The Night Eternal

in his life was gone. This was all Zack had left: a broken doll to keep him company.

Zack felt a warmth fill the breezy castle, as though left by a being in swift motion. The Master had returned, a slight murmur entering Zack’s head. He watched his mother ascend the stairs to the upper floors and followed her, wanting to see what the commotion was about.

The Master

THE MASTER HAD once understood the voice of God. It once held it within itself, and in a way, it retained a pale imitation of that state of grace. It was, after all, a being of one mind and many eyes, seeing all at once, processing it all, experiencing the many voices of its subjects. And like God’s, the Master’s voice was a concert of flow and contradiction—it carried the breeze and the hurricane, the lull and the thunder, rising and fading with dusk and dawn…

But the scale of God’s voice encompassed it all—not earth, not the continents, but the whole world. And the Master could only witness it but no longer could make sense of it as it was able to once upon a time in the origin of it all.

This is, it thought, for the millionth time, what it is to fall from grace…

And yet, there the Master stood: monitoring the planet through the observations of its brood. Multiple sources of input, one central intelligence. The Master’s mind casting a net of surveillance over the globe. Squeezing planet Earth in a fist of a thousand fingers.

Goodweather had just released seventeen serfs in the explosion of the hospital building. Seventeen lost, their number soon to be replaced; the arithmetic of infection was of paramount importance to the Master.

The feelers remained out searching the surrounding blocks for the fugitive doctor, seeking his psychic scent. Thus far, nothing. The Master’s ultimate victory was assured, the great chess match all but over, except that its opponent obstinately refused to concede defeat—leaving to the Master the drudgery of chasing the last remaining piece around the board.

That final piece was not, in fact, Goodweather, but instead the Occido Lumen, the lone extant edition of the cursed text. In detailing the mysterious origin of the Master and the Ancients, the book also contained an indication for bringing about the Master’s demise—the location of its site of origin—if one knew where to look.

Fortunately, the current possessors of the book were illiterate cattle. The tome had been stolen at auction by the old professor Abraham Setrakian, at that time the lone human on earth with the knowledge necessary to decrypt the tome and its arcane secrets. However, the old professor had little time to review the Lumen before his death. And in the brief time the Master and Setrakian were linked through possession—in those precious moments between the old professor’s turning and his destruction—the Master learned, through their shared intelligence, every bit of knowledge the professor had gleaned from the silver-bound volume.

Everything—and yet it was not enough. The location of the Master’s origin—the fabled “Black Site”—was still unknown to Setrakian at the time of his turning. This was frustrating, but it also proved that his loyal band of sympathizers did not know the location either. Setrakian’s knowledge of folklore and the history of the dark clans was unsurpassed among humans and, like a snuffed flame, had died with him.

The Master was confident that even with the cursed book in hand, Setrakian’s followers could not decode the book’s mystery. But the Master needed the coordinates itself, in order to guarantee its safety for eternity. Only a fool leaves anything of importance to chance.

In that moment of possession, of unique psychological intimacy with Setrakian, the Master had also learned the identities of Setrakian’s co-conspirators. The Ukrainian, Vasiliy Fet. Nora Martinez and Augustin Elizalde.

But none was more compelling to the Master than the one whose identity the Master had already known: Dr. Ephraim Goodweather. What the Master had not known, and what came as a surprise, was that Setrakian considered Goodweather the strongest link among them. Even given Goodweather’s obvious vulnerabilities—his temperament, and the loss of his former wife and his son—Setrakian believed him to be absolutely incorruptible.

The Master was not a being prone to surprise. Existing for centuries tended to dull revelations, but this one nagged at the Master. How could it be? Reluctantly, the Master admitted to having a high opinion of Setrakian’s judgment—for a human. As with the Lumen, the Master’s interest in Goodweather had begun as a mere distraction.

The distraction had become a pursuit.

The pursuit was now an obsession. All humans broke at the end. Sometimes it took mere minutes, sometimes days, sometimes decades, but the Master always won at the end. This was endurance chess. His time frame was much broader than theirs, his mind far more trained—and void of delusions or hopes.

This was what had led the Master to Goodweather’s progeny. This was the original reason the Master had not turned the boy. The reason the Master assuaged the discomfort in the boy’s lungs with a drop or so of its precious blood every week—which also had the effect of enabling the Master to peer into the boy’s warm and pliable mind.

The boy had responded to the Master’s power. And the Master used this, engaging the boy mentally. Subverting his naive ideas about divinity. After a period of fear and disgust, the boy, with assistance from the Master, had come to feel admiration and respect. His cloying emotions for his father had shrunk like an irradiated tumor. The boy’s young mind was an agreeable lump of dough, one the Master continued to knead.

Preparing it. To rise.

The Master normally met such subjects at the end of the corruption process. Here, the Master had the unusual opportunity to participate in the corruption of the son and surrogate of the allegedly incorruptible. The Master was able to experience this downfall directly through the boy, thanks to the bond of the blood feeding. The Master had felt the boy’s conflict when facing the snow leopard, felt his fear, felt his joy. Never had the Master wanted to keep anyone alive before; never had he wanted them to remain human. The Master had already decided: this was the next body to inhabit. With that in mind, the Master was essentially preparing young Zachary. It had learned never to take a body younger than age thirteen. Physically, the advantages included boundless energy, fresh joints, and supple muscles, requiring little maintenance. But the disadvantages were still those of taking a weaker body, structurally fragile and with limited strength. So, even though the Master no longer required extraordinary size and strength—as it did with Sardu, the giant body inside which it had traveled to New York, the host the Master had to shed after it was poisoned by Setrakian—it also did not require extraordinary physical appeal and seductiveness, as with Bolivar. It would wait… What the Master sought for the future was convenience.

The Master had been able to view itself through Zachary’s own eyes, which had been most illuminating. Bolivar’s body had served the Master ably, and it was interesting to note the boy’s response to his arresting appearance. He was, after all, a magnetic presence. A performer. A star. That, combined with the Master’s dark talents, proved irresistible to the young man.

And the same could be said in reverse. The Master found itself telling Zachary things, not out of rank affection but in the manner of an older self to a younger self. A dialogue like that was a rarity in its prolonged existence. After all, it had consorted for centuries with some of the most hardened and ruthless souls. Sided with them, molded them to its will. In a contest of brutality, he knew no equal.

But Zack’s energy was pure, his essence quite similar to his father’s. A perfect pool to study and taint. All this contributed to the Master’s curiosity about young Goodweather. The Master had, over the centuries, perfected the technique of reading humans, not only in nonverbal communication—known as a “tell”—but even in their omissions. A behaviorist can anticipate or detect a lie by the concert of micro-gestures that telegraphs it. The Master could anticipate a lie two beats before it even happened. Not that it cared, morally, one way or another. But to detect the truth or lie in a covenant was vital for it. It meant access or lack of it—cooperation or danger. Humans were insects to the Master and it an entomologist living among them. This discipline had lost all fascination for the Master thousands of years ago—until now. The more Zachary Goodweather tried to hide things, the more the Master was able to draw out of him—without the young man even knowing he was telling the Master everything it