“That would be most convenient, wouldn’t it? A handful of coffins in a basement, full of dozing vampires. But no, they don’t sleep at all. Not as we understand it. They will shut down for a while if they are sated. Too much blood digestion fatigues them. But never for long. They go underground during daylight hours solely to escape the killing rays of the sun.”

Nora appeared quite pale and overwhelmed, like a little girl who’d been told that dead people do not in fact grow wings and fly straight up to heaven to be angels, but instead stay on earth and grow stingers under their tongues and turn into vampires.

“That thing you said,” she said. “Before you cut them down. Something in another language. Like a pronouncement, or a kind of curse.”

The old man winced. “Something I say only to calm myself. To steady my hand for the final blow.”

Nora waited to hear what it was. Setrakian saw that, for whatever reason, she needed to know.

“I say, ‘Strigoi, my sword sings of silver.’” Setrakian winced again, uncomfortable saying this now. “Sounds better in the old language.”

Nora saw that this old vampire killer was essentially a modest man. “Silver,” she said.

“Only silver,” he said. “Renowned throughout the ages for its antiseptic and germicidal properties. You can cut them with steel or shoot them with lead, but only silver really hurts them.”

Eph had his free hand over his other ear, trying to hear Pete, who was driving in a car just outside Atlanta. Pete said, “What’s going on up there?”

“Well…what have you heard?”

“That I’m not supposed to be talking to you. That you’re in trouble. That you’ve gone off the reservation or some such.”

“It’s a mess here, Pete. I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Well, I had to call anyway. I’ve been putting in time on the samples you sent me.”

Eph felt another stone fall into his gut. Dr. Peter O’Connell was one of the heads of the Unexplained Deaths Project at the CDC’s National Center for Zoonotic, Vector-Borne, and Enteric Diseases. UNEX was an interdisciplinary group made up of virologists, bacteriologists, epidemiologists, veterinarians, and clinicians from inside and outside the CDC. A great many naturally occurring deaths go unexplained in the United States each year, and a fraction of these—about seven hundred per annum—are referred to UNEX for further investigation. Of those seven hundred, merely 15 percent are satisfactorily resolved, with samples from the rest being banked for possible future reexamination.

Every UNEX researcher holds another position within the CDC, and Pete was the chief of Infectious Disease Pathology, an expert on how and why a virus affects its host. Eph had forgotten sending him early biopsies and blood samples from Captain Redfern’s preliminary examination.

“It’s a viral strain, Eph. No doubt about that. A remarkable bit of genetic acid.”