The Master noted the big human’s weak knee, but those things could be fixed. The body was aged, yet size-appropriate. Suitable, perhaps, for temporary housing.
The Master eluded Angel. The wrestler swung around, but the Master was already behind him again. While assessing Angel, the Master slapped him on the back of his neck, where the stitched hem of his mask met skin. The wrestler jerked around wildly again.
Angel was being toyed with, and he didn’t like it. He turned fast and came around with his free hand, catching the Master on the chin with an open-palm blow. The “Angel Kiss.”
The creature’s head snapped back. Angel shocked himself with his success in landing the blow. The Master lowered his eyes at the masked avenger, the speed of the worms rippling under his flesh a sign of his rage.
Inside the mask, Angel smiled excitedly.
“You would like me to reveal myself, wouldn’t you?” he said. “The mystery dies with me. My face must remain hidden.”
These words were the catchphrase from every one of the Silver Angel’s movies, dubbed into many languages all over the world—words the wrestler had been waiting for decades to say for real. But the Master was through playing.
It struck Angel full-force with the back of its enormous hand. The jaw and left cheekbone exploded inside the mask and the wrestler’s left eye went with them.
But Angel didn’t give up. Through enormous effort, he stood on his own two feet. Trembling, his knee hurting like a motherfucker, choking on his own blood… yet in his mind he raced back in time, to a younger, happier place.
He felt dizzy and warm and full of juice and remembered he was in a film stage. Of course—he was shooting a movie. The monster in front of him was nothing but some clever special effect—a day player in a suit. Then why did it hurt so much? And his mask: it smelled funny to him. Like unwashed hair and sweat. It smelled like a thing removed to the oblivion of storage. It smelled of him.
An empty bubble of blood rose in his throat and burst there in a liquid whimper. His jaw and left side pulverized, the smelly mask was now the only thing holding the old wrestler’s face together.
Angel grunted and lunged at his opponent. The Master released the stick in order to grip the big human with both hands, and, in an instant, tore him to shreds.
Setrakian stifled a cry. He was stuffing pills in under his tongue—stopping just as the Master returned his attention to him.
The Master grasped Setrakian’s shoulder and lifted the slight old man off the floor. Setrakian dangled in the air before the Master, squeezed by the vampire’s bloody hands. The Master pulled him close, Setrakian staring into its horrible face, the leech’s face swarming with ancient evil.
I believe, in a way, you always wanted this, Professor. I think you have always been curious to know the other side.
Setrakian could not respond with the pills dissolving beneath his tongue. But he did not have to answer the Master verbally. My sword sings of silver, he thought.
He felt woozy, the medicine kicking in, clouding his thoughts—shielding his true intent from the Master’s perception. We learned much from the book. We know Chernobyl was a decoy… He saw the Master’s face. How he longed to see fear in it. Your name. I know your true name. Would you like to hear it… Ozryel?
And then the Master’s mouth fell open and his stinger shot out furiously, snapping and piercing S
etrakian’s neck, rupturing his vocal cords and jamming into his carotid artery. As he lost his voice, Setrakian felt no stinging pain, only the body-wide ache of the drinking. The collapse of his circulatory system and the organs it served, leading to shock.
The Master’s eyes were royal-red, staring at its prey’s face as it drank with immense satisfaction. Setrakian held the creature’s gaze, not out of defiance but watching and waiting for some indication of discomfort. He felt the vibration of the blood worms wriggling throughout his body, greedily inspecting and invading his self.
All at once, the Master bucked, as though choking. His head jerked back and his nictitating eyelids fluttered. Still, the seal remained tight, the drinking continued stubbornly until the end. The Master disengaged finally—the entire process having taken less than half a minute—its flushed red stinger retracting. The Master stared at Setrakian, reading the interest in his eyes, then stumbled backward a step. Its face contracted, the blood worms slowing, its thick neck gagging.
It dropped Setrakian to the floor and staggered away, sickened by the old man’s blood meal. A flame-like sensation in the pit of his gut.
Setrakian lay on the floor of the control room in a dim haze bleeding through the puncture wound. He finally relaxed his tongue, feeling that the last of the pills in the basket of his jaw were gone. He had ingested the blood vessel-relaxing nitroglycerin and the blood-thinning Coumadin derivative of Fet’s rat poison in massive overdose levels, and passed them along to the Master.
Fet was, indeed, correct: the creatures had no purging mechanism. Once a substance was ingested, they could not vomit it.
Burning inside, the Master moved through the doors at a blur, racing off into the screaming alarms.
The Johnson Space Center went silent halfway through the station’s dark orbit, as they passed the dark side of the Earth. She’d lost Houston.
Thalia felt the first few bumps shortly after that. It was debris, space junk plunking the station. Nothing very unusual about that—only the frequency of the impacts.
Too many. Too close together.
She floated as still as possible, trying to calm herself, trying to think. Something wasn’t right.
She made her way to the porthole and gazed out upon the Earth. Two very hot points of light were visible here on the night side of the planet. One was on the very edge, right on the ridge of dusk. Another one was nearer to the eastern side.