The going became harder, his purchase on the glossy stone compromised by the slick mess he was making.
With relentless fixation, his mind drove his body forward even as his conscious self, his actual will, the true north on the compass of his sentient being, said, No! Go back! Do not do this!
The disintegration and degeneration of his mind had started as soon as he’d gotten home. Standing in his back hall, by the alarm center and computer systems that ran the entire house, he had inexplicably become bombarded with childhood memories, the images and sounds and smells hitting him as cannon shots, rocking him internally until he had collapsed onto his knees.
It was every bad thing he had ever done: All the joy he had taken at the expense of others, the shame and humiliation he had puppet mastered on his younger brothers. On his classmates. On teammates. On opponents.
Lost in the morass of memory, he had watched his younger self ride the ugly, but ultimately triumphant, tide of his own creation, his prominence sustained by the power structures he created and leveraged on his behalf. He had cheated on tests. Gotten his papers written by smarter students who had secrets they needed to keep. He had falsified his SATs and gotten into Columbia on an application written by a fellow senior who had been sucking off their English teacher. In college, he had sold drugs, and he had used women, and he had sparked a campus riot just for the fun of it. He had gotten a physics professor fired for sexual harassment she did not commit just to see if he could. He had blackmailed a dean for swinging because he was bored.
Kraiten had graduated having learned nothing of substance academically, and everything that mattered in terms of exploiting weakness.
Five years later, he had founded BioMed. And seven years after that, he had been driving home from his summer house on Lake George late at night, and come upon a car accident on the rural road halfway between Whitehall and Fort Ann.
He had never understood why he had stopped. It was not in his nature.
But something had compelled him.
Behind the wheel of the wreck, he had found a woman who was not just a woman. She had been a female of a different species: The deer she had hit was still struggling on the ground, and as it expired, her open mouth had shown him the kind of anatomy that he was unfamiliar with.
Fangs.
She had coded in his car on the way to the lab. Twice. He had pulled over and revived her both times.
As soon as he had her in secure custody, so to speak, he had talked to his partner, who had instantly seen the possibility. And as they had worked on her, he had discovered where to find others. Make deals.
Seven of them. Over the course of thirty years. Males and females. Then one who had been born in captivity, the result of a breeding.
He had learned so much. He had …
Robert Kraiten abruptly realized that he was up off the floor, on his feet, in the kitchen. Blood was all down his chest and his belly. And as he looked down at himself, he noted that he hid his old man body under well-tailored suits.
Pudgy, flabby, gray hair on his chest.
He had been fit once—
His hands were moving, pulling open a drawer that revealed things that flashed, mirror bright, under the overhead lights.
Knives. Chef knives. Freshly sharpened, state-of-the-art, knives.
Tears formed in his eyes, flowing down, mixing with the blood that drip, drip … dripped from his forehead into the drawer, onto the blades.
His right hand, the hand he wrote with, reached in and gripped one of the fourteen-inch Masamotos. The blade at the tip was tiny. At the base, it was two inches. This was the knife that was used to cleave slices off turkeys and roast beefs.
He had always been in control of everything. His whole life, he had ruled everyone around him.
Now, at the end of his mortal coil, he could control nothing.
“No …” he said through the blood in his mouth.
Robert Kraiten watched as his hand turned the knife around and the other one joined its mate in steadfast grip, all ten of his knuckles standing out in stark relief under the skin that covered them.
His lips peeled off his teeth as he gritted and fought and tried to stop the stabbing. Fruitless. It was like fighting a foe,