Eph exited the highway in silence. This vampire business was the mental equivalent of eating bad food: his mind refused to digest it. He chewed and chewed but could not get it down.

When Setrakian had asked him to pick a passenger from the list of Flight 753 victims, the first one who came to mind was the young girl Emma Gilbarton. The one he had found still holding hands with her mother in the airplane. It seemed a good test for Setrakian’s hypothesis. How could an eleven-year-old dead girl journey at night from a Queens morgue all the way out to her family home in Freeburg?

But now, as he pulled up outside the Gilbartons’ address—a stately looking Georgian on a broad side street of widely spaced properties—Eph realized that, were they wrong, he was about to wake up a man grieving for the end of his family, the loss of his wife and only child.

This was something Eph knew a little bit about.

Setrakian stepped out of the Explorer, fixing his hat on his head, carrying the long walking stick that he did not need for support. The street was quiet at that evening hour, lights glowing inside some of the other houses, but no people out and about, no cars driving past. The windows of the Gilbartons’ house were all dark. Setrakian handed them each a battery-powered light with dark bulbs that looked like their Luma lamps, only heavier.

They went to the door and Setrakian rang the doorbell by using the head of the walking stick. He tried the doorknob when no one answered, using the gloved part of his hand only, keeping his bare fingertips off the knob. Not leaving any fingerprints.

Eph realized that the old man had done this sort of thing before.

The front door was firmly locked. “Come,” said Setrakian.

They went back down the stairs, and started around the house. The backyard was a wide clearing set on the edge of an old wood. The early moon provided decent light, enough to cast faint shadows of their bodies over the grass.

Setrakian stopped and pointed with his walking stick.

A bulkhead rose out at an angle from the cellar, its doors wide open to the night.

The old man continued to the bulkhead, Eph and Nora following. Stone steps led down into a dark cellar. Setrakian scanned the high trees buffering the backyard.

Eph said, “We can’t just go inside.”

“This is exceedingly unwise after sundown,” Setrakian said. “But we do not have the luxury of waiting.”

Eph said, “No, I mean—this is trespassing. We should call the police first.”

Setrakian took Eph’s lamp from him with a scolding look. “What we have to do here…they would not understand.”

He switched on the lamp, two purple bulbs emitting black light. It was similar to the medical-grade wands Eph used, but brighter and hotter, and fitted with bigger batteries.

“Black light?” said Eph.