“Okay,” said Creem. “Talk fast, Mex.”
“I’ll talk slow. You listen good.”
He laid it out for them. The turf battle between the Ancients and the rogue Master.
“You been smoking,” said Creem.
But Gus saw the fire in his eyes. He saw the fuse of excitement already burning. “What I am offering you is more money than you could ever clear in the powder trade. The opportunity to kill and maim at will—and never see jail for it. I am offering you a once-in-a-lifetime chance to kick unlimited ass in five boroughs. And—do the job right, we’re all set for life.”
“And if we don’t do the job right?”
“Then I don’t see how money’s gonna mean shit anyway. But at least you’ll have gotten your fucking rocks off, ’cause, if nothing else, this is about going out with a bang, know what I mean?”
Creem said, “Fuck, you’re a little too good to be true. I need to see some green first.”
Gus chuckled. “Tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna show you three colors, Creem. Silver, green, and white.”
He raised his hand in signal to the hooded driver. The driver went to the trunk, popped it open, and retrieved two bags. He ported them through the fence opening to the meeting place, and set them down.
One was a large black duffel bag, the other a moderately sized, two-handled leather clutch.
“Who your homie?” said Creem. The driver was big, wearing heavy Doc Martens, blue jeans, and the large hoodie. Creem couldn’t see the driver’s face under the hood, but it was obvious this close that this guy was all wrong.
“They call him Mr. Quinlan,” said Gus.
A scream arose from the other end of the park—a man’s scream, more terrible to the ears than a woman’s scream. The others turned.
Gus said, “Let’s hurry. First—the silver.”
He knelt and drew the zipper across the duffel. There wasn’t much light. Gus pulled out the long gun and felt the Sapphires reach for theirs. Gus flipped the switch on the barrel-mounted lamp, thinking it was a normal incandescent bulb, but it was ultraviolet. Of course.
He used the inky-purple light to show the rest of the weapons. A crossbow, its bolt load tipped with a silver impact charge. A flat, fan-shaped silver blade with a curved wooden handle. A sword fashioned like a wide-bladed scimitar with a generous curve and a rugged, leather-bound handle.
Gus said, “You like silver, Creem, don’t you?”
The exotic-looking weaponry piqued Creem’s interest. But he was still wary of the driver, Quinlan. “All right. What about the green?
Quinlan opened the handles of the leather bag. Filled with bundles of cash, anti-counterfeiting threads glowing under the indigo eye of Gus’s UV light.
Creem started to reach into the bag—then stopped. He noticed Quinlan’s hands gripping the bag handles. Most of his fingernails were gone, his flesh entirely smooth. But the fucked-up thing was his middle fingers. Twice as long as the rest of the digits, and crooked at the end—so much so that the tip curled around his palm to the side of his hand.
Another scream split the night, followed by a kind of growl. Quinlan closed the bag, looking forward into the trees. He handed the money bag to Gus, trading him for the long gun. Then, with unbelievable power and speed, he went sprinting into the trees.
Creem said, “What the…?”
If there was a path, this Quinlan ignored it. The gangsters heard branches cracking.
Gus slung the weapons bag onto his shoulder. “Come on. You don’t want to miss this.”
He was easy to follow, because Quinlan had cleared a path of downed branches, pointing the way straight ahead, weaving only for tree trunks. They hustled along, coming upon Quinlan in a clearing on the other side, finding him standing quietly with the gun cradled against his chest.
His hood had fallen back. Creem, huffing, saw the driver’s smooth bald head from behind. In the darkness, it looked like the guy had no ears. Creem came around to see his face better—and the human tank shivered like a little flower in a storm.
The thing called Quinlan had no ears and barely any nose left. A thick throat. Translucent skin, nearly iridescent. And blood-red eyes—the brightest eyes Creem had ever seen—set deep within his pale, smooth head.
Just then a figure broke from the upper branches, dropping to the ground with ease and loping across the clearing. Quinlan sprinted out to intercept it like a cougar tracking a gazelle. They collided, Quinlan dropping his shoulder for an open-field hit.
The figure went down sprawling with a squeal, rolling hard—before popping right back up.
In an instant, Quinlan turned the barrel light on the figure. The figure hissed and flailed back, the torture in its face evident even from that distance. Then Quinlan pulled the trigger. An exploding cone of bright silver buckshot obliterated the figure’s head.
Only—the figure didn’t die like a man dies. A white substance geysered out from its neck trunk and it tucked in its arms and collapsed to the ground.
Quinlan turned his head fast—even before the next figure darted from the trees. A female this time, racing away from Quinlan, toward the others. At the others. Gus pulled the scimitar from the bag. The female—dressed in tatters like the filthiest crack whore you’ve ever seen, except that she was nimble and her eyes shone red—reeled back from the sight of the weapon, but too late. With a single, clean move, Gus connected with the tops of her shoulders and her neck, her head falling one way, her body the other. When it all settled to the ground, a pasty-white liquid oozed out of her wounds.
“And there’s the white,” Gus said.
Quinlan returned to them, pumping the long gun and raising his thick cotton hood back over his head.
“Okay, yeah,” said Creem, dancing from side to side like a kid who had to go to the bathroom on Christmas morning. “Yeah, I’d say we’re fucking in.”
The Flatlands
USING A STRAIGHT razor taken from the pawnshop, Eph shaved half his face before losing interest. He zoned out, staring into the mirror over the sink of milky water, his right cheek still covered in foam.
He was thinking of the book—the Occido Lumen—and how everything was going against him. Palmer and his fortune. Blocking every move they could make. What would become of them—of Zack—if he failed?
The edge of the razor drew blood. A thin nick turning red and flowing. He looked at the blade with the smear of blood on the steel, and drifted back eleven years to Zack’s birth.
Following one miscarriage and a stillbirth at twenty-nine weeks, Kelly had been on two months’ bed rest with Zack before going into labor. She had a specific birth plan going in: no epidural or drugs of any kind, no cesarean section. Ten hours later, there was little progression. Her doctor suggested Pitocin in order to speed things up, but Kelly declined, sticking to her plan. Eight hours of labor later, she relented, and the Pitocin drip was begun. Two hours after that, after enduring almost a full day of painful contractions, she finally consented to an epidural. The Pitocin dose was gradually increased until it was as high as the baby’s heart rate would allow.
At the twenty-seventh hour, her doctor offered her the option of a cesarean, but Kelly refused. Having given in on every other point, she held out for natural birth. The fetus’s heart monitor showed that it was doing okay, her cervix had dilated to eight centimeters, and Kelly was intent on pushing her baby out into the world.
But five hours later, despite a vigorous belly-massage from a veteran nurse, the baby remained stubbornly sideways, and Kelly’s cervix was stuck at eight. The pain of the contractions was registering now, despite the successful epidural. Kelly’s doctor rolled a stool over to her bedside, again offered her a cesarean. This time Kelly accepted.
Eph gowned up and accompanied her to the glowing white operating room through the double doors at the end of the hall. The fetal heart monitor reassured him with its swift, metronomic tock-tock-tock. The attending nurse swabbed Kelly’s swollen belly with yello
w-brown antiseptic, and then the obstetrician sliced left to right low on her abdomen with confident, broad strokes: the fascia was parted, then the twin vertical belts of the beefy abdominal muscle, and then the thin peritoneum membrane, revealing the thick, plum wall of the uterus. The surgeon switched to bandage scissors so as to minimize any risk of lacerating the fetus, and made the final incision.
Gloved hands reached in and pulled out a brand-new human being—but Zack was not yet born. He was “in the caul,” as they say; that is, still surrounded by the filmy, intact amniotic sac. It ballooned like a bubble, an opaque membrane encircling the fetal infant like a nylon egg. Zack was still, in that moment, feeding off Kelly, still receiving nutrients and oxygen through the umbilical cord. The obstetrician and attending nurses worked to retain their professional poise, but Kelly and Eph both felt their apparent alarm. Only later would Eph learn that caul babies occur in fewer than one in a thousand births, with the number rising into the tens of thousands for babies not born prematurely.
This strange moment lingered, the unborn baby still tethered to his exhausted mother, delivered and yet unborn. Then the membrane spontaneously ruptured, peeling back from Zack’s head to reveal his glistening face. Another moment of suspended time… and then he cried out, and was placed dripping onto Kelly’s chest.
Tension lingered in the operating room, mixed with obvious joy, Kelly pulling at Zack’s feet and hands to count the digits. She searched him thoroughly for signs of deformity, and found only joy. He was eight pounds even, bald as a lump of bread dough and just as pale. His Apgar score was eight after two minutes, nine after five minutes.
Healthy baby.
Kelly, however, experienced a big letdown postpartum. Nothing as deep and debilitating as true depression, but a dark funk nonetheless. The marathon labor was so debilitating that her milk did not come in, which, combined with her abandoned birth plan, left her feeling like a failure. At one point, Kelly told Eph that she felt she had let him down, which mystified him. She felt corrupted inside. Everything in life had come so easily, to both of them, before this.
Once she got better—once she embraced the golden boy who was her newborn son—she never let Zack go. She became, for a time, obsessed with the caul birth, researching its significance. Some sources claimed the oddity was an omen of good luck, even forecasting greatness. Other legends indicated that caul-bearers, as they were known, were clairvoyant, would never drown, and had been marked by angels with shielded souls. She looked for meaning in literature, citing various fictional caul-bearers, such as David Copperfield and the little boy in The Shining. Famous men in real life, such as Sigmund Freud, Lord Byron, and Napoleon Bonaparte. In time, she came to discount all negative associations—in fact, in certain European countries it was said that a child born with a caul might be cursed—countering her own unfortunate feelings of inadequacy with the determination that her boy, this creation of hers, was exceptional.
It was these impulses that, over time, poisoned her relationship with Eph, leading to a divorce he never wanted, and the ensuing custody battle: a battle that had, since her turning, morphed into a life-or-death struggle. Kelly had decided that if she couldn’t be perfect for so exacting a man, then she would be nothing to him. And so it was that Eph’s personal downfall—his drinking—secretly thrilled her at the same time as it terrified her. Kelly’s awful wish had come true. For it showed that even Ephraim Goodweather could not live up to his own exacting standards.
Eph smiled derisively at his half-shaven self in the mirror. He reached for his bottle of apricot schnapps and toasted his fucking perfection, downing two sweetly harsh gulps.
“You don’t need to do that.”
Nora had entered, easing the bathroom door shut behind her. She was barefoot, having changed into fresh jeans and a loose T-shirt, her dark hair clipped up in back of her head.
Eph addressed her mirror reflection. “We’re outmoded, you know. Our time has passed. The twentieth century was viruses. The twenty-first? Vampires.” He drank again, as proof that he was all right with it, and demonstrating that no rational argument could dissuade him. “I don’t get how you don’t drink. This is exactly what booze was made for. The only way to swallow this new reality is by chasing it with some of the good stuff.” Another drink, then looked again at the label. “If only I had some good stuff.”
“I don’t like you like this.”
“I am what experts refer to as a ’high-functioning alcoholic’ Or I could go around hiding it, if you prefer.”
She crossed her arms, leaning sideways against the wall, staring at his back and knowing she was getting nowhere. “It’s only a matter of time, you know. Before Kelly’s blood-yearning leads her back here, to Zack. And that means, through her, the Master. Leading him straight to Setrakian.”
If the bottle had been empty, Eph might have whipped it against the wall. “It’s fucking insanity. But it’s real. I’ve never had a nightmare that’s even come close to this.”
“I’m saying I think you need to get Zack away from here.”
Eph nodded, both hands gripping the edge of the sink. “I know. I’ve been slowly coming around to that determination myself.”
“And I think you need to go with him.”
Eph considered it a moment, he truly did, before turning from the mirror to face her. “Is this like when the first lieutenant informs the captain he’s not fit for duty?”
Nora said, “This is like when someone cares enough for you that they are afraid you will hurt yourself. It’s best for him—and better for you.”
That disarmed him. “I can’t leave you here in my place, Nora. We both know the city is falling. New York City is over. Better it falls on me than on you.”
“That’s bullshit barroom talk.”
“You are right about one thing. With Zack here, I can’t fully commit myself to this fight. He needs to go. I need to know he’s out of here, he’s safe. There is this place, in Vermont—”
“I am not leaving.”
Eph took a breath. “Just listen.”
“I am not leaving, Eph. You think you’re doing the chivalrous thing, when, in fact, you are insulting me. This is my city more than it is yours. Zack is a great kid, you know I think that, but I am not here to do the women’s work and watch the children and lay out your clothes. I am a medical scientist just like you.”
“I know all that, believe me. I was thinking about your mother.”
That stopped her in her tracks. Nora’s lips remained parted, ready to fire back, but his words had stolen the breath from her mouth.
“I know she’s not well,” he went on. “She’s in early-phase dementia, and I know she weighs on your mind constantly, same as Zack does on mine. This is your chance to get her out too. I’m trying to tell you that Kelly’s folks had this place on a mountain in Vermont—”
“I can do more good here.”
“Can you, though? I mean—can I? I don’t even know. What’s most important now? Survival, I’d say. That’s the absolute best we can hope for. At least this way, one of us will be safe. And I know it’s not what you want. And I know it’s a ton to ask of you. You’re right—were this a normal viral pandemic, you and I would be the most essential people in this city. We would be at the crux of this thing—for all the right reasons. As it is now, this strain has leapfrogged our expertise entirely. The world doesn’t need us anymore, Nora. It doesn’t need doctors or scientists. It needs exorcists. It needs Abraham Setrakian.” Eph crossed to her. “I know just enough to be dangerous. And so—dangerous I must be.”
That brought her forward from the wall. “What exactly is that supposed to mean?”
“I’m expendable. Or, at least, as expendable as the next man. Unless the next man in question is an aging pawnbroker with a bad heart. Hell—Fet brings much more to this fight than I do now. He’s more valuable to the old man than I am.”
“I don’t like the way you’re talking.”
He was impatien
t that she accept the realities as he understood them. That he make her understand. “I want to fight. I want to give it my all. But I can’t, not with Kelly coming after the people I care about most. I need to know that my Dear Ones are safe. That means Zack. And that means you.”
He reached for her hand. Their fingers intertwined. The sensation was profound, and it occurred to Eph: how many days now had it been since he had experienced a simple physical contact with another person?
“What is it you plan to do?” asked Nora.
He knit his fingers more firmly into hers, exploring the fit as he reaffirmed the plan taking form in his mind. Dangerous and desperate, but effective. Maybe a game-changer.
He answered, “Simply to be useful.”
He turned away, trying to reach back for the bottle on the sink edge, but she gripped his arm and pulled him back toward her. “Leave it there,” she said. “Please.” Her tea-brown eyes were so beautiful, so sad—so human. “You don’t need it.”
“But I want it. And it wants me.”
He wanted to turn but she held him fast. “Kelly couldn’t get you to stop?”
Eph thought about that. “You know, I’m not sure she ever really tried.”
Nora reached for his face, her hand touching first his bristly, unshaven cheek, then the smooth side, stroking it gently with the backs of her fingers. The contact melted them both.
“I could make you stop,” she said, very close to his face.
She kissed the rough side first. Then he met her lips and experienced a surge of hope and passion so powerful, it was like a first-time embrace. Everything about their previous two sexual encounters came swarming back to him in a hot, anticipatory rush, and yet it was the fundamental human contact that supercharged the exchange. That which had been missing was now craved.
Exhausted, strung out, and utterly unprepared, they clung to each other as Eph pressed Nora back against the tile wall, his hands wanting only her flesh. In the face of such terror and dehumanization, human passion itself was an act of defiance.
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