Everyone else did.

Contemptuous of Hollywood, all three of them attacked at once. Four rounds from the nail gun hit me in the shoulder, buloke bullets, two of which went straight through; the other two set my heart’s klaxon off again.

Nonetheless sly joy warmed me. Because they had no idea, these over-equipped hopefuls. They had no idea.

Wrong.

I had no idea.

The dark girl went past me towards Justine, and my lunge to intercept her took me off-balance. There ought to have been plenty of time. We ought to have been operating according to the usual farcical discrepancy. (I watch humans trying to kill me the way McEnroe watched Connors trying to play him in the ’84 Wimbledon final, with a sort of incredulous pity.) But that’s not the way it was. The way it was was that whoever these three were someone had used them to take combat training to a new level. I got the dark girl off her feet, yes, but not before taking a deep cut across the chest and four more rounds in my left leg. She got, kicking, away from me. I could smell Justine behind me. I ducked under the redhead’s sword and broke her left femur with a single chop (a haito uchi, to be precise. It was good to feel my assault options wide awake, restive; briefly brought back Atsutomo’s training compound in Kikaijima, the damp hot mornings, the mountains like slumped heavyweights themselves.) Her odour was delicious: adrenal sweat and apricot hand cream and the fatigues’ whiff of clean canvas. Also, bizarrely, incense. Her breath said tuna Niçoise less than five hours ago. She went down in silence, mouth open. The lamplight caught her eyelashes. The guy’s hand gripping a stake whipped past my face. He was heavy but fast, with experience deep in the muscles, a useful familiarity with violence. AB negative, my nose reported (shrugging, doing its duty) fried onions, coconut Radox shower gel and roll-up smokes—and, again, incense. The hand holding the stake was broad-fingered, with discernible dark hairs. It would look dashing, Rolexed, coming out of a crisp white cuff.

The redhead speed-rolled away, still holding the sword. She had an intriguing Celtic face, broad-cheekboned and wide-mouthed, and the milky green eyes like a flash of faerie. Meantime I head-butted the guy from underneath, a sharp drive upward that cracked his bottom jaw (I heard the absurd clack of his teeth hitting each other) and snapped his neck back into his shoulders. He didn’t fall, but it was all the time I needed. I wrenched the stake from him and jabbed it hard and fast into his throat, felt the trachea’s cartilage split and three or four internal carotids rupture. The incorrigible bloodstink touched me, lewdly, but I was still full from Randolf. It brought a note of disgust, and in any case to drink again so soon would be dangerous. (Stake through the heart, beheading, fire—and overdose.) All the while some backroom boys of consciousness were going through the motions of wondering who these people were, but without much conviction: You’re a vampire. Someone’s always trying to kill you. After a while it doesn’t matter who or why—only that. The dark girl had got out of my sight. I let go of the guy, who dropped first to his knees then onto his side, both hands around the stake in his throat. He was making a depressing soft gargling sound. I was thinking—above or below or alongside the combat-maths—that Justine and I would have to use what remained of the night to Get Rid Of The Bodies and proof the room against the real world’s satirically unglamorous CSI squad. I turned to make sure she was all right—and a lignum vitae bolt hit me in the chest.

Not the heart. But this time less than an inch away. The dark girl had got behind one of the Thomasvilles and lined me up in the crosshairs.

The heart, in shock, went still.

It sprang a lock in me. I leaped, took the armchair and the girl twenty feet across the floor to crash against one of the stacks. Books toppled and fell. I pulled her out by her hair. She wriggled extraordinarily, and twice I almost lost my grip. But the heat coming off her now spoke of resignation. Her soul had turned to the exit, was already murmuring the first words of its prayer.

In fact, no: she was murmuring a prayer. The Lord’s Prayer. In Latin.

“Pater noster, qui es in cælis,” she said, while blood ran from her nose. “Sanctificetur nomen tuum; adveniat regnum tuum; fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra.”

“Who are you?” I said.

“Panem nostrum cotidianum—”

“Who are you? Speak now or you—”

I don’t know how she did what she did next. I had her by the hair. Her back was arched, her feet flat on the floor. I felt her thrust backwards against me, then her weight shifted—and her legs were around my neck.

There was, I knew, very little time. Her hands were free and already busy with a holstered stake. Heat pounded out of her. Her tiny armpits were drenched. The small, frenetic reality of her made me feel tender towards her, as did the inevitable realisation that we were in the sixty-nine position, albeit vertically, followed by the intuition that she was a virgin.

However, I broke her neck, cleanly and quickly, then let her slide to the floor, where she lay, one hand trapped beneath her, the other on one of the toppled books. It was open, face-down. An 1894 edition of Browning’s Collected Works. Something else fell, too. A first edition of Sylvia Plath’s The Colossus. I thought, I bet that’s open at “Black Rook in Rainy Weather.”

At which moment the light in the room shifted, and Justine screamed.

7

SHE WAS ON her back on the floor in front of the desk. She’d pulled the Tiffany lamp off the table by its cord. The redhead stood over her, leaning on the sword as if to provide support to her broken leg.

But the sword was buried in Justine’s guts.

Although a single leap took me back across the room, there was plenty of time. Time does you this perverse service of expansion when all you’ve got to fill it with is horror. Time to begin the relevant calculation of how long Justine might have left, of how quickly an ambulance could get here, of how I’d have to move her to another room—or better still outdoors—I came home and found her on the lawn like this—and how soon, since it was a stabbing, the police would show up. But time for questions, too: What would I do if she died? How would I stand being alone? Where, since Las Rosas would die for me with her, would I go? Time for whatever it was she hadn’t told me, the lacuna she might take to the grave, and for the dream, and for the beginning of the sense that I knew something, I knew something if only I could reach it … Time, too—how not?—for the perennially available option—to Turn her—and the irony that after all these years of her postponing it, choosing it now might kill us both.