Eph pushed past the hanging curtains of clear plastic, feeling Setrakian grow tense beside him. As they got close, Kent’s vitals rose on all the readout screens—which was highly irregular.

“Like the worm in the jar,” said Setrakian. “He senses us. He senses that blood is near.”

“Can’t be,” said Eph.

He advanced farther. Jim’s vitals and brainwave activity increased.

“Jim,” said Eph.

His face was slack in sleep, his dark skin turning a putty gray color. Eph could see his pupils moving fast beneath his eyelids in a kind of manic REM sleep.

Setrakian drew back the last intervening layer of clear curtain with the silver wolf’s head of his tall walking staff. “Not too close,” he warned. “He is turning.” Setrakian reached into his coat pocket. “Your mirror. Take it out.”

The inside-front pocket of Eph’s jacket was weighed down by a four-inch-by-three-inch silver-framed mirror, one of the many items the old man had collected from his basement vampire armory.

“You see yourself in there?”

Eph saw his reflection in the old glass. “Sure.”

“Please use it to look at me.”

Eph turned it at an angle, so as to view the old man’s face. “Okay.”

Nora said, “Vampires have no reflection.”

Setrakian said, “Not quite. Please now—with caution—use it to look at his face.”

Because the mirror was so small, Eph needed to step closer to the bed, his arm outstretched, holding the glass at an angle over Jim’s head.

He couldn’t pick up Jim’s reflection at first. The image looked as though Eph’s hand were violently shaking. But the background, the pillow and bed frame, were still.

Jim’s face was a blur. It looked as though his head was shaking with tremendous speed, or vibrating with such force that his features were imperceptible.

He pulled his arm back fast.

“Silver backing,” said Setrakian, tapping his own mirror. “That is the key. Today’s mass-produced mirrors, with their chrome-sprayed backing, they won’t reveal anything. But silver-backed glass always tells the truth.”

Eph looked at himself in the mirror again. Normal. Except for the slight trembling of his own hand.

He angled the glass over Jim Kent’s face again, trying to hold it still—and saw the tremulous blur that was Jim’s reflection. As though his body were in the throes of something furious, his being vibrating too hard and too fast to be visibly rendered.

Yet to the naked eye he lay still and serene.

Eph handed it to Nora, who shared his astonishment, and his fear. “So this means…he’s turning into a thing…a thing like Captain Redfern.”