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