The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (96 page)

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

Woodside

T
HE
FORMER
K
ELLY
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

T
HE
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.