Eph yelled over the motor and the wind, the pain in his ribs constricting his voice. “How, without turning him, did the Master create this … symbiotic relationship with my boy?”
I don’t know. The key is that he is away from the Master now.
“The Master’s influence will disappear once we do away with it, like all of its vampires?”
Everything that the Master was will cease.
Eph was cheered. He felt real hope. He believed that they could be father and son again. “It’ll be a little like cult deprogramming, I suppose. No such thing as therapy anymore. I just want to get him back to his old bedroom. Start there.”
Survival is the only therapy. I did not want to tell you before, for fear of your losing focus. But I believe the Master was grooming your son for its future self.
Eph swallowed. “I feared it myself. I couldn’t think of any other reason to keep him and not turn him. But—why? Why Zack?”
It may have little to do with your son.
“You mean, it’s because of me?”
I can’t know. All I know is that the Master is a perverse being. It loves to take root in pain. To subvert and corrupt. Perhaps in you it saw a challenge. You were the first one to board the aircraft on which it traveled to New York. You aligned yourself with Abraham Setrakian, its sworn enemy. Achieving the subjugation of an entire race of beings is a feat, but an impe
rsonal one. The Master is one that needs to inflict pain personally. It needs to feel another’s suffering. It needs to experience it firsthand. “Sadism” is your closest modern term for it. And here it has been its undoing.
Exhausted, Eph watched the third dark island pass. After the fourth island, he banked the boat. Difficult to tell the shape of the landmass from the river—and in the darkness impossible to see all six outcroppings without circling it first—but somehow Eph knew that the map was true and this was the Black Site. The bare, black trees on this uninhabited island resembled many-fingered giants burned stiff, arms raised to the heavens in mid-cry.
Eph spotted an inlet and turned toward it, cutting the engine, nosing right onto land. The Born grabbed the nuke and stood, stepping onto the rocky shore.
Nora was right. Leave me here to finish it. Go back to your boy.
Eph looked at the hooded vampire, his face slashed, ready to end his existence. Suicide was an unnatural act for mortal humans to commit—but for an immortal? Mr. Quinlan’s martyrdom was a many times more transgressive, unnatural, violent act.
“I don’t know what to say,” said Eph.
The Born nodded. Then it is time to go.
With that, the Born started up the rocky rise with the keg-sized bomb in his arms and the remains of the Ancients in his pack. Eph’s only hesitation was a memory of his vision and its haunting images. The Born had not been foreseen as the redeemer. But Eph had not had enough time with the Occido Lumen, and perhaps the prophetic reading was different.
Eph dipped the propeller back into the water and gripped the zip cord. He was about to pull when he heard a motor, the sound carrying to him on the swirling wind.
Another boat, approaching. But there had been only one other motorized boat.
Zack’s boat.
Eph looked back for the Born, but he had already disappeared over the rise. Eph’s heart pounded as he stared into the dark mist over the river, straining to see the approaching craft. It sounded like it was coming in fast.
Eph stood and jumped out of the boat onto the rocks, one arm across his broken ribs, the twin handles of his swords wobbling over his shoulders. He charged up the rocky rise as fast as he could, the ground smoking with mist rising into the spitting rain as though the land were heating up in anticipation of the atomic cremation to come.
Eph topped the rise, unable to spot Mr. Quinlan among the trees. He rushed into the dead woods, calling to him, “Quinlan!” as loudly as his chest would allow, then emerged on the other side into a marshy clearing.
The mist was high. The Born had set the weapon down in the approximate center of the trefoil-shaped island, in the middle of a ring of inlaid stones resembling rocky black blisters. He was moving around the device and setting up the white oak receptacles containing the Ancients’ ashes.
Mr. Quinlan heard Eph calling him and turned his way—and just then picked up the Master’s approach.
“It’s here!” yelled Eph. “It’s—”
A blast of wind stirred up the mist. Mr. Quinlan just had time to brace himself before impact, grabbing on to the Master as it streaked in from out of nowhere. The momentum of the body strike carried them many yards away, rolling unseen into the mist. Eph saw something twist and fall through the air—and believed it was Setrakian’s old wolf-handled walking stick.
Eph forgot about his chest pain, running for the bomb, pulling out his sword. Then the mist swirled up around it, obscuring the device.
“Dad!”