There were other dissidents—drug dealers, smugglers, looters—but they were anarchic vectors that never intersected with the Master’s plan, and so the Master cared little for their transgressions. But Goodweather was different. He and his group were remnants of Setrakian’s presence on Earth, and as such their very existence was an affront to the Master’s power.

But the Master held hostage the very thing that would lure Goodweather to him.

The Master smiled at the boy. And the boy smiled back.

Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Manhattan

AFTER THE BELLEVUE Hospital explosion, Eph had worked his way north up along East River Drive, using the abandoned cars and trucks for cover. He jogged as fast as he could with his sore hip and wounded leg, moving the wrong way down an entrance ramp, back toward Thirtieth Street. He knew he had pursuers, probably including some of the juvenile feelers, the freakish, blind psychic trackers who moved on all fours. He dug out his night-vision scope and hurried back to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, thinking that the last place the vampires would look would be a building they had recently infiltrated and cleared.

His ears continued to ring from the concussive blast. A few car alarms honked and blared, and freshly broken glass lay in the street, high windows shattered by the force of the explosion. As he came to the corner of Thirtieth and First, he noticed chunks of bricks and mortar in the road, part of a building façade had failed, raining debris into the street. As he got closer, through the green light of his scope, he noticed a pair of legs sticking out from behind two old traffic safety barrels.

Bare legs, bare feet. A vampire lying facedown off the sidewalk.

Eph slowed, circling the barrels. He saw the vampire laid out among chunks of brick and concrete. White, worm-infested blood lay in a small pool beneath its downturned face. It wasn’t released: subcutaneous worms continued to ripple beneath its flesh, meaning its blood was still circulating. Evidently, this wounded creature was unconscious, or its undead equivalent.

Eph looked for the largest chunk of brick and concrete. He lifted it over his head to finish the job… until a sense of gruesome curiosity came over him. He used his boot to roll the strigoi onto its back, the creature lying flat and still. It must have heard the rumbling of the loose bricks and looked skyward, because its face was bashed in.

The chunk of bricks grew heavy in his hands, and he lowered it, tossing it aside, letting it crash against the sidewalk just a foot away from the creature’s head. No reaction.

The medical examiner’s building was right across the street. A great risk—but if the creature was indeed blind, as it appeared, then it could not feed the Master its vision. And if it was also brain-damaged… then it could not communicate with the Master at all, and its current location could not be traced.

Eph moved quickly, before he could talk himself out of it. He got his hands beneath the creature’s armpits, careful of the sticky mass of blood, and rescue-dragged him off the curb, across the street, and around to the ramp leading to the basement morgue.

Inside, he nudged over a step stool to help him load the vampire onto an autopsy table. He worked quickly, binding the creature’s wrists beneath the table with rubber tubing, then similarly affixing its ankles to the table legs.

Eph looked at the strigoi laid out upon the examining table. Yes, he was indeed about to do this. He pulled a pathologist’s full-length smock from the closet, pulling on twin pairs of latex gloves. He taped the wrists to his sleeves and his leg cuffs to the tops of his boots, creating a seal. In a cabinet over one of the sinks, he found a clear plastic splash guard and fit it over his face. Then he wheeled over a tray and arranged upon it a dozen different stainless steel implements, all of them cutting tools.

As he was looking at the vampire, it roused into consciousness, stirring at first, rolling its head this way and that. It sensed the bindings and began to struggle against them, bucking its waist up and down off the table. Eph used another length of tubing around its waist and beneath the table, and then another across its neck, knotting it tightly underneath.

From behind the creature’s head, Eph used a probe to tempt its stinger, allowing for the possibility that it still might be functioning even within its smashed face. He saw the vampire’s throat buck and heard a clicking in its jaw as it tried to activate its stinging mechanism. But the mandible had been damaged internally. His only concern therefore was the blood worms, for which he kept his Luma lamp close at hand.