A shadow passed across the sun. It was winged, like a great bird of prey, banking fleetly before sailing away, the shadow fading into the darkening grass.
Atop the castle, a factory-sized smokestack chugged black ash into the sky, turning fair day into ominous night. Kelly appeared on one of the ramparts, and Eph yelled up to her.
“She can’t hear you,” Fet told him.
Fet wore his exterminator’s jumpsuit and smoked a corona, but his head was a rat’s head, his eyes small and red.
Eph looked up to the castle again, and Kelly’s blond hair blew away like smoke. Now she was bald Nora, disappearing inside the upper reaches of the castle.
“We have to split up,” said Fet, pulling the cigar from his mouth with a human hand, blowing silver-gray smoke that curled past his fine, black whiskers. “We don’t have much time.”
Fet the rat ran to the castle and squeezed himself headfirst into a crack in the foundation, somehow wriggling his big body in between two black stones.
Up top, a man now stood in the turret wearing a work shirt bearing the Sears insignia. It was Matt, Kelly’s live-in boyfriend, Eph’s first replacement as a father figure and the first vampire Eph had slain. As Eph looked at him, Matt suffered a seizure, his hands clawing at his throat. He convulsed, doubling over, hiding his face, contorting … until his hands came away from his head. His middle fingers stretched into thick talons, and the creature straightened, now a good six inches taller. The Master.
The black sky opened up then, rain pouring down from above, but the drops, when they landed, instead of the usual slapping patter noise, made a noise that sounded like “Dad.”
Eph stumbled away, turning and running. He tried to outpace the rain through the slashing grass, but drops pelted him at every step, shouting in his ears, “Dad! Dad! Dad!”
Until everything cleared. The rain stopped, the sky turning into a shell of crimson. The grass was gone and the dirt ground reflected the redness of the sky just as the ocean does.
In the distance, a figure approached. It appeared not too far away, but closer, Eph was able to better judge its size. It looked like a human male, but at least three times the height of Eph himself. It stopped some distance away, though its dimensions made it seem nearer.
It was indeed a giant, but its proportions were exactly correct. It was dressed, or bathed, in a glowing nimbus of light.
Eph tried to speak. He felt no direct fear of this creature. He only felt overwhelmed.
Something rustled behind the giant’s back. At once, two broad silver wings fanned open, their diameter longer even than the giant’s height. The gust from this action blew Eph back a step. Arms at its sides, the archangel—the only thing it could be—beat its wings two more times, whipping at the air and taking flight.
The archangel soared, its great wings doing all the work, arms and legs relaxed as it flew toward Eph with preternatural grace and ease. It landed in front of him, dwarfing Eph three times over. A few silver feathers slipped from its plumage, falling quill-first and sticking into the red earth. One floated toward Eph, and he caught it in his hand. The quill became an ivory handle, the feather a silver sword.
The massive archangel bent down toward Eph. Its face was still obscured by the nimbus of light it exuded. The light felt strangely cool, almost misty.
The archangel fixed its gaze on something behind Eph, and Eph—reluctantly—turned.
At a small dinner table poised on the edge of a cliff, Eldritch Palmer, once the head of the Stoneheart Group, sat dressed in his trademark dark suit with a red swastika armband around his right sleeve, using a fork and knife to eat a dead rat laid out on a china plate. A blur approached from the right, a large white wolf, charging toward the table. Palmer never looked up. The white wolf leaped at Palmer’s throat, knocking him from the chair, tearing at his neck.
The white wolf stopped and looked up at Eph—and came racing toward him.
Eph did not run or raise his sword. The wolf slowed near him, paws kicking up dirt. Palmer’s blood stained its snowy mouth fur.
Eph recognized the wolf’s eyes. They belonged to Abraham Setrakian, as did its voice.
“Ahsudau-wah.”
Eph shook his head with incomprehension, and then a great hand seized him. He felt the beating of the archangel’s wings as he was lifted away from the red land, the ground below shrinking and changing. They neared a large body of water, then banked right, flying over a dense archipelago. The archangel dipped lower, diving straight for one of the thousand islands.
They landed on a basin-shaped wasteland of twisted iron and smoking steel. Torn clothes and burned paper were strewn across the charred ruins; the small island was the ground zero of some catastrophe. Eph turned to the archangel, but it was gone—and in its place was a door. A simple door, standing alone in its frame. A sign affixed to it, written in black Magic Marker, illustrated with gravestones and skeletons and crosses, drawn in a young hand, read:
YOU MAY NOT LIVE BEYOND THIS POINT.
Eph knew this door. And the handwriting. He reached for the knob and opened it, stepping through.
Zack’s bed. Eph’s diary was set upon it, but instead of a tattered cover, the diary was faced in silver, front and back.
Eph sat down upon the bed, feeling the mattress’s familiar give, hearing it creak. He opened his diary, and its parchment pages were those of the Occido Lumen, handwritten with illuminated illustrations.
More extraordinary than that was the fact that Eph could read and comprehend the Latin words. He perceived the subtle watermarking that revealed a second layer of text behind the first.