Click. The hammer was drawn back.

Kate didn't move.

She held Jess in her arms. The girl was in a swoon. She was an awkward weight. In the moment, Kate heard Jess's beating heart.

Keith helped Fran stand up, get her robe straight and stem the blood pouring from her nose with paper tissues. Kate had another insight. Keith, the callous predator, was more into Fran than she was him.

DeBoys took the gun away from her head and showed it to her. A revolver. The cylinder was full. Matt silver bulletheads. That ammo would settle her hash, all right. He took aim again. His floppy cuffs were damp, stained with his own bloodsweat.

She couldn't expect help from the others.

Saying anything was likely to annoy DeBoys enough to finish her quickly. He could have Anna bite Jess, then glut himself on the snake woman, so he wouldn't miss his fix.

The door opened. A figure was outlined.

James Eastman. Not a Black Monk. She was saved.

The newcomer stepped into the room. Lava light rolled over his face. Not James Eastman.

Caleb Croft.

The last person in the world who'd want to save her. Indeed, someone who'd be only too happy to watch her execution. He'd been cheated of it during the Terror.

If DeBoys shattered her skull with silver in front of Croft, it would be like putting a ripe red apple on the Professor's desk. He'd get a first class degree without sitting any exams.

Kate relaxed and let Jess roll out of her arms. The unconscious girl rucked up the carpet and ended up face-down. Her sacrificial dress was backless. She had fluff and grit stuck to her bare skin and white silk-covered rump.

That might be the last thing Kate ever saw. A Van Helsing's bum. She would have words with God  -  if He existed  -  about this turn of events. Perhaps she'd get a better answer from the Other Fellow.

'Sir, she's not worthy,' DeBoys said. 'She won't kill.'

Croft smiled, a matter of a twitch of his dead mouth over jagged fangs. Blue and green blobs of light fought over his face, an eternal yin-yang struggle.

'Won't she indeed?'

'She's not a real vampire, sir.'

Croft chuckled, a sound like a shower of razor-blades.

Between the beats of Jessica's heart, between the ticks of Croft's expensive wristwatch, Kate stood up, shoulder-slammed DeBoys against the wall, took his gun away, rammed its barrel under his ribs, and shot him, firing upwards, bursting his heart with silver.

She let him go.

He took a step away from the wall and turned  -  red speckles grew in a circle a foot across on the back of his cape, as if the lining were leaking through  -  then fell.

Anna hissed. Kate pointed the gun at her.

'You're not a killer,' she said, forked tongue darting.

'I'm not a murderer,' Kate explained. 'I don't believe in capital punishment. I'm not a sadist. I don't enjoy killing, but...'

'Kate Reed was  -  is  -  a terrorist, space kidettes,' Croft told his remaining students. 'If Mr DeBoys had paid attention to my lectures, he'd know that.'

'I haven't had to kill anyone since...'

She didn't need to tell these people that. She had no nostalgia for the Terror or the Irish Civil War.

DeBoys looked like he didn't believe he could die.

She wanted to kick the smug, dead bastard. He'd made her go against her principles, after all. He had turned her into a killer. With that annoying clarity she hoped would soon wear off, she saw she'd served Croft's purpose too. The Black Monks' antics brought on him attention he did not seek. She'd ended that. If anyone was Grand Master of the Black Monks now, he was.

Of course, she could shoot him and have done with it.

She'd come up in the dock just after Donna Rogers. With a few character witnesses and equivocal testimony from the other Black Monks  -  who would, she guessed, feel disillusioned with their masters and mentors about now  -  she might get away with it. Penny, for one, had skated off after worse. And Genevieve. Lord, what other vampires had done...

But, annoyingly, it remained. She was not that kind of girl.

The doorway behind Croft was crowded. A gunshot always drew attention. Everyone wanted to know what had happened. James Eastman was there, just behind Croft.

Another unwelcome intuition. She'd mistaken Croft for Eastman in silhouette because they looked alike. It wasn't common, but some vampires could father children on warm women. Eastman called Croft Big Daddy. And hated him. Kate could only guess what the former Lord Charles Croydon, despoiler of warm wenches, had done to some poor Californian in about 1940. She gave Eastman the gun. How he used it was his decision.

Also in the crowd was Nezumi, one sock rolled down around her ankle, scratches on her face, hockey stick on her shoulder. Neither twin was there. Nezumi blew upwards, shifting her fringe out of her eyes. She flicked a glance at the dead man on the floor and nodded approval.

Kate accepted that she had saved herself, and not waited for someone else to do the dirty work. She could live with the guilt. The five or six others she'd killed had all been trying to murder her too. She'd not drunk any of their blood. She would not let being a vampire define her like that.

Now, with an audience, she needed to make a gesture.

She knelt by DeBoys, stuck her fingers in the ruin of his back, and licked them clean.

Images and impressions sparked. A big house, riding to hounds, flogging and being flogged, a lot of women, black candles and goat-heads, a beer glass smashing on an old man's face, pain, pain, blood, blood, blood. and nothing.

She stood.

Anna Franklyn came at her, spitting venom. Nezumi twisted the handle of her hockey stick and drew a steel short-sword from it. She placed the edge of the blade against the snake-woman vampire's throat. Anna closed her mouth and shed scales, showing a new, as-yet-unused face. Nezumi nodded, seriously, and Anna stepped away from the sword.

Someone must have called the police by now.