The Night Eternal

Eph looked at Nora. “I need a map.”

She ran off into the offices. They heard desk drawers slamming.

Eph just stood there, like a man recovering from an electric shock. “It was the sunlight,” he explained. “Reading the Lumen in natural sunlight. It was like the pages opened up for me. I saw it all… or would have, if I’d had more time. The original Native American name for this place was ‘Burned Earth.’ But their word for ‘burned’ is the same as ‘black.’ ”

Oscura. Dark.

“Chernobyl, the failed attempt—the simulation,” said Fet. “It appeased the Ancients because ‘Chernobyl’ means ‘Black Soil.’ And I saw a Stoneheart crew excavating sites around a geologically active area of hot springs outside Reykjavik known as Black Pool.”

“But there are no coordinates in the book,” said Nora.

“Because it was beneath the water,” said Eph. “At the time Ozryel’s remains were cast away, this site was underwater. The Master didn’t emerge until hundreds of years later.”

The youngest one. The last.

A triumphant yell, and then Nora came running back with a sheaf of oversized topographical maps of the northeastern United States, with cellophane street atlas overlays.

Eph flipped the pages to New York State. The top part of the map included the southern region of Ontario, Canada.

“Lake Ontario,” he said. “To the east here.” At the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River, east of Wolfe Island, a cluster of tiny, unnamed islands was grouped together, labeled “Thousand Islands.” “It’s there. One of those. Just off the New York coast.”

“The burial site?” said Fet.

“I don’t know what its name is today. The original Native American name for the island was ‘Ahsudagu-wah.’ Roughly translated from the Onondaga language as ‘Dark Place’ or ‘Black Place.’”

Fet slid the road atlas out from beneath Eph’s hands, flipping back to New Jersey.

“How do we find the island?” said Nora.

Eph said, “It’s shaped roughly like the biohazard symbol, like a three-petaled flower.”

Fet quickly plotted their course through New Jersey into Pennsylvania, then north to the top of New York State. He ripped out the pages. “Interstate Eighty West to Interstate Eighty-one North. Gets us right to the Saint Lawrence River.”

“How long?” said Nora.

“Roughly three hundred miles. We can do that in five or six hours.”

“Maybe straight highway time,” said Nora. “Something tells me it won’t be as simple as that.”

“It’s going to figure out which way we’re headed and try to cut us off,” Fet said.

“We have to get going,” said Nora. “We barely have a head start as it is.” She looked to the Born. “Can you load the bomb in the—”

When her voice dropped off, the others turned in alarm. Mr. Quinlan stood next to the unwrapped device. But Creem was gone.

Gus ran to the door. “What the… ?” He came back to the Born. “You let him get away? I brought him into this thing—I was going to take him out.”

We don’t need him anymore. And yet he can still be of use to us.

Gus stared. “How? That rat bastard doesn’t deserve to live.”

Nora said, “What if they catch him? He knows too much.”

He knows just enough. Trust me.

“Just enough?”

To draw fear from the Master.

Eph understood now. He saw it as plain as he had the symbolism in the Lumen. “The Master will be on his way here; that’s guaranteed. We need to challenge it. To scare it. The Master pretends to be above all emotion, but I have seen it angry. It is, going back to biblical times, a vengeful creature. That hasn’t changed. When it administers its kingdom dispassionately, then it is in complete control. It is efficient and detached, all-seeing. But when it is challenged directly, it makes mistakes. It acts rashly. Remember, it became possessed of a bloodlust after laying siege to Sodom and Gomorrah. It murdered a fellow archangel in the grip of a homicidal mania. It lost control.”

“You want the Master to find him?”

“We want the Master to know we have the nuke and the means to detonate it. And that we know the location of the Black Site. We have to get it to overcommit. We have the upper hand now. It’s the Master’s turn to be desperate.”

To be afraid.

Gus stepped up to Eph then. Standing close, trying to read Eph the way Eph had read the book. Taking the measure of the man. Gus held in his hands a small carton of smoke grenades, some of the nonlethal weapons the vampires had left behind.

“So now we have to protect the guy who was going to stab us all in the back,” said Gus. “I don’t get you. And I don’t get this—any of this, but especially you being able to read the book. Why you? Of all of us.”

Eph’s response was frank and honest. “I don’t know, Gus. But I think that part of this is I’m going to find out.”

Gus wasn’t expecting such a guileless response. He saw in Eph’s eyes the look of a man who was scared, and also accepting. Of a man resigned to his fate, whichever way it went.