The Night Eternal

The rotors were still spinning but slowing down. The engine had just been turned off. Gus held his machine gun away from himself as he scrambled up the weedy, rocky embankment, with Nora just behind and to the left of him.

They slowed at the top, their faces rising beneath the guardrail. The chopper was another one hundred yards or so down the highway. There were no cars in sight. The rotors stopped rotating, though the helicopter light remained illuminated, shining off to the opposite side of the road. Nora made out four silhouettes, one of them shorter than the others. And she could not be sure, but she believed that the pilot—probably a human, judging by the light—was still inside the cockpit, waiting. For what? Taking off again soon?

They ducked back down. “A rendezvous?” said Nora.

“Something like that. You don’t think it’s the Master, do you?”

“Can’t tell,” she said.

“One of them was small. Looked like a kid.”

“Yeah,” said Nora, nodding… and then she stopped nodding. Her head shot up again, and this time she looked over the top of the guardrail. Gus pulled her back down by her belt, but not before she had convinced herself of the identity of the ragged-haired boy. “Oh my God.”

“What?” said Gus. “What the hell’s gotten into you?”

She drew her sword. “We have to get over there.”

“Well, sure, now you’re talking. But what’s the—”

“Shoot the adults but not the kid. Just don’t let them get away.”

Nora was up and over the guardrail before Gus could get to his feet. She was running straight at them, Gus having to hustle to keep up. She watched the larger two figures turn her way before she had made any real noise. The vampires saw her heat impression, sensing the silver in her sword. They stopped and turned back to the humans. One grabbed the boy and tried to lift him inside the helicopter. They were going to take off again. The engine turned over, the rotors starting their hydraulic whine.

Gus opened up his weapon, picking at the long tail of the helicopter at first, then stitching up the side toward the passenger compartment. That was enough to drive the vampire carrying the boy away from the chopper. Nora was more than halfway to them now. Gus fanned out wide to her left, picking at the cockpit glass. The glass did not shatter, the rounds punching clean through until a spray of red went out over the opposite end.

The pilot’s body slumped forward. The rotors continued to speed up but the chopper did not move.

One vampire left the man he was guarding and ran at Nora. She saw the dark, decorative ink on its neck and immediately placed the vamp as one of the prison bodyguards—one of Barnes’s bodyguards. The thought of Barnes erased all fear, and Nora came at the vampire with her sword high and her voice at full yell. The big vampire went low at the last moment, surprising her, but she sidestepped him like a matador, bringing down her sword on his back. He skidded across the blacktop on his front side, burning off flesh, then hopped back up to his feet. Pale skin hung from his thighs, chest, and one cheek. That didn’t slow him down. The silver wound to his back did.

Gus’s gun rattled and the big vampire twitched. The shots stunned him but did not put him down. Nora did not give the powerful strigoi time to mount another attack. She treated his neck tattoos like targets and took off his head.

She turned back toward the helicopter, squinting into its rotor wash. The other tattooed vampire was away from the humans, circling Gus. It understood and respected the power of silver—but not the power of a machine gun. Gus walked up on the hissing strigoi, right up inside its stinging radius, and fired a cluster of head shots. The vamp went down backward and Gus advanced and shot up its neck, releasing the creature.

The man was down on one knee, bracing himself on the open door of the helicopter. The boy watched both vampires go down. He turned and ran toward the roadside, in the direction the helicopter light was shining. Nora saw something in his hands, which he held in front of him as he ran.

Nora yelled, “Gus, get him!” because Gus was closest. Gus took off after the kid. The skinny kid was fast enough but unsteady. He jumped over the guardrail and landed all right, but in the shadowy ground beyond he misjudged a step or two and got tangled up in his own feet.

Nora was standing near Barnes beneath the whirling rotor umbrella of the helicopter. He was still airsick and on his knee. Yet when he looked up and recognized Nora’s face, he paled even more.