No. He knew what he knew. The only thing wrong with him now was that he was being driven mad by desperation. Here he was, being held captive in a police station in Midtown Manhattan, while all around him…

Be smart, you old fool. Find a way out of here. You’ve worked your way out of far worse places than this.

He replayed the scene from the booking area in his mind. In the middle of his giving his name and address and having the charges of disturbing the peace and criminal trespass explained to him, and signing a property form for his walking stick (“It is of immense personal significance,” he had told the sergeant) and his heart pills, a Mexican youth of eighteen or nineteen was brought in, wrists handcuffed behind him. The youth had been roughed up, his face scratched, his shirt torn.

What caught Setrakian’s eye were the burn holes in his black pants and across his shirt.

“This is bullshit, man!” said the youth, arms pulled tight behind him, leaning back as he was pushed ahead by detectives. “That puto was crazy. Dude was loco, he was naked, running in the streets. Attacking people. He came at us!” The detectives dropped him, hard, into a chair. “You didn’t see him, man. That fucker bled white. He had this fucking…this thing in his mouth! It wasn’t fucking human!”

One of the detectives came over to Setrakian’s booking sergeant’s cubicle, wiping sweat off his face with a paper towel. “Crazy-ass Mex. Two-time juvie loser, just turned eighteen. Killed a man this time, in a fight. Him and a buddy, must have jumped the guy, stripped off his clothes. Tried to roll him right in the middle of Times Square.”

The booking sergeant rolled his eyes and continued pecking at his keyboard. He asked Setrakian another question, but Setrakian didn’t hear him. He barely felt the seat beneath him, or the warped fists his old, broken hands made. Panic nearly overtook him at the thought of facing the un-faceable again. He saw the future. He saw families torn apart, annihilation, an apocalypse of agonies. Darkness reigning over light. Hell on earth.

At that moment Setrakian felt like the oldest man on the planet.

Suddenly, his dark panic was supplanted by an equally dark impulse: revenge. A second chance. The resistance, the fight—the coming war—it had to begin with him.

Strigoi.

The plague had started.

Isolation Ward, Jamaica Hospital Medical Center

JIM KENT, still in his street clothes, lying in the hospital bed, sputtered, “This is ridiculous. I feel fine.”

Eph and Nora stood on either side of the bed. “Let’s just call it a precaution, then,” said Eph.

“Nothing happened. He must have knocked me down as I went through the door. I think I blacked out for a minute. Maybe a low-grade concussion.”