the top of the wall, a bald, red-eyed face appearing. Eph dropped to his knee, jabbing the end of his sword blade into the vamp’s open mouth, the point reaching the back of its hot throat. But he did not run it through, did not destroy it. The silver blade burned it, keeping its jaw from unhinging and unleashing its stinger.
The vampire could not move. Its red-rimmed eyes glared at Eph in confusion and pain.
Eph said, “Do you see me?”
The vamp’s eyes showed no reaction. Eph was addressing not it but the Master, watching through this creature.
“Do you see this?”
He turned the sword, forcing the vamp’s perspective toward Bellevue. Other creatures were scaling the wall, and some were already running out of the hospital, alerted to Eph’s escape. He had only moments. He feared that his sabotage had failed, that the leaking gas had instead found a safe way out of the hospital building.
Eph got back in the vamp’s face as though it were the Master’s itself.
He had just finished the last word as the building erupted behind him, throwing Eph forward, his sword piercing the back of the vampire’s throat and exiting its neck. Eph tumbled off the wall, gripping the handle of his sword, the blade sliding out of the vampire’s face as together they twisted and fell.
Eph landed on the roof of an abandoned car, one of many lining the inside lane of the roadway. The vampire slammed into the road next to him.
Eph’s hip took the brunt of the impact. Over the ringing in his ears, Eph heard a high whistling scream and looked up into the black rain. He watched something like a missile shoot out from high above, arc overhead, and splash down into the river. One of the oxygen tanks.
Mortar-heavy bricks thumped down onto the road. Shards of glass fell like jewels in the rain, shattering on the road. Eph covered his head with his coat as he slid down off the dented roof, ignoring the pain in his side.
Only as he stood up did he notice two shards of glass, lodged firmly in his calf. He yanked them out. Blood poured from the wounds. He heard a wet, excited squeal…
A few yards away, the vamp lay on its back, dazed, white blood gurgling from the perforation in the back of its neck—but still excited and hungry. Eph’s blood was its call for dinner.
Eph got in its face, gripping its broken, dislodged chin, and saw its red eyes focus on him, then on the silver point of his blade.
“
He then released the
Limping, bleeding, he got up again. “
Then he started his long journey back home.
Central Park
BELVEDERE CASTLE, SET on the northern end of the Lake in Central Park along the Seventy-ninth Street Transverse Road, was a high Victorian Gothic and Romanesque “folly” constructed in 1869 by Jacob Wray Mould and Calvert Vaux, the original designers of the park. All Zachary Goodweather knew was that it looked spooky and cool, and that was what had always drawn him to it: this medieval (to his mind) castle in the center of the park in the center of the city. As a child, he used to make up tales about the castle, how it was in fact a giant fortress constructed by tiny trolls for the original architect of the city, a dark lord named Belvedere who dwelled in catacombs deep beneath the castle rock, haunting the dark citadel by night as he tended to his creatures throughout the park.
This was back when Zack still had to resort to fantasy for tales of the supernatural and the grotesque. When he needed to daydream in order to escape from the boredom of the modern world.
Now his daydreams were real. His fantasies were attainable. His wishes were requests, his desires realized.
He stood inside the open doorway to the castle, a young man now, watching black rain pummel the park. It slapped the overflowing Turtle Pond, once an algae-rich pool of shimmering green, now a muddy black hole. The sky above was ominously overcast, which was to say, normal. No blue in the sky meant no blue in the water. For two hours a day, some ambient light seeped through the tumultuous cloud cover, enough so that visibility improved to a point where he could see the rooftops of the city around him and the Dagobah-like swamp that the park had become. The solar-powered park lamps could not soak up enough juice in that time to illuminate the twenty-two hours of darkness, their light fading soon after the vampires returned from their retreat beneath ground and into the shadows.
Zack had grown—and grown strong—in this past year; his voice had started changing a few months ago, his jawline becoming defined and his torso elongating seemingly overnight. His strong legs carried him up, climbing the near staircase, a skinny iron spiral leading to the Henry Luce Nature Observatory on the second floor. Along the walls and beneath glass tables remained displays of animal skeletons, bird feathers, and papier-mache birds set in plywood trees. Central Park had once been one of the richest bird-watching areas in the United States, but the climate change had ended that, probably forever. In the first weeks following the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions triggered by nuclear plant meltdowns and warhead detonations, the dark sky had hung thick with birds. Shrieks and calls all night. Mass bird deaths, winged corpses falling from the sky along with heavy black hail. As chaotic and desperate in the air as it was for humans on the ground. Now there were no longer any warmer southern skies to migrate to. For days, the ground had been literally covered with flapping, blackened wings. Rats feasted on the fallen voraciously. Agonized chirping and hooting punctuated the rhythm of the falling hail.
But now, the park was still and quiet when there was no rain, its lakes empty of waterfowl. A few grimy bones and feather strands melded in the mulch and the mud covering the soil and pavement. Ragged, mangy squirrels occasionally darted up trees, but their population in the park was way down. Zack looked out through one of the telescopes—he had jammed a quarter-sized stone into the pay slot so that the telescope operated without money—and his field of vision disappeared in the fog and the murky rain.
The castle had been home to a functioning meteorological station before the vampires came. Most of the equipment remained on the peaked tower roof, as well as inside the fenced compound south of the castle. New York City radio stations used to give the weather with, “The temperature in Central Park is… ,” and the number they called was a reading taken from the turret observatory. It was July now, maybe August, what used to be known as the “dog days” of summer, and the highest temperature reading Zack had witnessed during one particularly balmy night was sixty-one degrees Fahrenheit, sixteen degrees Celsius.
August was Zack’s birth month. There was a two-year-old calendar in the back office, and he wished that he had thought to keep track of the passing days more carefully. Was he thirteen years old yet? He felt that he was. He decided that yes, he was. Officially a teenager.
Zack could still—barely—remember the time his father had taken him to the Central Park Zoo one sunny afternoon. They had visited this very nature exhibit inside the castle, then ate Italian ices out on the stone wall overlooking the meteorological equipment. Zack remembered confiding in his father about how kids in school sometimes made wisecracks about his last name, Goodweather, saying that Zack was going to be a weatherman when he grew up.
“
“
“
Remembering that was like recalling a dream now—if it had ever existed at all. His dad was long gone, dead along with Professor Setrakian and the rest. Once in a great while, he would hear an explosion somewhere in the
