The Fall

  Someone was coming. The feelers’ disquiet was offset by the Master’s distinct lack of concern about the interloper.

  The Master said: The Ancient Ones have employed mercenaries for day hunting. A further sign of their desperation. And the old professor?

  Bolivar said: He slipped away in advance of our attack. Inside his domicile, the feelers sensed that he is still alive.

  Hiding. Plotting. Scheming.

  With the same desperation as the Ancients.

  Humans only become dangerous when they have nothing to lose.

  The whir of a motorized wheelchair, and the sound of its nubby tires rolling over the dirt floor, announced that the visitor was Eldritch Palmer. His bodyguard nurse trailed him, holding blue glow sticks to illuminate the passage for their human vision.

  Feelers skittered away at the wheelchair’s advance, crawling halfway up the wall, remaining outside the glow radius of the chemical luminescence, hissing.

  “More creatures,” said Palmer under his breath, unable to hide his distaste upon seeing the blind vampire children and their black-eyed stares. The billionaire was furious. “Why this hole?”

  It pleases me.

  Palmer saw, for the first time, by the light of the soft blue glow, the Master’s flesh peeling. Chunks of it littered the ground at his feet like shorn hair beneath a barber’s chair. Palmer was troubled by the sight of the raw flesh revealed beneath the Master’s cracked exterior, and got to talking quickly, in order that the Master not read his mind like a soothsayer divining through a crystal ball.

  “Look here. I have waited and I have done everything you’ve asked and I have received nothing in return. Now an attempt has been made on my life! I want my reward now! My patience has reached its end. You will give me what I am promised, or I will bankroll you no longer—do you understand? This is the end of it!”

  The Master’s skin crinkled as its ceiling-scraping head leaned forward. The monster was indeed intimidating, but Palmer would not back down.

  “My premature death, should it come, would render this entire plan moot. You will have no more leverage upon my will—nor claim upon my resources.”

  Eichhorst, the perverse Nazi commandant, summoned to the chamber by the Master, entered behind Palmer into the haze of blue light. You would do well to hold your human tongue in the presence of Der Meister.

  The Master, with a wave of his great hand, silenced Eichhorst. His red eyes appeared purple in the blue light, fixing wide on Palmer. So it is done. I will grant your wish for immortality. In one day’s time.

  Palmer stammered, taken aback. First, because of his surprise at the Master’s sudden capitulation—after all these years of effort. And then, in recognition of the great leap Palmer was poised to take. To dive into the abyss that is death, and surface on the other side…

  The businessman inside of him wanted more of a guarantee. But the schemer inside of him held his tongue.

  You do not place provisions on a monster such as the Master. You bid for its favor, and then accept its largesse with gratitude.

  One more mortal day. Palmer thought he might even enjoy it.

  All plans are fully in motion. My Brood is marching across the mainland. We have exposure in every critical destination, our circle widening in cities and provinces around the globe.

  Palmer swallowed his anticipation, saying, “And even as the circle grows, it simultaneously tightens.” His old hands described the scenario, fingers interlocking, palms squeezing together in a pantomime of strangling.

  Indeed. One last task that remains before the start of The Devouring.

  Eichhorst, looking like half a man beside the giant Master, said: The book.

  “Of course,” said Palmer. “It will be yours. But, I must ask you… if you already know the contents…”

  It is not critical that I be in possession of the book. It is critical that others are not.

  “So—why not just blow up the auction house? Explode the entire block?”

  Crude solutions have been attempted in the past, and have failed. This book has had too many lives. I must be absolutely certain of its fate. So that I may watch it burn.

  The Master then straightened to its full height, becoming distracted in such a way that only the Master could.

  It was seeing something. The Master was physically in the cave with them, but psychically it was seeing through another’s eyes—one of the Brood.

  Into Palmer’s head, the Master uttered two words:

  The boy.

  Palmer waited for an explanation, which never came. The Master had returned to the present, the now. He had returned to them with a new certainty, as if he had glimpsed the future.

  Tomorrow the world burns and the boy and the book will be mine.

  Fet’s Blog

  I HAVE KILLED.

  I have slain.

  With the hands typing this now.

  I have stabbed, sliced, beat, crushed, dismembered, beheaded.

  I have worn their white blood on my clothes and my boots.

  I have destroyed. And I have rejoiced at the destruction.

  You may say, as an exterminator by trade, I’ve been training for this all my life.

  I understand the argument. I just can’t support it.

  Because it is one thing to have a rat race up your arm in blind fear.

  Yet quite another to face a fellow human form and cut it down.

  They look like people. They are very much like you and me.

  I am no longer an exterminator. I am a vampire hunter.

  And here is the other thing.

  Something I will only say here, because I don’t dare tell anyone else.

  Because I know what they will think.

  I know what they will feel.

  I know what they will see when they look into my eyes.

  But—all this killing?

  I kind of like it.

  And I’m good at it.

  I might even be great at it.

  The city is falling and probably the world. Apocalypse is a big word, a heavy word, when you realize you are actually facing it.

  I can’t be the only one. There must be others out there like me. People who have lived their whole lives feeling half-complete. Who never truly fit anywhere in the world. Who never understood why they were here, or what they were meant for. Who never answered the call, because they never heard it. Because nothing ever spoke to them.

  Until now.

  Penn Station

  NORA LOOKED AWAY for what seemed like only a moment. As she stared at the big board, waiting for their track number to be announced, her gaze deepened and, utterly exhausted, she zoned out.

  For the first time in days, she thought of nothing. No vampires, no fears, no plans. She relaxed her focus, and her mind dipped into sleep mode while her eyes remained open.

  When she blinked back to awareness, it was like waking up from a dream about falling. A shudder, a startle. A small gasp.

  She turned and saw Zack next to her, listening to his iPod.

  But her mother was gone.

  Nora looked around, didn’t see her. She tugged down Zack’s earbuds, asking him, and he joined her in looking.

  “Wait here,” said Nora, pointing to their bags. “Do not move!”

  She pushed her way through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd waiting before the departures board. She looked for a seam in the crowd, some path her slow-moving mother might have left, but saw nothing.

  “Mama!”

  Raised voices made Nora turn. She pushed toward them, coming out of the dense crowd near the side of the concourse, by the gate of a closed deli.

  There was her mother, haranguing a bewildered-looking family of South Asians.

  “Esme!” yelled Nora’s mother, invoking the name of her late sister, Nora’s late aunt. “Take care of the kettle, Esme! It’s boiling, I can hear it!”

  Nora reached her finally, taking her arm, stammering an apology to the non-English-speaking parents
and their two young daughters. “Mama, come.”

  “There you are, Esme,” she said. “What’s that burning?”

  “Come, Mama.” Tears wet Nora’s eyes.

  “You’re burning down my house!”

  Nora clasped her mother’s arm and pulled her back through the crowd, ignoring the grunts and insults. Zack was on tiptoes, looking for them. Nora said nothing to him, not wanting to break down in front of the boy. But this was too much. Everybody has a breaking point. Nora was fast approaching hers.

  How proud her mother had been of her daughter, first a chemistry major at Fordham, then medical school with a specialty in biochem at Johns Hopkins. Nora saw now that her mother must have assumed she had it made. A rich doctor for a daughter. But Nora’s interest had been public health, not internal medicine or pediatrics. Looking back now, she thought that growing up in the shadow of Three Mile Island had shaped her life more than she had realized. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention paid government grade, a far cry from the healthy income potential of many of her peers. But she was young—there was time to serve now and earn later.

  Then her mother got lost one day on the way to the grocery store. Having trouble tying her shoes, turning on the oven and walking away. Now conversing with the dead. The Alzheimer’s diagnosis prompted Nora to give up her own apartment, in order to care for her declining mother. She had been putting off finding a suitable long-term care facility for her, mainly because she still did not know how she could afford it.

  Zack noticed Nora’s distress but left her alone, sensing that she did not want to discuss it. He disappeared back beneath his earbuds.

  Then suddenly, hours after it was scheduled, the track number for their train finally flipped over on the big board, announcing the train’s approach. A mad rush ensued. Shoving and yelling, stiff-arming, name-calling. Nora gathered up their bags and hooked her mother’s arm and hollered at Zack to move.

  It got uglier still when the Amtrak official at the top of the narrow escalator leading down to the track said the train wasn’t ready yet. Nora found herself near the rear of the angry crowd—so far back, she wasn’t sure they would make it onto the train, even with paid tickets.

  And so, Nora did something she had promised herself she would never do: she used her CDC badge to push her way through to the front of the line. She did so knowing that it was not for her own selfish benefit but for her mother and Zack. Still, she heard the name-calling and felt the daggers in every passenger’s eyes as the crowd slowly parted, begrudgingly allowing them through.

  And then it seemed it was all for nothing. Once they finally opened the escalator and allowed passengers down to the underground track, Nora found herself facing empty rails. The train was again delayed, and no one would tell them why, or give an estimate as to how long.

  Nora arranged for her mother to sit on their bags at their prime position at the yellow line. She and Zack split the last of a bag of Hostess doughnuts, Nora allowing each of them only sips of water from the half-full gym bottle she had packed.

  The afternoon had slipped away from them. They would be departing—fingers crossed—after sunset, and that made Nora nervous. She had planned and expected to be well out of the city and on their way north by nightfall. She kept leaning out over the edge of the platform, eyeing the tunnels, her weapon bag tight against her side.

  The rush of tunnel air came like a sigh of relief. The light announced the train’s approach, and everyone stood. Nora’s mother was nearly elbowed over the edge by some guy wearing an enormously bulky backpack. The train glided in, everyone jockeying for position—as a pair of doors miraculously stopped right in front of Nora. Finally something was going their way.

  The doors parted and the rush of the crowd carried them inside. She claimed twin seats for her mother and Zack, shoving their possessions into the overhead rack, save for Zack’s backpack—he held it on his lap—and Nora’s weapon bag. Nora stood before them, their knees touching hers, hands gripping the railing overhead.

  The rest piled inside. Once aboard, and knowing now that the final stage of their exodus was about to begin, the relieved passengers exhibited a bit more civility. Nora watched a man give up his seat to a woman with a child. Strangers helped others hauling bags. There was an immediate sense of community among the fortunate.

  Nora herself felt a sudden sense of well-being. She was at least on the verge of breathing easy. “You good?” she asked Zack.

  “Never better,” he said, with a slight roll of his eyes, untangling his iPod wires and fitting the buds into his ears.

  As she had feared, many passengers—some of them ticketed, some unticketed—did not make the train. After some trouble closing all the doors, those left behind began banging on the windows, while others went pleading to attendants who looked like they would rather be on the train themselves. Those that had been turned away looked like war-torn refugees, and Nora closed her eyes and said a brief prayer for them—and then another one for herself, for forgiveness, for putting her loved ones ahead of these strangers.

  The silver train started to move west, toward the tunnels under the Hudson River, and the packed car broke out into applause. Nora watched the lights of the station slide away and disappear, and then they were rising through the underworld, toward the surface—like swimmers surfacing for much-needed breath.

  She felt good inside the train, cutting through the darkness like a sword through a vampire. She looked down at her mother’s lined face, watching the woman’s eyes dip and flutter. Two minutes of rocking put her immediately to sleep.

  They emerged from the station into the fallen night, running briefly aboveground before the tunnels underneath the Hudson River. As rain spit at the train’s windows, Nora gasped at what she saw. Glimpses of anarchy: cars in flames, distant blazes, people fighting under strings of black rain. People running through the streets—were they being chased? Hunted? Were they even people at all? Maybe they were the ones doing the hunting.

  She checked Zack, finding him focused on his iPod display. Nora saw, in his concentration, the father in the son. Nora loved Eph, and believed she could love Zack—even though she still knew so little about him. Eph and his boy were similar in so many ways, beyond appearance. She and Zack would have plenty of time to get to know each other once they reached the isolated camp.

  She looked back out at the night, the darkness, and the power outages broken here and there by headlights, occasional bursts of generator-powered illumination. Light equaled hope. The land on either side began to give way, the city starting to retreat. Nora pressed against the window to chart their progress, to gauge how long it would be until they were through the next tunnel and clear of New York.

  That was when she saw, standing on the top corner of a low wall, a figure outlined against a spray of upturned light. Something about this apparition made Nora quiver, a premonition of evil. She could not take her eyes off the figure as the train approached… and the figure began to raise its arm.

  It was pointing at the train. Not just at the train, it seemed—but directly at Nora.

  The train slowed as it passed, or maybe that was only how it seemed to Nora, her sense of time and motion bent by terror.

  Smiling, backlit in the rain, hair sleek and dirty, mouth horribly distended and red eyes ablaze—Kelly Goodweather stared at Nora Martinez.

  Their eyes locked as the train rolled past. Kelly’s finger followed Nora.

  Nora pressed her forehead against the glass, sickened by the sight of the vampire, and yet knowing what Kelly was about to do.

  Kelly jumped at the last moment, leaping with preternatural animal grace, disappearing from Nora’s sight as she latched on to the train.

  The Flatlands

  SETRAKIAN WORKED QUICKLY, hearing Fet’s van arrive at the back of the shop. He flipped madly through the pages of the old volume on the table, this one the third volume of the French edition of Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs, published by Berthelo
t and Ruelle in Paris in 1888, his eyes going back and forth between its engraved pages and the sheets of symbols he had copied from the Lumen. He studied one symbol in particular. He finally located the engraving, his hands and eyes stopping for a moment.

  A six-winged angel, wearing a crown of thorns, with a face both blind and mouth-less—but with multiple mouths festooning each of its wings. At its feet was a familiar symbol—a crescent moon—and a single word.

  “Argentum,” read Setrakian. He gripped the yellowing page reverently—and then tore the engraving from its old binding, jamming it inside the pages of his notebook, just as Fet opened the door.

  Fet was back before sundown. He was certain he had not been found or traced by the vampire brood, which would lead the Master straight back to Setrakian.

  The old man was working over a table near the radio, closing up one of his old books. He had tuned in a talk show, playing low, one of the few voices still on the airwaves. Fet felt a true affinity for Setrakian. Part of it was the bond that grows between soldiers in times of battle, the brotherhood of the trench—in this case, the trench being New York City. Then there was the great respect Fet felt for this weakened old man who simply would not stop fighting. Fet liked to think there were similarities between himself and the professor, in their dedication to a vocation, and mastery of knowledge about their foes—the obvious difference being one of scope, in that Fet fought pests and nuisance animals, while Setrakian had committed himself, at a young age, to eradicating an inhuman race of parasitic beings.

  In one sense, Fet thought of himself and Eph as the professor’s surrogate sons. Brothers in arms, yet as opposite as could be. One was a healer, the other an exterminator. One a university-trained family man of high status, the other a blue-collar, self-educated loner. One lived in Manhattan, the other Brooklyn.

  And yet the one who had originally been at the forefront of the outbreak, the medical scientist, had seen his influence fall away in the dark days since the source of the virus had become known. While his opposite number, the city employee with a little sideline shop in Flatlands—and the killer instinct—now served at the old man’s side.