THREADED MOON

Part I: The Stoker Pact

By Hunter Lambright

Los Angeles, 1943

“How long before you think we’re gonna stomp them Japs an’ Germans, Toph?” asked a squirrelly teenager, looking over at his best friend, a solemn, pale boy with black hair. “I mean, they’re sayin’ the war could be over any day now, right?” The pair were walking down a dimly-lit Los Angeles street, not too long after dark.

“Maybe, maybe not, Jack,” replied Christopher. Only his friends ever shortened his name to ‘Topher’ or even ‘Toph,’ especially after he had repeatedly assured them that he possessed extreme hatred for being called ‘Chris.’ Even his parents called him by his full name. He shrugged off his jacket in the warm air of the night. “I guess so. Graham’s letters aren’t too encouraging, though.”

Jack’s mouth formed a small “o.” He’d forgotten that Topher’s older brother was fighting overseas in Germany. “Sorry. I shouldn’t’a mentioned it.”

“You’re fine, Jack,” said Christopher sadly. “Heck, with Graham gone, you’re the only friend I got right now. I can’t exactly afford to get mad at small things anymore.”

“So, you want to see if I can sneak us a beer from Charlie?” asked Jack hurriedly. “He says his dad’s got so many that he won’t miss a few goin’ missing.” A few seconds went by without an answer. “Topher?”

“Sorry. I was thinking,” Christopher explained. He pointed at a street corner. “That used to be where that old Japanese man kept his cart. I guess they finally went and rounded him up with the rest, huh?”

Jack shrugged. “It’s better they put all the Japs in the camps while we’re figurin’ this whole war out. We keep living next to ‘em, we’re liable to have another Pearl Harbor on our hands, you know what I mean?”

Christopher didn’t answer. His grandfather had been Japanese, having emigrated decades ago to work on the railroad. That wasn’t something his family paraded around anymore, considering the implications, but it didn’t mean that the criticism and intolerance hurt any less.

“So, you wanna go see Charlie or not?” Jack asked impatiently.

Christopher shook his head. “I can’t. You know my parents—they’re real witches about this kind of thing.”

“Tell me about it,” Jack said, shivering. He had his own theories about Christopher’s family, but Christopher always played it off. Jack simply had an ignorant fear of people with black cats. People who were different right now were bad, and Jack had taken to that like a bee to honey.

Rolling his eyes, Christopher shot back, “Hey, at least they have jobs, you know. Living off savings until the bond interest gets high enough isn’t making a living.”

“We couldn’t help it—the stocks crashed the two years after me and you were born. Look, let’s just stop talking about our families,” Jack said, reddening. “Remember what you said about getting mad over little things? Your toe’s on the line between ‘little’ and ‘big,’ Toph.”

“Sorry,” Christopher said. He peered up into the dark sky, into the nearly-full moon. Silhouetted against it was a pair of winged creatures. “Hey, look at those bats, Jack.”

As if his voice were a beacon, the bats seemed to pause in mid-flight. Then, drawn to the boys, the bats arced downward into a dive. “What’re they doing?” asked Jack, preparing to duck. The bats blew past them.

Christopher turned around to see if the bats were making a return attack, as stupid as it sounded, but only saw two beautiful women standing behind him. They looked as if they were dressed for an evening party in their long dresses, makeup, and hairstyles. “Are you lost, madams?” asked Christopher in a gentlemanly fashion.

“Not at all,” said the woman on the left, licking her blood-red lips. She was pale and white, her brunette hair almost dusty in appearance. “In fact, it seems like we just found our party.”

“Oh? Where is it?” asked Jack, dumbfounded as he looked around.

Christopher elbowed him. “I think she means us,” he hissed nervously.

“Yes, we’d absolutely love to have you for dinner,” said the other woman, a redhead. She was slightly pudgier than the other, but better dressed with a silky evening gown and pristine white gloves. The pair laughed at their own horrid pun, revealing what looked to be fangs dangling from their gums.

The two boys began backing away, as Jack furiously crossed himself over and over again. “I didn’t know you were Catholic,” Christopher whispered.

“I am now!” Jack exclaimed. The women had stopped laughing and rose into the air. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

“Yeah—run!” shouted Christopher. They turned tail and darted away, but the airborne vampires quickly caught up with them. Christopher cried out as his face was pounded into the bricks on the ground, the weight of the redhead atop his back. Ahead of him, he heard Jack crying out for his mother.

The redheaded vampire flipped Christopher over onto his back, obvious confusion spreading across her face. She clawed his shirt open, snapping the buttons off as though they were nothing. Then she found what she was looking for—the coat of arms insignia that he wore around his neck. “Clan Minoru! I knew I felt something!” she exclaimed. “You, child—are you a pureblooded clansman?”

Christopher couldn’t concentrate on the question as he heard Jack go infinitely silent now behind him. “Wh-what?” he asked weakly. Blood trickled from his nose. At the sight, the vampire licked at his upper lip, eager to drain what she could.

“Yes!” the witch howled. “I can taste the richness of the magical blood in your veins! Do you know what this means?”

“No,” Christopher moaned in a defeated tone. His best friend had just been killed, and now the same vampires who had slain him thought he had magic blood? What were they doing, talking about his last name like that, anyway?

The redheaded woman continued, her excitement almost palpable despite the severity of the situation. “It means you will be invulnerable to the spells that even now are attempted against the Nytechildren.” She paused. “Though it means that, until your thousandth convert, your power will remain latent. The seers have foretold that some godforsaken formula will have long rid the world of us by then—but you…you will live forever!”

She ran her pricking nails up and down the pale skin of his torso. “Ah, to be so young and ripe for eternity…! You’ll be the envy of the colony! What are you to be called?”

Christopher’s head rolled; he feared that he was going to faint. “Christopher,” he uttered. “But my friends…my friends…friends call me Topher.” As soon as he finished the final syllable, the boy fell unconscious, his mind unable to handle the situation held before it.

The two vampires looked at each other with greedy eyes. Then, before her sister could get the wrong idea, the redheaded vampire sank her greedy teeth into the unconscious boy’s neck, working furiously to drain his body of its lifeblood. Once she had succeeded, she let him fall to the ground unceremoniously, making sure to snap off the coat of arms from his neck as he fell.

“Then we’ll call you Topher, boy,” the redhead cackled, “because from now on, you will always be among friends…”

Los Angeles—The Lair of the Pride, Now

“I call this meeting, y’know, started.”

Alex Wilder stood at the head of the conference table, looking at his fellow runaways. “What’s happened in the last twenty-four hours? Anything new?”

Chase Stein looked up from studying the grain of the table. “Me and Molly went out, put some hurt on the new Melter. He was trying to rob a bank by standing there with the gun, waiting for the vault door to melt. Come to think of it, the guy wasn’t so much the Melter as some dude with the Melter’s gun. Go figure.”

“What did you do with the gun?” asked Nico Minoru, a pale girl at the opposite end of the table. “Does he still have it?”

“We took the liberty of taking the stolen property back from him,” Chase said with a wink. “I haven’t started looking at diagrams for weapons that complex yet. It’d be a nice project for me to start taking a look at.”

“D’you think the Melter guy is mad at me?” Molly chimed in. “I said sorry a thousand times for breaking his nu—”

“All right, who’s next?” asked Alex quickly, cutting Molly off before she could say something embarrassing. It was hard enough being sixteen with evil parents, but at least he could relate to most of the other kids. Molly was the youngest by two years, and unlike the Falcone brothers—the closest at fourteen—she had no one else her age to talk to.

Primo Falcone put up his hand meekly. “Uh, me and Matti started cataloguing some of what was in the Yorkes’ basement. I think it might be a job for more than the two of us, though, because it looks like they only cared what time it was from when they stole it and dumped it in there.”

“What he’s trying to say is that there are other objects of potential interest to people like Chase and Nico—objects of science and magic alongside artifacts,” Matti explained. “We can figure out the axes and suits of armor, but some of this is stuff we don’t want to touch until we know what it does.”

Alex pulled a turquoise eyepiece over the left side of his head. There was silence for a few seconds before Alex said, “Huh. No luck. Looks like my parents were the only ones who kept an inventory.” He flipped back the Wilder Automatic Tech Emitter and Receiver (W.A.T.E.R.) headset. After the first had been lost during the confrontation with their parents, Alex had taken on his father’s personal version of the software. “We’ll try to get to that stuff soon. We’ve got a lot on our plates.”

“No word from anyone about anything off-planet,” Karolina added quickly with what she hoped was good news. “It doesn’t mean that they aren’t talking about us, but it does mean they aren’t demanding anything that our parents ‘owe’ them yet.”

“Good to hear, but keep listening and recording. They aren’t working on our schedule, so a crucial call or warning could happen at any time,” Alex said. “I’m glad your job is going well, though. I just hope it’s not a temporary thing. The last thing we need is aliens breathing down our necks.”

Nico coughed to get Alex’s attention. “I have a problem with something,” she said. “I just don’t know how we’re going to do this, you know? I just ran across this letter that says our parents had some deal we don’t know about with this ‘Hellfire Club.’ Then there’s the so-called Champions that set up shop a couple of weeks ago that are going to look at us like villains. I’m just wondering…how long can we pull this off?”

Alex’s face was adamant. “As long as we can until we figure out how to stop the Gibborim from blowing up the world.” He looked around the table. “Let’s sleep on it and meet here in the morning. G’night, guys.”

Nico looked at Alex sternly, but said nothing more.

Standing high above the city at the edge of one of the tallest buildings that Los Angeles had to offer, a lone figure stood, his clothes billowing in the wind. The dark-haired male had the body of a teenager, but had been alive for over eighty years. A streak of blood trailed from the corner of his mouth, but his tongue snaked out with inhuman speed to catch the drying sustenance.

Behind the pale teen was the fallen form of the security guard who’d unfortunately found himself with the night shift that evening. He would wake again, of course, but he would never truly be alive. He would forever be a creature of the night.

Topher stood, hissing into the wind. This night had been too long in the making. His luck had gone to hell since the mutant girl who would have been his thousandth victim had been saved by the fat girl with the crucifix. Tonight he had met quota, after all these years—after the Montesi Formula had devoured all the vampires he had known but those from his bloodline.

He could feel it coming back to him. It was flowing, slowly, ebbing back into his veins and mixing with the blood he had sucked from his victim. The magic was returning. It brought with it a tingling sensation, like his muscles were on fire—or they were singing. Yes, that was it. They were singing, rejoicing that what was rightfully his had come back to him.

This day was a long time in coming, but now that it was here, Topher was well-prepared. He had long-since memorized the spell he needed for tonight. It was a small one, nothing on the scale of world domination. This spell was more of a test of his powers and their reliability.

Topher painted a circle on the rooftop with the remnants of his thousandth victim’s blood before inscribing a star inside it, effectively creating a pentagram with the body at the center. He then ignited gas lamps at each of the five points and looked up at the full moon, calling out his incantation. Mystical energy flowed from his voice toward the skies.

The sun would not rise in Los Angeles for another twenty-four hours. The Stoker Pact had been initiated.

Lifting his hands to the sky, Topher released a cry to the remaining four hundred fifty-seven of his “children” that had not been staked or exposed to sunlight over the past sixty years. “Come forth, my brethren!” he shrieked heinously to the stars. “Feed!”

Los Angeles—The Suburbs

The roar of a single motorcycle engine cut through the night, as the bike careened around corners and through yards indiscriminately. The man sitting astride the cycle was extremely well-built. He spoke little, and his dark skin and leather clothes helped him blend into the night. The man called himself Blade, and he had taken it upon himself to fight against the forces of the night.

The sun should have been up by now, he thought, as he raced down a straightaway. Looks like Graham was right about this one.

He spotted a businessman standing on his porch further up the block, staring into the night. He’d checked all the clocks in the house, and they all said the same thing. It was time for work, no matter the color of the sky.

The businessman got about halfway down the sidewalk before two creatures with skin the color of death swooped down from the skies and lifted him, struggling, into the air. His briefcase crashed to the ground, spilling its contents across the postage stamp of a yard. The motorcycle’s wheels squealed as the acrid smell of burnt rubber filled the air.

Blade whipped the crossbow from his back, loaded with stakes that had been soaked in holy water. One or the other would have done the trick by itself, but he was a perfectionist—that left no margin for error. The first shot lodged itself into the left side of one of the vampires’ rib cages. It vaporized, its meager clothing adding to the man’s lawn decorations.

The second shot arced over the hapless man’s shoulder. He winced, but the shot had done its job by causing the fiendish creature to back its mouth away from the screaming victim’s neck. The vampire swung the man in front of its body, using him as a living shield. It had some good moves.

Blade had better ones. Crossbow bolts had an almost equally devastating effect on the human body as a vampire’s. He had other weapons in his arsenal that did not. He pulled another gun from his trench coat, painted black to resemble a submachine gun. The vampire shook its finger, pointing at its hostage. Blade smiled, tipping his sunglasses at the creature. Then he fired the gun upward, pumping the gun all the while so that the pressure would continue forcing his artillery out of the spigot at the end. For the first time ever, evil was vanquished by a Super Soaker.

Holy water arced up into the night, spraying the vampire in the eyes. Steam rose where it struck, signaling the acidic reaction that took place at contact. The vampire let go of its hostage and took off, howling as it went. Blade dove forward and caught the man before he hit the ground, carefully setting the man on the sidewalk. “Go inside and keep your family there until the sun rises again. If you come out before then, you will die. Do you need further motivation?”

The rattled man shook his head, then darted for his front door. Blade waited until he heard the deadbolt click until he mounted his bike again. He had a feeling that, for more reasons than one, it was going to be a long night.

The Yorkes Residence

Primo awoke to the sound of his alarm clock going off. Across the room, he could see his brother already sitting up in his bed. It was as dark as the dead of night outside, yet the clock read 7:30. “Is it storming or something?” asked Primo. His half-awake mind hadn’t put anything together yet.

Matti swung his legs over the side of his bed. “I’ve been up all night. The clock never changed up.” He stood up with a pained grunt, his fourteen-year-old body shuddering throughout the effort.

“Are you okay?” Primo asked. He got out his bed and walked over to steady his brother. That was when he saw the dark red stain that had spread across Matti’s back. “Matti, you’re bleeding.”

“I know,” Matti said through his gritted teeth. His knees buckled, but Primo caught him before he hit the floor.

Primo supported Matti as they struggled into the hallway. “This is from when the Hayes attacked you, isn’t it?” Matti didn’t respond. “Isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Matti mumbled. The two stumbled into the bathroom, where Primo set his brother against the tub.

“Let’s take a look, man,” Primo said, his breath coming one after the other. He knew Matti was in bad shape, and it was taking everything he had not to sink into a panic. He lifted the back of Matti’s shirt. There on his brother’s back was the V-cut that had been made by Gene and Alice Hayes when they believed Matti had been threatening their daughter. The wounds had scabbed over and unsuccessfully attempted to heal several times, but the skin continued to break open. Primo pulled away the dark, sodden gauze and put one of the Yorkes’ bath towels against Matti’s back to sop up some of the sticky blood on his back.

“How—nh!” Matti closed his eyes and gritted his teeth for a moment before continuing weakly. “How bad is it?” Primo didn’t need to answer. Matti read it in his eyes. “That bad, huh?”

Primo nodded, dabbing as lightly as he could even though Matti tensed at even that much contact. “It’s pretty tender, then?” Primo asked.

“Yeah,” Matti said, wincing again. “What was your first clue?”

Primo shrugged. “Probably when I saw all the blood that’s supposed to be inside you all over your back,” he said offhandedly. “I think I’m gonna call Alex. No more stubborn crap, Matti. You need a doctor. You’re probably freakin’ infected. I told you this would happen.”

“Fine, you were right,” Matti said weakly. “Happy now?”

Primo allowed himself a half-grin before he went back into their bedroom to get his cell. He returned to Matti with the phone to his ear. When Alex picked up, Primo didn’t allow him any time for a greeting, jumping straight to the point. “Dude, we got a problem,” he said.

“You’re telling me,” Alex shot back. “It’s almost eight in the morning and no one has a clue why the sun’s not rising. It’s risen in San Fran and Sacramento, and even Yuba City, but not L.A. That never really spells ‘problem-free day’ to me.”

Primo sighed in exasperation. “We have a bigger problem than that, Alex. Matti needs a hospital, and I don’t know where we can go that’s not going to ask questions about our parents or our legal status. Your magic headset have anything for me?”

There was a short pause which Primo assumed meant Alex was searching through his parents’ files on W.A.T.E.R. Finally, Alex said, “I’ve got a guy for you. He’s listed here as ‘Physique.’ My parents used him once when my dad took a shoulder hit in a shootout. He’s been on their payroll since the beginning, it looks like.” Alex paused. “How bad is Matti?”

“Bad,” Primo said, turning and covering the mouthpiece. “He seems on top of things now, but he’s lost a lot of blood and I have a feeling he’s going to be teetering on the edge of delirious soon, you know?”

“I’ll call Chase, then,” said Alex. “He can pick you guys up and ferry you over there. I don’t want you trying to make it on your own with him.”

“Thanks, Alex,” said Primo. “I mean it.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Alex replied. “Just keep pressure on the wound and, yeah, all the stuff they used to teach us in school, okay?”

“Got it. Good luck fixing the sunrise,” Primo responded. “Seeya.”

Alex didn’t respond for a second, like there was something else he wanted to say. Finally, he let it go and said, “Bye.”

Primo ended the call and looked back at Matti, who was staring wide-eyed out the bathroom door at the bedroom window. “Did you see that?” he asked. Primo shook his head. “There was a person—out the window—on the second floor!” Matti gasped.

“Damn,” Primo cursed. “You’re already losing it, Matti. Stick with me, man!” He helped Matti to his feet, trying to lead him toward the door and the stairs outside it.

Matti’s eyes were fixed on the window, however. “No, Primo! Someone was really there! I don’t want to go out there, Primo! I’ve already seen this movie!”

“What are you talking about?” asked Primo in concern. “Are you okay?”

Matti shook his head. “I’m not seeing things, Primo. There was something at the window—and it looked just like a real, live vampire.” His face had gone pale, though whether that was from fright or the lack of blood was up for debate.

“Are you serious?” asked Primo.

Matti nodded.

“In Los Angeles?”

“Why not?” asked Matti with a weak shrug.

Primo walked to the closest window and peered up and out. There, circling above the house like vultures, was a pack of four or five pale creatures, clothed in business apparel, pajamas, and other normal attire. Primo exhaled quickly, looked at Matti’s back, and then back up at the sky. “They’re like sharks,” he whispered.

“What? Why?” Matti asked leaning back against one of the bedside tables.

Primo pointed at Matti. “They’re gathering at the scent of blood.” He grabbed the cell and punched in the speed dial for Chase’s phone.

“Hey, I’m on my way,” answered Chase. The sound of his van’s stereo crackled through the cell phone speakers.

“Did you bring any firepower?” asked Primo hurriedly, still staring up out the window.

The car stereo went silent before Chase answered. “No more than usual. Just my Fistigons and Lightning Rod. Why? We expecting a fight?”

“Basically,” Primo said. “Look, you’re not gonna believe when I say this, but—”

“Holy shit! There’s fricking vampires over your house!” shouted Chase. “This changes fricking everything!” There was the sound of him fumbling with something in the car before he said, “Look, I’ll be there. I’ll let you know when to try to get in. Don’t come outside, whatever you do. Got it?” The line clicked dead before Primo could respond.

“What’s going on?” asked Matti, as Primo put his phone in his pocket.

“He’s coming,” Primo said slowly. “I just hope he knows what he’s doing…”

As Chase neared the house, he realized how quickly he had drawn the vampires’ attention. There was almost no one out at this time of morning thanks to the dark—and, likely, to the fact that anyone who had stepped out had probably already been devoured.

Chase strapped his Fistigons onto his hands and flipped down his exo-specs. He toggled the knob on the side of the goggles and looked up through the roof of the van. None of the vampires hanging around the Yorkes’ old house had noticed him—yet.

He reached back for the Lightning Rod—a thin boom-stick his father had been working on up until his death. Chase had finished the job. Despite his encyclopedic knowledge of vampire movies and Buffy, Chase wasn’t sure what he was really going to be up against. The fact that the vampires were flying directly contradicted some of what he’d learned from TV. “Whedon got it wrong,” Chase muttered.

He steeled himself for opening the door when something else occurred to him. Leaning over to his glove box, Chase withdrew a jar of a black substance that oozed with the consistency of tar. It was called “Cape,” and could supposedly grant its user powers alongside its high. He stowed the jar in his inner jacket pocket. Then he looked up through his roof again and screamed.

There, crouched atop the roof of the van, was a pale-skinned, ravenous human being. If it weren’t for the fangs, Chase would have said the man had rabies. He punched the accelerator and grabbed his cell, which was ringing angrily on the dashboard.

“There’s one on your van!” Primo screamed through the earpiece.

“Ya think?!” Chase shouted. He clicked the speaker button and tossed the phone on the passenger seat so that he didn’t crash. “Is the garage attached to the house?”

“What?” asked Primo frantically. “Why does it matter?!”

“Is the garage attached to the fricking house?!” Chase screamed, still trying to shake the vampire from the roof.

“Yes!”

“Good!” Chase yelled as his van slammed into and through the garage door, slamming into the back wall where Dale Yorkes had kept his lawn and gardening tools. The van’s breaks screeched and then died at impact. Chase rocketed forward into his airbag. “Shit!”

Primo stood at the door to the garage, his mouth open. An aura surrounded his body protectively in the shape of a glowing green falcon. “W-what did you do?! You brought it in with you!”

“Try again,” Chase muttered, puncturing the airbag with his Fistigons. “They can’t come in unless you invite ‘em. Vampires 101, Primo.” He pointed to the now open entrance to the garage. The three vampires hovered there, hissing, but took not one step closer. The one that had been atop the van had abandoned ship before Chase had crashed inside. “Where’s Matti?”

“In the kitchen,” Primo said. “Can you give me a hand with him? He’s woozy as heck.”

Matti was mumbling on about something, but Chase didn’t bother to ask what. He merely hefted the younger boy up over his shoulder, and, grunting heavily, carried him to the back of his van. “We’ve gotta move. Get in the back with him.”

Primo did as he was told, the falcon folding back neatly over him until it was a tattoo on his back once more. “How do we get out of here?” he asked.

“Leave that to me,” Chase said. He pulled out the jar of Cape and unscrewed the lid. He quickly poured a globule into his hand. “Here goes nothing,” he muttered, and shoved the globule in his mouth, swallowing it whole.

He stood there for a moment, pointing his hands out in front of him. He made his arms shudder, but nothing happened. “Come on, baby. Do your thing,” he whispered. His arms shuddered, but nothing happened again. Chase looked up at the entrance to the garage. The vampires were gone. “Shit!”

Chase jumped back into the driver’s seat. “Plan B, boys!” he shouted, turning the key into the ignition. There was no response from the back. “What’s wrong?” he asked, turning around.

“Whoa.” Primo pointed at Chase, his mouth wide open in awe.

Chase turned back to the rearview mirror, barely recognizing the face staring back at him. His eyes oozed with black energy, though he could see just fine from them. The same black energy poured from his jacket, which was flapping wildly around him. “Plan A it is,” Chase said slickly, reaching for the gearshift.

The van careened backwards out of the garage, surrounded by a cloudy black aura projected from deep within Chase’s body. There was a dull thud as one of the vampires bounced off the top of the van. Primo shouted in the back, struggling to keep Matti’s body still through the chaos. Matti was even worse off than he had been before, moaning only slightly as Chase’s toolbox crashed open over his limp body. “Watch it!” Primo shouted, clearing the tools off Matti’s back and legs.

“Sorry I’m not driving at par—it’s not like we’re being chased by bloodsucking vampires or anything!” Chase yelled back. There was a sharper thud this time as a second vampire glanced off the side of the vehicle. Chase turned the wheel sharply, throwing Primo onto the other side of the van. The falcon jumped off his back just in time to catch a ladder that had been hanging on the inside, preventing it from falling on Matti’s prone form.

“Is there anything I can do?” asked Primo, shoving the ladder back onto its hooks. He looked out the front window, just in time to see the rapidly—approaching curb. As he screamed, his falcon phased through the roof of the van and appeared above it. Right before they were about to hit the curb, the falcon sank its talons into the top of the van, lifting it over the curb and onto a near-deserted street.

“You can do that,” Chase said quickly, punching the accelerator up the hill.

Primo craned his neck around so that he could see upward. “Uh, Chase? I think maybe we’ve drawn some more attention than we wanted to…”

Up in the sky, flocking together like birds, were former human beings. It was one of the most frightening sights Chase had ever seen in his life—second only to the sight of his mother and the rest of the kids’ parents being gunned down in front of their eyes. It was the sight of death hovering over them—the vultures of the night.

“Holy hell,” Chase uttered. He looked down at the mass of energy swirling underneath his jacket. “Here goes nothing.”

Then all he could hear was the sound of his and Primo’s screaming as the entire van was sucked inside his coat, emerging almost instantaneously into a freezing, rocky plain. Then, just as quickly, the van drove into another black mass, popping out unharmed in a back alley. The van crashed into the dead end, softened by the wall of garbage bags that had clustered there.

Chase’s nose was bleeding from hitting the steering wheel since his air bag had already deflated after crashing earlier. “We’re here,” he mumbled, looking skyward. There were no vampires in sight.

The two carefully lifted Matti with an arm over each of their shoulders, carrying them to the door at the side of the alley. Chase pushed the door open with his foot. “Hey, Doc! Wilder called, said we’d be bringing you one of our guys!”

The doctor, known to most as Physique, stepped out of one of the side corridors. His skin was opaque, revealing the layers of muscle tissue and bone beneath its surface. Primo’s jaw dropped at the sight, but Chase was able to maintain his composure. “Bring him here,” said Physique, pointing to an operating room.

Chase and Primo lay Matti facedown on the table so that his wounded back was face-up. Physique first looked at Chase. “Look up at the ceiling,” he said. Chase looked up, completely duped, and then screamed in pain as Physique grabbed his nose and popped it back where it belonged. “The bleeding should stop in the next few moments. You should find a splint in the third drawer on the right that will keep it in place. I recommend you wear it for a week.”

“Thanks,” Chase grumbled, his face red. The Cape had worn off after its use for the teleportation, he now realized, seeing only his own eyes and his red nose in the mirror.

Physique then turned his attention to Matti. “I’m going to need some time with him, if you wouldn’t mind?” the doctor asked, his eyes darting pointedly toward the door. Chase nodded, and put his hand on Primo’s shoulder. Primo looked back nervously at his brother, but came along without resisting.

“Go ahead and sit down,” Chase said once they were in the hall, indicating one of the waiting chairs. “He’ll let you know when something’s changed.”

Primo sat, then looked back at Chase. “What about you? What are you gonna do now?”

Chase looked at the door. “It looks like I’m going back out there. Alex can’t handle this on his own, no matter what he says, and you can bet there are people out there who are too stupid to stay inside. We’ll take care of it, though. You can guarantee those vampires are gonna fry by the end of the night, whenever that is.”

“Don’t let any of ‘em bite you,” Primo warned. “They can smell out blood.” He pointed at Chase’s nose, and the stream that had come down his face and neck.

“I’ll clean up first, Primo. Don’t worry about me. You’ve got more important stuff going on,” he said. With that, he stepped out the door, and back into the night without end.

Epilogue

“So, you weren’t kidding, were you, Graham?”

Blade stood in the foyer of a mansion, his motorcycle resting against one of the inner columns. He had brought it inside, knowing that he could afford to disembark in the open. There was a man with him, with white hair and a sense of strength that had been born to him during his time overseas in World War II. Now in his early nineties, Graham Minoru was still a force to be reckoned with. He remained spry in his age thanks to his magic blood.

“I told you, I could feel it when the magic was tapped,” Graham said. “My granddaughter has never used a spell that powerful, and my son had his own reservoir of energy that he could tap without me feeling it. Someone used that magic to carve night into this day.”

“You’re sure it was your brother? He disappeared when he was a teenager,” Blade said, leaning against the wall with his arms folded across his chest. His trench coat rested just inches over the tile floor.

“Do you need more proof?” asked Graham. He stood at the stairwell, and beckoned Blade closer. “Take a look outside.” He pointed at the window above the doorway, where the moon could be seen outside. Blade walked up the stairs so that he could see the moon outside.

“I see the moon, and the darkness,” Blade said, “which means I should be out there getting rid of the vampires instead of talking with you.”

“Take a closer look,” said Graham. “Do you see that wispy line trailing straight across the moon?”

“Yes.”

“They call it a ‘threaded moon,’ and it only appears during the rare phenomenon when a vampire finally taps into its latent magic abilities,” Graham said. “Topher’s powers have been marinating for sixty-three years, Blade. This twenty-four-hour night spell is child’s play to him. With his power, I’d say it’s only a matter of time before he learns how to banish the light of the sun forever!”

Next Issue: Come back next issue to find out where Karolina, Nico, and Molly have been as the vampires begin their takeover of Los Angeles! Plus, Blade begins the search for Topher, and Chase makes a pit stop with the Pusher Man!