You check your iPhone. It's broken. You take out the SIM card and destroy it, then destroy the spares you carry. You wear a watch because sunrise is never far from your mind, and—yes, that's broken, too. Then you check your satchel, but the USBs are all there, all safe.
Sated for the first time in years, you listen to the wight in the empty convenience store, snuffling and moaning. You walk back to where you left your car, but it's gone except for a single hubcap. You check your reflection. There's blood on your hands and face and clumps of gore in your hair, and your shirt and jeans are in tatters. You have nothing to wash with, but you rub sand all over yourself to try to get as much of the blood off as you can.
You look like something that just crawled out of the earth for revenge—you can't show yourself anywhere civilized like this. Headlights appear on the highway, and you fade back into the scrub.
Instinctively you check the satchel one more time, but everything is there. Everything that just happened was a distraction—someone else's problem. You can reach the outskirts of Tucson before dawn, and from there make your way to the new Prince's court. Just deliver these USBs, and you'll make enough money for a new car. You'll be able to keep doing this.
Night after night.
You start walking.
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Chapter Three: The Eagle Prince
Tucson, Arizona.
Night of November 2.
Sunrise: 6:42 a.m.
Your feet hurt.
You already passed the place you were supposed to stay yesterday, but it's just an empty garage; there's nothing there for you.
An hour before dawn, you reach the chain-link fences and industrial parks that mark the outskirts of Tucson. You can see cheap stucco houses up ahead, but the burbs are no place for a vampire. Without a cell phone or money, and with your clothes too trashed for polite company, you revert to skills you honed in the desperate years after Olivecrona tried to have you destroyed. When you find an abandoned semitrailer in a factory parking lot, you note that the high walls should keep the worst of the heat off. You check it for holes in the ceiling. Finding none, you crawl inside.
You spend the day with your brain screaming in terror and your body paralyzed, as trucks and factory machines move all around you. Someone actually moves the trailer, which you're sure hasn't been moved in years. They drag it into the sun, so you spend the day boiling in a metal box under Arizona's daytime heat. The moment the sun sets, you throw open the door and—even though people are still working—flee into the night.
As you kick some black filth off your ruined boots, a BMW i8 rolls past without making a sound.
You're not asking for a BMW. Just a car that runs, a screen that isn't cracked, boots that aren't…Christ, what is stuck to your boots?
You check your USBs. Your satchel is shredded beyond usefulness, but the delivery itself is fine. You're a few hours from where you need to be. You're going to walk in there looking like hell, but you're not going to walk out of there like that, you promise yourself.
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