The Fall (25 page)

Mr. Fitzwilliam pulled out his chair, and Palmer got to his feet amid the hubbub and gavel-banging from the chamber on the video wall before him.

Eph stood by the door, listening. Movement outside, but not enough hubbub yet. He was tempted to open the door just a bit, but it opened inward, and he would certainly have been seen.

He tugged on the pistol’s handle, keeping it loose and ready in his waistband.

A man walked past, saying, as though into a radio, “Get the car.”

That was Eph’s cue. He took a deep breath and reached for the door handle, walking out of the restroom and into murder.

Two Stonehearts in dark suits were moving to the far end of the hall, the doors leading outside. Eph turned the other way, seeing two more rounding the corner, advance men, eyeing him immediately.

Eph’s timing had been less than perfect. He stepped to the side, as though deferring to the men, trying to appear uninterested.

Eph saw the small front wheels first. A wheelchair was being rolled around the corner. Two polished shoes were set on the fold-down footrests.

It was Eldritch Palmer, looking exceedingly small and frail. His flour-white hands were folded in his sunken lap, his eyes looking straight ahead, not at Eph.

One of the advance men veered off toward Eph, as though to block his view of the passing billionaire. Palmer was fewer than five yards away. Eph could not wait any longer.

His heart racing, Eph pulled the gun from his waistband. Everything happened in slow motion and all at once.

Eph raised the gun and darted to the left, in order to clear the Stoneheart man in his way. His hand trembled, but his arm was straight, his aim true.

He aimed for the largest target—the chest of the seated man—and squeezed the trigger. But the lead Stoneheart man threw himself at Eph—sacrificing himself more automatically than any Secret Service agent had ever leaped in front of a U.S. president.

The round struck the man in the chest, thudding off the body armor beneath his suit. Eph reacted just in time, shoving the man to the side before he could be tackled.

Eph fired again, but off-balance, the silver bullet ricocheting off Palmer’s wheelchair armrest.

Eph fired again, but the Stonehearts threw themselves in front of Palmer. The third round went into the wall. An especially large man with a military crew cut—the man pushing Palmer’s chair—started to run, wheeling his benefactor forward so that the Stone-heart men were catapulted onto Eph, and he went down.

He twisted as he fell, his gun arm facing the exit doorway. One more shot. He raised it to fire at the back of the chair, around the large bodyguard—but a shoe stomped down on his forearm, the round firing into the carpet, the weapon leaping from Eph’s grip.

Eph was at the bottom of a growing pile, bodies rushing in from the main room now. Shouts, screams. Hands clawing at Eph, pulling at his limbs. He twisted his head just enough to see, through the arms and legs of his attackers, the wheelchair being pushed out through the double doors, into blazing daylight.

Eph howled in agony. His only chance gone forever. The moment slipping away.

The old man had survived unharmed.

Now the world was nearly his.

THE
MASTER
,
STANDING
at full height inside the utter blackness of a large chamber deep beneath the meatpacking plant, was electrically alert with meditative focus. It had become more deliberative as its sun-scorched flesh continued to flake off its once-human host body, exposing raw, red dermis beneath.

The Master’s head rotated a few degrees on its great, broad neck, turning slightly toward the entrance, giving Bolivar its attention. No need for Bolivar to report what the Master already knew, what the Master had already—through Bolivar—seen: the arrival of the human hunters at the pawnshop, evidently in hopes of contacting old Setrakian, and the disastrous battle that ensued.

Behind Bolivar, feelers skittered about on all four limbs, like blind crabs. They “saw” something that unsettled them, as Bolivar was learning to infer from their behavior.

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

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

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

Hiding. Plotting. Scheming.

With the same desperation as the Ancients.

Humans only become dangerous when they have nothing to lose.

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

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

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

It pleases me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The boy.

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

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

I
HAVE
KILLED
.

I have slain.

With the hands typing this now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here is the other thing.

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

Because I know what they will think.

I know what they will feel.

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

But—all this killing?

I kind of like it.

And I’m good at it.

I might even be great at it.

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

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

Until now.

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

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

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

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

But her mother was gone.

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

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

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

“Mama!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Come, Mama.” Tears wet Nora’s eyes.

“You’re burning down my house!”

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

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

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

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

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