The Fall

As she had feared, many passengers-some of them ticketed, some unticketed-did not make the train. After some trouble closing all the doors, those left behind began banging on the windows, while others went pleading to attendants who looked like they would rather be on the train themselves. Those that had been turned away looked like war-torn refugees, and Nora closed her eyes and said a brief prayer for them-and then another one for herself, for forgiveness, for putting her loved ones ahead of these strangers.

The silver train started to move west, toward the tunnels under the Hudson River, and the packed car broke out into applause. Nora watched the lights of the station slide away and disappear, and then they were rising through the underworld, toward the surface-like swimmers surfacing for much-needed breath.

She felt good inside the train, cutting through the darkness like a sword through a vampire. She looked down at her mother’s lined face, watching the woman’s eyes dip and flutter. Two minutes of rocking put her immediately to sleep.

They emerged from the station into the fallen night, running briefly aboveground before the tunnels underneath the Hudson River. As rain spit at the train’s windows, Nora gasped at what she saw. Glimpses of anarchy: cars in flames, distant blazes, people fighting under strings of black rain. People running through the streets-were they being chased? Hunted? Were they even people at all? Maybe they were the ones doing the hunting.

She checked Zack, finding him focused on his iPod display. Nora saw, in his concentration, the father in the son. Nora loved Eph, and believed she could love Zack-even though she still knew so little about him. Eph and his boy were similar in so many ways, beyond appearance. She and Zack would have plenty of time to get to know each other once they reached the isolated camp.

She looked back out at the night, the darkness, and the power outages broken here and there by headlights, occasional bursts of generator-powered illumination. Light equaled hope. The land on either side began to give way, the city starting to retreat. Nora pressed against the window to chart their progress, to gauge how long it would be until they were through the next tunnel and clear of New York.

That was when she saw, standing on the top corner of a low wall, a figure outlined against a spray of upturned light. Something about this apparition made Nora quiver, a premonition of evil. She could not take her eyes off the figure as the train approached… and the figure began to raise its arm.

It was pointing at the train. Not just at the train, it seemed-but directly at Nora.

The train slowed as it passed, or maybe that was only how it seemed to Nora, her sense of time and motion bent by terror.

Smiling, backlit in the rain, hair sleek and dirty, mouth horribly distended and red eyes ablaze-Kelly Goodweather stared at Nora Martinez.

Their eyes locked as the train rolled past. Kelly’s finger followed Nora.

Nora pressed her forehead against the glass, sickened by the sight of the vampire, and yet knowing what Kelly was about to do.

Kelly jumped at the last moment, leaping with preternatural animal grace, disappearing from Nora’s sight as she latched on to the train.

The Flatlands

SETRAKIAN WORKED QUICKLY, hearing Fet’s van arrive at the back of the shop. He flipped madly through the pages of the old volume on the table, this one the third volume of the French edition of Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs, published by Berthelot and Ruelle in Paris in 1888, his eyes going back and forth between its engraved pages and the sheets of symbols he had copied from the Lumen. He studied one symbol in particular. He finally located the engraving, his hands and eyes stopping for a moment.

A six-winged angel, wearing a crown of thorns, with a face both blind and mouth-less-but with multiple mouths festooning each of its wings. At its feet was a familiar symbol-a crescent moon-and a single word.

“Argentum,” read Setrakian. He gripped the yellowing page reverently-and then tore the engraving from its old binding, jamming it inside the pages of his notebook, just as Fet opened the door.

Fet was back before sundown. He was certain he had not been found or traced by the vampire brood, which would lead the Master straight back to Setrakian.