The Strain. Book I of The Strain Trilogy

face, revealing a mad subcutaneous being, a scowling, deathlike mask shifting and writhing, looking indefinably, yet undoubtedly, evil.

Setrakian went and found, leaning against a corner workbench, a new ax with a glossy wooden handle and a shiny red-and-silver steel blade. He returned with it in his gnarled hands.

“Wait,” said Eph.

Setrakian said, “Please stand back, Doctor.”

“He’s just lying here,” said Eph.

“He will soon arise.” The old man gestured to the stone steps leading up to the open bulkhead doors, his eyes never leaving the man on the floor. “The girl is out there now. Feeding on others.” Setrakian readied the ax. “I don’t ask that you condone this, Doctor. All I ask right now is that you step aside.”

Eph saw the determination in Setrakian’s face and knew the old man would swing whether or not he was in his way. Eph stepped back. The blade was heavy for Setrakian’s size and age, the old man bringing both arms up over his head, the flat of the blade almost at the back of his waist.

Then his arms relaxed. His elbows lowered.

His head turned toward the open bulkhead doors, listening.

Eph heard it then too. The crunching of dry grass being flattened.

He imagined it was an animal, at first. But no. The crunching had the simple cadence of a biped.

Footsteps. Human — or once-human. Approaching.

Setrakian lowered the ax. “Stand by the door. Silently. Close it behind her once she enters.” He took the lamp back from Eph, pressing the ax into his hands in trade. “She must not escape.”

He withdrew to where his walking stick stood against the wall, on the opposite side of the door — then switched off the hot lamp, disappearing into total darkness.

Eph stood beside the open cellar door, his back to the wall, flat up against it. Nora was next to him, both of them shivering in the basement of a stranger’s house. The footsteps were closer, light and soft on the ground.

They stopped at the top of the steps. A faint shadow fell over the moonlight on the cellar floor: a head and shoulders.

The footsteps started coming down.

At the bottom, just before the door, they stopped. Eph — not three yards away, the ax hugged to his chest — was transfixed by the girl’s profile. Small and short, blond hair falling over the shoulders of a modest, shin-length nightgown. Barefoot, arms hanging straight and loose, standing with a peculiar stillness. Her chest rose and fell, but no steam came out of her mouth into the moonlight.

Later, he would learn much more. That her senses of hearing and smell had become greatly enhanced. That she could hear blood pulsing through his and Nora’s and the professor’s bodies, and could smell the carbon dioxide emitted by their breath. He would learn that sight was the least acute of her senses. She was now at the stage where she was losing her color vision, and yet her thermal imaging — the ability to “read” heat signatures as monochromatic halos — had not yet fully matured.

She took a few steps forward, moving out of the rectangle of faint moonlight and into the full darkness of the cellar. A ghost had entered the room. Eph should have shut the door, but the girl’s very presence here froze him.

She turned toward where Setrakian stood, fixing on his position. The old man switched on his lamp. The girl looked at it with no expression. Then he started toward her with it. She felt its heat, and turned toward the cellar door to escape.

Eph swung it shut. The heavy door slammed hard, reverberating throughout the entire foundation. Eph imagined that the house was going to fall in on them.

The young girl, Emma Gilbarton, saw them now. She was lit purple from the side, and Eph saw glowing traces of indigo along her lips and on her small, pretty chin. Odd, like a ravegoer wearing fluorescent paint.

He remembered: blood glows indigo under ultraviolet light.

Setrakian held the bright lamp in front of him, using it to drive her back. Her reaction was animalistic and confused, recoiling as though confronted with a flaming torch. Setrakian pursued her cruelly, backing her up against a wall. From deep in her throat came a low, guttural noise, a groan of distress.

“Doctor.” Setrakian was calling to Eph. “Doctor, come. Now!”

Eph went closer to the girl, taking the Luma lamp from Setrakian and handing him the ax — all the while keeping the light trained on the girl.

Setrakian stepped back. He tossed the ax away, sending it clanking along the hard floor. He held his tall walking stick in his gloved hands, gripping it beneath the wolf’s-head handle. With one firm twist of his wrist, he separated the top handle from the rest.

From its wooden sheath, Setrakian withdrew a sword blade fashioned of silver.

“Hurry,” said Eph, watching the girl writhe against the wall, trapped there by the lamp’s killing rays.

The girl saw the old man’s blade, glowing nearly white, and something like fear came into her face. Then the fear went fierce.

“Hurry!” said Eph, wanting it to be over. The girl hissed and he saw the dark shade inside her, beneath her skin, a demon snarling to be let out.

Nora was watching the father, lying on the floor. His body began to stir, his eyes opening. “Professor?” said Nora.

But the old man was locked in on the girl.

Nora watched Gary Gilbarton sit up, then rise to his bare feet, a dead man standing in his pajamas, eyes open.

“Professor?” said Nora again, switching on her lamp.

The lamp crackled. She shook it, smacking the bottom, where the battery went. The purple light fizzled on, then off — then on again.

“Professor!” she yelled.

The fluttering lamplight had gotten Setrakian’s attention. He turned on the revenant man, who looked confused and unsteady on his feet. With skill rather than agility, Setrakian doubled Gilbarton up with jabbing thrusts to the gut and chest, opening white-bleeding wounds in his pajama top.

Eph, alone with the girl now, watching this demon assert itself inside her, and not knowing what was happening behind him, said, “Professor Setrakian!”

Setrakian directed thrusts at the father’s armpits in order to bring his hands down by his sides, then slashed at the tendons behind his knees, collapsing the revenant onto all fours. With Gilbarton’s head up and his neck extended, Setrakian raised his sword and uttered some words in a foreign language — like a solemn pronouncement — and then his blade sang through the man’s neck, separating his head from his trunk, the revenant’s lower quarters collapsing to the floor.

“Professor!” said Eph, pressing the lamplight on the girl, torturing her — a girl about Zack’s age, her wild eyes filling with indigo coloring — bloody tears — while the being inside her raged.

Her mouth opened as though to speak. Almost as though to sing. Her mouth kept opening and the thing emerged, the stinger from the soft palate beneath her tongue. The appendage swelled as the girl’s eyes changed from sad to hungry, almost glowing in anticipation.

The old man returned to her, sword first. “Back, strigoi!” he said.

The girl turned to the old man, her eyes still flaring. Setrakian’s silver blade was now slick with white blood. He intoned the same words as before, his sword poised two-handedly over one shoulder. Eph backed out of the way just as the blade swept through.

She had raised her hand in protest at the last moment, and the blade lifted it from her wrist before separating her head from her neck. The cut was clean and perfectly flat. White blood splattered against the wall — not in an arterial spray, but with more of a sickening splatch—and her body collapsed to the floor, head and hand dropping against it, the head tumbling away.

Setrakian lowered his sword and pulled the lamp from Eph’s hands, holding the fading beam close to the girl’s open neck wound, almost in a gesture of triumph. But triumph it was not: Eph saw things wriggling in the seeping pool of thick white blood.

The parasitic worms. They curled tight and went still when the light hit them. The old man was irradiating the scene.