At that moment, coming up the stairs of Eph’s apartment building two steps behind Fet, Setrakian gripped the handrail suddenly, his shoulder slumping against the wall. Pain burst in his head like a blinding aneurism, and a voice—vile and gloating and blasphemous—boomed like a bomb exploding inside a crowded symphony hall.

SETRAKIAN.

Fet stopped and looked back, but through wincing eyes Setrakian waved him ahead. A whisper was all he could muster: “He is here.”

Nora’s eyes darkened. Fet’s boots pounded as he ran up to the landing. Nora helped Setrakian, pulling him after Fet, to the door, inside the apartment.

Fet hit the first body he encountered, an open field tackle, going in low and getting grabbed as he did, falling and rolling over. He popped up fast in a fighting stance and faced his opponent, seeing the vampire’s face, not grinning, but with his mouth spread like a grin, ready to feed.

Then Fet saw the giant being across the room. The Master, with Eph in his grip. Monstrous. Mesmerizing.

The nearer vampire came at him and drove Fet back into the kitchen, against the refrigerator door.

Nora rushed inside, managing to switch on her Luma lamp just as the vampire Bolivar lunged for her. He hissed a breathless scream and reeled backward. Then Nora saw the Master, the back of his down-turned head against the ceiling. She saw Eph dangling by his head in the monster’s grip. “Eph!”

Setrakian entered with his long sword bared. He froze for a moment when he saw the Master, the giant, the demon. Here in front of him now after so many years.

Setrakian brandished his silver sword. Nora, closing from a different angle, drove Bolivar back toward the front wall of the apartment. The Master was cornered. Attacking Eph in such a small space had been a cardinal mistake.

Setrakian’s heart pounded in his chest as he turned the blade point out and ran it at the demon.

The droning inside the apartment expanded suddenly, an explosion of noise inside his head. And Nora’s, and Fet’s, and Eph’s. An incapacitating shockwave of sound that made the old man shrink back for a moment—just long enough.

He saw a black grin snake across the Master’s face. The giant vampire threw the flailing Eph across the room, his body slamming into the far wall and dropping hard to the floor. The Master hooked Bolivar by the shoulder with one of his long, taloned hands—and lunged at the picture window overlooking Worth Street.

A splintering crash shuddered the building as the Master escaped in a rain of glass.

Setrakian ran toward the sudden breeze, to the frame of the window edged with jagged shards. Three stories below, the glass spray was just hitting the sidewalk, glittering in the streetlight.