LITMIR.BIZ

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of the glass was a pleasant sensation against his warm skin and the throbbing inside his skull.

      Knowing was the worst part. Awareness of insanity does not make one any less insane. Awareness of drowning does not make one any less of a drowning person—it only adds the burden of panic. Fear of the future, and the memory of a better, brighter past, were as much a source of Eph’s suffering as the vampire plague itself.

      He needed food, he needed protein. Nothing in this house; he had cleaned it out of food—and alcohol—many months ago. Even found a secret stash of Butterfingers in Matt’s closet.

      He backed off from the window, turning to face the room and the kitchen area beyond. He tried to remember how he got here and why. He saw slash marks in the wall where, using a kitchen knife, he had released his ex-wife’s boyfriend, decapitating the recently turned creature. That was back in the early days of slaying, when killing vampires was nearly as frightening as the notion of being turned by one. Even when the vampire in question had been his ex-wife’s boyfriend, a man poised to assume Eph’s place as the most important male figure in Zack’s life.

      But that gag reflex of human morality was long gone now. This was a changed world, and Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, once a prominent epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was a changed man. The virus of vampirism had colonized the human race. The plague had routed civilization in a coup d’état of astonishing virulence and violence. Insurgents—the willful, the powerful, and the strong—had all largely been destroyed or turned, leaving the meek, the defeated, and the fearful to do the Master’s bidding.

      Eph returned to his weapon bag. From a narrow, zippered pocket meant for batting gloves or sweatbands, he pulled out his creased Moleskine notebook. These days he remembered nothing without writing it down in his tattered diary. Everything went in there, from the transcendental to the banal. Everything must be recorded. This was his compulsion. His diary was essentially a long letter to his son, Zack. Leaving a record of his search for his only boy. Noting his observations and theories involving the vampire menace. And, as a scientist, simply recording data and phenomena.

      At the same time, it was also a helpful exercise for retaining some semblance of sanity.

      His handwriting had grown so cramped over the past two years, he could barely read his own entries. He recorded the date each day, because it was the only reliable method of tracking time without a proper calendar. Not that it mattered much—except for today.

      He scribbled down the date, and then his heart pushed a double beat. Of course. That was it. Why he was back here yet again.

      Today was Zack’s thirteenth birthday.

      YOU MAY NOT LIVE BEYOND THIS POINT warned the sign affixed to the upstairs door, written in Magic Marker, illustrated with gravestones and skeletons and crosses. It was drawn in a younger hand, done when Zack was seven or eight. Zack’s bedroom had been left essentially unchanged since the last time he’d occupied it, the same as the bedrooms of missing kids everywhere, a symbol of the stopping of time in the hearts of their parents.

      Eph kept returning to the bedroom like a diver returning again and again to a sunken shipwreck. A secret museum; a world preserved exactly as it had once been. A window directly into the past.

      Eph sat on the bed, feeling the mattress’s familiar give, hearing its reassuring creak. He had been through everything in this room, everything his boy used to touch in the life he used to lead. He curated this room now; he knew every toy, every figurine, every coin and shoestring, every T-shirt and book. He rejected the notion that he was wallowing. People don’t attend church or synagogue or mosque to wallow; they attend regularly as a gesture of faith. Zack’s bedroom was a temple now. Here, and here alone, Eph felt a sense of peace and an affirmation of inner resolve.

      Zack was still alive.

      This was not speculation. This was not blind hope.

      Eph knew that Zack was still alive and that his boy had not yet been turned.

      In past times—the way the world used to work—the parent of a missing child had resources to turn to. They had the comfort of the police investigative process, and the knowledge that hundreds, if not thousands, of people identified and sympathized with their plight and were actively assisting in the search.

      This abduction had occurred in a world without police, without human law. And Eph knew the identity of the being that had abducted Zack. The creature that was once his mother—yes. She committed the abduction. But her action was compelled by a larger entity.

      The king vampire, the Master.

      But Eph did not know why Zack had been taken. To hurt Eph, of course. And to satisfy his undead mother’s drive to revisit her “Dear Ones,” the beings she had loved in life. The insidious epidemiology of the virus spread in a vampiric perversion of human love. Turning them into fellow strigoi locked them to you forever, to an existence beyond the trials and tribulations of being human, devolving into only primal needs such as feeding, spreading, survival.

      That was why Kelly (the thing that was once Kelly) had become so psychically fixated on their boy, and how, despite Eph’s best efforts, she had been able to spirit him away.

      And it was precisely this same syndrome, this same obsessive passion for turning those closest to them, that confirmed to Eph that Zack had not been turned. For if the Master or Kelly had drunk the boy, then Zack would surely have returned for Eph as a vampire. Eph’s dread of this very occurrence—of having to face his undead son—had haunted him for two years now, at times sending him into a downward spiral of despair.

      But why? Why hadn’t the Master turned Zack? What was it holding him for? As a potential marker to be played against Eph and the resistance effort he was part of? Or for some other more sinister reason that Eph could not—dared not—fathom?

      Eph shuddered at the dilemma this would present to him. Where his son was concerned, he was vulnerable. Eph’s weakness was equal to his strength: he could not let go of his boy.

      Where was Zack at that very moment? Was he being held somewhere? Being tormented as his father’s proxy? Thoughts like these clawed at Eph’s mind.

      It was not knowing that unsettled him the most. The others—Fet, Nora, Gus—were able to commit fully to the resistance, all their energy and their focus, precisely because they had no hostages in this war.

      Visiting this room usually helped Eph feel less alone in this accursed world. But today it had the opposite effect. He had never felt so acutely alone as he felt right here, at this very moment.

      Eph thought again about Matt, his ex-wife’s boyfriend—the one he had slain downstairs—and how he used to obsess over that man’s growing influence on Zack’s upbringing. Now he had to think—daily, hourly—about what sort of hell his boy must be living in, under the rule of this actual monster . . .

      Overcome, feeling nauseous and sweaty, Eph dug out his diary and scratched down the same question that appeared throughout the notebook, like a koan:

      Where is Zack?

      As was his habit, he flipped back through the most recent entries. He spied a note about Nora and tried to make out his penmanship.

      “Morgue.” “Rendezvous.” “Move at sunlight.”

      Eph squinted, trying to remember—as a sense of anxiety spread through him.

      He was supposed to meet Nora and Mrs. Martinez at the old Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In Manhattan. Today.

      Shit.

      Eph grabbed his bag with a clank of the silver blades, throwing the straps over his back, sword handles behind his shoulders like leather-wrapped antennae. He looked around quickly on his way out, spying an old Transformers toy next to the CD player on Zack’s bureau. Sideswipe, if Eph remembered correctly from reading Zack’s books outlining the Autobots’ specs. A birthday present from Eph to Zack, just a few years before. One of Sideswipe’s legs dangled, snapped from overuse. Eph manipulated the arms, remembering the way Zack used to

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