Read Online The Night Eternal by Guillermo del Toro, Chuck Hogan - Free Book Online Page B

heard a high whistling scream and looked up into the black rain. He watched something like a missile shoot out from high above, arc overhead, and splash down into the river. One of the oxygen tanks.
    Mortar-heavy bricks thumped down onto the road. Shards of glass fell like jewels in the rain, shattering on the road. Eph covered his head with his coat as he slid down off the dented roof, ignoring the pain in his side.
    Only as he stood up did he notice two shards of glass, lodged firmly in his calf. He yanked them out. Blood poured from the wounds. He heard a wet, excited squeal …
    A few yards away, the vamp lay on its back, dazed, white blood gurgling from the perforation in the back of its neck—but still excited and hungry. Eph’s blood was its call for dinner.
    Eph got in its face, gripping its broken, dislodged chin, and saw its red eyes focus on him, then on the silver point of his blade.
    “ I want my son, you motherfucker! ” yelled Eph.
    He then released the strigoi with a vicious chop to the throat, severing its head and its communication with the Master.
    Limping, bleeding, he got up again. “ Zack … , ” he murmured. “ Where are you … ?”
    Then he started his long journey back home.
    Central Park
     
    B ELVEDERE C ASTLE, SET on the northern end of the Lake in Central Park along the Seventy-ninth Street Transverse Road, was a high Victorian Gothic and Romanesque “folly” constructed in 1869 by Jacob Wray Mould and Calvert Vaux, the original designers of the park. All Zachary Goodweather knew was that it looked spooky and cool, and that was what had always drawn him to it: this medieval (to his mind) castle in the center of the park in the center of the city. As a child, he used to make up tales about the castle, how it was in fact a giant fortress constructed by tiny trolls for the original architect of the city, a dark lord named Belvedere who dwelled in catacombs deep beneath the castle rock, haunting the dark citadel by night as he tended to his creatures throughout the park.
    This was back when Zack still had to resort to fantasy for tales of the supernatural and the grotesque. When he needed to daydream in order to escape from the boredom of the modern world.
    Now his daydreams were real. His fantasies were attainable. His wishes were requests, his desires realized.
    He stood inside the open doorway to the castle, a young man now, watching black rain pummel the park. It slapped the overflowing Turtle Pond, once an algae-rich pool of shimmering green, now a muddy black hole. The sky above was ominously overcast, which was to say, normal. No blue in the sky meant no blue in the water. For two hours a day, some ambient light seeped through the tumultuous cloud cover, enough so that visibility improved to a point where he could see the rooftops of the city around him and the Dagobah-like swamp that the park had become. The solar-powered park lamps could not soak up enough juice in that time to illuminate the twenty-two hours of darkness, their light fading soon after the vampires returned from their retreat beneath ground and into the shadows.
    Zack had grown—and grown strong—in this past year; his voice had started changing a few months ago, his jawline becoming defined and his torso elongating seemingly overnight. His strong legs carried him up, climbing the near staircase, a skinny iron spiral leading to the Henry Luce Nature Observatory on the second floor. Along the walls and beneath glass tables remained displays of animal skeletons, bird feathers, and papier-mâché birds set in plywood trees. Central Park had once been one of the richest bird-watching areas in the United States, but the climate change had ended that, probably forever. In the first weeks following the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions triggered by nuclear plant meltdowns and warhead detonations, the dark sky had hung thick with birds. Shrieks and calls all night. Mass bird deaths, winged corpses falling from the sky