Читаем The Night Eternal полностью

He was a big male, backlit by the faint window light. On his large chest and the sides of his trunklike neck, Eph saw fading tattoo ink, turned green by the white blood and multiple stretch marks.

At once, like a traumatic memory forcing its way back into his consciousness, the Master’s voice was inside Eph’s head.

What are you here for, Goodweather?

Eph stopped and pointed his sword at the big vamp. Bruno spun around next to him, keeping an eye on the drones behind them.

What is it you came here to get?

Bruno roared next to Eph, hacking down two charging vampires. Eph turned, momentarily distracted, seeing the others bunched up just a few yards away—respecting the silver—and then, realizing he had allowed himself to become distracted, turned back fast with his sword up.

The tip of his sword caught the charging vampire in the right breast, entering skin and muscle but not running him through. Eph withdrew quickly and stabbed at the vampire’s throat, just as the thing’s jaw was beginning to drop, baring its stinger. The tattooed vampire shivered and dropped to the ground.

“Fuckers!” yelled Bruno.

They were all coming now. Eph wheeled and readied his sword. But there were just too many, and all moving at once. He started backpedaling—

You are here searching for someone, Goodweather.

—and felt stones beneath his feet as he neared the building. Bruno kept hacking and slaying as Eph backed up three steps, feeling for the door handle, opening the latch, the door giving way.

You are mine now, Goodweather.

The voice boomed, disorienting him. Eph pulled on Bruno’s shoulder, motioning to the gangbanger to follow him inside. They ran past makeshift cages on either side of the narrow walkway, containing humans in various stages of distress. A madhouse of sorts. The people howled at Eph and Bruno as they hurried through.

Dead end, Goodweather.

Eph shook his head hard, trying to chase the Master’s voice from his mind. Its presence was addling, like the voice of madness itself. Add to that the people clawing at the cages as he passed, and Eph was caught in a cyclone of confusion and terror.

The first of the pursuing vampires entered the other end. Eph tried one door, leading to an office of sorts, with a dentist-style chair whose headrest, and the floor beneath it, was crusted with dry, red human blood. Another door led outside, Eph jumping down three steps. More vampires awaited him, having gone around the building rather than through it, and Eph swung and chopped, turning just in time to catch one female leaping at him from the roof.

Why did you come here, Goodweather?

Eph leaped back from the slain female. He and Bruno backed away, side by side, heading toward an unlit, windowless structure set against the high perimeter fence. Perhaps the vampires’ quarters? The camp strigoi’s nest?

Eph and Bruno angled themselves, only to find that the fence turned sharply and ended at another unlit structure.

Dead end. I told you.

Eph stood up to the vampires coming toward them in the dark.

“Undead end,” Eph muttered. “You bastard.”

Bruno glanced over at him. “Bastard? You the one who ran us into this trap!”

Once I catch you and turn you, I will know all your secrets.

That turned Eph cold. “Here they come,” he said to Bruno—and got ready for them.

Nora had arrived at Barnes’s office inside the administrative building ready to agree to anything, including giving herself to Barnes, in order to save her mother and get close to him. She despised her former boss even more than the vampire oppressors. His immorality sickened her—but the fact that he believed she was weak enough to simply bend to his will made her nauseous.

Killing him would show him that. If his fantasy was her submission, her plan was to drive the shank into his heart. Death by butter knife: how fitting!

She would do it as he lay in bed or in the middle of his dinner patter, so hideously civilized. He was more evil than the strigoi: his corruption was not a disease, was not something inflicted upon him. His corruption was opportunistic. A choice.

Worst of all was his perception of her as a potential victim. He had fatally misread Nora, and all that was left was for her to show him the error of his ways. In steel.

He made her wait out in the hallway, where there was no chair or bathroom, for three hours. Twice he left his office, resplendent in his crisp, white admiral’s uniform, strolling past Nora carrying some papers but never acknowledging her, passing without a word, disappearing behind another door. And so she waited, stewing, even when the single camp whistle signaled the rations call, one hand across her grumbling stomach—her mind squarely focused on her mother and murder.