The Fall

THE BLOCK WAS already burning when Gus arrived with the Sapphires and Angel.

They saw smoke from the bridge on the way over: thick and black, rising in various spots uptown and down, Harlem and the Lower East Side and points between. As though the city had seen a coordinated military attack.

The morning sun was overhead, the city quiet. They shot up Riverside Drive, weaving around abandoned vehicles. Seeing smoke rising from city blocks was like watching a person bleed. Gus felt alternately helpless and anxious-the city was falling to shit all around him, and time was of the essence.

Creem and the other Jersey punks looked upon Manhattan burning with a kind of satisfaction. To them it was like watching a disaster movie. But to Gus, this was like watching his turf going up in flames.

The block they were headed to was the epicenter of the biggest uptown blaze: all the streets surrounding the pawnshop were blacked out by the thick veil of smoke, turning day into a strange, storm-like night.

“Those motherfuckers,” said Gus. “They blocked out the sun.”

The entire side of the street raged in flames-except the pawnshop on the corner. Its large front windows were shattered, security grates pulled off the building overhang and lying twisted on the sidewalk.

The rest of the city was quieter than a cold Christmas morning, but this block-the 118th Street intersection-was, at that dark daylight hour, teeming with vamps laying siege to the pawnshop.

They were after the old man.

Inside the apartment above the shop, Gabriel Bolivar moved from room to room. Silver-backed mirrors covered the walls instead of pictures, as though some strange spell had converted artwork into glass. The former rock star’s blurry reflection moved with him from room to room in his search for the old man Setrakian and his accomplices.

Bolivar stopped in the room the mother of the boy had tried to enter-the wall boarded behind an iron cage.

No one.

It looked as though they had cleared out. Bolivar wished the mother had accompanied them here. Her blood link to the boy would have proved valuable. But the Master had tasked Bolivar, and its will would be done.

The job of bloodhound instead fell to the feelers, the newly turned blind children. Bolivar came out to the kitchen to see one there, a boy with fully black eyes, crouching down on all fours. He was “looking” out the window toward the street, using his extrasensory perception.

The basement? said Bolivar.

No one, said the boy.

But Bolivar needed to see it for himself, needed to be sure, moving past him to the stairs. Bolivar rode the spiral railing down on his hands and bare feet, down one floor to the street level, where the other feelers had retreated to the shop-then continuing his descent to the basement and a locked door.

Bolivar’s soldiers were already there, in answer to his telepathic command. They tore at the locked door with powerful, oversize hands, digging into the iron-bolted frame with the hardened nails of their talon-like middle fingers until they gained purchase, then joined forces to rip the door back from its frame.

The first few to enter tripped the ultraviolet lamps surrounding the interior of the doorway, the electric indigo rays cooking their virus-rich bodies, the vampires dissipating with screams and clouds of dust. The rest were repulsed by the light, pushed backward against the spiral staircase, shading their eyes. They were unable to see through the doorway.

Bolivar was the first to haul himself hand over hand up the staircase, ahead of the crush. The old man still could be inside there.

Bolivar had to find another way in.

He noticed then the feelers tensed on the floor, facing the smashed windows and the street beyond, like pointer dogs responding to a scent. The first among them-a girl in soiled briefs and an undershirt-snarled and then leaped through the jagged shards of glass to the street.

The little girl came right at Angel, loping on all fours with fawn-like grace. The old wrestler backed up into the street, wanting no part of her, but she had locked in on the biggest target and was set on taking him down. She sprang up from the road, black-eyed, open-mouthed-and Angel reverted into wrestler mode, handling her as though she were a challenger throwing herself at him from the top turnbuckle. He applied the Angel Kiss, his open-palm blow smacking the girl out of the air in mid-leap, sending her lithe little body flying a good dozen yards away, tumbling to the road.

Angel recoiled immediately. One of the great disappointments of his life was not knowing any of the children he had sired. She was a vampire, but she looked so human-a child, still-and he started toward her with his bare hand outstretched. She turned and hissed, her blind eyes like two black bird’s eggs, her stinger darting out at him, maybe three feet in length, considerably shorter than an adult vampire’s. The tip flailed before his eyes like a devil’s tail, and Angel was transfixed.