And, whether by design or by accident, it was a silver threshold Ozryel crossed. His hostess was a stocky woman of light olive skin. Unrefined, ungroomed—the wife of a slave driver and interested only in commerce. But that night, when the hostess looked up from her post at the vestibule of the pleasure house, she saw the most beautiful, benevolent human-appearing creature standing before her by the golden light of the burning oil. The archangels were perfect, sexless vessels. No hair on their bodies or faces and immaculate, opalescent skin and pearlescent eyes. Their gums were as pale as the ivory of their teeth and the grace of their elongated limbs came from perfect proportions. They had no trace of genitalia: a biological detail that would be echoed obliquely in the horror that would spawn.
Such was the beauty—the benign magnificence—of Ozryel that the woman felt like weeping and asking for forgiveness. But years at the trade gave her the fortitude to peddle her services. As Ozryel witnessed the refined violence within the walls of the establishment, the archangel sensed his primal grace wane—abandoning him as desire arose—and even though he did not know exactly what he was looking for, he found it.
On impulse, Ozryel gripped the hostess’s neck, walking her back against a low stone wall, watching the woman’s expression change into fear. Ozryel felt the strong yet delicate tendons around the woman’s throat, then kissed them, licked them, tasting her salty rancid sweat. And then, on an impulse, he bit, deep and hard, and tore open her flesh, plucking her arteries like harp strings with his teeth—ping-ping—and savagely drinking of the blood essence that poured forth. Ozryel slayed this woman, not as an offering to his almighty Lord but simply in order to know Him. To know. To possess. To dominate and conquer.
And the taste of the blood, and the death of the burly woman, and the fluidity of the exchange of power, was sheer ecstasy. To consume the blood, made
of the essence and glory of the divine—and, in doing so, disrupting the flow that was the presence of God—put Ozryel into a frenzy. He wanted more. Why had God denied him, His favorite, this? The ambrosia hidden in these imperfect creatures.
It was said that wine fermented from the worst berries tasted sweetest.
But now Ozryel wondered: what about wine from the richest berries of all?
Left with the limp body at his feet, the spilled blood shining silvery in the high light of the moon, Ozryel was left with one thought only:
Do angels have blood?
Low Memorial Library, Columbia University
MR. QUINLAN CLOSED the pages of the Lumen and looked up to meet Fet and Gus, fully armed and ready to go. Much was left to learn about the Master’s origins, but already his head was swimming with the information that the book held. He jotted down a few notes, circled a few transcriptions, and rose. Fet took the book and wrapped it up again, put it in his backpack, and then handed it to Mr. Quinlan.
“I will not take it with us,” he said to Mr. Quinlan. “And if we don’t make it, you should be the one to know where the book is hidden. If they catch us and they try to get it out of us … well, even if you bleed, you cannot talk about what you don’t know … right?”
Mr. Quinlan nodded gently, accepting the honor.
“Glad to get rid of it, actually …”
If you say so.
“I say so. Now—if we don’t make it … ,” Fet said. “You have the most necessary tool. Finish the fight. Kill the Master.”
New Jersey
ALFONSO CREEM SAT in a plush, eggshell-white La-Z-Boy recliner, his untied Pumas up on the leg rest, a hard rubber chew toy in his hand. Ambassador and Skill, his two wolf-dog hybrids, lay on the dining room floor, leashed to the broad wooden legs of the heavy table, their silvery eyes watching the red-and-white-striped ball.
Creem squeezed the toy and the dogs growled. For some reason, this amused him and thus he repeated the process over and over again.
Royal, Creem’s first lieutenant—of the battle-worn Jersey Sapphires—sat on the bottom step of the staircase, spitting coffee into a mug. Nicotine, ganja, and the like were getting harder and harder to find, so Royal had jerry-rigged a delivery system for the only reliably available new-world vice: caffeine. He would tear off a small section of coffee filter, form a pouch for sprinkling ground coffee inside, then tuck it up against his gum like chaw. It was bitter, but it kept him fired up.
Malvo sat by the front window, keeping an eye on the street, watching for truck convoys. The Sapphires had resorted to hijacking in order to keep themselves alive. The bloodsuckers varied their routes, but Creem himself had witnessed a food shipment go by a few days ago and figured they were due.
Feeding himself and his crew was Creem’s first priority. It was no surprise that starvation was bad for morale. Feeding Ambassador and Skill was Creem’s second priority. The wolf-hounds’ keen noses and innate survival skills had more than once alerted the Sapphires to an impending night attack from the bloodsuckers. Feeding their women came third. The women were nothing very special, a few desperate strays they had picked up along the way—but they were women and they were warm and alive. “Alive” was very sexy these days. Food kept them quiet, grateful, and close, and that was good for his crew. Besides, Creem didn’t go for sickly-looking, skinny women. He liked his plump.
For months now, he had been mixing it up with bloodsuckers on his old turf, just fighting to stay alive and free. It was impossible for a human to gain a foothold in this new blood economy. Cash and property meant nothing; even gold was worthless. Silver was the only black-market item worth trafficking in, besides food. The Stoneheart humans had been confiscating all the silver they could get their dirty hands on, sealing it up inside unused bank vaults. Silver was a threat to the bloodsuckers, though first you had to fashion it into a weapon, and there weren’t many silversmiths around these days.
So food was the new currency. (Water was still plentiful, so long as you boiled it and filtered it.) Stoneheart Industries, after transforming their meatpacking slaughterhouses into blood camps, had left in place their basic food-transportation apparatus. The bloodsuckers, by seizing the entire organization, now controlled the spigot. Food was farmed by the humans who slaved in the camps. They supplemented the brief, two-to-three-hour window of pale sunlight each day with massive indoor ultraviolet lamp farms: glowing greenhouses for fruits and vegetables; vast warehouses for chicken, pigs, and cattle. The UV lamps were fatal for bloodsuckers, and so they were the sole human-only areas of the camps.
All this Creem had learned from hijacked Stoneheart truck drivers.
Outside the camp, food could be obtained with ration cards earned through work. You had to be a documented worker to get a ration card: you had to do the bloodsuckers’ bidding in order to eat. You had to obey.
The bloodsuckers were essentially psychic cops. Jersey was a police state, with every stinger watching everything, reporting automatically, so that you never knew you had been fingered until it was too late. The suckers just worked, fed, and, for those few sunny hours each day, lay in their dirt. In general, these drones were disciplined, and—like the slave humans—ate what and when they were told: usually these packs of blood that came from the camps. Though Creem had seen a few go off the reservation. You could walk the streets at night among the bloodsuckers if you looked like you were working, but humans were expected to defer to them like the second-class citizens they were. But that just wasn’t Creem’s style. Not in Jersey, no sir.
He heard a little bell and collapsed the recliner, pushing himself to his feet. The bell meant a message had arrived from New York. From Gus.
Atop Gus’s hideaway, the Mexican had fashioned a small coop for pigeons and some chickens. From the chickens, every once in a while he got a fresh egg packed with protein, fat, vitamins, and minerals—as valuable as a pearl from an oyster. From the pigeons, he got a way to connect to the world outside Manhattan. Safe, uncompromised, and undetected by the bloodsuckers. Some days Gus used the pigeons to set a delivery from Creem: weapons, ammo, a little porn. Creem could get almost anything for the right price.
Today was one such day. The pigeon—Harry, “the New Jersey Express,” as Gus called him—had landed in a little perch by the window and was pecking at the bell, knowing that Creem would give him some food.