The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (81 page)

“I had a stroke of good fortune,” said Setrakian. He looked at the others. “But what of your friend? The sick one. You did what you had to do?”

Gus winced, remembering. “
Si.
I did what I had to do. And I’ve been fucking doing it ever since.”

Angel dug into a knapsack on his shoulder, and Fet readied his nail gun. “Easy, big bear,” he said.

Angel pulled out the silver case recovered from the pawnshop. Gus went and took it from him, opening it, removing the card inside, and handing it to the pawnbroker.

It contained Fet’s address.

Setrakian noticed that the case was dented and blackened, one corner warped from heat.

Gus told him, “They sent a crew for you. Used smoke cover to attack in daytime. They were all over your shop when we got there.” Gus nodded to the others. “We had to blow up your place to get out of there with our blood still red.”

Setrakian showed only a flicker of regret, passing quickly. “So—you have joined the fight.”

“Who, me?” said Gus, brandishing his silver blade. “I am the fight. Been flushing ’em out these past few days—way too many to count.”

Setrakian looked more closely at Gus’s weapon, showing concern. “Where, may I ask, did you get such well-made arms?”

“From the fucking source,” said Gus. “They came for me when I was still in handcuffs, running from the law. Pulled me right off the street.”

Setrakian’s expression turned dark. “Who are ‘they?’”

“Them. The old ones.”

Setrakian said, “The Ancients.”

“Holy Jesus,” said Fet.

Setrakian motioned to him to be patient. “Please,” he said to Gus. “Explain.”

Gus did so, recounting the Ancients’ offer, that they were holding his mother, and how he had recruited the Sapphires out of Jersey City to work at his side as day hunters.

“Mercenaries,” said Setrakian.

Gus took that as a compliment. “We’re mopping the floor with milk blood. A tight hit squad, good vampire killers. Vampire shit-kickers, more like it.”

Angel nodded. He liked this kid.

“The Ancients,” Gus said. “They feel that this is all a concerted attack. Breaking their breeding rules, risking exposure. Shock and Awe, I guess …”

Fet coughed out a laugh. “You guess? You’re joking. No? You fucking dropout assassins have no idea what’s going down here. You don’t even know whose side you’re really on.”

“Hold, please.” Setrakian silenced Fet with a hand, thinking. “Do they know that you have come to me?”

“No,” said Gus.

“They will soon. And they will not be pleased.” Setrakian put up his hands, reassuring the confused Gus. “Fret not. It is all a big mess, a bad situation for anyone with red blood in their veins. I am very glad you sought me out again.”

Fet had learned to like the brightness that came into the old man’s eyes when he was getting an idea. It helped Fet relax a little.

Setrakian said to Gus, “I think perhaps there is something you can do for me.”

Gus shot a cutting look at Fet, as though saying,
Take that.
“Name it,” he said to Setrakian. “I owe you plenty.”

“You will take my friend and me to the Ancients.”

Brooklyn-Queens FBI Resident Agency

E
PH SAT ALONE
in the debriefing room, his elbows on a scratched table, calmly rubbing at his hands. The room smelled of old coffee, though there was none present. The ceiling-lamp light fell on the one-way mirror, illuminating a single human handprint, the ghostly remnant of a recent interrogation.

Strange knowing you are being watched, even studied. It affected what you do, down to your very posture, the way you licked your lips, how you looked at or didn’t look at yourself in the mirror, behind which lurked your captors. If lab rats knew their behavior was being scrutinized, then every maze-and-cheese experiment would take on an extra dimension.

Eph looked forward to their questions, perhaps more than the FBI was looking forward to his answers. He hoped that their inquiries would give him a sense of the investigation at hand, and, in doing so, let him know to what extent the vampire invasion was currently understood by law enforcement and the powers that be.

He had once read that falling asleep while awaiting questioning is a leading indicator of a suspect’s culpability. The reason was something about how the lack of a physical outlet for one’s anxiety exhausted the guilty mind—that, coupled with an unconscious need to hide or escape.

Eph was plenty tired, and sore, but more than that, he felt relief. He was done. Under arrest, in federal custody. No more fight, no more struggle. He was of little use to Setrakian and Fet anyway. With Zack and Nora now safely out of the hot zone, speeding south to Harrisburg, it seemed to him that sitting here in the penalty box was preferable to warming the bench.

Two agents entered without introduction. They handcuffed his wrists, Eph thinking that strange. They cuffed them not behind
his back but in front of him, then pulled him out of the chair and walked him from the room.

They led him past the mostly empty bullpen to a key-access elevator. No one said anything on the ride up. The door opened on an unadorned access hallway, which they followed to a short flight of stairs, leading to a door to the roof.

A helicopter was parked there, its rotors already speeding up, chopping into the night air. Too noisy to ask questions, so Eph crouch-walked with the other two into the belly of the bird, and sat while they seat-belted him in.

The chopper lifted off, rising over Kew Gardens and greater Brooklyn. Eph saw the blocks burning, the helicopter weaving between great plumes of thick, black smoke. All this devastation raging below him.
Surreal
didn’t begin to describe it.

He realized they were crossing the East River, and then really wondered where they were taking him. He saw the police and fire lights spinning on the Brooklyn Bridge, but no moving cars, no people. Lower Manhattan came up fast around them, the helicopter dipping lower, the tallest buildings limiting his view.

Eph knew that the FBI headquarters were in Federal Plaza, a few blocks north of City Hall. But no, they remained close to the Financial District.

The chopper climbed again, zeroing in on the only lit rooftop for blocks around: a red ring of safety lights demarking a helipad. The bird touched down gently, and the agents unbuckled Eph’s seat belt. They got him up out of his seat without getting up themselves, essentially kicking him to the rooftop.

He remained in a standing crouch, air whipping at his clothes as the bird lifted off again, turning in the air and whirring away, back toward Brooklyn. Leaving him alone—and still handcuffed.

Eph smelled burning and ocean salt, the troposphere over Manhattan clogged with smoke. He remembered how the dust trail of the World Trade Center—white-gray, that—rose and flattened once it reached a certain elevation, then spread out over the skyline in a cloud of despair.

This cloud was black, blocking out the stars, making a dark night even darker.

He turned in a circle, bewildered. He walked beyond the ring of red landing lights, and, around one of the giant air-conditioning units, saw an open door, faint light emanating from within. He walked to it, stopping there with his cuffed hands outstretched, debating whether or not to go inside, then realizing that he had no choice. It was either sprout wings or see this thing through.

Faint red light inside came from an
EXIT
sign. A long staircase led down to another propped-open door. Through it was a carpeted hallway with expensive accent lighting. A man dressed in a dark suit stood halfway down, hands folded at his waist. Eph stopped, ready to run.

The man said nothing. He did nothing. Eph could see that he was human, not vampire.

Next to him, built into the wall, was a logo depicting a black orb bisected by a steel-blue line. The corporate symbol for the Stoneheart Group. Eph realized, for the first time, that it resembled the occulted sun winking its eye closed.

His adrenaline kicked in, his body preparing to fight. But the Stoneheart man turned and walked away to the end of the hall, to a door, which he opened and held.

Eph walked toward him, warily, sliding past the man and through the door. The man did not follow, instead closing the door with him remaining on the other side.

Art adorned the walls of the vast room, supersized canvases depicting nightmarish imagery and violent abstraction. Music played faintly, seeming to find his ears in the same measured volume as he moved throughout the room.

Around a corner, at the edge of the building walled in glass, looking north at the suffering island of Manhattan, was a table set for one.

A stream of low light spilled down onto the white linen, making it glow. A butler, or a waiter—a servant of some kind—arrived when Eph did, pulling out the only chair for him. Eph looked at the man—he was old, a domestic for life—the servant watching him without meeting his eye, standing with every expectation that his guest should take the seat offered him.

And so Eph did. The chair was pushed in beneath the table, a
napkin opened and laid across his right thigh, and then the servant walked away.

Eph looked at the great windows. The reflection made it appear he was seated outside, at a table hovering some seventy-eight stories over Manhattan, while the city roiled in paroxysms of violence beneath him.

A slight whirring noise undercut the pleasant symphony. A motorized wheelchair appeared out of the gloom, and Eldritch Palmer, his frail hand operating the steering stick, rolled across the polished floor to the opposite side of the table.

Eph began to get to his feet—but then Mr. Fitzwilliam, Palmer’s bodyguard-cum-nurse, appeared in the shadows. The guy was bulging out of his suit, his orange hair cut high and tight, like a small, contained fire atop his boulder of a head.

Eph relented, sitting back down.

Palmer pulled in so that the front of his chair arms lined up with the tabletop. Once he was set, he looked across at Eph. Palmer’s head resembled a triangle: broad-crowned with S-shaped veins evident at both temples, narrowing to a chin that trembled with age.

“You are a terrible shot, Dr. Goodweather,” said Palmer. “Killing me might have impeded our progress somewhat, but only temporarily. However, you caused irreversible liver damage to one of my bodyguards. Not very hero-like, I must say.”

Eph said nothing, still stunned by this sudden change of venue from the FBI in Brooklyn to Palmer’s Wall Street penthouse.

Palmer said, “Setrakian sent you to kill me, did he not?”

Eph said, “He did not. In fact, in his own way, I think he tried to talk me out of it. I went on my own.”

Palmer frowned, disappointed. “I must admit, I wish he was here, rather than you. Someone who could relate to what I have done, at least. The scope of my achievement. Someone who would understand the magnitude of my deeds, even as he condemned them.” Palmer signaled to Mr. Fitzwilliam. “Setrakian is not the man you think he is,” said Palmer.

“No?” said Eph. “Who do I think he is?”

Mr. Fitzwilliam approached, pulling a large piece of medical
equipment on casters, a machine with whose function Eph was not familiar.

Palmer said, “You see him as the kindly old man, the white wizard. The humble genius.”

Eph said nothing as Mr. Fitzwilliam pulled up Palmer’s shirt, revealing twin valves implanted in his thin side, the man’s flesh hashed with scars. Mr. Fitzwilliam connected two tubes from the machine to the valves, taping them sealed, then switched on the machine. A feeder of some kind.

Palmer said, “In fact, he is a blunderer. A butcher, a psychopath, and a disgraced scholar. A failure in every respect.”

Palmer’s words made Eph smile. “If he was such a failure, you wouldn’t be talking about him now, wishing I were him.”

Palmer blinked sleepily. He raised his hand again and a distant door opened, a figure emerging. Eph braced himself, wondering what Palmer had in store for him—if this scallywag had a taste for revenge—but it was only the servant again, this time carrying a small tray on his fingertips.

He swept in front of Eph and set a cocktail down before him, rocks of ice floating in amber fluid.

Palmer said, “I am told you are a man who enjoys a stiff drink.”

Eph looked at the drink, then back at Palmer. “What is this?”

“A Manhattan,” said Palmer. “It seemed appropriate.”

“Not the damn drink. Why am I here?”

“You are my guest for dinner. A last meal. Not yours—mine.” He nodded to the machine feeding him.

The servant returned with a plate covered with a stainless-steel dome. He set it in front of Eph and removed the cover. Glazed black cod, baby potatoes, Oriental vegetable medley—all warm and steaming.

Eph didn’t move, looking down at it.

“Come now, Dr. Goodweather. You haven’t seen food like this in days. And don’t worry about it having been tampered with, poisoned or drugged. If I wanted you dead, Mr. Fitzwilliam here would see to it promptly and then enjoy your meal himself.”

Eph had actually been looking at the utensils set out for him.
He grasped the sterling-silver knife, holding it up so that it caught the light.

“Silver, yes,” said Palmer. “No vampires here tonight.”

Eph took up his fork and, with his eyes on Palmer, and his handcuffs clinking, cut into the fish. Palmer watched as he brought a morsel to his mouth, chewing it, juices exploding on his dry tongue, his belly rumbling with anticipation.

“It has been decades since I ingested food orally,” said Palmer. “I grew accustomed to not eating while recuperating from various surgical procedures. Really, you can lose your taste for food surprisingly easily.”

He watched Eph chew and swallow.

“After a time, the simple act of eating comes to appear quite animalistic. Grotesque, in fact. No different than a cat consuming a dead bird. The mouth-throat-stomach digestive tract is such a crude path to nourishment. So primitive.”

Eph said, “We’re all just animals to you, is that it?”

“‘Customers’ is the accepted term. But certainly. We, the overclass, have taken those basic human drives and advanced our own selves through their exploitation. We have monetized human consumption, manipulated morals and laws to direct the masses by fear or hatred, and, in doing so, have managed to create a system of wealth and remuneration that has concentrated the vast majority of the world’s wealth in the hands of a select few. Over the course of two thousand years, I believe this system worked pretty well. But all good things must end. You saw, with the recent market crash, how we have been building to this impossible end. Money built upon money built upon money. Two choices remain. Either utter collapse, which appeals to no one, or the richest push the pedal to the floor and take it all. And here we are now.”