Eph saw the small front wheels first. A wheelchair was being rolled around the corner. Two polished shoes were set on the fold-down footrests.
It was Eldritch Palmer, looking exceedingly small and frail. His flour-white hands were folded in his sunken lap, his eyes looking straight ahead, not at Eph.
One of the advance men veered off toward Eph, as though to block his view of the passing billionaire. Palmer was fewer than five yards away. Eph could not wait any longer.
His heart racing, Eph pulled the gun from his waistband. Everything happened in slow motion and all at once.
Eph raised the gun and darted to the left, in order to clear the Stoneheart man in his way. His hand trembled, but his arm was straight, his aim true.
He aimed for the largest target—the chest of the seated man—and squeezed the trigger. But the lead Stoneheart man threw himself at Eph—sacrificing himself more automatically than any Secret Service agent had ever leaped in front of a U.S. president.
The round struck the man in the chest, thudding off the body armor beneath his suit. Eph reacted just in time, shoving the man to the side before he could be tackled.
Eph fired again, but off-balance, the silver bullet ricocheting off Palmer’s wheelchair armrest.
Eph fired again, but the Stonehearts threw themselves in front of Palmer. The third round went into the wall. An especially large man with a military crew cut—the man pushing Palmer’s chair—started to run, wheeling his benefactor forward so that the Stone
-heart men were catapulted onto Eph, and he went down.
He twisted as he fell, his gun arm facing the exit doorway. One more shot. He raised it to fire at the back of the chair, around the large bodyguard—but a shoe stomped down on his forearm, the round firing into the carpet, the weapon leaping from Eph’s grip.
Eph was at the bottom of a growing pile, bodies rushing in from the main room now. Shouts, screams. Hands clawing at Eph, pulling at his limbs. He twisted his head just enough to see, through the arms and legs of his attackers, the wheelchair being pushed out through the double doors, into blazing daylight.
Eph howled in agony. His only chance gone forever. The moment slipping away.
The old man had survived unharmed.
Now the world was nearly his.
The Black Forest Solutions Facility
THE MASTER, STANDING at full height inside the utter blackness of a large chamber deep beneath the meatpacking plant, was electrically alert with meditative focus. It had become more deliberative as its sun-scorched flesh continued to flake off its once-human host body, exposing raw, red dermis beneath.
The Master’s head rotated a few degrees on its great, broad neck, turning slightly toward the entrance, giving Bolivar its attention. No need for Bolivar to report what the Master already knew, what the Master had already—through Bolivar—seen: the arrival of the human hunters at the pawnshop, evidently in hopes of contacting old Setrakian, and the disastrous battle that ensued.
Behind Bolivar, feelers skittered about on all four limbs, like blind crabs. They “saw” something that unsettled them, as Bolivar was learning to infer from their behavior.
Someone was coming. The feelers’ disquiet was offset by the Master’s distinct lack of concern about the interloper.
The Master said: The Ancient Ones have employed mercenaries for day hunting. A further sign of their desperation. And the old professor?
Bolivar said: He slipped away in advance of our attack. Inside his domicile, the feelers sensed that he is still alive.
Hiding. Plotting. Scheming.
With the same desperation as the Ancients.
Humans only become dangerous when they have nothing to lose.
The whir of a motorized wheelchair, and the sound of its nubby tires rolling over the dirt floor, announced that the visitor was Eldritch Palmer. His bodyguard nurse trailed him, holding blue glow sticks to illuminate the passage for their human vision.
Feelers skittered away at the wheelchair’s advance, crawling halfway up the wall, remaining outside the glow radius of the chemical luminescence, hissing.
“More creatures,” said Palmer under his breath, unable to hide his distaste upon seeing the blind vampire children and their black-eyed stares. The billionaire was furious. “Why this hole?”
It pleases me.
Palmer saw, for the first time, by the light of the soft blue glow, the Master’s flesh peeling. Chunks of it littered the ground at his feet like shorn hair beneath a barber’s chair. Palmer was troubled by the sight of the raw flesh revealed beneath the Master’s cracked exterior, and got to talking quickly, in order that the Master not read his mind like a soothsayer divining through a crystal ball.