“This too will be difficult for you to accept. But to them we are not enemies. We are not worthy foes. We don’t even rise to that level in their eyes. To them we are prey. We are food and drink. Animals in a pen. Bottles upon a shelf.”

Eph felt a chill, but then just as quickly rejected his own shivery response. “And to someone who would say this sounds like so much science fiction?”

Setrakian pointed to him. “That device in your pocket. Your mobile telephone. You punch in a few numbers, and immediately you are in conversation with another person halfway around the world. That is science fiction, Dr. Goodweather. Science fiction come true.” Here Setrakian smiled. “Do you require proof?”

Setrakian went to a low bench set against the long wall. There was a thing there covered in a drape of black silk and he reached for it in an odd way, his arm outstretched, pinching the nearest edge of fabric while keeping his body as far away from it as possible, and then drawing the cover off.

A glass container. A specimen jar, available from any medical supply house.

Inside, suspended in a dusky fluid, was a well-preserved human heart.

Eph stooped to regard it from a few feet away. “Adult female, judging by the size. Healthy. Fairly young. A fresh specimen.” He looked back at Setrakian. “Where’d you get it?”

“I cut it out of the chest of a young widow in a village outside Shkodër, in northern Albania, in the spring of 1971.”

Eph smiled at the strangeness of the old man’s tale, leaning in for a closer look at the jar.

Something like a tentacle shot out of the heart, a sucker at its tip grabbing the glass where Eph’s eye was.

Eph straightened fast. He froze, staring at the jar.

Nora, next to him, said, “Um…what the hell was that?”

The heart began moving in the serum.

It was throbbing.

Beating.

Eph watched the flattened, mouthlike sucker head scour the glass. He looked at Nora, next to him, staring at the heart. Then he looked at Setrakian, who hadn’t moved, hands resting inside his pockets.

Setrakian said, “It animates whenever human blood is near.”

Eph stared in pure disbelief. He edged closer again, this time to the right of the sucker’s pale, lipless receptor. The outgrowth detached from the interior surface of the glass—then suddenly thrust itself toward him again.

“Jesus!” exclaimed Eph. The beating organ floated in there like some meaty, mutant fish. “It lives on without…” There was no blood supply. He looked at the stumps of its severed veins, aorta, and vena cava.

Setrakian said, “It is neither alive nor dead. It is animate. Possessed, you might say, but in the literal sense. Look closely and you will see.”