At Dawn They Sleep

The Darkness Cuts Half of the Sky

Early October

Roland's Log

Fiona gave me a digital MP3 voice recorder. She said I had to send her my musings at the end of each week. Even a criminal organization that moonlights within the intelligence game must maintain sharp vigilance over its secrets and the possibility that a malevolent supernatural being could easily seduce a devoted agent. Gram intelligence officers would analyze the audio recordings. If there were the slightest question as to whether an operative had been compromised, they would be immediately extracted from active duty.

The history of the Uninvited was spotty at best, and it didn't help that they came around the same time as the Dark Ages, when records were scarce. Fiona gave me the thumbnail as best she could. Like Gram, there were three tiers of hierarchy: The First, godlike beings who, as Efraim had said, were the Adam and Eve of their kind, and the Offspring, who were the first mortals to be turned into their undead thralls over a thousand years ago; and then there are the newer vampires, Children of Shadow, that stretch back to around the 1700s. All of them, though, collectively are known as Uninvited.

Fiona briefly explained why they're so difficult to kill and the connection between what was a legend and a fact regarding them. Namely, something called the Nexus, the point at which the incorporeal and corporeal states of being converge. She said that around the 1930s, Gram and some secret government program called the Ice Box discovered that vampires existed in the same way as Schrödinger's cat did. This theory somehow explains everything from the Uninvited's aversion to sunlight, resistance to most projectiles, and why they can't cross running water or why you can only kill them when they're sleeping.

She also reiterated what Efraim had told me about them being like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, specifically pestilence. The Uninvited are vectors, just like insects that carry disease, and continued exposure to them can have dire consequences on your health. This made me think of my dad's lingering battle with cancer and if his lengthy contact with the vampire Cora was the root cause of that terminal illness. I could probably make myself pretty crazy with the speculation on that.

By the time I was heading back to the Bronx, the sun was over the Hudson. I dropped off Uncle Roy's car with the tank refilled, hopped on the subway, and headed to a garage in Midtown, where Fiona had her own set of wheels I could use. A vamp's Chosen, identified by Gram operatives, was spotted scoping out a mansion on Long Island; more than likely, whomever this home belonged to was on the next meal ticket of the Uninvited. My job was straightforward: tail the minion, the Chosen.

Fiona also told me until she got my blood results back confirming I couldn't be turned, I was basically on my own. My blood had to be sent to a special lab in Oslo, and it could sometimes take weeks to get results. Until then, I was being paid strictly as a freelance operative of Gram. It was just my spectral-suffused, glowy amulet and me against the creatures of the night.

Late October, Carla

The strange old woman had been in Carla's bathroom for the last hour. In the meantime, Carla had poured herself a glass of wine, and when that proved insufficient to calm her nerves, she poured all thirty ounces out in the sink and mixed herself a cocktail. She then lit a cigarette and felt instant gratification, a sort of jouissance; Cort had always forbidden her from smoking in the apartment, but he sure couldn't say shit about that now, she thought. She embraced the guilty vice, rounded her lips, and puffed out a pleasurably sized smoke ring.

"Hey, you smoking out there?" The old woman shouted from the toilet.

"No!" Carla said, frantically waving her hand to disperse the smoke.