NORA LOOKED AT the shank.
She had been working on it all night long. She was exhausted but proud. The irony of a butter-knife shank was not lost on her. Such a dainty piece of cutlery, now sharpened into a jagged point and edge. Still a few more hours to go—she could sharpen it to perfection.
She had muffled the sound of the grinding—against a corner piece in the concrete—by covering it with her lumpy bed pillow. Her mothe
r was asleep a few feet away. She didn’t wake up. Their reunion would be brief. The afternoon before, perhaps an hour after she had returned from seeing Barnes, they had been handed a processing order. In it was a request for Nora’s mother to leave the recreation courtyard at dawn.
Feeding time.
How would they “process” her? She didn’t know. But she would not allow it. She would call for Barnes, give in, get close to him, and then kill him. She would either save her mother or get him. If her hands were going to be empty they would be stained with his blood.
Her mother murmured something in her sleep and then lapsed back into the deep but gentle snoring that Nora knew so well. As a child Nora had been lulled to sleep by that sound and the rhythmic up-and-down of her chest. Her mother was, back then, a formidable woman. A force of nature. She worked, indefatigable, and raised Nora properly—always vigilant of her, always able to provide an education and a degree and the clothes and luxuries that go with them. Nora got a graduation dress and the expensive textbooks and not once had her mother complained.
But there was that one night right before Christmas, when Nora had been awakened by a soft sobbing. She was fourteen and had been particularly nasty about getting a quinceañera dress on her upcoming birthday …
She quietly climbed down the steps and stood at the kitchen door. Her mother was sitting alone, a half glass of milk by her side—reading glasses and bills all over the table.
Nora was paralyzed by this sight. Sort of like sneaking up on God crying. She was about to step in and ask her what was wrong when her mother’s sobbing became louder—a roar. She suffocated the noise by grotesquely covering her mouth with both hands, while her eyes exploded in tears. This terrified Nora. Made the blood freeze in her veins. They never spoke about the incident, but Nora had been imprinted with that image of pain. She changed. Perhaps forever. She took better care of her mother and of herself and always worked harder than anyone else.
As dementia settled in, Nora’s mother started to complain. About everything and all the time. Her resentments and anger, accumulated through the years and quieted by civility, came forth in torrents of incoherent nagging. And Nora took it all. She would never abandon her mother.
Three hours before dawn, Nora’s mother opened her eyes. And for a fleeting moment she was lucid. It happened now and then but less often than before. In a way, Nora thought, her mother, like the strigoi, was supplanted by another will and it was quite eerie whenever she snapped out of the trancelike disease and looked at Nora. At Nora as she was, right here, right now.
“Nora? Where are we?” she said.
“Shh, Mama. We are okay. Go back to sleep.”
“Are we in a hospital? Am I sick?” she asked, agitated.
“No, Mama. It’s all right. Everything is fine.” Nora’s mother held her daughter’s hand firmly and lay back down in her cot. She caressed her shaved head.
“What happened? Who did this to you?” she asked, mortified.
Nora kissed her mother’s hand. “Nobody, Mom. It will grow back. You’ll see.”
Nora’s mother looked at her with great lucidity, and after a long pause she asked, “Are we going to die?”
And Nora didn’t know what to say. She began to sob, and her mother hushed her now and hugged her and kissed her softly on the head. “Don’t cry, my dear. Don’t cry.”
She then held her head and looked her daughter straight in the eye and said, “Looking back on one’s life, you see that love was the answer to everything. I love you, Nora. I always will. And that we will have forever.”
They fell asleep together and Nora lost track of the time. She woke up and saw that the sky was clearing.
What now? They were trapped. Away from Fet, away from Eph. With no way out. Except the butter knife.
She took a final look at the shank. She would go to Barnes and use it and then … then maybe she would turn it on herself.
Suddenly it didn’t look sharp enough. She worked on the edge and the tip until dawn.
Sewage Processing Plant
THE STANFORD SEWAGE Processing Plant lay beneath a hexagonal red brick building on La Salle Street between Amsterdam and Broadway. Built in 1906, the plant was meant to keep up with the area’s demands and growth for at least a century. During its first decade, the plant processed thirty million gallons of raw sewage a day. But the influx of people delivered by two consecutive world wars soon made that rate insufficient. The neighbors also complained about shortness of breath, eye infections, and a general sulfurous smell emanating from the building 24/7. The plant shut down partially in 1947 and completely five years after that.
The inside of it was immense, even majestic. There was a nobility to industrial turn-of-the-century architecture that has since been lost. Twin wrought-iron staircases led to the catwalks above, and the cast-iron structures that filtered and processed the raw sewage had barely been vandalized over the years. Faded graffiti and a three-feet-deep deposit of silt, dry leaves, dog poop, and dead pigeons were the only signs of abandonment. A year before, Gus Elizalde had stumbled onto it and had cleaned one of the reservoirs by hand, turning it into his own personal armory.
The only access was through a tunnel, and only by using a massive iron valve locked with a heavy stainless steel chain.
Gus wanted to show off his weapons cache, so they could load up for the raid on the blood camp. Eph had stayed behind—needing some alone time after finally seeing his son, via video, after two long years, standing alongside the Master and his vampire mother. Fet had renewed understanding for Eph’s unique plight, the toll the vampire strain had taken on his life, and Fet sympathized completely. But still, on their way to the improvised armory, Fet discreetly complained about Eph, about how his focus was slipping. He complained in only practical terms, without malice, without rancor. Maybe with just a touch of jealousy, since Goodweather’s presence still could get in the way of him and Nora.