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Nora burst into the room behind Eph, turning on a Luma lamp, its harsh UVC light humming. The sight of Kelly Goodweather—this corrupted human being, this monster-mother—repulsed Nora, but she advanced, the virus-killing light in her outstretched hand.

Eph, too, moved toward Kelly and her hideous stinger. The vampire went deep-eyed with animal rage.

“OUT! GO BACK!” Eph bellowed at Kelly the way he might at some wild animal trying to enter his house, scavenging for food. He leveled the sword at her and made a run for the window.

With one last, painfully ravenous look at her son, Kelly pulled back from the window cage, just out of Eph’s blade’s reach—and darted away along the side of the exterior wall.

Nora placed the lamp inside the cage, resting it upon two intersecting bars so that its killing light filled the space of the smashed window, to keep Kelly from returning.

Eph ran back to his son. Zack’s gaze had fallen, his hands at his throat, chest bucking. Eph thought at first it was despair, then realized it was more than that.

A panic attack. The boy was all locked up inside. He was unable to breathe.

Eph looked around frantically, discovering Zack’s inhaler on top of the old television. He pressed the device into Zack’s hands and guided it to his mouth.

Eph squeezed, and Zack huffed, and the aerosol opened up his lungs. Zack’s pallor improved immediately, his airway expanding like a balloon—and Zack slumped, weakened.

Eph set down his sword, steadying the boy—but the revived Zack shoved him away, rushing toward the empty window. “Mom!” he croaked.

Kelly retreated up the brick face of the building, the talons developing out of her middle fingers aiding her ascent as she climbed flat against the building side, like a spider. Fury at the interloper carried her along. She felt—with the intensity of a mother dreaming of a distressed child calling out her name—the exquisite nearness of her Dear One. The psychic beacon that was his human grief. The force of his need for his mother redoubled her unconditional vampiric need for him.

What she saw when she had laid eyes upon Zachary Good-weather again was not a boy. Was not her son, her love. She saw instead a piece of her that stubbornly remained human. She saw something that remained hers by biology, a part of her being forever. Her own blood, only still human-red, not vampire-white. Still carrying oxygen, not food. She saw an incomplete part of her, held back by force.

And she wanted it. She wanted it like crazy.

This was not human love, but vampire need. Vampire longing. Human reproduction spreads outward, creating and growing, while vampiric reproduction operates in the reverse, turning back upon the bloodline, inhabiting living cells and converting them to its own ends.

The positive attractor, love, becomes its opposite, which is not, in fact, hate—nor death. The negative attractor is infection. Instead of sharing love and the joining of seed and egg and the commingling gene pools in the creation of a new and unique being, it is a corruption of the reproductive process. An inert substance invading a viable cell and producing hundreds of millions of identical copies. It is not shared and creative, but violent, destructive. It is a defilement and a perversion. It is biological rape and supplantation.

She needed Zack. As long as he remained unfinished, she remained incomplete.

The Kelly-thing stood poised on the edge of the roof, indifferent to the suffering city all around her. She knew only thirst. A craving, for blood and for her blood kind. This was the frenzy that compelled her; a virus knows only one thing: that it must infect.

She had begun to search for some other way inside this brick box when, from behind the doorway bulkhead, she heard a pair of old shoes crunching gravel.

In the darkness, she saw him well. The old hunter Setrakian appeared with a silver sword, advancing. He meant to pin her against the edge of the roof and the night.

His heat signature was narrow and dull; an aged human, his blood moved slowly. He appeared small, though all humans appeared small to her now. Small and unformed, creatures grasping at the edge of existence, tripping over their paltry intellect. The butterfly with a death’s head on its winged back looks at a furry chrysalis with absolute disdain. An earlier stage of evolution, an outmoded model incapable of hearing the soothing exultation of the Master.

Something in her always went back to Him. Some primitive and yet coordinated form of animal communication. The psyche of the hive.

As the old human advanced toward her with his slaying silver blade glowing brightly in her vision, a response came forth, directly from the Master, relayed through her into the mind of the old avenger.

Abraham.

From the Master, and yet—not of his great voice, as Kelly understood it.

Abraham. Don’t.

It came as a woman’s intonation. Not Kelly’s. No voice she had ever heard.

But Setrakian had. She saw it in his heat signature, the way his heart rate quickened.

I live in her too… I live in her…

The avenger stopped, a hint of weakness coming into his eyes. The Kelly vampire seized on the moment, her chin falling, her mouth jerking open, feeling the impending thrust of her activated stinger.

But then the hunter raised his weapon and came at her with a cry. She had no choice. The silver blade burned in the night of her eyes.