The Strain

Worth Street, Chinatown

It was early on the fourth night as Ephraim cruised past his building on the way to Setrakian’s to properly arm themselves. He saw no police posted outside his place, so he pulled over. He was taking a chance, but it had been days since he’d changed his clothes, and all he needed was five minutes. He pointed out his third-floor window to them, and said he would lower the blinds once he was inside if there was no trouble.

He made it into the building lobby with no problem, then climbed the stairs. He found his apartment door open a crack, and paused to listen. An open door didn’t seem very coplike.

He pushed inside, calling, “Kelly?” No answer. “Zack?” They were the only ones who had keys.

The smell alarmed him at first, until he realized it was the Chinese food left in the trash, from when Zack was over—which seemed like years ago. He entered the kitchen to see if the milk in the refrigerator was still good… and then stopped.

He stared. It took him a moment to understand what he was looking at.

Two uniformed cops lay on his kitchen floor, against the wall.

A droning started inside the apartment. Quickly rising to something like a scream, like a chorus of agony.

His apartment door slammed shut. Eph whipped around to the closed door.

Two men stood there. Two beings. Two vampires.

Eph saw this at once. Their posture, their pallor.

One of them he did not know. The other one he recognized as the survivor Bolivar. Looking very dead, and very dangerous, and very hungry.

Then Eph sensed an even greater danger in the room. For these two revenants were not the source of the drone. Turning his head back toward the main room took an eternity and it took only one second.

A huge being wearing a long, dark cloak. Its height taking up all of the apartment, to the ceiling and more, its neck bent so that it was looking down at Eph.

Its face…

Eph grew dizzy as the being’s superhuman height made the room seem small, made him feel small. The sight weakened his legs, even as he turned to race toward the door to the hallway.

Now the being was in front of him, between him and the door, blocking the only exit. As though Eph hadn’t actually turned but the floor itself had rotated. The other two normal, man-size vampires flanked him on either side.

The being was closer now. Looming over Eph. Looking down.

Eph dropped to his knees. Simply being in the presence of this giant creature was paralyzing, no different than if Eph had been physically struck down.

Hmmmmmmmmmm.

Eph felt this. The way you feel live music in your chest. A hum rumbling in his brain. He averted his eyes, to the floor. He was crippled by fear. He did not want to see its face again.

Look at me.

At first Eph believed that this thing was strangling him with its mind. But his breathlessness was the result of pure terror, a panic of his very soul.

He raised his eyes just a bit. Trembling, he saw the hem of the Master’s robe, up to the hands at the end of the sleeves. They were revoltingly colorless and nail-less, and inhumanly large. The fingers were of uniform length, all oversize except for the middle finger, which was even longer and thicker than the rest—and hooked at the end like a talon.

The Master. Here for him. To turn him.

Look at me, pig.

Eph did, raising his head as though a hand gripped his chin.

The Master looked down at him from where his head bent beneath the ceiling. It gripped the sides of its hood with its huge hands and pulled it back off its skull. The head was hairless and colorless. Its eyes, lips, and mouth were all without hue, worn and washed out, like threadbare linen. Its nose was worn back like that of a weathered statue, a mere bump made of two black holes. Its throat throbbed in a hungry pantomime of breathing. Its skin was so pale that it was translucent. Visible beneath the flesh, like a blurry map to an ancient, ruined land, were veins that no longer carried blood. Veins that pulsed with red. The circulating blood worms. Capillary parasites coursing beneath the Master’s pellucid flesh.

This is a reckoning.

The voice rode into Eph’s head on a roar of terror. He felt himself going slack. Everything muddled and dimming.

I have your pig wife. Soon your pig son.

Eph’s head was swollen to bursting with disgust and anger. It felt like a balloon forcing itself to pop. He slid one foot flat beneath him. He staggered to his feet before this immense demon.

I will take everything from you and leave nothing. That is my way.

The Master reached forward in a fast, blurry motion. Eph felt, as an anesthetized patient feels the pressure of the dentist’s drill, a gripping sensation on the top of his head, and then his feet were off the floor. He swung his arms and kicked out his legs. The Master palmed his head like a basketball, lifting him one-handedly toward the ceiling. To eye level, near enough to glimpse the blood worms wriggling like plague spermatozoa.

I am the occultation and the eclipse.

Lifting Eph to his mouth like a fat grape. The mouth was dark inside, his throat a barren cavern, a direct route to hell. Eph, his body swinging from his neck, was nearly out of his mind. He could feel the long middle talon against the back of his neck, its pressure at the top of his spine. The Master tipped Eph’s head back as though cracking open the pop top of a beer can.

I am a drinker of men.

A wet, crunching sound, and then the Master’s mouth began to open. His jaw retracted and his tongue curled up and back and his hideous stinger emerged.

Eph roared, defiantly blocking access to his neck with his arms, howling into the Master’s savage face.

And then, something… not Eph’s howl… something made the Master’s great head turn ever so slightly.

The nostrils in his face pulsed, the sniffing of a demon without breath.

His onyx eyes turned back to Eph. Staring at him like two dead spheres. Glaring at Eph—as though Eph had somehow dared to deceive the Master.

Not alone.

At that moment, coming up the stairs of Eph’s apartment building two steps behind Fet, Setrakian gripped the handrail suddenly, his shoulder slumping against the wall. Pain burst in his head like a blinding aneurism, and a voice—vile and gloating and blasphemous—boomed like a bomb exploding inside a crowded symphony hall.

SETRAKIAN.

Fet stopped and looked back, but through wincing eyes Setrakian waved him ahead. A whisper was all he could muster: “He is here.”

Nora’s eyes darkened. Fet’s boots pounded as he ran up to the landing. Nora helped Setrakian, pulling him after Fet, to the door, inside the apartment.

Fet hit the first body he encountered, an open field tackle, going in low and getting grabbed as he did, falling and rolling over. He popped up fast in a fighting stance and faced his opponent, seeing the vampire’s face, not grinning, but with his mouth spread like a grin, ready to feed.

Then Fet saw the giant being across the room. The Master, with Eph in his grip. Monstrous. Mesmerizing.

The nearer vampire came at him and drove Fet back into the kitchen, against the refrigerator door.

Nora rushed inside, managing to switch on her Luma lamp just as the vampire Bolivar lunged for her. He hissed a breathless scream and reeled backward. Then Nora saw the Master, the back of his down-turned head against the ceiling. She saw Eph dangling by his head in the monster’s grip. “Eph!”

Setrakian entered with his long sword bared. He froze for a moment when he saw the Master, the giant, the demon. Here in front of him now after so many years.

Setrakian brandished his silver sword. Nora, closing from a different angle, drove Bolivar back toward the front wall of the apartment. The Master was cornered. Attacking Eph in such a small space had been a cardinal mistake.

Setrakian’s heart pounded in his chest as he turned the blade point out and ran it at the demon.

The droning inside the apartment expanded suddenly, an explosion of noise inside his head. And Nora’s, and Fet’s, and Eph’s. An incapacitating shockwave of sound that made the old man shrink back for a moment—just long enough.

He saw a black grin snake across the Master’s face. The giant vampire threw the flailing Eph across the room, his body slamming into the far wall and dropping hard to the floor. The Master hooked Bolivar by the shoulder with one of his long, taloned hands—and lunged at the picture window overlooking Worth Street.

A splintering crash shuddered the building as the Master escaped in a rain of glass.

Setrakian ran toward the sudden breeze, to the frame of the window edged with jagged shards. Three stories below, the glass spray was just hitting the sidewalk, glittering in the streetlight.

The Master, with his preternatural speed, was already across the street and mounting the facing building. With Bolivar hanging from his free arm, he went over the top railing and disappeared onto the higher roof, into the night.

Setrakian sagged a moment, unable to process the fact that the Master had just been inside that very room and was now escaped. His heart was throwing a fit in his chest, pounding as if it was going to burst.

“Hey—a little help!”

He turned, and Fet was on the floor holding off the other vampire, Nora assisting with her lamp. Setrakian felt a new burst of rage and went walking over, his silver sword straight out at his side.

Fet saw him coming, his eyes going wide. “No, wait—”

Setrakian struck, sweeping his blade through the vampire’s neck, inches above Fet’s hands, then kicking the decapitated body off of Fet’s chest before the white blood could reach his skin.

Nora ran over to Eph, lying crumpled on the floor. His cheek was cut and his eyes were dilated and terrified—but he appeared un-turned.

Setrakian whipped out a mirror to confirm this. He held it to Eph’s face and found no distortion. Nora shone her lamp on Eph’s neck. Nothing—no breach.

Nora helped him sit up, Eph wincing in pain when his right arm was touched. She touched his chin underneath his cut cheek, needing to embrace him but not wanting to hurt him any further. “What happened?” she said.

Eph said, “He has Kelly.”

Kelton Street, Woodside, Queens

EPH TORE ACROSS the bridge into Queens. He used Jim’s phone to try Kelly’s mobile as he drove.

No ring. Immediate pickup by her voice mail.

Hi, this is Kelly. I’m not able to answer my phone right now…

Eph speed-dialed Zack again. Zack’s phone kept ringing through to the mailbox.

He screamed around the corner onto Kelton and pulled up hard outside Kelly’s front yard, vaulting the low fence and running up the stairs. He banged on the door and pushed the bell. His keys were hanging on a peg back inside his apartment.

Eph took a running start and put his sore shoulder into the door. He tried it again, hurting his arm even more. The third time he threw himself against the door, the frame splintered, and he fell, sprawling, inside.

He got to his feet and rushed through the house. Slamming into walls around corners, his feet kicking at the steps up to the second floor. He stopped at the door to Zack’s bedroom. The boy’s room was empty.

So empty.

Back downstairs three steps at a time. He recognized Kelly’s emergency go bag next to the broken door. He saw suitcases packed but not zipped. She had never left the city.

Oh, Christ, he thought. It’s true.

The others reached the door just as something struck Eph from behind. A body, tackling him. He fought back immediately, already primed with adrenaline. He rolled his attacker over, holding him off.

Matt Sayles. Eph saw his dead eyes and felt the heat of his overamped metabolism.

The feral thing that was once Matt snarled at him. Eph braced his forearm against Matt’s throat as the recently turned vampire started to open its mouth. Eph went up hard under his chin, trying to block whatever biological mechanism was about to unleash the stinger. Matt’s eyes strained and his head shook all over as he tried to work his throat free.

Eph saw Setrakian drawing his sword behind Matt. Eph yelled, “NO!” and drew from a ready well of rage to kick Matt off him.

The vampire snarled, rolling to a stop, then popping up on all fours, watching Eph get to his feet.

Matt rose, standing hunched over. He was doing weird things with his mouth, a new vampire getting used to the different muscles, his tongue swirling around his open lips in lascivious confusion.

Eph looked around for a weapon, finding only a tennis racket lying on the floor outside the closet. He grabbed the taped grip two-handedly and spun the titanium frame on its side, going after Matt with it. All of his feelings for Matt—this man who had moved into his wife’s house and bed… who wanted to be his boy’s father… who sought to replace Eph—came surging up as he swung for Matt’s jaw. He wanted to shatter it and the horror that lurked inside. The new ones weren’t so coordinated yet, and Eph got in seven or eight good blows, chopping loose teeth and dropping Matt to his knees—before Matt lashed out, catching Eph’s ankle and upending him. Some residual anti-Eph rage still boiled inside Matt too. He rose up gnashing his broken teeth, but Eph kicked Matt in the face, extending his knee and throwing Matt back. Eph retreated around the partition into the kitchen, and it was there he saw the carving knife stuck on a magnet strip.

Rage is never blind. Rage is uniquely focused. Eph felt as if he were looking through the wrong end of a telescope—seeing only the knife, and then only Matt.

Matt came at him and Eph strong-armed him back against the wall. He grabbed a handful of hair and yanked it back in order to expose the vampire’s neck. Matt’s mouth opened, his stinger swishing out, trying to feed on Eph. Matt’s throat rippled and bucked, and Eph attacked it, stabbing, knifeknifeknifeknifeknife. Hard and quick, right through the throat and into the wall behind, the blade tip sticking and Eph pulling out again. Crunching cervical vertebra. White goo bubbling. Body sagging, arms flailing. Eph stabbing until the head remained in his hand but the body sagged to the floor.

Eph stopped cutting then. He saw, without truly processing it, the head in his hand with its stinger drooping through the severed neck, still twitching.

He then saw Nora and the others watching him from the open door. He saw the wall and the white mess dripping down it. He saw the decapitated body on the floor. He saw the head in his hand.

Blood worms wriggled up Matt’s face. Past his cheeks and over his staring eyes. Into Matt’s thin hair, approaching Eph’s fingers.

Eph dropped the head, which struck the floor with a thud, not rolling anywhere. He dropped the knife too, which fell soundlessly into Matt’s lap.

Eph said, “They took my son.”

Setrakian pulled him away from the body and the infested vampire blood. Nora turned on her Luma light and irradiated Matt’s body.

Fet said, “Holy, holy shit.”

Eph said again, both as an explanation and as a nail to be banged more deeply into his soul: “They took my son.”

The homicidal roar in his ears was fading, and he recognized the sound of a car pulling up outside. A door opened, soft music playing.

A voice calling out, “Thanks.”

That voice.

Eph went to the broken front door. He looked down the walk and saw Zack getting out of a minivan, shrugging a backpack strap over one shoulder.

Zack made it only as far as the gate door before Eph wrapped him up in his arms. “Dad?”

Eph checked him over, grasping the boy’s head in his hands, examining his eyes, his face.

Zack said, “What are you doing—?”

“Where were you?”

“At Fred’s.” Zack tried to wriggle out of his father’s grip. “Mom never showed, so Fred’s mom took me over to their place.”

Eph let Zack pull back. Kelly.

Zack was looking past him, at the house. “What happened to our door?”

He took a few steps toward it, until Fet appeared in the doorway, Setrakian behind him. A big guy in a hanging flannel shirt and work boots, and an old man in tweed holding a wolf’s-head walking stick.

Zack looked back at his father, the troubled vibe now fully setting in.

He said, “Where’s Mom?”

Knickerbocker Loans and Curios, East 118th Street, Spanish Harlem

EPH STOOD in the book-lined hallway of Setrakian’s apartment. He was looking in on Zack eating a Devil Dog at the old man’s small kitchen table, where Nora was asking him about school, keeping him occupied and distracted.

Eph could still feel the sensation of the Master’s grip on his head. He had lived a life built on certain assumptions, in a world based on certain assumptions, and now that everything he thought he could rely on was gone, he realized he didn’t know anything anymore.

Nora saw him watching from the hall, and Eph could tell by the look on her face that she was frightened by the look on his.

Eph knew that he would always be a little insane from now on.

He went downstairs two flights to Setrakian’s basement armory. The UV alarm lights at the door were turned off, the old man showing Fet his wares. The exterminator was admiring the modified nail gun, looking like a longer, narrower UZI submachine gun, but orange and black, and with its loading nail magazine feeding the barrel on a slant.

Setrakian came straight over to Eph. “Did you eat?”

Eph shook his head.

“How is your boy?”

“Scared, but he won’t let it show.”

Setrakian nodded. “Like the rest of us.”

“You’ve seen him before. This Thing. The Master.”

“Yes.”

“You tried to kill it.”

“Yes.”

“You failed.”

Setrakian squinted, as though looking directly into the past. “I was not adequately prepared. I will not miss again.”

Fet, holding a lantern-shaped object with a spike on the end of it, said, “Not likely. Not with this arsenal.”

“Some parts I pieced together myself, from things that came into the store. But I am no bomb maker.” He clenched his gloved claws as proof of this. “I have a silversmith in New Jersey who molds my points and needles.”

“You mean you didn’t pick this up at Radio Shack?”

Setrakian took the heavy, lantern-shaped object from the exterminator’s hands. It was constructed of shaded plastic with a thick battery base, a six-inch spike of steel on the bottom. “This is essentially an ultraviolet light mine. It is a single-use weapon that will emit a cleansing spray of vampire-killing light in the pure UVC range. It is designed to clear a large room, and will burn very hot and fast once charged. You want to make certain you are out of the way when it does. The temperature and the radiation can get a bit… uncomfortable.”

Fet said, “And what’s with this nail gun?”

“This is powder actuated, operating on a shotgun load of gunpowder to drive the nail. Fifty nails per load, inch and a half brads. Silver of course.”

“Of course,” said Fet, admiring the piece, getting a feel for the rubber grip.

Setrakian looked around the room: the old armor up on the wall; the UVC lamps and battery chargers on the shelves; the silver blades and silver-backed mirrors; some prototype weapons; his notebooks and sketches. The enormity of the moment nearly overwhelmed him. He only hoped that fear would not turn him back into the powerless young man he had once been.

He said, “I have waited for this a very long time.”

He started upstairs then. Leaving Eph alone with Fet. The big exterminator lifted the nail gun out of its charger. “Where did you find this old guy?”

Eph said, “He found me.”

“I’ve been in a lot of basements in my line of work. I look around this little workshop here, and I think—here is the one crazy who’s actually been vindicated.”

Eph said, “He’s not crazy.”

“He show you this?” Fet asked. He crossed to the glass specimen jar, the afflicted heart suspended in fluid. “Guy keeps the heart of a vampire he killed as a pet in his basement armory. He’s plenty crazy. But that’s okay. I’m a little crazy too.” He knelt down, putting his face close to the jar. “Here, kitty, kitty…” The sucker shot out at the glass, trying to get him. Fet straightened and turned to Eph with a look of Can-you-believe-this? “This is all a bit more than I bargained for when I woke up this morning.” He sighted the nail gun on the jar, then pulled off his aim, liking the feel of it. “Mind if I claim this?”

Eph shook his head. “Be my guest.”

Eph returned upstairs, slowing in the hallway, seeing Setrakian with Zack in the kitchen. Setrakian lifted a silver chain off his own neck—containing the key to the basement workshop—and with his crooked fingers he placed it over Zack’s head, hanging it around the eleven-year-old’s neck, then patted his shoulders.

“Why did you do that?” Eph asked Setrakian once they were alone.

“There are things downstairs—notebooks, writings—that should be preserved. That future generations may find helpful.”

“You’re not planning on coming back?”

“I am taking every conceivable precaution.” Setrakian looked around, making certain they were alone. “Please understand. The Master has power and speed well beyond that of these clumsy new vampires we are seeing. He is more than even we know. He has dwelled upon this earth for centuries. And yet…”

“And yet he is a vampire.”

“And vampires can indeed be destroyed. Our best hope is to flush him out. To hurt him and drive him into the killing sun. Why we must wait for the dawn.”

“I want to go now.”

“I know you do. That is exactly what he wants.”

“He has my wife. Kelly is where she is for one reason only—because of me.”

“You have a personal stake here, Doctor, and it is compelling. But you must know that, if he has her, she is already turned.”

Eph shook his head. “She is not.”

“I don’t say this to anger you—”

“She is not!”

Setrakian nodded after a moment. He waited for Eph to compose himself.

Eph said, “Alcoholics Anonymous has done a great deal for me. But the one thing I never got out of it was the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”

Setrakian said, “I am the same. Perhaps it is this shared trait that has led us to this point together. Our goals are in perfect alignment.”

“Almost perfect,” said Eph. “Because only one of us can actually slay the bastard. And it’s going to be me.”

Nora had been waiting anxiously to speak with Eph, pouncing on him once he stepped away from Setrakian, pulling him into the old man’s tiled bathroom.

“Don’t,” she said.

“Don’t what?”

“Ask me what you’re going to ask me.” She implored him with her fierce brown eyes. “Don’t.”

Eph said, “But I need you to—”

“I am scared shitless—but I have earned a place at your side. You need me.”

“I do. I need you here. To watch Zack. Besides—one of us has to stay behind. To carry on. In case…” He left that unsaid. “I know it’s a lot to ask.”

“Too much.”

Eph could not stop looking in her eyes. He said, “I have to go after her.”

“I know.”

“I just want you to know…”

“There’s nothing to explain,” she said. “But—I’m glad you want to.”

He pulled her close then, into a tight embrace. Nora’s hand went up to the back of his head, caressing his hair. She pulled away to look at him, to say something more—and then kissed him instead. It was a good-bye kiss that insisted on his return.

They parted and he nodded to let her know he understood.

He saw Zack watching them from the hallway.

Eph didn’t try to explain anything to him now. Leaving the beauty and goodness of this boy and departing from the perceived safety of the surface world to go down and face a demon was the most unnatural thing Eph could do. “You’ll stay with Nora, okay? We’ll talk when I come back.”

Zack’s preteen squint was self-protective, the emotions of the moment too raw and confusing for him. “Come back from where?”

He pulled his son close, wrapping him up in his arms as though otherwise the boy he loved would fracture into a million pieces. Eph resolved there and then to prevail because he had too much to lose.

They heard yelling and automobile horns outside, and everyone went to the west-facing window. A mass of brake lights clotted the road some four or more blocks away, people taking to the streets and fighting. A building was in flames and there were no fire trucks anywhere in sight.

Setrakian said, “This is the beginning of the breakdown.”

Morningside Heights

GUS HAD BEEN on the run since the night before. The handcuffs made it difficult for him to move freely on the streets: the old shirt he had found, and wound around his forearms, as if he was walking with his arms crossed, wouldn’t have fooled many. He ducked into a movie theater through the back exit and slept in the darkness. He thought of a chop shop he knew over on the West Side, and spent a considerable amount of time making his way over there, only to find it empty. Not locked up, just empty. He dug through the tools he could find there, trying to cut the links joining his wrists. He even ran an electric jigsaw, held with a vise, and nearly sliced his wrists open in the process. He couldn’t do anything one-handed, and eventually left in disgust.

He went by the haunts of a few of his cholos but couldn’t click up with anyone he trusted. The streets were weird—there wasn’t much going on. He knew what was happening. When the sun started going down, he knew that his time and his options would be running out.

It was risky going home, but he hadn’t seen many cops all day, and anyway he was worried about his madre. He slipped inside the building, trying to keep his shirt-balled hands casual, making for the stairs. Sixteen flights up. Once there, he walked down the hallway and saw no one. He listened at the door. The TV was playing, as usual.

He knew the bell didn’t work, so he knocked. He waited and knocked again. He kicked at the foot plate, rattling the door and the cheap walls.

“Crispin,” he hissed at his dirtbag brother. “Crispin, you shit. Open the fucking door.”

Gus heard the chain lock being undone and the bolt turning inside. He waited, but the door never opened. So Gus unwound the shirt covering his cuffed hands and turned the knob.

Crispin was standing back in the corner, to the left of the couch, which was his bed, when he came around. The shades were all drawn and the refrigerator door was open in the kitchen.

“Where’s Mama?” said Gus.

Crispin said nothing.

“Fucking pipehead,” said Gus. He closed the fridge. Some stuff had melted and there was water on the floor. “She asleep?”

Crispin said nothing. He stared at Gus.

Gus started to get it. He took a better look at Crispin, who barely rated a glance from him anymore, and saw his black eyes and drawn face.

Gus went to the window and whipped apart the shades. It was night. There was smoke in the air from a fire below.

Gus turned to face Crispin, across the apartment, and Crispin was already charging him, howling. Gus got his arms up and got the handcuff chain across his brother’s neck, under his jaw. High enough so that he couldn’t get his stinger out.

Gus grasped the back of his head with his hands and pushed Crispin down to the floor. His vampire brother’s black eyes bugged and his jaw bucked as his mouth tried to open, which Gus’s strangling grip would not allow. Gus was intent on suffocating him, but as time went by and Crispin kept kicking, and there was no blacking out—Gus remembered that vampires didn’t need to breathe and could not be killed that way.

So he pulled him up by his neck, Crispin’s hands clawing at Gus’s arms and hands. For the past few years, Crispin had been nothing but a drag on their mother and a big pain in the ass for Gus. Now he was a vampire and the brother part of him was gone but the asshole part remained. And so it was retribution that moved Gus to wheel him headfirst into the decorative mirror on the wall, an old oval of heavy glass that didn’t crack until it slid down to the floor. Gus kneed Crispin, throwing him down onto the floor, and then grabbed the largest shard of glass. Crispin wasn’t quite to his knees when Gus rammed the point through the back of his neck. It severed the spine and poked the skin out of the front of his neck without quite ripping it. Gus worked the glass piece sideways, slicing Crispin’s head nearly off—but forgetting its sharpness against his own hands, cutting his palms. The pain stabbed at him, but he did not let go of the broken glass until his brother’s head was removed from its body.

Gus staggered back, looking at the bloody slash across each of his palms. He wanted to make certain none of those worms wriggling out with Crispin’s white blood got into him. They were on the carpet and hard to see, so Gus stayed away. He looked at his brother, in pieces on the floor, and felt sickened by the vampire part of him, but as to the loss, Gus was numb. Crispin had been dead to him for years.

Gus washed his hands at the sink. The cuts were long but not deep. He used a gummy dish towel to stop the bleeding and went to his mother’s bedroom.

“Mama?”

His only hope was that she not be there. Her bed was made and empty. He turned to leave, then thought twice and got down on his hands and knees to look under the bed. Just her sweater boxes and the arm weights she’d bought ten years ago. He was on his way back to the kitchen when he heard a rustling in the closet. He stopped, listening again. He went to the door and opened it. All of his mother’s clothes were pulled down off the hanging rack, lumped in a big pile on the floor.

The pile was moving. Gus tugged back an old yellow dress with shoulder pads and his madre’s face leered out at him, black eyed and sallow skinned.

Gus closed the door again. Didn’t slam it and run off, he just closed it and stood there. He wanted to cry but tears wouldn’t come, only a sigh, a soft, deep whimper, and then he turned and looked around his mother’s bedroom for a weapon to cut her head off with…

…and then he realized what the world had come to. Instead, he turned back to the closed door, leaning his forehead against it.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” he whispered. “Lo siento. I should have been here. I should have been here…”

He walked, dazed, into his own room. He couldn’t even change his shirt, thanks to the handcuffs. He stuffed some clothes into a paper bag for when he could change, and crumpled it up under his arm.

Then he remembered the old man. The pawnshop on 118th Street. He would help him. And help him fight this thing.

He left his apartment, exiting into the hall. People stood down at the elevator end, and Gus lowered his head and started toward them. He didn’t want to be recognized, didn’t want to have to deal with any of his mother’s neighbors.

He was about halfway to the elevators when he realized they weren’t talking or moving. Gus looked up and saw that the three people there were standing and facing him. He stopped when he realized that their eyes, their dark eyes, were hollow too. Vampires, blocking his exit.

They started coming down the hall at him, and the next thing he knew, he was hammering away at them with his cuffed hands, throwing them against walls, smashing their faces into the floor. He kicked them when they were down, but they didn’t stay down for long. He gave none of them the chance to get their stingers out, crushing a few skulls with the heel of his heavy boots as he ran to the elevator, the doors closing as they reached it.

Gus stood alone in the elevator car, catching his breath, counting down the floors. His bag was gone—it had ripped open, leaving his clothes strewn about the hallway.

The numbers got to L and the doors dinged open on Gus standing in a crouch, ready for a fight.

The lobby was empty. But outside the door, a faint orange glow flickered, and there were screams and howls. He went out into the street, seeing the blaze on the next block, the flames jumping to neighboring buildings. He saw people in the streets with wooden planks and other makeshift weapons, running toward the blaze.

From the other direction, he saw another loose gang of six people, no weapons, walking, not running. A lone man came running past Gus the other way, saying, “Fuckers everywhere, man!” and then he was pounced upon by the group of six. To an untrained eye, it would have looked like a good old-fashioned street mugging, but Gus saw a mouth stinger by the orange light of the flames. Vampires turning people in the street.

While he was watching, an all-black SUV with bright halogen lamps rolled up fast out of the smoke. Cops. Gus turned and chased his headlamp shadow down the street—running right into the gang of six. They came at him, their pale faces and black eyes lit up by the headlights. Gus heard car doors open and boots hit the pavement, and he was caught between these two fates. He raced at the snarling vampires, swinging his bound fists and butting them in the chest with his head. He didn’t want to give them a chance to open their mouths on him. But then one of them hooked its arm inside Gus’s cuffs and twisted him around, dragging him to the ground. In a second, the herd was on top of him, fighting over who would be the one to drink from his neck.

There was a thwok sound, and a vampire squeal. Then a splat, and one of the vampires’ heads was gone.

The one on top of him was hit from the side and suddenly knocked away. Gus rolled over and got to his knees in the middle of this street fight.

These weren’t cops at all. They were men in black hoodies, their faces obscured, black combat pants and black jump boots. They were firing pistol crossbows and larger crossbows with wooden rifle stocks. Gus saw one guy sight a vampire and put a bolt in his neck. Before the vampire even had time to raise his hands to his throat, the bolt exploded with enough force to disintegrate his neck, removing the head.

Dead vampire.

The bolts were silver tipped and top loaded with an impact charge.

Vampire hunters. Gus stared in amazement at these guys. Other vampires were coming out of the doorways, and these shooters were throat accurate at twenty-five, even thirty yards.

One of them came up fast on Gus, as though mistaking him for a vamp, and before Gus could even speak, the hunter put a boot on his arms, pinning them against the road. He reloaded his crossbow and aimed it at the links joining Gus’s cuffs. A silver bolt split the steel, embedding itself in the asphalt. Gus winced, but there was no explosive charge. His hands were apart, though still in cop bracelets, and the hunter hauled him up onto his feet with startling strength.

“Shit yeah!” said Gus, overjoyed by the sight of these guys. “Where do I sign up!”

But his savior had slowed, something catching his eye. Gus looked more closely into the shadowy recesses of his sweatshirt hood, and the face there was eggshell white. Its eyes were black and red, and its mouth was dry and nearly lipless.

The hunter was staring at the bloody lines across Gus’s palms.

Gus knew that look. He had just seen it in his brother’s and his mother’s eyes.

He tried to pull back, but the grip on his arm was lock solid. The thing opened its mouth and the tip of its stinger appeared.

Then another hunter came up, holding its crossbow to this hunter’s neck. The new hunter pulled back Gus’s hunter’s hood, and Gus saw the bald, earless head, the aged eyes of a mature vampire. The vampire snarled at his brethren’s weapon, then surrendered Gus to the new hunter, whose pale vampire face Gus glimpsed as he was lifted aloft, carried to the black SUV, and thrown into the third-row seat.

The rest of the hooded vampires climbed back inside the vehicle and it took off, wheeling a hard U-turn in the middle of the avenue. Gus was the only human inside the SUV.

A smack to the temple knocked him out cold. The SUV raced back toward the burning building, bursting through the street smoke like an airplane punching through a cloud, then screaming past the rioting, rounding the next corner and heading farther uptown.

The Bathtub

THE SO-CALLED BATHTUB of the fallen World Trade Center, the seven-stories-deep foundation, was lit up as bright as day for overnight work even in the minutes before dawn. Yet the construction site was still, the great machines quiet. The work that had continued around the clock almost since the towers’ collapse had, for the time being, all but ceased.

“Why this?” asked Eph. “Why here?”

“It drew him,” said Setrakian. “A mole hollows out a home in the dead trunk of a felled tree. Gangrene forms in a wound. He is rooted in tragedy and pain.”

Eph, Setrakian, and Fet sat in the back of Fet’s van, parked at Church and Cortlandt. Setrakian sat by the rear-door windows with a nightscope. Very little traffic rolled past, only the occasional predawn taxi or delivery truck. No pedestrians or any other signs of life. They were looking for vampires and not finding any.

Setrakian, his eye still to the scope, said, “It’s too bright here. They don’t want to be seen.”

Eph said, “We can’t keep looping around the site again and again.”

“If there are as many as we suspect,” said Setrakian, “then they must be nearby. To return to the lair before sunrise.” He looked at Fet. “Think like vermin.”

Fet said, “I will tell you this. I’ve never seen a rat go in anywhere through the front door.” He thought about it some more, then pushed past Eph toward the front seats. “I have an idea.”

He rolled north on Church to City Hall, one block northeast of the WTC site. A large park surrounded it, and Fet pulled into a bus space on Park Row, killing the engine.

“This park is one of the biggest rat nests in the city. We tried pulling out the ivy, ’cause it was such good ground cover. Changed the garbage containers, but it was no use. They play here like squirrels, especially at noon when the lunch crowd comes. Food makes them happy, but they can get food just about anywhere. It’s infrastructure that rats really crave.” He pointed to the ground. “Underneath, in there, is an abandoned subway station. The old City Hall stop.”

Setrakian said, “It still connects?”

“Everything connects underground, one way or another.”

They watched, and did not wait for long.

“There,” said Setrakian.

Eph saw a bedraggled-looking woman by a streetlight, some thirty yards away. “A homeless woman,” he said.

“No,” said Setrakian, handing his heat scope to Eph.

Eph saw, through the scope, the woman as a fierce blur of red against a cool, dim background.

“Their metabolism,” said Setrakian. “There is another.”

A heavy woman waddling, still getting her sea legs, staying in the shadows along the low iron fence ringing the park.

Then another: a man wearing a newspaper hawker’s change apron, carrying a body on his shoulder. Dropping it over the fence, then clumsily scaling it himself. He fell going over, ripping one leg of his pants, standing back up without any reaction and picking up his victim and continuing into the tree cover.

“Yes,” said Setrakian. “This is it.”

Eph shivered. The presence of these walking pathogens, these humanoid diseases, repulsed him. He felt sick watching them stagger into the park, lower animals obeying some unconscious impulse, withdrawing from the light. He sensed their hurry, like commuters trying to catch that last train home.

They quietly stepped out of the van. Fet wore a protective Tyvek jumpsuit and rubber wading boots. He offered spare sets to the others, Eph and Setrakian choosing only the boots. Setrakian sprayed, without asking, each of them from a bottle of scent-eliminating spray with a picture of a deer in red crosshairs on the label. The spray of course could do nothing about the carbon dioxide emitted by their breath, nor the sound of their pumping hearts and coursing blood.

Fet carried the most. The nail gun was in a bag hung across his chest, complete with three extra loaders of silver brads. He carried various tools on his belt, including his night-vision monocular and his black-light wand, along with one of Setrakian’s silver daggers in a leather sheath. He held a high-powered Luma light in his hand, and bore the UVC mine in a mesh bag over his shoulder.

Setrakian carried his walking stick and a Luma light, the heat scope in his coat pocket. He double-checked the pillbox in his vest, then left his hat behind in the van.

Eph also carried a Luma, as well as, in a sheath strapped across his chest, a silver sword, the twenty-five-inch blade and grip against his back.

Fet said, “I’m not sure this makes sense. Going down to fight a beast on its own turf.”

Setrakian said, “We have no alternative. This is the only time we know where he is.” He looked up at the sky, bluing with the first faint glimmer of day. “The night is ending. Let us go.”

They made their way to the low fence gate, which was kept locked overnight. Eph and Fet scaled it, then reached back to help Setrakian.

The sound of more footsteps on the sidewalk—moving quickly, one heel dragging—made them hustle deep into the park.

The interior was unlit at night, and thick with trees. They heard the park fountain running and automobiles passing outside.

“Where are they?” whispered Eph.

Setrakian brought out his heat scope. He scanned the area, then handed the scope off to Eph. Eph saw bright red shapes moving stealthily through the otherwise cool landscape.

The answer to his question was: they were everywhere. And quickly converging on a point to their north.

Their destination became clear. A kiosk on the Broadway side of the park, a dark structure Eph couldn’t make much more of from that distance. He watched and waited until the numbers of returning vampires declined, and Setrakian’s scope picked up no other significant heat sources.

They ran to the structure. In the burgeoning light, they saw that it was an information kiosk, kept shuttered overnight. They pulled open the door, and found it empty.

They huddled inside the cramped space, the wooden counter taken up by wire racks full of tourist fliers and tour-bus schedules. Fet turned his little Maglite on twin metal doors in the floor. There were thick eye-holes at either end, the padlocks gone. The lettering across the twin doors read, MTA.

Fet pulled open both doors, Eph with his lamp at the ready. Stairs led down into darkness. Setrakian aimed his flashlight at a faded sign on the wall as Fet started down.

“Emergency exit,” Fet reported. “They sealed off the old City Hall station after World War Two. The track turn was too sharp for newer trains, the platform too narrow—though I think the number six local still turns around here.” He looked from side to side. “Must have demolished the old emergency exit, and put this kiosk up on top of it.”

“Fine,” Setrakian said. “Let us go.”

Eph followed, bringing up the rear. He did not bother to close the doors behind him, wanting a straight shot to the surface if they needed it. Grime coated the sides of each step, the middles cleaned by regular foot traffic. Darker than night down there.

Fet said, “Next stop, 1945.”

The flight of stairs ended at an open door leading to a second flight of wider stairs, leading down to what had to be the old mezzanine. A tiled dome with four arched sides, rising to an ornate skylight of modern glass, was just starting to blue. Some ladders and old scaffolding had been laid against the wooden ticket room along one rounded wall. The arched doorways were without turnstiles, the station predating tokens.

The far arch led to another flight of stairs no more than five persons wide, emptying into the narrow platform. They listened at the arched doorway, hearing only the distant screech of subway car brakes, then emerged fully onto the abandoned platform.

It was like a whispering gallery inside a cathedral. Original brass chandeliers containing bare, dark bulbs hung from the arched ceilings, the interlocking tile along the arches looking like giant zippers. Two vault skylights allowed light through amethyst glass, the rest having been leaded over due to air raid concerns after World War II. Farther away, light appeared through some surface grates, still very faint, but enough to give depth to their perception along the gracefully curved track. There was not one right angle in the entire place. The tile work was damaged throughout, including the glazed terra-cotta of the nearest wall sign, done in gold with green borders, around white plates containing blue letters spelling CITY HALL.

A film of steel dust along the curling platform showed the vampires’ footprints, leading into the dark.

They followed the footprints to the end of the platform, jumping down onto the still-live tracks. Everything operated on a leftward curve along the train loop. They switched off their flashlights, Eph’s Luma showing urine splashes everywhere, iridescent and multicolored, ending farther on. Setrakian was reaching for his thermal scope when they heard noises behind them. Latecomers moving off the mezzanine stairs into the platform. Eph switched off his wand and they crossed the three rails to the far wall, standing flat against the recessed stone.

The latecomers came off the platform, feet scratching the dusty stones along the rail beds. Setrakian spied them through his heat scope, two bright orange-red forms, nothing unusual about their shape or posture. The first one disappeared, and it took Setrakian a long moment to realize that it had slipped into a seam in the wall, an opening they had somehow missed. The second form stopped at that same spot, but turned there instead of disappearing, looking their way. Setrakian did not move, knowing the creature’s night vision was advanced but not yet matured. His thermal reading registered the vampire’s throat as its warmest region. A spill of orange down its leg cooled immediately to yellow as it pooled on the ground, the creature emptying its bladder. Its head lifted like an animal scenting prey, looking up the tracks away from their hiding space… then ducked its head and disappeared into the crack in the wall.

Setrakian moved back into the railway, the others following him. The foul smell of fresh, hot vampire piss filled the arched space, the burnt-ammonia scent holding dark associations for Setrakian. The others stepped around the stain on their way to the seam in the wall.

Eph slid his sword out of the sheath across his back, taking the lead. The passageway widened into a hot, rough-walled catacomb smelling of steam. He switched on his Luma light just in time to see the first vampire rising out of a crouch and driving at him. Eph could not get his silver blade up in time, and the vampire threw him back against the wall. His light lay on its side near the streamlet of sewage lying along the guttered floor, and he saw by its hot indigo light that she was, or had been at one time, a woman. She wore a businesslike blazer over a dirtied white blouse, her black mascara rubbed into menacing raccoon eyes. Her jaw dropped and her tongue curled back—and that was when Fet darted out of the passage.

He went at her with his dagger, stabbing her once, low in the side. She rolled off Eph and came back up in a crouch. With a yell, Fet jabbed at her again, this time right above where her heart would have been, into her chest, below her shoulder. The vampire staggered backward, only to rush forward again. With a howl he buried his blade in her lower belly, and she buckled and snarled—but again reacted with more confusion than pain. She was going to keep coming at him.

Eph had recovered enough by this time, and when the vampire went at Fet again, Eph stood and swung his sword at her with two hands, from behind. The impulse to murder was still foreign, and because of this he took a little something off his swing at the end, so that the blade did not find its way through. But it was enough. He had severed the spinal column, the vampire’s head flopping forward. Her arms flailed and her body went into seizure as she pitched forward into the sewage in the center of the floor, like something sizzling in an overheated pan.

There was little time to be shocked. The splash-splash-splash sounds echoing in the catacomb were the footfalls of the second vampire running ahead—racing to alert the others.

Eph grabbed his Luma light off the floor and took off after him with his sword at his side. He imagined that he was chasing the one who had lured Kelly here, and that anger carried him along the steamy passageway, his boots splashing hard. The tunnel hooked right, where a wide pipe ran out of the stone and down the length of the narrowing hole. The steam heat fostered algae and fungal growth that glowed in his lamplight. He made out the dim form of the vampire ahead of him, running with its hands open, fingers clawing at the air.

Then another quick turn, and the vampire was gone. Eph slowed and looked all around, shining his lamp, panicking—until he spotted the thing’s legs wriggling through a flat hole dug under the side wall. The being undulated with wormlike efficiency, slithering out of the passage, and Eph slashed at its filthy feet but they whisked through too fast, his sword stabbing dirt.

Eph got down on his knees, but could not see through to the other side of the shallow hole. He heard footsteps and knew Fet and Setrakian were still well behind him. He decided he could not wait. Eph got down on his back and started through.

He fed himself into the hole with his arms over his head, lamp and sword first. Don’t get stuck here, he thought. If he did, there would be no way to wriggle back out. He wormed through, his arms and head emerging into the air of an open space, and kicked free of the burrow, getting to his knees.

Panting now, he waved the lamp around like a torch. He was inside another tunnel, but this one was finished off with track rails and stones, and had an eerie, unused stillness about it. To his left, not one hundred yards away, was light.

A platform. He hurried along the track and clambered up. This platform offered none of the splendor of the City Hall station; instead it was all bare steel beams and visible ceiling piping. Eph thought he had visited every station in the downtown area, but he had never stopped at this one.

A length of subway cars rested against the end of the platform, the door sign reading OUT OF SERVICE. The shell of an old control tower stood in the middle, plastered with old-school wild-style graffiti. He tried the door but it was sealed.

He heard scuffling back inside the tunnel. It was Fet and Setrakian coming through the burrow, catching up with him. Probably not smart, his running ahead alone. Eph resolved to wait for them there, in this oasis of light, until he heard a stone being kicked in the near track bed. He turned just in time to see the vampire breaking from the last subway car, running along the far wall, away from the lights of the abandoned station.

Eph raced after him, over the elevated platform to the end, then leaped down onto the tracks, following them back into darkness. The track bed veered right, the rails ending. The tunnel walls shuddered in his vision as he ran. He could hear the vampire’s scuttling footsteps echoing, its bare feet upon the cutting rocks. The creature was stumbling, slowing. Eph drew closer, the heat of his lamp panicking the vampire. It turned back once, its indigo-lit face a mask of horror.

Eph swept his sword arm forward, decapitating the monster in midstep.

The headless body pitched forward, Eph stopping to shine the Luma light on its oozing neck, killing the escaping blood worms. He straightened again and his harsh breathing subsided… and then he held his breath altogether.

He heard things. Or, rather, sensed them. Things all around him. No footsteps or movement, just… stirrings.

He fumbled for his small flashlight and clicked it on. The bodies of New Yorkers were laid out all along the grungy floor of the tunnel. Their clothed bodies lined each side, like victims of a gas attack. Some eyes were still open, gazing with the narcotized stare of the ill.

These were the turned. The recently bitten, the newly infected. Attacked that very night. The stirring Eph had heard was the metamorphosis inside their bodies: no limbs moving, but rather the tumors colonizing their organs, and the mandibles growing into oral stingers.

The bodies numbered in the dozens, and there were many more ahead, vague forms beyond the reach of his beam. Men, women, children—victims from all walks of life. He rushed around, moving his beam from face to face, searching for Kelly—and praying he would not find her here.

He was still searching when Fet and Setrakian caught up. With something like relief, and at the same time despair, Eph told them, “She’s not here.”

Setrakian stood with his hand held against his chest, unable to catch his breath. “How much farther?”

Fet said, “That was another City Hall station, on the BMT line. A lower level that was never put into service, only used for layup and storage. That means we’re underneath the Broadway line. This turn in the track takes us around the foundation of the Woolworth Building. Cortlandt Street is next. Meaning the World Trade Center is…” He looked up, as though able to see ten, fifteen stories through city rock to the surface. “We’re close.”

“Let’s finish this,” said Eph. “Now.”

“Wait,” said Setrakian, still trying to steady his heart rate. His flashlight beam played over the faces of the turned. He got down on one knee to check some of them with a silver-backed mirror from his coat pocket. “We have a responsibility here first.”

Fet and Eph exterminated the nascent vampires by the light of Setrakian’s flashlight. Each beheading was like a hack at Eph’s sanity.

Eph too had been turned. Not from human to vampire, but from healer to slayer.

The groundwater deepened farther into the catacombs, with strange, sun-starved roots and vines and albino growths crawling down from the unfinished ceiling to feed off the water. The occasional yellow tunnel light showed a total lack of graffiti. White dust lay across the untouched sides of the floor, some of it very fine, coating the surface of pockets of stagnant water. It was residue from the World Trade Center. The three of them avoided stepping in it where they could, with the respect afforded a graveyard.

The ceiling got lower, gradually dipping below head level, approaching a dead end. Setrakian’s search beam found an opening in the upper part of the shrinking wall, wide enough to admit them. A rumbling that had been vague and distant began to gather in force. Their flashlight beams showed the water at their boots beginning to tremble. It was the unmistakable roar of a subway train, and each of them actually turned around to look, though the tunnel they were standing in contained no rail beds.

It was in front of them, coming right at them—but on live tracks lifting over their heads, entering the active City Hall BMT platform above. The squealing, roaring, and shuddering became unbearable—reaching earthquakelike force and decibels—and at once they realized that this powerful disruption was their best opportunity.

They pressed through the crack, hurrying into another man-made, trackless passage, this one strung with unlit bulbs, construction lights dancing under the force of the passing subway train. Piles of dirt and debris had long ago been pushed back beyond steel beams rising some thirty feet to the ceiling. Around a long corner up ahead, jaundiced light shone faintly. They switched off their Luma lights and rushed along the dark tunnel, feeling it widen as they rounded the corner into a long, open chamber.

As the floor stopped trembling and the train noise faded like a passing storm, they slowed to keep their boot steps quiet. Eph sensed the others before he saw them, their outlines, sitting on or lying about the floor. The creatures were roused by their presence, sitting up, but not attacking. So he and Setrakian and Fet kept moving, wading forward into the Master’s lair.

The demons had fed that night, and were bloated with blood, like ticks, lying about and digesting. Their languor was deathlike, they were creatures resigned to waiting for sundown and the opportunity to feed again.

They started to rise. They wore construction clothes and business suits and workout clothes and pajamas and evening wear and dirty aprons and nothing at all.

Eph gripped his sword, searching faces as he passed them. Dead faces with bloodred eyes.

“Stay together,” whispered Setrakian, lifting the UVC mine thing carefully out of the mesh bag on Fet’s back as they walked. With crooked fingers, he peeled back a strip of safety tape, then rotated the top of the globe to ready the battery. “I do hope this works.”

“Hope?” said Fet.

One came at him then—an old man, maybe not as sated as the others—and Fet showed him his silver dagger and the vampire hissed. Fet put a boot on the man’s thigh and kicked him back, showing the others his silver.

“We’re digging ourselves into a deep hole here.”

Faces came out of the walls, flushed and leering. Older vampires, first or second generation, marked by their whitening hair. There were animal-like groans and glottal clicks from some, like attempts at speech blocked by the vile appendages grown beneath their tongues. Their swollen throats twitched perversely.

Setrakian said, walking between Fet and Eph, “When this spike makes contact with the ground, the battery should connect.”

“Should!” said Fet.

“You must take cover before it ignites. Behind these supports.” Rusted, rivet-studded beams stood at regular intervals. “You won’t have more than a few seconds. When you do, shut your eyes. Do not look. The burst will blind you.”

“Just do it!” said Fet, crowded by the vampires.

“Not yet…” The old man opened his walking stick just enough to bare the silver blade, and with the quick motion of flint striking stone he ran the tips of two crooked fingers against the sharp edge. Blood dripped to the stone floor. The scent went through the vampires with a visible ripple. They were coming from all over, crowding in from unseen corners, ever curious and ever hungry.

Fet swiped the dusty air with his dagger in order to maintain the few meters of open space around them as they moved. “What are you waiting for?” he said.

Eph searched faces, scanning the dead-eyed women for Kelly. One made a move toward him and he laid the tip of his sword against her breastbone and she shrank back as though burned.

More noise now, the front crowd being pressed closer from behind, hunger overriding hesitance, want trumping wait. Setrakian’s blood dribbled to the floor, its scent—and the casual waste—driving them into a frenzy.

“Do it!” said Fet.

Setrakian said, “A few more seconds…”

The vampires pushed in, Eph prodding them back with the tip of his sword. He only then thought to turn his Luma light back on, but they leaned into its repulsing rays like zombies staring at the sun. The ones in front were at the mercy of those in the rear. The bubble was collapsing… Eph felt one hand grab at his sleeve…

“Now!” said Setrakian.

He tossed the spiked globe into the air, like a referee serving up a jump ball. The heavy thing righted itself at its apex, weighted spikes pointing straight down as it drove toward the floor.

The four-edged steel spike sank into the stone, and a whir started, like that of an old flashbulb rack recharging.

“Go, go!” said Setrakian.

Eph waved his light and swung his sword like a machete, making for one of the stanchions. He felt them grabbing at him, pulling, and felt the squishy thump of his sword cutting, and heard their groans and garbled howls. And still—he checked faces, looking for Kelly, and striking down all those who were not her.

The mine’s whir became a growing whine, and Eph stabbed and kicked and swiped his way to the steel support beam, stepping into its shadow just as the underground chamber began to fill with a blazing blue light. He clamped his eyes shut and buried them in the crook of his elbow.

He heard the bestial agony of the shattered vampires. The melting, blistering, peeling sound of their bodies being desiccated at the chemical level, the collapsing of their innards like the charcoaling of their very souls. Their dumb cries strangled in scalded throats.

Mass immolation.

The high-pitched whine lasted no longer than ten seconds, the brilliant plane of cleansing blue light riding from floor to ceiling before the battery burned out. The chamber went mostly dark again—and when the only sound left was a residual sizzling, Eph lowered his arm, opening his eyes.

The nauseating stench of roasted disease rose in smoky steam from the charred creatures laid out over the floor. It was impossible to move without disturbing these rotted demons, their bodies crumbling like artificial logs hollowed out by fire. Only those vampires lucky enough to have been partially behind a beam remained animate, Eph and Fet moving quickly to release these crippled, half-destroyed creatures.

Fet then walked over to the mine, which had caught fire. He surveyed the damage.

“Well,” he said, “that fucking worked.”

“Look,” said Setrakian.

At the far end of the steaming chamber, set on top of a yard-high mound of dirt and refuse, was a long, black box.

As Eph and the others approached it—with the dread of bomb-squad agents approaching a suspicious device without wearing blast suits—the situation felt terribly familiar, and it was only a moment before he placed it: he had felt exactly the same walking toward the darkened airplane on the taxiway, at the start of this whole thing.

This sense of approaching something dead and not dead. Some delivery from another world.

He got close enough to confirm that it was indeed the long, black cabinet from the cargo hold of Flight 753. Its top doors exquisitely carved with human figures swirling as though burning in flames, and elongated faces screaming in agony.

The Master’s oversize coffin, set here on an altar of rubble and rubbish beneath the ruins of the World Trade Center.

“This is it,” Eph said.

Setrakian reached out to the side of the box, almost touching the carvings, then pulling back his twisted fingers. “A long time I have searched for this,” he said.

Eph shuddered, not wanting to meet this thing again, with its devouring size and ruthless strength. He remained on the near side, expecting the top doors to burst open at any moment. Fet went around to the facing side. There were no handles on the top doors. One had to slip one’s fingers in beneath the lip of the middle seam and pull up. It would be awkward, and difficult to do quickly.

Setrakian stood at the presumed head of the cabinet, his long sword ready in his hand. But his expression was grim. Eph saw the reason for this in the old man’s eyes, and it deflated him.

Too easy.

Eph and Fet wriggled their fingers in beneath the double doors, and on a nod of three, pulled them back. Setrakian leaned forward with his lamp and his sword… and discovered a box full of soil. He probed it with his blade, the silver tip scraping the bottom of the great box. Nothing.

Fet stepped back, wild-eyed, full of adrenaline he could not stifle. “He’s gone?”

Setrakian withdrew his blade, tapping off the soil on the edge of the box.

Eph’s disappointment was overwhelming. “He escaped.” Eph stepped back from the coffin, turning to the wasteland of slain vampires inside the stultifying chamber. “He knew we were here. He fled into the subway system fifteen minutes ago. He can’t surface because of the sun… so he’ll stay underground until night.”

Fet said, “Inside the longest transit system in the entire world. Eight hundred miles of tracks.”

Eph’s voice was raw with despair. “We never even had a chance.”

Setrakian looked exhausted but undaunted. If anything, his old eyes showed a bit of fresh light. “Is this not how you exterminate vermin, Mr. Fet? By rousting them from their nest? Flushing them out?”

Fet said, “Only if you know where they’re going to end up.”

Setrakian said, “Don’t all burrowing creatures, from rats to rabbits, construct a kind of back door…?”

“A bolt-hole,” said Fet. He was getting it now. “An emergency exit. Predator comes in one way, you run out the other.”

Setrakian said, “I believe we have the Master on the run.”

Vestry Street, Tribeca

THEY HADN’T TIME to properly destroy the coffin, and so settled for shoving it off its altar of rubble, overturning it and spilling the soil to the floor. They had resolved to return later to finish the job.

Getting back through the tunnels and out to Fet’s van took some time, and more of Setrakian’s energy.

Fet parked around the corner from the Bolivar town house. They ran the sunny half block to his front door with no effort to conceal their Luma lamps or silver swords. They saw no one outside the residence at that early hour, and Eph started up the crossbars of the scaffolding in front. Over the boarded door was a transom window decorated with the address number. Eph smashed it in with his sword, kicking free the larger shards and then clearing out the frame with his blade. He took a lamp and went inside, lowering himself into the foyer.

His purple light illuminated twin marble panthers on either side of the door. A winged angel statue at the bottom of the curling stairs looked down at him balefully.

He heard it, and felt it: the hum of the Master’s presence. Kelly, he thought, misery aching in his chest. She had to be here.

Setrakian came down next, held from the outside by Fet, helped to the floor by Eph. Setrakian landed and drew his sword. He too felt the Master’s presence, and with it, relief. They were not too late.

“He is here,” said Eph.

Setrakian said, “Then he already knows we are.”

Fet lowered two larger UVC lamps to Eph, then clambered over the transom himself, his boots striking the floor.

“Quickly,” said Setrakian, leading them under the winding stairs, the bottom floor in the midst of renovation. They moved through a long kitchen of still-boxed appliances, looking for a closet. They found it, empty inside, and unfinished.

They pushed open the false door in the back wall, as it had been pictured in Nora’s People magazine printouts.

Stairs led down. A sheet of plastic behind them flapped, and they turned around fast, but it was only riding the draft rising up the stairs. The wind carried the scent of the subway, and of dirt and spoilage.

This was the way to the tunnels. Eph and Fet began arranging two large UVC lamps so they could fill the closet passageway with hot, killing light, and thereby seal off the underground. And block any other vampires from rising up, and, more imperative, ensure that the only way out of the town house was into direct sunlight.

Eph looked back to see Setrakian leaning against one wall, his fingertips pressing against the vest, over his heart. Eph didn’t like the looks of that, and had started toward him when Fet’s voice turned him back around. “Damnit!” One of the hot lamps tumbled over, clunking to the floor. Eph checked to make sure that the bulbs still worked, then righted the lamp, wary of the radiative light.

Fet quieted him. He heard noises below. Footsteps. The odor in the air changed—became ranker, more rotten. Vampires were assembling.

Eph and Fet backed away from the blue-lit closet, their safety valve. When Eph turned back to the old man, he was gone.

Setrakian had moved back into the foyer. His heart felt tight in his chest, overtaxed by stress and anticipation. So long he had waited. So long…

His gnarled hands began to ache. He flexed them, gripping the sword handle beneath the silver wolf’s head. Then he felt something, the faintest breeze in advance of movement…

Moving his drawn sword at the last possible moment saved him from a direct and fatal blow. The impact knocked him back, sending his crumpled body sliding headfirst over the marble floor to slam into the base of the wall. But he kept his grip on his sword. He got back to his feet quickly, swinging his blade back and forth, seeing nothing in the dim foyer.

So fast the Master moved.

He was right here. Somewhere.

Now you are an old man.

The voice crackled inside Setrakian’s head like an electric shock. Setrakian swung his silver sword out wide in front of him. A black form blurred past the statue of the weeping angel at the foot of the curling marble stairs.

The Master would try to distract him. This was his way. Never to challenge directly, face-to-face, but to deceive. To surprise from behind.

Setrakian backed up against the wall beside the front door. Behind him, a narrow, door-framing window of Tiffany glass had been blacked over. Setrakian struck at the lead panes, smashing out the precious glass with his sword.

Daylight knifed into the foyer.

At that moment of breaking glass, Eph and Fet returned to find Setrakian standing with his sword raised, his body bathed in sunlight.

The old man saw the dark blur rising up the stairs. “There he is!” he yelled, starting after him. “Now!”

Eph and Fet charged up the steps after the old man. Two other vampires met them at the top of the stairs. Bolivar’s former security detail, his Big-and-Tall-Store bodyguards now hungry-faced hulks in dirty suits. One swatted at Eph, who stumbled backward and almost lost his balance, grabbing the wall to keep himself from tumbling down the marble stairs. He stuck out his Luma light and the big dummy recoiled and Eph chopped at his thigh with the sword. The vampire let out a gasp and swung at him again. Eph gutted him, running his sword most of the way through his belly before pulling it back, the vampire sinking to the landing like a stuck balloon.

Fet held his at bay with his lamp light, sticking and cutting at the bodyguard’s grabbing hands with his short-bladed dagger. He brought the light up, right into its face, and the vampire flailed and looked around wildly, temporarily blinded. Fet ducked him and got behind his back, stabbing the bodyguard in the back of its thick neck before shoving him hard down the stairs.

Eph’s vampire tried to rise, but Fet dropped him again with a kick to the ribs. The bodyguard’s head lay off the top step, and with a cry of anguish, Eph brought his sword down.

The head bumped down the stairs, gaining speed and rotation at the bottom, hopping the other vampire’s body and rolling all the way to the wall.

White blood oozed out of its opened neck, onto the carmine runner. The blood worms emerged, Fet frying them with his lamp.

The bodyguard at the bottom of the steps was no more than a skin sack of broken bones, but he was still animate. The fall had not severed his neck, and so had not released him. His eyes were open and he stared dumbly up the long staircase, trying to move.

Eph and Fet found Setrakian near the closed elevator grate with his sword out, taking a swipe at a dark, fast-moving blur. “Watch out—!” called Setrakian, but before the words were out of his mouth, the Master struck Fet from behind. He went down hard, nearly smashing his lamp. Eph barely had time to react before the form flew past him—slowing down just long enough for Eph to see the Master’s face again, his wormy flesh and sneering mouth—and he was thrown back against the wall.

Setrakian lunged forward, sweeping his sword two-handedly, driving the fast-moving form into a wide, high-ceilinged, floor-through room. Eph got himself up and followed, as did Fet, a lick of blood dribbling down his temple.

The Master stopped, appearing to them before the massive stone fireplace at the midpoint of the room. The town house had windows only at either long end—leaving no sunlight in the middle to assist them. The Master’s cloak rippled and settled and his horrible eyes looked down on them all, but mainly Fet, no small man himself. The blood trickling down his face. With something like a howling grin, the long-armed Master grabbed up lumber and bales of electrical wire and any other debris within reach and hurled them at the three assassins.

Setrakian flattened against the wall, Eph taking cover around the corner, Fet using a chunk of wallboard as a shield.

When the assault ended and they looked up, the Master was gone again.

“Christ!” hissed Fet. He swiped the blood off his face with his hand, then tossed aside the wallboard. He threw his silver dagger into the cold fireplace with a clank and a thud—useless against this giant—and took Eph’s lamp from him, giving Fet two, freeing Eph up to wield his longer blade with both hands.

“Stay after him,” said Setrakian, pushing ahead. “Like smoke rising up a chimney, we must force him to the roof.”

As they rounded the corner, four more hissing vampires came at them. They looked like former fans of Bolivar’s with their razored hair and piercings.

Fet went after them with the twin lamps, pushing them back. One got through, and Eph played backup, showing her his silver sword. This one looked like a chubby Vampira in a denim skirt and torn fishnet stockings. She had that curious rapacity of the newly turned vampire that Eph had come to recognize. Eph aimed his sword at her from a crouch, the vampire feinting right, then left, hissing at him through white lips.

Eph heard Setrakian yell, “Strigoi!” in that commanding voice of his. The chopping sound of the old man cutting down vampires emboldened Eph. The chubby Vampira feinted too aggressively and Eph jabbed her, his sword tip slicing into the front shoulder of her torn black cotton top, burning the beast within. Her mouth opened and her tongue curled up, and Eph darted back barely in time, her stinger just missing his neck. She continued at him, mouth agape, and with a howl of anger, Eph ran his sword at her face. Straight at her stinger, the blade slicing right through the back of her head, the tip burying a few inches in the unfinished wall.

The vampire’s eyes bugged. Her stinger was cut and leaking white blood, filling her mouth and spilling down her chin, which she could not move. She was pinned to the wall. She bucked and attempted to cough her wormy blood onto Eph. A virus will propagate itself any way it can.

Setrakian had slain the other three vampires, leaving the newly polished maple flooring at the end of the hall slathered in white. He returned to Eph, yelling, “Back!”

Eph released his sword, the grip quivering out of the wall. Setrakian swung at the vampire’s neck, and gravity pulled the headless body to the floor.

The head remained speared to the wall, white blood spilling from its severed neck, the vampire’s black eyes flaring wide at both men… then rolling upward and relaxing, holding still. Eph grasped the handle of his sword and plucked it from the wall behind her mouth, and her head dropped on top of her body.

There was no time to irradiate the white blood. “Up, up!” said Setrakian, walking along the wall to a different set of stairs, these circular with an ornate iron railing. The old man’s spirit was strong, but his strength was flagging. Eph passed him at the top. He looked right and left. In the dim light, he saw finished hardwood floors and unfinished walls. But no vampires.

“We split up,” said the old man.

“Are you kidding?” said Fet, grabbing hold of him and helping him to the top. “ Never split up. That’s the first rule.”

One of his lamps fizzled. The bulb popped as the unit overheated, and suddenly burst into flames. Fet dropped it, crushing the flames underneath his boot. Now he was down to one lamp.

“How much more battery time?” Eph asked.

“Not enough,” said the old man. “He will wear us down like this, having us chase him until nightfall.”

“Gotta trap him,” said Fet. “Like a rat in a bathroom.”

The old man stopped then, turning his head to a sound.

Your heart is weak, you old wretch. I can hear it.

Setrakian stood still, his sword at the ready. He looked all around, but there was no sign of the Dark One.

He tapped the point of his sword on the floor. Pick-pick-pick. “Show yourself.”

You have fashioned a handy tool.

“You don’t recognize it?” said Setrakian aloud, with heavy breaths. “It was Sardu’s. The boy whose form you took.”

Eph pulled closer to the old man, realizing that he was in a conversation with the Master. “Where is she?” he yelled. “Where is my wife?”

The Master ignored Eph.

Your whole life has led to this point. You will fail a second time.

Setrakian said, “You will taste my silver, strigoi.”

I will taste you, old man. And your clumsy apostles—

The Master attacked from behind, throwing Setrakian to the floor again. Eph reacted, swiping his sword at the breeze he felt, a couple of guessing swishes. When he pulled back the blade, he found the tip sticky with white.

He had hurt the Master. He had cut him.

But in the moment it took to process this fact, the Master returned and swatted Eph in the chest with his taloned hand. Eph felt his feet leave the floor, his back and shoulders ramming into the wall, his muscles exploding with pain as his body fell to the side.

Fet swept forward with his lamp, and Setrakian swung silver from one knee, pushing back the beast. Eph rolled over as fast as he could, bracing for more blows… but none came.

They were all alone again. They could feel it. No sound except the tinkling of construction lights strung along the ceiling, swaying near the foot of the stairs.

Eph said, “I cut him.”

Setrakian used his sword to get to his feet, as one arm was hurt and hanging limp. He moved to the next flight of stairs going up.

There was white vampire blood on the unfinished planking of the stairs.

Sore but determined, they climbed the steps to the top. This was Bolivar’s penthouse, the top floor of the taller of the two conjoined town houses. They entered the bedroom half, looking for vampire blood on the floor. Seeing none, Fet went around the unmade bed to the far windows, tearing down the room-darkening curtains, letting in light but no direct sun. Eph checked the bathroom and found it even larger than he had expected, with facing, gold-framed mirrors reflecting him into infinity. An army of Ephraim Goodweathers with swords in their hands.

“This way,” gasped Setrakian.

Fresh streaks of white stood out against a black leather chair in the broader media room. Two arched and heavily draped doorways along the eastern wall showed soft light edging beneath the hem of the long curtains. The roof of the adjoining town house lay beyond.

There they found the Master standing in the center of the room, his worm-infested face angled down toward them, onyx eyes staring, the dangerous daylight behind him. Iridescent white blood dripped, slow and irregular, down his arm and off his elongated hand, falling from the tip of his unearthly talon to the floor.

Setrakian limped forward, his sword dragging behind him, scoring the wood floor. He stopped and raised the silver blade with his one good arm, facing the Master—his heart racing at too many beats per minute.

“Strigoi,” he said.

The Master stared, impassive for the moment, demoniacally regal, his eyes two dead moons in clouds of blood. The sole indicator of his predicament was the excited wriggling of the blood parasites beneath his inhuman face.

For Setrakian, the moment was nearly at hand… and yet his heart was locking up, shutting him down.

Eph and Fet converged behind him, and the Master had no alternative but to fight his way out of this room. His face spread into a savage sneer. He kicked up a long, low table at Eph, which battered him backward, and with his good arm sent a club chair sliding at Setrakian. These moves had the effect of splitting them, the Master blazing through the middle, going straight at Fet.

Fet raised his lamp, but the Master dodged and came clawing at him from the side. Fet went down, falling, dazed, near the top of the stairs. The Master lunged past him, but Fet was fast, swinging the lamp on him—right into the Dark One’s snarling face. The UVC rays staggered him, driving him back against the wall, the plaster cracking against his great weight. When the Master’s claws came down from his face, his eyes were wider than before, and seemingly lost.

The Master was blinded, but only temporarily. They all sensed their advantage here, and Fet went right at him with the lamp. The Master flailed back wildly. Fet drove the towering beast back across the room toward the curtained doors, and Eph rushed after him, slashing at the Dark One’s cloak, catching a bit of flesh. The Master’s talon swung but struck no one.

Setrakian gripped the chair that had been slid at him, his sword clattering to the floor.

Eph cut down the heavy drapes over one of the arches, revealing bright sunlight. Decorative iron grating barred the glass doors, but with one chop of his blade, the latch cracked free in a spray of sparks.

Fet kept driving the Master backward. Then Eph spun around, looking to Setrakian to administer the finishing blow. That was when he saw the old professor laid out on the floor next to his sword, gripping his chest.

Eph froze, looking at the vulnerable Master, then at Setrakian, dying on the floor.

Fet, holding his lamp on the vampire like a lion trainer with a footstool, said, “What are you waiting for?”

Eph ran to the old man. He got down on his hands and knees and saw the distress in Setrakian’s face, the distant stare. His fingers plucked at his vest, over his heart.

Eph set down his sword. He ripped open the vest and his shirt, baring Setrakian’s sagging chest. He reached up under his jaw for a pulse, but couldn’t find one.

Fet yelled back, “Hey, Doc!” He kept pressing forward, pinning the Master up against the edge of the sunlight.

Eph massaged the old man’s chest over his heart. He didn’t start CPR right away because he was worried about the man’s bones, about crushing his rib cage. Then he noticed that Setrakian’s old fingers were no longer poking at his heart, but were reaching for his vest.

Fet turned back in a panic to see what the hell was holding them up. He saw Setrakian laid out on the floor and Eph kneeling over him.

Fet looked for a moment too long. The Master clawed at Fet’s shoulder and pulled him in.

Eph squeezed the pockets of Setrakian’s tweed vest and felt something. He pulled out the little silver pillbox and quickly unscrewed the top. A dozen tiny white tablets tumbled to the floor.

Fet was a big man himself, but he was a child in the Master’s grip. He still had the lamp in his hand, even though his arms were pinned. He turned it on the Master, burning his side—and the blinded beast roared in pain but did not relinquish his grip. The Master’s other hand gripped the top of Fet’s head and wrenched back his neck despite Fet’s resistance. Then Fet found himself staring up into this unspeakable face.

Eph pinched up one of the nitroglycerin tablets and cupped the old man’s head in his hand. He worked open his clenched jaw and slipped the pill in underneath the old man’s cool tongue. He pulled out his fingers and shook Setrakian, yelling at him. And the old man’s eyes opened.

The Master opened his mouth over Fet and extended his stinger, lashing about in the air above Fet’s wide eyes and exposed throat. Fet fought mightily, but the compression of the back of his neck cut off the blood flow to his brain, so the room blackened and his muscles went limp.

Eph yelled, “No!” and ran at the Master with his sword, slashing the blade across the abomination’s broad back. Fet fell to the floor in a heap. The Master’s head whipped around, his stinger searching, his clouded eyes finding Eph.

“My sword sings of silver!” cried Eph, slicing at the Master’s upper chest. The blade did indeed sing, though the Dark One flew backward and avoided it. Eph swung again—and missed again—the Master thrashing backward, out of control. He was in the sunlight now, framed before the twin glass doors, the full and broad daylight of a rooftop patio behind him.

Eph had him. The Master knew he had him. Eph brought his sword up with two hands, ready to stab it up through the Master’s bulging neck. The king vampire stared down at Eph with something like outright disgust, summoned even more height, and raised the hood of his dark cloak over his head.

“Die!” said Eph, running at him.

The Master turned and crashed through the plate-glass doors and out onto the open patio. Glass exploded as the cloaked vampire fell rolling onto the hot clay tiles, in full view of the killing sun.

He came to a rest momentarily, hunched over on one knee.

Eph’s momentum carried him through the shattered door, where he stopped, staring at the cloaked vampire, awaiting the end.

The Master trembled, steam rising from within its dark cloak. Then the king vampire stood to its full height, quivering as though in the grip of a violent seizure, his great claws curled into beastlike fists.

With a roar he threw off his cloak. The ancient garment fell away, smoking, to the tile. The Master’s nude body writhed, his pearlescent flesh darkening, cooking, changing from fair, lily white to a dead black leather.

The slashing wound Eph had made across his back fused into a deep black scar, as though cauterized by the rays of the sun. He turned, still shaking, and faced Eph, and Fet standing in the doorway behind him, and Setrakian risen to one knee. He was ghoulishly lean, with a smooth and sexless crotch. His broiled black flesh writhed with pain-crazed blood worms.

With a most horrible smile—a sneer of intense pain and even triumph—the Master turned his face toward the sun and let loose an openmouthed howl of defiance. A true demonic curse. Then, with dizzying speed, he bolted to the edge of the patio, slid over the low wall at the edge of the roof, and raced down the side of the building to the third-story scaffolding… disappearing into the morning shadows of New York City.