The Master looked down at him from where his head bent beneath the ceiling. It gripped the sides of its hood with its huge hands and pulled it back off its skull. The head was hairless and colorless. Its eyes, lips, and mouth were all without hue, worn and washed out, like threadbare linen. Its nose was worn back like that of a weathered statue, a mere bump made of two black holes. Its throat throbbed in a hungry pantomime of breathing. Its skin was so pale that it was translucent. Visible beneath the flesh, like a blurry map to an ancient, ruined land, were veins that no longer carried blood. Veins that pulsed with red. The circulating blood worms. Capillary parasites coursing beneath the Master’s pellucid flesh.

This is a reckoning.

The voice rode into Eph’s head on a roar of terror. He felt himself going slack. Everything muddled and dimming.

I have your pig wife. Soon your pig son.

Eph’s head was swollen to bursting with disgust and anger. It felt like a balloon forcing itself to pop. He slid one foot flat beneath him. He staggered to his feet before this immense demon.

I will take everything from you and leave nothing. That is my way.

The Master reached forward in a fast, blurry motion. Eph felt, as an anesthetized patient feels the pressure of the dentist’s drill, a gripping sensation on the top of his head, and then his feet were off the floor. He swung his arms and kicked out his legs. The Master palmed his head like a basketball, lifting him one-handedly toward the ceiling. To eye level, near enough to glimpse the blood worms wriggling like plague spermatozoa.

I am the occultation and the eclipse.

Lifting Eph to his mouth like a fat grape. The mouth was dark inside, his throat a barren cavern, a direct route to hell. Eph, his body swinging from his neck, was nearly out of his mind. He could feel the long middle talon against the back of his neck, its pressure at the top of his spine. The Master tipped Eph’s head back as though cracking open the pop top of a beer can.

I am a drinker of men.

A wet, crunching sound, and then the Master’s mouth began to open. His jaw retracted and his tongue curled up and back and his hideous stinger emerged.

Eph roared, defiantly blocking access to his neck with his arms, howling into the Master’s savage face.

And then, something…not Eph’s howl…something made the Master’s great head turn ever so slightly.

The nostrils in his face pulsed, the sniffing of a demon without breath.

His onyx eyes turned back to Eph. Staring at him like two dead spheres. Glaring at Eph—as though Eph had somehow dared to deceive the Master.

Not alone.