Armand stood there facing him. Benji was right behind him.
Garekyn held Eleni against him, drinking from her open mouth as though it were a fountain, his eyes fixed on Armand.
"Give her to me," said Armand. "Give her to me or I burn you alive."
Garekyn, do as he tells you to do. He can restore her. I will make him let you go.
Garekyn wanted to do it, to surrender her, let her go. But he couldn't let go of this blood, this sizzling blood that was so rich and so beautiful and the telepathic voice that was speaking to him almost tenderly, the voice he was certain he knew, coming through this blood. He saw the web growing in all directions, ever more elaborate, and strangely beautiful to him with its myriad pinpoints of twinkling light but even more beautiful was the sense of meaning, the sense of understanding everything utterly and completely, and yet losing his grip on it as soon as he had grasped it. And then he would have the sense again.
He saw the towers of Atalantaya melting. Millions of voices screamed in panic, in agony.
Garekyn, let her go.
Armand stood right before him. Garekyn held Eleni's helpless body by the waist. And slowly, lapping the blood from his cupped right hand, Garekyn let Armand take her away. Gently, Armand laid her body on the floor.
"Get out of here," Armand whispered. He appeared unable to move, staring at Garekyn even as his eyelids descended, even as his eyes appeared to close. Then the creature appeared to shake himself all over, and his eyes fixed on Garekyn again.
Garekyn couldn't reason. He had no will. Sluggishly he backed up and gazed on the ruin of the room--the shattered marble, the stupid steel cable coils tangled in the weak iron table frame that had supported the marble. And then he spied something that quickened his pulse. His leather wallet lying there on a wooden table against the back wall opposite the door. His keys. His passport, his phone, his things.
He cleaned all the blood clumsily from his hand with his tongue and, in an instant, he'd scooped up these personal items of his, these indispensable personal things, and he was moving out the door.
Benji Mahmoud cowered against the wall, speaking a stream of frantic words into his little phone. It was Garekyn's full name he was saying over and over, Garekyn's description he was repeating, Garekyn's address in London!
Every instinct told Garekyn to get away as fast as he could. But he turned back once.
Armand held the broken, helpless Eleni to his chest, his left wrist pressed to her mouth. She was moving her mouth. She was sucking his blood. The creature was doing all he could to restore the damaged Eleni, the poor broken Eleni, and he made no move to stop Garekyn.
And neither did the helpless Benji, who sat asleep against the wall now, his head bowed, his cell phone beside his right hand on the concrete floor.
Garekyn rushed towards the staircase.
As he came up into the empty house above he understood why the monsters hadn't tried to stop him. The pale white morning light filled the first floor of the townhouse. It made the glass in the front door look like ice. The sun was rising over the city of Manhattan.
The creatures couldn't come after him. It was true, their vampire lore. They were powerless when the sun rose, and that's why Benji had dropped down unconscious against the wall and Armand had used his last few precious moments to heal Eleni.
He could go back now. He would have them at his mercy! He could examine them ever more closely! He might batter them to pulp with the fragments of the broken marble slab.
But a sudden banging noise sent a shudder through the building. The great heavy door below had been slammed back into its metal frame sealing the basement chamber off from the outside world.
Garekyn fled.
In the taxi, on the way to his hotel, he almost lost consciousness. He was physically sick. However well the restorative properties of his body functioned they could not restore the equilibrium of his soul. He had almost killed that thing, and Amel had spoken to him, his Amel! His Amel!
Like a stunned and drunken creature he blundered into his room, stripped off his bloodstained clothes, and headed for the steady blast of the shower.
Pray they had no human protectors, no human task force that could overtake him here or stop him from escaping New York. Ah, but they were such clever beings! Clever enough to track his credit cards, clever enough to find him here or anywhere else he went.
At the airport, the first flight he was able to confirm would have released him at London's Heathrow Airport after dark. Impossible. He couldn't chance it. They knew where he lived. He had to throw them off his trail. In his desperation, he had to make something resembling a plan. For surely if the wounded Eleni had not been restored to herself by nightfall, they'd be after him with two murders charged to his account.
Where could he go? What could he do?
"Amel," he whispered as if he were praying to a god for help, a god who had no earthly reason to help him except that the god might love him as he, alone in the whole world, loved the god. "I would never have harmed you. You know this. You remember the vow we took, all of us, we, the People of the Purpose."
Slowly, he was able to collect his thoughts.
"Los Angeles," he said. "Earliest through flight."
For five solid hours as the plane flew west, he listened to Benji Mahmoud's archived broadcasts on his iPhone, examining all that these creatures revealed of themselves in a new light. But at the same time, he was thinking, dozing, and remembering, remembering more than ever before. It seemed at times it was all coming back to him, all of those splendid months, but then he would lose the thread, and every time he tried to sleep he would see the city again sinking under the waves.