Читаем The Night Eternal полностью

Gus looked at her standing inside the cage, feasting on her son’s blood, and tried to remember the woman who raised him. The single mother with a sometime husband and occasional boyfriends. She did her best for him, which was different from always doing the right thing. But it was the best she knew how to do. She had lost the custody battle, her versus the street. The barrio had raised him. It was the street behavior he emulated, rather than that of his madre. So many things he regretted now but could not change. He chose to remember their younger days. Her caressing him—treating his wounds after a neighborhood fight. And, even in her angriest moments, the kindness and love in her eyes.

All gone now. All disappeared.

Gus had disrespected her in life. So why did he now revere her in undeath? He did not know the answer. He did not understand the forces that drove him. All he knew was that visiting with her in this state—feeding her—charged him up like a battery. Made him crazy for revenge.

He placed one of the CDs in a luxurious stereo system he had pillaged from a car full of corpses. He had jimmied a few speakers of different brands and managed to get a good sound out of it. Javier Solis started singing “No te doy la libertad” (I will not give you freedom), an angry and melancholic bolero that proved eerily appropriate for the occasion.

“Do you like it, Madre?” he said, knowing all too well that this was just another monologue between them. “You remember it?”

Gus returned to the cage wall. He reached inside to close the faceplate, sealing her back in the darkness, when he saw something change in her eyes. Something came into them.

He had seen this before. He knew what it meant.

The voice, not his mother’s, boomed deep inside his head.

I can taste you, boy, said the Master. I taste your blood and your yearning. I taste your weakness. I know who you are in league with. My bastard son. The eyes remained focused on him, with a hint of a spark behind them, like that tiny red light on a camera that tells you it is passively recording.

Gus tried to clear his mind. He tried to think nothing. Yelling at the creature through his mother brought him nothing. That much he had learned. Resist. The way old man Setrakian would have advised him. Gus was training himself to withstand the dark intelligence of the Master.

Yes, the old professor. He had plans for you. If only he could see you here. Feeding your madre in the same manner he used to feed the infested heart of his long-lost wife. He failed, Gus. As you will fail.

Gus focused the pain in his head on the image of his mother as she once was. His mind’s eye stared at this image in an attempt to block out everything else.

Bring me the others, Augustin Elizalde. Your reward will be great. Your survival will be assured. Live like a king, not as a rat. Or else… no mercy. However much you beg for a second chance, I will no longer hear you. Your time is growing short…

“This is my house,” said Gus, aloud but quietly. “My mind, demon. You are not welcome here.”

What if I gave her back? Her will is stored in me along with the millions of voices. But I can find it for you, invoke it for you. I can give you your mother back…

And then, Gus’s mother’s eyes became almost human. They softened and became wet and full of pain.

“Hijito,” she said. “My son. Why am I here? Why am I like this… ? What are you doing to me?”

It hit him all at once, her nakedness, the madness, the guilt, the horror.

“No!!” he screamed, and reached in through the bars with a trembling hand, sliding the faceplate shut at once. Immediately, once it was closed, Gus felt released, as though by an invisible hand. And in the helmet, the laughter of the Master exploded. Gus covered his ears but the voice continued resounding in his head until, like an echo, it faded away.

The Master had attempted to engage him long enough to get a fix on Gus’s location, so it could send in his army of vampires to wipe him out.