Eph tried to imagine Professor Setrakian there with him right now, wearing his tweed suit, leaning on the oversized wolf’s-head walking stick that hid his silver blade. The vampire scholar and killer. Eph opened the book. He recalled the one time Setrakian got to touch and read these pages he had sought for decades, just after the auction. Eph turned to the illustration Setrakian had shown them, a two-page spread showing a complex mandala in silver, black, and red. Over the illustration, on tracing paper, Setrakian had laid the outline of a six-limbed archangel.
The Occido Lumen was a book about vampires—not, Eph realized, a book for vampires. Silver-faced and -edged in order to keep it out of the hands of the dread strigoi. Painstakingly designed to be vampire-proof.
Eph thought back to his vision . . . finding the book upon the outdoor bed . . .
It had been daylight . . .
Eph walked to the door. He opened it and stepped out into the parking lot, looking up at the swirling dark clouds beginning to efface the pale orb of the sun.
The others followed him outside into the gloaming, except for Mr. Quinlan, Creem, and Gus, who remained at the door.
Eph ignored them, turning his gaze to the book in his hands. Sunlight. Even if vampires could somehow circumvent the silver protections of the Lumen, they could never read it by natural light, due to the virus-killing properties of the ultraviolet C range.
He opened the book, tipping its pages toward the fading sun like a face basking in the last of the day’s warmth. The text took on new life, jumping off the ancient paper. Eph flipped to the first of the illustrations, the inlaid silver strands sparkling, the image bright with new life.
He quickly searched the text. Words appeared behind words, as though written in invisible ink. Watermarks changed the very nature of the illustrations, and detailed designs emerged behind otherwise bare pages of straightforward text. A new layer of ink reacted to the ultraviolet light . . .
The two-page mandala, viewed in direct sunlight, evinced the archangel image in a delicate hand, appearing quite silver against the aged paper.
The Latin text did not quite translate itself as magically as it had in his dream, but its meaning became clear. Most elucidating was a diagram revealed in the shape of a biohazard symbol, with points inside the flower arranged like points on a map.
On another page, certain letters were highlighted, which, when put together, formed a peculiar yet familiar word:
A H S U D A G U–W A H.
Eph read quickly, the insights leaping into his brain through his eyes. The pale sunlight faded quickly at the end, and so did the book’s enhancements. So much more to read and to learn. But for now, Eph had seen enough. His hands continued to tremble. The Lumen had shown him the way.
Eph walked back inside past Fet and Nora. He felt neither relief nor exhilaration, still vibrating like a tuning fork.
Eph looked at Mr. Quinlan, who saw it in his face.
Sunlight. Of course.
The others knew something had happened. Except for Gus, who remained skeptical.
“Well?” said Nora.
Eph said, “I’m ready now.”
“Ready for what?” said Fet. “Ready to go?”
Eph looked at Nora. “I need a map.”
She ran off into the offices. They heard desk drawers slamming.
Eph just stood there, like a man recovering from an electric shock. “It was the sunlight,” he explained. “Reading the Lumen in natural sunlight. It was like the pages opened up for me. I saw it all . . . or would have, if I’d had more time. The original Native American name for this place was ‘Burned Earth.’ But their word for ‘burned’ is the same as ‘black.’ ”
Oscura. Dark.
“Chernobyl, the failed attempt—the simulation,” said Fet. “It appeased the Ancients because ‘Chernobyl’ means ‘Black Soil.’ And I saw a Stoneheart crew excavating sites around a geologically active area of hot springs outside Reykjavik known as Black Pool.”
“But there are no coordinates in the book,” said Nora.
“Because it was beneath the water,” said Eph. “At the time Ozryel’s remains were cast away, this site was underwater. The Master didn’t emerge until hundreds of years later.”
The youngest one. The last.
A triumphant yell, and then Nora came running back with a sheaf of oversized topographical maps of the northeastern United States, with cellophane street atlas overlays.
Eph flipped the pages to New York State. The top part of the map included the southern region of Ontario, Canada.
“Lake Ontario,” he said. “To the east here.” At the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River, east of Wolfe Island, a cluster of tiny, unnamed islands was grouped together, labeled “Thousand Islands.” “It’s there. One of those. Just off the New York coast.”
“The burial site?” said Fet.
“I don’t know what its name is today. The original Native American name for the island was ‘Ahsudagu-wah.’ Roughly translated from the Onondaga language as ‘Dark Place’ or ‘Black Place.’ ”
Fet slid the road atlas out from beneath Eph’s hands, flipping back to New Jersey.
“How do we find the island?” said Nora.
Eph said, “It’s shaped roughly like the biohazard symbol, like a three-petaled flower.”
Fet quickly plotted their course through New Jersey into Pennsylvania, then north to the top of New York State. He ripped out the pages. “Interstate Eighty West to Interstate Eighty-one North. Gets us right to the Saint Lawrence River.”
“How long?” said Nora.
“Roughly three hundred miles. We can do that in five or six hours.”
“Maybe straight highway time,” said Nora. “Something tells me it won’t be as simple as that.”
“It’s going to figure out which way we’re headed and try to cut us off,” Fet said.
“We have to get going,” said Nora. “We barely have a head start as it is.” She looked to the Born. “Can you load the bomb in the—”
When her voice dropped off, the others turned in alarm. Mr. Quinlan stood next to the unwrapped device. But Creem was gone.
Gus ran to the door. “What the . . . ?” He came back to the Born. “You let him get away? I brought him into this thing—I was going to take him out.”
We don’t need him anymore. And yet he can still be of use to us.
Gus stared. “How? That rat bastard doesn’t deserve to live.”
Nora said, “What if they catch him? He knows too much.”
He knows just enough. Trust me.
“Just enough?”
To draw fear from the Master.
Eph understood now. He saw it as plain as he had the symbolism in the Lumen. “The Master will be on his way here; that’s guaranteed. We need to challenge it. To scare it. The Master pretends to be above all emotion, but I have seen it angry. It is, going back to biblical times, a vengeful creature. That hasn’t changed. When it administers its kingdom dispassionately, then it is in complete control. It is efficient and detached, all-seeing. But when it is challenged directly, it makes mistakes. It acts rashly. Remember, it became possessed of a bloodlust after laying siege to Sodom and Gomorrah. It murdered a fellow archangel in the grip of a homicidal mania. It lost control.”
“You want the Master to find him?”
“We want the Master to know we have the nuke and the means to detonate it. And that we know the location of the Black Site. We have to get it to overcommit. We have the upper hand now. It’s the Master’s turn to be desperate.”
To be afraid.
Gus stepped up to Eph then. Standing close, trying to read Eph the way Eph had read the book. Taking the measure of the man. Gus held in his hands a small carton of smoke grenades, some of the nonlethal weapons the vampires had left behind.
“So now we have to protect the guy who was going to stab us all in the back,” said Gus. “I don’t get you. And I don’t get this—any of this, but especially you being able t
o read the book. Why you? Of all of us.”
Eph’s response was frank and honest. “I don’t know, Gus. But I think that part of this is I’m going to find out.”
Gus wasn’t expecting such a guileless response. He saw in Eph’s eyes the look of a man who was scared, and also accepting. Of a man resigned to his fate, whichever way it went.
Gus wasn’t ready to drink the Kool-Aid yet, but he was ready to commit to the final leg of this journey. “I think we’re all going to find out,” he said.
Fet said, “The Master most of all.”
The Dark Place
THE THROAT WAS buried deep in the earth beneath the cold Atlantic sea. The silt around it had turned black upon contact with it and nothing would grow or live near it.
The same was true of every other site where the remains of Ozryel were interred. The angelic flesh remained incorrupt and unchanged, but its blood seeped into the earth and slowly radiated out. The blood had a will of its own, each strand moving blindly, instinctively upward, traversing the soil, hidden from the sun, seeking a host. This is the manner in which the blood worms were born. Within them they contained the remnant of the human blood, tinting their tissue, guiding them toward the scent of their potential host. But also within them they carried the will of their original flesh. The will of the arms, the wings, the throat . . .
Their thin bodies wriggled blindly for the longest distances. Many of the worms died, infertile emissaries baked by the merciless heat of the earth or stopped by a geological obstacle that proved impossible to negotiate. They all strayed from their birth sites, some even transported away along with the earth on unwitting insect or animal vectors. Eventually they found a host—and they dug in the flesh, like a dutiful parasite, burrowing deep. In the beginning, it took the pathogen weeks to supplant, to hijack, the will and the tissue of the infected victim. Even parasites and viruses learn through trial and error—and learn they did. By the fifth human host body, the Ancients began to master the art of survival and supplantation. They extended their domain through infection, and they learned to play by the new earthbound rules of this game.
And they became masters at it.
The youngest one, the last to be born, was the Master, the throat. God’s capricious verbs gave movement to the very earth and the sea and made them clash and push upward the land that formed the Master’s birth site. It was a peninsula and then, hundreds of years later, an island.
The capillary worms that emanated from the throat were separated from their site of origin and wandered away the farthest, for in this newly formed land, humans had not yet set foot. It was useless and painful to try to nurture or dominate a lower form of life, a wolf or a bear; their control was imperfect and limited, and their synapses were alien and short-lived. Each of these invasions proved fruitless, but the lesson learned by one parasite was instantly learned by the hive mind. Soon their numbers were reduced to only a handful, scattered far away from the birth site: blind, lost, and weak.
Under a cold autumn moon a young Iroquois brave set camp on an earth patch dozens of miles from the birth site of the throat. He was an Onondaga—a keeper of the fire—and as he lay down on the ground, he was overtaken by a single capillary worm, burying itself into his neck.
The pain awakened the man and he instantly reached for the wounded area. The worm was still not entirely burrowed in, so he was able to grab the tail end of it. He pulled with all his might, but the thing wiggled and squirmed against his efforts and finally slipped from his grip, digging into the muscular structure of his neck. The pain was unbearable, like a slow, burning stab, as it wriggled down his throat and chest and finally disappeared under his left arm as the creature blindly discovered his circulation system.
As the parasite overtook the body, a fever started, lasting for almost two weeks and dehydrating its host body. But once the supplantation was complete, the Master sought refuge in the darkened caves and the cold, soothing filth in them. It found that, for reasons beyond its comprehension, the soil in which it overtook its host body provided it with the most comfort, and so it carried around a small clump of earth wherever it went. By now the worms had invaded and taken nourishment from almost every organ in the host’s body, multiplying in his bloodstream. His skin grew taut and pale, contrasting sharply with his tribal tattoos and his ravenous eyes, veiled by the nictitating membrane, glowing brightly in the moonlight. A few weeks went by without any nourishment but finally, close to dawn, he fell upon a group of Mohawk hunters.
The Master’s control over its vehicle was still tentative, but thirst compensated for fighting precision and ability. The transference was faster the next time—multiple worms going into each victim through the wet stinger. Even when the attacks were clumsy and barely completed, they accomplished their end. Two of the hunters fought bravely, their throw-axes doing damage to the body of the possessed Onondaga warrior. But, in the end, even as that body slowly bled out into the earth, the parasites overtook the bodies of their attackers and soon the pack multiplied. Now the Master was three.
Through the years, the Master learned to use its skills and tactics to suit its needs for secrecy and stealth. The land was inhabited by fierce warriors and the places where it could hide were limited to caves and crevices that were well-known to hunters and trappers. The Master seldom transmitted its will into a new body and only did so if the stature or strength of a new host was overwhelmingly desirable. And through the years it gained in legend and name and the Algonquian Indians called it the wendigo.
It longed to commune with the Ancients, whom it naturally sensed and whose empathic beacon it felt across the sea. But every time it attempted to cross running water its human body would fail and be struck by a seizure, no matter the might of the occupied body. Was this tied to the place of his dismemberment? Trapped within the flowing arms of the river Yarden? Was it a secret alchemy, a deterrent written upon his forehead by the finger of God? This and many other rules it would come to learn during its existence.
It moved west and north looking for a route to the “other land,” the continent where the Ancients were thriving. It felt their call—and the urge inside it grew, sustaining the Master over the grueling trek from one edge of the continent to the other.
It reached the forbidding ocean in the frozen lands at the uppermost northwest, where it hunted and fed on the inhabitants of that cold wasteland, the Unangam. They were men of narrow eyes and tanned skin, who wore animal pelts for warmth. The Master, entering the minds of its victims, learned of a crossing to a great land on the other side of the sea, at a place where the shores almost touched, reaching like outstretched hands. It scouted the cold shore, searching for this launching point.
One fateful night, the Master saw a cluster of narrow, primitive fishing ships near a cliff, unloading the fish and seal they had hunted. The Master knew it could cross the ocean aided by them. It had learned to ford smaller bodies of water with human assistance, so why not a larger one? The Master knew how to bend and terrorize the soul of even the hardest man. It knew how to gain and feed upon the fear of its subjects. The Master would kill half the group and announce itself as a deity, a fury of the wood, an elemental force of grander power than his already amazing one. It would suffocate any dissidence and gain every alliance either by pardon or by favor . . . and then it would travel across the waters.
While hidden beneath a heavy coat of pelts, lying upon a small bed of soil, the Master would attempt the crossing that would reunite it with those closest to its nature.
Picatinny Armory
CREEM HID IN another building for a while, scared of that Quinlan dude and what his reach was. Creem’s mouth still hurt from the elbow he had taken, and now his silver teeth wouldn’t bite right. He was pissed at himself for going back to the maintenance garage at the university for the guns, for being greedy. Always so hungry for more, more, more . . .
After a while, he heard a car go past, but not too fast, and quiet. It sounded like an electrical
car, one of those plug-in compacts.
He headed out toward the one place he used to avoid, the front entrance of Picatinny Armory. Darkness had fallen again, and he walked toward a cluster of lights, wet and hungry and holding the cramp in his side. He turned the corner and saw the smashed gate where they had entered and beings clustered near the Visitor Control building. Creem put his hands up and walked until they saw him.
He explained himself to the humans, but they put him in a locked bathroom anyway, when all Creem wanted was something to eat. He kicked at the door a few times, but it was surprisingly solid; he realized the restroom had doubled as a secret holding cell for problem visitors to the armory. So he sat back on the closed toilet seat and he waited.
A tremendous crash, almost like a blast, shook the walls. The building had taken a blow, and Creem’s first thought was that those assholes had hit a speed bump on the way out and nuked half of Jersey. Then the door opened and the Master stood there in its cloak. It carried a wolf’s-head walking stick in one hand. Two of its little critters, the blind children, scampered around its legs like eager pets.
Where are they?
Creem sat back against the tank of the toilet, oddly relaxed now in the king bloodsucker’s presence.
“They’re gone. They hit the road. Little while ago.”
How long?
“I don’t know. Two vehicles. At least two.”
Which direction?
“I was locked in a fucking bathroom here, how would I know? That vampire they got on their side, the hunter, Quinlan—he’s an asshole. Dented my grille.” Creem touched the unaligned silver in his mouth. “So, hey, do me a favor? When you catch them? Give him and the Mexican an extra kick in the head from me.”