The Night Eternal by Guillermo del Toro, Chuck Hogan Read Free Book Online Page A

himself, justifying plain abandonment.
    Still—he couldn’t understand it. He reread the other part. So he was a “risk.” He was “dangerous.” Unreliable. They seemed to think that they were carrying him. Part of him felt relief. Relief for Nora— Good for her— but most of him just throbbed with mounting rage. What was this? Was he jealous just because he couldn’t hold her anymore? God knew he was not exactly minding the store; was he angry because someone else had found his forgotten toy and now he wanted it back? He knew himself so little … Kelly’s mother used to tell him he was always ten minutes too late to all the major milestones of his life. Late for Zack’s birth, late for the wedding, late to save his marriage from falling apart. God knew he was late to save Zack or save the world, and now—now this …
    Nora? With Fet?
    She was gone. Why didn’t he do something before? Strangely, amid the pain and the sense of loss he also felt relief. He didn’t need to worry anymore—he didn’t need to compensate for his shortcomings, explain his absence, mollify Nora. But as that tenuous wave of relief was about to kick in, he turned around and caught himself in a mirror.
    He looked older. Much older than he should have. And dirty, almost like a hobo. His hair was plastered against his sweaty forehead and his clothes were layered with months of grime. His eyes were sunk and his cheeks jutted out, pulling the taut, thin skin surrounding them. No wonder, he thought. No wonder.
    He pulled himself back out of the chair in a daze. He walked down four flights of stairs and out of the medical examiner’s building through the pissing black rain to nearby Bellevue Hospital. He climbed in through a broken window and walked the dark and deserted halls, following signs for the emergency room. Bellevue’s ER was once a Level 1 trauma center, meaning it had housed a full range of specialists providing access to the best facilities.
    As well as the best drugs.
    He arrived at the nurses’ station and found the drug cabinet door torn off. The locked refrigerator had also been pried open and ransacked. No Percs, no Vikes, no Demerol. He pocketed some oxycodone and antianxiety meds in blister packs—self-diagnosing and self-medicating—tossing empty cartons over his shoulder. He popped two white oxys and dry-swallowed them—then froze.
    He had been moving so quickly and making so much noise that he had not heard the bare feet approaching. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement from across the nurses’ station and stood.
    Two strigoi, staring at him. Fully formed vampires, hairless and pale, unclothed. He saw the thickened arteries bulging through their necks, running down over their clavicles into their chests like throbbing tree roots. One had once been a male human (larger body) and the other had been a female (breasts shriveled and pale).
    The other distinguishing trait of these matured vampires was their loose, floppy wattle. Disgusting, stretched-out flesh that hung like a turkey neck, pale red when in need of nourishment, flushing crimson after feeding. The wattles of these strigoi hung pale and scrotumlike, swaying with a turn of their heads. A sign of rank, and the mark of an experienced hunter.
    Were these the same two that had accosted Nora and her mother or otherwise rousted them from the OCME? There was no way to confirm it, but something told Eph this was the case—which, if true, meant that Nora might have gotten away clean after all.
    He saw what he thought was a glimmer of recognition in their otherwise blank, red eyes. Normally there was no spark or hint of a brain at work behind a vampire’s gaze—but Eph had seen this look before and knew that he had been recognized and identified. Their surrogate eyes had communicated their find to the Master, whose presence came flooding into their brains with the force of possession. The horde would be there in a matter of minutes.
    “ Doctor Goodweather