The Night Eternal

Eph went to the laptop computer on the desk, opening it. It was still powered on, and he struck the space bar to wake up the screen. Workstation computers in the ME’s building were hardwired to a still-functioning network server. The Internet was heavily damaged in spots and generally unreliable. One was more likely to receive an error message than a page load. Unrecognized and unauthorized Internet protocol addresses were particularly susceptible to worms and viruses, and many computers in the building had become either locked up due to hard-drive-damaging malware or slowed to an unusable crawl by corrupted operating systems. Mobile phone technology was no longer in existence, either for telecommunication or for Internet access. Why allow the human underclass access to a communications network capable of spanning the globe—something the vampires possessed telepathically?

Eph and the others operated under the assumption that all Internet activity was vampire-monitored. The page he was now looking at—that Nora had apparently abandoned suddenly, without time to shut down the hard drive—was some sort of personal message exchange, a two-party chat conducted in shorthand.

“NMart” was obviously Nora Martinez. Her partner in conversation, “VFet,” was Vasiliy Fet, the former New York City exterminator. Fet had joined their fight early, by way of an invasion of rats prompted by the arrival of the strigoi. He had proven himself invaluable to the cause, for both his vermin-killing techniques and his knowledge of the city, in particular the boroughs’ subterranean passageways. He had become as much of a disciple of the late Setrakian as Eph was, coming into his own as a New World vampire hunter. Currently, he was on a freighter somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean, returning from Iceland on a very important errand.

This thread, full of Fet’s grammatical idiosyncrasies, had started the day before, and it was mainly about Eph. He read words he was never meant to see:

NMart: E not here—missed rendezvous. You were right. I shouldn’t have relied on him. Now all I can do is wait…

VFet: Don’t wait there. Keep moving. Return to Roosvlt.

NMart: Can’t—my mother is worse. Will try to stay another day at most. TRULY cannot take this anymore. He’s dangerous. He’s becoming a risk to us all. Just a matter of time before bitch-vamp Kelly catches up with him or he leads her back here.

VFet: I hear you. But w need him. Most keep hm close.

NMart: He goes out on his own. Doesn’t care about anything else.

VFet: He’s 2 important. 2 them. 2 the M. 2 us.

NMart: I know it… it’s just that I can’t trust him anymore. I don’t even know who he is…

VFet: We all just have to keep him from sinking all to the deep end. You especially. Keep him afloat. He dsn’t know where the book is. That’s our double blind. He can’t hurt us that way.

NMart: He’s at K’s house again. I know it. Raiding it for memories of Z. Like stealing from a dream.

And then:

NMart: You know I miss you. How much longer?

VFet: Returning now. Missing you too.

Eph shrugged off his weapon pack, resheathing his sword, and dropped down into the office chair.

He stared at the most recent exchange, reading it again and again, hearing Nora’s voice, then Fet’s Brooklyn accent.

Missing you too.

He felt weightless, reading it—as though the force of gravity had been removed from his body. And yet, here he sat, still.

He should have felt more anger. More righteous fury. Betrayal. A jealous frenzy.

And he did feel all these things. But not deeply. Not acutely. They were there, and he acknowledged them, but it amounted to… more of the same. His malaise was so overwhelming that no other flavor, no matter how sour, could change his emotional palate.

How had this happened? At times, over these past two years, Eph had consciously kept his distance from Nora. He had done so to protect her, to protect them all… or so he said to 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?