 
LUCIFER'S CHILDREN

Worlds of Yifan Book 5

The Technical War Book 1

J L Blenkinsop

In memory of Alek Lotoczko, 1960-2018. My best friend.

This work contains the full text of the poem _Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening_ , by Robert Frost, quoted without permission from the copyright holders. Copyright 1923, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc., renewed 1951.

Lucifer's Children, Copyright © 2017, 2018, 2019 by John L Blenkinsop. All rights reserved. This eBook may not be copied, converted, given or sold, used within any other document, quoted or altered without the permission of the copyright owner. The copyright owner may be reached at john_blenkinsop@msn.com
Table of Contents

Prologue

Shanghai

Burial

Hunger

Travelling

Bran Castle

London

The Scholomance

Initiation

Town Visit

The Master

Drachenfels

Lucifer and His Children

The Wolf
Lucifer's Children

Prologue

I was born in 2002, in Changchun, in Jilin Province. The winters there were bitterly cold, sinking down to minus forty degrees on the Centigrade scale, and the summers ferocious, reaching up to thirty-five. But I was not there long enough to experience much of that range of discomfort, because my parents took a flight to Japan.

No-one told me why they needed, or wanted, to go there, in the years that followed. All I eventually found out was that they had boarded a dirigible at Longjia Airship Port, and seven hours later they were among four hundred bodies floating in the sea off the port town of Sonbong. I was then eighteen months old, and suddenly an orphan.

My mother put me into the arms of her mother-in-law, kissed me, smiled and waved bye-bye. She – I dreamt of her as impossibly glamorous – took my father's arm; they went out onto the grassy field, turning to wave every few paces until they reached the steps up to the forward gondola. I saw this in memories I constructed many years after the event, saw my beautiful parents mount the stairs, stopping at the top, smiling so lovingly at me, waving.

And that was all there was.

Until I was ten years old I did not know any of this, nor had I begun to imagine it. For my grandparents, full of the windfall of money that came with the possession of their son's child, the inheritance they promised to keep for their precious little girl, sold up and moved down to Shanghai. There they bought a fine rambling house, and several apartment buildings to rent out. As soon as they considered me old enough they told me that my mother and father would never be coming back, and why, and put me into a boarding-school that catered for Chinese children whose parents wanted them to become Westerners.

This solitary girl thrived there. She fought off bullies, made a few close friends. She discovered she loved to learn. She discovered, too, that she hated her grandparents, and loved her mother and father, because her parents hadn't stayed away from her because she was bad, but because they had died. Death, I thought, brought me in peace into the arms of my mother. I did not realise, then, what death was capable of, nor how far, through time and space, my mother's arms could stretch.
Shanghai

A bell clanged and fourteen girls scraped back their chairs and swept up their books and bags. We filed out of the classroom, half-bowing to the Geography teacher even as we pushed her against her desk, heading for the next subject in our timetable: History. By the time the last of us was out of the door the first of Mrs. Juniper's next class were coming in. I saw her sigh, and knew she was yearning for a cup of good old British tea.

Sir Luke Prendergast was the grandson of the last British Governor of Hong Kong. How he had come to teach at Miss Hart's Academy for the Daughters of the Chinese Gentry I did not know, but he bore his lot with fortitude and with great kindness toward us girls, always genteel and correct.

He waited patiently as we settled, standing easy before the blackboard, flanked by the portraits of the immortal leaders of our modern world – Queen Victoria, Empress of Britain; Franklin Roosevelt, President of the American Republic; Franz Josef, the Austro-Hungarian Emperor; and our own dear Cixi, Empress Dowager of China. In but two years' time I would be seventeen, and Victoria would celebrate the bicentenary of her own birth. The stability, peace and prosperity these – and other, lesser, monarchs – had brought since the end of the war confirmed to us all the Golden Age in which we were so fortunate to be alive.

Sir Luke cleared his throat quietly, and I directed my attention to him. "Last week," he began, "we talked about the causes of the Great War; the rise of nationalism in Europe, of Imperialism in the East, and the trigger being the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by..." He waited expectantly.

"Please, sir... Sir Luke, sir..." A girl, I think it was Jao, waved her hand frantically in the air. Our teacher nodded toward her. "It was Armadillo Pritship, sir!"

"Very close, Jao," (I was right, it was her) "It was Gavrilo Princip, a member of a gang of Serbian dissidents trained and directed by the Chief of the Serbian Military Intelligence, Dragutin Dimitrijević. The trigger was not the whole reason for the war, of course.

"Today we will discuss the progress of the war, and the aftermath. Since we have a double lesson, this will complete your knowledge of that era; and our next lesson will concentrate on modern history."

I, together with my sorority, listened with half an ear to our teacher as he droned on, precisely and with footnotes, on the length and ferocity of the Great War, 1914-1937. At one point he used the term 'the Technical War', but it went over our heads. It had been a long war; it was a long time ago; it ended with plague and pestilence. So long as we revised, we would pass our History examinations. Most of us were looking forward to lunch. And some, to the lesson that followed.

The English stream was very popular. There were twenty pupils in Mister O'Donnell's class, and as we entered he was pacing in front of his desk, desperate for a smoke.

I, Shen Aoyun – named for the Summer Olympics of 2002, which had been held in Beijing – was now almost fifteen. I plonked myself down beside Wu Jing, my always-ever best friend, who smiled broadly and pushed over a note which, opened covertly while the class settled, read 'I love Mister Odon-li'. I smiled, screwed up the paper and dropped it on the floor.

"What's that?" the teacher called out over the din of settling girls. He looked pointedly at me.

"What's what?" I countered, looking innocent.

"You appear to have dropped something."

"Oh!" I looked down. There was a piece of paper by my feet. I picked it up and took it to the bin. "Merely a Chemistry jog. Please accept my apologies; I should not have littered the floor." I smiled shyly, and he smiled back.

The class, settled, began to learn about gerunds. It was a bore, but Mister O'Donnell followed in the second half with readings of poetry: Wordsworth, Rossetti, and Frost, whose words spoke in my heart.

"Do you really love him?" I squeaked at Jing, wide-eyed, when we were finally free to play for a quarter-hour in the wooded park surrounding the school.

"Yes! Oh, he's dishy!"

I raised my eyes theatrically to heaven, where my parents were. I'd picked the note out of the bin during the end-of-class scrum, and now I took it from my pocket and threw it at Jing. "He's nearly forty, and he's married. And you're only thirteen."

Jing stuck out her tongue and ran off.

Around the park rose the metropolis of Shanghai, with buildings over twelve stories all around, some in the business district behind the Bund as tall as mountains, twenty floors and more, all of offices, all conducting Commerce around the globe. I would go to one of those in a few years, making deals, directing the flow of money towards our Empire, making myself rich and thumbing my nose at my monstrous grandparents.

The bell rang far off. I shouldered my bag of books and went back to the ornate red-brick building for my favourite lesson, Mathematics.

The blinds were drawn down in the classroom when we filed in. Lady Sheldrake, who taught the subject, had weak eyes and could not bear the glare of the China sun. She typically arrived at the school in the back of a brougham and stepped down draped in a linen scarf, her eyes shaded by tinted spectacles. Sometimes, if it was raining or if the sun was exceptionally bright, her coachman would hold an umbrella or a parasol for her until she disappeared into the main building. Once inside the classroom she pulled down the day-blinds, which muted the light but did not cast us into darkness, and discarded her protection to stand, as now she did, erect, slim and beautiful, to greet her pupils.

There were more girls fancied themselves in love with her, than there ever were for Mister O'Donnell.

"Which of you," Lady Sheldrake began, once the class had settled, "can recall what we learnt in our last lesson?"

All hands went up. "Wu Jing?"

"Geometry, your Ladyship."

"Correct." Her Ladyship recapitulated the salient points, then segued into Trigonometry. This, occupying ninety minutes, was followed with much attention and very little restlessness from us girls. We all knew that China's future in the world was to be scientific, commercial and triumphant; we, though we were mere females, would be among the drivers of our country's prosperity.

To my surprise Lady Sheldrake asked me to stay for a minute after class. It was the last of the day; no penalty would ensue from being late for a walk in the grounds with Jing. I smiled, and sat at my teacher's bidding.

"Your progress is very good, Shen Aoyun," the great Lady opened. "It is always a pleasure to teach you."

I muttered thanks shyly.

"I understand that your parents are no more – please don't mind me being stark, I mean nothing but good for you. Your grandparents bring you up now, I've heard?"

"The school brings me up," said I, "and very well. I don't see my grandfather and grandmother much at all, even in the holidays... They send me to Changchun to stay with my mother's family, who are always so sad to see me because I remind them so much of... of her..." I was surprised to find I was crying. The teacher's gloved hand came to rest on mine, and I hung my head.

When Lady Sheldrake left, muffled against the late afternoon's sun, I walked into the parkland behind the school, dazed, muted, toward a favourite spot for solitude. I climbed a tree, one of a dozen in a copse that hid a pool of cool water, fed from a tinkling stream. There I went over in my mind what had just happened.

Jing, when she begged for details of the interview later in our dormitory, was ecstatic.

"She wants to sponsor you? To present you in Society?"

Other girls chipped in their presents of awe and incredulity.

"Why you?"

"Because she's an orphan, that's why."

"Because Aoyun is clever and kind," said Jing determinedly, jutting out her jaw. "And she'll be a wow in Society, just you see!"

"Well, so long as the school lets her," said Jao, practical as ever. "She'd miss evening meals, prep, prayers – I don't think they'll agree."

But the school, flattered by the attention of a Lady, were only too eager to consent, so long as their pupil had an approved chaperone. They chose Miss Yuan, an elderly spinster who taught music, badly. Lady Sheldrake graciously agreed to the arrangement and a week or so after our chat I found myself, with the slightly deaf Miss Yuan, being driven out of the grounds in the school buggy, toward the Sheldrake's large house on the Bund.

On that first evening my head swam with new experiences. Their house was magnificent, in the Italian style, with an open courtyard in the centre and galleries rising up four stories, a fountain cooling the air. The Sheldrakes sat on the shaded side, with friends from many of the Embassies surrounding them, for Count Arisztid Sheldrake was the Ambassador for Romania; and many of the other diplomats had brought their sons and daughters, who seemed at first outraged and then amused that some random Chinese girl should have been brought in from the street to sit with them.

It was of no concern to me. I was used to sitting quietly, in the company of my grandparents sometimes, and of my mother's inconsolable family. I could do that for hours, responding politely to enquiries, laughing pleasantly at others' jokes, keeping boredom away by making up nick-names for those around me.

This one, the Belgian Ambassador's daughter, fat and with bad teeth – she was Gongfu Panda. The girl with the frizzy hair, whose brother kept bringing wine, was at least twenty, and should by now have been married – she was Junior Yuan. And so on, around the group. Only one of those present smiled at me and essayed a few kind words. This was an earnest fifteen-year-old black girl, the daughter of the Nigerian Consul, and who I suspected had been until my own appearance the neglected one in the party. I smiled back, and made polite conversation. Sipewe – for that was her name – surprised me by speaking in very passable Mandarin, at which the other girls gaped, then aped, chanting "Ywa ywa, mwa mwa, ching-chong-cha!" until the adults told them to be still.

"They are fools," Sipewe said, in the language the others could not, and would ever not understand. "They spend their days with tutors and in boutiques, they learn nothing. Only existing to find some poor man to marry. And then, to torment."

"I do pity them," I replied. "Why don't they go to school?"

"School? Oh! They would hate it. To risk meeting someone of a lower class than they?" Sipewe laughed, which earned glares. "To speak of which – how do you come to be here?"

I determined to take the remark as humorously meant, and gave a short account of my meeting with the Lady. Sipewe nodded. "Well, perhaps you will grow from this experience. I know that the Count and Lady Sheldrake have no children of their own. Perhaps they will adopt you."

This hadn't occurred to me. I felt uncomfortable, then, but stuck with my new friend, talking about what I supposed, and what Sipewe knew, about the life of those limited to living in the foreigners' enclave, rich though it was; and by the time the evening was over I felt quite comfortable, and had no thought about being adopted by a rich Western couple.

I was handed into the buggy, and Miss Yuan, who had amused herself with sherry, was poured in behind me. Back to the school we went, to a telling-off for the teacher and an interrogation for me behind the doors of my dorm.

Illness was rife in Shanghai in that summer, even in the enclave. Funny Ghost – the nick-name I bestowed on a slim, pale girl in the clique of diplomatic daughters – sickened and died, having become paler and thinner each time I had seen her since that first evening. Her parents mourned, but the callous girls all forgot her within a week.

"Tragedy and death are always close," I remarked to Lady Sheldrake, when we were getting ready together for a Ball. My chaperone had been discontinued; it was satisfactory to my school that the Sheldrakes now sent their own coach and a maid to bring me, and poor Miss Yuan needed a break from the sherry.

"I am aware of that, Aoyun," my benefactress replied with a smile. She held up a necklace made all from diamond and platinum. "Will you wear this tonight, for me?" She put it around my neck and fastened the clasp. Her face was powdered lightly, cheekbones hinted with rouge, lips naturally full red. She came so close that I felt her breath – minty, but with a trace of metal to it. Of iron. The clasp closed, her hands fell away. Lady Sheldrake stepped back and I breathed again. Then she gave me a hand-mirror; there were no other mirrors in the dressing-room.

"Look! You are a princess!" And indeed, I was. I saw, when I held the mirror far enough away, a perfect almond face, black hair dressed just-so, up in a chignon and with sweeps of my long hair on either side brought around to curl on my collar-bones. The dress, bought from a swish store just behind the Bund, showed my shoulders to advantage, and was bodiced to make the most of what little chest I had so far obtained.

I turned, to catch myself in different angles of light. I was so beautiful, I almost dropped the mirror. But I did not; and placed it, with exaggerated care, glass side down on the dressing-table, and turned to my sponsor, smiling with delight, sparkling with diamonds and joy. "Let's go down! The carriage must be waiting!"

So we went, and had a wonderful time at the Columbian Embassy, where I danced with careless boys and uncaring girls – for there was a dearth of male companions – and spinning in my mind why it was that when I had turned the mirror, there had been no sight of the Lady who stood beside me, but only an empty dress standing on its own.

On the anniversary of my invitation to the Sheldrake's coterie I, now almost sixteen, completed my General exams.

I took the required Imperial examinations in Mandarin, calligraphy, poetry, mathematics and technology, and the school's examinations, from the Cambridge curriculum, in English, art, mathematics, music, sciences and general philosophy. It was a very progressive school, taking advantage of its distance from Europe to promote its own conviction that girls must be at least as intelligent as boys, and wanting just as much intellectual stimulation. Of course, I did well; but my Form teacher thought that I might have done better.

"You spend so many nights out," Mrs. Juniper complained when she handed me my envelope. "I wouldn't be surprised to hear you'd failed everything!" But I hadn't.

"Of course you did well in English," Wu Jing moaned. "YOU'RE not in love with Mister O'Donnell." Her own scores had been very good save in that one subject. "Although you did quite well in mathematics, which surprises me."

I laughed. I was not in love with Lady Sheldrake. Truth to tell, although I liked the Lady, I felt that I was being pushed toward a decision I did not want to take, which was to consider being adopted by the Sheldrakes. I felt it would be a betrayal of my own parents; but in quiet hours I could see that this was a foolish fancy. My parents would have approved of any means by which I could escape my grandparents' uncaring and avaricious guardianship.

And I was now almost of age to accept for myself, or deny, as I wished. The money left to me by my parents' demise would rest in the old folks' hands until I turned eighteen, but in almost all other ways I was now free from their control.

And Lady Sheldrake, once the results of the examinations were known, came straight to the point.

"My husband and I would like you to come to live with us," she began. "You would attend the school as a day-girl, and of course you may bring a companion with you. But we – I – we find that we love you as if you were our own; having had your company for a year, we find we can't bear to think of you remaining here, alone, bedding down in a draughty loft full of other girls. Please – say you will come to live with us?"

It was a heartfelt plea, accompanied by the glimmer of a tear in the Lady's eye, and I found it impossible to refuse. I of course nominated Jing as my companion, which brought a wide grin to the girl's face, and the school made the arrangements rather more efficiently than it normally would; so that we were out of the stuffy farty dormitory and into the big Italianate house on the Bund within a week.

The Lady sent a steam-wagon to bring our trunks and valises, as well as we ourselves. It was exciting, but the smell of hot metal and burning coke, the particles of soot and the infernal clanking made us both feel sick, and when we stumbled out onto the carriage-park at the end of the drive we swore never to go horseless again.

The accommodation was wonderful. I had seen the upstairs rooms before, but had never spent the night. Jing wandered around our shared suite, touching things, examining the bathroom fittings – there was a shower, and it had hot water! – and generally oohing and aahing over the smallest convenience.

"There isn't a mirror," she complained eventually, sitting on her own bed, in her own chintzy bedroom.

"There's a hand-mirror on your dressing-table," I pointed out nervously. Jing conceded that, but still found it peculiar. A pillow-fight changed the subject, and Jing never mentioned it again for the rest of her life.

I, Jing, Sipewe and the few other non-white girls formed our own clique within the group of diplomatic and Society young women accepted into the ballrooms and salons of the foreigners' enclave. We acted together, finding strength in our unity. Our ripostes in response to the insults from the others were witty and hit home, so much so that we found ourselves in an ascendant, selecting our dancing-partners from the young males and hardly ever having to dance with one another; while the pasty-faced teenage girls fumed, going quite red in the cheek at our audacity.

Sophie – Lady Sheldrake, but now, _in loco parentis_ , Sophie to we two girls – bought clothes and jewellery for Jing and me, effortlessly upstaging the fashion-setting attempts of the 'creamers' – the nick-name I had given to the white girls. Indeed, there was so much jewellery around the Sheldrake home that it was impossible to wear the same thing twice in a season.

I donned an ivory silk dress for the ball at the Ecuadorian Embassy, and Lady Sophie fastened a wonderful ruby choker around my neck before we went, two tiers of baguette-cut rubies, dark like blood, set in butter-yellow gold. They smouldered in the hand-mirror like lava.

Sipewe caught sight of us as we entered the Embassy and bustled over, grabbed my arm and started to pull me towards a stand of potted palms.

"What are you doing? Let go!"

"Come; or I'll hurt you." Sipewe was strong, and she dragged me, struggling, behind the plants and pressed me hard against the wall, then reached around, fumbling with the clasp of the choker. I protested but my friend pressed hard; and finally the jewel was free, and Sipewe dropped it into her reticule. "You'll get it back later."

"Why? What's wrong... Are you jealous of me? Sipewe –"

The Nigerian girl hissed through her teeth. I had never seen her so angry. "That necklace belonged to Adriana."

"Who?"

"Funny Ghost, you called her."

I was speechless. How could my benefactress be so crass as to purchase, and then to display, such an item? "Oh! So... Oh, thank you, Sipewe – you have saved me from such an embarrassment, I can never repay..."

"She was buried with it around her neck," Sipewe growled, her eyes mere slits. She turned and left me stock-still behind the palms, my brain in turmoil.

The mirror thing was real. The Romanian diplomat and his wife attended many balls and soirees, but never in the American Embassy, which ballroom was lined expensively with floor to ceiling mirrors of Venetian glass; and when they went to other venues they tended to keep court in some un-overlooked area, dancing seldom, and otherwise not moving much about. I sometimes glimpsed them in a glass, and saw how any normally unobservant spectator might not notice anything amiss – they were covered, in the main, the Count with the usual male outfit, gloves, and a simple and undetectable wig, the Lady with long gloves, a silken shawl or mantilla and often a wig of her own. A keen eye could have discerned the absence of faces in the mirror, but the normal mind would dismiss the image as fancy.

I didn't say anything to anyone, not even to Jing. I should have. I wish I had.

We of course still attended school. Every morning after breakfast the brougham would take us there, and sometimes in the afternoon we would come back with Sophie. Since now I was a sixth-former I had time to study by myself, rather than in the class-room; and it was while I was so engaged, in the copse of trees around the pool, that a distasteful incident occurred.

Mister O'Donnell, the English teacher, emerged from the shrubbery that surrounded my hideaway and tipped his hat to me. I nodded back. I was seated beneath a tree; my books were spread around me, my head was spinning with Physics and the theories and discoveries that had sprung up since Professor Einstein, a century ago, had pronounced his theories of Relativity, and Professor Planck had propounded the Quantum universe. So that I was surprised when Mister O'Donnell was suddenly beside me, and waving something in my face. I was confused, and then it dawned on me what it was.

"Could you not find something bigger?" I enquired, raising an eyebrow. My quip had the desired effect, and he stepped back.

"You'll find it more than sufficient. Virgin chinks like you – like your little friend Jing – just love a dose of white –"

I had risen, and now I lifted my skirts and kicked him full in his privates. My shoes were the latest in fashion, provided by Sophie, and sported a severely tapered toe capped with metal. I suspect that I drove his unmentionables quite back through his inguinal canal. It appeared to hurt; so much so that I had more than enough time to pick up my books and make my departure.

Anger and embarrassment drove me. I first sought out Jing, who stammered when I pressed her, and finally broke down – the man had indeed abused her, and made free with her in private places about the school. So then I tried to take her to Miss Hart, but she would not go. I went instead alone, and had a most frustrating conversation in which I found myself accused of leading on a married man.

"Look for him," I told my headmistress, holding myself back from the fury I felt on my own and my friend's behalf, "and see how much pain he is now experiencing. If he did not want to be kicked, he should not have been waving his filthy flag in my face!"

This gave Miss Hart some pause, and she sent for him, insisting that I stay. Of course, when he came, he looked quite ill. He accused me, as he had no other defence, citing my spoilt pursuit of pleasure with Western worthies beyond my social level as an evidence that I was a wanton. But the school nurse, examining him in Miss Hart's private bathroom, revealed such bruising as could not be gainsaid; and to my satisfaction he was instantly dismissed, although I would have preferred a prosecution for the number of girls he must have so badly abused in his career.

Jing, when I taxed her, said only that she loved him, and that he had been unfairly treated. She did not admit to any deeper physical intimacy with the devil, and beat against me with her fists until I withdrew. Sophie, who as a teacher had of course heard of the dismissal, talked with me. She agreed with my actions, and closeted herself with Jing for quite some time in the evening, after which my friend became more docile. At the time I rejoiced, believing that Jing had come to terms with the gross betrayal of her feminine agency by one who had been sworn to uphold her; but it became apparent, once it was too late, that she had fallen from one evil power into the clutches of another.

Through two cold winters and one hot Shanghai summer we sixth-formers toiled towards the examinations that would, we hoped, secure us places at prestigious Universities. I would be celebrating my majority, my eighteenth birthday, at the end of those tests, and would leave the school with whatever monies my grandparents had not spent from my parents' inheritance; and with, I confidently hoped, the key that would unlock the riches of the world to me: a first-class education, and a place at Cambridge to study Physics.

My relations with Jing grew back to an approximation of their former cheer and intimacy, but she did not seem to have recovered from the disappearance of her tormentor. She grew pale and taciturn, and had to be cajoled to eat more than a few mouthfuls at each meal. She had always been slim; but now she was gaunt, and sometimes when I could not sleep I fancied I heard her moaning and crying, like some sort of ghost, from her own room. I was at times tempted to go to her, but I did not, and that is to my shame. But if I had, I would surely not have been able to stop what was happening, and would merely have hastened my own demise, and hers.

We still attended the balls, and we coloured girls continued successfully to taunt the creamers, and to attract the attention of their menfolk. We became, all of us, very accomplished dancers; and expert, too, in fending off unwanted liberties. If it had not been for my worry over Jing, this would have been the best time of my young life. Sipewe, and Sunitha, the second daughter of the first attaché to the Embassy of the Republic of India, took us to small ethnic restaurants in the cramped streets just behind the Bund, where I found that I loved Indian curries – the hotter the better! So that I feared I would get fat, and even more that I would break noisy wind the next day; but it was far worse when it did happen, for though I was able to keep silent, the scent of the curry-house wafted through the class-room, and the windows had to be opened wide. I did not confess; but all knew, even the teacher.

In retaliation Jing and I took our friends to the real Shanghai, the Chinese city, to hot-pot restaurants and tea-houses, and showed them the authentic China in its variety of foods. Some meats, like dog or cat, I did not describe, knowing how Westerners made such a fuss; and they ate and enjoyed them. Jellyfish, tripe and sea-snail were tasted, and Sipewe loved more of those delicacies than Sunitha or Shona – Shona was a jolly white girl who was in our clique because she had red hair and freckles! Such stupid bigotry! – but she professed she was happier with us than ever she had been with the creamers, and she was great fun, bringing a smile always to Jing's pale face.

I was drawn to Sipewe particularly, from our group, and we spent much time together talking. But as Jing's health continued to fail my Nigerian friend's conversation turned dark. At first I did not understand where she was leading with her talk of the gods and demons of Afrique – it was interesting, of course; young women like a ghost story as much as any boy – but when she turned her theme to the ancient monsters of Europe a cold thrill ran down my spine. She talked of vampires, their glamours and their thirsts, and when she told me of their aversion to mirrors I almost cried out, but caught myself just in time. Did she suspect? Did I believe her? I felt caught in a trap, helpless to help my friend Jing, unable to confide in my friend Sipewe. As with so much at this time I did nothing, said nothing. We should have fled, Jing and I; but I did not move in any direction, and condemned us both.

It was during the cold Shanghai winter that Jing's health began to collapse. The Sheldrake's doctor, who attended, diagnosed influenza and recommended bed rest, beef tea and the other common remedies, but my friend continued slowly to deteriorate. He then advised that perhaps she suffered from consumption.

In the Lunar New Year holiday I was again compelled to go to Changchun to visit my mother's family. When, demoralised from their usual passive reproach, I returned, Jing's appearance dismayed me. Her eyes were sunken and darkly smudged around with pain. Her skin was pale and clammy, her limbs limp and trembling. She smiled when she saw her loving friend: there were curves of blood at the base of her teeth, where the gums had shrunk away. I sat on the bed with a bump, and held the poor invalid's hand. It was burning with heat.

"I'm glad you're back," Jing whispered. "I can go now. She... she said that I might..."

In the night, in the small sick-room, she died.
Burial

The doctor, their doctor, who had come to Shanghai with them, wrote a certificate to state that Wu Jing had died of consumption. This, I was aware, was a very contagious disease; yet few other cases had been reported around Shanghai, excepting in the poorer districts where doctors were loath to set foot. I reproached myself, for I had shared rooms with her, yet had not seen the creeping sickness taking hold.

I had not, in fact, noticed any cough or palpitation in the vital young woman. The usual symptoms of tuberculosis were notable by their absence.

"We have purchased a tomb in the Eight Immortals Bridge cemetery," Count Arisztid announced at breakfast, the day after. Jing's body had been taken down to a store-room beside the stables, where the winter cold would keep her. "She will be laid to rest this afternoon. I have sent word, and some from your school will come."

"She was a very popular young lady," Sophie remarked, buttering toast. I felt ill. I gulped coffee and refused food, dove rudely out of the breakfast-room and up to our suite. Jing's bed had been removed during my short breakfast, and her possessions. There was no evidence that she had ever lived.

Thirty people or so stood hunched beneath umbrellas in the thin and spiteful sleet, watching impatiently as the coffin was carried from its two-horsed hearse into a marble-clad concrete tomb, one of several new-built in this corner of the foreigners' cemetery. She should not be here, thought I, she is not a foreigner. She should have been taken back to her home, to rest with her family. But there had not been time to tell them, before these Westerners had taken control. She was not their property; but they evidently believed she was.

The bearers came out, and one sealed the door, and a priest no-one had ever seen before made some speech in English, about the mercy of a god from a land far away, and then the mourners wove their way to an inn opposite the cemetery gates for a wretched meal of sandwiches and sponge cakes, sherry, and weak English tea. Half of the group were from my school, two teachers and twelve girls, all subdued. I talked with them in Mandarin, responding to desultory questions with anodyne answers, accepting condolences.

By the time the carriages arrived the mourners had split into two very different groups – a jolly, loud collection of Western diplomats and their children, scoffing cake and catching up on one another's news, and the silent clump of white teachers, Chinese and non-white girls. I stood in the freezing rain mumbling good-byes as my and Jing's school-friends clambered into their charabanc, and leant on Sipewe when it drove off. I hated the Sheldrakes and all that they stood for. I had, however, no energy to bring to my hatred, nor even to my grief. The slow thin rain cried for Jing, as Sipewe held me.

I began to refuse the evening entertainments. I still met with the clique, my 'coloured friends', as the rump of pale misses called them, in the Grand Arcade and in the open-air cafés along the Huangpu, and we talked of young men, schoolwork, the latest moving-picture, our hopes for the future. I wasn't certain I had a future. I felt more and more that my association with the Sheldrakes was leading me toward tragedy, towards death. I had nightmares when I felt a presence in my room, a pressure fixing me to my bed, Sophie's perfume filling my head and mixed with the scent of iron. After those nights I invariably felt fatigued, and struggled to concentrate at school. I was fearful of slipping behind, and studied ever harder, until the printed words swam before my eyes.

Sometimes Jing came to me in my dreams. Her eyes were wide and dark, her lips red as rubies, as blood. She said nothing, but only stared at me, longingly, and I felt such shameful emotions for her in those dreams that I began to wonder what I was becoming.

One day in the coffee-house on Dianchi Road Sunitha remarked on how pale I was looking. She even leant forward, almost knocking over the cups, and picked at my high collar.

"Look! You've been bitten!"

The others craned their necks. A tiny red mark was visible above Sunitha's finger as it pulled on my garment.

"Oh, yuck!"

"Oh, be real," I protested, grabbing my friend's hand and pulling it away. "It's just a mosquito bite. We've all got them."

"Mozzie bites are big and itchy. That's something else."

"A spider. I bet it's a spider-bite!"

It wasn't much, just the larking around one might expect of bored young women. But when I got home – no; not home; I resisted that thought. That house was not, still is not, never will be my home – I picked up the hand-mirror and inspected myself.

There were two small red wounds, about an inch apart. They did not hurt, nor did they itch. They were, in every sense, unimportant.

But I had seen just such marks on Jing, before the poor girl had so untimely died.

"Come back," the headmistress urged. I stood in her warm study. Outside the March winds shook the trees, blowing clouds of snow into the air. The metropolis of Shanghai could not be seen. Miss Hart, standing too, was in earnest. "You're so pale, Aoyun. The life on the Bund is doing you no good. Please consider?"

"I want to come back," I replied. And I did, with an ache that filled me head to toe. But I did not think that the Sheldrakes would let me return. Even if they did – what other girl would replace me, what other innocent might be placed in danger?

The bites had not healed. They had grown, rather, and when I rose from my bed each morning I immediately took up the hand-mirror and examined them. Sometimes they leaked thin threads of blood.

"Then we will arrange things with your benefactors," Miss Hart said, and turned back to her desk.

"No, please... I must stay."

"Though you don't want to. Miss Shen, I cannot fathom you."

"I..." I faltered, couldn't say what I suspected, what Sipewe had talked about. And more, the presence in the house on the Bund, the evidence in dreams of my true friend, Jing, my dead friend Jing. "I have made friends there, Miss Hart. I have options, I may be able to leave with the Nigerian Consul and his family in May – they will be returning to Afrique, through Europe, they want me to travel with them, a companion to Sipewe..."

"You may live here in the meantime."

But I could not, and the interview fell into an awkward silence, until Miss Hart sighed and signalled her leave for me to withdraw.

Two weeks later I called upon my Nigerian friend and invited her to take tea with me on the Bund.

"I have left my school, and am no longer under the security of the Sheldrakes," I revealed. She looked astonished.

"Where are you living now?"

"Nowhere of consequence," I replied, truthfully.

"So come to live with us," Sipewe urged, leaning over the table towards me. I was sorely tempted to accept, but said nothing. "Why won't you?" My girl-friend was suspicious. She poured tea and looked narrowly at me as she passed the cup and saucer. I took it, and it clattered as I set it down on the damask. "Why don't you go back to your grandparents? Or to Changchun? What keeps you here?"

"Don't be sharp with me, Sipewe," I pleaded, putting my hands in my lap to hide the tremors. "I must stay. I want to confront them, I have to be strong to do that. They killed my friend." Tears fell and I didn't notice, they were so familiar these days. "They are everything you suspected, everything you told me. The Old Ones, the drinkers of blood; and they took my Jing..."

"What can YOU do? Tell my father. He will believe you. Let the adults run them out of China! I'm sure they're used to that, the fiends. I told you – they are well-known to us! Their magic is old, it is evil. You can't resist against it – why do you believe you can't leave Shanghai? Because they make you think that way. Please, let us help you!"

Sipewe had told me often about the ghosts and gods of Afrique, the spider-god Anansi, the floating balls of hair and teeth, the water-spirits. And then she told me too about the ghouls of old Europe: Nosferatu, Dracula. The vampires. I knew that she had suspected what my benefactors were; but it was now too late.

She reached out and touched my high collar. "You cannot defeat them, even if you become one of them. You will be bound."

I shook off her hand. "I can, and I will. This will end. Jing shall be avenged." And then I told my friend what I had now become.

Jing had already been avenged. I had seen to that, but not by my design. I'd crept from my lonely suite and padded down the landing to the sick-room, two nights before this meeting with Sipewe. I locked the door and curled up on the cot-bed. I knew that something came to my room – not every night, but often. The evidence was there in the mornings, in smudged dark stains on my pillow, in the crusted marks on my neck seen in the hand-mirror, in my lack of energy, my unnatural pallor, and in the sad eyes of my friends and schoolmates.

In the sick-room I did not sleep. I listened as the house ticked in the cool of the night. Footsteps sounded there and about, servants mostly, then the Count and his Lady going to their beds. Silence fell for a while, save for the insects and the geckos that prowled for them.

When boards creaked I sprang into alertness. The door of my suite, opening, was obvious, because I had put a small bell behind it before I decamped to the sick-room. It tinkled in the still night. There was silence for a few moments, then a sudden vicious whoosh of air inflated the whole house, making my ears sing; some great and implacable thing shook the building to its foundations in a turmoil of anger and frustration, a huge and petulant stamp that clanged around the place in a hungry riot of rage. I trembled, and knew now what power I was ranging myself against, and it was terrifying.

The house boomed for a while with ire and disturbed geckos, but at length settled. Drained, I drowsed, my heart relaxing. But in the smallest hours I felt a presence, and woke with a start, and thought at first that I was still asleep and dreaming. For there, in the small sick-room, Wu Jing stood limned in the light of the moon.

"I must feed," the girl faltered in Mandarin. "They keep me hungry." The wraith, clothed in nothing but her own pale skin, crossed to the window. I rose slowly from the cot, keeping my eyes on my dead friend. The door was locked, the key still in place. I put my hand in the pocket of my dressing-gown, fingers curling around a crucifix Sipewe had given me.

"That won't work," said Jing, not turning from the window. The moonbeams seemed to slant through her, leaving no shadow on the dusty floor. "If it did, you wouldn't be able to touch it."

"Am I gone so far?" I cried, knowing despite myself, and then, "Are you really my Jing?"

"I don't know. I think I am," said the girl. She was so still. Not the beat of a heart nor the rise of a breath moved her. Only the moon glittered from a single tear. "I am so hungry. I can't know what I am."

I went back to the bed and sat. I sighed. What would one more night of leeching mean, after all those that must have gone before? "Come to me, Jing," I said. "Hold me."

Jing, slim and famished, dithered at the window. "She would not like it; you're hers. You belong to her. I cannot –"

"You can. You will." I slipped off my robe, unbuttoned my nightdress. I slipped it down around my shoulders and swept my hair back to expose the pale neck with its two vivid stigmata. Jing turned, saw me, shuddered. The single tear fattened and fell to the floor.

"I can't. I would spoil you for her."

"That's what I want you to do, Jing darling. She took you away from me. I will take her away, if you help me. Take me. Spoil me. Take away the power she has over me, and I will save us both." I was not at all certain that this was true, but I had to break the terrible geas that hung –

Jing swept towards me, a moonbeam wraith; she was beside me in a heartbeat. The vampire was hot, hot; she held her victim in strong arms, and my desire rose in the scent of iron. My throat flushed with what little blood I had left in me. I wanted to feed her, my love, my friend. Her red lips closed around my throat, her needle teeth visited the tracks left by a vastly older monster, slid down old scars into my tired vein. This was the first time I had known I was being fed upon, after what must have been so long a period of secret exsanguinations. It was so sexual and vertiginous a thing, it tilted my world, my mind; my heart fluttered with a grovelling desire to feed my – mistress? Friend? There was no proper word for this thing that sucked at me. There had never been such self-sacrificing love felt by any human for any such inhuman thing – and that love was a deception bred in my mind by the nature of this beast. But beneath the slavish adoration, my free will and my own remaining true love for her kept me sane.

My hand found Jing's breast, the heat she was shedding burning my fingers. No dormitory sniggers could gainsay this feeling, could invalidate these emotions. It was as if Jing were pumping pure, hard and urgent love into me even as she took my bright life.

And suddenly it was over. The fangs withdrew. Jing sat heavily on the bed beside me and the heat died, echoes wavering across the room, echoes in my heart and stomach and groin, and my head dizzy with lack of blood. And lack of common sense, my brain scolded. Yet I reached out and took the dead girl's hand in mine.

"You must feed on me," she said, my blood trickling down her chin.

"What? Why?" And how, I thought; but the answer was in my mouth already. I felt the stretch, and a corresponding ache and urgency. I rose and searched the sickroom, finding a tiny square mirror in a drawer. But when I lifted it, to see what my teeth looked like – there was nothing. No me. Just the collar of my night-dress, with nothing above it. I dropped the mirror onto the night-stand and turned to Jing. She had the grace to look embarrassed; she shrugged, and gave me a wan smile. When I sat down beside her she presented her neck.

"You'll know what to do."

I did. I embraced her, and my lips sealed around her neck. I felt the slow pulse of blood deep beneath her skin. Trembling, I let the new sharp needles at the outer edges of my incisors prick her, and knew. Jing trembled in my arms, my fangs grew long, piercing her, driving down through skin and fat and muscle, seeking her jugular vein, finding it. The blood of the vampire surged through the hollow hearts of my needle-teeth, her terrible virus surged into me, quickening my own turgid blood, making my heart bang with excitement and terror in equal measure. She gasped, slumped in my arms. If now I had wanted her body I could have had it, for she was enwrapt, but all I wanted was her blood. She eventually tore herself away, her poor neck ripped by my barbs, and I swooned, or so I thought, onto the bed on which my friend, my fiend, had died.

They found me in the sick-room in the morning, after breaking down the door. The servants fled at the rage that poured from the Lady. She howled like a banshee, brought down threats and thunders, and her husband had to restrain her from tearing my lifeless body apart.

In the night they took me to the tomb. He fumbled with the fake lock and pulled the doors open. Sophie entered with my body in her arms, a light body, lightly held. She waited until he'd taken the lid off Jing's empty coffin, then tossed me into it and stalked back out into the darkness. The Count replaced the lid and closed the doors, locking them with a real, stout padlock.

"She went to see her mother's family," Sophie said, not looking back. "And she died up there in the north." Her husband nodded, and helped her to climb the low cemetery wall.

I awoke from that dream with a hunger that astonished me. My stomach felt hollow. I sucked energy from the very marrow of my bones and it did not seem enough. I did not know where I lay – the darkness was absolute. My shoulders rested on a thin padding over a hard board. There was a vinegar smell in the close air around me.

I raised my arms and explored the cramped environment. Wood all around, as far as I could reach, and wood close above me. I panicked, thrashed around, cracked my head on the coffin-lid, fell back panting. This would not do.

Was this how all such creatures were born? Was this Jing's awakening, into a nightmare? How had she got out? I lay still, dragging stale air into my lungs, sick and dizzy with its acrid odour. Slowly my heart ceased its hard knocking, and the lightness left my head. I brought my hands to my chest and pressed upwards, felt the heavy wooden lid shift.

The tomb was rough concrete inside, unfinished and uneven. It was made just for show, after all. The moon had risen, and slits of silvery light indicated the entrance. Pushing on the doors confirmed they were locked tight. But Jing had come into the sick-room through a locked door – I cursed that I hadn't thought to find out how.

"What do you expect? A text-book?" I asked myself, and chuckled. The pain in my stomach grew suddenly and I doubled up, retching. I had to move. I thought of the moonlight, the silver grass outside the tomb, the coming dawn. I reached through the doors and stumbled out into the graveyard. It was just that simple, and just that frightening. For now I knew that I must feed.

The Eight Immortals Bridge cemetery was surrounded by the suburbs of the foreigners' enclave, dwellings that surrounded the Bund and kept China at arms' length from the West. Here were houses for the servants, the clerks, the necessary functionaries swept up and brought abroad to serve their respective Empires. I didn't want to feed on them. I had an ideal of innocence, and an idea of guilt. I knew those must not apply to me now; but they were all that I had.

It was a spring night, and warm. There was a slight and intermittent breeze, which I felt rather more than I thought I should. I looked down and found I was naked. When I'd woken in the coffin I had been wearing my night-dress, I was certain. And when I knelt in front of the securely-locked doors I could see a corner of it in a slim shaft of moonlight. How exasperating! Searching around I found a faded wreath, stripped some of the wire from it and spent a frustrating ten minutes – a whole ten minutes! – fishing the damn'd thing out through the crack.

Then I walked, as normally as I could, though clad only in a night-dress, and keeping when I could to the shadows, towards the Sheldrake mansion. There was no-one on the streets but me.

When I reached the Bund I drank greedily at a public fountain, walked on past shops and offices deserted by humans but scurrying with rats and cockroaches, through courtyards and past carriage-drives leading to the big houses of merchants and diplomats. The broad streets led toward the river and the road that ran alongside it. On the way I tried to enter buildings, but there were some I could not penetrate. With a little thought I worked out that if I had been in a private house before, or if it was a public space such as a shop, I could enter. But dwellings that I had not been invited into, I could not.

I was hungry, and I was not powerful. I could not confront my tormentors. But their puppet doctor lived around here. I had been taken there with Jing when she was first ill. I knew I could enter.

His house was shuttered close. It was an easy lay, in thieves' parlance, if you were a vampire. In I went and up, searching for the man who had written the death certificate for my friend. I found him sleeping in a separate room, leaving his wife to snore alone.

"How are you here?" Sipewe asked, awed by my story, frozen with the realisation that she was having tea with a vampire.

"I gained strength from the doctor. I drained him. He is truly dead; there will be no resurrection for him. And I took these clothes from a boutique. I opened a window in a store-room at the back, and dropped them outside in a bag, and donned them in the alley."

"The sun..."

"It is bright. But I'm new. I think I can resist it well enough so far. And my hat – fetching, isn't it?"

"No," said Sipewe, "it looks horrible. Perhaps good taste flies off with your life-blood!" I laughed, and Sipewe grinned. "Come. I'll explain to my father. He'll be angry to begin with; but we Afriques know about spirits. He will protect you." She rose and held out her hand, fearless. And so began the next phase of my existence.
Hunger

Sipewe's father listened attentively to his daughter, and then to me. His wife Nnedi sat stone-faced during my discourse, but when her husband finally spoke she smiled.

"You're honest, I grant you," he began. "I've never met a spirit so open about the danger she poses... You claim you can drift through walls; well, then, we are none of us safe. For you crave blood, and can kill, or create others of your kind.

"It seems to me that giving you shelter may protect us. From you, and perhaps from your kin. We are Afrique, we have borne millennia of spirits and the inconveniences they bring. I own a library of unparalleled excellence, with many books of such lore – Sipewe has been dipping into it, I suspect, on the subject of European vampires. Perhaps she will show you the volumes.

"You may stay here with us. If you go out, go at night – I don't want people to spot you. But do not injure my family, or else we will use our knowledge to destroy you."

"What about the Sheldrakes?" Sipewe asked.

"I will destroy them," I said.

"WE will destroy them. Sipewe is right to bring them to mind. The Sheldrakes have travelled much; they will have been moved on many times. We don't want other communities to suffer as ours has. Do you know – there have been twenty unexplained deaths, so far, in this city? Twenty boys and girls, men and women, since they came to Shanghai? Their pet doctor came at the same time as them; I'm glad you offed him, the low-life scum... Now go sleep. There's an afternoon to get through. Tonight you and I will talk again."

Sipewe showed me to a room filled with sports flags and trophies. "My elder brother. He's away making a name for himself in athletics... He always asks people if they're athletic supporters, then laughs when they say 'yes'!" The joke passed over my head. There was a narrow, firm bed. I settled myself, after undressing. Sipewe smiled. "Will you tell me your diet secrets?"

"Find the nastiest fiends from hell!" I retorted. My new best friend snorted with laughter, and left me to sleep.

I rose with the moon. The sun had set hours before, but I must have needed the rest. I drifted naked through the house, avoiding the bedrooms, not wishing to alarm my hosts, and down the stairs. The building was lit by electricity; small yellow lamps burned in nooks. I found the library and looked through a few books, but without a guide I had no direction.

So I went out into the cold night. To find someone who deserved to die was impossible – I had no moral meter that could tell me – and so I went aimless, and my eyes were opened.

In the distance, along the Bund, I saw Adriana. Funny Ghost was no longer funny. She prowled, she stalked. Some drunken men had made a fire on the bank of the river, and she lurked in the shadows, waiting for the flames to gutter and die, for the drunks to fall asleep. I moved on swiftly; if it was so easy for me to see Adriana, it would be as easy for her to see me.

The dead of night in Shanghai was a hunting-ground. Within the space of an hour I saw three vampires. One was male, and I thought I knew who he had been, but could not see his face; it was not the Count.

It was not any more a mystery to me that deaths from drunkenness or exposure had become so common in the city, but I wondered at the blindness of the authorities to the blood loss that must have been so apparent, and to the feeding-punctures.

After stealing some clothes I drifted away from the Bund, through the suburbs; saw wraiths wavering in the graveyards – unconscious remnants of souls, I thought then, that had passed on to the higher lands. I saw ghouls, that hissed at me, eager for my bones but not up to fighting for them.

Eventually I reached the countryside. Hunger was burning in me now. I hated myself, regretted my decisions and condemned all others to my own hell if only I were out of it. But a kernel of decency, and of rational thought, brought me through.

There was a water buffalo. It was warm, it had blood. I neared it and it did not notice me. I'd achieved the level of not being seen, at least by water buffalo. But the beast was impossible to penetrate – its hide was thicker than my fangs were long. I gave up, and started searching for either rabbits or rapists.

In the end I found a man. Cursing, drunk and stumbling, he had taken a wrong turn and fallen off the dyke into a paddy. His neck was broken; he was close to death. I swooped, my hunger fierce, and took his blood. The relish of his dying terror stimulated and shamed me.

Shanghai was by this time far away. Dawn was not long to come. I did not know if there was some magical method by which I could transport myself home. I walked, sated with the blood, confident that I was alone beneath the sky, the wheeling stars and the setting moon.

But I was not. Coming toward me along the road was a strange procession. First a big man, bowed beneath the weight of two bamboo poles over his shoulders, then behind him a group of people swaddled in cloths, bouncing low and high.

The Jiangshi. The hopping vampires.

I stood at the side of the road, watching them pass by. The man at the front was big, perspiring, alive. His eyes flickered towards me as he passed, almost apologising. The poles he carried bore five corpses, workers from Xiangxi who had died in Shanghai. They bobbed up and down as the poles flexed, looking more alive than their bearers. At the back another living man trudged with the further ends of the poles. He grunted at me, and I bobbed my head in respect.

These corpses, being transported home for burial in the least expensive way, by night, had given rise to the legend of the hopping vampires. Sighted on lonely roads in the dead of night they scared observers so much that their hair, or so it was claimed, turned white.

To an extent I envied these corpses. They at least were properly dead. I resumed my walk, hoping to make it back to the Nigerian Consul's home before the sun rose.

"How far did you go?" Sipewe gasped, after I was admitted into the house and seated at the breakfast-table. Sipewe was alone – her father had gone to work at the Consulate, and her mother was out in her garden, attempting to grow the crops of Afrique in the red soil of China, and succeeding. She had a plantain that reached almost to the third floor, and our breakfast was the fried fruit of the tree.

"Far enough," I replied. The plantain was good, salted and savoury and served with creamy scrambled eggs, but not as nice as blood. "I wandered."

"Did you... feed?"

"Yes." I told my friend everything, the hunger, the shame, my relief when the man died. Sipewe was fascinated and appalled.

"You know," she said, "you can't rely on people dropping dead in your path. What will happen tonight? You can't survive as a vampire with moral scruples."

"Tonight," said I, "I'm going after the Sheldrakes."

"It's in hand," Sipewe poured coffee, sugared it. "My father has already mustered support. He found out that the Sheldrakes are planning to leave Shanghai tonight."

"You... They can't! I need to kill them! And what about Jing? What about Funny Ghost? What will happen to them? I can't let this happen!"

"It's happening. You can't stop it. Come, read the books with me. Perhaps you can learn how to give Jing and Adriana peace." She led the way to the library and pulled out three books, one fat, two slim, and for a few hours we girls took notes.

"How do we know what's real and what's not?" I groaned. My stomach was cramping and I needed my bed. The sun, even through the blinds, hurt me. I put down the pencil and rested my head on the library table. Sipewe stroked my neck.

"It's common sense," she said. "You know that a crucifix doesn't work, at least with Jing, who wasn't a Christian anyway. Sunlight is toxic but not invariably fatal. Garlic is a laugh! Cutting off the head and staking the heart at least sounds feasible. And sort of fun."

"Oh, yeah; and you'll be doing that to me soon enough, I bet."

"Only if you want me to... Look; if they're still there tonight, I'll stalk them with you. I'll go off to the garden shed now and find stakes and a mallet. There are some machetes too. You, go to bed – I'll sleep as well. After dinner we'll go hunting."

"You're mad," I managed, before I found myself borne up in the arms of Sipewe, being taken to my room, and sleep.

"She cannot come! And neither can you! Sipewe – what do you think we are here for?" The Consul swung his arm around, encompassing the group of men assembled in the dining-room. I recognised some from the balls I used to attend. They were young men, sons of merchants and diplomats, and their fathers, those very merchants and diplomats, some foreign, some Chinese, dressed roughly and looking quite uncomfortable. Fourteen men in all, armed with swords and pistols, stakes and hatchets. Sipewe in the meantime was quite as furious as her father, and she wouldn't back down.

"They killed my friends!" she shouted, tears running down her sweet face. "They did... did this..." She indicated me. The men's eyes, fixed on me, betrayed variously pity, fear, distrust. I felt horribly exposed.

Sipewe and I had dressed respectively in her cycling and walking clothes, tweed jackets and knickerbockers, thick stockings and sensible shoes. We'd crept down from her room with machetes and stakes in her absent brother's cricket bag, had almost reached the door to the kitchens and our exit through the yard, when one of this group had caught us. So here we were, being dressed-down as if we were children... Although, of course, we were.

"Take me," I suggested quietly. They heard me over Sipewe's sobs. "Not her; she is precious, she must stay here –" she looked daggers at me "– safe. I can enter the house, I can scout for you. I can tell you where they are, what they're doing."

"Perhaps you would warn them," one of the men suggested. I laughed.

"You cannot keep me confined. If I was going to warn those scum I would do it and you could not stop me. But I want them dead, truly dead. I will not allow you to fail."

"We will take you." Sipewe's father said this before I could incriminate myself further. It dawned on me that these men did not properly know what I was, knew only that I had been a protégé of the Sheldrakes, escaped from them into sanctuary here. "Sipewe and her mother, and the servants, will confine themselves to the drawing-room until we return." And that, despite her protestations, was what happened to my friend.

We strode through the Bund in the dead of night, the men resolute but not understanding what they faced, and I, quaking with fear and the desire to rend, but knowing what the Sheldrakes were. My conversations and readings with Sipewe had shown me that blood-drinking was found in many cultures, in most countries around the globe. The potency of blood was a given thing, from the cow-blood puddings of the Afrique Masai to the reindeer-blood possets of the Lapps. But that human blood conferred such spiteful gifts was an unique construction of the Christians, or so it seemed to me. The blood of their master being so potent as to forgive all sins, blood itself became a substitute for grace, a means by which evil men might escape the compassionate demands of that founder of redeeming love and instead maintain their corrupt souls. I had – I still have – a sympathy with that Jesus, who died for such pigs.

The Consul was in command. His name was Maduka, Maduka Ndongwe. He led his men with confidence through the silent streets. He had told his band that since I was escaped from the clutches of the Sheldrakes I was familiar with their mansion and their habits, and filled with a thirst to destroy them in vengeance against the abuse I had suffered – he hid my true new nature from his followers. I strode beside him, hungry and aflame with the thought of revenge. And all too soon we came to the house, and stood in the shadows around it.

I did not see any vampires, and told him so in a whisper. His lieutenants craned to hear, but were frozen out. All was quiet about the area. I asked, and he answered; so I scooted into the darkness of an alley beside the building, and through a locked wooden gate.

The stable-yard was not bustling, but a coach was being prepared. There were four fine fresh horses hitched up and it was almost ready for the off. I drifted around the walls un-noticed and into the house proper, where I found the servants still up – in the kitchen preparing baskets of viands, in the main rooms packing goods. I assumed these latter would be sent on behind my mistress and her husband.

Of them I saw no sign, but I was on the ground floor. I had information for Maduka, so I reluctantly but necessarily withdrew back to the alley, where I put on just the knickerbockers and jacket to cover myself, and then to my beloved friend's father to tell what I had seen.

"Covering the carriage-way would be the plan," he said, and all agreed. "But we must build a barricade – to block the way with our own selves alone would invite death."

They dispersed to find the means, and I entered the mansion again.

After guzzling water from a ground-floor bathroom I went up to our old suite, which was sad and deserted, then ranged around and found Jing in the sick-room that once was hers, in other times. There she sat on the old sagging bed, sobbing, and when she saw me she cried out, "Why have you come? Go! They will find you! They will kill you!"

"Why – should I fear death?" Sitting beside her I took her in my arms. "You are ever so silly. Now, just rest against me."

We stayed for a while like that, together, until I remembered my purpose and went to find the Sheldrakes.

Trying my best to be silent I padded through the upper floors looking for them, and found the ancient vampires in their own suite, talking together. She was fastening a jewel around her neck, calm and unruffled; he was irritable, fumbling at a cravat. Why they thought they should dress for so precipitous a departure I had no idea – but then, I was only a chink to them.

"Why must we flee?" he complained. She made a face. I saw her mostly from within the wall of the room, my nose and brow and eyes peeping out. She would have to look right at me to see me; and I could pull back if she moved her head.

"That spiteful girl. She is bound to Jing, not to me. If she achieves her power she could destroy us. Who knows where she may be now, what forces she might arraign against us? The doctor we brought is murdered. It could only have been her." She snapped shut the clasp of the necklace and stood; I withdrew. I could still hear them.

"Who is this man?" Arisztid enquired. What man? Thought I.

"He is looking for information," Sophie told her husband, "and he is willing to protect us, if we can help him. We know what he is desperate to find: When we get to Nippon, we will be rewarded."

"I only want to go home," the Count complained. "Come – help me with this damn'd neckerchief!"

"We need to bring out the funds... Stay still! You must go and wipe the smile from the young man's face."

I knew exactly what she was saying. The 'young man' was a statue of Pan, and he stood at one end of the main corridor on the ground floor. At the other end was a goddess, perhaps Aphrodite – I had no idea. She was merely a draped female; but he was a spirit of joy and disturbance, with cloven hooves and goat-legs, and a pipe and curly hair and...

And I was there in an instant, found the gold in small heavy boxes, and bags containing packets of papers and gems, behind a loose panel at the back of the alcove. I carried it all away to stash behind my supposed Aphrodite. It took several trips, but I was not threatened, for Sophie had ever been over-confident, and her husband always slow. Then I returned to Jing, and persuaded her to come with me.

I left her in the alley, to dress in my discarded shirt and drawers, and padded back to Maduka in the tweeds. I told him what was happening, and that he must look after Jing.

He refused.

"I cannot take her. I know nothing about her. You I trust. But her, I know not. Look at these men – they are toiling to destroy your kind. They think you are not such a thing, but they know with certainty that your friend is one. Some here saw her entombed. Flee now, take her to my house. You know that I trust you, though I should not."

"I need to see them destroyed!" I plainted, aching for just exactly that.

"You will know when they are no more... Please; for the sake of your soul, and your friend, and Sipewe – please; be satisfied with that."

I walked slowly away, back to the alley where Jing stood in shadow, and had barely reached her when back on the street the doors opened on the stable-yard and the black coach rattled out, its innocent horses striking immediately into the barricade of timbers and street-furniture dragged there by the men. I heard the legs of the lead horses break, and cried out; I heard the screams of the coachmen as they were pitched over their dash-board and into the milling beasts. Jing huddled against me, and I held her tight.

And then all Hell broke loose. Maduka's men rushed the stalled carriage, and its doors burst open. Lady Sheldrake flew out of one side, her husband the other, their feet not touching the ground. She spun, flying around the coach like a top, striking merchants and diplomats and their hapless sons alike, blood arcing black in the moonlight, while he rose high, her consort, spreading his arms, summoning lightnings from the clear sky, and Jing quivered in my arms.

Maduka charged Sophie, with others behind him just as determined, and he closed on her, swinging his machete, slicing it into her neck. She screamed, and I had nothing but joy for her passing; but Jing went rigid, and flung me off into the wall. My Wu Jing went to the defence of her tormentor, she flew literally and swiftly toward Maduka and his men, and they caught her, and they hacked at her until there was no recognisable human piece to see.

And in the meantime the real evil had dragged herself back to her coach, and her man had wiped out the barricade. Two horses remained uninjured, and they were all that were needed once the traces had been cut; the vampires galloped away, and no-one who should have cared, no-one, stopped them. Which included me, for I was with Jing. I could not help myself. I ran at the men, I shoved and kicked them. My strength was that of ten, and I broke their bones. Jing was my focus, my heart, my life. I killed for her; and when I spun from punching a Chinese tea-house owner in the throat and found my knuckles a bare inch from Maduka's breast I could not stop. I drove my fist through his body, and all I saw were his eyes, full of hurt and betrayal, then nothing more. He died.

I turned and gripped another, a youth I had danced with, and tore his throat open with my fangs. Blood gushed over me and into me, sweet and hot and dark, better than chocolate.

The lucky ones fled. I stood over the corpses, panting, then knelt to the remnants of my love, my friend. She had died once, and now she was dying again.

"I'm so sorry," I whispered.

"Take me," she replied, her words a breath around me.

"I cannot."

"Why not? Please – I may live still, if I live in you."

"I cannot. I must destroy her; and you will not allow that, for you belong to her, as I belong to you. For you gave me this life, not her. And for that, I must thank you, and give you such peace as I may."

Then I took up a stake, slick with the blood of a boy I had danced with, a boy I had slain, and I drove it into her failing heart. Her sweet face dissolved into dust, and the severed limbs around me. The stake fell with a clatter to the ground; and, in the silence of the night, her fine black dust blew all away.
Travelling

I drank from the men I had felled. I have no apology to make for that; I needed their sustenance. My heart pounded with the lust for blood, and they were dying anyway. But I did not take from Maduka; his sightless eyes were a reproach to me. I had betrayed him, I had stolen him with violence from my trusting and eternal friend. I could never go back to her, and my tears, red with the blood I gorged, flowed for her and for me.

So I set my face towards China, and left the Bund, the foreigners' enclave, Shanghai. I joined the hopping vampires on the road, and carried poles, giving respite to honourable and ill-paid men on their way to Xiangxi.

Months went by, and the constant travel hardened me. The walkers of the dead, brave men, gave me raw meat to eat, and found small animals I could with conscience suck. We journeyed between many of the cities and towns of eastern China, transporting the corpses of those who had died far from their families' homes, for the proper rites to be performed before those that loved them.

I saw so much pain: so many widows weeping, so many husbands prostrate with grief. And there were orphans; because often both parents travelled far to find work, leaving their tiny children in the care of relatives, and then they died of the diseases of poverty and over-work, far from home.

The girls, the boys, toddlers, children, teen-agers; all, to me, were Sipewe. They watched while we cut down their father or their mother from the poles, the rot pungent beneath the cheap scents we sprayed over their grave-cloths; all looked accusingly at us, as if we were the ones who had destroyed them, as if we had brought their parents back as trophies. They wore us down, those constant, accusatory looks, the grave, judgemental eyes, the downturned mouths that never would smile again. And their uncles or their grand-parents would put the pittance of money into our hands as if we were stealing it from beneath their pillows.

Finally I had enough. I could no longer endure those eyes, those unmuttered curses. And my despite for my own grandparents had grown to such an extent that it threatened to overwhelm me. They had taken me to Shanghai, enrolled me at that school, where a monster prowled for children. I made my apologies to Liu Qiang and Zhang Baoyong, with whom I worked the poles, and left them, when we returned to Shanghai. They embraced me, and I wept.

That night I walked through the sagging gates into the Sheldrake mansion, which even after so many months remained untenanted, and stole away the gold from behind Aphrodite. I secreted it in a dry culvert, and in the morning, swathed against the sun with rich clothes stolen from Emporio Armani, I checked into an hotel and began to spend it.

Raw steak and rabbits' blood may only sustain a vampire for so long before she craves, like an addict for opium, the sweet, hot iron blood of those she once counted as her kind. Shanghai was full of those who deserved to die, so now I became a crusader from the comic-books, avenging injustice, righting wrongs – my hunger was so great that I was not thinking straight. In those first few days I found myself imagining Shanghai as one fat neck, and my fangs sinking into it. It shamed me, in my moments of lucidity, in the humanity that still clung to me.

In those days I swang through the city like Tarzan in the moving-picture, swooped from the roofs down onto muggers and rapists. I sated myself on the lowest lives in the biggest city on Earth, and I killed them utterly, for how could I make more of such monsters as I, from such monsters as them? Sophie thrived on building more vampires, preying on young girls. I guessed that her husband did the same with young boys; for I saw several such, creeping about, jumping on lone walkers in the suburban streets at dead of night.

One particular evening, with a half-moon in the sky, I spied a smartly-dressed vampire boy stalking a woman along the Zhichuan road, near Zhenru park. She was well aware of his presence, and her step was quick. She did not glance behind her. He, cocky, arrogant, sauntered at a pace that matched hers despite his languid manner. I knew he would soon swoop, that his teeth were already transforming into needle fangs. His body took on that male swagger, the suffusion of hormones and of entitlement that could brook no refusal. I watched as he prepared to spring.

I had no real idea of my powers. I had seen Sophie and her husband perform inhuman feats, and I had felt Jing's power to oppose me. But I did not know that I could kill one such as I, until I did it. I lifted from my perch and I flew down towards the closing boy, angling to intercept him, and just a few feet before he came to her I took him, lifted him into the air and smacked him into the wall of Zhenru park. His eyes blazed with pain and wounded pride, and he raised his arms to crush me; but I head-butted him, and the crack must have woken the district. His eyes, from flashing anger, turned to mud and confusion, and I lifted him high, and swooped down, impaling him on the spears of the park-gate rails. Three iron rods smashed through his slight frame, and as I hovered in the air above him I felt the overwhelming hunger, and I drained him, and grew in strength.

From then on I preyed on my own kind. During the day I slept in the best suite in the hotel; in the night, I hunted them down, those filthy remnants of an ancient disease. And with every conquest I grew in power, until finally the city rose up against me.

Funny Ghost was the last I took, and I loved her – more from sympathy than from any great friendship, I confess; but she had been part of my life, my old human life, and I did not want to ambush her. So I approached openly, in her usual hunting-ground on the bank of the river.

She, of course, knew who I was and what I was. She smiled, but it was a cynical and a knowing smile.

"You've come for me at last, Aoyun."

"Yes." I stood before her. The waves lapped languidly at my feet. Behind Adriana lay the corpse of a man. He didn't look like a drunkard. He may simply have been a young man stricken in love, who had found a young girl sympathetic to his predicament. Whatever: his throat was now mangled, and his life-blood consumed. Adriana was new-flushed, fit and strong and confident.

She hissed, and flew at me. I stood my ground and raised my arm, and she crashed into me, and I, impaling her on my clenched fist, punched her heart right out of her body – the Maduka trick, I later realised, and wept then.

Her rush brought us face to face, my outstretched arm protruding from her back like a pole, and even then she snapped at me. I dodged her teeth, and batted her so hard with my free hand that I heard her neck snap. Then I sank myself into her throat, slurping the stilling but still-hot blood while she screamed curses at me.

Her voice finally failed, and I let her body fall with a sucking sound down from my gore-red arm to drop softly onto the pebbled shore, where it crumbled into dust.

When I looked up there were people arrayed before me, real human men, carrying staves and hatchets. Their eyes bored into me. Their silence stupefied me. The moon gazed down on them, casting their shadows behind; but I knew that I cast none.

The remains of Adriana were blown by the gentle breeze. I had no need to stay here, and no desire to be impaled on a stake. Slowly I rose into the air, drawing their eyes with me; and I smiled down at these men who had assembled to kill the undead.

"I have freed you," I crowed, "I have killed only those who prey on you. Now, I go. Be vigilant; for they are ever among you."

I was proud of that.

And then an arrow pierced my shoulder, and a baulk of wood, thrown hard, hit my head. I almost fell then, but wavered away over the river where they could not follow, and dove into its depths, and so made my way out of danger, and, dripping, bleeding and sore, discarded my clothes in an alley behind the hotel to fly up and ooze back into my rooms, where I lay, refusing telephone enquiries regarding my health from the desk, and offers of help through the door, for three whole days.

I felt very un-appreciated.

In the morning of the third day there was yet another knock. I was up now, bathed and dressed, my wounds fully healed and my hunger purely human, wanting congee and eggs rather than blood; so I went, and I opened the door.

Sipewe marched in past me, straight into the centre of the sitting-room, and turned to confront me.

"Close the door."

I was gaping stupidly, my hand still clutching the knob. I nodded, but my head drooped down as shame rose through me. I gently closed the door. The double-click of the lock gave us both pause – she, because now she was locked in with a vampire who had murdered her father; I, because I was locked in with one who had every reason to hate me. Yet she blushed, and turned her back on me, to look out of the window.

"You have a fabulous view," she said, but her voice was a-tremble. Her shoulders slumped, she groped for an armchair and sat heavily. She was on the verge of collapse. The courage she must have had, to come to my lair, was all used up. I – my legs felt rubbery – tottered to another seat and dropped into it.

"How..."

"How, why, when, where, who. The necessary requests of journalism." Sipewe took a shuddering breath. "I'm at college, to become one. A journalist, that is.

"For the how – I listen, I learn. You have been seen many times. The confrontation a few days ago was inevitable. And people talk, so gossip of an eccentric young woman barricading herself into her expensive suite in an expensive hotel gets around.

"As to why – because I need to be here. If it were not I, it would be some other, and you would have to fight or die..." There was another knock at the door. Sipewe rose to open it and two waiters came in with trolleys, the smell of food entering with them. When they left, after setting the table for two, and the double-click of the lock sounded, Sipewe took me by the hand and led me to breakfast. I admit, I fell on it – there was congee, there was dim sum, steamed bread, fruit; and my tears made all salty while she continued.

"When – when you came back to Shanghai... We had been plagued by the spawn of Sophie and Arisztid, child-vampires roaming the city, creating mayhem. Vigilante groups were formed, some successes were achieved – but at the cost of innocent lives, false identifications, malicious accusations.

"And then the monsters began to die." She seemed much calmer now, more assured of herself. Sipewe poured herself tea and took a steamed bun. I was beginning to feel more... More human.

"So you guessed it was due to me."

"I did. And you were seen, and described. The news-papers were full of you. The Avenging Angel."

"I don't read them. And I'm quite the opposite of an angel."

"Where – of course it's obvious. I told you, so you know how I knew where to find you. And lastly, who."

"Who, is obvious."

"Not so. For I am 'who', not you. I am the one who had to find you, to come to you. You are the last vampire we know of in Shanghai. You have done your job, and now you must leave; for if you do not, the vigilantes will destroy you."

"Would that be such a sorrow to you?" I did not mean to sound bitter and self-pitying, but I did, and I hated myself.

"It would. For I know you were compelled to defend your mistress. You could not prevent the slaughter."

"I could, if I had not gone with them."

She was silent then, for a while, struggling with her emotions. For Sipewe had wanted to go too, and her dear father had forbidden her. A fat tear rolled down her cheek and fell onto the table-cloth. When she finally spoke she surprised me mightily.

"Hold me." She gripped my forearm. She stood, and I got up from my chair too, and we embraced. Her tears wet my neck, her sobs came up from the depths of her heart and shook my body, so that my own tears flowed free to mingle with hers.

"Make me one like you. Take me."

"No!"

She shook still, but now her raw misery mixed with anger. "You must! You owe me!"

"I... If I owe you anything, it is my own life, not yours. I cannot, I will not make you as awful a monster as I am now!"

She pleaded and entreated, fell to her knees in actual fact, clutching at my skirts, but how could I give way to such an astonishing and self-destructive request? Eventually she relented and rose stiffly to stumble over to the armchair, where she curled up sniffling and trembling. I said nothing, for there was nothing I could say. And in time she stilled, and fell into a fitful sleep.

I packed a bag. It was small enough; I had few possessions. I knew that Sipewe would not be my only visitor. I called down to the front desk to prepare my bill and engage a cab, and finally woke my friend. She was miserable still, but docile, and accepting. The tracks of dried tears marred her dark smooth face, and I urged her to wash. "I'm leaving," I explained while she used the bathroom. "As you so eloquently explained, Shanghai is not safe for me."

"I had come to warn you," she confessed, muffled by a towel, "but I was overcome." She came out and hugged me. "Since that night I have had no rest. We were due to leave for Nigeria, as you know; but the Consulate withdrew the funds, and evicted us from our fine house. We live in Danyang road now, in Yangpu near the waterworks. My mother has been selling everything she could to make up the money so that we might leave China forever."

"How could they be so cruel!"

"The Consulate employed my father, not his family. And we were told that he had made an unauthorised intrusion into Chinese affairs. This, while we waited to bury him..." Her eyes brimmed again with tears.

"I have money," I said. "I'll leave enough for you all to travel home, to live in peace."

We left my hotel and shared the cab. It was safer for me, since if there were enemies around they would expect me to travel alone. The sunshine was painful, but I did not swaddle my face; for that, too, would draw attention from those who knew what they looked for.

I paid off the cab at the railway station and put my bag into a locker. We took lunch in the public dining-room. There I checked the time-tables, and made a map for Sipewe showing her the location of the gold – it was well-hidden, but easy to get to. She would need help to remove it all, for there was a very large amount in specie as well as packets of diamonds and other gems, more than enough to bring riches to her and her family. She stammered that she could not accept it, but I insisted.

I knew where I could get more.

That night I paid a visit to my grandparents. They lived now in a walled compound in Gaojiazhai, in Pudong, which district had been a maze of waterways, warehouses and artisans' workshops, but was now improved and gentrified, a beautiful model of how China was progressing. Save that it had all been bought from my inheritance, I should have enjoyed living there.

They were lolling in huge carved-teak chairs, plushly upholstered – though they were both themselves well enough upholstered that they had no need of cushions – listening to a programme of music and comedy on the radiogramophone. Their servants had left for the night, so it was easy for me to crack open a window and push my clothing in, then drift through the wall and dress. I padded into their sitting-room and stood before them for almost a minute before my grandmother raised her head and screamed.

My grandparents were strong people, when they had the upper hand. But to be confronted by a fiend who they had thought dead shook them deeply, and they were both at their core superstitious to a fine degree. They grovelled. I made my demands. They were astonished! How could I leave them poor? What need I of money, who was but a ghost? But in the end they gave in. I think that my wandering around their house, picking up this treasure and that and dashing it to pieces, was more injurious to them than my threats of death, or worse; and I left with jewels, cash and a very fortune in bearer bonds, with the wails of my kin behind me.

An hour later I was on the train, speeding through the night, back in the proper China and not ever to return to Shanghai.

The hunger for blood was intense, but I could resist it nowadays, for a time anyway. When I left the train in Hong Kong, after three days and nights of travel, I was almost prostrate with famishment, and could hardly wait to be checked in to an hotel before I swept out into the night to find some deserving victim – preferably one of my own kind.

I did not find a vampire, but I did find a pair of rapists who had dragged a girl into the darkness of a park. I was not too late to save her, so I knocked the pair to the ground, leaving them unconscious, and walked the poor youngster to her intended destination.

"Tell no-one," I cautioned, "and do not go about unescorted again!" She nodded vigorously, and I left her to return to the park, where I finally slaked my thirst.

Hong Kong is a pleasant busy place, the gateway to the south of China for merchants from the West. Having money made it even more pleasant. I bought a small mansion up on the slope of the Peak, boasting gorgeous views over the harbour and the bay of Kowloon, with a sizeable enclosed garden set with mature trees and lush with flowering shrubs. I bought papers and made myself a back-story, that I was the widow of an Imperial official – there were so many in Beijing that I could not imagine anybody would detect the lie. Given this new life I was able to integrate into Society, though I limited my visits to others' houses, and avoided the salons and restaurants where mirrors were major elements in the decor.

Twice a week I went out into the night, to feed.

I settled there for three years, and used my time in the libraries of the city. These were fine edifices, built by both Chinese and Western philanthropists in classical styles, and full of information on every subject. But I had to make firm friends with the librarians, to be able to access the more arcane volumes, the books of forbidden knowledge, the maps of strange realms, the stories of un-human creatures.

One librarian, Wilbur, a young man from the Americas who had voyaged to the East in search of his fortune – without success, it must be said – helped me most, staying long past closing-time to search for what I needed. He would telephone me excitedly whenever he found an item on my list, and always managed to set aside a private room when I turned up with my notebooks and pencils. He was, I think, sweet on me; but I was careful never to encourage him.

I was learning about my kind, but had to plough through so much trash to find the truths. On the way I read about other fiends: lycanthropes and zombies, wraiths and ghouls; there were so many! And I sometimes saw them, as I had seen the wraiths and ghouls when I explored the countryside around Shanghai in my early days. They, on their part, kept clear of me, as I of them.

Three years was as long as I dared stay in Hong Kong, for I did not age, and always looked young. I made my preparations to leave, including putting some monies I could well afford into the bank-accounts of various librarians, and an extra amount into Wilbur's. I put the mansion up for sale and booked a ticket on the airship to London, the capital of the West. I would take my leave of China within the week.

I was reading reports from a firm of detectives I had privately commissioned to look for Sipewe and her family – it appeared they had packed up and gone to Europe, thence I supposed to Afrique, a few months after I had left Shanghai; I wished them well – when my maid announced a visitor. This was a foul morning, with the remnant of a typhoon buffeting the islands with rain and wind, and I did not expect any sane soul to be about. When I entered the receiving-room I found Mister O'Donnell.

My heart lurched, and the taint of our last encounter rose in my imagination. He, on the other hand, appeared very composed, though damp, seated with his legs crossed nonchalantly and smoking a cheroot. He stubbed it out and unfolded himself from the chair like some languid stick-insect. He had grown a small moustache since last we had met, and it looked vile on him.

I rang for the maid and asked for tea. Indicating that he should reseat himself, I sat too, in a straight chair. I did not want to become comfortable in his presence.

"I was surprised when I saw you in the bank the other day," he began.

"Should I not go into banks?"

He looked irritated, but composed himself to carry on the conversation he had mapped out in his head. I had in my turn already assumed he meant to blackmail me. Then Jao, my maid, further discommoded him by bustling in with the tea-things, and he must wait until she had furnished him with a side-table bearing a small pot of tea, a cup, and a plate of sweetmeats. When finally she retired I was atop myself with amusement, and he was flushed with ill-disguised ire.

"Where were we?"

"I was visiting a bank when you caught a glimpse of me." I sipped my tea. He grumped and stroked his scruffy, greying moustache.

"I work in that bank; I can no longer teach."

"That is good. Are you enjoying your new career?"

"It has its moments. Such as when I see an old face – pardon me; a young face. Very young, in fact. Life must have been kind to you."

I took more notice of him. His clothing was good, but not top-notch, and it was old, though carefully mended. He still had his wife, I surmised. She must have been very loyal.

"Life deals as it will. If you had stuck solely to teaching, then you should perhaps have been head-master by now, in some prestigious college." He did not like that, I could plainly see. There was a flash of arrogance in the look he threw at me.

"Life, Miss Shen, is what we make it. That's the Western philosophy – none of your fatalistic rubbish. We make what we can of the hand we're dealt – and I have been dealt a Royal flush!"

"What a quaint expression! Are you here to teach me more English?"

"You are a bitch. Yes, I can say that, to your face! You took airs from your relationship with the Sheldrakes; and you treated your betters with contempt –"

"My better? You?" I laughed. This interview was refreshing me. He could do nothing to harm me; and within the week I would be gone anyway. I popped a sweet rice-cake into my mouth and beamed at him. I had never seen someone so red before.

"You were involved in a scandal some while after I left the... After I left. I heard about it – I still have friends, though it seems to me that you do not. For all your friends die, or go into penury. I heard about the Nigerian Ambassador, how his heart was riven from his chest, his men scattered, many murdered, by those very benefactors who raised you up to heights you do not deserve. And when I made enquiries in the bank, about who you were, I was told some interesting things. How you were a young widow, come from Beijing. How you paid into the bank over a million Imperial dollars of paper, and directed their investment..."

"To great advantage, I'm sure you heard."

"I am not come here for financial advice," he said coldly.

"I can be whomever I wish," I said. "There is yet no requirement for a citizen to declare herself in full particular. Just as there is no onus on you to declare yourself a child-molester and philanderer."

That hit home! I was enjoying his humiliation hugely.

"I know where they are."

"Who?"

"The Sheldrakes."

I could not help myself; I paused. My silence gave him impetus.

"They left China..."

"I know." I was thinking furiously. I wanted so much to destroy them, as they had destroyed those so dear to me. In the four years since that night I had pressed that desire down, had refused to send those private detectives out to find them; for I was certain that if I found that pair of murderers I would spend my life fruitlessly, dashing myself against their might, failing, falling, finally trampled beneath their feet, as all they infected were, it seemed to me, in the end.

I put my cup down softly on my side-table and poured tea. My hand did not shake. Indecision showed in Mister O'Donnell's eye; but he persisted.

"They are in Romania."

"Where else would they be? That is where they came from, after all."

"I have more information. An exact location." He rose. "If you are interested I will see you tonight, in Whampoa's Gardens." He left, and I relaxed, sitting back in the hard chair, my eyes turned inward to that night, and the impossible power of the Sheldrakes. I could not hope to best them.

I would not go to meet Mister O'Donnell. I would not, as much as I wanted to, rip out his throat and drink his foul blood.

After lunch I had another visitor. Two, in one blustery day; it was too much! I told Jao to send them away, but she came back and told me he had insisted he needed to see me; and that his name was Wilbur Deneuve.

I met with him in my sitting-room; I did not want to bring distasteful memories to our conversation. Wilbur was neat and of good demeanour. He accepted tea with alacrity, and chomped into the buns with relish. He made me smile. Although he was in his mid-twenties he seemed younger than I. Most humans, these days, seemed younger than I. I waited for him to introduce his theme.

"Ma'am, I am indebted to you for your charity."

I smiled. "It is all that you deserve. And other librarians were rewarded in like wise."

"Ma'am – we librarians talk between one another, and we are honest. I feel you have given me an amount that requires explanation."

"Why should I explain myself? Perhaps you were more able, more forthcoming than the others."

"Well; it's not for my looks!" he chortled, which made me laugh too. "Indeed, I wonder that you might have divined what I have been researching, while you have been conducting your own investigations – but how could you?"

I was intrigued. "What research is this?"

"Why – into you, yourself." He sat forward in his seat. "You claim to be the widow of one Yuen Je Jiang; but he, you must know, was the father of General Yuen; and that woman is the closest to the Empress there has ever been!"

I had not known. I cursed myself for not conducting the investigations into possible husbands with greater care. "Why – how could this be a problem?"

"Because General Yuen maintains that her father's widow is looked after by the Empress herself."

I admit, my mouth was open. Had only this young Westerner discovered this, or was I a laughing-stock in Hong Kong Society?

"There are several Yuens in Beijing," Wilbur added. "But only that one who could have been your husband at the time you say he died. I suspect," he added, almost with a wink, "that no-one in your circle has bothered to look."

"For which I am most grateful," I said, and I was. He knew, and there was no way to gainsay him; so I must make the best of it. "I am happy to be exposed by you, and not others."

There was a pause. He smiled, still, but I knew that there was more, and worse, to come.

"You came from Shanghai," he began, and I started inwardly – there was no way he could have seen. But he did, the intelligent young assassin. "You were involved in a frightful battle in which many men – and in some reports, a woman – were killed. Your true name is Shen Aoyun. And, I know, you are a vampire."

The room spun around me. I felt my teeth lengthen, the needles urging me to rend. But I steadied; and I confronted my accuser.

"Your evidence for this astonishing nonsense?"

"In your own notes. I brought out books and news-papers for you, and I put them back. You left slips of paper in-between the pages that interested you, as so many professional readers do. Not one of us would disfigure a book by turning the corner of a page! So, in my own time, I read what you had read, and learned what you had learnt.

"I made enquiries. There is a library network. Information flows freely, and without compromise. No librarian who helped me to piece this thing together would ever tell – even if, as I know some have, they came to the same conclusion as myself."

"I am indebted to the corps of librarians," I said drily. I did not take up my cup; I was becoming sick of tea, and blood was more in my mind. Nevertheless, smiling, he continued.

"You are soon to leave Hong Kong. My guess, since you gave me such an emolument. Perhaps you are going to Europe, to hunt down the Sheldrakes?"

I wished I had not got out of bed this morning. Two sources of information in the same day? I would rather have stayed ignorant.

"Shen Aoyun – you have given me riches; I need no more. I will give you freely what I have found."

And he did.

And, I let him live.

Whampoa – his real name had been Hu Hsuan-tse – had died more than a hundred and fifty years before, but his Gardens in east Kowloon were still the place to be, for the elite of Hong Kong. They were lush and pleasurable, and once you were through the gates all was available, for free, though the price for admittance was eye-watering. I wondered how the penurious Mister O'Donnell had managed to enter; by the time I worked it out, I was almost truly dead.

I wandered down the thoroughfare, enwrapt by the stilt-walkers, the jugglers, the dragon-players. Away towards the water there was Peking Opera, its high quavering voices soaring above the crowd and commotion; by the road that bounded the Gardens on the west there were music-hall artistes clowning around, making hay with reality. I had not come here before, and I now wondered why I had not, for it was wonderful, exciting; it even entertained me, and I was a being sunk inwards, into gloom and introspection. I almost wished I had not bought my ticket on the airship.

And then, through the blustery squalls that buffeted us from the dying remnants of the typhoon, I saw O'Donnell, and he saw me. He made off into the gardens surrounding the merriment and I followed, confident that I would soon be feasting on his blood.

I had read much about vampires, by courtesy of Sipewe at first, and then Wilbur and the other librarians. They had given me free access to much that was not permitted to the casual reader. And I had read of the strength of these beings, of their power to fly, their ability to stay invisible in plain sight – these were attributes I had practised, learning from those I killed, whose potent blood I drank. Yet my mind refused to believe what my altered body knew to be true – I believed in my head that vampirism was but a virus, an infection that made the living virtually immortal, but with a lust for the blood of their fellow-humans, when, in fact, I knew in my gut that there was more to it than that; and that magic, foul and chaotic, underpinned the monsters that walked among us.

And I had not read, or I had forgotten that I had read, that vampires may conceal their nature even from their own.

In a clearing rimmed with pale flowers as big as dishes I found Mister O'Donnell. He lounged, as he had always lounged: leaning on his cane, his hat at a rakish angle. He was smiling; and I was suddenly afraid.

"My employers said to give you this," he said, and taking his hat from his head he flung it at me. I did not move – and when it hit me, it hurt. I looked down to see a slash across my breast, and blood oozing.

And then he was on me.

My arms came up to defend, but he swept them away. His knees smashed into my stomach; I folded, and his hands clapped hard on either side of my head; my ears rang, and the pain was tremendous. I flew backwards and up, wavering in the wind, and he swept up to follow me. Beneath us was gaiety and laughter; above those rollicking citizens there was blood and disaster. He pummelled me with his fists, laughing, his exultation snatched away by the wind. I, taken so much by surprise, bowled around by wind and violence, had not a breath to sustain me, and I tumbled down towards the Opera.

He barrelled in to catch me, and propelled me out to the bay. Over the water the remnants of the typhoon held some greater strength, and we both were battered by it. I saw a chance and took it, flying at him with my hand stretched out like a blade, and pierced his chest through coat and shirt and skin. My fingers scraped on bone and pierced a lung, but missed his heart by a mere half-inch, and though he screamed he also twisted, and I felt the bones of my forearm break.

I pulled back instantly and darted down, his rage following me, pain flooding me with the healing, savage draughts that vampire blood brings. I must finish this soon, and straighten my arm, or it would heal at right-angles to its normal scheme.

I heard him roaring down at me and I jinked so that he passed me at speed. I resumed my dive then, colliding with him heavily and driving him down with a mighty splash into the waters of the bay. He struggled, but I kept pressing. I only had one functioning arm, so I used my slight body and the velocity of my attack. The grating bones in that injured arm hurt like fury, but what else was I to do? To fall back would be to die. So I pressed him down, down, knowing that I could survive the descent, having done it before.

The water was not silent. Some ship was coming, perhaps a Star ferry. The night and the murk made it difficult to see, but then a hull darkened the surface above us. I took the opportunity of his distraction to catch up my tormentor around his middle with my working arm. He was floundering in the depths, and I guessed that he was panicked and could not swim. He struck backwards at me, but ineffectually.

I easily took him up, for he wanted to rise, and steered him to the ferry and its thrashing propeller, taking care not to be caught myself, fighting the wash of the screw as it chewed up O'Donnell's head, tasting blood and brains in the brine, and as I weakened I let him go, to sink, to rise no more.

His blood was potent. Even that dilution in the salty water revived me sufficiently to make it home, where I called a medical practice from the telephone directory. It was now late in the night, and when a doctor arrived he was tired and grey from a full evening of work. I offered him tea or brandy, and he gratefully took both. My maid had stayed to wait for my return – a touching gesture which I appreciated beyond words – and produced the drinks instanter while the medical man introduced himself.

"I am Doctor Vaidyanathan."

"Doctor who?"

He wagged his head gravely, but with a weak smile on his face. "That's what they all call me around here. I should change my name." He bade me sit, and examined the arm. "I will need to set this. There are two bones in the forearm, and both here are broken... How did this happen?" He had seen, of course, that I was wet through. I could not hope to change my clothes until my arm had been seen to.

"I fell into the bay," I lied. "I smacked my arm against a piling on the way down. I survived only because of the quick wits of passers-by."

He looked into his bag and picked out a syringe.

"I shall not need that," I said. "I have a capacity for pain." He looked sceptical, but I refused the jab, taking a brandy instead, and asked for Jao to come in and hold my shoulders while he pulled on my wrist with one hand, and felt for each bone-end with the other, so that finally they grated back into their proper place. Then he strapped me up with splints and wrote out a bill.

It was very reasonable, so I paid him double. He left cheerful, though still tired and grey. I went up to bed and allowed Jao to help me to undress, then dismissed her with heartfelt thanks and sank under the covers. I could feel my bones knitting already, and the pain was no more than a dull ache. By the morning I would be whole, and my enemy dissolved to atoms in the bay.

When I rose, with Jao hovering attentively and getting in my way, Wilbur was waiting for me downstairs. Jao told me that he had appeared at seven, and would not leave. Since he appeared to be in no rush, neither was I. I got Jao to remove the splint – my arm was now whole – and took a leisurely shower.

Half an hour later I found him reading a book from my small collection.

"Have you read everything in the City Hall Library?" I asked, and he grinned.

"Pretty much." He put the book down on a side-table and stood – it was my collection of the poetry of Robert Frost, and I smiled at his good taste. Waving him back to his armchair I took the other, while Jao bustled in with tea and a selection of dim sum.

"Have you had breakfast?"

He shook his head, still smiling, and we tucked in. My cook is very good, but these had been brought in from Fook Lam Moon, which was situated two minutes from my gate. Heavenly! And the American thought so too, for we did not talk for ten minutes, until all was consumed.

I had during that time the leisure to inspect him more closely. He was around twenty-two or three, quite cute. If I had still been human I would have liked him... I would have liked him a lot.

Perhaps he saw the sadness in my face. He put down his chopsticks and looked at me. I found it unsettling – after four years as a vampire, it usually worked the other way round.

"Was O'Donnell a vampire too?" he said. My mouth, it appeared, fell open, for he laughed.

"What do you know?"

"I'll tell you later."

I shut my mouth with a snap, for my brain had nothing to say. And then this infuriating man picked up his chopsticks and took the last prawn har gow. I resented him hugely.

I thought I must be falling in love.

Wilbur pushed the empty bowl aside and leaned back in the armchair, sweeping his unruly brown hair away from his face with a casual gesture. His fingers were long; in point of fact, he was a lanky young man altogether. He crossed his legs, flashing me a glimpse of quite horrible Argyle socks. But his clothing was neat and of good quality, his shoes casual 'sneakers' blazoned with the symbol of the manufacturer – a trend that was ever more common – and his smile was genuine. I smiled back, and then I listened to his smooth Republican voice.

"I left my home a good few years ago," he began, and this, I thought, would go on for some time. I did not mind. "I'd always been a reader; got into some scrapes at school for being a nerd – a swot, I guess you'd say – and my dad always said I'd wear out my pants seat sooner than my shoes; for all that I loved a walk, I loved better to sit with a book.

"I read voraciously, everything that came my way. I wore out the library in my home town, and took a weekend job to buy books from the mail-order. I read science and science-fiction, romance and biography... And history, of course." A troubled frown. "The Technical War. Nineteen-fourteen until thirty-seven. The whole world gone mad."

He leaned forward and poured tea for us. I guessed he was composing himself.

"Because of that war, because of the horrendous engines of destruction it spawned, we live now in this Victorian simulacrum." He sipped. "So many dead, and the plagues that followed killed double, treble that. We retreated from science; we threw out the baby, so now we're here, depleted, untrustful of the benefits that could have sprung from that awful conflict."

I knew so little. I recalled the cursory treatment of the Great War from Sir Luke's history lessons when I had been but a child. I wished now I had paid more attention. The war was long, and many innovations of murder had come from it. There were people I knew – my grandparents, on both sides, had been born during the plague years that followed the conflict – who never talked about it, counting themselves lucky to have survived. Until now I had never heard it regretted so, that the agreements that came after three-quarters of humanity died less than a century ago were counted a bad thing.

"It has kept the peace," I said, and he nodded.

"Surely! Who am I to object to that? But I am at heart a dreamer." He laughed, and I grinned. He surely was. "I read Verne and Wells, and saw what they said in their time was to come. And it came. And since then I read Heinlein and Asimov, LeGuin, Okorafor, Moorcock... And I saw what might have been. Both the bad and the good.

"We live now in an artificial world, stifled by a bogus Imperialism. The clones of Franz Josef, Victoria and Cixi sit on their thrones as figureheads of an eternal stagnation. Why; even the benefits of medicine are rationed! And by now we should have been en route to the stars!" Wilbur was agitated, quivering even. He set down his cup and stood to pace around the room. I followed him with my eyes – he was magnificent, the book-learn'd nerd!

"I would bring it all down, if I could!" he cried. He stopped before the shelves and ran his fingers along the spines of my books. "You read a great deal," he commented, in a much quieter tone.

I stood, trembling somewhat, and stepped up beside him. My hand rested on his shoulder. He did not wince, neither did he show fear. Foolish, he; and foolish, me. With his right hand he drew out a slim volume from the shelf, and with his left arm he circled my waist.

I rested my head against his shoulder. "What book is that?" I asked softly.

"Dracula, by Bram Stoker," he answered; and I shivered.

He took me to Whampoa Gardens. I wore a veil, of course; the sun was fierce, the typhoon gone. While we walked, he talked, and enlightening it was indeed. I had not expected to be so... understood. I confess, I cried, in a secluded part of the garden that I then realised was my battle-zone from the night before. Which made me cry harder; and Wilbur held me close, and I did not bite him.

Eventually he started talking again. Naturally.

"A man's clothing was found in the bay," said my Wilbur. "It is supposed that he disrobed to commit suicide, and was drowned. His body has not been found."

"Not very newsworthy."

"True. But it gained an inch of type in the South China Morning Post... Were you injured?"

"Yes. But I am quite recovered now."

"Remarkable. He was, of course, a vampire. His name was Peter Patrick O'Donnell... Would you like to see where he lived?"

My old teacher had lodged in a tenement building close by the bridge that arched over to Hong Kong island from west Kowloon. We took a rickshaw, and it was a jolly ride, though bumpy. I kept jostling up against Mister Deneuve – Wilbur – at every slight jolt; he seemed to enjoy it as much as I.

But our destination was grim, and grimy. The piers of the bridge overstepped even this high building, and shaded it permanently from the sun. I supposed it to be ideal for one such as O'Donnell. Wilbur conducted me into the building and up the littered stairs to the fifth floor. There was nothing to stop us entering the dingy suite of rooms that Mister O'Donnell had lately occupied.

"Surely, Wilbur, there must have been some interest in him?"

"None," my love replied, "for the authorities do not know who he is. His clothing, it is reported, contained no identification."

"So how..?"

"Because I'd seen him before. Hanging around the library, and following you when you left it. And I saw him when he went to your house. I wanted to see you, but he got there first. I followed him when he left, back to here, and then returned in a cab to meet with you."

The rooms were dire. I could not understand how a vampire could live like this. After all, he was able to enter any locked place that the public had a right to access, and any home he had been invited into. He could have taken money from a vault, clothes from a shop. Yet here was misery.

"He had a wife," I ventured to say. But there was no wife here, nor any evidence of one.

"He never had a wife," said Wilbur, rootling through the dead man's possessions. Finally he came up with a clutch of notebooks and a sheaf of letters, and we left the noisome building to return to my mansion.

We read the wretched material together, and it was so sad I almost felt sorry for the man. It appeared that O'Donnell had preyed for years on young girls, in several establishments. Part of his veneer of respectability had been his 'wife' – a local prostitute, who consented for cash to appear with him on occasion.

He had gone to the Sheldrakes to denounce me, to break whatever bonds he imagined bound them to look after me – but he had found that those bonds were forged in blood.

The whole story was in these notebooks, his journal. His writing was small and crabbed, the style pretentious and self-pitying. He ever cast himself as the victim – rightly, when the Sheldrakes got hold of him.

He suffered. His descriptions of his confinement in the dungeon beneath their mansion were harrowing, written after the events in a shaky hand. The virus-laden blood had been injected into him by syringe – the Count having no desire to let this miserable man sink his new fangs into an aristocratic neck – and the pseudo-death and resurrection played out in the stink of his cell, lightless and solitary.

After the Sheldrakes were driven from Shanghai they kept in touch, though he was bemused by how they managed to find him – they had turned him out into the night to feed only hours before Sipewe's father died trying to foil their escape; and when O'Donnell got back he found the mansion deserted. He lived there for a while, subsisting initially on rats and the occasional child that wandered in to play, then venturing out, slowly learning the extent of his powers until one night he stole clothing and cash, and left for Beijing on the train.

They found him there. A telegram delivered to his door told him to go to a specific hotel and await a telephone call. His orders were to find me, and to destroy me.

"They made him stay beneath notice," Wilbur said, and I understood. If he had been rich, a mover in Society, I would have known of him. I would have recognised him and killed him. So they forced him to live in poverty.

We spent the afternoon with his papers, and when evening approached had a light dinner. Then Wilbur took up his hat and cocked an eyebrow at me. "To the library," he drawled; and so we went.

The Hong Kong City Hall Library was open until late, and Wilbur was a Section Leader. He took me through the vast public areas and unlocked a small door in a corner of Biology. The space revealed was awesome. Here were far more books than could be found on the public shelves: books in rack after rack of mobile shelving, on floor after floor reaching up to the full height of the building. Wilbur took me to a desk placed centrally and consulted a huge catalogue in drawers arranged around behind it. "We use Dewey Decimal," he said, whispering in his reverence for the weight of learning around us. "I have a list of the books I'd like to show you." He rooted around in the drawers, his list and a pencil to hand, and eventually led me up and down through the maze, opening great wheeled metal shelves on tracks, darting in to select books – which he gave to me to carry.

"You're a vampire, Aoyun – you're stronger than I," was all he said; and I laughed.

From time to time we met other librarians, who smiled at us as they passed. After dinner I had changed into a plain skirt with sensible boots and a sparsely-embroidered waist-coat, with a cream high-necked blouse beneath. It pleased me that these ladies were dressed similarly. Blending in, it seemed, was natural to me. Or, perhaps, to one such as me.

Eventually we struggled – I struggled, he sauntered – down to some reading-tables where I dumped the books, and he began to show me the world.

"We all accept our society as it now is. Generations have gone by, and those who came through that long, long war are ancient and decrepit. The plagues killed so many of those that followed. What remains in human memory is no substitute for clear records." He swivelled a book around to me, open at a page. "Read."

I read. This was a brief but horrible description of the Great War, the war that ended all wars. It started in a seeming flash, and for several years was mired in mud and incompetence. But behind the front lines scientists were busy. Gas and air-dropped bombs, tanks and machine-guns were the first developments. Then nerve agents, vile bacteria and missiles that found their own targets. The conflict spread, bringing in the Republic of America when Japan attacked China in violation of a mutual-aid pact; reluctantly the Americans geared for war.

As it progressed, the arcane sciences brought to light by professors Einstein, Bohr and Fermi were matured into weapons. I had not heard of this, of the depths to which humans would stoop to twist the wonderful into the utterly destructive. These had been my heroes, and now they were revealed as the destroyers of men. Wilbur touched my cheek, and took away a trembling tear.

Blame and anger spread around the globe. Warships fought in the estuaries of South American rivers, bringing the southern hemisphere into the conflict. Australia spent its youth in the defence of its Imperial mother, Britain, and Africa blazed with conflict.

Russia played both sides, attacking the German States and their allies while at the same time invading China, trying to crush the Middle Kingdom between it and Japan. But it failed; and it failed because of Chinese science.

Nothing more specific was mentioned in these few pages. Only that the war was extensive and long, that it spawned many new branches of science bent wholly towards destruction. And that when it was won, the winners suffered just as much as the losers from the honourable deaths of war and the pathetic deaths in the peace that followed: the plagues, which killed far more than the bombs, missiles and death-rays.

My head swam. This was not what we had been taught so cursorily at school. But worse was to come. He set another book before me. Here were more details of the scientific advances, and of the resolution by the Powers at the end of the war to reset the clock. Biology, they argued, was the key. The bones of Victoria, of Cixi, Czar Alexander II, Shaka Zulu and Franklin Roosevelt – their bones were plundered for their essence, and a new set of Empires was built.

They had ruled for the last seventy-five years. Every so often one or another would be retired – there was no indication as to where – and a new clone installed, but this was invisible to the general population. All we subjects knew was the glory and splendour of our eternal leaders, and the stability and safety of their realms.

"Take a break," Wilbur urged, and we went out into the night to drink coffee in the cafeteria attached to the Kowloon Ferry buildings.

I was not hungry. Not for food, nor for blood. For I knew that my new friend – my only ever male friend – was leading me towards something awful.
Bran Castle

The airship from Hong Kong was spacious, certainly for those of us in First Class. I upgraded to a suite, so that Wilbur and I could have separate rooms. I did not want to hunger in the night and find my fangs in his neck, and constantly stressed to him never to invite me into his bed-room.

"I got the picture," he complained for the umpteenth time. "Really, Aoyun – just calm down!"

Those are not words to say to a Chinese woman – he was a slow learner, being Caucasian. But eventually we settled into a relationship that satisfied us both, although chaste.

To me it was idyllic. I had come up fast to Wilbur, that day he showed me the falsity of our world, and it had surprised us both. I had not thought I could love, in my condition; and he had not thought himself lovable, given his bookish manners and quite frankly ridiculous hair, physique and taste in clothes. Especially his hosiery.

"Why do you have to wear such eye-searing patterns?" I cried, when he crossed his legs and revealed yet another pair of psychedelic socks.

"It's an expression of my individuality," he plainted.

"Well, stop it!"

I finally bought a dozen black cotton socks in a haberdashery in Istanbul, where the ship lay up for several days. It was a fascinating city, and I fed well on lamb and chicken during the day, wrapped up in veil and gloves, and on the blood of ruffians in the night, of whom there was an alarming sufficiency.

I like to think I left that ancient city a better place.

On we went, and sometimes my hunger for blood was desperate. But I withstood it, for thanks to my Wilbur and the books he dug out of the depths of his library, I knew what I was.

I had become an inadvertent soldier, a victim of an experiment that had been conducted towards the end of that long war. The virus that infected me, that passed to me in tiny amounts from Sophie, and in a massive draught when I drank the blood of my true and best friend Jing, was a jumble of tiny machines. They thrived in my blood, they strengthened my bones, inured me against infections and desired me to pass them on. They consumed my will; or they would have, if I had let them. It was a constant battle. They even were the things that made me able to fly, spinning natural gravity unnaturally, and although I had not tried it – on an airship filled with hydrogen, one would not – I knew that they could make me spit out balls of fire, exactly as the Count had on that awful night.

I was on my way to find Sophie and Arisztid, her husband. But whilst their destruction was foremost in my mind, the lure of travel, and especially of travel with Wilbur, overrode that thirst. The stop beyond Istanbul, however, was Bucharest, and here we disembarked to take the train to Brașov.

The hotel Bella Muzica was located in a quaint sixteenth-century building by the main square, all cock-eyed angles and creaking stairs. We had adjoining rooms, and shared a bathroom, which gave me an inadvertent opportunity to see the whole of Wilbur. To my annoyance he did not shriek and cover his modesty, but grinned instead and continued with his shower. I slammed the door, and heard him laugh.

It was but a short step by coach from Brașov to Bran Castle; we hesitated to take that step, dithering in the mediaeval town, lingering in its pubs, trying to coax information from the locals. Some spoke English or German; we had no Romanian. It took a lot of time and many free drinks until Wilbur snapped his fingers. "The library," he moaned; and we must needs find some local to direct us there, in bad German.

The librarian disapproved of me, and more of Wilbur. His claims to be a fellow book-keeper, while breathing beer-fumes over the poor lady, would not have convinced me. But finally, after some sort of intellectual test which passed quite above my head, she relented and took us aside into a cramped office. She at least spoke passable English, and once I had described the Sheldrakes she went off to consult the precious books. When she returned, she opened up.

"Arisztid is Ambassador to the Court of China," she offered.

"No more," I said. "He and his wife fled after a series of murders in Shanghai." This gave the woman pause. She looked down at her notebook, her thin nose like a spike to drive into it. There had probably been a plethora of information about that diplomatic appointment which now would never be imparted. She sighed, took off her glasses and polished them thoroughly. Wilbur smiled gently, patiently, while I dreamt of throats.

"There is some histories, which in cases are suspected that they are legend, of wampyr," the Miss began. "Long was that family thought to be of that clan." She settled the spectacles onto her face, and her eyes grew considerably smaller. It was not a nice look. "When they left, we all breathed more comfortable. It was like as if a pressure was lifted from we all. Young people could walk in the dark again. Their parents, they could smile, not worry. I would not speak ill of the un-dead – no-one here would. But they was the worst neighbours anyone could ever have.

"I, myself, have no child, no kin at all now living, in fact, save for an old uncle who cannot remember me. It passes me by, the terror those two provoked. But if they have returned, there has been no sign. Even I would have noticed."

"Is Bran Castle now occupied?"

"There is a caretaker and his wife; we have not seen them for a while. But of their master and mistress there has been no sign. Will you go to it?"

"We may," admitted Wilbur.

"Grace of God with you," the librarian said, rising. "Tell me, your hotel?" We told her. "So wait there. They have a good bar, which I think is important to you." Wilbur flushed. "I will send you a man to help."

"Thank you, ma'am," I said, rising too and offering my hand, which she took. Her eyes widened as soon as we made contact. "We are here to destroy them."

"You will not find them there," she said, detaching her hand and almost counting her fingers. "We would know. If they are back at Bran, we would be burying our children."

Wilbur's hand was on the door-knob when she spoke again, and we turned back to her. She stood, reluctance in every aspect of her posture.

"There was others before you, seeking the Count and his Lady... Perhaps four year ago a man entered here, tall, beyond his middle age, a servant by his clothes. Outside my library his coach was stood, black as sin, and some creature watching from inside, folded in darkness.

"He was Romanian, this servant, and asks questions the same like you. I told him as I told you. The coach drove off, but we seen it around now and again for six month or so until no more."

"Do you think they found the Sheldrakes?"

She sighed. "Yes."

Our interview was over. We left in silence.

We ate, Wilbur and I, in a small restaurant next to our hotel. Schnitzel, fried potato, limp beans followed by bread pudding and an acceptably strong coffee. When we skittered back to the Bella Musika we headed for the bar, and ordered schnapps. The bartender squinted at Wilbur and croaked, "You are mister and missus Deneuve?"

"Not yet," Wilbur admitted, and I almost laughed out loud. Our server shot me a narrow glance and smacked the thick glasses onto the counter.

"Booth three," he suggested.

It was easy to find, for there were but five such along the far wall. That middle booth contained sufficient bench seating for six normal people, except that the most enormous man was occupying three places. He glowered at us as we slid in opposite him.

"Miss Cojocaru tell me meet with you. Take heed." He had a tankard before him, which he banged once, hard, on the table. Within an instant the bartender plonked another down for him and whisked away the empty. "I am Cuţov. If ones hurts you, I hurts them." Wilbur smiled, and held out his hand. Impressively, he did not wince when our new friend gripped it. I fancied I heard bones grinding. "I take you to Bran, back way. Look not touch."

That appealed. Our complete agreement, and the fact that we did not query the price of his help, endeared us to him. Wilbur and I rolled up to our conjoined rooms in the small hours with the promise of our guide to meet around eight, in the bar.

Cuţov was downing a stein of lager when we bumped back down the narrow stairs, fashionably late, and had already ordered up breakfast for us, if that word could be used to describe a plate of cheese and thin-sliced sausage washed down with pale Romanian beer. I distinctly heard Wilbur groan. But outside, when the fresh air hit, he perked up, and we mounted into an open coach of antique design pulled by a single frisky mare.

Up we went into the mountains. Lowering clouds hid the peaks, and when after an hour had passed we saw Bran Castle it was a complete revelation.

Bran was a honey-coloured, compact confection of sloped roofs and shy towers, round and square. The curtain wall wrapped it all up into a delightful parcel, its curves seeming to squeeze the towers up. I could not imagine it as a place of horror, this red-roofed sweet. But it was the source, the home of the Sheldrakes, and in the intermittent sunshine I yet felt chilled, and leant on my Wilbur, who took the opportunity to put his thin arm around me.

We lunched at a restaurant, Popasul Drumețului, that served tasty, fatty, meaty food. I admit, I gorged. Wilbur, too, piled in, and our guide stuffed himself as if the world were about to end.

"Now for walk," Cuţov announced; and walk we did, right up to the walls of Bran. I looked at Wilbur, my eyes enquiring. He shrugged, and I took that as assent.

Later, back in our room in the Bella Musika, he told me what he had seen, and related how Cuţov barely raised an eyebrow. When I melted, as I thought, through the rock, what they saw happen was that my clothes all sagged and fell; a black rash spread over the stones, melting in here and there, bigger clumps reaching up to windows and around to gates until finally all was gone and the stonework left clean but faintly damp.

To me, I passed through whole and found myself in a dark chamber, naked. Faint light showed me the door, and I tried the latch. I was thirsty and wanted a drink. The latch lifted. The corridor beyond was empty, lit only by sunlight through high windows.

The castle was deserted. I took an hour, wandering around, up to the tops of the towers, down to the grim dungeons. I saw much that was horrifying – instruments of torture, rusty but used; and two shrunken human forms curled in corners, still moist and smelling of rot. I knew I had found the caretaker and his poor wife.

The apartments that Sophie and Arisztid would have occupied were dusty and empty, but the dust had been disturbed. There were footprints on the floors, marks on surfaces, fingerprints. I investigated and found a safe, empty, behind a rather unlovely painting, and wardrobes ransacked. Then I went out into the courtyard.

There was horse dung, not fresh, but deposited within only a few weeks. They had been here. They now were gone, and I did not know where.

When I oozed back through the wall – which Wilbur described to me later as a blooming of black mould on the stone, coalescing and lumping up, changing colour and form, becoming a horrid sort of homunculus and then filling out into a fully-formed, naked Chinese girl – Cuţov almost lost his substantial lunch. He turned his back as I dressed, led us back to the restaurant and to the coach parked over the road. Our guide was silent all the way back to the hotel.

Next morning we went to see Miss Cojocaru again. I told her what I had found, and she seemed relieved. "They are gone. I pray they never return."

"They will return, unless I kill them," I pointed out. She looked sour at that. "Where else might we look for them?"

She humphed, and left us for a few minutes, returning with a map. Once it was spread out over her desk she indicated the castle. "Bran." Then she slid her finger deeper into the mountains. "The hunting lodge."

"Why did you not tell us of this place before?"

"Why would they go live in there? They would be far from the blood they craves."

I knew that we could live on animal blood, on bloody meat. I had done it myself, though I had difficulty in imagining Sophie practising such restraint.

"Will Cuţov guide us there?"

"He is... disturbed, from yesterday; I know you understand." She polished her glasses and sighed, her insubstantial chest rising, then falling. "Perhaps I will have to apply persuasion."

"Well, you know where we're staying," Wilbur offered cheerily, and we left her to consider how she might persuade her lover.

The lodge was far more difficult to approach than Bran Castle. It was hidden in dense woods, patrolled by wolves and wild boar, decorated with deer and game birds that sprang up as we attempted a quiet approach. There was a track, but it was overgrown; and we spotted horse dung on it that was too fresh to ignore. I did not want to meet the Sheldrakes on the path, so we pushed through the forest instead.

Once a cloud of flies flew up around us, revealing the fresh corpse of a doe, her throat ripped, her carcass disembowelled. Guts spewed over the blood-soaked moss; her heart and rich liver were missing.

"Wolf," Cuţov observed, but with little conviction. I had a different thought, but did not voice it.

The day was overcast. We would miss the next airship to London, so had no need to hurry, but Cuţov drove us on through sodden undergrowth with a rain of condensation falling on us from the trees, wanting to get this thing over with, until finally we saw the hunting-lodge.

It looked much like the gingerbread house in which Hansel and Gretel had almost come to their end, but it was considerably larger. Moisture dripped from the trees that loomed around it, dripped from its fretted roofs, made puddles in the moss and fern surrounding the cuckoo-clock monstrosity. An image came unbidden to my mind, of an Oriental lodge, in an Eastern forest: murder and rescue, the burgeoning of love in the midst of bravery. I had no idea where it came from.

In the windows of the lodge there were lights. From some place behind the building there came the whinny of a horse. They were there. Sudden fear gripped me, but it was not on my own behalf. I had a responsibility towards Cuţov; and I loved Wilbur.

"Go back," I told them. "There is nothing you can do. Only I can fight them."

And, of course, there followed an argument that I absolutely must win, and against such stubborn and pointless humans! "Go!" I commanded, and kicked them both in their shins, logic not prevailing. "I know where the coach is! Go back, hide nearby the coach and see if it is I who goes to it. If it is them – well; you'll just have to walk home."

The men set off grumbling and limping down the track. I girded up my courage, undressed and sailed naked into the damp air. I shot straight up, then down, to light upon the scalloped wooden tiles of the roof, sinking through them into the darkness of an attic.

I waited, literally breathless, my body sucking in moisture, my ears tuned to any sounds from the rooms beneath. There was nothing. I pushed my head carefully through the boards and peeped into a dusty bedroom, unoccupied and dripping with chintz. Truly, some vampires have no taste.

I stole through the upper story of the lodge, finding it free of threat. Two rooms showed evidence of occupation: trunks beside made-up beds, jewellery on the dressing-table, clothes in the wardrobes. In my slow investigation I drifted, not touching the floor, so that when I heard a creak I knew it did not come from me. Someone, some thing, was climbing the stairs. I rose, passed through the ceiling, left a fraction of brow and eye protruding beside the vulgar chandelier.

Into this room came Arisztid. He was darkly handsome as ever, dressed in tweeds as if about to go for a hack. He mumbled to himself as he searched his dressing-table, then the drawers, looking for what I did not know, nor care – only that he was distracted. I would never have a better chance.

I oozed through the plaster, dropped silently, spreading my body like a black shroud fluttering down behind and over the Count, wrapped around him, squeezing tight. I generated the fire I had first seen him use in Shanghai, I sent it seething into him. When his mouth opened to scream I poured into it, stifling any sound he might have made to warn Sophie. I lifted him from the floor. The heat I sent into his core was furious. Paper began to char and curl from the walls; the bed-clothes browned and scorched.

Within my prisoning cowl the Count struggled, gagged, fought for air, for his mind still believed he needed to breathe. His panic helped me, and doomed him, and when finally he went limp I unfolded him onto the smouldering bed.

He looked dead; but he was not. His eyes sprang open, and he brought up a hand to shock me with a bolt. I was still outspread, thin but substantial, and fast. An edge of me folded around and slashed through his arm, a flat black razor slicing through cloth, skin and bone – and he screamed. Sophie was warned. She would be swift to respond. I slammed a knife-edge down through Arisztid's neck, severing his head. My fingers reached into his body to tear out his heart. There was a clatter on the stairs – why, she was so panicked she had forgotten she could just swoop up! That alone gave me the seconds I needed to retire up into the attic, my last sight of Arisztid his body crumbling into ashes on the flaming bed.

I soared up through the roof, high and higher in the healing cloudy air, lost myself in the grey sky. I did not want to fight Sophie right now – I was hot, had heated myself as much as I had burnt Arisztid, and was depleted from the exertion. So much energy expended, so weak... I fell back through the clouds some way away from the lodge, got my bearings, and headed for the rendezvous I had agreed with Wilbur and Cuţov. There were spare clothes in the coach, and hot coffee in a flask.

Behind me a soundless scream rocked the air, a sub-sonic rage that shivered the clouds so that a sudden rain fell. How strong Sophie must be, to shock the world like that! And as I swooped down to the clearing and the coach I was glad I had not had to fight her; and frightened that some day I would have to.

Cuţov took us directly to the railway station, where our luggage from the hotel was being looked after in the porter's room. He shook Wilbur's hand – he was wary of mine – and we took the train back to Bucharest, and the next dirigible for London.

"You're smaller," Wilbur remarked as the train pulled away. My clothes were now too big – my blouse wrapped me like a tent, and I had had to roll the waistband of my skirt to stop it falling down or tripping me.

"So much of my energy has been used," I surmised, "and my substance. If I had had the time I would have fed from Arisztid before I killed him... But perhaps that would not have helped, for his own body was shutting down too."

"How could they have been there all that time, and not known to the people?"

I had thought about that, and about the mysterious visitor who had appeared in Brașov not long after they fled from China.

"I think they were threatened," I told Wilbur, keeping my voice low. "They fled Bran to live in the hunting-lodge, and they have been living off the wild-life in the woods around. Otherwise nothing could have stopped them from preying on their human neighbours."

Wilbur was silent. I looked up into his eyes, and saw he was troubled. "What is it?" I asked, resting my hand on his.

"What is there," he murmured to me, "that is so powerful it could threaten them?"

There was a dining-car on the train, and Wilbur watched in awe – as did the waiters and passengers about us – while I devoured as much steak, potato and alcohol as could be set before me. Before long my blouse began again to fit, and I had to surreptitiously unwind my waist-band. Whatever made me, made that food into copies of itself. I was no longer human. I knew what I truly was because of my dear Wilbur.

The books my love had shown me back in Hong Kong were not for public view. He had only been able to pull them because his position gave him access that was denied to most of the other staff. How long had he searched for them? How dedicated must he be, to find out what I was, and then not simply believing the first and obvious answer – that I was a vampire, an ancient plague on humanity – but that there were roots to my being, and answers to be found, in the legends of that long and recent war.

When books were discovered which challenged Society, he told me, that could not be made public for fear of turmoil, there were always librarians on hand to secrete them away behind the stacks. No knowledge could be lost. In fact, Wilbur explained, there were reporting procedures for such discoveries, and never had there been any request come back for a book's destruction.

Wilbur had found two. One that showed us the evolution of Science in that Great War, turning the genius minds who could have provided so much good for Humanity into manufacturers of weapons born from the heart of scientific study, weapons to beat down the foe, to prevent the slaughter of friends, to try to stamp down the conflict with some final crashing chord of power.

The second was a fragment of a technical paper from late in the War. It described the way that tiny grains of semi-intelligent machinery could be injected into a human body, and which would replace every biological element of that body, including even the brain. What use this weapon had we could not divine; there was no hint in the text. But Wilbur's conclusion, revealed to me in the Hong Kong library, was clear and compelling. I was an exemplar of one of those beings, and no part of me was any more human. The powers I had were technological. The brain I had was a distributed copy of my own, when last I had been a whole human woman.

Armed with this knowledge I found that I was able to shrug off merely human concerns – I had already known I did not need breath, when I fought Mister O'Donnell, but now I knew why. I did not need a beating heart. I did not need breakable bones or flowing blood. I did not even need the form of my human body, and knowing that had enabled me to kill the Count, though at some cost to my own fabric.

On the airship we once more had a suite, the power of money being what it was. I believe the previous occupants were told their quarters were in some danger from gas or electrical leaks, so the Company put them up in Bucharest until the next ship. We, meanwhile, settled in to their vacated rooms and resumed our progress towards Britain via Budapest, Vienna, Munich, Zürich and Paris. It was travel in a grand style, just as before, and with the opportunity to explore each city for a few days, visiting palaces, opera houses and fine restaurants; and in the depths of the night I sought out evildoers, and fed on those of my kind I could find.

I sat on the pinnacle of Saint Stephansdom in Vienna, and the bell-tower of Notre-Dame de Paris, searching for victims whilst my Wilbur slept – or perhaps he didn't. Either way, I lived, and whatever passed for adrenaline coursed through whatever had replaced my veins, while I killed and drank.
London

It was smelly, at least in Essex, where we tied up at a pylon in the marshes. A train waited at a modern station, bright with electric lights and vending-machines. One of the advantages of the agreements and treaties brokered since the war was a universal currency, so that I could sate myself on chocolate and milky English tea, paid for in Chinese ren-min-bi, while we glided towards the capital. I smiled at Wilbur, munching, and he pulled out a handkerchief to wipe a dribble from the corner of my mouth.

The marshy stink faded, and a coal stink took its place. Factories and forges belched out smoke on either side. This, too, passed; we reached the suburbs, neat rows of brick-built houses, with the occasional church spire or shopping-mall poking up above them. From time to time we caught a glimpse of the Towers of Commerce in the City. When we arrived at Fenchurch Street, with its bustle and its touts and guides, I found a porter to organise our trunks toward the taxi-ranks, and within half an hour our procession of smelly diesel cabs turned into the carriage-drive of the Savoy on London's famous Strand.

"Woo!" cried Wilbur, collapsing onto his huge bed, becoming almost engulfed by a satin-sheathed duvet. He rolled around a few times and sat up. "Come – christen this bed with me!"

I stood beyond the doorway and shook my head. "I would think that bed has experienced far more carnal activity than either of us," I replied. "Even if it's brand-new. I'm not going to give myself the opportunity to drain you – in either sense."

He made a face, and jumped up when the doorbell rang. It was a page, with a silver plate bearing a visiting-card. I took it and tipped the boy – too generously, I guessed, from the grin on his urchin face. Wilbur came up behind me and clasped my waist, looking over my shoulder.

"What's that?"

"A service, I suppose. Remember that massage in Budapest?"

He shuddered. "I do. Never again." My love crossed to the window, which looked out over the Embankment and the river Thames. I, meanwhile, read the card, intending to consign it to the litter-bin. But I didn't.

"Who knows we are here?" I asked softly.

"No-one," he replied, the joy still in his voice. I hated to quash it.

"A Professor wishes to call on us."

"Professor who?"

I turned, looked toward my love, my as-yet unconsummated lover, limned in the noon-light. We both knew this name; but the man was not real, had never existed. "Professor Abraham Van Helsing."

The reverse of the card gave the time of his arrival; and at precisely four in the afternoon, with the sun so bright on the river that I had drawn the blinds half-down, the man who lived only in the pages of an old classic rang our bell. Wilbur bade him enter. I saw a man of around fifty-five, with reddish hair above and falling around a broad forehead, framing a strong face. He pulled off soft grey gloves and handed them, with his cane, to Wilbur as if he were a servant; Wilbur bowed slightly, and took them to lay gently on a side-table before conducting our visitor to a high-backed armchair beside my Chesterfield.

"Would you care for a drink?"

"Brandy and soda, if I may," the Professor said in a thick European accent. I could place it only as Dutch or German. Wilbur fixed drinks and served them, then sat beside me and held my hand. A silence rose as we inspected Van Helsing, and he in his turn inspected us. Finally his bushy eyebrows lifted, and he took up the glass to drink.

"You have not completely broken the conditioning," he began, putting the heavy lead crystal tumbler, much depleted, down beside him. "But you are certainly working on it."

"Professor – please forgive me; what are you talking about?"

His eyes, wide-set and an intense blue, levelled at me like guns, and his eyebrows came down. "You know. And your companion, also. You are infected with the vampire symbiont. You crave blood, you exhibit powers no normal human possesses. You are enslaved to conditions over which you have very little control. Please don't persist in fencing with me. This matter is of great concern."

"To whom?" Wilbur demanded.

"To you, both of you. And to the world. For there are many vampires... But there are very few who can think beyond their desires."

"There is always a hunger," I ventured, and he nodded. I felt strangely happy that I had been able to please this man.

"Yes, and yet you can control it. You are discerning in your victims; but victims there must be. How do you feel about that?"

"I wish I had not become such that I am." Oh, and I meant that, so deep in my soul! Wilbur clutched my hand tighter and I squeezed back – he yelped in pain, and I slackened off.

Van Helsing got up, drained his brandy and went in search of more. I gulped at mine, and noticed that Wilbur's bourbon was now just a jumble of ice-cubes. Only five minutes, and we were all turned into alcoholics. What a depressing man Van Helsing was! I thought of throwing him out, but the coming five minutes convinced me to keep him close.

"I am Van Helsing. You know the name," he said, very conversationally, pouring Jim Beam into a tumbler, over ice, and handing it to my beau, who grasped it gratefully. "I do not exist. And, of course, neither do you. Vampires are a myth.

"Excepting that we managed to create them, as your librarian friend well knows. Long ago, in that war now so far away. They were the last-gasp attempt of a failing foe to foment chaos in the powerful elites. Vampires, passing as aristocrats, moving in rarified social circles, and able to make more of their own, each beholden to their maker. They were specifically designed to be unable to cross any threshold where they had not been invited – thus were their human creators protected; for the aim of this cadre was to infiltrate to the top of Society, and to murder all, cutting off the head, letting the body fall to ruin."

"Any Society?"

"Any. Which is why the threshold rule was established. For an example – in the beginning years of the war, the land leviathans, tanks, were invented. These were great metal machines that rode over the trenches, mounted with guns to blow apart the enemy, propelled by continuous tracks that crushed and maimed. Both sides had them, within a year. The Germanic Alliance had a brilliant idea: it trained dogs to go towards and under tanks, where explosive charges strapped to their backs would be detonated when a wand sticking up was pushed aside by the tank's belly."

"Oh, the poor dogs!"

"The poor Germans, you should say – for they had no Allied tanks to practise with, but only their own; and the dogs naturally went to theirs, and not to ours!"

I suppressed a smile. The biter bit.

"The biter bit," commented Wilbur, who was making his third drink. Van Helsing waggled his eyebrows at me, and I laughed out loud.

"A sense of humour is vital," he said, which quite dampened me. "It shows you are not wholly enthralled."

"I am not, sir. I have my own capacity."

"I can see. You have not converted your lover..."

"Nor will I. I hate what I am."

The Professor nodded slowly. "I am glad... Do you have any questions for me?"

"How did you find us?" Wilbur asked, loudly. The Professor smiled.

"We have sniffers around our ports. Devices to take samples of what is in the air. Your nanomachines registered immediately at Basildon. And so we tracked you, and so I was woken, and so, I am at last here. But we knew you would arrive, in time."

"Why are you called Van Helsing?"

"Everyone must have a name!" he protested. But then he smiled. "And mine is a name known to all vampires. You cannot become one such without also becoming curious about your origins; and Bram Stoker's novel is the place at which you all start."

"It does make sense."

"What do you see, when you look at me?" he enquired softly, staring at me with those wide, hypnotic eyes.

I hesitated. I had not thought... But now I did, and it was a revelation.

"Why, sir – I see no-one!"

Van Helsing grinned, and Wilbur looked confused, and I laughed.

Van Helsing was not a human being.

Wilbur, at dinner in the Savoy Grill, hardly noticed what he ate. He talked incessantly, so that I had to keep my eyes cast down or else I would either laugh or be disgusted.

"He's an android! Why, this is marvellous!"

"Keep your voice down, Wilbur – we do not want our business known to all."

"But... Oh, you're right!" He moderated his voice. "All the stories I read of such things – 'I, Robot', 'Do Androids Dream...', 'Soul of a Robot' – these were the nourishment of my youthful brain! And now to find... Oh! Words fail me!"

But, of course, they didn't.

The Professor worked for an adjunct of the world's government, tasked with the destruction of the last weapons of the Great War – those mostly human armaments which used intelligence and vicious speed to destroy vital facilities and to assassinate heads of state. There had been several such attempts on the lives of our leaders within the past seventy or so years, but since they were mere clones, even if they had been killed a 'miraculous recovery' would be staged, and their rule continued. But these weapons – of which I was now one – were driven by imperatives that took no notice of the facts of the modern world.

I pondered our earlier conversation, eating automatically and letting Wilbur's superlatives roll over me. It was a source of wonder to my mind, I had said to the professor, that the people of the world simply accepted that their Emperors and Empresses continued on, in the prime of their health, through threats and explosions for the last seventy-odd years, and never looked a day older. But Van Helsing laughed. "It is a suspension of disbelief," he explained. "All of us want stability since that great and terrible war. Humanity will believe whatever it must, to be secure and safe."

He had reminded us how at the time of my death the machinery that made me a vampire replaced every atom of my being, even my brain. "So that you are able to pass through most solid things, for these tiny machines find ways through, between the grains and structures; and seep their way around obstacles, so that at the other side they re-assemble. Some barriers – metal plate, for example – you could not go through. But if there is a way around such a wall, it will seem to you that you passed through."

"I know this – and I am human no more."

Wilbur found my hand again. "You are human to me," he said softly. "Truly so; and more than many I have known."

"Your thoughts are your own, your desires, your ethos, and your moral compass. But you are of course aware that there are new imperatives in you that are dictated by the programming of the machines." Van Helsing was kind, but I knew that I had disappeared. What sat here was not me. I ate my rare steak, drank wine, spooned sugary dessert into a mouth that was but a shifting cloud of miniscule machinery. Wilbur prattled on.

"How can such as we die?" I had asked our Professor. "Surely, impaling, or cutting off the head, should be useless, for we can re-form ourselves!"

"Programming. Those who designed you had to be able to destroy you. A sequence of acts of violence perpetrated against you will trigger the machine-cloud to shut down. The vampire paradigm was chosen because, as I have said, vampires naturally aspire to rise in Society, and to infect others, and can thusly reach to the top, to decapitate the enemy. And because those who created them can cause them to be limited – as by the action of sunlight, and by the requirement of invitation – they may destroy them when necessary, although with great difficulty."

"So am I to be destroyed?"

"By no means. Your controlling influence – your friend Wu Jing – is no more. You are beholden to no-one. And so – who is more able to defeat any vampire, than another vampire? You showed as much in Shanghai, and Hong Kong – and in Romania."

I was, I realised, being recruited. A vampire-hunter, or so I thought. But it was much different to that, as I was to discover at our next meeting.

When Wilbur and I finished our meal we took a stroll along the Embankment, the globes of electric light yellow on their poles stretching away towards the City, the Thames flowing beside us, crowded with tourist boats and cheap one-man ferries.

Well, cheap if you were not a tourist.

"That was a splendid meal," Wilbur exclaimed. I looked at him sidelong.

"You noticed?"

He bridled, but in good humour. "Of course. When I was not looking at you." I laughed, and let him take my arm. "You had three bloody steaks," he observed. "The waiters were astonished."

"I bloody needed them," I retorted, "or I would be out flying for villains to drain, instead of walking in a civilised manner with a notorious idiot."

I had to admit, it was a pleasure that he shut up for quite five minutes.

Our suite was lit low when we returned, and the beds turned down, with chocolates on the pillows and a complimentary half-bottle of champagne on ice beside the couch in the sitting-room. The air was scented with vanilla, the curtains were half-drawn. Over the river the lights of Southwark burned, and above their dim galaxy the greater one burned brighter. The stars, to which we would never travel, for humanity, Wilbur assured me, had proved that it was not worthy.

We drank, and kissed a little, and went to our respective rooms. I heard Wilbur's shower running, and took one myself for the pleasure; for it appeared that I was self-cleaning, and did not need to wash. I took energy from food and drink, particularly sugars and alcohol, and the hydrocarbons from proteins and fats were converted to carbon for my machinery, and more energy; and then the trace elements were extracted and bonded into my electronics. What little remained was disposed of discreetly. When I passed through hard barriers much of the water I held within me was squeezed out, leading to my necessary thirst. So much information from my new mentor, in such a short time. He was impressive.

I was not tired, but I was weary. The revelations of the day spun my mind into wild orbits. I ached for Wilbur, but it now seemed to me that I was not even remotely capable of being to him what he so evidently desired me to be. I lay naked on my bed, the night pulling at me, at the programming, tugging me to seek blood, to advance the redundant role of my kind. And into this mood the idiot intruded. He knocked softly and came in immediately, in a robe and barefoot, and sat on my bed to stroke my face gently, and then he bent to kiss me.

When we turned up at the tourist entrance to Buckingham Palace we were intercepted and taken, as we had been told we would be, to a spacious office overlooking the garden. There was a party in full-swing there, and young Victoria and her consort Albert mixed with the great and the good while flunkeys dispensed champagne and canapés. I wondered how many in that crowd were truly human.

Van Helsing came in, accompanied by a worried-looking little man whom he introduced as the Prime Minister. He had crumbs on his coat.

"Librarians – such as yourself, Mister Deneuve – are curious beings," Van Helsing began. "And there are many books and manuals still surviving since the war. You found several such in the City Hall library; and despite our removing as many as we find to more secure locations, they do keep turning up.

"These old works reveal too much. So we recruit library staff to find them. You, alas, were not approached, possibly because your grasp of Chinese was not good enough. Yet there are many books in English in foreign libraries."

"I would have been flattered, if you had approached me," Wilbur said, "but I think I would have read anything I found that you might have wanted kept apart."

"I expected no other reaction. Librarians are free spirits. But they know the ultimate good; and we do not destroy books, however awful or incriminating. Nevertheless – your activities were noticed, and the books you read. So, we were able to put you, and then Miss Shen, under surveillance, and dig into your histories."

"We found out what you are," the Prime Minister said, blunt and accusing, looking at me with a mixture of anger and fear. Our noble Professor waved his hand.

"You see the reaction you engender in the ignorant."

"Now, look here!"

"Sir David. We are not met here to accuse. We are here to solve a problem."

"Yes! This thing is an instrument of war, a tool of terror! My skin crawls to be in the same room as it. We are dedicated," he stared at me, making me think of one of the pop-eyed stone dogs that sit outside Chinese banks, and I almost giggled, "to expunging them from the planet!"

Wilbur stiffened beside me, but not in a good way. I put my hand on his arm.

"Did we not talk about this just yesterday?" Van Helsing said reasonably, turning to the politician. "There are circumstances which require desperate measures."

"Still..."

"You are fearful. I understand. But Miss Shen is just as human as you or I. Made from different materials, granted. And she is impelled by her programming, as you are by your prejudice. Please settle down, for you will otherwise either die of an apoplexy, or by my own hand."

There was silence then. We watched the Prime Minister pale. Then he nodded, and groped behind him for a seat, which point we all therefore sat, and the meeting continued without further histrionics.

There was a castle in Romania. The original, it was supposed, of the castle Dracula was said to inhabit in Bram Stoker's novel. For many years it lay crumbling, uninhabited and unloved; but a few years ago it was bought, and renovated. It now functioned as a most secret school.

"The Scholomance," Van Helsing began, in what would surely prove to be a most entertaining lecture, "does not advertise. It takes its pupils from the strange and unexplainable parts of the population – those who remain from the vile experiments of the war. Such a concentration of powers can bode no good to humanity.

"We do not know what or who is behind this venture. It attracts not only vampires, but other chimera. It approaches its potential pupils. Those who refuse to join it, die."

"You think I will be approached."

"We are certain of it. If you had not left Hong Kong so suddenly, you would probably have been contacted there. Now that you are in London, remain at your hotel. Let them find you. If they do not offer you a place, they will surely try to kill you."

"I think that they will try to kill me first. If I survive, then they will offer me a place," I guessed. "So please – why does this concern your Prime Minister?"

"Because we need his permission, if we are to conduct this exercise on British soil."

We three looked at the man, who did not immediately respond.

"Would you sanction this, Sir David? We need a suspension of the Act against smart weapons of war, in this specific case."

The man fidgeted, but of course gave the only answer he could. "All right. Do what you must."

"Yes, Prime Minister."

The interview was over. All we had to do now was to wait.

"Are you looking at my bottom?"

"Yes. It's a very nice bottom."

I paused. I was pinning up my hair, which was difficult without recourse to a mirror. And, I was naked. "How many bottoms have you seen?" I asked suspiciously.

"Lots! Cats, dogs, racoons..."

"Well then. You are an expert. You do know, you're not looking at a bottom? You are gazing in rapt adoration at a swarm of intelligent nanites."

There was a second or two of silence.

"You have a gorgeous swarm of nanites."

Waiting meant making love. Wilbur was insatiable, although I must admit, so was I. Since our first day in London, which brought so many revelations, that completed the destruction of my humanity, ending with such dread and self-pity, and then with the urgent love of my love, the melting of my anxious heart – since that day, that night, I had no thought for anyone but him. I forgot myself in his arms, although I schooled him quite in what most amazed and satisfied me.

I did not bite him. He seemed disappointed.

We settled in. During the day Wilbur haunted the British Library, being taken through the forbidden literature by a member of the Library staff at Van Helsing's direction. I rested in our suite, roaming out sometimes into the night, sluggish and sated by both Wilbur's attentions and the excellent food from whichever of the Savoy's three restaurants we favoured with our custom, but driven by the lust for blood. When I returned Wilbur was safe in his room.

The poorer parts of London were grim for sure. There was more than enough work for all, and entertainment at a price that all might afford, but there were always those who preyed on others for sport. I should, I suppose, count myself as one of them. The violence of men against women played out nightly in the dark lanes and alleys, and I fed well. After a few weeks the news-papers noticed, and replaced headlines of Royal doings and celebrity affairs with shocking warnings of a 'New Ripper'. They did not mention, at first, that all the victims were male. I guess they did not want to frighten the poor dears, or else they had not bothered to check.

But a body, the Union of Prostitutes, gave voice, and were published, to the effect that this murderer must be caught, and quick! For their clients were all frightened and would not go out to play! I had not thought that I might be restricting Commerce. So I laughed myself silly at the sheer stupidity of my – but they were not fellow-humans, not any more. It sobered me somewhat. What then should I care for their disregard for their own lives, that they preferred to be maimed and killed for silver than to live without fear?

Van Helsing, when I told him about it, gently explained to me how women's choices were sometimes so curtailed, their circumstances so straitened, that there remained to them no choice but to sell that which they had left; and I was ashamed.

I moved west. For a while I haunted the streets around Saint Paul's and Newgate; and then the Convent Garden, and Fleet Street. Here was a better class of woman-hater, a more vicious type of mugger. Van Helsing warned me against going too far. I berated him: how could people learn to live in peace when everywhere was lust and murder from men? Society needed to become more equal. He did not disagree, but he did point out that I was known to those at the top of government, and they were deathly nervous that my crusade should impact on them if I continued my drift towards the seat of power.

I hated him then, for a few days, and perhaps would have hated him still, until finally I was approached.

I crouched on an elaborate cornice at the top of a tall building that afforded excellent views into the cramped streets around Convent Garden's Flower and Vegetable market. My attire was loose black trousers, boots and a waxed canvas wind-cheater jacket with a zip-fastening. I had marked a few groups of men who were loafing around and eyeing-up the girls; and I kept watch on several of the women who might be most in danger from them. The night was warm, and the precincts of the market were crowded. It would be a while, I thought, before violence would flare up. I was wrong.

From the corner of my eye I saw movement, up on a level with me, and had no time to react before a body slammed into mine, sending me soaring over the street far below until my back crashed into the building opposite. I rolled along the brickwork, fast, and the pursuing vampire slammed head-first into the smashed wall. Its skull flattened, but it lived. I rose into the air, felt a broken shoulder-blade and crushed ribs. But they were not real; and I rebuilt them in the space of seconds.

The other followed me, of course. I laughed at it, and set off for the huge Ferris wheel that had been erected on the far side of the river in celebration of the dear Queen's bicentenary. I did not fly as fast as I could, for I wanted my pursuer to catch me up over the water.

And it did. I watched it come up behind me and dipped just before it caught me. My fingers lengthened into blades and I stuck out my hand into its path; I barely felt the impact as it burst apart into strips, spattering me with its false blood. The river Thames would make sure its components could not re-assemble.

So crude an attack, I felt sure, could not have come from the Romanian group. But I was wrong. The very next day, when Wilbur had gone off after love and breakfast to the Library, a page brought up a visiting-card. I met my caller in one of the public rooms of the hotel.

She was plump and vivacious, a very British young woman, all jolly hockey-sticks and ruddy cheeks. I supposed she must have a pony somewhere in Surrey. She introduced herself as Belinda, and enthused over the coffee and croissants.

"I bet you're wondering why I'm here," she gurgled, while I poured.

"No," I replied, pushing the cup towards her. She spooned in sugar and clinked it about.

"Well. I don't think I'll tell you, then!"

"That suits me very well," I said, and rose to go. Belinda went chalk-white.

"No! Oh! Please, sit down!" I raised an eyebrow and walked away. Behind me I heard a clatter and the smashing of crockery, the cry of a waiter, and the patter of not-so-tiny feet. When she reached me I spun and put up a hand. She halted abruptly, her nose an inch from mine, my fingers inside her chest and cupping her fast-beating heart.

"Please, don't," she groaned. "I have only this one thing to do, and then I may be free."

I withdrew my hand. She was not injured, but certainly she was astonished. The idea that we could enter other vampires in the same way as we could pass through walls had never occurred to her. "Come with me," I said coldly, and walked her out of the hotel and up to a pub near Charing Cross, where there was a garden.

"I represent the Scholomance," Belinda said, a half-pint of mild beer in front of her. She had brought out a packet of cubebs and was smoking one as she hastened to tell me her credentials. "We seek out individuals with talent, such as yourself, to attend a special and quite exclusive school in Romania." She blew out a stream of smoke, thankfully not into my face.

"Your test last night. I guess I passed."

"Oh, yes! Carl was really quite good. I – we will miss him."

"Do you have a brochure?"

She giggled, missing poor Carl not at all. "Course not! Why would we? Aoyun – I may call you Aoyun, mayn't I?"

"No."

"Aoyun. This is a tremendous opportunity. All the best will be there. We need you. The Master has been following you with interest for years!"

I doubted that. Only since I'd come to London, and made such a splash. But I had to play along. "When do you want me?"

"Oh, within a month. I'll have the paperwork delivered to your suite."

"May I bring my friend?"

"What friend?"

These people were so ill-informed, it would be embarrassing to slaughter them.

"Never mind," I said, and took a sip of my soda-water.
The Scholomance

After a week of exhausting travel I arrived at the school. It was up on the top of a crag, on a mountain high above the plain below. The coachman I hired from Sibiu, a medieval town that humped around the railway station twenty miles away, wouldn't drive all the way up to it, citing the steepness of the ascent and the condition of his elderly and asthmatic horses, all the while dropping my bags and boxes insolently onto the stony ground, then holding out a grimy hand for payment.

I fumbled in my purse, found sufficient silver, paid the man the exact and agreed charge. The coachman glared, but I pulled the scarf down from my face and smiled, baring my teeth. Beneath the road-dirt the man's face paled. He scrambled up behind the dash and whipped his horses away.

I looked down at the luggage. It would take several trips to get it all up there. I sighed, and hefted a knapsack onto my back, picked up a valise in one hand and a Gladstone bag in the other, and turned my face to the climb.

Evening was arriving. The sun, not quite set, still gave enough to the sky to light the scudding clouds; they piled behind the lowering castle, blurring its outline, washing out detail. Yellow lights wavered in windows.

Behind me, down a precipitous track, Lake Hermanstadt glittered dully. The antique coach clattered through the trees a few hundred feet below me, taking a bend at a dangerous speed, heading back to the town, and life.

When at last I stood before a pair of dark-studded oak doors I looked for a bell-pull and, finding it to my right, pulled it twice. It was stiff. I heard nothing through the thick wood, but after a minute the doors swung creaking open to reveal a tall gaunt man dressed in a butler's antique black clothes.

"Miss Shen?" he enquired, in heavily-accented English.

"Yes," I replied, injecting a note of nervousness into my voice. The man smiled.

"Give me your bags."

"There are others, down on the road..."

"I will have them brought up. Please; come inside."

The hall was dark-panelled and high-ceilinged, lit by sconces and candelabra jammed with candles, rippled with old wax. Ancient banners hung mouldering from the walls above displays of obsolete swords and maces, patterned in circles, their steel black with age. Wide galleries led off left and right, and a high, dark stained-glass window at the back towered over the space, above the sweeping wings of an imposing staircase that swept down, right and left, terminating in solid fluted posts topped with dully-flickering lanterns.

"Mergem la bucătărie", the servant announced, his voice sepulchral but not unfriendly. Then, when I looked blank, "Menj a konyhába." I gazed at him and shook my head. He reverted to English "To the kitchen. Give you food, then rest. It would have been a long journey?"

I nodded, and he nodded back. "Thought so. Food first. Room next. Apologies; I hoped you might speak Romanian, or Magyar."

"I wish I did," I smiled back up at him. "Perhaps I will learn while I am here."

The kitchen was a huge and warm set of rooms, found down a well-lit passage behind a plain door next to the end of the left-side staircase. A fat ruddy cook and a pair of pale scullery-maids turned their round faces towards me, then looked up at my escort, who smiled warmly. They levered themselves slowly out of their chairs to lay a place for me at the scrubbed table and plonked down bread, yellow butter, strong cheese; then a bowl of rich stew, aromatic with thyme and pepper, and a beaker of dark red wine.

"Local to the region, all," the man said. The cook nodded, beamed. "I am Berndt." My mouth fell open; he threw back his head and laughed. "Ah! English! Not BURNT! Berndt. My name. Although working here, it is always a risk. Eat, drink, I will return. Will have your bags in your room. In the morning you will meet the Master."

When he left the cook plonked herself back down into a greasy armchair at the head of the table. Her two maids stopped bobbing and, at a nod from their mistress, brought tea from a samovar and small dark cakes from the pantry, and sat opposite me, gazing at me curiously. I smiled. They smiled.

"Hello," I essayed.

They said something in Hungarian, or perhaps Romanian.

I sighed, smiled, dipped buttered bread into stew, ate. It was wonderful. I lifted my eyes to the maids, turned to look at the cook. She smiled a whole and genuine smile; and they beamed back at me.

No language necessary.

When I rose from supper one of the maids went off to get Berndt and a lantern and the other, under her mistress' eye, wrapped some cakes in a cloth and put them on a tray with a jug of water and the topped-up beaker of wine. I was escorted back along the passage, up the grand staircase, two flights, and into a maze of passages. I committed the path to memory. Finally we stopped in front of a tall door in a corridor of tall doors, laid with a predominantly russet Turkey carpet, spotted at intervals with small ormolu tables bearing empty vases. One, I saw, was an authentic Ming. The place was spotless, panelling gleaming softly in the lantern-light, the high ceilings with their plaster mouldings devoid of cobwebs. Berndt smiled, and opened the door to my room.

The maids followed me in. The lantern-bearer set it down on a huge dressing-table which in every other way was complete, but had only bare wood instead of mirrors, and used a taper to light candles around the room. The other put her tray down on a desk beneath the central of three arching windows. She opened a few small casements set in the larger frames, to let in the cool night air, then put the plate of cakes and the drinks on a table beside the canopied bed. My bags and boxes were all here, stacked in a corner. Toiletries and a nightdress had already been unpacked, the first arranged around a basin on a stand in a corner of the room, the last laid out on the bed.

Bobbing and smiling the maids withdrew, taking the tray and lantern and closing the door behind them. I, Aoyun, the Chinese vampire, sat down on the huge, soft bed, looked up at the tapestry underside of the canopy, recognised Dionysus and his cronies getting drunk above me. I smiled, missing Wilbur, almost wept but caught myself in time. Sighing, I undressed and donned the nightie, brushed my teeth and blew out the candles. I was asleep just one minute after my head touched the soft, fragrant pillow.

The breakfast-room of the castle was spacious, lit with the ubiquitous candles and the grey light of dawn through its tall arched windows. I entered hungry, shiny patent shoes clicking on the stone flags, wearing an outfit I'd found on the chest at the foot of my bed when I woke up – that was unsettling, because, before I slept, I had locked the door and left the key in it.

So now I wore a tight-bodiced black jacket-dress that had far too many buttons and was much too short, flaring out like an invitation, with stiff white petticoats peeking out beneath, and black knee-length stockings showing the flesh of my thighs. A black bow trimmed with white adorned my hair, completing the ensemble. I felt both over and under-dressed.

Two men were eating breakfast when I clattered in. Both wore what I supposed was the male equivalent of my outfit: white shirts with frilled cuffs and high stiff collars, tight black trousers and long fitted black coats with lots of buttons. They looked up from their victuals. One, his hair razored short, his face round and jolly, and body likewise, smiled at me. The other, sharply handsome, blonde long hair framing his narrow face, burned blue eyes into me for a second then returned to his meal.

There was a sideboard with chafing-dishes, plates beside, and urns of coffee and Russian tea. I loaded up a plate, filled a mug with coffee and sat down opposite the young men. The round one smiled; blue-eyes ignored me.

"Welcome to the gates of hell," the jolly one said.

I smiled and offered my hand. "I'm Shen Aoyun."

"Aleksander Lotoscko. Pleased to meet you. And this is Leofric." The other gave no sign of acknowledgement. "There are two others, still in their beds, and the final three will arrive today, or so I'm told."

"You are told so much, Aleksander. So blessed. Can you tell us who will remain when this is done?" Leofric put down his fork gently. "You? Me? The girl?"

"I'm hardly a girl," I protested.

"A girl. Enough." He rose. His hair swung around his face in a swish that would have made a writer of romantic fiction swoon, and he left the room.

"Sorry about Leofric; he's a prick," Aleksander said. I laughed. Then hunger overcame me and I piled into my breakfast, barely noticing when we were joined by two more males, a European and an Afrique. The former was pushing the latter, who was in a wheelchair.

"Greetings!"

I looked up, surprised. I saw a strained but beaming black face.

"Good morning," I said. Then I looked up further, at the whitest boy I'd ever seen.

"Hi," he said, and blushed, becoming instantly the reddest boy I'd ever seen. "I'm Manuel, and this is..." He paused, and the other chuckled.

"Folami Jones, a Yoruba, but I am not so hot on respect as our Von Liechtenstein."

"Who?"

"Leofric. A grandson of Henry, who married Elizabeth Hapsburg-Lorraine."

"I have seen him. He was here earlier."

"So you know. A dreadful snob." Folami wheeled himself up to the table. Manuel went to the sideboard and returned with two loaded plates, then went back for coffee. He sat beside the Yoruba and both began eating ravenously.

I went back for more. There was black pudding, rare steak oozing, plenty of eggs. But I craved blood. Without it I needed to eat so much to keep up my strength. If I was to be tested – and I would be, here – I would have to gorge myself.

When I sat back down Folami leant toward me over the table. "Would you mind if I got some more?"

Confused, I said, "Oh – of course. Please do."

Folami got up from his wheelchair and sauntered over to the buffet carrying his empty plate. He took his time, selecting steak, kidneys, eggs, mushrooms. I, meanwhile, got up for more coffee.

But I didn't.

I tried to rise, but couldn't. My legs didn't work.

Then the Afrique came back, set his plate on the table and plonked himself back into his wheelchair.

I rose, and tottered to the coffee urn. When I returned Manuel smiled at me. "He does that to me. When I'm on the toilet I can hear him tap-dancing."

There was an astonished pause; then we all laughed.

"He did it to Leofric yesterday," said Aleksander. "I've never heard such language!"

"Ah, Leofric!" Folami chuckled. "His head's so far up his own bottom he can see what he had for dinner!"

I opened my mouth to defend the man, but I had only seen him for two minutes, and he hadn't been very nice to me. It was, I surmised, because he counted himself handsome and self-assured. Truly, he was only arrogant; whereas my present company was entertaining, and they were all easy enough on the eye.

Berndt came in with a pair of maids, who started to clear away the breakfast buffet. He planted himself at the head of the table and smiled at our group. It was not a warm smile.

"Today we will learn the geography of Castel Dracul," he began. "Dragon's Castle. I believe you all know the purpose and history of the Scholomance. You are here of your own free will, and you will remain here until your education is complete."

I studied the man as he talked. His English was much better than it had been the night before. His eyes were hard, his manner was imperious. I looked more closely. He was trembling, vibrating. I believed that Berndt had been taken over, in much the same way as Folami had taken my legs.

"We will meet in the hall in ten minutes."

"What about Leofric?" Manuel asked.

"He has been instructed," said whatever was in Berndt as he left the breakfast-room.

"Well." Aleksander said. "I think we've just met the Master."

I used the time to brush my hair. When I left my room I bumped into Aleksander and rebounded. He smiled, and I smiled back. Aleksander was not as young as the others; perhaps thirty-five. He looked comfortable in his black and white outfit. There was a streak of white in his close-cropped hair. He saw me notice it.

"A spell gone wrong," he said. "I was lucky that's all that I got from it. My master died... It was long ago."

So Aleksander was a mage. And it must be fairly obvious to him what I was. My skin was so pale it looked like bone china. I had a scarf around my neck I could pull up to protect against the sunlight, and a pair of tinted spectacles poking out of the breast pocket of my jacket-dress.

We descended the staircase arm in arm. Although it was by now mid-morning the huge stained-glass window over the mezzanine was still dark, and I couldn't make out the picture.

Down in the hall the rest of the students were gathered, Leofric standing aloof and apart, with a scowl on his face.

"Let us begin," cried Berndt, coming into the hall from the kitchen passage. He was beaming genially. The difference between now and but ten minutes before was obvious. This Berndt was the real McCoy.

He escorted his charges along one of the wide galleries, showing off a billiard room, several withdrawing-rooms and a huge ballroom at the end. Then back to the hall, and down the other wing, where there was much of the same save that it terminated in a banqueting-hall arranged in mediaeval style – a top table up on a dais, and two long refectory tables with benches down the sides of the vast space. The centre was open and empty and smoothly flagged, spotlessly clean. I glimpsed Manuel sniffing the air, then we were led back to the hall again and through a hidden door between the two staircases, beneath the mezzanine and its enigmatic window.

We found ourselves in a courtyard. The walls and towers surrounding it were much older than the bulk of the building we had just left, and covered all over with ivy. Berndt led us across the cobbles and between a wide-open pair of carriage-doors into a dark tunnel that ended in another pair. He opened a judas-gate and waved us through. The Carpathian Mountains rose up before us, dark in the overcast morning, clothed with trees. Rills ran down their flanks, cloud stroked their peaks. But it was the nearer scene that was to awe us.

A broad drive, bounded by a low wall, circled the castle, leading around to the steep road at the front. To the left and right were stables and servants' quarters. At Berndt's urging we crossed the drive to the wall, where a broad valley swept down, jewelled with grass. At the bottom a small river meandered, and on the greensward in a loop of that river lay a dragon.

Lunch was taken in the dining-room, which was the first room off the west gallery from the hall. Even Leofric seemed dazed by the dragon; we all were sunk in our own thoughts.

The Scholomance was a school, true, and for exceptional people. Those who'd proved themselves in magical arts, who had raised demons, tamed elementals, crossed dimensions. I knew what everyone here also knew: there would be eight of us, and at the end of our course seven leaving. The eighth, the best, taken for immortality and branded by the devil himself, would become a dragon-rider, commanding storms, calling down fire.

So far six dragon-riders had been selected, or so Belinda had told me, reading from her notes in London. From our intake of students there might come the seventh. Then, we were assured, the world would end in a rain of fire from the skies.

I was already immortal, barring very deliberate applications of force or lore. The Scholomance had not attracted me: I had been directed by Van Helsing, selected by Belinda. I was beginning to wonder whether it had been wise to accept. It didn't seem to be a very good deal – I could scrape a pass, leave Castel Dracul to go back to my previous life, and then the world would end; or I could graduate _summa cum laude_ to bring it about myself. Neither seemed to me to be a wise move.

I sipped an oxblood soup, hot and rich and dark, with circles of fat floating on its shiny surface, and looked around cautiously, keeping my head low, trying to gauge what the others were thinking. They were all doing the same – their eyes flickered around the group, wary, measuring. Who might win? What, in any event, would be the point of winning?

Well, there was one very good reason – the legends described by Belinda were very clear on one thing. If there was no-one at the end of the course who could become a dragon-rider, our entire class would not leave the castle alive.

Aleksander was the first to excuse himself from the table, laying down his napkin and striding out back to his room. I was determined not to be the next, but as the silence ached around me I got up from my chair, took a plate of cakes and a jug of wine from the sideboard, and went upstairs.

Aleksander was waiting outside my room. He looked sad, which wasn't surprising. I gave him the plate so I could open my door and he walked in, sat himself on the chair before the writing-desk, and started talking even before I put the jug down to sit in a comfy armchair next to the ceramic stove heater.

"You know..."

"I know. We all know. We're either the last, or we are the dead." I loosened the buttons at the top of my jacket-dress and took off my scarf. The day had been so overcast that I hadn't needed it.

Aleksander sighed. "Evil is... well, a necessary evil. We harness it; we use it for our own ends. Sometimes," he looked at me, smiling a twisted smile, "we are inherently evil, through no fault of our own." He was referring to me, and my vampire nature. "You're not to blame for what you are. You may've been good before... before it happened to you. But now you're a beast, a monster. And you can't help it."

I hadn't tasted human blood since I'd left Bucharest on the train to Sibiu. I craved it, now, and hated myself for my appetite.

"But, I _can_ help it," the mage continued. "I went into magic with my eyes wide open, for money and power. When my master died I took over his practice. I renewed his pacts, I studied hard. For myself. I even managed to help people, odd though that may sound."

"It doesn't sound odd," I said. "You need to get along with hum... people, to get what you want."

Aleksander laughed quietly. "And now we're here. In the home of the devil himself, come to learn how we might destroy the world."

"Do you really believe that?"

"Yes. It's the dragon that convinces me. They're here, those previous six riders, and their mounts. What we saw out there was the seventh dragon, the one we're competing for. I've never before seen a dragon. I hadn't thought they really existed.

"Do you know? I was impelled here, forced, blackmailed. Men who threatened to expose my magic to those around me, who would have inflamed the mob to claim my blood! Why? Am I the best mage in the world? I don't think so. But I am perhaps the most ignorant, and so I accepted this place without reasoning it out."

"Why bring the world to an end?" I asked, not expecting any answer.

"How would I know? Hatred, maybe. Frustration. Evil. The devil already has a foothold in this world, and nothing to look forward to in hell. Seems mad to me. So maybe it's just madness."

I poured wine for Aleksander, and some for myself in a glass from beside the wash-bowl. We drank for a while and ate some of the desserts I had purloined, until a gong sounded down below. Sighing, we went down to the hall, and another new experience.

The Master was back, occupying his servant. Berndt, clammy and trembling, took us gathered students to one of the drawing-rooms and had us sit. His eyes glittered with eagerness and malevolence; he paced the floor, making his points by striking the back of one hand against the palm of the other.

"How have you all avoided death? You, all of you, are feared and despised in your communities, even if those good citizens don't know it's you bringing them ill.

"You're adept at concealment, at prevarication and misdirection. Because of magic, or nature, or the powers you've brought up in and around yourselves." He stopped pacing, looked at each of us in turn. "There are not many left like you. You are hunted, you are found, and you are destroyed.

"Across the years, there are fewer who would qualify for the Scholomance. You – and the three who remain to arrive – are the best my agents could find.

"And it's pitiful. Look at you!"

Pinned by his eyes, I could not look away. Then he released me and transfixed Leofric, who froze like a deer caught in head-lights.

"Death is what I bring. The death of everything. To transform us into a new world, a world of magic and strength, where you – all of you – may thrive, may spin your spells and weave your dreams; where your natures can become fulfilled."

The lecture went on in the same vein for some time. I believed that this being must have very few friends, and thus was taking an opportunity to be garrulous. Truly, he commanded a captive audience.

Yet, eventually, he stopped. Berndt's forehead gleamed with sweat; the black wide eyes swept the group, and he departed.

Moments later he was back again, the true Berndt, and ushering us in to afternoon tea.

Leofric was subdued. He drank wine, refused cakes, stared anywhere other than at his companions. The others murmured together uneasily. This was not what we had been led to expect.

Manuel wheeled Folami Jones up beside me, the latter dipping a biscuit into his tea. Folami smiled, but there was strain in his face.

"We are in for it now," he said in a whisper, and I nodded. "This is not what I expected."

"Nor I," I replied.

He slurped the biscuit and closed his eyes briefly with pleasure. "I am the son of a shaman," he began. "And I and my family brought nothing but evil to our people. We opposed modern medicines, preferring our own ancient herbs. So when outbreaks began, many died. Yet still they remained true to us, women carrying their dead babies to our home, men gaunt and weak with disease placing offerings on our step.

"We alone were fat and clean. We had the best to eat, the purest water. We had spells to ward away the diseases, but we doled them out only to the people we favoured. And there were fewer of those, as time went on.

"Eventually the people of the district came to destroy us. They had heard from the town, far away, that medicines were cleansing folk of the sicknesses, curing them and making them happy. They came for us from miles around, they crucified my father and brutalised my mother and sister. Then they threw me over a cliff and left me to die.

"But I did not die."

My heart was in my mouth. Folami sipped tea.

"I was found by men who took me to a modern hospital, in Lomé. They were ivory poachers; I'm surprised that they didn't leave me there to die.

"When the hospital let me go, there were other men to meet me. They were, they said, interested in how I had survived. They felt that I had powers to convince others. And I do. Just as I did with you this morning."

"Did you convince Manuel to help you here?"

"He needed no convincing. I met him on the train from Budapest. We each knew at a glance that the other was coming here. I like him. He is now my family." Folami sighed softly. "I don't think I am cut out for this. My power has been unconscious in me for most of my life. What I have learnt of my shaman ancestry distresses me. How can I compete among so many fine students?"

A tear trickled down my cheek for him, but then I saw his sly smile.

"You see how it works?"

"Yes," I said. "But whether it will convince a dragon..."

He laughed, loud, shattering the gloom around the morose group.

Behind him, Leofric's mouth twisted, and he got up to leave.

"Stay, brother! Why, do you think we're laughing at you?" Folami beamed.

The young aristocrat scowled, but sat back down. "None of you are taking this seriously," he complained. "The world is in your hands, and you make jokes."

"Nobody is joking," countered Manuel. "What we are here to do is no laughing matter."

The remainder of the afternoon was given over to what Berndt called 'free time'.

"You are urged," he said, "to explore, to go anywhere. Take flight, go down to the town, indulge your appetites. We do not expect you back until night has well fallen." He smiled a genuine and avuncular smile. Here was the true, not the zombie Berndt. I wondered how he had fallen into the clutches of the mysterious Master.

Still, the free time was welcome. It was a long way into town, but there were horses, and a well-maintained coach. A surly young man was our coachman, and we all piled in, excepting Leofric, who sat up beside the youth, bouncing around as the vehicle rattled down the steep hairpin road.

When we reached the plain below we saw farm labourers, women and men, toiling in the fields in the afternoon sunshine, such as it was. Many averted their eyes from the coach; some crossed themselves; one spat.

On into Sibiu, where we got down shakily to explore. "I'll be back at eleven by the clock-bell," warned the driver, swatting the horses with his reins and clattering off.

"I suppose we'll meet back here," said Manuel, settling Folami into his wheelchair. He started pushing and turned a corner.

"See you," said Aleksander, and strode off in the other direction. The small square suddenly seemed a lot smaller, with just Leofric and I in it – apart from the humans, of course.

"Off to feed?" He enquired, with an arch of an eyebrow.

"I should think so," I replied. I felt both attracted and repelled. I was sure that Leofric must be one like me; but there were many kinds of monsters in the world.

There was silence, of an uncomfortable sort, for a few moments.

"I used to follow the moon," Leofric began. "But I am stronger now; the moon does not rule me. I will be what I can be, and take their blood in my own way."

A werewolf. There was something I had always wondered, and had to ask. "What about your clothes?"

He looked astonished, but recovered. "I'll find an inn, or an hotel. Get a ground-floor room." He mused for a moment. "It would be easier if you were to accompany me."

"No way." My voice was firm. I had other things to do.

"As you wish. Go swooping, girl. And I'll go hunting." He turned and left me.

It was still overcast enough to feel reasonably comfortable, and in this part of the world muffling up would betray me for what I was – the Romanian people were wise to monsters. So I wandered around, looking in shop-windows and buying hot chestnuts from a street-seller. I watched a funeral pass by. There was probably a lot of proper entertainment here, but it was known only to the locals.

When I came to a street that ran down to the Cibin river I began to look at the house-fronts. My senses were stretched around me; I did not want to be discovered here by my comrades.

There was the door, the house-number I had been looking for prominent in brass. I mounted the shallow steps and it was opened for me by the most astonishing man. His name was Orace, I learned, and he lived in a room behind the kitchen. Van Helsing had brought him from London to look after the household, which he did with terrifying efficiency and a degree of surliness which was in many ways as impressive as his appearance.

Orace was bald and tough, about as wide as he was tall, with fierce dark eyes and a huge walrus moustache that quite drew the eye. He had the air of a retired Army sergeant, and ran the domestic affairs of the house with precision. He was also an excellent cook, which I was soon able to appreciate.

"What's it like up there?" Wilbur demanded, hugging me hard and pressing his cheek against mine. I beat on his back until he let go, and gained the sanctuary of a comfortable wing-chair. I accepted a cup of strong coffee from Professor Van Helsing, and pointed to a cake. Wilbur dropped onto an over-stuffed couch, grinning. "You've survived your first night, anyway!"

"How many more, I don't know," I confessed, and told them everything I had seen and heard. Wilbur was astonished, but Van Helsing merely nodded.

"The dragon is an article of bio-technology," he began, "The Mage's master accessed intelligent weaponry; the werewolf is a nano-symbiont like you. I suspect that your Afrique friend is the only truly magical human there – he and his family used techniques that have worked on human minds over centuries. That it should also affect your mind, I confess, is odd. But then, you still believe in your essential humanity." He took a biscuit. "This Master – who runs the Scholomance – I do not know what he, or it, might be."

"He can take over the servant Berndt," I observed. "Perhaps he is actually Berndt."

"Perhaps. Or he may be an artificial intelligence. Berndt may be an android, as I. We will not know until you have penetrated the school more completely. All I can say positively is that the Scholomance is an old legend; but this is new. There can not have been six previous courses at that castle. There are no other dragon riders. I will contact London and apprise them of your data; we will try to provide you with information on your next visit."

"I must go." I stood and brushed crumbs from my skirt. "There remains but an hour until we must assemble for the coach."

"I'll show you the back gate," my love said, standing suddenly and cracking his shin against a side-table. He led the way limping past a stack of wooden crates in the scullery and out into a dark yard. At the gate he kissed me, and I had to remember that he, at least, required oxygen; but he did look very cute in blue.

I left him gasping.

On my way back to the square I sought out narrow lanes, dark and menacing. The houses leaned together overhead, leaving only a sliver of dark starless sky. When a low and appreciative whistle sounded from the depths of an alleyway I smiled. I had found what I was looking for.

There were two men in the shadows. One was tall and slim, the other of average height, and fat. They were only four or five paces away. If I had been an ordinary woman I would have turned and run back to the street, or been rooted by fear to the spot.

I stood, as if rooted by fear to the spot, and the tall man sauntered up to me, with his companion at his shoulder.

"Are you lost, little one?" He smiled, but it was in anticipation rather than as a reassurance.

I punched him just below the breastbone, in the nerve complex known as the solar plexus. He coughed abruptly and fell to his knees with a crack. As he was keeling over, struggling to take a breath, I spun on my left foot and kicked the other man hard over his heart. I heard a rib crack.

Surprising, I thought as I reached down to pick up the taller man by the front of his jacket; the fat one didn't fall. But he was certainly dead.

I shoved my prize up against the wall and pulled his shirt open. Cloth ripped. He still hadn't been able to take a breath; there was panic in his eyes. I let him slide down a few inches and closed in. Suddenly he breathed out, his breath foul in my face, then took a shuddering inhalation as my mouth sealed around his neck. It was filthy, tasting of grime and sweat, but I was so hungry.

My fangs slid into him gently, stretching for the deep carotid artery where the blood was hot and fresh and sweet, rich with energy, with chi, with oxygen and life. The punctures burst with the pressure and blood jetted into my mouth. I gulped it down, chugging the hot life, heard him moan beside my ear. My nose was full of the smell of iron, my ears heard the frantic beating of his heart, first slowing, then skipping, now banging erratically. I drank him by the pint, holding him against the wall with one strong arm while the lightness, the light, blossomed in my head, while my heart sang, while my excitement rose into orgasm. Even after, when clarity returned, I sucked, draining the last I could get. It had been a long time, since Bucharest.

The body of the fat man still stood, when I left the dark lane. Evening was falling. Lights were going on around Sibiu, gas in the Old Town and electric in the new, making my pale face appear to glow from within. I was smiling.

When I met the others in the small market square they all appeared satisfied with their own activities. I wondered what Folami and Manuel had done together, and how Aleksander had passed his time. I already knew what Leofric must have done.

Ah. Leofric. Where was he?

"You look happy," Manuel grinned. I nodded. "Have you seen our Hapsburg anywhere on your travels?"

"No," I replied. "And I don't think the coach will wait for him. So he will have to get a move on."

It was a few minutes shy of eleven, and while we waited for our transport the townsfolk around us, some dressed for the theatre, some drunk, others just mooching, cast their eyes over our group. It was understandable; we were all identical in our dress, all youngish, just standing around waiting. A scream, raw and long, came from several streets away, bringing everyone to alertness.

"Did you hear that?" I cried, my eyes wide, and the others followed my cue, looking around startled. Aleksander made as if to go off to investigate, but I grabbed his sleeve. "Oh! Don't go!"

We quite fitted in with the people around us, whose reactions were much the same, but far more genuine.

The town clock chimed at that moment, making me start, and our coach rattled into the square. Aleksander helped Folami in while Manuel folded the wheelchair, unhurried, and strapped it to the back of the coach. He handed me in, then mounted up behind after talking to the coachman.

"Will he wait?" Aleksander asked as Manuel sat down beside Folami and slammed the door shut.

"No." And we set off with a jerk, clattering down a main street and then veering right onto the broad road – Strada Cibinului – that followed the river. There were other vehicles. Carriages, landaus and the occasional motor-car forced our coachman to slow somewhat to blend in – and then there was a loud bang as something struck the body of the coach, hard. There was a scrabbling sound from above and the top-hatch opened. Leofric, his clothing dishevelled, stared down at us. "Sorry I'm late." The hatch closed, and we rolled on out of Sibiu to turn toward the mountains.

When the coach drew up in the courtyard it was almost one, yet Berndt was there to greet us. He helped me down, then gave a hand with the wheelchair and Folami. The young coachman whispered to him. He chuckled, and led us to the breakfast-room, pushing the Yoruba.

There were two women there, tucking in to a light supper. Both were in their travel-clothes, but otherwise were very different.

"Hallo! My name is Hilda!" the first exclaimed cheerily, rising from her seat. She was well-built, tall, her hair auburn, long and crinkled, her face broad and ruddy. She held out a large hand and shook each of ours, smiling broadly, talking all the time. "I'm from Iowa. It's in America? You know America? Have you ever been?"

Manuel, it seemed, had been to America, but not to Iowa, which was tragic news to Hilda. "Oh, but you MUST go! We have so much there! So good for – well, people like us." She cast an arm behind her, indicating the other woman, who had continued to eat during the greetings. "This is Mirador. She's a womp-ire – am I saying that right?"

"Vampire," said Mirador stonily. "The contempt is silent."

Leofric bowed to both women – he hadn't done that to me, thought I. But I was still cresting on the blood, so it didn't cause me much irritation.

"And yourself?" he enquired. Hilda's eyes opened wide.

"Oh, gosh! I just forgot! So many new things, I just – I'm a witch," she replied, "and I left my broomstick in the stable-yard to cool down, otherwise you'd have known. And you must be a wizard," she continued, to Aleksander. "And I guess you're a wolf, handsome. What's your name again?"

"Leofric," said Leofric, with not a little acid in his tone. He went over to the buffet and started filling a plate.

"I don't know what YOU are," Hilda continued, looking Manuel up and down, "but you sure are cute. And this little lady is another womp-ire..."

"Vampire," said Mirador, wearily. I didn't know how long she'd spent in Hilda's company, but it hadn't done her any good.

"And now this young man," she squatted down in front of Folami, "must be a witch-doctor."

We held our breaths. Then Folami beamed.

"Do you have any aches or pains?" he asked, his eyes wide and innocent.

Leofric appeared to be captivated by Mirador. During the course of supper, with wine moving the late hours along, and our respective kills having filled us with energy, we students talked freely. Folami explained his injuries, during the course of which he casually asked Hilda, "Would you mind if I got more wine?"

"Of course not," she giggled, and Folami looked at Manuel, who got another bottle of Tokay from the sideboard and opened it. I was confused; but later I found out what the Afrique was up to.

The party broke up well into the small hours. I found that Aleksander, Manuel and Folami were in the same corridor as I. The others – well, I didn't know.

I sat at the writing-desk for a while in my nightdress, reviewing the day. A dragon, for a start. I saw it again in my mind's eye, slumbering huge on the emerald grass. Its scales glowed like jewels, purple above, jade green on its flanks, pale on what of its belly I had seen. Its legs were small in proportion, its tail likewise short. The skull was broad and flat, with a short curved beak. Its eyes had been closed.

The dragon's wings were long, springing from a terrific hump of muscle behind its shoulders and lying close against its flanks, like a bat's. Altogether it was a practical beast, nothing like the sinuous Chinese dragons of legend, and not quite like the European dragons of folklore. We were to learn to ride it. I shuddered, just as a knock came on the door.

When I opened Folami was standing there. Bemused, I ushered him in, where he wandered around looking out of the windows, peering up at the tapestry of Dionysus in the bed-canopy.

"May I help you, Folami?"

"I brought more wine," he said, bringing a bottle from behind his back. I grinned, he poured.

"I guess you're using Hilda's promise," I said.

"Correct. She's asleep. She'll never know. Unless she tries to get up for a pee."

"You do seem – if I may say – to be something of a one-trick pony."

Folami sat in the armchair and crossed his legs. "You'd be surprised," he said. "Given permission, I can do pretty much anything with what I can get from others. Sympathy, love. Gifts, prizes, abilities, talents. I can play piano like a maestro, so long as that maestro gave me his unwitting permission."

"Has that happened?"

"Yes, but not the piano. I needed to help a friend. He'd been seriously injured. I had no skills; but I had talked with a surgeon a while before – I'd remarked, 'I wish you could lend me your talents'. He'd been flattered, nodded. A tacit agreement. So I took those talents, and I saved my friend.

"But a while after, I heard that the surgeon had failed during an operation. This was in Nairobi. He'd had a breakdown in the theatre. The patient, a child, died of massive blood loss."

"But your friend survived."

"Of course. We look after our friends. I did not know the child."

I picked up my hairbrush and stroked it through the billions of machines that pretended to be my hair. "We are truly monsters."

"We do what we can... I am here for your story. I've told you mine. I would like to know yours."

I brushed while I thought. It would have to be told sometime. I began. But the story I told was not wholly mine – it was the story of every victim.

"It was when I was fifteen, I guess. There was a tutor, a Westerner, and her husband was some diplomatic bigwig. She was glamorous, always talking about posh parties..."

"Balls," suggested Folami.

"I thought so too. But she was seductive, in her way, for someone like me who was shy and unattractive."

"You are not unattractive," he ventured, smiling. I nodded.

"I know that, now. But back then I was insecure. Always alone. I felt I was intruding whenever I entered a room. I felt unwelcome, especially in polite company.

"But Lady Shelby made me feel important. Wanted. And so, whenever there was a weekend free, she took me to their residence on the Bund. She dressed me from the European boutiques. She introduced me at parties. She and her husband danced with me, she taught me how to dance... she held me close, gave me the confidence..."

"And then?"

"She came to me in the night. She was so beautiful, so self-assured. There was no hesitation. She pulled back the covers and set herself down beside me. I would have been shocked if it had been her husband. But since it was her, I felt flattered. Loved. And when she nuzzled my neck... I was in love."

Folami poured more wine, and I gulped it down.

"I became tired at school. Couldn't concentrate on my studies. The teachers shouted at me, but I could not summon the energy to care. They struck me, sent me to the Head. Nothing worked.

"I spent more time with her, my tutor. She offered me a home, she and her husband. My school objected, of course, but not with any great conviction. So I moved to the Bund, moved in with her and her tall, elegant man. They treated me well. I learned how to behave in polite white company, learnt German and English, the pianoforte. And in the nights my tutor sucked my blood, gently and painlessly, injecting her virus into me, transforming me."

"And then you died."

"Not for quite a while. She judged it finely. I think, in a way, she loved me. She drew it out for several years. I craved rare meat, I became fixated on people's necks – that smooth white flesh, the pulsing vein below the skin. I had to drag my gaze away, because some found it unsettling. Or perhaps they just thought I was gauche. I was still only a child, after all, and exposure to the glitter of Society was intoxicating.

"I slept during the day and came alive in the night, when the Bund sparkled with light. It was busy into the small hours, carriages and phaetons darting everywhere, motor cars charging along with their trumpets blaring. Everyone dressed fine, in silks and satins, sashaying along beside the Huangpu, showing off. And I with them, except that I was just a pet. The girl the Ambassador and his wife had taken in.

"And such a sickly little thing! So pale, so thin. Yet I was oblivious to this, though I heard the comments. I was wanted, I was in love, I was secure. And then, one day, I was dead."

"Do you want to continue this another time?" Folami asked, gently. I shook my head.

"No; I'll be fine. So long as nobody else asks. I don't want to have to go through this again."

"I think they'll not," he said, pouring more wine. "Would you like me to get some dessert? I have a stash in my room."

I looked up at him, and grinned. He went off and reappeared within a minute with a plate of sugary cakes, and we both tucked in.

"They are all self-absorbed," Folami continued. "As am I. And, I guess, you. We are all monsters, after all. Outcasts from humanity."

"Unnatural freaks," I contributed. "Deviations from the norm."

"Aberrations." He licked sugar from his fingers. "Do please go on... You died, I believe?"

I laughed. "I did. Good of you to remember. They found me in my bed in the morning. A doctor was called. I suspect he was one of them; he didn't spot the marks on my neck, or so I was told afterwards, or else I'd have been laid out for autopsy and cut to ribbons. Even a vampire can't survive that.

"So they buried me, in a private crypt. Before even the ink dried on the death certificate. And that night, I woke up."

The candles were guttering low. Folami's face shone in the yellow flickering rays. His smile was broad, and to my mind suddenly menacing. "What did you do?" he asked.

I hesitated, but I wanted to finish this.

"I was hungry," I recalled, "and I was in the dark. Close, confined; there was a smell of naptha, of must and cloves, and vinegar. The bed was hard beneath me, and there was something over me, over my face. I... I felt panic. I felt I was suffocating." I was becoming agitated now, reliving the experience. "I started feeling around. I tried to sit up, and I banged my head. I was in a box."

"And what did you do then?"

"I screamed."

And I knew, though I would never say it, not to this man, nor to any other being: I had not stopped, and never would stop screaming.
Initiation

The newcomers had the castle tour in the morning, coming back dazed from the sight of a dragon sleeping in the hidden valley. Hilda, eyes bright, enthused about it during lunch, describing it in glowing words, throwing her arms around.

"We've all seen it, Hilda," Aleksander protested, when one of her huge gestures nearly caught him on the side of his head. "Do, please, calm down!"

Mirador, on the other hand, ate quietly, keeping herself aloof from conversation, her body language relaxed but repelling. When Folami tried his party trick, asking "Do you mind if I get some more?" she looked at him and nodded. He got up, filled his plate and sat down again.

"If you ever do that to me again," Mirador remarked casually, cutting into an oozing piece of iron-rich liver, "I will tear out your heart and make you watch me eat it."

Hilda looked confused, but at least it shut her up.

The day progressed much in the way it had in the sixth-form of my old school. We were ushered into a spacious study to sit in club chairs, each with a side-table bearing a carafe of water, a notebook and pencils. The Master jerked Berndt around, expounding on the history of the Scholomance and its place in the world. The information soaked into my nanite brain, and it was fearful strange. For either this Master was serious about what he said, and believed in it, or he knew that all these things were the product of a long and terrible war. Either way, he was using us and our powers to advance a new conflict, which could only culminate in the destruction of humankind.

There was one thing he said that brought all of us to attention.

"One only remains to be found. One dragon rider. My hope, of course, is that he – or she – will be drawn from this intake. For while the world contains such as you, they are so very few, and your numbers are reducing swiftly; whether by some natural attrition, or by some vile initiative by the powers behind this artificial society.

"Humankind is everywhere in chains. Believe me – we will smash apart those chains! The cure for the malady of Man is terrible, it is true – the vast majority will indeed die. But those who remain will be transformed. They will host a wonderful army, a glorious melding of the Enlightened with the flesh of Men.

"You here now will glory in the emancipation of your race. The yoke of my people is easy, and our burden is light."

I suspect he thought he was giving a stirring speech – a variety of Henry V, or Churchill in the middle years of the Great War. But what came across to me was something alien, something terribly evil. I took care not to look at my companions; for that would, I thought, bring only suspicion and disaster.

The lesson was long, and night had fallen ere we tottered out for dinner. Berndt, restored, came to us while we supped to give us a time-table. In it was a schedule of Town visits. The Master had decided – probably from reports of our first excursion – that we should not wear our school clothes, for which I was thankful. It would make me more difficult to spot when I visited my love and my mentor. But one of the appointments on our time-tables was unnerving. An initiation. Each was to be conducted separately. I shuddered inwardly at the thought of meeting the Master alone; and I could see that the others, save for Mirador, felt much the same.

The entry – and mine was to be the first appointment – was marked, 'You will talk of this meeting with no-one'.

Mirador was looking peaky. The night had not been kind to her. I suspected that she was used to feeding, and that the long journey and the long school-day, culminating in an evening in which she had no opportunity to harvest human blood, had frayed her nerves and exhausted her resources. Now, at breakfast, she tore into steak and liver, fragments flying over her fellow diners. Her eyes were red with need. Aleksander took his plate quite away from her, and sat at the side-board! Even Leofric, who as a werewolf could hardly have been fastidious, avoided her; but Hilda stood her ground, uncaring of the spittle and the gobbets of flesh that landed on her plate, her dress, her hair.

"Half an hour remains, until your appointment," Berndt reminded me softly. I had not heard him come in to the breakfast-room. I looked up. It was truly him. I smiled, and he smiled softly and sadly back at me. I supposed he would be possessed again, to induct me. How wrong I was.

Mirador looked toward me with hate and lust battling in her eyes. "You. Ow-yun. Share with me." I knew she meant we should bite one another. She truly lusted for blood. I remembered Van Helsing's entreaty – let no-one know what vampires truly are, especially other vampires. For that knowledge frees us, and not one in an hundred of us deserves that freedom.

I refused, to her face, and she flew into a rage; flew, indeed, up to the ceiling, and rained down fire upon me, which I by now could easily deflect. The others dived for cover, Folami waiting until Manuel was safe before borrowing his legs and scooting beneath the table. I sent a single clump of nanites into Mirador, which then burst in a pulse of energy that crashed her to the floor, where, as she lay twitching, I approached her.

"You will behave," I demanded. "Your opportunities will come. You will not die from hunger; nor will you perish for lack of human blood. But you _will_ die if I command it. Heed me!"

I left the room, and went, trembling with anger, to meet Berndt for the dreaded initiation.

The cellars of the castle were extensive. There were many levels. I was conducted down stairs broad and narrow, straight and twisted, along dank corridors scurrying with rats and foul with stagnant water. Berndt carried the lantern, and I had nothing; so that when he led me into a dark chamber, then left me and locked the door, I was in pitch-dark.

The schematics that Wilbur had unearthed in Shanghai came to my aid. We had studied them together, that night in the library, made copies to bring with us; and the Professor enlightened me on the means by which I could utilise them. I focussed my will, and so increased the sensitivity of my eyes, far beyond what even a vampire could naturally achieve, that I saw a dim light patch to my left. There was no detail; but I knew that this was the Master, truly, and without the shielding flesh of his servant.

His voice was masculine, but alien. His English was strangely inflected. It sounded as if he should know Mandarin, so when he asked me whether I was frightened, I replied in that language.

"Yes."

"And so should you be," he said in Mandarin, back to me. He sounded more comfortable. I'm sure that I did not. "For I am your worst nightmare."

"What do you think is my worst nightmare?" I countered. I felt that I ought to at least pretend to be the victim he so obviously expected, but it did not sit well with me. Perhaps, I thought, I would gain more information by unsettling him. It seemed to work; he paused. I saw the blurred outline of his body shift.

"Do not play games with me."

I thought then that I had him. I'd watched enough Korean movies in Shanghai and in Hong Kong to know when the villain is at a disadvantage. But the cinema is not, alas, real life.

I saw the hazy brightness split, into two, then four, then eight and finally sixteen parts. Each floated toward me. And then the outrage began: Every nerve in my body flared at once in pain; my skin was afire. Each of the sixteen elements of this vile being violated me in its own sadistic way – burning, penetrating, squeezing, abrading...

My mind shrank with the violence, until it almost blinked out. But then the knowledge came, that Wilbur and then Van Helsing had given to me – you are a machine, a weapon of war.

I seized on this, built upon it. Even as the worms gnawed at my vitals, as acid coursed through my veins, I remembered – I have no nerves, no stomach, no veins save for those my machinery makes for me. The commonplace human body is to me merely a myth. And so I withdrew my consciousness into a core, protected by a hard shell of nanites, and rode it out.

The thirsty fragments of this vile being assaulted what I then assumed it must have continued to think was an essentially human body. It peeked and probed, skewered and sliced. And while it ran riot through the ersatz cells of my never-flesh it gurgled its enjoyment, but did not reveal itself.

Of course I did not tell, though the others pleaded. I sat shaking in the dining-room, being plied with brandy, Aleksander attentive and apologetic, Leofric aloof but chewing at his lip, Mirador hunched in her chair, suffering, staring malevolently towards me. Folami, Manuel and Hilda sat close together whispering, casting glances at me. They all knew it was to come for them. They knew I was strong. And yet here was I, weak, broken, trembling with the terror I had beheld.

Eventually Aleksander led me up to my room and put me to bed in my undergarments. Slowly the sun left the sky, to bring the long night, which, unrelieved by any artificial light, was awful dark, and my dreams were chaotic and dire. Slowly my kernel unravelled, and in sleep it reclaimed my body and the shards of my soul from the Beast. When dawn came I was, if not quite whole, at least on the way to healing.

I could not think of how any of the others, who I counted now as friends, could possibly survive the ordeal ahead of them. I had, by virtue of self-knowledge; but that was knowledge they did not have, and I commanded abilities beyond their ken. Perhaps, I thought as I washed and dressed, perhaps that evil creature tested only up to the limit of any being's measure. It was a consoling thought; but that was all it was.

Breakfast. When we live together in a group, we measure everything by mealtimes. It had been so at school. I came down after that healing night, in which my machine body and mind repaired themselves, to the same concerned faces. Mirador looked dreadful. I had seen her time-table; she was to be the last to endure the madness. I pitied her.

I ate ravenously, every bloody morsel, every scrap of energy I could stuff into myself – though I was decorous; I had had manners instilled into me from my first day at school. Not for me the sputtering deglutition that drove my fellow-diners to the corners of the room.

Our time-table was blank until after lunch, so I went out in the morning overcast for a walk in the wild land around Castel Dracul, and to gaze again upon the dragon. I clambered over the low wall and slip-slid down to the bottom of the green valley. The dragon still slumbered. According to Van Helsing it was not a machine, such as he or I, but a biologically engineered being, alive in a way that I nevermore could be, and that he had never been.

Up close the beast was immense. Its flanks rose and fell with breath, its scales gleamed in the soft light that penetrated the damp grey clouds. The wings that sprang from the hump on its back were thick and shone with the dullness of well-worn leather. Its smell – well; that was as great as the beast itself, a pungency of ammonia and sulphur, and the acrid odour that comes from the diesel vehicles that plague the streets of every city. My eyes would have watered, if I had let them.

I did not touch her at first – I fancied she was a lady dragon – but walked around her, keeping a discrete distance. Her tail, curled around, reminded me of the pictures of dinosaurs I had seen in my school-books. Her haunches seemed underdeveloped, along with her front legs. She would not spring from the ground, but launch herself through the power of her stupendous wings.

When I got to her neck I paused. Beyond was the head. The flat cranium, covered with armouring scales; the beaked snout; her closed eyes. Did I detect a quiver in her jowls? I backed away a good ten feet and circled around to see her full-face.

Her eyes opened.

I froze.

If I had still been human I would have wet my pants. The huge head lifted, and quested toward me. I hadn't thought that her neck was so long. I did not, could not move, yet the curved cruel beak came closer, the eyes, golden and intelligent and cold, pierced me through. It – her – the mouth opened. I glimpsed yellowed dull teeth that stretched back down into its throat, and a glow as of banked fire far down; and a tongue, wet and red, that unfurled like a carpet laid for an Empress, and it came out of that gaping maw, and...

And she licked me, toe to top, covered me in slime that felt awful and smelled worse. She raised herself, her tail uncurling, and stood on those inadequate legs. Weak though I thought they were, when she stamped closer the ground shook beneath us.

The massive head lowered. Her chin rested on the grass before me. I found myself looking directly into those eyes, eyes the size of cart-wheels, eyes deep with terror and with trust. Her breath pumped gently enough, but still rocked me. I put out my hand, and I stroked her adamantine beak.

There was a shout from above! She started, I looked up to the castle; she spun around with far greater agility than I had supposed she could muster, and her shoulder caught me, and flung me into the stream. When I struggled from it, it seemed the whole castle had turned out to watch my humiliation – all my fellow students, the maids, the coachman, and, in the midst of all, Berndt. I squelched up the steep slope, past the dragon, who was up on her haunches and looking annoyed at being so disturbed, but I could not get up to the wall. I thought I should fly, and prepared myself, but felt a sharp nudge in my nether regions – she was helping me! And she, my dragon, lifted me, and I walked my hands up the bank and the wall and climbed over the top, and into Manuel's arms, a heroine.

I saw Berndt's black-clad back as he stalked away, and knew that the Master had seen all.

Folami's initiation was set for this evening. I could tell that he feared it; but he did not come to me to talk about his apprehension. I had thought he might. But at tea it became apparent why he had not taken the opportunity of the post-lunch ten minute grace.

The afternoon lesson was overseen by Berndt, the real and genuine. He was looking a little frayed around the edges, and that was no surprise. Our topic was the spirit world, and it seemed to me to be heavily-weighted in favour of the benign. Berndt read from a script, prepared, of course, by the Master, which assured us that the cloud of malevolent demons we all supposed to be willing to be summoned for our own ends were but dross, the tailings of processes of enlightenment, and that the better products of this process constantly hovered to catch our attention, and guide the path of humanity.

I knew a scam when I saw one, and I could see that the others knew it too. But we all were far too sensible of the precariousness of our positions to show any scepticism. We made notes, we nodded sagely. We were the models of students as we supposed they should be. But inside, my peers and I wondered how this Master could ever hope to get away with his deception.

The answer, I knew, was in the initiation. I felt more and more that I had got off lightly because I knew what I really was, and could defend myself. The prospect for the others, I felt, was bleak indeed.

At tea I found the mood of my fellows.

"Come on, Folami – It's not as bad as you think," Manuel cajoled, rubbing his friend's neck. "After all – look at Aoyun. She's quite recovered, thank you very much, and just as annoying as she was before!"

I knew this to be a joke, though I thought it weak, but the others seemed disposed to take it at face-value.

"Folami," I ventured, kneeling by his chair, "It will be hard. Keep your centre. Remember who you are." I could say no more, for fear of breaching the requirement to secrecy. And it was not enough.

"I know who I am," the young man said, glaring at me. "I do not need you to remind me."

I could see there was a general agreement to his remark. I stood, and tried to look humble. "Pardon me," I said meekly. "I can say no more."

"Good!" Mirador crowed. "You talk more than you ought anyway. Chinks should know their place!"

"And blacks too?" Folami shot back, shutting her nasty mouth. She simmered, Leofric sniggered, and Hilda just looked confused as usual. Only Manuel showed any decisive mettle, wheeling his friend out of the room.

Hilda roused from whatever internal sense she was making of the conversation. "How does he get upstairs?"

"There's an elevator," Aleksander told her. "Beside the kitchen passage in the hall. It's used to take food and furniture up. Despite all the candles, there's electricity here. There's a generator beneath the waterfall on the other side of the dragon's glen."

Ah, yes; the dragon. At its mention all eyes flickered towards me, and I knew the source of their animosity. I was the one who had been favoured. She had taken to me.

"By no means," I started, "should you think I am marked for her! She is her own beast, and I'm sure she will take to us all, each as we go to her. I was but the first. You are all to come!"

"You seem always to be the first," Leofric observed, nastily.

"That's what she thinks, anyway," Mirador sniped; when I shot a glance her way she flinched. I snorted.

"I went where I should not, and I was surprised by the gentility of a noble beast," I said, though I wondered that I should have had to explain to these dullards. "Go yourselves, and find her yourselves. I have not spoilt her for you." And then I swept out, and to my room, where I hoped for Folami and Manuel, but they did not come. It was Aleksander, instead, who knocked.

The mage plonked four bottles of local beer down on my writing-desk and pulled an opener from his pocket. "Et voila!" he cried in execrable French, causing me to laugh out loud. The release of tension was supreme, and I found I could not stop, but snorted until I began to hiccough, and had to sit down. "You needed that," he observed, popping the crown off a bottle and handing it to me.

"Pass me the tooth-mug," I croaked.

"Do you have to take out your teeth to drink?" he cawed incredulously, which started me off all over again.

I settled, eventually, and poured amber beer into the glass. I felt so much less wound-up, and said so. "What else brings you here, beside the desire to see a grown woman fall about with hysterics?"

"I'd thought I might ask you to share your knowledge," he replied.

"I can't. We are enjoined not to talk about the initiation."

"That's not what I meant."

"The dragon, then. I think she is a 'she'..."

"Nor that. What I mean to ask, is what you know of this place. The Scholomance."

I thought for a few seconds. I knew what Van Helsing had told me, which might be too much. "You first," I decided. He shrugged, dropped into the chair at my desk and took a pull from his bottle.

"It's an ancient school, or Scholasticum, dedicated to occult knowledge." Aleksander sounded somewhat pompous now that an opportunity had arisen for him to show off. "Depending on what you read, it's either thousands or hundreds of years old, takes in eight or ten pupils, and is owned and operated by the devil himself – Satan, Lucifer; the head honcho."

I shuddered. I had indeed met the devil himself, in that chamber far beneath the ground. Aleksander went on.

"After I was recruited, by the rather menacing men I mentioned before, I had some time to research. The story originally was of a Thracian, Salmoxis, a follower of Pythagoras, who started a cult of eternal life. It grew up across the years to be what we are now in – a devil's academy. It's mentioned in Stoker's book, Dracula."

"I know," I said. "Required reading for vampires." I poured the rest of the bottle into my glass.

"So what is it really?" my mage demanded.

"What do you mean?"

"It wasn't started by Satan. It's a myth become fact. But when? And who is our Master?"

I thought, Aleksander knows more than he is letting on. I decided to be honest, at least about this. "The castle was purchased about three or four years ago. It had been falling gently into ruin over three hundred years, save for a new facade in the nineteenth century. Its owner then died in the plagues, and Castel Dracul's crumble continued. The recent buyer was but an agent. No-one knows the true owner. So, what we have been told about the previous seven dragon-riders is evidently untrue. Yet there is a dragon, and the Scholomance follows faithfully some of the legends told about it."

"You believe it was created just to lure people such as we here."

"Yes, Aleksander. People just like us. I believe the Master when he says we are to lay waste to the world, to make way for other beings."

"And these beings?"

"I don't know," I admitted, "Save that they may be creatures like him."

Aleksander sat back; the chair squeaked on its castors. "The beings my old master used to conjure were not the sort of creatures I'd like to share our world with."

"What manner of things do you do?" I asked. "I'm curious – I don't know anything about magic."

He pondered for a handful of seconds. "The magic of mages is embodied in the spirits. We call them up, and they perform for us. If our rituals are properly construed, we achieve success. If not–"

"You die, or get a streak in your hair."

"There's much in-between. I was lucky. My master, alas, was not."

"Yet still you do it... What do you have that others do not?"

"A curious question. I have a periapt. It belonged to my master, and I must keep it close by, or nothing works. All mages have such a thing – an amulet, a book, a sword; the source of their magic."

A device. A piece of intelligent technology from the later years of the war. Bringing to life other foul devices lain otherwise dormant, nanoscale clusters that produced physical – and often fatal – effects. Projections of malign beasts, apparently controllable. What fell laboratories produced such nightmares, and why? Their reasons were nowadays inscrutable to us, but from such things sprang these self-declared magicians, fooling with what they did not understand.

"I do not think you will be able to withstand the initiation," I said. Aleksander nodded slowly, sadly.

"I think I'll bale out," he admitted. "I don't think my talisman will be able to protect me."

"It would be best," I agreed. And I hoped he would be able to get away. But there were no Town-nights until after the initiations had all been done.

When he left, taking the remaining unopened bottle with him, I rested a while. It seemed to me that the truly human in our band would suffer mightily at the Master's hands. I felt death in the air.

The remainder of the afternoon was flat and boring. Some of us took recourse to the library, browsing the occult books, of which there were a great many, but nothing – so Manuel and Aleksander assured us – very rare. The others went out to see the dragon. None of them were brave enough, or perhaps motivated enough, to go down to her.

Folami appeared unconcerned about his impending meeting with the Master. Berndt came around a few times, taking orders for drinks, being his normal, sadly-smiling self. He wheeled Folami out to see the dragon, and the Afrique reported back to us that she was in her appointed place, resting.

"Pining for her sweetheart," he said, and I shrugged it off; though privately, I knew she was mine.

We gravitated to the dining-room when it wanted but ten minutes until dinner, and Manuel was helping Berndt to fix cocktails, when all changed. A tremendous crash sounded through the castle, for all the world as if a battering-ram had been swung at the thick oaken doors. Then another, and the same measured number of seconds after, a third. They shook through the stones, shivered our bodies. Hilda dropped her gin Martini. Berndt departed from us at a speed I did not know he could achieve, after the first blow, and in the stunned silence that followed the last strike we waited for his return, barely breathing.

Without warning the doors to the dining-room burst open and a short hooded figure, swirled in a black cape, strode in, followed by the hapless Berndt, now definitely possessed by a very curious Master. The newcomer swept back the hood, revealing a tumble of black hair framing a strong elfin face. She swept her gaze around the room, fixed each of us for the merest fraction of a second, then smiled broadly. Long fingers plucked at the clasp of the travel-cloak and it fell to the floor; and I swear – every man in the room stiffened, and every woman melted, for she was...

Was, is, will ever be, the most beautiful being to be seen in human form. While I write these words she comes to me anew, and my body turns to cream; and she, the cat, laps me up. Or so I dream. For she is something more precious to me now. But then, in that grim castle, she ripped us all up with claws of pure and indiscriminate sensuality. Her scent washed over us, raw and compelling, and her form drew our eyes to everything we found desirable. Her smile was genuine and open; her stance, inviting, brought us all a step toward her. I was alone in the room with her, as we all were, and our eyes were for her only.

Even the Master, I think, was captured. Berndt's eyes were not now the gimlet-sharp windows onto an unknowable and alien soul: they were, though still hard, hard in a different way, a way I could not understand. If this woman – this Chinese woman, for so she appeared to be – had cast a spell, it was a deep and abiding spell, and it settled on us all.

She spoke, and it was the tinkling of bells.

"Good evening. I am Ji Aoyun. I am hu li jing." The others did not know. I did, but did not care to explain to them. The hu li jing are fox demons, seductive, oozing with love and loveliness, fair of face and form, as likely to be good as evil. And here she was – our latest and last student.

"She has your name," Folami murmured to me.

"A part. I am Shen Aoyun." I did not tell him that my mother's family name was Ji. Was this some bizarre coincidence? "Please, Ji Aoyun – come and sit. You must have travelled far." I drew out a chair at the table and the fox-woman sat, graciously, and I felt warm and approved-of. Aleksander put a glass of deep red wine before her, which she quaffed greedily. I watched the Master leave Berndt's eyes and the servant blinked, picked up the cloak and left the room.

The initial shock of Ji Aoyun's appearance had subsided somewhat, and we students introduced ourselves. Leofric was especially smarmy, kissing the demon's hand; I thought he might unroll his huge wolf's tongue and lick her! But he resisted the urge. Mirador, still hungry for blood, hovered uncertainly behind the others until only she was left, when she mumbled her name and retreated to the background.

"We must call you Ji," Manuel decided, "since we already have Aoyun here with us. Is that acceptable to you?"

"Truly, yes," the fox-demon demurred. Then the door from the kitchens opened, and dinner was served.

Through the meal all eyes, including mine, remained on our newest member. It was so difficult to look away. The small-talk was desultory, what there was of it, and nobody mentioned either the Master or the dragon. By the time the pudding had been cleared away, and Port, cheese and nuts brought out, we seemed to be strangers to one another, and poor Folami's impending ordeal had been forgotten – even, it seemed, by the man himself.

But this was only a temporary reprieve. Berndt, himself, appeared to wheel the shaman out; and the room on their departure grew still.

"Is something happening?" Ji asked. She had such an appearance of concern that I felt sorry for her, and hastened to tell her of the initiations we all had to undergo.

"That is usual, in such a cult as this," she observed. "I'm sure my own turn will come. I expect there is the usual requirement for secrecy?"

"There is," Mirador complained. "And Aoyun is sticking to it. But truly, how hard can it be? For she seems unaffected. Manuel can tell us, I suppose, how well his friend may stand against frights."

But Manuel was not with us. He had slipped out unnoticed.

And then the screams began.

"You utter bastard," I hissed to Folami two hours later, when I found his room and barged in on him. He sat unconcerned in his wheelchair, typing on a portable Remington, and he did not stop while I rushed at him with my knowledge and my imprecations. "How could you do that?"

"Manuel suggested it," the Yoruba said calmly, pulling out the page and placing it on a short stack of papers. "He seemed confident."

"So you escape, and Manuel must go through that horror again, in his own flesh! You are despicable!"

"You, dear vampire, did not tell us what you experienced. But we observed your distress afterwards, and how much better you were in the morning after. How bad could it be?"

"So why not suffer it yourself?"

He looked down at the keys of his machine. "I don't like pain," he confessed. "I've experienced it before, and I would do anything to avoid it. My friend – he said it was all one to him, he could take it..."

"We heard his screams though they came through a hundred feet of cellars and rock!"

"We never heard yours," Folami said. "My body must have good lungs."

"You are a devil!" I cried, hating him for his complacent acceptance of another's pain; pain I knew was unsurpassable.

"We all are devils here," was his smooth response. He picked a sheet of blank paper from a packet and fitted it into the typewriter. I shrieked, and left before I hit him.

Manuel's room was across the passage. I knocked softly, and rattled the knob, but it did not open. When I returned to my own room I found the man himself gazing out of my window into the night. He had brought wine, and two proper glasses stood filled on the writing-desk.

"I did it for information," the young pale man said, not turning. "And I think you and I must now pool what we have."

"I do not know what you are," I said, still angry, picking up my glass. The wine looked like blood, and I needed that hot ichor so much! But wine was all there was.

"I am only a curious man," he said. "Here because I was summoned." He sat in the desk-chair and took up his glass. His hand trembled. Deep lines were etched on his face. "What did the Master do to you, Aoyun?"

I did not know if I should tell. My mind was turmoiled; but my mouth began for me, and told the whole tale, hesitantly at first, so that by the time my brain caught up with it I was back there, in the pitch-black, watching that being split into its sixteen pieces; and I was able, then, to hide my true nature from this brave, foolish and so-perceptive young man.

I told how I had seen it dimly – the eyes of a vampire being sensitive – and how it sundered itself, each piece entering me in its own way, bringing each its particular load of venom. The foulness of that examination, the clinical ferocity of that torture! An assault on every womanly part of me, that tilted my mind into madness... I told Manuel that I had fainted.

"No, you didn't," he countered, and I felt myself redden.

"No. I did not. But I wish that I had."

"I did not see the beast," Manuel said, pouring more wine. I grabbed my glass eagerly, though I knew I could not wash the memory away. "It was utterly dark. Folami's eyes could see nothing."

"But if you had had your own eyes?" I said slyly.

He paused in the filling of his own glass. A rich fat drop of wine splashed down onto the writing-desk. "Perhaps. I will find out when my own time comes."

When finally he returned to his room – or to his coward friend's, I did not look – I reviewed the time-table. Six more of these awful nights; and then the next Town visit, when I would report to Van Helsing, and fall sobbing into the arms of Wilbur.
Town Visit

Our sadistic Master changed the time-table, purely to keep Mirador until last. The poor girl, shaking with her unslaked craving for blood, tried to ambush Aleksander and had her face deeply scored by an imp for her trouble. The scar healed within a day, but the wildness did not leave her eyes. At mealtimes she demanded raw meat, and got it; but her habits were so disgusting she had to be made to eat in her room.

There was a pretence at some form of teaching during the day, with the Master stomping around in Berndt, fulminating about humanity, and the final days, when his children would come down to possess the earth, the remainder of humanity mere steeds for them to whip and to ride. It did not seem to any of us there to be a good thing.

"But power! You all will gain power," the Master barked when Aleksander and Manuel questioned him. "Power over what remains. Princes of Lucifer, preparing the way for His Children." I should note: this being spoken always in Capital Letters; and had it not been for the brutality of the initiations we none of us would have believed he had any true power, but would have left him to rail alone in this reconstructed parody of a school.

They went on; and night followed night, with Leofric next, who we all thought might withstand, but he did not, and was taken up to his room unconscious, and did not emerge from it all the next day.

That was Aleksander's day, and he was nowhere to be found. The mage had disappeared. It seemed he must have fled, but he hadn't. Berndt found him in the cellars, hiding. He was locked into the initiation room for the remainder of the day, and in the night we sat, still and silent, in the dining-room, straining our ears; but we heard no sound from the depths. Eventually, and without warning, the dining-room door opened and there he stood grinning.

"Easy-peasy!" he crowed, and collapsed to the floor, from where we took him up to bed. Hilda offered to sit with him, but Manuel reassured her and sat the night with the mage himself.

"What is Manuel?" I asked Folami the next day. I was wheeling him around the carriage drive. In the valley below my dragon slept. Folami shrugged.

"I don't know. He has not confided in me. But he told me what my body suffered in my initiation, and I am grateful to him. He withstood. I would have been driven insane." He pulled himself up, with my help, and stood braced against the low wall, looking down at the beast. "Is this a deception? What is the Master really doing? Do you believe one of us will become a dragon rider?"

I had thought about this. The dragon was a relic from the war. I did not know what damage it could do, but I did not think it could lay waste to the world, and I did not think there were six others, with their riders, stowed somewhere around Castel Dracul. "What do _you_ think, Folami?"

"I? I think you keep your cards close to your rather excellent chest. As for the dragon, I'm sure there is only this one. When we went to Sibiu Manuel and I went bar-hopping, got into conversations. There are not any black people in that town; I was a talking-point. The citizens were friendly – we were bought drinks. The local beer is very tasty."

"I wondered about the smell, when we boarded the coach."

"When we boarded, all I could smell was blood," he countered. I lowered my eyes. Below us the dragon lumbered to her feet, looked up at me, and turned around to settle again. "We were tourists, staying in the area. What was there to see? We were given several recommendations – the old abbey is worth a trip, it appears.

"I asked about the castle. It is indeed known locally as Castel Dracul. An eccentric American bought it maybe four years ago, and had it done up – by contractors from Italy, which led to some grumbling. Some think he might want to open it as an attraction, others are less optimistic. Those folk believe he is the devil, come to destroy them. The new Vlad."

"If they connect us with this place, the town could become dangerous."

"If we behave next time as we did the last," he observed, gripping my arm and lowering himself back down into his chair, "they will certainly make that connection. I am not murderous towards my fellows to the extent that you others are. You cannot help yourselves: you have to kill. And in ways that make it obvious what you are."

I started to wheel him along the drive, past the servants' quarters, to make a circuit of the castle, and to keep my face from him.

"I can control my urges," I said.

"You are not the only monster," he said; and we continued in silence until we came to the turning-circle before the castle's front doors.

"Do you know why we who have suffered the initiation do not run from here?" Folami asked, over the shush of gravel.

"I..." I did not know. I could fly. Leofric could lope. I did not know what Manuel could do. The others – unless Hilda had a long broomstick – must steal horses, or the coach, or strike out down the mountain on foot.

"His name is Fat," Folami said. "The devil. The Master. Manuel's mind suffered in my body. I do not know what Manuel is, but he plucked the being's name from the cloud of pain, and that is the only clue we have.

"We know that this Fat is powerful, and we are afraid. We know that he holds power, and we crave it. Good reasons not to leave.

"But he is in our minds. I do not know how much he can discern of our thoughts, or even our spoken words. All I do know is that he holds us here. We may want to go, but our legs will not lift to seek the road out."

The Master burst into the dining-room that night and dropped Hilda's eviscerated body onto the dining-table. Through Berndt's contorted mouth he yelled, "Imposter! Weak!" His borrowed eyes, reddened and savage, raked us. He was trembling with rage. "She was..." he began, then turned to go, stalking back to the doorway, tall and gaunt and utterly terrifying. Turning back to us he showed his teeth in what might have been a smile. "...delicious."

The doors slammed shut behind him, and the stone silence he left behind was broken only by a low moan of hunger from Mirador.

We fled the dining-room and the wreck on the table. When I got back to my room I found a card on a string pinned to my door. It read, 'The psychiatrist is out'. I smiled wanly, flipped it around. Now it read, 'The psychiatrist is in'.

I should not have turned it. My visitor was Mirador. She barged in while I was testing the extent to which I could deform my body. Since Shanghai I had grown in my ability to control my shape – in London I had sprouted knives from my hands to impale or to slash; and in the hunting-lodge at Bran I willed my body into a winding-sheet to kill Count Arisztid. Now the hapless vampire walked in on me just as I was practicing my control. She saw ten-inch blades protruding from my sleeves, and shrieked.

"Close the door," I said calmly, as my hands regained their normal form. I waved one at a range of bottles left by Aleksander and Folami. "A drink? Most of my visitors insist on something."

"Brandy."

I gave her a large one, and took another for myself. I waved her to the comfy seat and sat in the desk-chair. She subsided with relief.

"Who put that stupid sign up?"

"Well, now I know you did not," I replied. "Probably Aleksander. He has a puerile sense of humour."

Mirador nodded curtly and gulped the spirit down. I indicated the bottle and she gratefully took another.

"How did you fare in the initiation?" she demanded. "We are the same, you and I. If it held no terrors for you, it should not for me. But I need to know."

"I may not tell," I said, sipping. I wondered if she was aware that vampires could not get drunk.

"I cannot abide pain."

"Pain is the least of it." I found myself relenting, and I did not care about the Master's prohibition in any case, since Hilda. Poor Berndt was downstairs now, cleaning up the dining-room. "How old are you, Mirador?"

"Fifteen," she replied, and I must confess I was surprised. I had thought she was thirty, by the hardness of her face and the abrasiveness of her demeanour. But then I realised, what came across as bitchy sneering might just be teenage insecurity.

Whoever put that sign up on my door was more perceptive than I.

"How long?"

"Four years... I should be twenty in October..." The tears came. I caught the glass as it slipped from her fingers, and held her while she sobbed. All credit to the girl: she did not try to bite me.

When dawn came she was beside me in my bed. I had let her drink from me. I touched my neck, but the marks were gone. How brittle the young are, I thought; and then, that I was but two years older than she.

Mirador was, of course, not her name. She was Albertina, the daughter of an English merchant, and she had been seduced, then vampirised, by a teacher in her private Academy. Her mistress had at least allowed her to wake from death in the comfort of a proper bed, and schooled her in her new role. But she had been turned onto the streets quite quickly, when another, younger, girl caught her mistress' eye.

She survived, of course. Finding her strengths, arrogant with privilege, she terrorised the neighbourhood until her mistress fought her and drove her out. She then trolled the suburbs of Penge and the Crystal Palace, growing fat and complacent until Belinda found her, and tested her. And so now she was here, way in over her head.

We took my towels and toiletries to the shared bathroom at the end of the corridor for a shower. It was a jolly few minutes of elbowing and soap-sharing, until, blowing out lather, we dried off amid giggles and scooted back to my room.

"I am to be tested, the day after tomorrow," she reminded me while I set her hair.

"I know," I said. "What I may say – oh, what can I?" I did not know where even to start. She was but a child, and the intrusions of this supreme monster could destroy her. I rallied, mentally, and marshalled my words on her behalf.

"This being – the Master – is not human, nor ever has been. He will try you with rape, both mental and physical... Stay!" – for she was shuddering, and on the edge of her mind even at these, mere words – "You can be strong. For you can withdraw your mind into a shell..."

I looked inside myself to discover how I had done this, and gave it all to Mirador. Everything but the truth of what she really was. I practised with her the steps to take, and in time we went down to breakfast together arm in arm, to the surprise of all.

Hilda was not mentioned. The dining-table was always spread with a new cloth every mealtime, but only Leofric sat up to it. We others stood at the buffet or sat with our plates on our knees or on side-tables.

The fox-demon sat elegantly in a dining-chair, drinking tea. She seemed supremely unconcerned by the silence in the room; but then, she had only been with us for a few days. Ji Aoyun hadn't spoken much to anyone, and few had spoken much to her. Her beauty, her sensuality, intimidated us all. She had, of course, been taken on the tour, and seen the dragon, but had said nothing about it.

Berndt came in while I was musing to announce that Manuel's initiation would now be the last; Ji Aoyun's tomorrow; and Mirador would be initiated tonight. He looked sad while he gave us this news, and Mirador burst into tears, so that I spent the next hour comforting her, whispering that she would be able to protect herself, to withdraw somewhat. But I knew what a dreadful time awaited her nevertheless.

She walked with me around the castle walls. I was conscious of how I did not want to stray down towards the town, to escape. It truly was as Folami had said: we who had been initiated were under some sort of geas that constrained us.

When we looked down at the dragon she raised her head and looked at us. "May we go down?" Mirador asked eagerly, and I smiled. Of course we might, and so we did, scrambling and sliding down the steep bank like schoolgirls, giggling together, heading for the gorgeous creature.

She, our dragon, watched us approach. She seemed indulgent of our excitement, and I thought she might even wag her tail! But that did not happen, and as Mirador and I approached that great animal we began to feel apprehensive. The beast raised its head high, arching its neck, the close scales gleaming in the weak sunshine. Its eyes fixed upon us, looking down that great beaked snout; we advanced very slowly, ready to cut and run, to fly up and away at a moment's notice.

Closer we got, and closer; and then her wings snapped open with a great crackle of leather, and they were huge. She reared up on her haunches, we saw her talons, long, curved like scimitars, five fingers spread a fathom across on each fore-foot, ready to rend. Breath full of sulphuric snorted from her nostrils. Her belly was pale gold, finely scaled, and we were now so close we could not tear our eyes away from her, only wonder, and tremble.

Then she folded her wings, bent down that massive head, tucked herself and fell onto her side with a crash that bounced us together. When we untangled we stared into one great eye, and for all the world that dragon looked at us with love and trust and hope, her pale-gold belly exposed to us.

So we rubbed it. It was softer than I had expected, and very warm. I felt the slow beat of the great heart, and the rise and fall as she breathed. Her belly-scales were small, and fitted together like a mosaic, flexible and precise, and she loved it.

After almost an hour in her company Mirador and I suffered a bath from the great long tongue. We rose dripping into the air to return to my room, then for a shower, thence to lunch, where we learned we had missed an important announcement from the Master.

"We are to have a Town night tonight," Folami told us. "Mirador's initiation is postponed." The poor girl almost swooned, having keyed herself up for the ordeal, and I thought she would perhaps go insane with the cruelty of this shuffling around. The Master treated her as if she was of no consequence, pushing her this way and that without consideration. But she rallied, and we all sat at the table together, smiling, relieved, looking forward to the opportunities the night might bring.

"May I accompany you?" Mirador asked me while we ate. "We can hunt together."

"I hunt alone," I said, knowing I must visit my love.

"But..."

"No 'buts', Mirador. You don't need me to hold your hand." I smiled, to mitigate any offense. "Vampires do not hunt in packs."

"You may hunt with me," Leofric said. "If you can keep up."

"I know your sort of hunting," Mirador countered. "Greedy and vicious. Why, there would be nothing left to drink from, after you had ripped out its throat!"

Leofric laughed, and Aleksander looked queasy. "Where do you go, Aleksander?" the Hapsburg enquired, arching an eyebrow at the mage.

"For a drink," came the reply. "Beer, I mean. And a walk around to collect grave-sprites."

"Come with us, then," Manuel called over from the far end of the table. "We like a drink, in convivial company!"

"We'd be happy to have you with us," Folami agreed, and so Aleksander's evening was settled.

Ji Aoyun said nothing, but only smiled her Giaconda smile. I asked her in Mandarin, "What will you do, in town?"

"I will find someone to give me love," she replied, also in Mandarin. No-one else would understand us, I was sure. "And then I will eat his heart."

"Ah... You are a Korean Kumiho?"

"Assuredly. Do you think a mere huli jing could make the grade here among such predators as yourselves? I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman," she continued, "but I have the heart and stomach of a King – and several other quite important men, though I suppose they must all be digested by now." Ji Aoyun smiled so sweetly I felt quite damp. I grinned back weakly and hurriedly turned to Mirador, but Ji Aoyun called to her, "Accompany me. I will help you and watch you drink, before I take my own portion."

The girl accepted, and I felt only relief that I would be free this evening.

The afternoon was spent without the Master's presence. Berndt and the maids brought us tea and biscuits in the library. Mirador took Aleksander and Ji Aoyun to be licked by the dragon, with Folami tagging along on Manuel's borrowed legs. When I went up to change for the early dinner I found the enigmatic Westerner in my room, in Folami's wheelchair.

"The card on your door said you were in," he began, smiling.

"I forgot to turn it," I replied. "I've never had a card on my door before."

He took a bottle of white Burgundy from a pocket in the wheelchair and asked for a cork-screw, which I had, and we sipped while he talked.

"I am what I am, and that is less than human," he said. I waited. "That is to say, I am not human at all, but a mere simulacrum of humanity."

"You are human enough to be enticed by Ji Aoyun," I observed, and he laughed.

"By no means! All I do is to mimic others. I am not attracted by her. My talent, if such it is, is that I am not fooled. I am impervious to human wiles, and I do not fall into the emotional traps of humankind."

"Yet you are susceptible to Folami's magic."

"That is perplexing. I haven't found an answer as to why."

"Which means you may also be vulnerable to the Master."

"True. And it frightens me. But I have already met him, in my good friend's body. I must say – I am glad Folami had not been there, for he would hardly have survived."

"How did you find out the Master's name?"

Manuel hesitated. He took a sip of his wine, playing for time, I supposed. We all were wary of one another, in this place; but the initiations had been knitting us together, and we were developing strong bonds. "As a mimic, I must of necessity understand humans. I need to get into their heads. Where Folami entices promises which he may later make material, he does not 'read' a mind. He uses it, and the owner's physical attributes.

"I can visit into a mind. I can inhabit it without detection, and learn from it. I learned from Fat – the Master – and what I learned, while he was outraging the body and brain of my friend, is alarming."

"Fat is not human."

"Nor is he a devil... How much do you know of the Great War?"

"A lot," I confessed, and he nodded.

"Then you should know – he is not a relict of that war. Fat is truly alien, something from another world, perhaps another universe. How he is here, I do not know. But that he has something that might destroy the world as we know it is beyond dispute."

"Who are you working for?" I demanded directly, and Manuel looked astonished.

"That you would ask me –"

"Yes."

"Then if I tell you, you must likewise tell me."

"You could just pluck it from my mind."

"I would not." He stood, then, and put down his glass. "Take a drink with us tonight."

We swaggered into an antique and sway-backed pub in the Old Town, dressed in our own clothes, dragging the outside fog in to mix with the inside smoke. The locals paid no great attention to us until Aleksander marched up to the bar and started to harangue the inn-keeper in mangled French, pointing at barrels and bottles and miming the sort of drinking that perhaps a clown would consider proper. Leofric tapped him on the shoulder, then spun him round and pointed to a clear table. "Go there. What would you like?"

"Beer," the mage replied cheerily, heading over to the table. "Mine's a large one!"

Mirador was having difficulty standing, due to her laughing so much at him, and had to be helped to her seat. I could see that this outing was already reaping therapeutic benefits.

Leofric talked in German with the inn-keeper and paid her, then came to sit with us while she assembled the order – which when it came included good bread and sausage, curls of butter and thick, fatty smoked ham. Aleksander was given a huge lidded stein of lager-beer, and nearly put his eye out trying to drink it. It was the beginning of a jolly night out.

It became apparent that all of us apart from Aleksander were tolerant of alcohol – we could rise sober even if we had spent the whole night drinking. It was hardly surprising, of course, for we machine-monsters could burn away the alcohol, and Folami probably had some poor acquaintance somewhere rapidly getting drunk on his behalf. As the rounds accumulated we found ourselves talking one with another about our prior lives, our real lives. We really were becoming friends.

"Come help with the drinks," Manuel suggested, standing, and I went to the bar with him to order a round. Manuel smiled as he bent his head to mine, murmuring sweet nothings, or so it seemed. "I work for the Republic," he whispered. America.

"And I for Britain," I smiled back, fluttering my lashes. A drunk beside us rolled his eyes.

"Tell your control my name – Manuel Banderas. Also tell them, 'Blue Oil'."

"Get a room, you two," moaned the drunk – probably. It was in Romanian.

After a few hilarious hours we left Manuel, Folami and Aleksander to bond manfully over beer, and went out into the night. Mirador and Ji Aoyun headed towards the unsavoury end of town, Leofric to an hotel. I turned my hooded cape so that its red lining was now outside – a perfect disguise, or so I thought – and went off to meet my Wilbur.

The broader streets were thronged with townsfolk, and I kept to those thoroughfares as much as I could. I did not want to skulk down alleys, knowing that I might meet those unsavoury characters upon whom I would inevitably feed. I intended to meet my love clean; I would hunt afterwards. But I found myself in a place where, to get to the house, I had to cross park-land; and it was dark and deserted. There was no help for it – I turned in through the gates and strode on between the trees.

The sounds of the town faded. Around me was the rustle of leaves, above were the stars. The path curled around one way, then another, passing by a still dark pool fringed with rhododendrons here, and a group of statues hunched black against the sky there; although I was what I was, I still felt apprehensive. The trees pressed around, and there could be anything behind them. I pulled my red cloak tighter around me and wished my footsteps did not crunch so much on the loose gravel.

Before me a clearing opened out, a confluence of pathways. I would fly up and take my bearings; but a low, deep growl from behind frayed my over-tightened nerves, and I panicked, fled into the clearing – and tripped.

I turned onto my back in time to see a huge creature leap over me; slaver from its jaws wet my face. A squall of snarling burst out, the snapping of jaws, the scuffling of feet. When I got up on my knees and turned around there were two huge wolves circling one another, red eyes glowing, jaws agape. A flurry of action – one leapt at the other, took it by the neck. Blood flew. The defender broke free, twisting away, and gathered itself to spring.

I had no thoughts in my head. I could have done something, but my brain was empty of all but terror. The attacker's fangs shone dark in the starlight, its shoulders hunched, head low, daring the other to make its move. The move never came. Dripping blood from the great rent in its neck the defeated wolf slunk backwards until it was hidden in the darkness beneath the trees.

And then the victor turned itself to me.

Its eyes were black spots surrounded by wide, luminous orange-red circles. They bored into mine. I was transfixed, helpless – even such a one as I – felled by the crushing fear that lurks within all humans, the fear of the wolf.

It took a firm small step towards me, then another. Slow, confident. Its muzzle was wrinkled in a snarl, and dripped with the blood of its foe. I rose shakily to my feet: I did not want to die on my knees. My red hood fell back, and the wolf stopped.

Before my eyes the creature twisted. Its shoulders slumped, its fur shortened. The soft sounds that accompanied this transformation were not in any way pleasant; within ten long seconds Leofric straightened up, naked and impossibly handsome, his eyes still black discs surrounded by orange-red, and then that last vestige faded, and he grinned.

"Do I have to eat your Grand-Mama?" he asked with a grin.

"I wish you would," I replied shakily. "I hate her."

He offered his arm; I took it gratefully. "You were going to eat me," I offered as he walked with me through the woods.

"I did have that in mind. I fought another for the pleasure... I did not know it was you." He looked like a silver statue come to life, as we passed through another clearing. "The gate is along this path a hundred yards. I will leave you – you are safe now."

"I could have defended myself..."

"But you did not... We have far more power than you thought, Aoyun. We whisper to the part of your once-human brain that still must hide beneath the bedclothes. There is no defence against us."

And he turned back, transforming as he padded back down the path, disappeared as his pale body sprouted its dark pelt; and I had learned that my fake and optional heart could still pound with truly human fear.

I went in the back way, into a veritable fog of swearing. The air smelt of hot metal, ozone and sweat. I followed the obscenities to the back parlour, where Van Helsing was reading from a large paper-bound book and Wilbur fiddled with a brightly-glowing slab. Between them on the floor a low dais, finished in black crackle, stood humming.

"What on earth are you two doing?"

Wilbur started, and Van Helsing almost dropped the book. Both looked astonished.

"We didn't see you until you spoke!" Wilbur stammered. My mentor, too, was rattled.

"I shouldn't be affected by your talents," he said, "but I am. Please – come in. Take off your clothes."

"What?"

"Your clothes. Please take them off. Mister Deneuve has, I understand, experienced the wonder of your body already. I am indifferent."

"It's all for you," Wilbur pleaded, salivating. I believed that I required more information.

"What is all this? Is this what was in the crates?"

"Some of it."

"What is it?"

"It's a programming unit," Van Helsing explained, while Wilbur untied my cape and tried to unbutton my blouse. I slapped his hand. "You have very little control over the things you are now made from – "

"The nanites."

"Correct. This will give you that control. If, of course, Wilbur can get it to work."

Wilbur looked shifty. He pointed at the slab, which had the same black-crackle finish as the dais. It had a flat typewriter keyboard, and something like a small cinema-screen jutting up from the back, very bright and colourful.

"We've been testing it on a maquette," he said, indicating a mangled black... _thing_ on the dais. Well. It was certainly mangled. Who knew what it might once have been.

"You want me to stand on that pad." I said. They nodded.

"With your clothes off."

"Naked."

I sighed, and began to unbutton. It took some time, and I began to fear for my love's blood pressure. When the last and most flimsy garment was dispensed with I took my place on the metal pad, kicking aside the test piece, and folded my arms. "I trust you. I have no idea why."

Van Helsing and Wilbur ignored me and went into a huddle over the slab, pointing at things on the screen and picking at keys. Sometimes Wilbur waggled a small object next to the slab. Once Van Helsing hissed, and hit him on the shoulder.

It was not encouraging.

Then I started to see things. A colourful series of objects appeared before my eyes. When I turned my head, they turned with me.

"Can you see it?"

"I can see several things."

Wilbur explained them to me. One symbol controlled my vision, another my hearing. A picture of a spanner (how drearily male!) took me to a 'tool kit' when I looked at it.

It was astonishing. The deeper I went, the more options there were. I already knew that I did not need to have human organs – no heart, no blood, no stomach. I felt I had them simply because I always had had them; vampires did not know what they truly were.

It was little different when I switched off my human organs. I no longer had a heartbeat, I no longer breathed.

And then, as I flicked my eyes around, pulling down the various options, I found an 'appearances' menu. It was a revelation! I changed the size of my breasts; Wilbur uttered a strangled sound.

"Now for the good bit," he said, once he had taken a brandy and calmed down. He rattled the typewriter keys and a new icon appeared in my sight. It was a dress. I opened it. It was a wardrobe!

Whatever I selected, I was clothed in it. Stunning gowns, armour, trousers and a work-shirt with stout boots – I liked those. Then something so wonderful, I cried out! I donned it, a thin black leather body-suit that followed all of my curves, that shone in the gas-light, that would hide me in the night and would go through walls with me – because it was part of me.

"Aren't nanites wonderful!" I exclaimed. Wilbur grinned, indicating I should stand down from the dais, and, with my internal organs back so that I could enjoy a sandwich and a brandy, I settled down to brief Van Helsing on everything that had happened at the castle.

"So, Manuel is an android working for the Americans. I will check with my opposite number in the Republic... As for your latest recruit, I have no idea. Her name is a coincidence I am uncomfortable with. Do you know what route she used to get here?"

"No. She speaks seldom."

"No matter. But if you hear more, come to me."

"There is one thing... The Master, Berndt. I wonder if they are the ones who visited Sophie and Arisztid at Bran." I said this, and recalled a much earlier conversation. "When Sophie was still in Shanghai..." I remembered that night, would always, but this had been irrelevant then; I had to make an effort to dredge it up through all the blood. "They were fleeing to Nippon, to meet a man, to give him information he sought."

"What information?"

"I do not know. But he would protect them, would see them safe home."

"This visit? I do not know of it."

I repeated what the Bran librarian had told us. The more I thought about it, the more apprehensive I became. Was the Master in league with Sophie? I was not, even now, sure that I could defeat her, if we were to meet.

"Your Sophie is an old-order vampire," the Professor began. "She and Arisztid were built during the war. They may even have been the originals... Their humanity is long gone, and they are set in their ways.

"But she may have become privy to information that would advance the Master's agenda, all those years ago. I will look into her past; and when we next meet, I hope to be able to enlighten you."

"It's strange that you can't leave the castle unless you have permission," Wilbur said, ogling me in my new cat-suit. "Whatever power he has, this Master seems able to affect humans and machines equally." He reached for the last sandwich; I smacked his hand and took it myself.

"You have not attempted to explore the castle." Van Helsing said. His statement made me hesitate. I had not. I could have wandered through its walls at any time, and discovered its secrets. I felt somewhat foolish.

"I will, when I get back," I promised. "Which will be soon – now I must go!" I gulped down the sandwich and pulled on my clothes – I could not go back so altered – and, with an embrace from Wilbur and a curt nod from Van Helsing I went out through the back way and headed for the meeting-point. I had no desire to feed, so excited was I about my new understanding.

They were pouring Aleksander into the coach as I arrived, and I followed him in. Leofric was on top again, beside the young coachman, and the others budged up for me. It was quite crowded; we all apologised to one another as the coach jerked away.

Off in the distance a police-whistle blew shrill. At least one of us had fed tonight.

In my room I wrote a card and pinned it to the one that hung on my door. It read, 'The psychiatrist is asleep'. I hoped it would put off visitors. Then I divested myself of my clothes and ran through some of my new wardrobe. These clothes borrowed from my mass, being of my substance, and so I could not take on anything of great weight; but the nanites were smart, and made shells of support for the most voluminous dresses. To say that I was impressed would have been an understatement.

Now I slipped into my favourite, the cat-suit, and flattened its shiny character to a matt camouflage of dark greys. I practised walking through the bed first, then making my foray into the castle proper.

It was perhaps three in the morning. Nothing and no-one stirred. I explored the rooms on my corridor first, those I knew were empty, and found nothing of note. Then I peeped into the inhabited rooms.

Aleksander snored on his bed. Folami wrote in a journal, and did not see me.

Manuel's room was empty.

I wondered whether I would bump into him. As an android, I did not think he had the same capabilities as I, so I drifted out of the castle and circled it in flight, looking for lights in windows. One there was, and I approached cautiously, used the tool-kit to build an eye onto the end of a finger, and hooked it around the window-frame.

This was Mirador's room. She lay indecently on the bed, clad only in the shortest silk shift and knickers, asleep. Standing beside her were Ji Aoyun and Manuel, arguing. I touched the window-glass and listened to the vibrations of their speech.

"...without warning her; you cannot put things into her mind that he might see!"

"I must do what I can, to discover what he has." This was Ji Aoyun. She was calm, he was not. "I helped her kill tonight. She is competent and ruthless. If she is revealed, she may die; but what is death, to such as her? She craves it, knowing what she is!"

"You cannot condemn her to that monster – I have been in that mind, the mind of the Master. Only briefly, or I would have been found out. But he is alien, truly something not of this world – "

"And so am I!"

That gave him pause; I decided to dispense with my advantage, and drifted through the window. My appearance was electrifying.

"What do you intend to do with my sister?" I asked. Ji Aoyun frowned. Manuel sat down heavily on the bed; Mirador did not stir.

"I can use her to examine the Master," Ji said, "and then I may kill him."

"I'm sure we'd all like to do that," I replied. "Certainly after Hilda, and given his imperious and deadly summons to us... So who do you work for?"

Ji Aoyun opened her mouth, but nothing came out for several long seconds. And then...

"That thing destroyed my life. I've followed it for centuries, through countless worlds... If I can destroy it here, we will all be free."

"Then let's find its body," I suggested, "and kill it dead."

She snorted, and Manuel shook his head sadly. "It is amorphous," he explained. "May be here, may be there. Any slightest sliver of it may escape, and will contain its whole. Ji Aoyun has explained to me, although I had to threaten her to get her to talk."

I wondered what the android could have threatened her with, then decided I did not want to know. "So you need to know all the places that being's consciousness is contained in?"

"Yes. To do that, I need a precise signature from him. To get that, I need a fusion between the Master and Mirador. I will be in her mind, and I will see."

"Despite her being compromised by your presence," Manuel interjected. He was calm; but he was a true machine.

"Wasn't Folami compromised by _your_ presence?" I enquired, only wishing clarification.

"Perhaps; but Folami's brain is an organic brain. It contains him, whether he is present there or not. Mirador's is a construction, based on her previous human life; and it is sensitive to disturbance. I know that you understand that."

"I do." I sat on the bed beside Mirador, and took her hand. She was very fast asleep. "Why did you take my name?"

Ji Aoyun stared at me. Her eyes were bleak. I did not think she would answer; and I certainly did not expect the answer she eventually gave.

"I can move between Worlds, into minds... I had a job once, a real life, on a huge city in space, orbiting an unobtainable planet.

"Fat – the demon – took over a version of me, in Joseon, a mediaeval Korea. She was a servant, there. He used her to get to me; and he ruined my life. I will destroy him.

"I learned from him, as we hopped around between Universes. He could enter anyone, and I at first only those who were 'me' in those Worlds. But I saw how he did it, and I now can inhabit most minds."

"Whose did you enter, here?" I asked.

"A young woman. Ji Ye."

I was silent. She spoke again.

"She had not been married long. A few, perhaps three years. She had a child, Aoyun. I talked long with her, she was not afraid; she accepted me. And we investigated, looking for the demon."

"You got a lead," I suggested. "He was in Nippon."

"Yes –"

"You decided to go there... You persuaded my father."

"I –"

"You survived. And you never came back to me."
The Master

I flew out of there full of fury, out and up, heading for the black places, the depths of the Carpathians. Around a mile out from Castel Dracul a terrible feeling of dread assailed me; my limbs trembled, and a blinding pain lanced through my head. But pain was not sufficient to override my anger – I rode it, and in time I felt a lightening as the Master's geas weakened, then failed. I had escaped.

When I descended into a black clearing, guided between the tall trees only by my non-human senses, I leant against the trunk of a conifer and howled until my throat gave up. Then, sinking to my knees I wept, it must have been for hours. But the sky was still black when I had no more moisture left to discharge.

I clambered shakily to my feet, drank deeply at a stream. I could not go back. But then where?

Of course, there was only one place; and I rose up, and I flew to Sibiu.

I slipped into Wilbur's room feeling somewhat sheepish – I'd gone to Van Helsing's bedroom first – how was I to know? The android cocked an eye at me and indicated my proper destination with a jerk of his head. He did not sleep, but worked through the night, it seemed.

Wilbur properly slept, human that he was. At least he did not snore. I oozed beneath the blankets, raising them with my form, snuggled up against him, put my arm over him. And I muted my hearing, in case he whispered, "Angela!" or some such nonsense.

But he did nothing, just slept on. It wasn't till the dawn broke through the window that he stirred, and then his eyes flickered open and gazed at me, and he whispered, Aoyun.

I was naked, and not; clothed in my own insubstantial body. Silk spun from a trillion trillion intelligent machines crushed beneath his hands, yielding to his long librarian fingers. I rose on his breath, hovered above him, felt him stretch up to touch me. I balanced on my belly, on his desire, shifting like a cloud, my long hair a floating inky nimbus around my head. I dipped down for a kiss, another; long kisses... long kisses.

His hands slid down to my waist, down to my bottom, exploring and evoking. Warmth suffused me. I spread an insubstantial part of myself down over his lean body and ate his pyjamas. Wilbur, naked and astonished – all anyone could want from a librarian...

I tilted in the air and came down hard on him, taking a stake through a different heart, bringing myself quite awake; for I had till then been languid, enveloped in a sweetness of love.

Perhaps I was still but seventeen, for I felt pierced to my core, although we had made love before, in London; but this was of an order I had not imagined, fierce, demanding, and how I demanded! oh! so! much!

I forgot that my man was human. It fled my mind as I surrounded him, adjusting, roughening my surfaces, at times heating myself, playing as if on some marvellous instrument, shifting my body – I enlarged my breasts as I had before, I altered the colour and texture of my clothing, settled on a transparent, slippery film, which he seemed to like, but otherwise I quite forgot him, taking only the glow that pulsed like stars from the black space that was me; speared by cosmic radiation, I orbited a male planet, I caressed his skin with the feathers of my substance, penetrated him as I had penetrated walls; found the slippery internal surfaces of his wet and biological existence.

At some point the need for blood rose up in me, and I panicked. Up flashed a display before what remained of my eyes, a multi-faceted crackle of colour that startled me, for I had not seen how far I had sunk into blackness, nor how weak the body was beneath me. His vital signs showed orange and red: my hands were sunk deep in his chest, my sex abraded him. I rose, alarmed, straight up to the ceiling, and heard him gasp, felt, as my ghostly fingers withdrew, the shudder of his heart.

There was not sufficient water left in the grasp of my intricate machinery for me to weep.

I brought the android to my love's side. Van Helsing's face was grave. He felt for signs of vitality, tutted. He demanded of me items from his room and I swept through walls to obey, returning contritely by a normal route.

Wilbur's eyes flickered after some application of the Professor's techniques. I'm sure they had flickered during the application of my techniques too, but this time I sagged with relief. And, eventually, the emergency was over and Wilbur was restored, red in the face when he recognised the Professor, and me standing behind him with the Mask of Tragedy on my face. His torso was naked, and was one big black bruise, from neck to abdomen, the cavity of his poor chest suffused with blood. Had I been so far gone from my humanity, to do this to the one I loved?

Wilbur coughed a few times, and Van Helsing calmly wiped a trace of blood from his lips. "You're going to have to set down some ground rules," he said; and I nodded.

Breakfast for Wilbur was buttered black bread and beef tea, prepared by Orace. For me there was steak so rare it moo'd.

"Wen' out'n gorrit fer yer speshul," Orace growled at me, stabbing a thick forefinger at the huge slab that lay on my plate. I smiled nervous thanks. He smiled back (I think) and poured three lightly-fried eggs on top. "'E dun eat much, 'im," pointing at Van Helsing, who sat with Wilbur and me at the table, a large glass of some thick drink in front of him.

"Thank you, Orace," the Professor said distantly. Orace grunted and returned to the kitchen, no doubt to warm up something newly dead for lunch. My mentor turned his blue eyes on me.

"What happened, before you came here so early this morning?"

I told him about my wandering the castle as he had asked, and seeing Manuel and Ji in Mirador's room; the result of my confrontation with the fox demon; my flight from Castel Dracul, and the breaking of the Master's spell. "And then I came here."

"As we know... I have found more about Sophie."

"Pray tell." I was calmer than I felt, but Sophie was the least of my problems right then.

Van Helsing rose and paced the floor. It was not something I had seen him do before, and I felt apprehensive.

"She and her husband are indeed old war-time vampires," he began. "They moved in rarefied circles amongst the elite of the wartime Hapsburg Empire. We know of at least two diplomats dead by their fangs. Truly dead – they did not make vassals for themselves at that time.

"The Count then gained an entrée into diplomacy for himself. He was granted the position of Ambassador to the court of Kaiser Wilhelm the Second at Köln – Cologne, to you, perhaps. It became the German capital in the later years, once Berlin was obliterated."

"That is over eighty years ago!"

"So. Sophie was young then. She is old, now. I believe she has not learned much about what she is, during this long time. But I do think that she and her husband may well have learned something of value to the Master... what that was, I have still not found out." Van Helsing stopped his pacing and turned the narrow beams of his blue eyes on me. "Do you think Ji Aoyun is your mother?"

The _non sequitur_ knocked me back. "I don't know, truly. If she is, I hate her for leaving me. If she is not, I hate her for her deception... I cannot go back."

"You can, and you will. Tonight, you tell me, is Mirador's ordeal. You must be close to the cell when she is taken in. We need more information. If the fox is telling the truth the Master is something alien. We have never seen its like. It may be making empty threats, trying to use you and your companions for some purpose that will surely fail. But if it has found one of the worst weapons of that war–"

"What weapon?"

"There are many. Mostly plagues and bombs. The plagues need delivery systems – one dragon is not sufficient. The bombs are big, hard to hide and to transport. It seems that the Master, Fat, intends to bring his own people here, possibly taking over human minds."

"From some other dimension," Wilbur mumbled. We looked at him. His face was grey. "From another world, so how?"

Van Helsing started to shrug, but froze in the gesture. His eyes narrowed, the great brows knitted. "How, indeed. Your mother – if she was your mother – said something about that, you told me."

"She could get into the mind of someone who was 'her' in another Universe... I do not know what that means."

"I think I might. Go on."

"The demon – Fat, she and Manuel called him – he can inhabit any mind, and she learned from him. So she entered the mind of my mother, twenty years ago, and she made her find Fat in Nippon..."

"And the airship blew up. But she survived."

"I thought them both dead, my father, my mother. But she lived, and it was her fault, and she did not come back to me..." I had absorbed enough moisture now, from my food and drink and from the air around, that I could cry; and I did, copiously, shedding great fat tears that slid off my skin of clothing. Wilbur rose and tottered weakly round to kneel and embrace me, and Van Helsing, who I thought devoid of emotion, reached across the table and took my hand in his. It was warm, and so were his eyes.

"She is a mystery. You need to go back, to talk with her and with your mother."

"No. You want me to go back for your own reasons. I don't want to see her."

"Darling," Wilbur croaked, "you loved her. You've loved her all your life. At least hear what she has to say." He squeezed my hand, and I could not stand against him.

"I will go."

I really didn't want to. But Orace chose that moment to come in, to clear away the breakfast things. He looked sternly at me, and at the remains of the steak.

"Are you gonner finish that?" he demanded. He looked so affronted that I laughed; his eyebrows met in a bushy vee, his walrus moustache quivered, and I laughed even more.

"I am," I cried, wiping away tears, and so I did, cold eggs and all, and after a mug of tea and ten minutes alone with my bruised love I left the cosy household and flew high above the lowering clouds, back to the Master and his coterie.

I landed in the dragon's valley, making sure she could see me as I set down. I fully expected a good licking, and I got it, from top to toe. I showered beneath the waterfall then found my windows and seeped in to my room, where I found a delegation.

"The wanderer returns," Leofric said drily. Mirador, looking unhappy, cast her eyes to the floor. Aleksander and Manuel stood by the bed clutching glasses of what must only have been beer – they had the grace to look sheepish, though Aleksander did not have far to go in that department.

On my bed lay Ji Aoyun – Ji Ye, my mother, her eyes closed, not breathing. And in a corner of the room was Berndt, in his usual black. I stared at him, but it was only the man. He looked sad.

"He took her," he said, "in the morning. I brought her here hoping you could help."

"Berndt," I said, as kindly as I could, "please leave now." He nodded curtly, sadly, and left the room. I looked around the assembled cast. "Would you also leave me now?"

"We can help," said Leofric, looking deperate. "We've all been through this."

"We survived," Aleksander said softly, putting down his glass. "Come on; let's move!"

They traipsed out, and Manuel, with an appealing look back, closed the door; and I was left with a corpse.

I sat on the bed, and put my hand on the woman's breast. I called up the display into my sight and looked through the tools. I had seen Wilbur's vital signs just this morning, and I hoped I could find out how I had done that. It took a seeming age! But then I found the sub-menu, and looked into my mother and her parasite.

There was, it seemed, life. My mother was just as I – an assemblage of tiny machines. She did not need breath, nor a heart. What I found in her was a hard shell, deep inside, sheltering the core of her being. I recognised it – it was just what I had created when I was trapped in the dungeon with the Master. But then I had been aware of what was happening – though at a certain remove – and had cracked myself out of it when the nightmare had ceased. Ji Aoyun's shell, it seemed, had no thought to cracking.

My fingers sank into the body on the bed. Every tiny machine of mine attempted a communion with hers. Tiny flashes of light tried to awaken a response. My own codes – the way each of my nanites called to the other – would not work; so I pulled down the tools again and sought for a way.

The elements of her body glowed dimly with feeble bursts. I intercepted them, crunched them. For more than an hour I felt the numbers clicking over, thirty-digit primes rattling in pairs hundreds of times each second, trying to unlock the code. It was brute force, speed over ignorance. My energy was dipping, I was running hot, but I persisted. I was so glad that Orace had made me finish my meal, for the boost it gave me now, but even that threatened not to be enough.

And then the tumblers of her body's locks turned. I melded with her, my machinery and hers pulsing together, talking about damage, about failure. Her vital signs flashed before my eyes, all down into red, and my own systems lit up in response, making suggestions, sending specialised nanites throbbing down my fingers and into the machine beneath me.

I did not know whether it would work, but I sent a pulse of nanites to find Mirador. Bring food, they said, and within five minutes she came with a plate of raw meat, and followed by Manuel with brandy. I let them sit, was fed steak, all the while wrist-deep in my mother's chest. Gradually her signs grew better – orange, yellow, green; and mine hovered in yellow. Still she did not breathe, nor did she have a heart to beat, and at the core was still that black ball of her being, capsuled and inert.

Mirador went off for more meat. Manuel stared at me. I ignored him, took each forkful when Mirador returned, heat pouring off me. The body on the bed sucked energy in from me, glowed green in my expanded sight, but still there was that ball of darkness.

My hands cupped it. My diagnostics failed. All I had left was human emotion, human and failing love. I loved her. I always had. My mother, who had borne me, who had left me in the arms of my vicious grandmother, who had stood on the steps of that enormous, doomed ship.

And she was like me. An animated corpse, a relict of humanity. Would we all one day be this way? Was this the last and determinant plague?

There were worse things that could happen. We were still human, I thought, holding that core, and my fingers melted through it. It opened like a lotus flower. My mother, and the cuckoo that rode her, both were back, expanding into their machinery, animating it.

I fancied that she squeezed my fingers, before her body rejected them, and I sat back, dazed, hungry, hot, with my hands before my face and my breathing mother beneath me.

"How much did you see?" I asked Manuel.

"Enough," he said. I credited his android eyes with more than human sight. I hoped that we would both live long enough to compare notes later.

Berndt came in, with coffee and cakes. I thought that was rather a vulgar thing to do, though I refrained from comment. But the sweet coffee and the sugary cakes helped both me and Ji Aoyun, so that within only a few minutes she sat up, smiling weakly, and demanded meat.

"Go," I said again to Berndt, frightened of the Master, and he, understanding, left with Mirador to seek for more flesh.

When we went down to the dining-room it was already past five in the afternoon. The table was set for tea, and Ji Aoyun piled in, scooping up sugary delights and pouring hot tea into herself. Berndt was absent, but all the remaining students were there; and they were all, including Leofric, relieved. No-one wanted a repeat of Hilda's demise.

Tonight was supposed to be Mirador's initiation, but we were unsure as to whether it would go ahead after my mother's forced and almost fatal interview with the Master this morning. Perhaps he would not be up to another. We speculated, but could not know for certain.

Berndt finally came in with the maids to clear up the tea-plates. Leofric asked him point-blank, and the faithful and much put-upon servant replied, "Not tonight. The Master is occupied," which made our vaunted alien sound like a public toilet! But we did not snigger until Berndt had left. Oh, we were so juvenile; and it was a welcome and vulgar release of tension.

Our laughter subsided, and the clearer heads among our number began to speculate on the Master. All those so far initiated had noted the geas that prevented us from leaving the environs of the castle. We all knew that we were not being taught anything of utility, but merely being harangued. What, we discussed, was the point of our situation?

It had to do, obviously, with those beings the Master wanted to introduce to our world. There must be few, Aleksander argued, or else why look to reduce the number of human hosts? Did we want to help this aggressive and sadistic being in its aims? I think that our consensus answer was no.

But there was beneath our talk the thought that the Master had entangled us already in his plot. That he had a hold over us, we who had been through his process so far. I myself thought that was not true, but Leofric and Aleksander both countered me – they felt, they said, that he had them in his thrall.

The whole conversation made me gloomy. Whatever I could say made no difference. I was no exception, they said – I had fled, but come back, proving that the Master had power over me. I watched Mirador absorb these mistaken opinions, and resolved to counter them. So at the end of the evening I told her, the psychiatrist is in; and she brightened, and so she came up with me to my room.

My mother and her cuckoo were there before me. She was sitting at the writing-desk, reading a book on ghosts that she must have brought with her, for it was in Chinese. Next to the book was a large bottle of five-star Maotai and four small glasses.

"I am about to talk with my friend," I began, but she curtailed me.

"I am about to talk with you both," she said, "and it would do you well to listen." She rose and poured the drinks. Alcohol was an efficient fuel for my body – and for Mirador and my mother – so we sat and drank. My nanites soaked it up, and let me have the sting of it on my artificial tongue. Mirador smacked her lips and waited for the lecture. It was not long in coming.

"There are four of us, here in this room," Ji Aoyun began. "I am two; for I am Ji Ye, mother to the most beautiful young woman I have ever seen, my Shen Aoyun, who I abandoned when she was so young. Too, I am Jae-eun, from Korea in a world far different from this one.

"I – Jae-eun – am a traveller between Worlds. I learned from the demon Fat, who shares my body in the chill of a freezer, on a space-station orbiting a planet far away from Earth.

"We are entwined, he and I. He looks for some human world where he can bring his people. I look to thwart him. We have fought for centuries, it seems; but always, at the end of each battle, we start again, in new bodies, on new worlds. The same old struggle."

"You must be weary," Mirador said, pouring more for us.

"I am not weary, for I prevail," Jae-eun said. "But I'm so sad. He persists, though I best him every time. He is not a competent adversary; but he is impossible to destroy."

"Should we therefore worry?" I interjected. We all had just discussed this down in the dining-room. It did seem to us that Fat was not able to achieve his goals. But Jae-eun shook her head.

"He has never been so able as he is now. This world contains such treasures for him. Your war has left an abundance of hidden weaponry, lethal half-humans he can manipulate, artificial intelligences; technology he knows how to use. I am a technological woman – I can use the machines of my world, and make them do what I want. But I do not understand your more advanced machines. Fat knows deeply both your machineries and the psychology behind them, and I fear that here, in this world, I may fail."

"Why did you take my parents?" I demanded; it would not stay inside me, that desperate plea. I truly felt robbed, though what remained of my mother was in front of me, who I had thought dead all these years.

The sweet face twisted slightly and a new light came to her eyes. "Jae-eun came to me, and she told me what was happening."

This was my mother, my Ji Ye, the one who had stood on the steps of that airship, and who I had never seen again, until now. My sight blurred, and I hung my head. "Look," she urged me, so I did; and an astonishing thing happened. She blurred, and I thought my eyes were swimming with new tears, but they were not. Ji Aoyun's body began to vibrate in front of us. Mirador gasped, and I fell back. The fox demon became wide, like some circus fat-lady, and her face grew an extra eye between the... and... I cannot even now describe what I saw in any rational way. She split, divided like a cell in a petri dish into two different and distinct women, in the space of several long seconds, until a mismatched pair stood before us where there had before been one whole being. Both looked frail, for they each had half the mass of the whole.

She spoke again, the one who appeared most unchanged, while the other, shorter by a few inches, a woman with a Korean look, a strong peasant face and dark intelligent eyes, kept quiet.

"This was before you were conceived of, my love," my mother continued. "I talked with your father about this – this strange possession. We – all three of us – we hardened Jae-eun's case with hammers of reason, we talked into the night, over so many nights. This woman is not a fiction. She exists, and the demon exists, an alien from an unimaginable realm.

"There is no gainsaying her. Fat is dangerous, and he will destroy our world, if we are weak.

"And so, twenty years ago, we left our new-born child in the arms of my husband's parents; and we chased off to Nippon, to find him and to destroy him."

"You died."

"I did not die. But your sweet father, he did. I miss him, every moment of every day. The airship exploded, whether by accident or by design we do not know. Most on board were killed. But there are always survivors, and I was one. I washed ashore in some lonely place, and knew I had to disappear. Jae-eun helped me to make a new life, to get money, to become what I am today."

"A fox demon."

"Why not? A vampire, like you? I could have been. Or a wolf. It was a matter of finding the right weaponry and the right set of mind. Fox demons are solitary; but vampires are beholden to their maker, and wolves to their pack."

I tried to convey that Mirador was not wise to this, but it only brightened my mother's eyes.

"Why – are you trying to keep poor Mirador in the dark?" She turned to the girl, who was looking quite confused. "Tomorrow night you will meet the devil, and he will try you sorely. He will visit such pain upon you that you cannot imagine. He will spear your soul, and if he does not like what he sees in you, he will destroy you utterly, as he did Hilda."

"Aoyun gave me a help against him..."

"Without preparation you may not be able to build such barriers in time. You cannot gamble with your life!"

"What can I do?" Mirador cried. She trembled, and her plaint broke my heart.

"You can leave," my mother said. "Those who have been through that dire initiation cannot, unless we have strength such as hers," – she indicated me – "but you are still free. He has not yet planted his geas in your brain."

"Fly away. Leave this place!" urged the other, Jae-eun, grasping Mirador's shoulders.

"Fly," I demanded, covering the girl's trembling hands with mine. "Go now!"

But she did not move. "I cannot leave you all here with such a thing! I will fight!"

"Then you will die." Ji Ye looked then at me, and I faltered in her gaze. I had to tell.

"If you are to stay... I must... You are stronger than you know."

The strain in her eyes as she looked at me... Oh, but the tiny spark of hope behind! So I told her what she was. Once human, now a solid fog of smart and tiny machines. A weapon, with almost infinite resources, with powers she had not dreamed of. As I talked I felt my hands fuse with hers, our nanites exchanging information, I saw light dawn in her eyes. Mirador straightened from her hopeless slump and began to smile. I felt the thrum of her body as she tested her systems, and she beamed with understanding.

"I am not a vampire!" she burst out. "I am not some filthy undead blood-worm! I am pure! I am light!" She rose from the chair and hovered above me, and it seemed to me she leaked light from every pore, like an angel.

"He will still bind you," Ji Ye said, "but you can survive, just as I did, and my daughter."

For a while, in my room, there was such love between us four, an exchange of information without words. Then the dinner-gong rang, and we separated our substances, checked our clothes; and while Jae-eun flew out to find her own sustenance, my mother, my friend and I descended to the others.

Mirador was radiant at breakfast the following day, and even Berndt's news that her initiation would take place that night did not seem to dent her. I understood why she was so optimistic, but it was suspicious behaviour, so I took her away from the others after the brief harangue the Master gave us in lieu of any useful lesson, and we went again to see our dragon.

There was a saddle on her, when we got down to the bottom of the valley. It was fixed in front of the hump of muscle between her shoulders. After greeting her, tickling her belly and avoiding a wetting, we rose up to examine it.

It was a double seat, with belts to keep the occupants firm in flight, and it was fastened to her by cruel metal spikes that slid under her scales. Before it was a pair of reins, similarly fixed, by which I supposed she could be steered. Such barbarity was all we could expect of the Master... I wondered, then, why two seats, if only one of us was to ride her... The image of Sophie rose in my mind, beautiful, poised, deadly. I shook my head and turned my attention back to Mirador, and to my dragon.

She was looking back over her shoulder at us, saw us hovering, not sitting – and rose up on her legs, so that we fell together into the seats. I almost fancied a smile on her face.

And then there was a whoosh and a loud snap! Her wings unfolded, spread either side of us like the sails of some tremendous ship; and they rose up high above us...

"Buckle in," I advised Mirador, and we scrambled with the straps – and then her wings swept down, and we rose.

Her up and down strokes took about two seconds to complete, and must have moved a tremendous volume of air. We lurched away from the valley, up towards the mountains, a smoother ride than I would have expected, and rather more exciting than I thought was good for me. Mirador, though, was whooping with joy; and soon so was I.

She banked, and we saw the sloping wooded ground to our left on her downbeat, the tumbling waterfall, and then the castle coming into sight. A few tiny figures were out on the roadway, pointing at us as we barrelled toward the towers, and then around them, her wingtip so close to a sloping roof that I feared for her – but she judged it so nicely, and for another ten minutes we swooped around, going out over the plain and the lake far below, then circling back and buzzing the Scholomance again, and finally with short brisk strokes our darling brought us to rest beside the stream, and we scrambled down dizzy and breathless, to be given the comprehensive licking we had avoided earlier.

"If you fall off, at least you can fly," Leofric complained when he helped us over the low wall. Then he looked at the dragon-spit on his hand and went off in a huff to wash.

The afternoon brought another lecture, in the study-room. The Master was in a brooding mood, and paced around for several long minutes while we tried not to fidget. Eventually he sighed, and turned to us.

"My people are in chains," he began. "For a thousand, two thousand years; and for ten thousand before that, our males and females separated, ignorant even of the existence of the other. So that, when we arrived on our Mara, our Eden, we did not recognise those we should have loved.

"There was war, bitter, technological, senseless. We used up all the resources of our vast ship, everything we needed to make our new life, on our new world.

"Eventually, a sort of truce was arranged; but still we were separate, and the prolongation of our species was intricate and fraught. But we survived, for those few thousand years, until humans came." His long fingers were knotted into fists, his back hunched; I thought he would burst with anger, or attack us. He did neither. Instead he sighed, a long exhalation, and his shoulders slumped.

"You came to destroy us. To wipe us away and take Mara for yourselves. This will not remain unavenged. My people, male and female, will leave our Eden to you, and take instead this place, and make slaves of those humans that yet remain, once you, my students, have done your job."

And on that he swept from the room, leaving us open-mouthed, and silent.

As evening approached Mirador became anxious. She hunched in a corner of the dining-room, clutching a large glass of brandy, with the bottle on a side-table beside her. No-one wanted to disturb her, though Folami tried to get her to eat something.

"Give me your neck, then, Mister Jones," she whispered, and tried to look seductive. The despair and apprehension in her eyes was heartbreaking. Folami laughed nervously and withdrew, rolling back his wheelchair with the plate of steak still on his lap. I took his place and knelt before her.

"Remember what we taught you, darling. Remember what you really are."

"I am not scared to die," came her response. "I am scared to live and be that thing's puppet. And look at what you had to do for Ji Ye–"

"Ji Aoyun, I think you mean, sweetheart. And if you come back from your ordeal as she did from hers, we will bring you back to life." I lowered my voice even more. "I will be close by you. And remember – you can break his power in you, as we have shown."

She gulped brandy, her eyes brimmed with tears, and reached for the bottle just as Berndt came in. I kissed her cheek and made off to my room, stripped from the cumbersome faux-school clothing, assumed my own cat-suit, and flowed out into the evening. I found the outside cellar entrance, slipped easily between the wooden hatches, crept down listening for Berndt and Mirador's footsteps, my eyes peeled for the flickering lantern.

When they neared that awful room I squatted behind a collection of crates and barrels until Berndt passed by me on his way back; then I approached Mirador's initiation.

The door fit tight in its frame, and both were steel. I tried to probe around it, but could not penetrate into the gap more than a half-inch at any point. I hadn't noticed this detail when I had been brought here – too concerned for my own skin, of course. I stood back and examined the wall, generating light from my body.

It was a box. It filled this end of the cellar room, a cube of smooth concrete ten feet on a side, purpose-built to thwart creatures such as I. This solved one problem we had had – Fat really did know what we truly were, long before he met us.

An armoured cable came out of the front face at one corner, near the floor, and I followed it back to the steps that led up to the wine-cellar. It terminated in a metal box with a huge horn loudspeaker on top. This was how we could hear the screams of Fat's victims.

The box hummed gently. I turned a dial slightly and heard whispering from the horn.

"...of all the worlds. I move between them with ease, and you, too, may stride around the stars." Then Mirador muttered something I could not understand. I did not want to turn the volume any higher. "You – all of you – may share in the glory of my people. But to do that you must experience the pain I feel.

"I have been persecuted for the love I feel for my people. Imprisoned, humiliated, outraged. I have been denied my rights, trapped in a worthless human body and frozen for ever within sight of my own beautiful planet." The bitterness in his voice was underlaid with a whine. Did he feel he had to justify himself to her? It seemed characteristically self-indulgent. This was the being that had the upper hand over us. We who had been through this torture were in thrall to him. And he whined like a snotty child.

It came to me then that he was like us. He, too, was the end-product of a long and unnecessary war, a casualty become a weapon, spreading strife where none need be spread. Jae-eun had told us of his planet, of the huge spaceship that swung around it, full of the last weary remnants of humankind, unable to land on that promised world; and Fat himself had told us of the bitter enmity between the males and the females of his species, a stand-off that had lasted for thousands of years.

What must have happened on that world since these two spirits had left their frozen prison? Surely something better than he had in mind for ours.

There was silence from the loud-speaker, and I heard a footstep above. I melted away into a shadowed corner, extinguishing my own faint light. Berndt came down the stairs with his lantern and stopped at the apparatus to set the dial high, then retreated. All I heard was a hiss, loud in the cellar. I imagined Fat fissioning into those obscene parts, approaching Mirador, who could see nothing, who was keyed-up to any horror.

And then her screams blasted out of the horn.

Mirador came back, on her own feet, though supported by Berndt. The others helped her to an armchair and comforted her, brought hot chocolate and brandy while she wept, and we, my mother and I, joined them. But what we wanted most of all was to take her up and heal her as only we could.

Leofric, who had betrayed some attraction towards Mirador when she had first joined the company, knelt beside her chair, stroking her hand. He was badly affected – I could see his own hand oscillating, becoming almost a paw, returning to human form; and his face... Well, I could have done without that sight! But Mirador suffered his attentions, and the others', so it was an hour or more before we got her to ourselves, and roasted her for information.

"I am so, so glad you revealed my nature to me!" she exclaimed, while Ji Ye and Jae-eun hugged her and I prepared drinks. She gulped a brandy, then looked up at us with such gratitude that I almost cried. "Thank you, thank you! Oh! It was horrible! The pain... But I used your deposition, that you planted in me. I formed such a shell around my mind that I could not feel its depravity. I prevailed. It did not break me."

"Come with me," I cried impulsively, holding out my hands. "All of you. Come fly with me."

"To where?" Mirador asked, blankly.

"To Sibiu," I replied, opening the window, and out we four went, into the air.

The two parts of Ji Aoyun had some difficulty, which they endured, when the limit of the geas was reached, and I did not; but our protégé thrashed in the air, screaming, and slipped behind us, so that we re-formed ourselves and made a cage around her with our bodies. We forced her, weeping and shrieking, until we were over the plain, heading for Sibiu in the dead of the night, and she became calm.

When we landed in the park close to the safe-house Mirador was shuddering again. My mother supported her and I led the way, banging on the front door until Orace, clad in a most extraordinary night-shirt and matching cap, flung the door open and told us to "eff off". We did not, and seeing that it was me he hastened us into the house and into the full-on disapproval of the sleepless Van Helsing and the befuddled myopia of Wilbur, who stood attired in the most awful magenta pyjamas at the top of the stairs, fumbling with his glasses.

"Are we to have all of you here eventually?" my mentor enquired as Orace dispensed hot drinks and small cakes which I was sure he had baked himself. I demanded steaks and alcohol, to which the stalwart merely nodded, and provided in double-quick time. My Wilbur stood in a daze, staring at the three new women, and I resolved to make his life a misery for at least a century.

"I am likewise charmed to meet you," Ji Ye responded, inclining her beautiful head. Van Helsing, however, was not vulnerable to such an approach.

"I await an explanation," he demanded. So I explained. At least when I finished he showed more understanding, and Wilbur had managed to shake off his owl-eyed appreciation of my companions. I expanded my breasts a little, surreptitiously, but Mirador spotted it and asked me to teach her, which quite spoiled the trick.

"Have you found out yet what Fat aims to do?"

"No, Professor. I believe that once the initiations are over he will reveal his plans. He is using the process to bind us to him; and if we were undetected in our flight away, he will not suspect that we are no longer in his thrall."

"The situation is becoming critical," he said, looking gloomy. "We have nothing of moment to report. Just some monsters beguiled by a charlatan, and ancient vampires whispering. What Fat has said could be regarded as misdirection. Whitehall – the real power, not the sham – is concerned that there are other more immediate dangers which must be faced. We are close to being pulled out."

"Just a few more days," I pleaded, and he smiled, which pleased me very much. "There are four of us now, and one of those unsuspected. We can find out – Fat will tell – I will come to you."

We left the house before the dawn, after Van Helsing and Wilbur had passed my friends through their re-programming machine and investigated them, giving Mirador the same head-up display as I had been provided with – Ji Ye and her cuckoo already had that, and much more – and coached her in the self-clothing option. At the completion of his work Wilbur looked so tired, with deep dark bags under his eyes and a grey pallor on his face, that I almost cried. I had brought this pressure upon him. But I needed to be strong – towards him, and towards myself. For I had resolved that I must no longer love him.

We flew back in the blackness of the night, and I hung back to prevent my tears being seen.

Jae-eun remained outside the castle, for safety, and it proved a wise decision, for when we flew through the open window we flew into trouble. Berndt was there, and his eyes were flint.

"Where have you been?" Of course this was the Master, Fat, the devil.

"Out," I said insolently, closing the casement. He snarled.

"Where, I asked."

"Around. Up into the hills, down into the valley. We feel we cannot fly so far. Strange." I made drinks and offered a tooth-mug to the Master, who refused.

"Why?"

"To feel the air beneath us. To bring some life back into our sister." I hugged Mirador, who was looking horribly guilty. She smiled, a sickly look. Ji Ye leant against my desk, rolling the glass between her hands.

"Are you always so concerned for us?" she enquired, her eyes round. "We could not get lost."

"You are all lost," was his bleak reply. He spun on his heel and left, slamming the door shut. We held our breaths for a few seconds, then hugged furiously, trying hard not to burst out in laughter in case he was lurking in the passage.

The bed was a squeeze for three, but quite comfortable nonetheless, and we immortals slept for fewer than four hours till breakfast, when on our descent we heard an announcement from the proper, gentle Berndt.

"There will be no initiation tonight," he informed us. "The Master believes he has seen you all, including Manuel. Your proper teaching will begin instead, once breakfast is over. You will go to the green sitting-room by ten."

"Proper teaching?" Leofric scoffed. "Perhaps an alphabet? That would be advanced, compared to what drivel we have so far suffered."

"He was waiting until we'd all been put through it," Aleksander countered. "I, for one, feel committed to his cause, however bad it is. I think he has taken our wills."

Leofric scowled, but could not refute the mage's opinion; nor could any of the others. So when we went in to the sitting-room and took our seats we expected Berndt – he came, with maids, and furnished us with water, placed jugs of coffee and a samovar of tea on a side-board – but then he left, and we waited almost half an hour until the door opened again, and a creature entered.

It was at first sight human, and unattractive. Of medium height, greyish complexion, the Master was garbed in a light robe of Chinese silk beneath which his legs moved in a decidedly goat-like manner, as if his joints were on backwards. The long almond-shaped face and heavy-lidded eyes were very disturbing; the being's nose was long and narrow, over a slash of a mouth. It smiled, not a nice smile, and revealed teeth that were all incisors, dull yellow.

"At last we meet," the devil said. We each felt him tug on our souls, testing the bond he had created through pain and terror. And thus our first lesson began.

"There was a terrible war," Fat started. "It continued for years, with all sides racing to develop decisive weaponry, to break the stalemate. Science advanced; the discoveries of Academicals unfolded the Universe into the hands of Generals. First came chemical weapons – gasses, explosives, flame-throwers. Then engineering, with land-leviathans on tracks instead of wheels, rolling over the trenches and the bodies of men.

"Behind the lines humanity relied on its brains. Aircraft, dirigibles, helicopters, jets, rockets were developed. At the Front many young men died, very little ground was taken. The prime of your manhood was gathered up and tossed into the fire. But if you were clever, if you knew mathematics, engineering, physics, chemistry... Then you were saved from that inferno, and set to creating new furnaces.

"Men were being lost. So fight with intelligence. Mechanical brains were developed, then electronic, then you harnessed the power of the quantum world. In the later years of the Great War the battlefields were devoid of humans. Machines fought in the skies, on the ground, beneath the seas. Your leaders targeted cities, water sources and hospitals, all with much moral justification – they are evil, we are good. They attack, we defend.

"And thus were the plagues released, ravaging populations, bursting hearts and smothering lungs. The people died in their millions. On all sides the perpetrators of the war stayed safe behind their barricades of technology, directing the destruction of a world."

Fat stopped; he had been striding up and down in front of us, his harsh voice driving this précis into our numbed minds. We sat silent, all of us, knowing it was true. It was less than a century ago, but it was not taught fully; all other facts we knew from that time were the tales told by our grandparents – and those were confused, fragmentary; hearsay and conjecture. For the plagues ravaged the world even after the war had been lost, and more died after that war than in its bloody course.

"Toward the end of your war the targets were refined. Now both sides were aiming for the head of the monster, to destroy the top of the pyramid. So human weapons were created, the most sophisticated devices ever to be seen... I have lived on countless worlds," said Fat, and we believed him, "countless worlds, worlds where everyone lives in peace, or where there is perpetual war; where beings are threatened from outside, or from within. Democracies, theocracies, dictatorships, tyrannies, anarchies. All depend on the brains of their people; all have technology, be it the plough and the loom, or the robot and the missile.

"But only in this world did there come to exist the most perfect engines of assassination, the pinnacle of scientific endeavour. Humans made into machines, human-like intelligences built by inhuman intelligences, science borrowing from your deepest human fears to create impossible archetypes." He was positively salivating. His deep dark eyes sought us out, each in our turn.

"You – a vampire. Once human, now a swarm of machinery with all your human intellect intact – and you, Mirador – and you, Ji Aoyun, though a different nightmare from the folklore of your people, yet you too are a human become machine.

"Leofric also. How could a human become a wolf? Impossible! But not at the end of that war. Then, ghosts and wraiths, demons and imps were set loose in the world – and people like you, Aleksander, controlled them."

He turned next to Manuel, who stood now beside Folami, protecting him. "An android, a humanoid robot. Not the most advanced artificial intelligence, but formidable enough; sleepless and determined, almost indestructible...

"So many beasts called forth from the laboratories of death. My dragon is another such. Biology growing a weapon to unman the bravest foe, to sear and maim the innocent, if there were any left towards the end. For all were guilty, by then. All moved by their masters to hate, to point, to betray. Parents sold their children to the police, sons and daughters denounced their parents, their siblings. No-one was safe, at the end. Each warring country was at war with itself. Only the elite remained untouched.

"Until you."

This was not new to me, nor to Ji Ye, but Leofric sat numb in his seat, and Mirador was pale. Aleksander looked down at his lap. Manuel stood stock-still, his mouth a stubborn line, his arms folded, daring something but not knowing what it might be. Only Folami smiled.

"And me?" he enquired, with a lift of an eyebrow.

Fat said nothing, for a second or two that seemed like minutes.

"I do not know what you are," he said finally. "You are wholly human. You have no augmentation. Yet you can influence not only other humans, but machines.

"Manuel; you swapped your mind with him for our ordeal. You suffered in his stead. I do not know how this black cripple could do that."

Folami smiled more broadly. "Would you like me to demonstrate for you?"

"No. For I know you need permission. Just as vampires are programmed to require invitation into a dwelling or else they may not enter. Just because I do not understand you, does not mean I am not wary of your power. And you," he pointed at us all, jabbing his long finger, "should be wary of mine."

"So what are you?" Folami asked. His confidence radiated through the room, warming us. We hated the Master, resented his control, but we were all of us curious. Our spokesman rolled forward in his wheelchair and looked up at the devil. "Why should we stay?"

"You stay because I command you. Shen Aoyun tried to get away from me, but I drew her back. She and her fox-friend tried again, with young Mirador, but none of them got far."

How little he knew. I kept my face blank.

"What are you? What do you want?" Manuel demanded. The Master made a face, waved dismissively.

"I am not human," he said redundantly. "I am from a world so far away that you cannot understand. A world where the last of my people live in squalor and strife, sex warring against sex, our breeding a cautious truce, our females living apart from us, and when they bear male children they taunt us. Of course we take them, our sons, for if we did not they would be drowned. It has been so for thousands of years. And then our world was found by you – you humans. We deny you, prevent you from gaining a foothold on the surface. But that will not last. We cannot live on Mara any more. You brought your own squabbles, your own strife, your own technology, your own wars.

"I am here to take _this_ world. To make in it a fit home for my people, male and female. We will burst in flame from the bodies of humans, uncaring who we kill. Those who remain alive will become our slaves.

"Your decision – and you know you are not any longer human, you owe nothing to those who made you what you are – your decision is this: Do you help me, or will you too be destroyed?"

I don't think any of us felt that this being, this thing could destroy us. I reckoned that most of us were agents of powers in the human world who suspected that this creature was dangerous. I was, for a start, and Manuel too. Fat had been comprehensively infiltrated, and it was only the sickening initiations that had made us pause. He had power. We needed to know just how much power he had, and what his target was, before we and our backers moved against him.

He took our silence for acquiescence.

"There is one more thing. We are leaving here tomorrow. Rest now; for you will be sorely tested." The devil swept from the room, and in came Berndt and the maids to bring us sustenance.

We assembled beside the dragon. She seemed pleased. Folami used my legs while I flew into the valley, and scrambled down the bank with an indecent glee.

"How many of us here think that the Master is insane?" I asked. All save Leofric and Aleksander nodded.

"Why do you not agree?" asked Manuel. Aleksander shrugged.

"It makes some sense," he said. "Humanity has done appalling things. Maybe we deserve to die. At least, to be taken in hand by some beings more moral than we are."

"Do you know that they are more moral?" countered Ji Ye. "They are desperate to make a home at the expense of our world."

"He is honest. He has told us just what he wants to do," Leofric said emphatically, striding into the centre of our rough circle. "Are we to deny a whole lost people a place to live, because we are squeamish about our creators, who despise us?"

"We are not monsters." Mirador stood against him. Behind her the dragon cocked an eye. "We are made to be what we are by violent and uncaring men. But now we are being coerced into betraying our own race by a violent and uncaring – and wholly alien – creature. He feels his people can't live with humans on his own planet. How does he know, unless they try? Why delete humans from their own home, just because he is not able to be diplomatic?"

"We are the future," said Leofric stubbornly. "Not the humans. If all were like us we would rule over a united planet."

"And the devil would have no foothold," my mother said. "But you are happy for the destruction to take place, leading not to your own enhancement, but to his?"

"With him, we have an opportunity. He knows something. He has a plan. When it comes close, we can remove him and rule instead. All of you," Leofric opened his arms wide to encompass us all, "know that I am right. Humans took us into a bloody war. They destroyed their population, and in the process they built us. Creations more than human, immortal, powerful, intelligent. Look at humanity – look at what remains. A stagnant world overseen by eternal politicians, filled with the poor, lacking resources.

"When we rule, we will hunt them. We will make them into us." He stood tall, a finger pointed toward the sky, a hand gripping the lapel of his jacket. An imposing posture, noble and fierce.

A raspberry sounded from behind him. It was Folami.

"You don't seem to know how deep the Master's conditioning has gone in you. You preach a rebellion you may not be able to deliver." He planted himself beside Leofric, looked levelly at him, his black face shining in the weak sunlight. "That creature wants to destroy humanity, wants to make slaves. He needs us to do that for him.

"I know about slaves. I and my family enslaved many, to keep us in comfort. We gave people hope, so that we could exploit them. Then they turned on us, when new and more certain hopes came along. So my family died, and I should have died with them.

"I know slavery when it is offered, and that is just what the Master is presenting to us. Not just an enslaved humanity; but you too, the fruit of the blasted tree of war. Do you think we will survive when his people burst into our world? We are a bigger threat to them than any mere human."

"You are not one of us. We do not know where your power comes from. Don't lecture me about consequences!" The aristocratic Leofric was angry now, and coarse hairs covered the backs of his hands. His spine was hunching, straining the seams of his coat. The faint machineries of ghouls rose up behind Aleksander, and both Mirador and I felt our teeth lengthening. Only Manuel and Ji Ye remained calm. Then into the charged and angry group came Berndt, sliding down the steep slope from the castle.

"Come up," he urged. "The Master has been attacked!"
Drachenfels

The alien, Fat, lay on a couch in the green sitting-room, with a cloth across his brow. He looked like some old dowager taken with the vapours. I hoped that this would be the end of the affair; that Fat would die, and the whole Scholomance fiasco would wither with him. But when we entered he cocked an eye at us, and I sagged inwardly, seeing it was only a ploy.

"You came," he croaked, and managed a sickly smile, which was not returned; but Leofric hastened to his side, and took his long-fingered hand in his own paw, fawning over the outrageous thing. I felt sick, seeing this, and turned my head away.

"Am I so horrible in my sickness, Shen Aoyun?" the creature wheezed. I almost vomited.

"We are all appalled," Ji Ye said, going to him and taking his other hand. Leofric looked bilious with jealousy, and gripped Fat's hand tighter – the demon winced. "How did this happen?"

Fat looked at us while he answered her. "I was sitting, brooding on the plight of my people," he began. "I felt a stab in my vitals. Berndt knows the food on this planet is alien to me; I thought it only that. But the pain intensified; it drove deeper. If Berndt had not come in I might have died."

"Who could do such a thing to you, Master?" Leofric cried, and we knew he was milking the scene. Such a ham! Aleksander caught my eye, and I smiled back at him. I was sure that there would be several of our number queuing at the psychiatrist's bar this evening.

"One of you," Fat replied. "One of the swarm beings – you who are made of tiny machines. The vampires, the wolf, the fox. Any of you could have sent a portion of yourself to invade me." His dark angry eyes looked at each of us in turn. Since I knew it had not been me, I did not fear him.

"Or me, perhaps," Folami piped up. "I might have an assumed permission from you, and used that to irritate you. For it's certain that whatever you felt did not kill, or even injure you. Or it may have been Manuel – he is a dark horse. Or Aleksander, sending one of his imps. Perhaps Berndt put ground glass in your food – or most likely you had a bad indigestion. You have recovered. You don't have to become paranoid."

Fat simmered during this disposal of his pet theory, but what our friend said was true – if we had attacked the Master, he would indeed be dead. I began to wonder at the extent of our powers, and the weakness of the alien. We could kill him, at any time.

I let my body prepare a thin explosive spear, ready to fly.

"He might be right," Berndt confessed nervously. "The food may have been off, a bit. It has been a while since we went down to Sibiu for fresh provisions..."

"I do not like to be contradicted," Fat said, his voice a stone. "Since you all have taken my initiation, you know that you cannot flee the land around the castle. Now you will learn what else I planted in you."

Pain blazed up in me like fire. My vision blurred, and every particle of my body vibrated. A high singing sound filled my ears, and with an effort I shut them down. The display appeared, wavering before my eyes, flashing red bars. Around me the others all were falling, shrieking, even Berndt. I saw but did not hear Folami jerking out of his chair, Manuel tilting backwards with smoke curling from his eyes, Ji Ye fighting the geas and failing... We all, all fell, and the pain kept on. When finally it stopped we could only twitch helplessly for ages after, and when Leofric, weeping, managed to push himself up onto his knees, and my mother's fingers stroked my brow, I still could not move. Mirador lay in a spreading pool, the water in her body squeezed out by shock. Ji Ye, stumbling up, clutching at a table, dumped a carafe over the girl; her machinery sucked it in eagerly.

Fat, monster above monsters, was gone.

We lost Manuel. Whatever Fat had planted in us had been particularly savage to him. He lay on the floor rigid, his body so hot that the carpet was scorched beneath him. All he was now was a lump of burnt-out machinery.

Aleksander, quivering with pain, knelt beside Folami, massaging the man's chest. Suddenly he thumped the shaman hard, then put an ear to his breast and listened. Restarting the massage, interspersing it with breaths into Folami's mouth, the mage slowly brought his fellow-human back to life.

Leofric carried Folami to his room and closeted there with Aleksander, while we three women went out to overlook the dragon and her valley, to talk.

"Unlike the others, we know that we can leave at any time," Ji Ye said. We resolved to make an attempt this evening, she, I and Mirador – where Jae-eun was, we did not know. But the disruption to the fabric of our beings had been frightening and severe; we had no idea how the Master had managed it. Down below us the dragon was on her feet, opening and closing her huge wings slowly. I wondered whether she was held here like us, with the threat of pain and death. She looked up into my eyes, and I fancied I saw the answer there in hers.

Dinner was bread and water.

When midnight came Jae-eun tapped at my window, and I opened a casement. She was much more substantial now than she had been when she and my mother had split apart; she must have fed well. Ji Ye and Mirador hugged her, and I told her what had happened in the afternoon.

"Oh! Poor Manuel!" Jae-eun was appalled by the news of our friend's death, but practical too: "How will this affect the Master's plans? Since he put this group together, he must have had some task in mind that only an android could perform... Perhaps this spells the end of the affair."

"Fat has not cancelled his orders. We move out tomorrow regardless."

"If we remove ourselves from his influence, he has no-one to work for him. Can we urge the others to leave with us?"

"I don't think so," Ji Ye mused. "Folami is not in any fit state to run away; and both Aleksander and Leofric were at any rate half-convinced that Fat has some justice in his views – though today's experience may well have changed their minds. Let we three escape, and perhaps the few who remain will not suffice."

And then, I thought, the Master might simply destroy them. But what else could we do?

We flew up into the clouds, then down to the forested mountains, following the high road to Sibiu in close formation. Orace opened to my knock, and we swept in to report.

"You're costing the Government a fortune in steak," Van Helsing said drily, while we stuffed ourselves on raw beef. Wilbur was absent, but I expected an awkward meeting with him later. In the meantime the Professor had Ji Ye on the podium and was clicking keys on the typewriter, and watching what came up on the screen.

"We can be out of your hair soon enough," Ji Ye said, then, "Oh! That tickles!"

"There is something... I need Wilbur. He knows the underlying code better than I."

"How? He's just a librarian!"

"And he reads, voraciously. A very intelligent young man. Orace – would you please bring him?"

When Orace brought my love in my eyes started with tears. Wilbur leaned on the solid servant like an old man. His face was etched with pain, and when he looked at me I saw fear, quickly suppressed.

I wanted to run from the room, from the house, from the world.

"There is more damage than I at first thought. Bruising around his heart." Van Helsing said calmly as Wilbur slowly took his place at the machine. "I cannot take him to hospital here, there are not the facilities. But if we can wrap up this affair he will be treated in London or Budapest... Wilbur – do you see?"

"I see," my young man said in a hoarse whisper, wincing as he bent over the screen. I had done this to him. "It is like a virus; it has propagated to every nanite."

"Can you fix it?" Mirador quavered. "We vampires must all be affected."

"The humans, the wolf, the android too, sadly. I suspect the Master used different weapons to infect us all. An AI virus would not affect Aleksander or Folami, but Manuel only. A code hack could take out Leofric and us. An injection of neural nanites would be sufficient to disable the true humans."

"How do you know these things?" The Professor looked bleakly at Jae-eun.

"I am from another, different World. I was a programmer. We had some very complex systems, including artificial intelligences – not, like you, self-aware; but the threat of code glitches was very real."

"Stand still," Wilbur said, and my mother stood like a stone. His screen filled with a field of tiny red squares, which started flipping to green very slowly, from the top left. "This could take a while," he said.

"We do not have enough time to fix you all," the Professor remarked. Mirador looked shocked.

"We cannot go back! He will – we are leaving tomorrow – where will we be?"

"Give me a little while," he responded, and left the room. Mirador looked at me with panic in her eyes. I shrugged.

"I'm sure we do not have to go back." But I was not.

When the Professor returned it was with no good news. Evidently he had been on the telephone to someone much higher than himself. He looked resigned. "Wilbur – how much longer?"

"Another hour." It was almost four in the morning. Only one of us would be cleansed, if...

"You have to go back," Van Helsing said. Mirador moaned, and I felt weary.

"Spare Mirador," I said. "She cannot take the pain."

"We can keep her here," Wilbur urged over his shoulder. "I can probably create a transceiver link between her and Aoyun. Then we can track them."

"If you finish Ji Ye in time."

"Yep. Going as fast as I can." My fox-demon mother looked like a beautiful wax-work, unmoving, unbreathing. The screen was now mostly green, but so slow to change. We would have to go back; and I would remain vulnerable to the monster's spells.

"Aoyun, I'm sorry," Wilbur said softly. The dark circles beneath his eyes shimmered with tears, reflecting the achingly slow flipping of red to green. A jab on my shoulder, and Orace offered a cup of tea. I scowled at him, and he winked.

"'E'll be orl-right," Orace growled, and made off sharpish.

"Damn this device," Wilbur whispered. "I should be able to do more than just this one thing." He did not dare press any keys, though, for fear of slowing the program or even halting it; and any shred remaining of the Master's virus would simply spread again.

"What will happen to the dragon?" Van Helsing asked, accepting a mug from Orace.

"I don't know," I replied. "It depends what plans Fat has for it."

"I've called in transport. We might be able to follow you, but it does depend on Wilbur being able to track you through Mirador."

We glanced at her. She looked dreadful. "Don' worry," Orace said, tapping her smartly on her head and proffering tea. "You'll stay 'ere wif us. Safe 'n' sound."

And of course, she began to weep.

Eventually the screen was all green, and made a noise. Wilbur tapped furiously. Ji Ye woke up and he made motions to shoo her off the pad, and we all made to embrace her; but my love croaked urgently, "No! Don't touch her!" We stood back, confused. "You'll reinfect her. Don't touch her from now on... Get on, Mirador." She did, avoiding contact with Ji Ye, and Wilbur brought up colourful displays and hammered on the keyboard. Sweat dripped from him, and his face was grey. "Get on, darling," he muttered, and I exchanged places with my friend. The clicking of keys coincided with the bright display before my eyes – a new sigil flashed. "Open it," my sweet Wilbur urged. When I did, I found a connection with Mirador. Oh! I thought, how do I use this?

"Oh! How do I use this?" Mirador giggled; and I heard her words in my head. It was spooky.

When Van Helsing bundled us out of the house the sky in the east was lightening. We rose up into the clouds, my mother, her cuckoo and I, leaving Mirador behind. All through the flight I tested the connection – she was loud, very loud, at times; and clear. I hoped she would not interrupt me at some vital moment, for it did seem to me that great danger lay waiting for us in the days to come.

Breakfast was a dire affair. Our normal repast had been laid out, which we girls wolfed, but the men were all gathered in gloom. Folami trembled, hardly able to hold his cutlery. Aleksander picked at his food. Leofric had a face like thunder.

"Where were you last night?" he accused, pointing a fork at me.

"Out in the fresh air, away from the stink of this place," I answered, spearing a kidney that was almost raw.

"And where is your little friend?"

"I have no idea. In her room, I expect."

The wolf grunted. Well, he would find out soon that she had flown the coop.

Berndt entered. "Where is Mirador?"

"I just asked," said Leofric. "In her room, apparently."

"She is not. Nor is she with the dragon." The servant turned to me; his eyes were the Master's. "What do you know?"

"As much as Leofric. She should be in her room. You did deal harshly with us yesterday. I would not be surprised if she sulks for a week."

"We do not have 'a week'. We leave today. Those things you most need have been packed. Get on your feet and out to the hall. The coach awaits. Our destination is Drachenfels." He swept out of the room; Leofric raised an eyebrow.

"Drachenfels?" I asked him.

"A hill with a castle on it. Much the same as here. By the Rhine at Königswinter."

"Near Bonn?" Aleksander enquired. Leofric nodded. "Ah. That's a forbidden area."

"What do you mean?"

"In the war there was a bomb... It was like nothing else." Aleksander paused. He was pale. "It devastated those cities where it was used. No-one can go to those places... If we spend too long there, we will die."

"Oh, great!" Folami muttered. "Radiation."

The coach clattered down the steep mountain, teetering on the hair-pin corners. The Master was above with our young coachman; behind us the staff, including Berndt, were closing down the castle. We would not see them again. High above in the lowering sky, climbing into the clouds, my dragon beat her wings, shadowing us, drawn by Fat and his power.

He did not care about the spectacle we made as we dashed pell-mell into the town, the citizens shouting, hurling themselves out of the way of our furious charge. When we reached the station he impelled us up to the platform, where we waited for the train to Budapest. It was seriously weird. People stood in bunches, shunning us, whispering about us. We wore our own clothes, not the black and white of the Scholomance; but we still presented a frightening-looking group.

My head filled suddenly with a clattering sound, and Mirador's excited voice. "We're flying!" she shouted, and I had to be careful not to leap out of my skin. I glanced around, but of course no-one could hear her but me. "Look up! You can see me!"

I looked up and saw a flickering object in the sky, fleeing northwards at speed. "Is that you?"

"Yes!" she yelled. "It's a flying machine!"

"Well, so are you!" I retorted, sub-vocalising my response so none around me could hear.

Then suddenly and unexpectedly I saw through her eyes. Van Helsing was seated in front of her, with a big pair of ear-muffs on his head, and before him was a view of the land beneath, through curved glass. Beside him was a woman I did not know, similarly protected from the noise, with a long lever in her hand to steer the machine. Beside Mirador, when she turned her head, I saw Wilbur, looking faintly green and sporting the same fashionable ear-wear. "Tell Van Helsing we are going to Drachenfels, near Bonn."

Mirador said she would, and I broke the connection. My own sight swam back to me. I could still hear the clatter of the machine. "It's loud!" Aleksander was saying.

Loud enough to attract the attention of everyone in Sibiu, for sure, and to take some of the heat away from us. The Master watched it with a scowl on his face; I wished that Van Helsing had been more discreet.

"It seems we know now what Mirador has been doing behind my back," he said; but although he had power, he had not power at any great distance, and the clattering insectile machine faded into the north, while our train drew up with a squeal of metal and the hiss of steam, to drown it out. I looked for my dragon before I boarded, and did not see her. Perhaps she knew where she was to go.

The journey to Budapest seemed interminable, and the fear from our fellow-passengers palpable; so much so that at one station stop the police were called, and we were required to show our documents, proving we were school-students, and span a story that we were taking Aleksander's aged aunt to a nursing-home in Vienna – the Master scowled so much at this that he completely convinced the officers, and we were let on our way without further hindrance.

In Budapest we transferred to an airship bound for Frankfurt, the closest we could get to Bonn by aerial transportation. I was famished with hunger by this time, but while wandering around the various decks of the gondola that night I found an extremely unsavoury old man who took a fancy to me. He commanded the help of his two servants – burly men – to pinion me and take me to his cabin, where certain deeds were to have been done, and my spent remains promised to his aides.

Events took their inevitable course. I flew out of the craft from the balcony of his suite to drain each of them, dropping their corpses into convenient lakes, then sharing the excess of blood with my mother. She doubted the pervert and his goons would be much missed by the other passengers; and indeed no alarms were raised for the remainder of our journey.

At Frankfurt there was a motor-wagon waiting, commanded by a tough-looking blonde man with old scars on his face. Fat gave him a thick envelope, which disappeared into an inside pocket of the grey Army great-coat, and we and our small bags were transported away from the city to a cuckoo-clock inn overlooking a picturesque lake, set in tall forest. There we met three more ex-soldiers, one of whom cooked us a meal of fatty pork and potato noodles. Fat ate fish from the lake, whole and raw.

When night fell the men disappeared off in their motor-wagon. We were left alone with the sigh of the breeze through the trees, and the full moon rising to silver the lake. Fat looked at Leofric and nodded; the wolf leapt eagerly to his feet and rushed to his small room to strip, and then out into the rustling darkness. Within minutes we heard his howl, then from the distance a chorus of answering calls that sent prickles up our spines.

"We rest here two nights. The mercenaries will be back with transport to take us to Drachenfels. It's around a hundred and twenty miles. The roads are not much travelled," Fat informed us. His grey face looked truly demonic in the flickering light from the log fire that was all the illumination we had. "I expect you would like to know what we are to do when we get there."

We certainly would, and all leaned forward in anticipation.

"We are to break into a fortress," the Master began. "It has lain forgotten since the war, because it is towards the centre of a place where a tremendous bomb was detonated, which has left that countryside uninhabitable even now."

"What will it do to us?" Folami enquired. He was more or less back to his old self now, having been tended by Aleksander and Leofric during the airship journey.

The Master laughed mirthlessly. "For so long as we are in that area, we organic beings will sicken. I have no idea whether our mechanical friends will be affected." He looked pointedly at Ji Ye and me. "Once we have breached the fortress we will be shielded from radiation. Then there will be leisure to bring my plans to fulfilment."

"And your plans?" I asked; but received only a slow wag of the head from Fat.

"You will be told when you need to know. Suffice to say that I need your skills, and my dragon, to have any chance of breaking the security around Drachenfels. You will work hard. Now – go do what you want. Fly, feed, whatever. I am retiring."

When Fat had gone to his room Aleksander went to the one he was sharing with the Yoruba, Folami then borrowing his legs to follow. Ji Ye and I banked the fire, and after undressing in our shared little room reclothed ourselves in our own sleek skins, and set out into the night sky.

There were so many stars! The heavens blazed even though the huge moon washed out a quarter of the sky. I exulted in flight, wheeling and tumbling over the whispering trees, skimming the shimmering lake, playing tag with my mother. Then we descended to sit beneath the Milky Way, on an outcrop of rock that overlooked the water.

"I must talk with Mirador."

"Take my hand first," said Ji Ye, so I did; and our nanites talked together. It was strange and intimate. Her voice was soft in my brain, as if she was just behind my eyes. I reached, and found her, all her sparkling intelligence in motion, her in me, and I in her; and for a while we revelled in our communion.

"You'd better get Mirador," Ji Ye said softly. "It's past midnight."

The young vampire was still up, and it was only eleven o'clock in London. I saw the Professor through her eyes, face grave, lips thin. "Shen Aoyun," he said, looking into her eyes, and so on into mine. "Please report."

I told him all that had happened, ending with a plea. "Where is Wilbur? Is he alright?"

"Wilbur is in hospital," Van Helsing replied, rubbing his high brows. He looked very tired. "He has, as you know, internal injuries, which are being treated..."

"Oh!"

"Please don't be concerned; the hospital is modern – by which I mean from the later period of the war. He is in the best hands, and conscious. He asked me to tell you: He loves you, and will be back at work soon." I had not seen the android embarrassed before. And Wilbur loved me still. But why? I had gifted him those injuries, by my selfishness, my lack of care. My eyes brimmed with tears.

"Please don't do that!" Mirador protested. "It's really inconvenient!"

"Do you know anything about this place, Drachenfels?"

"I have had to search diligently for information," Van Helsing replied. He picked up a thin folder, though I knew he remembered everything. "This is all I could find." From across the lake the howls of wolves rose, and his eyebrows lifted in surprise. "Your companion Leofric has found friends?"

"Yes."

"Be glad that the wolf variant is not programmed to fly... Now – to the point. During the war an atomic strike was called down on Königswinter, near the city of Bonn – coincidentally close to Cologne, where we know your Sophie and Arisztide had been on their diplomatic posting.

"The Allied Powers Command claimed urgent need, although the War Planning Group knew of no compelling reason why that sector should be targeted by such a fearsome weapon. Millions could potentially die – hundreds of thousands immediately, many more in the months after. The Axis Powers were under stress, and would have made very little effort to help their civilian populations. The request was resisted, but the Allied leadership demanded – by which I mean the High Command: Churchill, Roosevelt and Trotsky. An imperative that could not be gainsaid.

"And so the bomb was prepared, and sent, and detonated." Van Helsing waved the slim folder gently. "To destroy Drachenfels. To destroy a project called Lucifer's Children."

"I thought that was what we were supposed to be," breathed Ji Ye. Chilling as my mentor's news was, still I smiled.

"We may yet be, if we help the Master in his aims. Abraham – what was the project? What was it intended to do?"

He did not mind my using his fore-name; indeed he seemed pleased by the familiarity. "We do not know. We do not have the information that brought our High Command to its awful decision; neither do we have any Axis documents on the subject. I have deep searches running in various of the old databases, and librarians scrambling through their forbidden stacks all around the world. As soon as we have something we will let you know. But this is my command to you – kill Fat. Stop this before he gets anywhere close to Drachenfels. We cannot afford to find out what weapon is there."

We returned to our room at the quaint inn well before dawn and slept together in a saggy bed with a thin cotton sheet to cover us. It was getting late in the summer, and here in the early hours there was now a coolness that our human remembrances would have relished. We did not care so much; but the feeling was pleasant.

Nightmares plagued me; I started awake with the sun slanting in low through the window, and the birds greeting it in the trees outside. Today was a rest day. It was, we knew, the day when we should murder our alien Master.

But Fat was nowhere to be seen when we rose. Folami was scrambling eggs as my mother and I entered the kitchen. Aleksander sat with a mug of coffee, across the broad table from Leofric, who looked lazy and sated, though still sartorially elegant, with not a hair out of place.

"Where is the Master?" Ji Ye enquired, and received shrugs. We sat at the table to hot plates of eggs and thick German ham, buttered rye bread and steaming coffee. There was little talk. No-one wanted to quiz our Hapsburg about his night with the pack; and to discuss Drachenfels – well, we had so little information. I could not share what we had learned from Van Helsing – and beside, we did not know whether Fat might be somewhere listening to us. So we ate, and then went out to stroll in the sunshine beneath the high cobalt sky, each letting Folami walk for a while as we sat admiring the views, until we found a jetty from which we watched fat fish flickering lazily in the clear cold waters.

Someone suggested a swim. Ji Ye and I simply switched our clothing to sleek body-hugging leotards – an act which astonished the men! Aleksander goggled, Folami grinned hugely, but Leofric leapt up and demanded to know how we did that – after all, he was the same type of machine as we – but we could not tell him. We said that it was an ability we had discovered, and that perhaps he could do it too. He was angry for a while, then sulked for a time; but by then we others were all in the water, splashing about, and like the dog he was the desire to play overcame his annoyance, so that soon he took off his clothes and joined us.

Folami had my legs, for I did not need them to swim effectively, and splashed around like a schoolboy, laughing and shrieking with delight. For a few hours we forgot the awful mission we had been coerced into, and were simply friends having fun.

When in the afternoon we returned to the inn we found two motor wagons outside, guarded by the mercenaries. They nodded to us and grinned at the boys, who were all still wet, as we trooped silently into the building to meet with our noxious Master.

He was not there. Instead the mercenary leader, sitting back in a chair in the kitchen with his boots up on the table, greeted us. Behind him one of his men was stirring a stew.

"We take you to the place," he began in bad Engish. Leofric addressed him in German and the man stiffened, his mouth an O of astonishment. Our Leofric berated him; he took his feet off the table and stood white-faced until the wolf finished. Then he gabbled something in German and left us, dragging the cook behind him.

"What was all that about?"

"Insolent dog," Leofric spat, ignoring Aleksander. "At least now he knows who he's dealing with!" He crossed the kitchen and peered into the pot. "Chicken. Huh. Peasant food."

"Needs more wine," said Aleksander, trying to lighten the mood. He took a taste. "Mm. Nice."

"Leofric – would you please tell us just what happened?"

"The Master has gone on ahead, with the dragon. It was hidden in a valley east of here. Apparently he can ride it."

"Her," I corrected, and he shot me a look.

"Whatever. 'She' is on her way to her mountain, with an alien monster on board. We are to be driven there tomorrow morning by these... these vermin. Dogs!" He banged the table, making me jump. "They will stay here tonight."

"Would you tell us what made you so angry, Leofric?" Ji Ye asked sweetly.

He sighed, rubbed his face. "The Master told us nothing. He left without a word. He expects us to follow. Like pets. That man –" he almost spat "– treated us without respect. His English, a joke. And I –"

"A Hapsburg."

"– A Hapsburg... What are you laughing at?"

We put our arms around our Hapsburg wolf, and after a little while he too began to laugh.

I reported the change of plan to Van Helsing, and he told me we would have to follow the Master. I sighed. We had an opportunity to be free – if none of us turned up at Drachenfels, surely then the whole problem was solved. But there was a slim chance that Fat might discover a way in that did not rely on us; so we had to go there to foil him.

"What about your end?" Ji Ye enquired. The Professor responded with a scowl.

"Since no-one knows what is there, they are dragging their feet. The powers-that-be feel that anything inside that zone must have been totally destroyed anyway. To them, this is a wild-goose chase."

"And it isn't?"

"I don't know." His brows knitted. I could see the strain he was under. "Perhaps it is. But if it is not, then the world is at stake. You are all I have. Go there. Kill him. On no account should you let him enter Drachenfels.

"And more – you may tell your companions about me. About the danger. Whether I trust them or not..." He sighed. "I need everyone I can get on my side." The transmission cut off, and I could no longer see through Mirador's eyes.

Ji Ye looked at me. "Should we tell them?"

I sighed.

We told them.

"What the hell?" Leofric stormed, striding around the kitchen like a rather more handsome version of the Master. "You're foreign agents?"

"Aren't you?" Ji Ye asked disingenuously. Leofric scowled. "I thought we all were!"

"I'm not," Aleksander piped up. He sounded disappointed not to have been asked.

"Nor I," said Folami. He looked greatly amused. "Who are you working for?"

"Well," said I, "I'm working for the British."

"And I for Nippon," said Ji Ye. "Manuel was an agent for the American Republic. I don't know about Hilda. Given that our Hapsburg is – well, a Hapsburg," she mused, "I would guess that he's working for the Evidenzbureau. Or perhaps the Heeresnachrichtenamt."

Leofric coloured. Then he stopped raging around the kitchen and sat down heavily at the table. "I work for Franz Joseph himself, through the Evidenzbureau. I've filed reports when I have been able, but I have no way of getting instructions since we left Sibiu."

"We can help, if you like. Van Helsing can open a channel with your mentor."

"It might be useful. Something awful is about to happen, I'm sure... I had hoped I was becoming close to the Master, but he's just as suspicious of me as of all of you. And now we will arrive at Drachenfels days after he gets there, and no idea what we will find."

"Do you know what's there?"

"No. I've had no opportunity to contact my handlers since our last night in the town."

I called Mirador, and we had a conference. Wilbur was not there. We sat around the kitchen table, giving what little we had to Van Helsing. The Professor noted Leofric's credentials and spoke with him in German, using me as some sort of loud-speaker or telephone, in rapid conversation unintelligible to the rest of us. I did hear 'Luzifers kinder', which meant nothing to our wolf. But he was eventually satisfied, and said at last in English that he looked forward to receiving instructions through us.

The remaining news was not much. Still no decision from the top, still no more information about Drachenfels. Van Helsing spoke with Ji Ye and promised to liaise with the Tokubetsu Keisatsutai, or Tokkeitai, for whom my mother was working.

"They probably will not talk with you," she warned, but Van Helsing shrugged that off.

"They will. I have a contact there, one such as I. We non-humans run things, and we are all on the same side. Now – get to Drachenfels as soon as you can. Be careful of those guides. They may have orders to weed you out.

"As soon as I have news for any of you, I will be in touch. Good luck." And he was gone.

The men – there were five of them now – were relaxing in the afternoon sunshine. Three were down at the jetty, fishing in the clear water. I hovered high, spread out, spotted the fish they'd caught laid out on the grey planking, leaking watery blood from their bashed heads.

The scarred leader sat with the remaining man in the shade of one of the wagons. When I descended we went as a body to confront him. He grimaced when he saw us, and got up off his haunches with a sigh. "How may I help you?" he enquired, with not a trace of civility in either eyes or voice. The other man also rose, clinking with guns.

"We need to get to Drachenfels as soon as we can," Leofric demanded. "Our mage believes the Master's life is in danger."

To give him his due, the mercenary gave this some consideration. He lit a small cheroot while he mulled our lie over, then shrugged. "If you like. It is that way." He pointed north.

"Well, take us!"

"We will. Tomorrow. Otherwise we will be driving in the night, on bad roads. Dangerous. An axle could break."

Leofric spoke in German, and the man laughed.

"I don't care what you are. Two of you can fly – good. Go. Carry the rest."

I stepped forward. "Who are your drivers?"

This surprised him. "Ah? Ernst and Manfred."

"What use are the rest of you?"

"We look after you. And if necessary, we kill you." The other man lifted a pistol and clicked the safety-catch off.

"Are you Manfred?" I asked the gunman, getting a terse shake of the head. "Ernst?" Again the shake. He was not a talkative man.

My arm shot out, lengthened impossibly, crossing the fifteen feet to the wagon in a fraction of a second. The gun went off, but it was too late for the shooter. My arm came back more slowly, hand clutching a dripping heart still beating. The hole in my face closed up. Somewhere behind me the bullet was buried in a tree. I stepped forward and dropped the heart at the leader's feet. "There are two more of you who are redundant, I believe?"

Stripped of their weapons these military types had a lot less swagger about them. We loaded up the wagons with our packs and food from the inn, while Aleksander cooked the fish and fed us all. There would be light for several hours yet – we could be more than half-way there by the time it got dark.

Leofric shared the lead wagon with Ji Ye, Aleksander, the leader, and Ernst; while Folami, Manfred, a trembling hunk of muscle called Friedrich and I took the other. We jounced down the short drive to the road and turned north, the stinky wagons hurtling along at twenty miles an hour, Folami coughing until Friedrich let down a window. The cool air was sweet with pine from the mountains, and the views along the road were superb. We climbed chugging up to a pass and down into a broad valley lit by the westering sun, a patchwork of cultivated fields and orchards, small villages with tall-steepled churches, a river and lake glowing orange like magma. Down we rattled, passing through a hamlet called Taunusstein at the bottom, and onto a nicely-maintained metalled road at Idstein. I hoped that we could do this in one night, for the fear that Fat might have something up his sleeve was preying on my mind. I told Mirador we were _en route_ , and she in her turn gave me information about the other agencies – the Nipponese were happy that Ji Ye was working with us, and Leofric's bureau, likewise, were content, though demanding progress reports hourly. The Republic had been told of Manuel's death, and were resolved to send a team to Castel Dracul to recover his body, along with any clues they could discover. But there was still no information about our destination.

We stopped for toilet breaks for the humans, but otherwise made good time, travelling more than half the distance in three hours. When darkness finally fell we pulled off the road to make dinner and stretch our limbs. Leofric stripped and made off into the woods, while my mother and I climbed into the sky and flew along the route. It didn't take us very long. Below us the lights of towns and villages grew more sparse, until only the stars lit our way. The Rhine sparkled dully beneath us, and the bulk of the mountains loomed ahead. We turned back, not wanting to risk detection, and only fifteen minutes later we were on the ground again watching the men load Folami into the wagon. Leofric reappeared neatly dressed, though with twigs in his hair, and reported that the country to the north was sickening to the wolves of the area, and shunned.

"Better not eat the rabbits, then," I grinned, and to my great surprise he grinned back, then leapt up into his wagon. I turned to Friedrich just in time to see him shudder.

"Don't worry," I reassured him. "He won't eat you." The big man sighed with relief. "You're mine," I continued, and mounted into the vehicle.

The road was good until Aegidienberg, a ghost town with few lights in its houses and signs warning that to go onwards was forbidden. A few miles further, along the increasingly lumpy road, we came to a set of tall gates barring our route, made from steel pipe and thick chain-links, with broken-down fences on either side. The drivers just powered over the collapsed fencing and continued on. By two in the morning we had reached Gräfenhohn, our turn-off to Königswinter, and picked our way through debris almost a century old, armoured vehicles and military equipment littering the deserted town, ghostly in the moonlight. As we wound between the hills, heading towards the Rhine, a signal appeared in my eye – radiation warning, the words flashing yellow. I wondered whether it would affect me; then thought, of course it will – otherwise why warn me?

Drachenfels was on our left as we came in sight of the great river. The road by this time was no more than a track, crunchy with lumps of concrete. We began to pass the remains of buildings on either side, walls no more than a few feet high poking out of mounds of rubble. In the yellowish beams of the headlamps the road disappeared completely, so our drivers negotiated a way as best they could, in the lowest gear, until the wagons stopped in what once had been the centre of Königswinter. When their clattering engines shut off the silence was absolute. We got out. Above us the stars wheeled, the moon was setting; around us were no lights at all. The mercenaries threw bags of food and our possessions out onto the uneven ground. "That's Drachenfels," said Manfred, pointing. I thanked him, and he smiled wryly. "Now we must go." He directed the rear vehicle to turn around, then with some co-operation got his own pointing back up towards the valley. Once the boom of their straining motors and the crackle and crunch of rubble beneath their big tyres had faded, we stood and looked at one another.

"I've borrowed Friedrich's legs," said our Yoruban magician. "He's not getting them back until this is over, one way or another."

I tried to contact Mirador, but all I got was hissing in my ears. When I ramped up my night-vision it was full of speckles, like flickering fireflies, and the radiation signal was flashing bold bright red. I shut it off.

We sat on boulders that once had been houses, and determined a plan of action. Ji Ye and I would scout by air, Leofric on four legs. As a wolf his sense of smell might help to locate either the Master or the dragon. The humans would stay here – we were by the remains of a railway station, its rusted rails sticking up like twisted fingers, and they made a reasonable landmark. It wanted an hour to dawn as Aleksander bundled Leofric's clothes into his pack and the wolf set off; my mother and I rose into the air, heading to Dragon Rock.

My flight was somewhat erratic, affected, I guessed, by the radiation. I held my fox-demon mother's hand, and we flew together for stability. First we went up to the mountain-top the most direct way, finding the ruins of an ancient castle. There was nothing that drew our eyes, so we flew back down in a spiral around the peak, looking for something that we hoped would be obvious when we saw it. There was only rock, blasted clean of trees and earth by the fireball from long ago.

One side of the mountain fell almost sheer down to the Rhine. The other sides sloped more gently. There were the traces of a narrow railway track leading down to the town, and buildings here and there. We searched the cliff down to the river, and the slopes. In some places stunted trees were struggling to grow, but they looked sickly. Nowhere did we find anything that might excite further investigation.

The sun was brightening the sky behind the mountains to the east when we got back to the others. Königswinter was still in darkness, and would be until around ten, I calculated. Leofric returned half an hour after us and reported a scent from the dragon, near some buildings on the slope that we must have missed in the dark. There was also a strong smell of scorched earth. He had detected nothing from the Master.

Our human companions had breakfast from the supplies we had brought, then we flew them up to the buildings Leofric indicated, where he met us twenty minutes later. The walls, which were still intact, were scorched, and struggling brushwood had been burned away from the area around. Our dragon had to have been responsible. But for what purpose?

"This is Nibelungenhalle," Leofric announced as he dressed. "The hall of the Nibelung. The whole area is a tribute to Richard Wagner and his Ring operas. A sort of mountain theme-park." Then he had to explain Wagner and the Ring Cycle to me, while we explored. Both Aleksander and Folami were asleep, covered by blankets we had brought from the inn. My mother flew up to explore the roof while Leofric and I circled the building, the wolf bending my ear with the story of the Ring.

We had not gone all around the windowless concrete shell when Ji Ye flew down. "There's a hole in the roof," she began. "It might have been made by the dragon."

"What's inside?"

"Darkness. The litter of the building. And another hole punched down through the floor."

It seemed that Fat and his dragon had found a way inside. We wondered whether he was still there. "It's our only option so far," said Leofric. "Let's complete the circuit first, and then explore the holes." So we did, and though we found doorways they were blocked by concrete plugs, it did seem that this place, whatever it may originally had been, had become a lid over some secret place.

"Go back to the others," my mother ordered. "I will investigate inside. Give me fifteen minutes – if I am not back by then, fear the worst." She rose into the air and disappeared over the lip of the flat roof before we could either of us raise an objection. I could have followed, but hesitated too long, torn between care for her and care for the rest. Leofric took me by the arm, gently, and I blinked.

We walked back to Aleksander and Folami. They were unconscious, sweat beading their faces. Leofric used a little of our water to cool their brows, and began again to talk.

"I was infected by a wolf on a hunting trip," he told me. "I left my friends drinking in the lodge, to take a walk beneath the stars, to clear my head. This was near Augustinerwald, west of Vienna. Wild country, twelve years ago. We were hunting boar and deer. The night was beautiful – as dark as your hair, Aoyun, but scattered with stars like jewels. There was no moon; but I could see the path.

"I heard – I felt a vibration in the air. Low and menacing, as if someone was pulling a saw-blade gently back over a block of hard wood. I admit, the hairs on my neck stood up. I am not easily scared – well, now never, but then seldom – but I was terrified just then. I continued on."

"Why?"

"Because it was behind me."

I felt his fear. I had experienced this same terror myself in the park in Sibiu.

"I did not run. For what good would that have done? The path I was on led to a look-out affording a view down onto Vienna. I was almost upon it when I saw a useful branch, and stooped to pick it up. When the plain came into sight, and the lights of the city, the sparkle of the stars on the beautiful Danube – then it attacked. Its growl peaked, loud and hungry, and I turned and struck.

"I wounded it, caught it on the side of its head, a mighty whack. But those terrible claws raked my chest, tore great rents in my shirt and gashed me deeply. I cried out and fell back, and I felt I was doomed, but the wolf was staggering from my blow, and before it could collect itself there were shouts from the lodge, and lights along the path.

"It fled stumbling into the forest. My friends carried me back, though I protested I could walk, and one, a junior doctor at the Medizinische Universität, cleaned and bound my wounds. By the morning I had stiffened up, though the pain had subsided somewhat. It rather put a damper on the trip for me, but the others were overjoyed to go out hunting for the wolf. They never caught it."

The further side of the Rhine was lighting up from the sun coming over the mountains. The shadows receded towards us, revealing the devastation the huge bomb had wrought. Across from our vantage was Lannesdorf, a flattened grey drift of rubble. North of that was Godesberg, on higher ground, a blackened glitter of fused ash. I supposed that must have been the centre of the blast.

Where we were the old trees had all been felled, torn from the ground or snapped like match-sticks, and all burnt to charcoal. The radiation meter in my head was hot red, pulsing, when I brought it up. I could not think that anything could have survived. There was no weapon left to find. It had all been a wild-goose chase, wishful thinking from an alien brain.

"When did you change?" I asked Leofric. He shrugged.

"I don't know. Perhaps it was gradual, since the wolf injected its venom. I developed a fever, and lay abed for a week. When the next full moon came, I craved its rays. I felt my body twist, my joints popping. It hurt like hell, a hot hell and a cold together. A week after that I felt well enough to go back to my father's house in Salzberg. But when the moon came full again... I changed."

He looked so lonely, so much not the arrogant young man who had sneered at me when I arrived at Castel Dracul. And for all this time he had believed himself a monster; and now he knew that he was a machine, built by humans to kill humans.
Lucifer and His Children

My mother came back to us, gliding over the uneven ground, her face set and grim. "Get the humans inside, now," she demanded, and while I packed the blankets she picked up Folami as if he was a feather and flew back the way she had come.

I took up Leofric, then Aleksander. We found her standing beside a wide shaft that led down into the darkness of the building. She warned, "Be alert!" and dropped down into the void, our Yoruba friend in her arms.

I was apprehensive that Leofric might simply jump down, but he had more sense than the average dog; and so I took the mage and then him, we all five coming together a hundred feet or more below the ground, beside the rubble from the ceiling and with an astonishing sight to awe us.

There were glowing lights, faint but steady, set regularly around the wall ten feet above the floor, illuminating a circular space perhaps eighty feet in diameter. A pair of dust-shrouded Army trucks squatted on perished tyres beside a dark tunnel that sloped up, we assumed, to an entrance we had not found above ground. Opposite was a large metal door set in its frame, proud of the curved wall.

Folami and Alek had not stirred while we carried them, but when we set them down on the blankets the Yoruba woke, his face slimy with sweat, and gazed up at Ji Ye.

"Are we there yet?" he asked, and my mother smiled.

"Almost. Not far to go now. Do you still have legs?"

We supported Folami as he struggled to stand, grimacing, but he stood at last, trembling. "I feel very sick," he whispered. I checked my radiation meter – it was yellow. Better here than above.

While Ji Ye found the water-bottles and tried to revive our mage I wandered over to Leofric, who was investigating one of the trucks. There were two skeletons in the cab, wrapped in rotting drab uniforms, and our wolf was picking what remained of their pockets. He slung a satchel towards me. "Have a look," he commanded, so I snapped the rotting tabs and emptied the contents on the ground. A knife in its perished canvas sheath, sealed rolls of bandages, cardboard boxes softened by time, their contents strips of white stuff with printed foil on one side. Leofric squatted beside me. "Can you read that? Have you got some sort of encyclopaedia in that brain of yours?"

"What are we looking for?" I started dragging menus down, looking for some way of searching whatever my distributed brain held.

"Medicine, for Alek and Folami. I guess that soldiers must have had something to use in case of an attack by radiation."

The print on the boxes was illegible, but on the foil it was perfectly clear – I didn't need to search. After all, soldiers in the field couldn't be expected to look up a pharmacopeia in the heat of battle. The words on the foil, in German, which I showed to Leofric, translated as 'Radiation Medicine, two every eight hours'.

"But this is over eighty years old," I protested.

"It's all we've got," he countered, so we looked for and found more in the other truck, and took it to our companions. Aleksander was now sitting up, Folami beside him retching. We gave them four tablets each, popped through the foil and washed down with water, hoping our friends could keep the medicine down.

I went back to the spilled pack and picked up the knife. It pulled from its disintegrating sheath with ease, was dark with old crackled oil. The edge was still keen. I intended to give it to Aleksander or Folami, so, having no pockets, I folded it into my own body to keep my hands free.

Ji Ye was examining the door. She tried to pass through it. I watched her body thin and spread across the surface of the metal in a bloom of black, but she couldn't get through anywhere, and re-formed. There was, however, a smile on her face.

"It's locked electrically," she told us. "I could feel the connections in the control panel." She indicated a square box on the wall beside the door. We brushed dust away to reveal a group of faded square buttons similar to those on Van Helsing's programming device. "I might be able to work directly on the wires that lead to the locking mechanism." She melted her hand into the box. "I'm tracing the wires from the box to the locks. My nanites can bridge gaps and let electricity flow, if I can find which gaps to bridge."

We waited what seemed an age, but in reality could only have been a few minutes. Ji Ye's substance was infiltrating tiny spaces, groping in the dark while her brain built three-dimensional models of whatever she touched. There was a tiny click, a series of loud grating shrieks, and the door moved outwards a half-inch, then sagged in its frame and jammed.

"What do we do now?"

"We open it," said Leofric, and directed us. We women built ourselves into jacks beneath the bottom of the door and lifted it a fraction, while our Hapsburg, shedding his clothes, changed to a quite revolting half-human, half-wolf form and curled his taloned fingers around the exposed edge. He planted a hairy foot against the wall and heaved – and the door squealed open, held up by us, propelled by him. A rush of cool air came out, laden with a hydrocarbon stink. Leofric, his muzzle wrinkling, returned to human form rather quickly. "Ooh, what a smell!"

"At least it's not the smell of bodies," Folami said weakly. We gathered up our supplies, and helped our sick humans through into a wonderland of death.

The first chamber beyond the door was stained with soot. The craters left by bullets pocked the walls left and right, around long slots – a murder zone, fire from the defenders pouring into the killing-box. Yet there were no bodies here.

The door opposite our entrance was similar to the first, but already ajar. Beyond was another box, another door, and the first body. The soldier wore a huge black rubber mask, a respirator. He was slumped against one wall, flakes of dried blood blackening the floor around him. Dark metal shields, curved and dotted with bright scars from bullets, were stacked beside the next door. Ji Ye unlocked it.

We stepped into a scene from Wilbur's beloved science-fiction. Here was a reception area: beige walls, metal-framed chairs with faded red seats facing a huge black screen like the one Wilbur used, with a podium beside it. "What is this stuff?" Ji Ye asked, feeling the red material. I stroked it – it was slippery, like leather, but cold and repulsive.

A set of ordinary double-doors took us into a larger space. There were racks of white suits and helmets with transparent visors hanging on either side. They crackled with age when we touched them.

"Should we wear these?"

"I have no idea," I replied, and led us on through the next set of doors, which suddenly closed behind us and locked. Bright bluish lights bathed us, a high-pitched whine assaulted our ears and strong wind blew all around, buffeting us about. When it all stopped the wall ahead slid aside, leaving us free to go on into what would soon become Hell.

We found carnage between rows of huge cylindrical vats, some yellow, some blue, that soared up fifty feet on either side of a central aisle. White-clad corpses, their blood drifted in dry rust-red flakes around them, mixed up with camouflaged soldiers mummified by over eighty years in a bacteria-free environment. Their wounds were slashes, ripped and rent flesh exposing pale bone.

Here and there were the bright silver score-marks of bullets that had ricocheted off the tanks. Folami stooped down and picked up a vicious-looking gun. He tried to work the action, but the grease had dried and the mechanism would not move. He dropped it with a loud clatter that echoed around the huge hall. "The invaders got in," he observed, "and killed the staff before they themselves died. The question must be – did they finish what they set out to do?"

We walked on, clumped together, until a whispering in the air brought us to a stumbling halt. Aleksander pulled at my sleeve. Perhaps it was my wishful thinking, but I did believe he looked much better, though still sheened with sweat.

"There are more guards than they thought," he said, as the air here and there began to shimmer. He rummaged around down his shirt to pull out a large flat silvery disc, impressed with strange designs. I held him up while he muttered at it, as ghostly images formed from the very air around us, wavering spectres tuned to afright. Their teeth were their most apparent part – long, curved, and becoming very real. Aleksander's charm held them away, but we were unsure for how long. The mage bowed his weary head, seemed to be listening to the periapt. Faint lights fluttered before his face. He pressed against some of the sigils on the device – and the ghostly guards rushed toward us screaming unbearably loud. He barked a command and they stopped, gnashing, just feet from us.

"Fingers," he muttered. "Sorry." He indicated to me and I lowered him to the floor, where he sat propped against a cylinder.

"Comfortable?" Leofric enquired, lifting a brow and smiling. Alek grinned briefly and began to press again, carefully. The apparitions turned milky, began to waver; and then they streamed toward the mage, soaking into his clothing, burrowing in ripples beneath his skin. Within seconds all was calm.

"This is what I collect, from graveyards and secret places, because of my amulet," Alek panted, letting the device hang free to bump against his chest. We lifted him to his feet and continued on.

This chamber, high and wide, forested with the tall petrol-smelling vats, mazed with pipework, scattered with preserved bodies, went on for another few hundred feet, ending in a straight wall with a door set in it. Ji Ye stepped forward and seeped around the locks. "Simple enough," she called to us – we were standing well back. Within a few minutes the door clanked and swung open onto darkness.

"After you," said Leofric, with a sweeping bow.

"And your granny," said Ji Ye, raising a chuckle. But she stepped through, and when she did, it was still black. Folami Jones followed her – and the lights came on.

"It seems to recognise humans," he observed. "Hopefully not as food."

When we were all in, and looking around, it seemed almost drab. There were screens, huge and dark, and long desks curved before them with office chairs behind. The desks were cluttered with their own small screens and key-boards. Nothing moved. There were bodies. They were white-clad, and appeared to have died by their own hand. A pistol lay on the floor beside one. We mooched about, but there was no indication of any activity.

"It's a control room," Ji Ye opined, "but for what?"

We went back to the vat-room and searched further, finding another door in the wall off to our right. The pipework from the vats all gathered above and came down the wall, disappearing beside the sturdy door. It opened onto a long corridor, rough concrete walls dimly lit, wide and tall, lined with cables and pipes and with another door at the end several hundred feet away. We were just about to enter when we heard, faintly, the high-pitched whine of the antechamber.

Aleksander twinkled his eyes at me. "Fat?"

"I expect so. I can't imagine who else it could be. At least the dragon is too big to get in here."

"He used our dragon to mark this place for us," Leofric said bitterly. "He used us all to serve his agenda, to get him inside." There was no dissent. We had been manipulated, sent down chosen routes, out-witted at every turn.

There was nowhere to go but on, down to the far door. It had a keypad, of course, which Ji Ye circumvented, and we passed into a huge long chamber empty save for a row of eight wide, deep pits sunk in the floor, with heavy metal lids eight feet across opened back and resting on the rough floor. The walls were burnt and sooty. The pits were empty.

"Whatever was there has gone," Ji Ye muttered. "I wish Jae-eun was here. This is something she would know more about than any of us."

"Rockets, like giant fire-works. They would have gone up," I pointed out. When we looked at the ceiling it was criss-crossed with twisted steel girders, and would once have split open; obviously had, eighty years ago. Thin shafts of daylight lanced down from between the black and buckled plates.

"They have gone!" Leofric blurted. "They were used! The Master's weapon is not available to him."

"Perhaps," Aleksander whispered, in pain, leaning against me, "they just went somewhere where they could be used."

We looked around, but there was no way to open the roof from inside the chamber. No way out for our humans or Leofric. We would have to go back to the vat-room and confront the Master. I looked to my mother, and she to me, our gaze filled with love, knowing what secret we had – until it dawned on us both at the same time.

She had been purged of the Master's virus. She should have been clean, and immune to his devastating attack. But we had forgotten Van Helsing's warning, and merged our substances. I had re-infected her.

There was no-one now in our party who could resist the Master.

"What do we have?"

"Certainly not the element of surprise," Leofric said. "He knows we are here – we opened the door for him, as he knew we would. He will use his power against us, and we cannot counter it." He looked glum. He hadn't put his clothes back on since we opened the main door, had been wandering about naked with us. Now he stretched into his full wolf shape, with the sickening sounds that accompany that transformation. He was big, and impressive. I turned to the pits and shot out an arm, testing, twenty feet of hard nanites, a razor-sharp blade. Behind me Folami whistled low, in awe, and Aleksander giggled nervously.

"May we help one another?" Folami asked his friend. The mage, fully knowing what Folami was, did not hesitate.

"We may," he said.

I looked at my mother. She stepped back through the door and spread over the rough wall of the corridor like living paint, blended with its colour.

We made our way back to the vat room. When I peeked around the door I saw and heard nothing, but I felt a presence I had hoped not to encounter. Aleksander's AI spirits flowed past me, grave-sprites, ghouls, banshees silently gnashing their teeth, rising high. They would not attack us. Ji Ye flowed over the door-frame and rippled across the smoother wall beyond, heading for the control room. Leofric padded out into the maze of vats, his hackles raised. Folami and Aleksander remained in the corridor. "Stay here," I whispered. "There's nothing for you to do out –"

There was the smack of a giant foot, a petulant and powerful stamp like the slamming of a lead door. The whole place shivered. The vats rang, deep vibrations overlapping, subsonic dissonances building to a crescendo of noise. Roof-beams creaked above, concrete dust sifted down, twisting in strange figures through the agitated air. Both humans threw up their meagre breakfasts and collapsed twitching to the floor. My own eyes hummed and I saw double; every particle of my body felt like a bone, every bone being wrenched from its socket. I fell, but did not fall unconscious. As the horrendous noise died away, echoing, there was the sound of footsteps, quick, annoyed, and the sharp voice of the Master.

"What did I tell you? Can't you follow the simplest command? Proportionate responses – none of your grandstanding! There are forces here that are in delicate balance – if you destroy this chance for my people, I will rip you apart piece by piece over centuries... Stay. Protect me, but do not disobey me again!"

There was no response that I could hear, and Fat's footsteps, more measured now, were the only sound until the slamming of the control room door.

The Master's outburst had given me time to recover my wits. I checked the humans and made them comfortable – they breathed, they were not bleeding; they were as safe as any of us here in this damned place – and I knew what I was up against, and what my only course could be. I hoped that I was ready for it. Then Aleksander stirred, and, keyed-up though I was, I attended to him.

"What happened?" he whispered.

"An old enemy," I replied softly. "She used her power to destroy your creatures."

Aleksander chuckled weakly. "They will be back. And I have more – those from here, and worse... Will she be weakened?"

"Assuredly. She expended a lot of energy to accomplish her aim."

The mage, his round face glistening with sweat, fumbled with the heavy metal disc. I hoped his fingers would not slip again. He shifted, I lifted him gently, propped him against the wall beside the door, hidden from the vat room. His breathing was ragged and I feared for him, but eventually he raised his poor head and smiled into my eyes. "Always keep the best till last," he panted. "Please go down the corridor a way..."

I scrambled to comply, dragging Folami's limp body with me, watched as Aleksander mumbled over the periapt and dragged a shaking finger around its rim. At once his skin and clothing boiled with activity, ectoplasm bubbling out dense into the air around, pale amorphous fingers of stuff that grew into bloated wobbling blobs. The air crackled with electricity and grew cold; frost formed on the walls beside him, and rime on his stubbly chin and scalp. The final sprites began to form, drawing their power from the air and from the man. He seemed to shrink into himself, but still his lips moved close to the frosty amulet, still his frozen fingers hovered, considered, pressed; and he did not miss.

The monsters unfolded, huge and awesome, stilted creatures from our deepest nightmares, beaked and toothed: unspeakable things from Bosch and Lovecraft lofting into the air, hunching against the ground, clinging to the walls to peep around the open door. Aleksander lifted his head with an effort and looked at me. He smiled sadly and pressed yet once more; and in silence his monstrous and eldritch army swept out into the vat-room.

I stepped out from the corridor, ready to kill. The silence in the huge chamber was unnerving. Most of the high lights in the ceiling were still working, but there were pools of darkness. I tried to cross through those in the shelter of the vats, floating inches above the now-gritty floor. I came at last to the central aisle that led from the robing-room to the control centre, and slipped an eye on a finger around the broad curve of a vat.

Standing motionless with an impertinent and dangerous tilt to her hips, dressed in a grey cat-suit much like mine and surrounded by a circle of fine black dust, was Lady Sheldrake.

On a sudden the air boiled with horrors. Aleksander's sprites shot at the vampire, closing from all sides, some hopping over the floor, others coming in high and diving down, vast mouths crammed with teeth all screaming – she spewed out her lightnings, rose high in the air, twisted and dodged. I could not obtain any convincing aim, but used the commotion to get closer. Our wolf dashed across the aisle to bracket her, taking cover, going to ground behind a vat.

The sprites, huge as they were, were nevertheless insubstantial. The most of their mass was dedicated to their weapons – teeth, claws, blades. Sophie's bolts took chunks out of them but did not halt their rush; she took damage, particularly in her back and her legs as those horrors she could not focus on took their advantage. She was using up energy at a furious rate, to destroy them and to heal herself. I was content to watch as the battle took its inevitable course.

When the last of the mage's sprites was dust, and my hated benefactress hung spinning slowly in the air, I shot out my arm and speared her through her chest, then rose, reeling in to her at speed. My blade-hand slashed and mauled inside her, but she was just a cloud, with no heart to rend. She knew what she really was.

We collided and I wrapped around her as I had her husband, heating up my skin and my spear, but she laughed and shocked me; her substance, gripping tight about my mutated hand, crawled along it groping for an entry to my core. I broke off with difficulty and spun away. Part of my body was broken off and stuck in her; she pondered as her own nanites analysed mine.

"Powerful," she said, and spat a fireball at me, which I batted away. When I turned back she was fleeing. I flashed in pursuit and crashed her against a vat before she could find my humans. She rounded on me and I head-butted her, driving her back into the vat, making a terrific dent. The metal boomed, but Sophie bounced back unmarked and gripped my shoulders. Her fingers became spikes, digging in. She drew me close. Her mouth opened and I saw her teeth lengthen.

To my horror I felt a pulse start in my neck! The programming that made us vampires vulnerable was asserting itself, presenting me for her to suck, to drain and kill. I had no defence, not against my own deep code.

But,

But then...

The knife I had absorbed for Folami rose up in my throat, vomited from my mouth. My strong nanite teeth gripped it and I slashed her as she closed on me, left to right through her eyes and the bridge of her aristocratic nose. Her eyes burst, blood and jelly jetting over my face. Sophie's grip faltered and I flew back, spitting out the knife. My own blades spun into her face, slicing her, hoping to whittle her head away from her neck. I sent a shock, too, watched her back arch, head and heels drumming against the metal cylinder, but she rallied. Eyes sprouted all over her body, blinkless, intent, staring at me. She melted away from my attack, slid down to the floor and re-formed, and I must follow.

Sophie and I struggled together back and forth, bouncing off the vats, the floor, the ceiling, murder in our eyes. We sizzled with fire and charge, scorched the walls, gouged one another with hooks and penetrating needles. My display showed her body, the damage she was taking. I tried to find the seat of her mind, and supposed she was doing the same to me. But we were distributed intelligences, cunning, learning the other at the same speed, and there was no root at which we might hack.

We were flagging, though. Energy is finite. Powerful though we were, we were running out of juice. She slammed me against a vat and shrieked in my face, and from behind, leaping up to get her, came Leofric, jaws wide and slavering, and took her in the neck, tore her loose from me, dropped to the floor and shook her like a doll.

That ought to have been that, but Sophie flowed around him as I had around her, wrapping his incompressible body then flying up to the lamps far above to drop him back to the ground. Leofric was not so canny as we, nor able to transform beyond his programmed limits: He fell hard, smacked into the smooth stone floor and lay there limp. Bones he need not have were shattered, blood merely cosmetic pooled around his head. I gasped, and lost a precious second; she caught me with a cage of black nanites spun from her body, hovered above me, her hands transforming into narrow flat blades.

"We will see whether your programming has been altered enough," Sophie said with real malevolence, "to survive having your pretty head cut off."

At least she still thought I was pretty. I tested the cage that held me against the vat, but though I could ooze a little through it would take too long to escape, and her blades came –

"Hold!"

Sophie, incredibly, held, her thin gleaming knives crossed like scissors beneath my chin. The Master, dressed in trousers and shirt, ambled out again from the control room. His face was tired and drawn. He flexed his long fingers, looked up at me, down at the wreck of Leofric.

"Where are the others?"

"We are all who survived," I replied. He sniffed, unconvinced, then looked at Sophie.

"There is a way to get them all," he said flatly. "I understand your personal animosity against this woman, but we must be efficient."

"Why?" I whispered to Sophie. She looked back with contempt.

"Arisztid and I found him," she snarled. "And in exchange for this place he told us what we really are." Her blades did not waver.

Then the Master unleashed his curse, and all was agony. My back arched, but Sophie's cage was gone. I saw her quiver in the air, sparks flying – she had been infected by the virus from my own nanites! I crashed to the floor beside Leofric, who was shuddering too, and Sophie, her energies more depleted than mine, ambushed by an attack she had not expected, burst apart, and fell over us in a rain of dust.

Fat padded up to where I lay trembling. "You got me in," he said. "That's all I wanted from you. I had no idea what might have been defending it. You, my team, performed well." He looked almost proud. "Now you die."

I braced myself for the final blow, but a streak of blackness flew over my head and slammed the alien creature back fifty feet through the control room door. I struggled to rise, felt a weak pulse of the Master's curse – I was, I thought, out of its range, or he needed time to recharge – and left the trembling wolf, stumbling to help my rescuer.

Within the control room the lights flickered, whatever mechanism driving them not sure whether Fat was human or not, and I saw mayhem. My mother was sprawled over a desk, groggy, while Fat and Jae-eun battled together in the space before the giant screens. These were now lit, and showed a map of the world unroll'd, with curved coloured lines imposed upon it. A set of numbers counted down in one corner. Guessing what that must mean I looked wildly around for some way of stopping the clock.

One desk had a lit screen, and I headed for it. Fat was engrossed in his fight, and I hoped he would not see me; Jae-eun was hand-to-hand with the creature. She had snapped one of his arms, which hung crooked and useless, and her nanite fingers were burrowing into his chest.

I reached the screen but could see no obvious thing to do to stop the weapon. A cry from Jae-eun made me turn – Fat, shrinking into a ball of grey fire, splitting into pieces as he had before, penetrated his assailant. Jae-eun shrieked, the slivers of the devil lancing into her, mashing her up. I started forward and at once all the lights in the room steadied, bright and clear.

Folami entered from the vat room, his steps hesitant, his face shining with sweat. Pain hunched his body.

"Fat!" He cried. "I have your permission. I will destroy you now!"

The blurred grey components froze. Jae-eun slid off the knives of Fat's substance, wriggled away, dropped exhausted to the floor. The body of the alien came back together, larger than normal and ghostly, its outline shimmering. Behind it the numbers were getting very low.

"You lie," the monster spat. "If you had, you would never have announced it. I have been careful –"

The blades of my and my mother's hands leapt out and sliced into the demon, threshing like beaters in his body, cutting him up like chicken into mince; and his Nemesis, Jae-eun, on her knees, burnt those fragments with white fire from her flagging body. The stink of burnt alien flesh was acrid and fecal, and it fitted the Master's death utterly. When our powers finally sputtered and failed there was not one atom left of the creature.

"How do we stop this?" I cried to Jae-eun, waving at the screen. The numbers were down to just over five minutes. She hauled herself upright and my mother and I rushed to hold her, staggered with her to the console, sat her in the old chair with its crumbling cushions. She looked at the display, then the key-board, shook her head. She pressed some keys, her fingers shaking; the display changed. Small menus like those I had dropped down and she clicked through them furiously. A bright box opened on the screen, filled with lines of incomprehensible text.

"I am rusty," she muttered, "and this is so old..." She scrolled through the text slowly. "Fat has disabled the abort button... This is ancient, XML... if he has only changed a tag and not deleted..." She swore then, and clicked a sub-menu down from the top of the window, the box split in two and now she had two long lists to look through. She compared, rattled changes into the dense text, stumbling a few times and correcting herself with a tut. Occasionally she glanced up at the big screens and grimaced. Finally she pressed a key and was prompted to save. She grunted, clicked, and the box disappeared. The screen flickered, and a new icon appeared, a round red disc flashing. Jae-eun drew the tiny arrow over it and pressed it decisively.

We looked up at the world. The numbers still fell; what was going to happen would still happen, and Fat's Apocalypse would extinguish the world. At least he was no longer here to bring his vile people through... and then they stopped.

"Eight," Jae-eun whispered. "My lucky number."

I limped over to Folami, who slumped against the door-frame. His silent tears fell, and I knew why.

"Aleksander."

He nodded. "We caught the edge of the Master's blast. I survived; my friend did not."

I led the Yoruba to a chair and went to see to Leofric, who still breathed, though he was in a bad way. He lay barely conscious in a pool of his own water, in his naked human form, streaked with the black dust that was all that remained of Sophie. I tried to drag him to the control room but had no strength left, and slumped down to the cool floor.

None of us had sufficient energy remaining to ascend the shaft. We tried the ramp behind the trucks, but it was blocked at the top with a heavy door which we could not penetrate. Behind it, we suspected, would be fallen stones. Folami took some more pills and washed them down with the last of our water. "Not that it matters," he quipped, "for we will die in any event."

We monsters tried to pool energy, to give one of us a hope, but all our nanites were depleted. Any food in this place was eighty years old, and useless even if we found it. Then Folami plucked up his courage, and spoke.

"You must gain strength," he began. This much we had already determined. It was not news. "So you must eat. One of you, sufficiently fed, can transport us up one at a time, and we perhaps can contact your people."

"Are you volunteering as our feast?" Leofric said sardonically. Folami laughed weakly.

"No. But I know a man who is."

We were puzzled. There were bodies scattered around the place, but all ancient, all desiccated. And then Folami's awful words penetrated our brains.

"Aleksander?"

"We can't! It would be – be –"

"It would be sensible," said Folami. "You have all eaten human flesh. What is one already dead, to you?"

"But –"

"Cease. There can be no argument. He was my friend – and yours. His flesh is cooling, his spirit has fled. What lies back there is only meat, and our means to live."
The Wolf

Jae-eun did it, while Leofric lapped up the shrinking pool of water in the vat-room. The Korean came back fat and spry to offer her veins to us. Leofric could not partake, but we women did, slaking our desperate thirst. It did not seem so awful a thing, taking Aleksander's blood from her second-hand.

She flew us up individually, and when we came out of the shell of the building there was our dragon, sleeping peacefully beside it, silhouetted in afternoon light slanting across the river from the west. She cocked a golden eye and we greeted her, tickling her tummy, until Folami suddenly began to cough blood. Then it became a scramble; we lashed Leofric and Folami to the seats on her back then spread ourselves like sheets and clung on, and when she lifted into the sky our hearts – those of us who had them – were in our mouths.

She flew, her great wings sweeping up and cracking down, until we were well beyond the restricted zone. We did not know where to direct her, but she was assuredly a smart beast and flew north, following the course of the Rhine. When my radiation warning flickered green I patted her neck and she descended in looping glides to a flat tarmacked area beside a rutted and crumbling main road – an old view-point over the river, perhaps, or a marshalling-point for military vehicles. I raised a crackling connection with Mirador and described our location from a faded metal sign. There was nothing now to do but wait, and care for our fragile wounded. Folami was drifting in and out of consciousness, and Leofric, weak and depleted, lay on his side on the rough ground, his breathing shallow. I did not know what we could do for either, except to get water – which we did, and it helped a little. My mother went out into the forest and came back with some small animals, but Leofric was too sunken to respond to them. She dropped the little corpses on the ground and turned to Jae-eun and me.

"We must bring Leofric into our company. Do for him what you and I, Jae-eun, did for one another; and what your Professor, darling Aoyun, did for you. Give him the power to save himself."

"How?" I protested. We had no machinery – there was no procedure. Yet I saw our Korean sister nod sagely, slowly; and I knew that I did not know, and resolved that I was here to learn, and to lend my support.

First we three flew off in turn to feed, taking deer or rats, whatever we could find, gorging on steaming meat and hot blood, bloating ourselves, wobbling back fat and fizzing with energy, leaving the local wildlife traumatised and in need of serious counselling. We checked Folami and made him more comfortable, plumping up his bed of leaves and moss, alert always for our rescuers but hearing nothing. It would take time to organise, we reckoned, which was time that neither Folami nor Leofric had.

We sat around our wolf. Leofric and Folami were in the shelter of the trees that rimmed the view-point, so we were hidden, but the dragon slept out on the tarmac, glittering in the level golden rays of the sun. I don't think any potential rescuers could have overlooked her. We bent our attention to our Austrian companion, laid each of us one hand upon him, and connected to one another with the other, a trinity of communication and processing power that opened me like a book. We delved into the werewolf.

He was a mess, close to shutting down. Jae-eun sought and found the control panel he did not know he had, and it sprang up before us plastered with flashing red flags. She reached out a ghostly hand and touched quickly on spot after spot of blood-red iconography, gasping at the revealed damage. I myself could not move – I was awed, rooted in an intimate space with my mother's face glowing beside mine, and the Korean's between us, and all of us inhabiting the cavern of a man made into a machine, a vast factory of mind and vitality now decaying into death. The walls around us dripped with danger and regret, with fear and a tired acceptance of mortality. I felt the ghostly touch of chains and the slow drip of stinking moisture, and over all rode the moon, a sick and tarnished silver, hanging in a sky the colour of old liver. Beneath us the soft floor undulated with a slow peristalsis, eructating now and then in foul low-lying gouts of gas. There was at once a feeling of vast spaces, and the cramped inevitability of the grave.

My mother's hand stroked mine, and I raised my eyes. "Be strong," she said. "This can kill us. Stay close to me." I nodded, dumb, and did not know what I could do to help. But they, my mum, my always-ever best friend, my Jing, my Wilbur... They blended in her, they were with me, my eyes blurred but their hands directed me, they brought up the sigils in my electronic mind and I felt the energy I had obtained flow towards Jae-eun, saw the conduit between us fatten and grow, pulse with blood, with life, chi, energy; and she took it raw and refined it, and my mother too, her abundance flowing, directed, cleaned, spreading into the necrotic tissue beneath us, darkening the pale diseased flesh, raising blood vessels, spreading out and deep, claiming back a space for life, spinning his microscopic machines up to strength. Fast tiny flickers of light sprang up. The analogue bloodstream faded and was replaced by shifting geometries of black crystals, all stuttering into life, calling out their status, their position, their availability. Jae-eun grabbed for his display again and we could see the improvement – much there was still red, but orange predominated, and here and there green.

"Now we go deep," she said, her voice an authority in this place, the Mandarin she spoke so well falling on my ears like slabs of law; her fingers twisted in the luminosity of Leofric's control centre, and we plunged into the heart of darkness.

Snow fell, silent and slow. The tall trees, draped in white, rose into the grey sky like rockets waiting to be launched. Beneath their laden boughs snow heaped against black trunks, and before us there was an obvious path into the woods. We stood, we three, each alone, shivering in the frigid air.

I looked at the others. Jae-eun was clad in a long woollen night-dress with a greyish bed-jacket over, crudely embroidered with blue lupins. Her hair, silvery-grey, was plaited in a sort of crown. My mother looked almost as ridiculous – worn greasy leather half-trousers with grey hose below tucked into sturdy wooden-soled boots, a white open-necked woollen shirt with a short dark jacket over. Her sleeves were rolled up. In her right hand she carried a vicious-looking and well-used axe.

I looked down at myself. I wore a long full skirt and a calico blouse with a brightly-patterned dirndl over it. My hair was its usual black, still long and free, but it fell over my long red hooded cloak.

"What is this?" my mother protested. She brandished the axe. The blade caught the dull light and I fancied I heard a soft sigh from the woods around us.

"It is a story," Jae-eun replied, "from Old Earth. It ends in the death of a wolf."

Ji Ye touched the blade and winced. A bead of blood welled from her thumb, dripped to the forest floor. A low hungry moan rippled through the trees. I tried to pull up my display, but it was not there. When I tried to change my body, it did not change. The others, I saw, were trying too, but with no success. We were in Leofric's world now. We were human.

We were prey.

Looking around brought no comfort. The woods hemmed us in all about, save for the broad path leading away. Nothing could more obviously have been a trap. So we tried to push through between the encircling trees. Deep snow concealed falling ground, brambles hidden in the drifts raked us, low boughs scored our faces – and for every cut or tear the hunger in the black deeps of the forest grew and licked its lips. Finally we had to give up, and looked down the path, loath to start the journey, knowing its inevitable end. My hand itched from thorns, my head ached from the cold and a smack from a branch. Blood spotted our clothes. "Follow the yellow brick road," said Jae-eun. I had no idea what she was talking about, but we set off abreast down the broad path. Behind us the woods closed in, and the hunger stalked beside us.

The Korean woman told Ji Ye the story as we walked, a story that came from Old Europe and yet had parallels in our own cultures. It was a cautionary tale for children – beware of strangers, don't go out alone, don't draw attention to yourself. The end of the story was fantastical.

"So he will eat you," Ji Ye said.

"Yes, in the story."

"And in the story the woodsman kills him, and splits him open, and you spring out alive."

"In the story, yes."

"I don't think it is going to get that far," I observed. "I think Leofric is giving up."

"That's not much of a comfort for me," said Grandma.

We came to a clearing. The snow fell in thick flakes from a sky like a flat sheet of lead. I was freezing cold, my limbs shook, my mind was woolly and slow. It didn't register, at first, what I was seeing, but I made an effort and wiped my face with a handful of the crisp snow to wake my brain.

There was a small sway-backed cottage on one side of the clearing. The corpses of rabbits hung in pairs from the eaves. No smoke rose from the old stone chimney. To one side was a large pile of logs, to the other a stack of chopped wood: kindling, dressed planks, beams glistening pale gold, lifted off the wet ground on rough-cut laths. Some of the piles were covered with sacking.

Beyond the cottage the path continued. The trees were closer together there, the path narrower and leading into darkness.

"Am I supposed to stay here?" Ji Ye enquired, and Jae-eun nodded.

"You come to her rescue," she said, "and you kill the wolf."

Something in the woods was holding its breath. I could feel it. Ji Ye stood shivering, the scratches on her arms vivid against her bone-white skin. She looked utterly miserable. I realised that none of us had reached out to touch the other since we had arrived in this monstrous place.

"I refuse," she said, but there was no strength in her voice. "We go on together."

That was the last I heard for a while; for weariness overcame me, and when I woke everything had become more real, and far more dangerous.

A rhythmic cracking, splintering sound roused me from my slumber. I did not feel refreshed. I raised myself and the ground shifted beneath me – I had been laid on a woodpile, and covered with sacking. I can't say that it made me any warmer.

My mother was splitting logs, swinging the long axe around and down, the gleaming blade biting deep into the wood. An efficient wiggle, and the baulk split. She kicked the halves towards a small pile and selected another log. Her cheeks were ruddy, her flesh healthy and glistening with a fine sheen of sweat. She flicker a glance towards me as I got down from my bed and shook the snow from my hair.

"How long?" I asked.

She shrugged. "I don't know. It seems like hours."

"Come with me," I wheedled, imploring her, reaching out my hands to her, begging but not able to touch her. "Come with me."

But she could not. Her time would come, but it was not now.

The path narrowed quickly, darkened quickly, and the sounds of the axe faded quickly. Branches wove overhead, blocking out the sky and the snow. The path was mud and sodden moss, pocked with stones, and I stumbled often. To the left and the right the close-packed trunks gave little away save that behind them there were shadows and low sounds, padding steps keeping pace with me, sometimes the flash of a baleful red eye, sometimes a hunched hairy back brushing against a low branch, snow falling and carried away by a monster.

Why were there so many here? This was Leofric's nightmare. I tried to force my brain to work. I was not a victim. Not a silly girl in a tragic morality tale. How dare he force me to conform to his designs! I stood still, lifted my head, my nostrils flared in indignation. He knew this story. I had been in it before with him, when he had fought another wolf for the prize of my throat. Then, I was a vampire, a match for him – I could at the very least have tried to escape. But the unnerving fear that night had frozen me. I was angry, now, and wanted to change the story, but I did not know how.

I saw from the corner of my eye a huge high-shouldered beast pad onto the path, blocking my retreat, and another on the path ahead, one more now joining it; and like a magic picture dawning on one's mind from a book the gaps between the trees grew hot orange eyes, long muzzles. Boughs unloaded their snow in sudden soft sighs onto pelts that shook it off with automatic ease. All eyes were on me.

The three wolves on the path, two before, one behind, sat all at once on their haunches and looked at me. It is a fair estimate of their size that their eyes were all on a level with mine. There was something in them, in those eyes – not madness, not hunger. My refrigerated brain trundled through thoughts, squeezing past what I had been forced to be and into what I really was – and I thought I knew what might be happening.

Ji Aoyun, the composite fox demon, because a fox demon is solitary and has no master or mistress. Freedom of movement.

Mirador and me. Vampires. Tied to the monsters who bled us, who gave us their own infected blood to drink.

Wolves... The pack. Every werewolf connected to every other. This was Leofric's pack. I looked them in their eyes, those wise hot bloodthirsty eyes, and they knew I understood. The wolf behind me padded up and nuzzled my shoulder, and I absently reached up to stroke her neck. Her breath was a hot mist on my cheek. When I turned back to the trail ahead one of the wolves was lying down, the other turning in half-circles, eager to move. I got a nudge in the back, and stumbled to mount a werewolf. It rose in one smooth motion, I hastening to tangle my fingers into its deep fur, and we set off at break-neck speed down the path.

How long a time had passed? How long, since I had slept, since my mother had accepted her allotted role, since Jae-eun, beaten down by the story, eventually set off to her destiny? Had she been brisk? Had she stumbled? At the end there would be the house in the woods, homely smoke curling from the chimney, wood from the woodsman neatly stacked beside the door, the smell of baking. How long, before she curled up in that big soft feather-bed, pulled up the quilt, waited for the creak of the door, the pad across the rush-matted floor, the light through the small horn window eclipsed by the broad high shoulders, the dipping snuffling head, the hot wet blood-scented breath...

The pack streamed behind, the leader stretching out the pace before us. My mount was sure-footed, loping fluidly as fast as he could go. I ducked low branches, was showered with falling clumps of snow. The lead wolf kicked pebbles back toward me but they were nothing, just more small stings amongst all the others from snow and bough and conscience. Blood ran from my tiny cuts and abrasions. The pain served to keep me high, high on the hope of rescue, high on the hope of rescue...

And we burst into a snow-free clearing, the pack and me, with the cottage just as I knew it would be, a high chimney smoking, marten's nests tucked beneath the eaves, grass close-cropped by fat wild rabbits, a small tidy garden proud with leafy greens, orange carrot-tops peeping up. I dismounted and ran for the door, but the leader barred me.

We stood nose to nose. Around us her pack stalked, searching, sniffing, glancing always to her, and finally she stood aside. I brushed twigs and snow from my red cloak and marched up to the door, into my Grandma's house.

It was dark outside. The chirrup of crickets came strident through the pierced teak window-frets. A low lamp burned on a side-table littered with expensive ugly ornaments. I knew this room. If I looked out of the window I would see the lanes and waterways of Pudong. My feet clattered loudly on the block floor. The radiogram was lit, a weak yellow light behind the dial and a dance-band from Beijing playing ever so softly. Otherwise the silence was carved around me, a tunnel through which I travelled, seeing the shattered vases, the flowers strewn, their feng-shui broken. I could not lift up my eyes until I came to the two huge oiled teak armchairs and saw my grandparents' legs.

They were sprawled in their seats like dolls. Their throats had been ripped out; blood in rivers soaked them, pooled in their laps, sprayed behind them over the expensive Griffin and Wong mural wallpaper. I had not done this. I could not have done this.

I did not remember.

I remembered the arguments, the fear in their eyes, their defiance, then their defeat when I started smashing their precious possessions.

I remembered leaving, with jewellery and cash and bonds. I do not remember if I had left them alive.

A door, ajar, led to the cool passage that serviced the bedrooms. My heels clicked down it. I found my room, the one I used on the miserable occasions when I stayed with my grandparents. I used to spend hours in it, days, reading, listening to the old valve radio they had replaced when they got their new expensive radiogramophone, paying with my inheritance.

She was in there, lying on my bed, her eyes closed as if in peace. I looked for signs but there were none – her throat was intact, she had no whiskers, a flat Korean face and not a long, strong cruel muzzle. Her chest rose and fell; she seemed asleep, until, as I knew she would, she spoke.

"Did this really happen, Aoyun?"

"I don't know," I faltered. "I truly don't recall."

"It is his gift to you, he said. To eat your Grand-mama."

Sudden rage boiled up in me. "Where is he?"

Jae-eun's eyes flew open and she smiled a smile so fierce, so feral, I thought I must be wrong, that this was truly him, and the end of everything. But it was her, and she was fierce, and so was I.

"Go back." She swung herself from the small bed, stood in the old woollen night-dress and the poor ridiculous grey shawl. She poked her feet into faded slippers I recognised as my own, from my youth. I felt strangely proud that she would deign to use them. I led her through the carnage in the main room – it could not be called any more a living-room – through the door to the compound, and thence through the round gates onto the streets of Pudong.

Jaeu-eun came up behind, but could not touch me. I looked out on the clearing in the woods. Snow was falling. The green plants and carrot-tops were covered in a thick white blanket. Dusk was coming, the sky was low with cloud. In the gathering gloom, at the edge of the clearing, a ring of burning eyes. The path was gone, no trace of the gap between the trees. In the centre of the space, radiating pain, the mad orange eyes of Leofric bored into me.

He lay on his side, chest heaving sporadically, each breath a labour, air hissing between his clenched teeth. His muzzle was wrinkled in a snarl. I took a step. He growled, low and mean, ended with a cough. Dark blood dripped like treacle from his jaws onto the snow. I took another step; his head drooped. He was dying.

Step I took, and step. It was a long, long way, in the course of which I realised just why he wished to die. For he was guilty as I was guilty, he had shown me that clearly, inside the cottage, and we both deserved to die. I sank to my knees before him, a bare foot from his huge jaws.

"It is not your fault," I said, to myself, and to my friend. "It is not your fault."

The look in his eyes pled for this, even as he shuddered and bared his stained teeth. I leant toward him, reached out my hand over his head, hovered while he rolled up his eyes at it.

"I do not know what I did, but I do know why I did it. I was entranced, as were you. The machines – the makers of the machines – they are arrogant, they build monsters from humans and they do not care who they hurt.

"Those days are gone. We are what remains, and we are better than them. We can change. We do not have to rend, to kill.

"What has gone before..." I lowered my hand to his shoulder. The pelt was cold, mangy. Clumps of fur slipped away beneath my fingers, leaving them greasy and foul. Still I stroked him gently. Still his muzzle wrinkled with hunger and hatred and fear. Beyond us the circle of wolves lay unmoving. Behind me the Korean stood mute.

He wanted so much to die, so much for the pain to stop. As had I, too many weary years ago.

There had been, in all the books I collected around myself in my youth, one with words that had at the time given me pause. Because of the stay they brought me, those words, that hesitation, I had come to meet Wilbur, and through him Van Helsing, and through him Leofric, this pompous arrogant Hapsburg. The thought of reading poetry to a dog bubbled up in me and I smiled, light-headed. Leofric gave a lurch and came up, looking down on me now from a height, hot and muscular, fierce mad, his limbs shaking, hot slaver falling on my face. But I looked up, as he looked down, and I spoke words not mine, for no words of mine were adequate; and I only knew these words that had worked for me.

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

His eyes betrayed a puzzlement, and I could well understand, for I had felt the same when I had read these words of Frost's before, in the heat of the Chinese night. And I finished it with tears running freely down my face, burning holes in the snow, my hand caressing my poor wolf's neck.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

He stretched out towards me, and I did not flinch away. Beneath my hand his muscles bunched and knotted, then creaked, and began to flow. Leofric rested his head on my shoulder, just for a moment, then drew back. His black lips curled, his long black tongue lolled out. He licked me, studiously, and smacked his lips. Around us the pack were shuffling closer, and when he lowered his head wearily to the snowy ground I took my leave to join Jae-eun, and held her hand. We watched as Leofric became that naked and vulnerable man, so little different from the naked, vulnerable wolf.

When the moon had risen an hour two clattering machines came down, flashing bright beams around and waking our dragon. There was plenty of room for them to land, or I think she might have swatted them away.

I knew no-one among the drab-clad technicians who came at us, but they were friendly and brisk; and while some of those serious-looking people listened to my mother's instructions on the care of dragons, Folami, unconscious, was loaded and flown away at speed, with Leofric in his healing sleep beside him.

I stood apart from the crowd with Jae-eun, the woman who had taken my mother away and brought her back. "What now?"

"Now, I go," she said. "Take from me; for I will not need it when this body is no more."

I drank from her behind a tree to save the sensibilities of the humans; and when I wiped my chin she smiled weakly. "Fat is truly dead. My mission is ended. Thank you." She kissed my cheek, and turned away. Then she turned back, indecision on her face.

"I... You..."

"Spit it out," I said, smiling. I knew she was grateful to me, as I was to her. I expected only some more profuse thanks, but that is not what she was offering.

"I know you," she said emphatically. "I have known you for centuries. Wherever I go among the Worlds, I glimpse you. Most often, a little girl, wise beyond her years. Sometimes a woman with lines in her face, graven from experiences so far removed from human that I cannot fathom her, but laughter there too.

"And I have seen her as a young woman, walking on the Worlds I walked, observing my quarrel with Fat, never, or so I believe, interfering. Perhaps she does – you would, and you are as much like her as any I have seen.

"For there is an Aoyun in many of those Worlds, on many Earths, and far out in space; you are ubiquitous. Wherever I find you I see her too, looking over you, keeping you safe, perhaps. A guardian angel? I don't know."

"How far have you travelled?"

"Too far. I am ready to go back to Black, and serve out my time. I'm tired." She surely looked it. "I have been so close to death for so long – mine, and many others. That takes a toll. It has brought me to the edge of guilt so often, to the edge of despair.

"But now no more!" She brightened, reached out to me, took my arm. "Let's see the Rhine in the moonlight!" Jae-eun walked me through the trees to a jutting spur of rock, and indeed the river below, silver in the full moon's beams, calmed us both and charmed us with its beauty. Despite that it had flowed through that blighted zone it looked so pure, so tranquil. Thanks to dear Leofric I imagined the Rhine Maidens singing beneath it, guarding their gold, and Alberich the Nibelung, deft and crafty to steal it. Fafner, the dragon up on his crag...

I was in her arms, and weeping, and so we stayed until we heard people shouting for us. It was time to leave.

She walked no more than twenty feet back into the woods, her substance whisping off her like cloud, until there was nothing left but a faint and dissipating mist, luminous in the light of the moon.

My mother and I were flown to Düsseldorf. Van Helsing was there before us and set up in the British Hotel overlooking the Hofgarten. Leofric, now calm and well-fed, had already been delivered to him. The Professor, however, was irritating, demanding we stand on his infernal podium for hours while Wilbur, looking much better, though still threadbare, removed the virus from us all, and opened up the toolkit with all its wonders to Leofric, who was ecstatic – I knew he was, for he smiled briefly. Then he and Ji Ye were sent to their respective handlers, and I was alone with the Professor, and with Wilbur.

And then I was alone with Wilbur, for my mentor just stood up and left the room without a word. My love looked at me. I could do nothing but hang my head. A splash of moisture hit the floor at my feet, and another, and then his arms were around me.

"I cannot," I began, but he silenced me with a kiss. It was a weak one, but a good effort nonetheless. I let him nibble at me for a little while, wormed with guilt, then wriggled free. "I cannot stay with you," I said, and I heard how brutal my words sounded. He smiled.

"Okay," he said; and I was stunned. I dropped down into an armchair and looked up at his soft-smiling face, those brown eyes, that unruly hair... I could not believe...

I heard a mewing sound, sad and soft, like an abandoned kitten – and realised that it came from me; and once that small noise was out all the rest followed. I howled, I gushed with tears, slumped, folded quite in half in that chair, and all the pain I had felt in all my life till then was like nothing, before the pain I felt now.

"I guess that means we stay together," the brute drawled, so I hit him.

The debriefing was gruelling. Every event was dissected, every conversation queried. Who said that? What happened then? I put myself into the back of my mind and let my brain answer from its memories, not listening, for explaining cheapened everything, chipped away at the friendships I had forged, made them simply a means to someone else's end. They were not. They were real, and they were mine.

This went on for a week, and I knew that the others were getting the same treatment from their own people. I hoped they were able to withstand it. When, finally, it was over, and the men from London stood and said their good-byes to Van Helsing – not to me, I noticed sourly – I went out into the town and walked for the rest of the day in the fresh air, and into the night. I did not seek out violence or vice, but they found me nonetheless, and I dealt with the perpetrators with perhaps more vigour than was warranted. I was still what I was; but now I accepted it.

The next day Wilbur walked with me beside the Rhine, where just hours before I had dumped two drained rapists. I tried only to have eyes for him, despite the distraction of a police launch fishing things out of the river.

"The Professor would like me to work for him," Wilbur was saying, when I dragged my attention back.

"You already do work for him."

"Only with you, only for this case. We are free, now – he told me; we can leave at any time, go around the world together, if you like."

"If I like? I may indeed go around the world, if I choose. Would you be happy to go with me, to travel, as you Republicans so quaintly say, 'on my dime'?" It was cruel, but I had had a hard week.

"I..."

"You have been offered a job. I would take it, if I were you. You are obviously more than a mere librarian –"

"There is nothing 'mere' about a librarian!"

"There is something pathetic about a man so needy for attention that he dangles his prospects before one in the hope of securing something better!" We were nose to nose, and well-dressed strollers were giving us a wide berth. I was too far along to care. "Either you are with me or you are not! Don't assume I will swoon for your suit, for I will not. Take the bloody job. Do something you're good at. Find a real girl, a good girl, one who... who will... can love you. Who will not kill you. A human." My eyes were blurred, and I wiped them with the back of my hand. When my vision cleared he was still in my face. "Are you going to take that job?"

"He did not offer me a job."

"He did! You said!" Truly, this was the most amazingly obtuse man there had ever been. "You just said!"

"I did say that, and it's true, but it is not what Van Helsing said... Don't hit me!"

"I will if you don't get a move on."

"The Professor – in his capacity as head of a rather secret and important department of the World Government..."

"Which you are loudly pitching all over Düsseldorf..."

"As you say. He has offered me and you a job."

"One job?"

"You know what I mean – why are you so belligerent?"

"My period is coming," I blurted untruthfully.

We both paused, Wilbur's mouth working but no sound coming out, mine a perfect O of mortification. There was utter silence all around us – even the police were looking at us from the river, bits of felon half-hooked from the waters hanging unnoticed from their poles. I looked at Wilbur; and it was a toss-up who would giggle first. He gulped a few times, but being a man and embarrassed he kept silent, so it was up to me to start it; and once begun, we could not stop for ages.

Folami astonished us when we were finally allowed to visit him in hospital. He rose from a lounger in the sun-room and strode confidently toward us.

"I thought you must have given poor Friedrich his legs back by now," I commented.

"I have," he replied. "These are mine, for life."

I paused. Who had been sacrificed to give him such a gift? Folami sensed our thoughts, and grinned. "I have some news from Aleksander," he said. I admit, I thought for a second the Afrique was talking of some communication from beyond the grave. Leofric tilted his head and scowled.

"I do not like your humour," he muttered.

"None intended," beamed the shaman. "We helped one another. While he lay dying I took his mind. My good friend is in my brain – after all, I am a lazy man; I don't use much of it. So I have a lodger, and the full use of his faculties." He looked momentarily rueful. "But by now I have heard all his jokes."

Then an amazing thing happened. The dark eyes changed, sparkled, becoming the eyes of that one we had lost in the caverns beneath Nibelungenhalle. His voice came as close as Folami's deeper larynx could to Aleksander's light tenor. "Hello! Surprise!" He positively twinkled. "Mine's a large one!"

"It is now," Folami interrupted, which silenced the mage while we roared with laughter.

A few weeks later we were all together again, in a conference room at the Sacher Hotel in Vienna, guests of Emperor Franz Josef's Evidenzbureau. We were not the main event – in fact we were at the back of the room, which was otherwise filled with politicians, engineers and scientists. Van Helsing sat with us, whispering an English translation of the salient points.

The conference discussed the Lucifer's Children project, which had been begun almost ninety years ago by the Axis. Eight rockets to boost satellites into orbit around the Earth; eight satellites on each rocket, armed with eight hardened re-entry vehicles. Five hundred and twelve bombs, air-bursting over Allied territories, spreading virulent plague.

Eighty years or so ago the facility at Drachenfels was the target of an attack by Allied commandos. The mission failed, so the High Command demanded the deployment of an atomic bomb centred on Königswinter. By then it was too late. The rockets had been launched. Over our heads right now, circling like wolves beyond the firelight, Lucifer's Children spun, waiting for a trigger which now, because of us, would never be sent.

The End
About the Author

J L Blenkinsop lives in England with his wife and daughter, both of whom appear in his books. They are looking forward to a time, way in the future, when he might actually make some money from them.

He is an old man now, but has been writing for many years – at first for friends, then for enemies, and now for his family, who are neither one nor the other.

His influences are many – R M Ballantyne, a late nineteenth-century writer whose books A Coral Island and Martin Rattler were favourites in his formative years, along with Enid Blyton, R L Stevenson and Dennis Wheatley.

In his teens he found science fiction. Philip K Dick, Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov among many others; and lately Ian M Banks, Charles Stross, Nnede Okorafor, Aliette de Bodard, Anne Leckey, Pratchett, Gaiman – the list is far too long to credit every author.

With so many influences, what can there be to make his work stand out? Well, there's humour – a vital component, not quite as evident as in early Pratchett, but always infused into the books. Then characters drawn from life, from friends and family, from strangers on the train and from old fiction. You may notice some characters (such as Orace) come from other writers' works, and have barged their way into his because they are just so darned good! And they fit perfectly.

Why am I referring to the author as 'him'? You all know it's me writing this. I love to write, and I started on novels because of my lovely daughter Yifan. Previously I'd written short pieces, but she deserved more. And it has just grown from there.

And, it will continue to grow. There will be at least a novel a year... until I get it right.
The House Party  
(The Technical War, Book Two)

Here are the first few chapters of the next book in this new series. As with all the books, there is a mixing of stories and genres – the underlying story of Yifan and her ability to move between selves in different Worlds, a story that could have been told in the 1930s, of England, its people and its privileges, of a world now vanished but here laid out in its glory.

And the ongoing tale of Aoyun and Wilbur, of Leofric and Mirador, of the ancient android Van Helsing, all caught up in an incursion from Fairyland that began hundreds of years before the Technical War.

If you enjoy this taster, please contact me at john_blenkinsop@msn.com and let me know what you think. I won't spam you or give your information to anyone else – but I will let you know when the book is due for publication, and I will give you a code to get it for free.

All I ask of you is – please, having read Lucifer's Children, and perhaps the previous books – leave a review on Smashwords.com or Goodreads. Writers thrive on reviews. Even if you did not enjoy them, leave a review and tell me what you didn't like – all feedback is helpful, to any author.

Thank you. Now – The House Party...

Wensleydale, 1650

Nora, frightened, and with the winter sun falling behind the fells, sought shelter. The dale below grew darker as the shadow of the hills walked across it, weak lights springing up in the cottages of New Biggin, across the valley, and West Burton, a mile or so away. Nora did not feel she could walk even that short distance. She had shaken off pursuit, was exhausted, wanted only a place away from the thin knife of the wind, to hide from the foreign men who had tried to snatch her up from the moor.

Closer by was the foundation of the house being built by the manorial lord, Sir Charles Powlett, for his daughter and new son-in-law. Very well for them: Nora's family lived in a one-room cottage in Aysgarth, five souls together with only their father earning, mother busy with baby Eric. Next year Nora would be eleven, and would contribute her share if she could find work as an under-maid for some more fortunate family.

Nora crept into the building-site. It was Sunday, so deserted, no help for her; but it had many hiding-places, and she crept into the tiniest hole she could find in the deepest, darkest shelter of the frosted founding stones. The colours in her head brightened the little cold cave, seemed even more compelling here in the gloom. These twisting rainbows had been a part of her life for as long as she could remember; they accompanied her here, now, in the evening of her death, transporting her, as her small heart faltered and stilled in the falling cold of night, to a vicious heaven. Her dying breath brought a piece of that heaven down to Earth, in that tiny and forgettable hole.
Wensleydale, 2021

Gerald had been a butler for more years than he cared to count. He'd served the present Baron's father as his batman during the latter years of the Technical War, and sheltered the family from the plagues which followed. He could not be affected by microbes or viruses – at least, not those that affected humans – and conducted the family's business in the years during which Bolton Castle shut itself tight away from the world.

Those times were long in the past. Life had returned to normal in Wensleydale. Now cars and steam-wagons roared along the winding roads. Commerce joined east to west. Sheep once again dotted the slopes of the hills, lost themselves on the heather'd moors, wandered in front of the barrelling vehicles. Wool was big money, and mutton a delicacy down south. The farmers, here, now, were rich, and their workers well-fed and well-paid. And of course, wealth trickles up, and the Baron benefitted from the increased rents sufficiently to consider renovating Bargh Hall, as a gift to himself.

The Hall lay in the lee of a deep cliff that fell from the moor overlooking West Burton and Aysgarth. It had remained a derelict since before the War, when Sir Harry Powlett's grandfather had, after a similar restoration, been found dead in mysterious and grisly circumstances in the Library.

Gerald had no qualms for himself; but he was a product of the War, and suspicious of anything that could have had a source therein. The death of Sir Martin preceded the conflict, and so could not have been due to any of its arcane and technological magic. But still... Gerald stalked about the place when his duties allowed, poking into hidden rooms and passages, seeking out traps and mysteries for the safety of his master. It was just unlucky that this day he found what he had been looking for, when there was no signal he could send to warn either his human master, or his inhuman ones.

The cellars were extensive, utilising the steep slope of the ground to delve deep beneath the Hall. An ice-house had been built in the foundation phase of building, to keep ice sawn in winter from the rivers and becks frozen throughout the spring and summer, to cool drinks, keep meat fresh and make iced delights for the guests it had been hoped would flock to the Baron's Hall. Gerald, this day, following a map he had built in his brain, ticking off the areas he had searched, anticipating those to come, ruminated on the spectacular failure of Bargh Hall. It had been an unlucky place even before its completion.

He picked his way carefully down the steps into the darkness. The ice-house was a cylindrical chamber, with a chute near the top leading to the outside, down which the river-ice could be shovelled. As the year warmed the level of ice lowered, and servants must descend ever deeper to harvest the cold treasure. Now, of course, it was empty, the floor, when he reached it, merely a drift of litter, crunchy with the skeletons of rats fallen in and unable to escape.

The butler generated a light and played it around the walls. His android mind was capable of meshing with human minds, but there were no human minds here. He hadn't expected any. He was looking for traps, not living beings.

He didn't spot the alcove until it was too late. The tendrils had already found him, were climbing his legs. His light played over ancient brick, dipped into the niche. Gerald tried to step forward and fell crashing to the floor, where his gaze was held by a body hidden huddled there, the pathetic remains of a young human, now just a skeleton spotted with shreds of cloth, writhing with grey threadlike filaments, shining with an inner and sickly light.

The threads burrowed into him, to begin separating the elements of his body. A tittering sound, joyful, juvenile, malevolent, rose around him. His neck, the diagnostic displays confirmed, was being invaded, connections severed; the android pulled his memories into his core, recorded the small humanlike creatures that popped out of the alcove before him. Down here, so far beneath the ground, surrounded by ancient Yorkshire gritstone, he could not find help, couldn't call, could not tell others who might come to his aid.

He was being slowly disassembled. He did not die. All the while he recorded the tiny humans that danced and strode around him, festive creatures, the tallest less than a foot in height. He watched as the dense components of his body were mined by the thin, strong grey tendrils, were drawn back into the alcove, slid between the child's grey bones, finally disappearing into a knot of light that hurt even his unhuman eyes. The miniature people prodded him, gabbling in a language he did not know, sometimes leaping laughing out of the way of an energetic tentacle bearing a slab of circuitry. Gerald had the feeling that he should know what these beings were, but nothing came to mind.

Then came a tight prickle of connection: the Home Hub at Bolton Castle – just a short spike of low-quality contact, but enough for him to send a distress call. He smiled, lubricant dribbling from the corner of his mouth. One of the small people, a male, dressed in artisanal clothing quite at variance with the richness of silks the others wore, turned suddenly towards him, eyes narrowed, and wagged a finger in the android's face.

"Naughty, naughty!"

By the time a party from the Castle arrived, responding to Gerald's call, the creatures and the tentacles had all disappeared back into the alcove. All that remained in the dark niche was the huddled skeleton of a child long dead, and Gerald's detached and gently-smiling head.

In the months that followed the android's discovery, Bargh Hall's renovation was accelerated. The Baron moved into a half-finished room on the ground floor, leaving Bolton Castle to his son and daughter-in-law. The noise and clatter of building-work appeared to energise the old man: he strode around the place with the foremen and architect, inspecting, suggesting, approving. But no-one went into the ice-house.

Sir Martin's renovation effort meant there was not a great deal left to do, save to make good the ravages of a hundred years of neglect. The present Baron's grandfather had collected widely and eclectically, gathering quantities of antiquities, stuffed beasts, arms and armour from every period of British and Colonial history, and books – great piles of books. All of these items had been boxed up and stored away in the undercroft at Bolton, space there not being an issue. Now trails of wagons brought the useless stuff in its crates, down the hill to Aysgarth, over the narrow bridge, then to West Burton and on up the steep track to Bargh Hall. Most of Sir Martin's decorations were obvious to dispose about the place; but the library, Sir Harry decided, needed a more expert touch. He valued books, and learning; and there may just be, in the dozens of crates, books he could usefully use, and books he could lucratively sell.
Wensleydale, 2023

Brown drool leaked from the corner of Mirador's mouth. Aoyun turned away in pretended disgust.

"If Leofric were here, he would wipe it away for me," Mirador complained. Her vampire companion shrugged.

"I am not your lover... Are you clean yet?"

Mirador, a vampire herself, grinned, licked chocolate from her lips and patted the excess away with a paper serviette. "Yes."

York was a city that immersed itself in its own history. The round castle keep on its high mound, the soaring Minster, the mediaeval buildings leaning together within the city walls – all maintained by the city councillors on the revenues of wool and minerals, and attracting tourists from the south. From the railway station the two women had walked to their hotel, examined their separate but connecting rooms and then gone out to explore. Some magnet drew the younger vampire directly to Terrys of York, in St. Helen's Square. "They've been making chocolate for two hundred and fifty years," she explained to Aoyun, whose enthusiasm did not quite match her own. "I've so looked forward to this!"

"You have spent two shillings on confectionery. Do you intend to live on it?"

"Two shillings, twenty cents, two mao. Isn't the universal currency marvellous?"

"It is, if you are not the one paying," Aoyun complained, two shillings down after her rash decision to indulge the younger girl. "All I can say is, you are paying for dinner tonight."

After Terrys they strolled around the city and along the banks of the Ouse, a placid river overhung with willows and much loved by the citizenry. Working families sat on the sward eating Sunday picnics. Society dames and their younger, poorer companions walked sedately together. Officers from the garrison paced arm in arm, shooting the breeze, twirling their moustaches at nursemaids and debutantes alike. The June sun in her sky dodged occasional clouds, fat like Yorkshire sheep, to scatter warmth over all.

"This place will be wild, in the night," Mirador observed. "Muggers, and sly rapists. A good place for a hunt."

"Noted, darling. But range far while you are here. A spate of murders will attract attention."

Mirador snorted, and grabbed the bag of sweets back from her friend. "I'll be circumspect. In fact, chocolate seems to sate me. Perhaps a steak tonight, and bed."

In the event they went out together, once the late darkness had settled over the city. Walking arm-in-arm in the park drew just the sort of attention Mirador had predicted.

"Where is you two ladies a-headin' this fine evenin'?" The bulky man and his two companions rose as if by machinery from the bushes that clumped in the park, dark masculine shapes, sudden threats calculated to freeze two maidens in their tracks. Aoyun and Mirador duly froze, and let their victims approach.

"Cat got yuh tongues?" the spokesman enquired as his friends bracketed them.

"Our mother entreated us never to talk to our food," Mirador responded coyly. It took a moment for this to sink in; and by the time it did it was far too late. Her teeth were in his throat, their needle-points growing down into him, questing for the deep, rich carotid. Aoyun punched one of the other men in the head, almost decapitating him, then took the remaining thug by the arm and pulled him back to the bushes.

"Let's get intimate," she suggested.

For some unaccountable reason the young man seemed reluctant.

They'd already scouted out a handy reservoir, into which they dumped the bodies, and got back to the hotel before two in the morning. York seemed to go to bed at ten, the hotel porter likewise, but when they gained their rooms, by the simple expedient of flying up and oozing in through the window, the girls, high on blood, became garrulous, and lovingly disposed to the world in general.

"It's like being drunk, don't you think?"

"Giddy. The air spinning around you like – like a carousel." Mirador paused at the connecting door. "May I?"

Aoyun smiled, took her friend's hand, and pulled her into her own room. There was nothing more than companionship in the gesture; but while men might part with a 'cheerio!' women were more easy in the firmness of their close friendships; and so the two vampires spent the remaining hours of the night asleep in one another's arms.

*

The stopping-train to Cockermouth via Leyburn lived up to its name, wheezing into every station and halt, squealing to a stop from time to time in-between to bid sheep shift across the line, or lazing over a tall viaduct to let its passengers enjoy the gorgeous views. Aoyun read the poems of Robert Frost from her precious first edition, remembered how one poem in particular had saved the life of the Austrian werewolf, Leofric. She wondered how he and Mirador had got their act together. Her friend was uncharacteristically reticent about that.

Leyburn, finally achieved, was a tidy town sloping down a long hill. The station was near the bottom, of course. The porter she engaged was an unsmiling, unspeaking young man who blinked rarely, like a lizard, and she watched him watching her as she waited for what had been advertised as 'the local' – since the stopping train unaccountably did not stop between Leyburn and Kendal – to complete her journey. She used the time to contact Mirador, who was replenishing her supplies of chocolate.

"You'll get fat," the Chinese girl remarked.

"No I won't."

"I have to provide some brake to your excesses," Aoyun laughed. "Or you would leave the citizens of York with nothing!"

"Oh – Turkish Delight!"

Aoyun gave up the mental chat, just as the local train sagged into the station with all the grace of an expiring hippopotamus.

It was a slow and beautiful jaunt between Leyburn and Aysgarth. The sparkling river Ure caught her eye between the trees – she blessed her lover Wilbur, and Van Helsing, her mentor, for they had delved into her programming to remove the fearful results of daylight on the vampire symbiont. But they had not been able to hack the deeper code. She still craved human blood, still could not see herself in a mirror – a quantum effect, her beau had told her, which helped not at all – and remained vulnerable to the stake and beheading.

Aoyun brightened as she listened to the birds along the way. The song thrush, the blackbird – even the cheep of the common sparrow – were music to her, sigils of a world that was the best of all possible worlds. It had been engineered so, and she knew it. Since the Great War, which had ended all wars, the world was governed by vast artificial intelligences, hiding their power behind perpetual leaders cloned from history. Queen Victoria ruled a cut-down British Empire, Franklin Delano Roosevelt presided over the American Republic, and Cixi, the Empress Dowager, commanded the Middle Kingdom – China, Aoyun's birthplace and the country she missed so much.

For in China all was energy, vitality! The streets never slept, commerce continuing into the night, the cries of street-vendors so familiar that anyone who needed rest snored contentedly in their beds while the cacophony of the city clamoured around them. Aoyun missed the night markets, the cuttlefish and beetle-grubs grilled on sticks, cheap umbrellas you would buy if it started to rain, dough-sticks dusted with sugar. Here in England the rain fell slowly, miserably, and the sun warmed hardly at all. The British took to their beds at nine or ten in the evenings. There were dark and empty nights for sure, good for villains and the monsters that preyed on them, but boring for one used to the Orient and its ways.

The train climbed away from the Ure and up into Redmire where the passengers took advantage of a ten-minute stop to stretch their legs. Half a mile away there stood Bolton Castle, a grey square keep thrust up like geology, mirroring the sheer grey scars that ran down from the tops of the hills. Aoyun got back in her carriage as the porter's whistle blew, and fell back into her reverie.

Since their involvement the year before in the affair of the Master and Lucifer's Children Aoyun and her beau Wilbur had set up together in a cosy house in Hampstead, gathering to themselves a collection of neighbourhood misfits as friends and dinner companions. There had been talk that they might marry – but that came more from Wilbur's side than from hers. She loved him, of course, from the time he had confronted her in Hong Kong with his knowledge of what she was. But that very fact – that she was no longer human, but a machine, a relic of the later years of the Great, or Technical, War – stood between them. While they lived together, loved together, the constant thought was in her mind: that she had almost killed him in Sibiu when she made love to him, on the night her dead mother revealed herself. Wilbur was mortal. He oft-times expressed his wish to join her in her condition; but that was because he was a fool, a fool in love.

In the throes of her passion she sometimes felt her teeth stretch, the blood-lust rising, Wilbur above or beneath her, helpless... She erased her mouth then, dissolved the traitor teeth back into the blur of microscopic machines from which her body was built. The sight of her mouthless face generally brought Wilbur to a more powerful effort; an encouragement and a frustration she loved and hated in almost equal measure.

Abraham Van Helsing, their mentor and friend, sympathised but could offer no aid. "We have given you as much control of your body and mind as we are able," he explained when she taxed him with her limitations. "For reasons which must be obvious to you the methods by which you crave blood, and by which you may be destroyed, are deep in the code that runs in your nanomachinery. We are working on it – Wilbur especially has accumulated a huge pile of books and manuals on the subject of nano-programming – but the creators did not want their creations to become invincible, nor to stray away from their essential purpose as a weapon of war."

The best they could do was to relieve her of the corrosive action of sunlight; and even that had been fraught with fears that changing the programming at that fundamental level might kill her. It had not, and so here she was, looking out on the sunny dale, the river sparkling in her eyes, the sun's warmth a pleasure on her skin.

She alighted at Aysgarth, a village of grey stone houses and mills sunk into the valley, curtained by woods, with the river falling in a series of cascades of ale-brown water beneath an ancient bridge. The trap she engaged waited for a convoy of steam-wagons to cross before clattering over and up the steep hill to the main road.

West Burton was picturesque in itself, and benefitted from its open situation with glorious views of the moor-topped hills that loomed over Wensleydale. Her accommodation at the Fox and Hounds was in a solid Yorkshire stone house behind the pub, where she had an upper room with an appealing view towards Aysgarth, and breakfast thrown in.

Aoyun was travelling with a single trunk of an appropriately convincing weight. Her clothes she could make from her own substance, but weapons and technology had been foisted on her by an enthusiastic young man introduced to her by Van Helsing as 'Q'; these occupied most of the luggage-space, the rest being taken up with books and recreational equipment – walking-boots, a collapsible staff and camping stuff. Her cover was that of a post-graduate student collecting the quaint ways of country folk for her dissertation in the science of Anthropology, for which she had studied with an actual graduate, while dear Wilbur had the easier task of learning to appraise rare books – something in which he already had a little proficiency.

She hung up some token clothing in the small wardrobe, re-locked the trunk and headed downstairs and out across the yard to the pub, clutching a hefty book on British Folklore. The snug was deserted, so she followed a murmur of deep voices into the bar.

She was greeted with silence.

There were nine men in the wide, low-ceilinged room, the elders taking up the benches by a fitful fire, the youngers engaged in a game of darts. Behind the bar a tired-looking woman pulled a pint for a lanky grey-hair. She swept the pennies into her cupped hand through a puddle of beer and dropped them into her apron-pocket. "Can I help you, miss?"

"I'd like a drink, please, and some food, if you're serving at this hour," Aoyun said confidently. She felt a bout of male entitlement coming on, and was all too happy to accommodate it.

The barmaid smiled. "What'd ye like, love?"

Aoyun looked at the drinks the men had parked up in front of them. "That looks nice. I'll try a pint, if I may?" Some low chuckling broke out.

"If you'll go sit in t'snug, I'll bring you a half of mild." The woman smiled again, hoping that the foreign girl would twig.

"I'm fine here," Aoyun said, sitting at an empty table. "The snug is so empty and cold." She smiled around at the men, who grumped back at her like walruses. A dart went awry and smacked against a beam, spinning off past an old man's ear. Wilbur would no doubt have brought to mind the O K Corral.

"Let 'r stop," one of the old ones said. "She've nowt to fear, nor we. Move wi' t'times." He supped the last of his beer and looked into the pot. "Bugger."

Aoyun laughed, genuine and loud. "If it takes a round, put it on my bill!"

She'd arrived too late for lunch, too early for dinner. Her machinery made short work of alcohol, converting it to energy with relentless efficiency, so by the time the sun's rays levelled across the green outside the small-paned windows she alone was capable of coherent thought. Some telepathy brought the odd idler into the bar while she held her court, drawn by the novelty or the free ale, but most of the village's men were out in the fields or up on the moors tending sheep, and would be home for their teas before daring to leave their wives for the comfort of the pub. It was an opportunity Aoyun had hoped for. She answered the inevitable questions about her purpose in visiting Yorkshire – to research folk-tales, local history, stories of the bizarre for her dissertation – and about her marital status – single, but with a fiancé back in London Town.

"Lucky bugger," remarked one young man, gazing down into his tankard with a glumness that might have been feigned. "But 'e's nor married quite yet!" The men roared, and Aoyun too. She was sitting beside the oldest-looking man in the room, snug on his settle next the fire, a pint of the delicious local ale before him on the table. He didn't seem to have heard the young man's joke.

"Wheer's tha' from?" he enquired, turning rheumy eyes to Aoyun.

"I'm from China," she replied, and he nodded.

"China. Long way, so t'song goes... Me son, he went there, forty year sin'. Ah got letters, till five year sin'. First Mate on a Clipper. Skipped at Shanghai, for a girl 'e met...

"Ne'er met any Chinaman til' thee, and th'art a picture. I'll not fault him taste nor sense. Th'art a sensible and comely lass, wi' diplomacy in tha' brain, and iron in tha' heart.

"Th'art here for tales? Aye, weell. There's plenty hereabout. Stick here for supper, an' Tom'll sitheh. Then tha'll know."

"Dinner's at seven," the barmaid said, picking up the old man's mug. "Tom'll be in by half-past. If you want fairy stories, you've fallen right here." She waltzed off, and the old man coughed a laugh.

"Tom'll set thee right," he wheezed. "And fairy stories is what ye'll get."

She excused herself on the pretext of having to get ready for dinner and left the bar full of cheerful freeloaders, to go back to her room and a call to Mirador.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to many people for the final form of Lucifer's Children.

First, and sadly, to my late friend Alek Lotoczko, who suffered my constant harping about the book while we sipped elegantly on Guinness and Kronenbourg in Canary Wharf. In the cold. His character – his real character – is, I hope, amply displayed in this book.

For all my life, I will remember the love he had for all his friends, and for his children, his partner, his step-daughter – and for his own life, which he credited, for its depth and richness, to that wonderful, intimate and extended family. Alek was my best friend. He was always slow to criticise, swift to praise. He was also, despite his many awful jokes, the funniest man I have ever known. I miss him greatly.

To my wife, and my daughter, I of course owe a great debt. They drive these books. Without them, I would not have written anything. Some may blame them....

To the writers and readers who have changed my words for the better. For Carole McDonnell, Eva Caye and Marion Pitman, all brilliant authors whose boots I am thankfully too far away to lick, I give thanks. To Tjo de Vlieger, who reads everything and says very little – you will be back! And to Linda Smith, who made a huge number of suggestions, most of which have been incorporated into the novel. You all, and many others, have helped to make this book, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

JLB, 5 January 2019.
