The Night Eternal

She carried with her always the mark on her forehead: the scar from Barnes’s gunshot. She regarded this scar as a symbol of how close she had come to a fate worse than death, though, in her later years, it became instead for her a symbol of luck. For now, as Nora gazed into the face of her baby—unmarked and full of peace—a great serenity overcame her, and out of nowhere, she remembered her mother’s words:

Looking back on one’s life, you see that love was the answer to everything.

How right she was.

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to acknowledge Dr. Seth Richardson at the University of Chicago for his assistance with Mesopotamian and biblical lore.

Also by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

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The Strain

Also by Chuck Hogan

Devils in Exile

The Killing Moon

Prince of Thieves

The Blood Artists

The Standoff

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the authors’ imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE NIGHT ETERNAL. Copyright © 2011 by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 9780007319527

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EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007328628

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Stephen King on The Night Eternal

Stephen King is the author of more than 50 books, all of them worldwide best-sellers. Among his most recent are the Dark Tower novels, Cell, From a Buick 8, Everything's Eventual, Hearts in Atlantis, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and Bag of Bones. He is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.

The Strain trilogy opened with an authentic wow moment: a Boeing 777 arrives at JFK airport with all but four of the passengers dead in their seats. The flashlight beams of the first responders “registered dully in the dead jewels of their open eyes.” Not much later these corpses begin to rise from their morgue slabs, and a plague of blood-hungry predators overwhelms New York. The first hundred pages of The Strain is a sustained exercise in terror that held this reader in spellbound delight, because del Toro and Hogan write with crisp authenticity about both the fantastical (vampires) and the completely real (New York City, with all its odd nooks and crannies).