The Fall by Chuck Hogan, Guillermo Del Toro

silver plate Setrakian had hired his village smith to fashion.
    Hauptmann felt the opposite wall at his back. He groaned, weakened and confused. But Setrakian could see that he was only readying his next attack.
    Resilient to the end.
    As Hauptmann ran at Setrakian, Setrakian produced, from the folds of his robe, a silver crucifix whose long end had been sharpened to a point, and met him halfway.
    The slaying of the Nazi vampire was, in the end, an act of pure release. For Setrakian, it represented an opportunity for revenge upon Treblinka soil, as well as a blow against the great vampire and his mysterious ways. But, more than any of that, it served as confirmation of Setrakian’s sanity.
    Yes, he had seen what he had seen in the camp.
    Yes, the myth was true.
    And yes, the truth was terrible.
    The slaying sealed Setrakian’s fate. He thenceforth dedicated his life to educating himself about the
strigoi
—and hunting them down.
    He shed his priestly vestments that night, trading them for the garments of a simple farmer, and burned clean the whitish tip of his crucifixion dagger. On his way out, he overturned the candle onto his robe and some rags, and walked off with the light from the flames of the cursed farmhouse flashing against his back.

COLD WIND BLOWING

Knickerbocker Loans and Curios, East 118th Street, Spanish Harlem
    SETRAKIAN UNLOCKED THE pawnshop door and raised the security gate, and Fet, waiting outside like a customer, imagined the old man repeating this routine every day for the past thirty-five years. The shop-owner came out into the sunlight, and for just a moment everything might have been normal. An old man squinting into the sun on a street in New York City. The moment inspired nostalgia in Fet, rather than encouragement. It did not seem to him that there were many more “normal” moments left.
    Setrakian, in a tweed vest without jacket, white shirtsleeves rolled just past his wrists, looked at the large van. The door and side wall read: MANHATTAN DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC WORKS .
    Fet told him, “I borrowed it.”
    The old professor appeared pleased and intrigued. “I wonder, can you get another?”
    “Why? Where are we going?”
    “We cannot remain here any longer.”

    Eph sat down on the flat exercise mat inside the odd-angled storage room on the top floor of Setrakian’s home. Zack sat there with one leg bent, his knee as high as his cheek, arms hugging his thigh. Zack looked ragged, like a boy sent off to sleepaway camp who came back changed, and not for the better. Silver-backed mirrors surrounded them, giving Eph the feeling of being watched by many old eyes. The window frame within the iron bars had been hastily boarded over, a bandage uglier than the wound it covered.
    Eph studied his son’s face, trying to read it. He was worried about the boy’s sanity, as he was worried about his own. He rubbed his mouth in preparation for talking, and felt roughness around the edges of his lips and chin, realizing he hadn’t shaved in days.
    “I checked the parenting handbook earlier,” he began. “Unfortunately there was no chapter about vampires.”
    He tried to smile, but wasn’t sure it worked. He wasn’t sure his smile was persuasive anymore. He wasn’t sure anyone should be smiling now.
    “Okay, so, this is going to sound twisted—and it is twisted. But let me get it out. You know your mom loved you, Z. More even than you know, as much as a mother can love a son. That’s why she and I went through all we did, what felt to you at times like a tug-of-war—because neither one of us could bear being apart from you. Because you’re it. I know that children sometimes blame themselves for their parents’ breakup. But you were the one thing holding us together. And driving us crazy fighting over you.”
    “Dad, you don’t have to—”
    “I know, I know. Cut to it, right? But no. This stuff you need to hear, and right now. Maybe I need to hear it too, okay? We need to set each other