The Night Eternal Read Free Page A

years now, at times sending him into a downward spiral of despair.
    But why? Why hadn’t the Master turned Zack? What was it holding him for? As a potential marker to be played against Eph and the resistance effort he was part of? Or for some other more sinister reason that Eph could not—dared not—fathom?
    Eph shuddered at the dilemma this would present to him. Where his son was concerned, he was vulnerable. Eph’s weakness was equal to his strength: he could not let go of his boy.
    Where was Zack at that very moment? Was he being held somewhere? Being tormented as his father’s proxy? Thoughts like these clawed at Eph’s mind.
    It was not knowing that unsettled him the most. The others—Fet, Nora, Gus—were able to commit fully to the resistance, all their energy and their focus, precisely because they had no hostages in this war.
    Visiting this room usually helped Eph feel less alone in this accursed world. But today it had the opposite effect. He had never felt so acutely alone as he felt right here, at this very moment.
    Eph thought again about Matt, his ex-wife’s boyfriend—the one he had slain downstairs—and how he used to obsess over that man’s growing influence on Zack’s upbringing. Now he had to think—daily, hourly—about what sort of hell his boy must be living in, under the rule of this actual monster …
    Overcome, feeling nauseous and sweaty, Eph dug out his diary and scratched down the same question that appeared throughout the notebook, like a koan:
    Where is Zack?
    As was his habit, he flipped back through the most recent entries. He spied a note about Nora and tried to make out his penmanship.
    “Morgue.” “Rendezvous.” “Move at sunlight.”
    Eph squinted, trying to remember—as a sense of anxiety spread through him.
    He was supposed to meet Nora and Mrs. Martinez at the old Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In Manhattan. Today.
    Shit.
    Eph grabbed his bag with a clank of the silver blades, throwing the straps over his back, sword handles behind his shoulders like leather-wrapped antennae. He looked around quickly on his way out, spying an old Transformers toy next to the CD player on Zack’s bureau. Sideswipe, if Eph remembered correctly from reading Zack’s books outlining the Autobots’ specs. A birthday present from Eph to Zack, just a few years before. One of Sideswipe’s legs dangled, snapped from overuse. Eph manipulated the arms, remembering the way Zack used to effortlessly “transform” the toy from car to robot and back again like a Rubik’s Cube grand master.
    “Happy birthday, Z,” whispered Eph before stuffing the busted toy into his weapons bag and heading for the door.
    Woodside
     
    T HE FORMER K ELLY Goodweather arrived outside her former residence on Kelton Street just minutes after Eph’s departure. She had been tracking the human—her Dear One—since picking up his bloodbeat some fifteen hours before. But when the sky had brightened for the meridiem—the two to three hours of dull yet hazardous sunlight that filtered through the thick cloud cover each planetary rotation—she’d had to retire underground, losing time. Now she was close.
    Two black-eyed feelers accompanied her—children blinded by the solar occlusion that coincided with the Master’s arrival in New York City, who were subsequently turned by the Master itself and now gifted with the enhanced perception of second sight—small and fast, skittering along the sidewalk and over abandoned cars like hungry spiders, seeing nothing and sensing everything.
    Normally, Kelly’s innate attraction to her Dear One would have been sufficient for her to track and locate her ex-husband. But Eph’s signal was weakened and distorted by the effects of ethanol, stimulants, and sedatives on his nervous and circulatory systems. Intoxication confused the synapses in a human brain, slowing its transfer rate and serving to cloak its signal, like interference over a radio channel.
    The Master had