The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (103 page)

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

P
RIOR
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.