The Strain. Book I of The Strain Trilogy

Two uniformed cops lay on his kitchen floor, against the wall.

A droning started inside the apartment. Quickly rising to something like a scream, like a chorus of agony.

His apartment door slammed shut. Eph whipped around to the closed door.

Two men stood there. Two beings. Two vampires.

Eph saw this at once. Their posture, their pallor.

One of them he did not know. The other one he recognized as the survivor Bolivar. Looking very dead, and very dangerous, and very hungry.

Then Eph sensed an even greater danger in the room. For these two revenants were not the source of the drone. Turning his head back toward the main room took an eternity and it took only one second.

A huge being wearing a long, dark cloak. Its height taking up all of the apartment, to the ceiling and more, its neck bent so that it was looking down at Eph.

Its face…

Eph grew dizzy as the being’s superhuman height made the room seem small, made him feel small. The sight weakened his legs, even as he turned to race toward the door to the hallway.

Now the being was in front of him, between him and the door, blocking the only exit. As though Eph hadn’t actually turned but the floor itself had rotated. The other two normal, man-size vampires flanked him on either side.

The being was closer now. Looming over Eph. Looking down.

Eph dropped to his knees. Simply being in the presence of this giant creature was paralyzing, no different than if Eph had been physically struck down.

Hmmmmmmmmmm.

Eph felt this. The way you feel live music in your chest. A hum rumbling in his brain. He averted his eyes, to the floor. He was crippled by fear. He did not want to see its face again.

Look at me.

At first Eph believed that this thing was strangling him with its mind. But his breathlessness was the result of pure terror, a panic of his very soul.

He raised his eyes just a bit. Trembling, he saw the hem of the Master’s robe, up to the hands at the end of the sleeves. They were revoltingly colorless and nail-less, and inhumanly large. The fingers were of uniform length, all oversize except for the middle finger, which was even longer and thicker than the rest — and hooked at the end like a talon.

The Master. Here for him. To turn him.

Look at me, pig.

Eph did, raising his head as though a hand gripped his chin.

The Master looked down at him from where his head bent beneath the ceiling. It gripped the sides of its hood with its huge hands and pulled it back off its skull. The head was hairless and colorless. Its eyes, lips, and mouth were all without hue, worn and washed out, like threadbare linen. Its nose was worn back like that of a weathered statue, a mere bump made of two black holes. Its throat throbbed in a hungry pantomime of breathing. Its skin was so pale that it was translucent. Visible beneath the flesh, like a blurry map to an ancient, ruined land, were veins that no longer carried blood. Veins that pulsed with red. The circulating blood worms. Capillary parasites coursing beneath the Master’s pellucid flesh.

This is a reckoning.

The voice rode into Eph’s head on a roar of terror. He felt himself going slack. Everything muddled and dimming.

I have your pig wife. Soon your pig son.

Eph’s head was swollen to bursting with disgust and anger. It felt like a balloon forcing itself to pop. He slid one foot flat beneath him. He staggered to his feet before this immense demon.

I will take everything from you and leave nothing. That is my way.

The Master reached forward in a fast, blurry motion. Eph felt, as an anesthetized patient feels the pressure of the dentist’s drill, a gripping sensation on the top of his head, and then his feet were off the floor. He swung his arms and kicked out his legs. The Master palmed his head like a basketball, lifting him one-handedly toward the ceiling. To eye level, near enough to glimpse the blood worms wriggling like plague spermatozoa.

I am the occultation and the eclipse.

Lifting Eph to his mouth like a fat grape. The mouth was dark inside, his throat a barren cavern, a direct route to hell. Eph, his body swinging from his neck, was nearly out of his mind. He could feel the long middle talon against the back of his neck, its pressure at the top of his spine. The Master tipped Eph’s head back as though cracking open the pop top of a beer can.

I am a drinker of men.

A wet, crunching sound, and then the Master’s mouth began to open. His jaw retracted and his tongue curled up and back and his hideous stinger emerged.

Eph roared, defiantly blocking access to his neck with his arms, howling into the Master’s savage face.

And then, something…not Eph’s howl…something made the Master’s great head turn ever so slightly.

The nostrils in his face pulsed, the sniffing of a demon without breath.

His onyx eyes turned back to Eph. Staring at him like two dead spheres. Glaring at Eph — as though Eph had somehow dared to deceive the Master.

Not alone.

At that moment, coming up the stairs of Eph’s apartment building two steps behind Fet, Setrakian gripped the handrail suddenly, his shoulder slumping against the wall. Pain burst in his head like a blinding aneurism, and a voice — vile and gloating and blasphemous — boomed like a bomb exploding inside a crowded symphony hall.

SETRAKIAN.

Fet stopped and looked back, but through wincing eyes Setrakian waved him ahead. A whisper was all he could muster: “He is here.”

Nora’s eyes darkened. Fet’s boots pounded as he ran up to the landing. Nora helped Setrakian, pulling him after Fet, to the door, inside the apartment.

Fet hit the first body he encountered, an open field tackle, going in low and getting grabbed as he did, falling and rolling over. He popped up fast in a fighting stance and faced his opponent, seeing the vampire’s face, not grinning, but with his mouth spread like a grin, ready to feed.

Then Fet saw the giant being across the room. The Master, with Eph in his grip. Monstrous. Mesmerizing.

The nearer vampire came at him and drove Fet back into the kitchen, against the refrigerator door.

Nora rushed inside, managing to switch on her Luma lamp just as the vampire Bolivar lunged for her. He hissed a breathless scream and reeled backward. Then Nora saw the Master, the back of his down-turned head against the ceiling. She saw Eph dangling by his head in the monster’s grip. “Eph!”

Setrakian entered with his long sword bared. He froze for a moment when he saw the Master, the giant, the demon. Here in front of him now after so many years.

Setrakian brandished his silver sword. Nora, closing from a different angle, drove Bolivar back toward the front wall of the apartment. The Master was cornered. Attacking Eph in such a small space had been a cardinal mistake.

Setrakian’s heart pounded in his chest as he turned the blade point out and ran it at the demon.

The droning inside the apartment expanded suddenly, an explosion of noise inside his head. And Nora’s, and Fet’s, and Eph’s. An incapacitating shockwave of sound that made the old man shrink back for a moment — just long enough.

He saw a black grin snake across the Master’s face. The giant vampire threw the flailing Eph across the room, his body slamming into the far wall and dropping hard to the floor. The Master hooked Bolivar by the shoulder with one of his long, taloned hands — and lunged at the picture window overlooking Worth Street.

A splintering crash shuddered the building as the Master escaped in a rain of glass.

Setrakian ran toward the sudden breeze, to the frame of the window edged with jagged shards. Three stories