AWAY from the window and the vampires converging on Bellevue Hospital on the streets below. He had screwed up . . . Dread burned at the pit of his stomach. It was all lost.

His first instinct was to keep rising, to buy time by heading to the roof—but that was an obvious dead end. The only advantage to being on the roof was that he could throw himself off of it, were the choice death or vampire afterlife.

Going straight down meant fighting his way through them. That would be like running into a swarm of killer bees: he was almost certain to get stung at least once, and once was all it took.

So, running was not an option. Nor was making a suicidal final stand. But he had spent enough time in hospitals to consider this his home turf. The advantage was his; he just had to find it.

He hurried past the patient elevators, then stopped, doubling back, stopping before the gas control panel. An emergency shutoff for the entire floor. He cracked open the plastic shield and made sure the cutoff was open, then stabbed at the fixture until he heard a pronounced hiss.

He ran to the stairwell, charging up one flight, racing to that floor’s gas control panel, and repeating the same damage. Then right back into the stairs—and this time he could hear the bloodsuckers charging up the lower flights. No outcry, because they had no voice. Only the slapping of dead, bare feet as they climbed.

He risked one more floor, making quick work of the access panel there. He pressed the nearby elevator button but did not wait for the car, instead running off in search of the service elevators, the ones the orderlies used to transport supply carts and bedridden patients. He located the bank of elevators and pressed the button, waiting for one to board.

The adrenaline of survival and the chase put a charge into his blood that was as sweet as any artificial stimulant he could find. This, he realized, was the high he sought from pharmaceuticals. Over the course of so many life-or-death battles, he had messed up his pleasure receptors. Too many highs and too many lows.

The elevator door opened and he pressed “B” for basement. Signs admonished him on the importance of patient confidentiality and clean hands. A child smiled at him from a grimy poster. Sucking on a lollipop and giving him a wink and a thumbs-up. EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE A-OKAY said the printed moron. On the poster were timetables and dates for a pediatrics fair taking place a million years ago. Eph returned one sword to the bag on his back, watching the floor numbers go down. The elevator jerked once, and the car darkened and stopped between floors—stuck. A nightmare scenario, but then moments later it lurched and continued downward. Like everything else that depended on regular upkeep, these mechanical conveyances were not to be trusted—that is, if you had a choice.

The door dinged and opened finally, Eph exiting into the service wing of the hospital basement. Stretchers with bare mattresses were bunched up against the wall like supermarket carts awaiting customers. A giant canvas laundry cart sat beneath the open end of a wall chute.

In the corner, on a handful of long-handled dollies, stood a dozen or so green-painted oxygen tanks. Eph worked as fast as his fatigued body allowed, hustling the tanks into each of the three elevators, four tanks to a car. He pulled off their metal nose caps and used them to hammer at the feed nozzles until he heard the reassuring hiss of escaping gas. He pressed the buttons for the top floor, and all three doors closed.

He pulled a half-full can of charcoal lighter fluid from inside his pack. His box of all-weather matches was somewhere inside his coat pocket. With trembling hands, he tipped over the canvas laundry cart, emptying the crusty linen in front of the three elevators, then squeezed the lighter fluid can with wicked glee, pissing flammable liquid all over the heap of cotton. He struck a pair of matches and dropped them onto the pile, which ignited with a hot whumph. Eph pressed the call button for all three elevator cars—operated individually from the service basement—and then ran like hell, trying to find a way out.

Near a barred exit door, he saw a large control panel of colored pipes. He freed a fire axe from its glass cabinet—it felt so heavy, so big. Repeatedly, he chopped at the gaskets of all three feeds, using more the ax’s weight than his own fading strength, until gas came whistling out. He pushed through the door and found himself in the spitting rain, standing in a muddy sitting area of park benches and cracked walkways overlooking Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and the rain-swept East River. And for some reason all he could think of was a line from an old movie, Young Frankenstein—“It could be worse. It could be raining.” He chuckled. He had seen that movie with Zack. For weeks they had quoted punch lines from it to each other. “There wolf . . . there castle.”

He was behind the hospital. No time to run for the street. He instead rushed across the small park, needing to put as much space between him and the building as possible.

As he reached the far edge, he saw more vamps coming up the high wall from Roosevelt Drive. More assassins dispatched by the Master, their high-metabolism bodies steaming in the rain.

Eph ran at them, waiting for the building behind him to explode and collapse at any moment. He kicked back the first few, forcing them off the wall down to the parkway below—where they landed on their hands and feet, righting themselves immediately, like unkillables in a video game. Eph ran along the top edge of the wall, toward the NYU Medical Center buildings, trying to get away from Bellevue. Before him, a long-taloned vamp hand gripped the top of the wall, a bald, red-eyed face appearing. Eph dropped to his knee, jabbing the end of his sword blade into the vamp’s open mouth, the point reaching the back of its hot throat. But he did not run it through, did not destroy it. The silver blade burned it, keeping its jaw from unhinging and unleashing its stinger.

The vampire could not move. Its red-rimmed eyes glared at Eph in confusion and pain.

Eph said, “Do you see me?”

The vamp’s eyes showed no reaction. Eph was addressing not it but the Master, watching through this creature.

“Do you see this?”

He turned the sword, forcing the vamp’s perspective toward Bellevue. Other creatures were scaling the wall, and some were already running out of the hospital, alerted to Eph’s escape. He had only moments. He feared that his sabotage had failed, that the leaking gas had instead found a safe way out of the hospital building.

Eph got back in the vamp’s face as though it were the Master’s itself.

“Give me back my son!”

He had just finished the last word as the building erupted behind him, throwing Eph forward, his sword piercing the back of the vampire’s throat and exiting its neck. Eph tumbled off the wall, gripping the handle of his sword, the blade sliding out of the vampire’s face as together they twisted and fell.

Eph landed on the roof of an abandoned car, one of many lining the inside lane of the roadway. The vampire slammed into the road next to him.

Eph’s hip took the brunt of the impact. Over the ringing in his ears, Eph heard a high whistling scream and looked up into the black rain. He watched something like a missile shoot out from high above, arc overhead, and splash down into the river. One of the oxygen tanks.

Mortar-heavy bricks thumped down onto the road. Shards of glass fell like jewels in the rain, shattering on the road. Eph covered his head with his coat as he slid down off the dented roof, ignoring the pain in his side.

Only as he stood up did he notice two shards of glass, lodged firmly in his calf. He yanked them out. Blood poured from the wounds. He heard a wet, excited squeal . . .

A few yards away, the vamp lay on its back, dazed, white blood gurgling from the perforation in the back of its neck—but still excited and hungry. Eph’s blood was its call for dinner.

Eph got in its face, gripping its broken, dislodged chin, and saw its red eyes focus on him, then on the silver point of his blade.

“I want my son, you motherfucker!” yelled Eph.

He then released the strigoi with a vicious chop to the throat, severing its head and its communication with the Master.

Limping, bleeding, he got up again. “Zack . . . ,” he murmured. “Where are you . . . ?”

Then he started his long journey back home.

Central Park

BELVEDERE CASTLE, SET on the northern end of the Lake in Central Park along the Seventy-ninth Street Transverse Road, was a high Victorian Gothic and Romanesque “folly” constructed in 1869 by Jacob Wray Mould and Calvert Vaux, the original designers of the park. All Zachary Goodweather knew was that it looked spooky and cool, and that was what had always drawn him to it: this medieval (to his mind) castle in the center of the park in the center of the city. As a child, he used to make up tales about the castle, how it was in fact a giant fortress constructed by tiny trolls for the original architect of the city, a dark lord named Belvedere who dwelled in catacombs deep beneath the castle rock, haunting the dark citadel by night as he tended to his creatures throughout the park.

This was back when Zack still had to resort to fantasy for tales of the supernatural and the grotesque. When he needed to daydream in order to escape from the boredom of the modern world.

Now his daydreams were real. His fantasies were attainable. His wishes were requests, his desires realized.

He stood inside the open doorway to the castle, a young man now, watching black rain pummel the park. It slapped the overflowing Turtle Pond, once an algae-rich pool of shimmering green, now a muddy black hole. The sky above was ominously overcast, which was to say, normal. No blue in the sky meant no blue in the water. For two hours a day, some ambient light seeped through the tumultuous cloud cover, enough so that visibility improved to a point where he could see the rooftops of the city around him and the Dagobah-like swamp that the park had become. The solar-powered park lamps could not soak up enough juice in that time to illuminate the twenty-two hours of darkness, their light fading soon after the vampires returned from their retreat beneath ground and into the shadows.

Zack had grown—and grown strong—in this past year; his voice had started changing a few months ago, his jawline becoming defined and his torso elongating seemingly overnight. His strong legs carried him up, climbing the near staircase, a skinny iron spiral leading to the Henry Luce Nature Observatory on the second floor. Along the walls and beneath glass tables remained displays of animal skeletons, bird feathers, and papier-mâché birds set in plywood trees. Central Park had once been one of the richest bird-watching areas in the United States, but the climate change had ended that, probably forever. In the first weeks following the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions triggered by nuclear plant meltdowns and warhead detonations, the dark sky had hung thick with birds. Shrieks and calls all night. Mass bird deaths, winged corpses falling from the sky along with heavy black hail. As chaotic and desperate in the air as it was for humans on the ground. Now there were no longer any warmer southern skies to migrate to. For days, the ground had been literally covered with flapping, blackened wings. Rats feasted on the fallen voraciously. Agonized chirping and hooting punctuated the rhythm of the falling hail.

But now, the park was still and quiet when there was no rain, its lakes empty of waterfowl. A few grimy bones and feather strands melded in the mulch and the mud covering the soil and pavement. Ragged, mangy squirrels occasionally darted up trees, but their population in the park was way down. Zack looked out through one of the telescopes—he had jammed a quarter-sized stone into the pay slot so that the telescope operated without money—and his field of vision disappeared in the fog and the murky rain.

The castle had been home to a functioning meteorological station before the vampires came. Most of the equipment remained on the peaked tower roof, as well as inside the fenced compound south of the castle. New York City radio stations used to give the weather with, “The temperature in Central Park is . . . ,” and the number they called was a reading taken from the turret observatory. It was July now, maybe August, what used to be known as the “dog days” of summer, and the highest temperature reading Zack had witnessed during one particularly balmy night was sixty-one degrees Fahrenheit, sixteen degrees Celsius.

August was Zack’s birth month. There was a two-year-old calendar in the back office, and he wished that he had thought to keep track of the passing days more carefully. Was he thirteen years old yet? He felt that he was. He decided that yes, he was. Officially a teenager.

Zack could still—barely—remember the time his father had taken him to the Central Park Zoo one sunny afternoon. They had visited this very nature exhibit inside the castle, then ate Italian ices out on the stone wall overlooking the meteorological equipment. Zack remembered confiding in his father about how kids in school sometimes made wisecracks about his last name, Goodweather, saying that Zack was going to be a weatherman when he grew up.

“What are you going to be?” asked his dad.

“A zookeeper,” Zack had answered. “And probably a motocross racer.”

“Sounds good,” said his dad, and they threw their empty paper cups into the recycling bin before moving on to an afternoon matinee. And, at the end of that day, after a perfect afternoon, father and son had vowed to repeat the excursion. But they never did. Like so many promises in the Zack-Eph story, this one went unfulfilled.

Remembering that was like recalling a dream now—if it had ever existed at all. His dad was long gone, dead along with Professor Setrakian and the rest. Once in a great while, he would hear an explosion somewhere in the city or see a thick plume of smoke or dust rising into the rain and wonder. There had to be some humans still resisting the inevitable. It made Zack think of the raccoons that pestered his family one Christmas vacation, raiding their garbage no matter what Dad did to secure it. This was like that, he supposed. A nuisance, but little more.

Zack left the musty exhibit and went back down the stairs. The Master had created a room for him that Zack had modeled on his old bedroom at home. Except that his old bedroom did not have a wall-sized video display screen taken from the Times Square ESPN Zone. Or a Pepsi machine, or entire store racks of comic books. Zack kicked a game controller he had left on the floor, dropping down into one of the luxe leather chairs from Yankee Stadium, the thousand-dollar seats behind home plate. Occasionally, kids were brought in for matches, or he played them online on a dedicated server, but Zack almost always won. Everybody else was out of practice. Domination could get boring, especially when there were no new games being produced.

At first, being at the castle was terrifying. He had heard all the stories about the Master. He kept waiting to be turned into a vampire, like his mom, but it never happened. Why? He had never been given a reason, nor had he asked for one. He was a guest there and, as the only human, almost like a celebrity. In the two years since Zack had become the Master’s guest, no other nonvampire had been admitted to Belvedere Castle or anywhere near the premises. What had at first seemed like a kidnapping instead came to seem, gradually, over time, like selection. Like a calling. As though a special place had been reserved for him in this new world.

Over all others, Zack had been chosen. For what, he did not know. All he knew was that the being that had delivered him to this point of privilege was the absolute ruler of the new dominion. And, for some reason, he wanted Zack at his side.

The stories Zack had been told—of a fearsome giant, a ruthless killer, and evil incarnate—were obvious exaggerations. First of all, the Master was of average height for an adult. For an ancient being, it appeared almost youthful. Its black eyes were piercing, such that Zack could certainly see the potential for horror if someone fell into disfavor with it. But behind them—for one so fortunate to view them directly, as Zack had been—was a depth and a darkness that transcended humanity, a wisdom that reached back through time, an intelligence connected to a higher realm. The Master was a leader, commanding a vast clan of vampires throughout the city and the world, an army of beings answering its telepathic call from this castle throne in the swampy center of New York City.

The Master was a being possessed of actual magic. Diabolical magic, yes, but the only true magic Zack had ever witnessed. Good and evil were malleable terms now. The world had changed. Night was day. Down was the new up. Here, in the Master, was proof of a higher being. A superhuman. A divinity. His power was extraordinary.

Take Zack’s asthma. The air quality in the new climate was extremely poor, due to stagnancy, elevated ozone readings, and the recirculation of particulate matter. With the thick cloud cover pressing down over everything like an unwashed blanket, weather patterns suffered, and ocean breezes did little to refresh the city’s airflow. Mold grew and spores flew.

Yet, Zack was fine. Better than fine: his lungs were clear, and he breathed without wheezing or gasping. In fact, he hadn’t had anything resembling an asthma attack in all the time he had been with the Master. It had been two years since he had used an inhaler, because he did not need one anymore.

His respiratory system was fully dependent upon one substance even more magically effective than albuterol or prednisone. A fine, white droplet of the Master’s blood—administered orally, once weekly, from the Master’s pricked finger onto Zack’s waiting tongue—cleared Zack’s lungs, allowing him to breathe free.

What had seemed weird and disgusting at first now came as a gift: the milky-white blood with its faint electrical charge and a taste of copper and hot camphor. Bitter medicine, but the effect was nothing short of miraculous. Any asthma sufferer would give just about anything never to feel the smothering panic of an asthma attack again.

This blood absorption did not make Zack a vampire. The Master prevented any of the blood worms from reaching Zack’s tongue. The Master’s only desire was to see Zack healthy and comfortable. And yet the true source of Zack’s affinity and awe for the Master was not the power the Master exercised, but rather the power the Master conferred. Zack was evidently special in some way. He was different, exalted among humans. The Master had singled him out for attention. The Master had, for lack of a better term, befriended him.

Like the zoo. When Zack heard that the Master was going to close it down forever, he protested. The Master offered to spare it, to turn the entire zoo over to Zack, but on one condition: that Zack had to take care of it. Had to feed the animals and clean the cages, all by himself. Zack had jumped at the chance, and the Central Park Zoo became his. Just like that. (He was offered the carousel too, but carousels were for babies; he had helped them tear it down.) The Master could grant wishes like a genie.

Of course, Zack didn’t realize how much work it was going to be, but he kept at it as best he could. The changed atmosphere claimed some of the animals quickly, including the red panda and most of the birds, making his job easier. Still, with no one to prod him along, he allowed the intervals between feeding times to grow and grow. It fascinated him how some of the animals turned on one another, both the mammals and the reptiles. The great snow leopard was Zack’s favorite and the animal he feared most. So the leopard was fed most regularly: at first, thick slabs of fresh meat arriving by truck every other day. Then one day, a live goat. Zack led it into the cage and watched from behind a tree as the leopard stalked its prey. Then a sheep. Then a baby deer. But over time, the zoo fell deep into disrepair, the cages fouled with animal waste that Zack grew tired of cleaning. After many months he came to dread the zoo, and more and more he ignored his responsibilities. At night sometimes he heard the other animals cry out, but never the snow leopard.

After the better part of a year, Zack went to the Master and complained that the work was too much for him.

It will be abandoned, then. And the animals destroyed.

“I don’t want them destroyed. I just . . . don’t want to take care of them anymore. You could have any of your kind do it, and they would never complain.”

You want me to keep it open just for your enjoyment only.

“Yes.” Zack had asked for more extravagant things and always received them. “Why not?”

On one condition.

“Okay.”

I have watched you with the leopard.

“You have?”

Watched you feed it animals to stalk and devour. Its agility and beauty attracts you. But its power frightens you.

“I guess.”

I have also watched you allow other animals to starve.

Zack began to protest. “There are too many to take care of—”

I have watched you pit them against one another. It is natural enough, your curiosity. Watching how lesser species react under stress. Fascinating, isn’t it? Watching them fight for survival . . .

Zack did not know if he should admit to this.

The animals are yours to do with what you wish. That includes the leopard. You control its habitat and its feeding schedule. You should not fear it.

“Well . . . I don’t. Not really.”

Then . . . why don’t you kill it?

“What?”

Have you never thought about what it would be like, to kill such an animal?

“Kill it? Kill the leopard?”

You’ve grown bored with zoo-keeping because it is artificial, unnatural. Your instincts are correct, but your method is wrong. You want to own these primitive creatures. But they are not meant to be kept. Too much power. Too much pride. There is only one way to truly possess a wild animal. To make it your own.

“To kill it.”

Prove yourself equal to this task, and I will reward you by seeing to it that your zoo remains open and the animals fed and cared for, while relieving you of your duties there.

“I . . . I can’t.”

Because it is beautiful or because you fear it?

“Just . . . because.”

What is the one thing I have refused you? The one thing you asked for that I declined to allow?

“A loaded gun.”

I will see to it that a rifle is maintained for your use within the confines of the zoo. The decision is yours . . . I want you to take a side . . .

So Zack went to the zoo the next day, just to hold the loaded weapon. He found it on an umbrella table inside the entrance, brand-new, small sized, with a satin walnut stock and a recoil pad, and a scope on top. It only weighed about seven pounds. He carefully carried the weapon around his zoo, sighting various targets. He wanted to shoot but wasn’t sure how many rounds it held. It was a bolt-action rifle, but he wasn’t 100 percent certain he could reload it, even if he could get more ammunition. He aimed for a sign that said RESTROOMS and fingered the trigger, not really squeezing, and the weapon jumped in his hands. The rifle butt slammed into his shoulder, the recoil shoving him backward. The report was a loud crack. He gasped and saw a wisp of smoke coming out of the muzzle. He looked at the sign and saw a hole punched through one of the O’s.

Zack practiced his aim for the next several days, utilizing the exquisite, whimsical bronze animals in the Delacorte clock. The clock still played music every half hour. As the figures moved along their circular track, Zack aimed at a hippopotamus playing the violin. He missed his first two shots entirely, and the third one grazed the goat playing the pipes. Frustrated, Zack reloaded and waited for the next go-around, sitting on a nearby bench as the distant sirens lulled him into a nap. The bells woke him thirty minutes later. This time he aimed ahead of his target rather than trying to track with it as it moved. Three shots at the hippo, and he distinctly heard one sharp ricochet off the bronze figure. Two days later, the goat had lost the tip of one of its two pipes, and the penguin had lost part of a drumstick. Zack was able to hit the figures now with speed and accuracy. He felt ready.

The leopard habitat consisted of a waterfall and a birch and bamboo forest, all contained within a high tent of stainless steel woven mesh. The terrain inside was steep, with tunnel-like tubes carved into the slope, leading to the windowed viewing area.

The snow leopard stood on a rock and looked at Zack, associating the boy’s appearance with feeding time. The black rain had soiled her coat, but the animal still possessed a regal air. At four feet in length, she could leap forty or fifty feet if motivated, as when going after prey.

She stepped off the rock, prowling in a circle. The rifle report had antagonized her. Why did the Master want Zack to kill it? What purpose would it serve? It seemed like a sacrifice, as though Zack were being asked to execute the bravest animal in order that the others might survive.

He was shocked when the leopard came bounding toward the steel mesh separating them, baring her teeth. She was hungry and disappointed that she did not smell any food, as well as alarmed by the rifle shot—though that was not at all what it seemed like to Zack. He jumped back before reasserting himself, pointing the rifle at the snow leopard, answering her low, intimidating growl. She walked in a tight circle, never taking her eyes off him. She was voracious, and Zack realized that she would go through meal after meal and that, if the food ever ran out, she would feast on the hand that fed her without a moment’s justification. She would take if she needed to take. She would attack.

The Master was right. He was afraid of the leopard, and rightly so. But which one was the keeper and which one the kept? Didn’t she have Zack working for her, feeding her regularly over these many months? He was her pet as much as she was his. And suddenly, with the rifle in his hand, that arrangement didn’t feel right.

He hated her arrogance, her will. He walked around the enclosure, the snow leopard following him on the other side of the mesh. Zack entered the ZOO EMPLOYEES ONLY feeding area, looking out through the small window over the door through which he dropped the leopard’s meat or released livestock. Zack’s deep breathing seemed to fill the entire room. He ducked through the top-hinged door, which slammed shut behind him.

He had never been inside the leopard’s pen before. He looked up at the high tent overhead. A number of different-sized bones were scattered over the ground before him, remnants of past meals.

He had a grand fantasy of striding out into the small wood and tracking the cat, looking her in her eyes before deciding whether or not to pull the trigger. But the noise of the closing door was the equivalent of ringing the dinner bell, and at once the snow leopard came slinking around a boulder strategically set to shield the leopard’s feeding from zoo visitors.

The leopard stopped short, surprised to see Zack inside there. For once there was no steel mesh between them. She lowered her head as though trying to understand this strange turn of events, and Zack saw that he had made a terrible mistake. He brought the rifle to his shoulder without aiming it and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. He pulled it again. Nothing.

He reached for the bolt handle and yanked it back and slid it forward. He squeezed the trigger, and the rifle jumped in his hands. He worked the bolt again, frantically, and squeezed the trigger, and the report was the only thing that reached his ringing ears. He worked the bolt again, and squeezed the trigger, and the rifle jumped. Another time, and the rifle clicked empty. Again, and still empty.

He realized only then that the snow leopard was lying on its side before him. He went to the animal, seeing the red bloodstains spreading over its coat. The animal’s eyes were closed, its powerful limbs still.

Zack climbed up on the boulder and sat there with the empty rifle on his lap. Overcome with emotions, he shuddered and cried. He felt at once triumphant and lost. He looked out at the zoo from inside the pen. It had begun to rain.

Things began to change for Zack after that. His rifle only held four rounds, and for a while he returned to his zoo each day for target practice: more signs, benches, branches. He began to take more risks. He rode a dirt bike along the old jogging routes in the park, around and around the Great Lawn, riding the bike through the empty streets of Central Park, past the shriveled remains of hanging corpses or the ashes of funerary pyres. When he rode at night, he liked to turn the bike’s headlight off. It was exciting, magical—an adventure. Protected by the Master, he felt no fear.

But what he did feel, still, was the presence of his mother. Their bond, which had felt strong even after her turning, had faded over time. The creature that had once been Kelly Goodweather now barely resembled the human woman who had been his mother. Her scalp was dirty, hairless, her lips thin and lacking even a hint of pink. The soft cartilage of her nose and ears had collapsed into mere vestigial lumps. Loose, ragged flesh hung from her neck, and an incipient, crimson wattle, undulating when she turned her head. Her chest was flat, her breasts shriveled, her arms and legs caked with a grime so thick the driving rain could not wash it away. Her eyes were orbs of black floating on beds of dark red, essentially lifeless . . . except for sometimes, rarely, perhaps only in Zack’s imagination now, when he saw what he thought might be a glimmer of recognition reflective of the mother she once was. It wasn’t so much an emotion or expression, but rather the way a certain shadow fell across her face, in a manner more obscuring of her vampire nature than revealing of her former human self. Fleeting moments, growing more rare with time—but they were enough. More psychologically than physically, his mother remained on the periphery of his new life.

Bored, Zack pulled the plunger on his vending machine, and a Milky Way bar dropped to the bottom drawer. He ate it as he went back up to the first floor, then outside, looking for some trouble to get into. As though on cue, Zack’s mother came scrabbling up the craggy rock face that was the castle’s foundation. She did so with feline agility, scaling the wet schist seemingly without exertion, her bare feet and talon-aided hands moving from purchase to purchase as though she had ascended that very path one thousand times before. At the top, she vaulted easily onto the walkway, two spiderlike feelers following behind her, loping back and forth on all fours.

As she neared Zack, standing in the doorway just out of the rain, he saw that her neck wattle was flush, engorged and red even through the accumulated dirt and filth. It meant that she had recently fed.

“Had a nice dinner out, Mom?” he asked, revolted. The scarecrow that had once been his mother stared at him with empty eyes. Every time he saw her, he felt the exact same contradictory impulses: repulsion and love. She followed him around for hours at a time, occasionally keeping her distance like a watchful wolf. He had, once, been moved to caress her hair and afterward had cried silently.

She entered the castle without a glance at Zack’s face. Her wet footprints and the muck tracked in by the feelers’ hands and feet added to the grunge coating the stone floor. Zack looked at her and, for a fleeting moment—though distorted by vampiric mutation—saw his mother’s face emerge. But, just as immediately, the illusion was broken, the memory soiled by this ever-present monster that he could not help but love. Everybody else he ever had in his life was gone. This was all Zack had left: a broken doll to keep him company.

Zack felt a warmth fill the breezy castle, as though left by a being in swift motion. The Master had returned, a slight murmur entering Zack’s head. He watched his mother ascend the stairs to the upper floors and followed her, wanting to see what the commotion was about.

The Master

THE MASTER HAD once understood the voice of God. It once held it within itself, and in a way, it retained a pale imitation of that state of grace. It was, after all, a being of one mind and many eyes, seeing all at once, processing it all, experiencing the many voices of its subjects. And like God’s, the Master’s voice was a concert of flow and contradiction—it carried the breeze and the hurricane, the lull and the thunder, rising and fading with dusk and dawn . . .

But the scale of God’s voice encompassed it all—not earth, not the continents, but the whole world. And the Master could only witness it but no longer could make sense of it as it was able to once upon a time in the origin of it all.

This is, it thought, for the millionth time, what it is to fall from grace . . .

And yet, there the Master stood: monitoring the planet through the observations of its brood. Multiple sources of input, one central intelligence. The Master’s mind casting a net of surveillance over the globe. Squeezing planet Earth in a fist of a thousand fingers.

Goodweather had just released seventeen serfs in the explosion of the hospital building. Seventeen lost, their number soon to be replaced; the arithmetic of infection was of paramount importance to the Master.

The feelers remained out searching the surrounding blocks for the fugitive doctor, seeking his psychic scent. Thus far, nothing. The Master’s ultimate victory was assured, the great chess match all but over, except that its opponent obstinately refused to concede defeat—leaving to the Master the drudgery of chasing the last remaining piece around the board.

That final piece was not, in fact, Goodweather, but instead the Occido Lumen, the lone extant edition of the cursed text. In detailing the mysterious origin of the Master and the Ancients, the book also contained an indication for bringing about the Master’s demise—the location of its site of origin—if one knew where to look.

Fortunately, the current possessors of the book were illiterate cattle. The tome had been stolen at auction by the old professor Abraham Setrakian, at that time the lone human on earth with the knowledge necessary to decrypt the tome and its arcane secrets. However, the old professor had little time to review the Lumen before his death. And in the brief time the Master and Setrakian were linked through possession—in those precious moments between the old professor’s turning and his destruction—the Master learned, through their shared intelligence, every bit of knowledge the professor had gleaned from the silver-bound volume.

Everything—and yet it was not enough. The location of the Master’s origin—the fabled “Black Site”—was still unknown to Setrakian at the time of his turning. This was frustrating, but it also proved that his loyal band of sympathizers did not know the location either. Setrakian’s knowledge of folklore and the history of the dark clans was unsurpassed among humans and, like a snuffed flame, had died with him.

The Master was confident that even with the cursed book in hand, Setrakian’s followers could not decode the book’s mystery. But the Master needed the coordinates itself, in order to guarantee its safety for eternity. Only a fool leaves anything of importance to chance.

In that moment of possession, of unique psychological intimacy with Setrakian, the Master had also learned the identities of Setrakian’s co-conspirators. The Ukrainian, Vasiliy Fet. Nora Martinez and Augustin Elizalde.

But none was more compelling to the Master than the one whose identity the Master had already known: Dr. Ephraim Goodweather. What the Master had not known, and what came as a surprise, was that Setrakian considered Goodweather the strongest link among them. Even given Goodweather’s obvious vulnerabilities—his temperament, and the loss of his former wife and his son—Setrakian believed him to be absolutely incorruptible.

The Master was not a being prone to surprise. Existing for centuries tended to dull revelations, but this one nagged at the Master. How could it be? Reluctantly, the Master admitted to having a high opinion of Setrakian’s judgment—for a human. As with the Lumen, the Master’s interest in Goodweather had begun as a mere distraction.

The distraction had become a pursuit.

The pursuit was now an obsession. All humans broke at the end. Sometimes it took mere minutes, sometimes days, sometimes decades, but the Master always won at the end. This was endurance chess. His time frame was much broader than theirs, his mind far more trained—and void of delusions or hopes.

This was what had led the Master to Goodweather’s progeny. This was the original reason the Master had not turned the boy. The reason the Master assuaged the discomfort in the boy’s lungs with a drop or so of its precious blood every week—which also had the effect of enabling the Master to peer into the boy’s warm and pliable mind.

The boy had responded to the Master’s power. And the Master used this, engaging the boy mentally. Subverting his naïve ideas about divinity. After a period of fear and disgust, the boy, with assistance from the Master, had come to feel admiration and respect. His cloying emotions for his father had shrunk like an irradiated tumor. The boy’s young mind was an agreeable lump of dough, one the Master continued to knead.

Preparing it. To rise.

The Master normally met such subjects at the end of the corruption process. Here, the Master had the unusual opportunity to participate in the corruption of the son and surrogate of the allegedly incorruptible. The Master was able to experience this downfall directly through the boy, thanks to the bond of the blood feeding. The Master had felt the boy’s conflict when facing the snow leopard, felt his fear, felt his joy. Never had the Master wanted to keep anyone alive before; never had he wanted them to remain human. The Master had already decided: this was the next body to inhabit. With that in mind, the Master was essentially preparing young Zachary. It had learned never to take a body younger than age thirteen. Physically, the advantages included boundless energy, fresh joints, and supple muscles, requiring little maintenance. But the disadvantages were still those of taking a weaker body, structurally fragile and with limited strength. So, even though the Master no longer required extraordinary size and strength—as it did with Sardu, the giant body inside which it had traveled to New York, the host the Master had to shed after it was poisoned by Setrakian—it also did not require extraordinary physical appeal and seductiveness, as with Bolivar. It would wait . . . What the Master sought for the future was convenience.

The Master had been able to view itself through Zachary’s own eyes, which had been most illuminating. Bolivar’s body had served the Master ably, and it was interesting to note the boy’s response to his arresting appearance. He was, after all, a magnetic presence. A performer. A star. That, combined with the Master’s dark talents, proved irresistible to the young man.

And the same could be said in reverse. The Master found itself telling Zachary things, not out of rank affection but in the manner of an older self to a younger self. A dialogue like that was a rarity in its prolonged existence. After all, it had consorted for centuries with some of the most hardened and ruthless souls. Sided with them, molded them to its will. In a contest of brutality, he knew no equal.

But Zack’s energy was pure, his essence quite similar to his father’s. A perfect pool to study and taint. All this contributed to the Master’s curiosity about young Goodweather. The Master had, over the centuries, perfected the technique of reading humans, not only in nonverbal communication—known as a “tell”—but even in their omissions. A behaviorist can anticipate or detect a lie by the concert of micro-gestures that telegraphs it. The Master could anticipate a lie two beats before it even happened. Not that it cared, morally, one way or another. But to detect the truth or lie in a covenant was vital for it. It meant access or lack of it—cooperation or danger. Humans were insects to the Master and it an entomologist living among them. This discipline had lost all fascination for the Master thousands of years ago—until now. The more Zachary Goodweather tried to hide things, the more the Master was able to draw out of him—without the young man even knowing he was telling the Master everything it needed to know. And through the young Goodweather, the Master was amassing information about Ephraim. A curious name. Second son of Joseph and a woman once visited by an angel: Asenath. Ephraim, known only for his progeny—lost in the Bible, without identity or purpose. The Master smiled.

So the search continued on two fronts: for the Lumen, containing the secret of the Black Site in its silver-bound pages, and for Ephraim Goodweather.

It occurred to the Master, many times, that he might claim both prizes at the same time.

The Master was convinced the Black Site was near at hand. All the clues indicated this was so—the very clues that had led it here. The prophecy that had forced it to cross the ocean. And yet, in an abundance of caution, its slaves continued their excavations in far-flung parts of the world to see if they could find it elsewhere.

The Black Cliffs of Negril. The Black Hills mountain range in South Dakota. The oil fields at Pointe-Noire, on the western coast of the Republic of the Congo.

In the meantime, the Master had nearly achieved complete worldwide nuclear disarmament. Having taken immediate control of the military forces of the world through the directed spread of vampirism among infantry and command officers, it now had access to much of the world’s stockpiles. Rounding up and dismantling rogue nations’ weaponry, as well as so-called loose nukes, would take some more time, but the end was close.

The Master looked at every corner of its Earth farm and was pleased.

The Master reached for Setrakian’s wolf-headed staff, the one the vampire hunter had carried. The walking stick had once belonged to Sardu and had been refitted to include a silver blade when twisted open. It was nothing more than a trophy now, a symbol of the Master’s victory. The token amount of silver in its silver handle did not bother the Master, though it took great care not to touch the ornamental wolf’s head.

The Master carried it into the castle turret, the highest point in the park, and stepped outside into the oily rain. Beyond the spindly upper branches of the denuded treetops, through the thick haze of fog and pollution-heavy air, stood the dirty gray buildings, the East Side and the West Side. In the glowing register of his heat-sensitive vision, thousands upon thousands of empty windows stared down like the cold, dead eyes of fallen witnesses. The dark sky roiled above, voiding filth on the defeated city.

Below the Master, forming an arc around the base of the raised rock foundation, stood the guardians of the castle, twenty deep. Beyond them, in answer to the Master’s psychic call, a sea of vampires had assembled on the fifty-five-acre Great Lawn, each staring up with black-moon eyes.

No cheer. No salute. No exultation. A still and quiet congregation; a silent army, awaiting its orders.

Kelly Goodweather appeared at the Master’s side, and, next to her, the Goodweather boy. Kelly Goodweather had been summoned; the boy had wandered over out of pure curiosity.

The Master’s command went out to every vampire’s mind.

Goodweather.

There was no answer to the Master’s call. The only response would be action. In due time, he would kill Goodweather—first his soul, and then his body. Unbearable suffering would be endured.

He would make sure of that.

Roosevelt Island

PRIOR TO ITS late-twentieth-century reinvention as a planned community, Roosevelt Island was home to the city’s penitentiary, its lunatic asylum, and its smallpox hospital, and was previously known as Welfare Island.

Roosevelt Island had always been a home for New York City’s castaways. Fet was that now.

He had decided that he would rather live in isolation on this narrow, two-mile-long island in the middle of the East River than reside in the vampire-ruin city or its infested boroughs. He could not bear to live inside an occupied New York. Apparently, the river-phobic strigoi could find no use for this small satellite island of Manhattan, and so, soon after the takeover, they cleared the island of all residents and set it afire. The cables to the tram at Fifty-ninth Street had been cut and the Roosevelt Island Bridge destroyed at its terminus in Queens. The F line subway still ran through the island beneath the river, but the Roosevelt Island Station stop had been permanently walled up.

But Fet knew a different way in from the underwater tunnel up to the geographic center of the island. An access tunnel built to service the island community’s unusual pneumatic tube system of refuse collection and disposal. The vast majority of the island, including its once-towering apartment buildings offering magnificent Manhattan views, was in ruins. But Fet had found a few mostly undamaged belowground units in the luxury apartment complex constructed around the Octagon, formerly the main building of the old lunatic asylum. There, well concealed among the destruction, he had sealed off the burned top floors and joined four bottom-floor units. The water and electricity pipes under the river had not been disturbed, so once the borough grids were repaired Fet had power and potable water.

Under cover of daylight, the smugglers dropped off Fet and the Russian nuke at the northern end of the island. He retrieved a wheeled hardware-store pallet cart he kept stashed in a hospital utility shed near the rocky shoreline and towed the weapon and his rucksack and a small Styrofoam cooler through the rain to his hideout.

He was excited to see Nora and even feeling a bit giddy. Return journeys will do that. Also, she was the only one who knew he was meeting with the Russians, and so he arrived with his great prize in tow like a boy with a school trophy. His sense of accomplishment was amplified by the excitement and enthusiasm he knew she would show him.

However, when he arrived at the charred door that led inside to his concealed subterranean chamber, he found it open a few inches. This was not a mistake Dr. Nora Martinez would ever make. Fet quickly removed his sword from his bag. He had to tow the cart inside in order to get it out of the rain. He left it in the fire-damaged hallway and walked down the partially melted flight of stairs.

He entered his unlocked door. His hideaway did not require much security, because it was so well hidden and because, other than the rare maritime smuggler risking a journey along the Manhattan interior, almost no one else ever set foot on the island anymore.

The spare kitchen was unoccupied. Fet lived largely on snack food pilfered and stockpiled after the first few months of the siege, crackers and granola bars and Little Debbie cakes and Twinkies that were now reaching or, in some cases, already surpassing their “sell by” dates. Contrary to popular belief, they did become inedible. He had tried his hand at fishing, but the sooty river water was so rife with blight he was worried that no flame could get hot enough to safely cook out the pollution.

He moved through the bedroom after a quick check of the closets. The mattress on the floor had been just fine with him until the prospect of Nora perhaps staying overnight made him hunt for a proper bed frame. The spare bathroom, where Fet kept the rat-hunting equipment he had salvaged from his old storefront shop in the Flatlands, a few instruments from his former vocation that he had been unable to part with, was otherwise empty.

Fet ducked through the hole he had sledgehammered open, into the next unit, which he used as a study. The room was stocked with bookshelves and stacked cartons of Setrakian’s library and writings, centered around a leather sofa under a low-hanging reading lamp.

At about two o’clock in the circularly arranged room stood a hooded figure, well over six feet tall, strongly built. His face receded into the black cotton hood, but the eyes were apparent, piercing and red. In his pale hands was a notebook filled with Setrakian’s fine handwriting.

He was a strigoi. But he was clothed. He wore pants and boots in addition to the hooded sweatshirt.

He eyed the rest of the room, thinking ambush.

I am alone.

The strigoi put his voice directly into Fet’s head. Fet looked again at the notebook in his hands. This was a sanctuary to Fet. This vampire had invaded it. He could easily have destroyed it. The loss would have been catastrophic.

“Where is Nora?” Fet asked, and then moved on the strigoi, unsheathing his sword as fast as a man of Fet’s size can move. But the vampire at once eluded him and pushed him down to the ground. Fet roared in anger and tried to wrestle his opponent, but no matter what he did, the strigoi would retaliate with a block and a crippling move, immobilizing Fet—hurting him just enough.

I have been here alone. Do you, by chance, remember who I am, Mr. Fet?

Fet did, vaguely. He remembered that this one had once held an iron spike at his neck, inside an old apartment high above Central Park.

“You were one of those hunters. The Ancients’ personal bodyguards.”

Correct.

“But you didn’t vaporize with the rest.”

Obviously not.

“Q something.”

Quinlan.

Fet freed his right arm and tried to connect with the creature’s cheek but the wrist was clamped and twisted in the blink of an eye. This time it hurt. A lot.

Now, I can dislocate this arm or I can break it. Your choice. But think about it. If I wanted you dead, you would be by now. Over the centuries I have served many masters, fought many wars. I have served emperors and queens and mercenaries. I have killed thousands of your kind and hundreds of rogue vampires. All I need from you is a moment. I need you to listen. If you attack me again, I will kill you instantly. Do we understand each other?

Fet nodded. Mr. Quinlan released him.

“You didn’t die with the Ancients. Then you must be one of the Master’s breed . . .”

Yes. And no.

“Uh-huh. That’s convenient. Mind me asking how you got here?”

Your friend Gus. The Ancients had me recruit him for sun hunting.

“I remember. Too little, too late, as it turned out.”

Fet remained guarded. This didn’t add up. The Master’s wily ways made him paranoid, but it was precisely this paranoia that had kept Fet alive and unturned over the past two years.

I am interested in viewing the Occido Lumen. Gus told me that you might be able to point me in the right direction.

“Fuck you,” said Fet. “You’ll have to go through me to get it.”

Mr. Quinlan appeared to smile.

We seek the same goal. And I have a little more of an edge when it comes to deciphering the book and Setrakian’s notes.

The strigoi had closed Setrakian’s notebook—one that Fet had reread many times. “Good reading?”

Indeed. And impressively accurate. Professor Setrakian was as learned as he was cunning.

“He was the real deal, all right.”

He and I almost met once before. About twenty miles north of Kotka, in Finland. He had somehow tracked me there. At the time I was wary of his intentions, as you might imagine. In retrospect, he would have made for an interesting dinner companion.

“As opposed to a meal himself,” said Fet. He thought that perhaps a quick test was in order. He pointed at the text in Q’s hands. “Ozryel, right? Is that the name of the Master?” he said. Fet had brought along with him on his voyage some copied pages of the Lumen to study whenever possible—including an image Setrakian had first focused on upon opening the Lumen. The archangel whom Setrakian referred to as Ozryel. The old professor had lined up this illuminated page with the alchemical symbol of three crescent moons combined to form a rudimentary biohazard sign, in such a way that the twinned images achieved a kind of geometric symmetry. “The old man called Ozy ‘the angel of death.’ ”

It’s “Ozy” now, is it?

“Sorry, yeah. Nickname. So—it was Ozy who became the Master?”

Partially correct.

“Partially?”

Fet had lowered his sword by now and leaned on it like a cane, the silver point making another notch in the floor.

“See, Setrakian would have had one thousand questions for you. Me, I don’t even know where to start.”

You already started.

“I guess I did. Shit, where were you two years ago?”

I’ve had work to do. Preparations.

“Preparations for what?”

Ashes.

“Right,” Fet said. “Something about the Ancients, collecting their remains. There were three Old World Ancients.”

You know more than you think you do.

“But still not enough. See, I just returned from a journey myself. Trying to track down the provenance of the Lumen. A dead end . . . but something else broke my way. Something that could be big.”

Fet thought of the nuke, which made him remember his excitement at returning home, which made him remember Nora. He moved to a laptop computer, waking it from a weeklong sleep. He checked the encrypted message board. No postings from Nora since two days ago.

“I have to go,” he told Mr. Quinlan. “I have many questions, but there might be something wrong, and I have to go meet someone. I don’t suppose there’s any chance you’ll wait here for me?”

None. I must have access to the Lumen. Like the sky, it is written in a language beyond your comprehension. If you produce it for me . . . next time we meet I can promise you a plan of action . . .

Fet felt an overwhelming urge to hurry, a sudden sense of dread. “I’ll have to talk to the others first. This is not a decision I can make alone.”

Mr. Quinlan remained still in the half-light.

You may find me through Gus. Just know there is precious little time. If ever a situation called for decisive action, this is it.