The Night Eternal

Its two bare feet landed in the aluminum boat with a bang. Ann, kneeling at the front point, barely had time to turn. “Fuck me…” She saw the Master before her—recognizing the pallid flesh of Gabriel Bolivar. This was the guy her niece was always yapping about. She wore him on T-shirts, hung his posters on her walls. And now, all that Ann could think of was, I never liked his fucking music…

The Master set down his staff, then reached for her and, in a ripping motion, tore her in half at the waist the way strongmen do very thick phone books—then hurled both halves into the river.

William was transfixed by the sight of the Master, who lifted him by his armpit and flat-handed his face with such tremendous force that William’s neck snapped and his head flopped back off his shoulders like a removed coat hood. It dumped him into the river water as well, then retrieved its walking stick and looked down at the boy.

Take me there, my son.

Zack moved to the tiller and changed course, the Master standing astride the middle bench, its cloak swirling in the wind, as they followed the first boat’s disappearing wake.

The smoke began to thin out, and Nora’s calls to Fet were answered. They found each other and then found their way back to the restaurant, outrunning the rounds from the helicopter snipers overhead.

Inside, they found the rest of Gus’s weapons. Fet grabbed Nora’s hand and they ran to the riverside windows, opening one onto the deck. Nora had picked up the Lumen and had it with her.

They saw the boats bobbing offshore. “Where’s Gus?” asked Nora.

“We’ll have to swim for it,” said Fet. His injured arm was now covered in blood, the wound reopened. “But first—”

Fet fired at the chopper spotlights, shattering the first one he aimed at.

“They can’t shoot what they can’t see!” he yelled.

Nora did the same, the weapon chugging in her grip. She got one too. The remaining lights swept the shoreline for the source of the automatic gunfire.

That was when Nora saw Gus’s body laid out in the sand, river water lapping at his side.

Her shock and sorrow only paralyzed her a moment. Immediately, Gus’s fighting spirit came over her, as well as Fet. Don’t mourn—fight. They moved out aggressively onto the beach, firing away at the Master’s helicopters.

The farther they got away from shore, the harder the boat rocked. The Born held tight to the nuke’s belt straps while Eph steered, trying to keep them from pitching over into the river. Thick, green-black water sloshed over the sides, spraying the bomb’s casing and the oak urns, a thin puddle forming underneath. It was spraying rain again, and they were sailing into the wind.

Mr. Quinlan lifted the urns off the wet floor of the boat, moved them away from the water. Eph did not know what it meant, but the act of bringing the remains of the Ancients to the origin site of the last of their number reminded Eph that it was all about to end. The shock of seeing Zack that way had thrown him off.

He motored past the second island, a long, rocky beach backed by bare, dying trees. Eph checked the map, the paper in his hand growing damp, the ink starting to run and spread.

Eph yelled over the motor and the wind, the pain in his ribs constricting his voice. “How, without turning him, did the Master create this… symbiotic relationship with my boy?”

I don’t know. The key is that he is away from the Master now.

“The Master’s influence will disappear once we do away with it, like all of its vampires?”

Everything that the Master was will cease.

Eph was cheered. He felt real hope. He believed that they could be father and son again. “It’ll be a little like cult deprogramming, I suppose. No such thing as therapy anymore. I just want to get him back to his old bedroom. Start there.”

Survival is the only therapy. I did not want to tell you before, for fear of your losing focus. But I believe the Master was grooming your son for its future self.

Eph swallowed. “I feared it myself. I couldn’t think of any other reason to keep him and not turn him. But— why? Why Zack?”

It may have little to do with your son.

“You mean, it’s because of me?”

I can’t know. All I know is that the Master is a perverse being. It loves to take root in pain. To subvert and corrupt. Perhaps in you it saw a challenge. You were the first one to board the aircraft on which it traveled to New York. You aligned yourself with Abraham Setrakian, its sworn enemy. Achieving the subjugation of an entire race of beings is a feat, but an impersonal one. The Master is one that needs to inflict pain personally. It needs to feel another’s suffering. It needs to experience it firsthand. “Sadism” is your closest modern term for it. And here it has been its undoing.

Exhausted, Eph watched the third dark island pass. After the fourth island, he banked the boat. Difficult to tell the shape of the landmass from the river—and in the darkness impossible to see all six outcroppings without circling it first—but somehow Eph knew that the map was true and this was the Black Site. The bare, black trees on this uninhabited island resembled many-fingered giants burned stiff, arms raised to the heavens in mid-cry.

Eph spotted an inlet and turned toward it, cutting the engine, nosing right onto land. The Born grabbed the nuke and stood, stepping onto the rocky shore.

Nora was right. Leave me here to finish it. Go back to your boy.

Eph looked at the hooded vampire, his face slashed, ready to end his existence. Suicide was an unnatural act for mortal humans to commit—but for an immortal? Mr. Quinlan’s martyrdom was a many times more transgressive, unnatural, violent act.

“I don’t know what to say,” said Eph.

The Born nodded. Then it is time to go.

With that, the Born started up the rocky rise with the keg-sized bomb in his arms and the remains of the Ancients in his pack. Eph’s only hesitation was a memory of his vision and its haunting images. The Born had not been foreseen as the redeemer. But Eph had not had enough time with the Occido Lumen, and perhaps the prophetic reading was different.

Eph dipped the propeller back into the water and gripped the zip cord. He was about to pull when he heard a motor, the sound carrying to him on the swirling wind.

Another boat, approaching. But there had been only one other motorized boat.

Zack’s boat.

Eph looked back for the Born, but he had already disappeared over the rise. Eph’s heart pounded as he stared into the dark mist over the river, straining to see the approaching craft. It sounded like it was coming in fast.

Eph stood and jumped out of the boat onto the rocks, one arm across his broken ribs, the twin handles of his swords wobbling over his shoulders. He charged up the rocky rise as fast as he could, the ground smoking with mist rising into the spitting rain as though the land were heating up in anticipation of the atomic cremation to come.

Eph topped the rise, unable to spot Mr. Quinlan among the trees. He rushed into the dead woods, calling to him, “Quinlan!” as loudly as his chest would allow, then emerged on the other side into a marshy clearing.

The mist was high. The Born had set the weapon down in the approximate center of the trefoil-shaped island, in the middle of a ring of inlaid stones resembling rocky black blisters. He was moving around the device and setting up the white oak receptacles containing the Ancients’ ashes.

Mr. Quinlan heard Eph calling him and turned his way—and just then picked up the Master’s approach.

“It’s here!” yelled Eph. “It’s—”

A blast of wind stirred up the mist. Mr. Quinlan just had time to brace himself before impact, grabbing on to the Master as it streaked in from out of nowhere. The momentum of the body strike carried them many yards away, rolling unseen into the mist. Eph saw something twist and fall through the air—and believed it was Setrakian’s old wolf-handled walking stick.

Eph forgot about his chest pain, running for the bomb, pulling out his sword. Then the mist swirled up around it, obscuring the device.

“Dad!”

Eph turned, feeling Zack’s voice right behind him. He whipped back around fast, knowing he had been