I got to my feet. The face and chest wounds were burning. Obviously I’d heal, but the pain was determined to show its stuff while it could.

However. This was a chance. Russell & Co. all had mobiles. I’d just doubled the time I had to set up a rescue. (There remained the question of how, once inside the renegade WOCOP facility, I was going to let my guys know where that facility was , but again, since there was nothing to do but trust I’d find a way, that’s what I did, wondering, with haggard realism, whether mobile phones were small enough these days that I might conceal one up my arse.) I hurried out onto the landing.

Cold air and the sound of heavy rain came down from the floor above. The boochie must have taken out roof-man, Andy, and got in through the skylights—whereupon I remembered young red-haired Wazz, as yet unaccounted for, who’d been on watch on the ground floor. If he was alive he’d be on a hair trigger. I didn’t want him shooting me by mistake. Also, depressingly, I’d have to kill him if I was going to take full advantage of the phones.

I stepped over Russell and Chris’s remains and took a cautious peep over the banister. Blood crept down my face like the hot tears of childhood.

“Is this what you’re looking for?” a female voice said.

I spun left. The blond vampire, Mia, stood on the landing maybe fifteen feet away. The bottom half of her face was covered in blood in just the supposedly endearing way a Kodak toddler’s is covered in chocolate (or a scat star’s in shit, I always think every time I see one of these revolting infants) and in her hand she held the raggedly severed head of the unfortunate Wazz. His tongue protruded lewdly from between his lips and his eyeballs had rolled back in their sockets. He looked as if he’d died just as he was about to blow a halfhearted raspberry, to express extreme tedium.

Mia, on the other hand, in black boots, black suede skirt, black nylons, black satin blouse and black leather jacket, appeared superabundantly alive, smiling through the blood mask. Her blue eyes—not the dark lapis lazuli of Ellis’s but somewhere between periwinkle and turquoise—glittered with what looked like joy. A vein in her temple showed. She was white, even by vampiric standards. From her name and the company she’d been in at Jacqui Delon’s I’d made her Italian, but now that I mentally replayed Is this what you’re looking for? the accent, though elusively mixed, put her roots a long way east of Trieste. A Russian with Norse colouring—but why not? Scandinavian marauders sailed down the Volga and took charge of Novgorod more than a thousand years ago. For all I knew she’d been there when the Vikings raided Constantinople.

All of which redundant speculation laboured under the perceptual paradox of a beautiful woman exuding a smell of decomposing meat and ripest pigshit. Initially her teammate’s odour—less faecal but gamier—had obscured hers. Now I got it clear and unmingled. I sank to my knees, put a hand out to stop myself from complete collapse, slipped in Russell’s lake of blood and fell facedown next to his corpse.

There was very little time. No time, really. Any moment now she’d drop Wazz’s head and be upon me. Any moment now it would already have happened.

Nonetheless I’d made certain calculations. (Whatever is happening, something else is going on.) Russell had ended up on his front with his right arm trapped under him. That put most of the kit—including the UV stick he still had in his hand—out of reach. The Staker’s holster was empty, the Staker itself lay five feet away in the library doorway. Getting at the stake , still buried in his throat, would require three seconds more than the one I’d actually have from the moment I made my move. The only weapon within reach was the flamethrower, and I wasn’t sure how to—

I heard the head drop and felt the air shift. She Is Coming. Hopeless hopeless hopeless but I rolled and plucked at the BBs’ gun-unit holstered at Russell’s thigh—not fast enough. Her boot heel gouged a divot from the side of my skull as she went past in a blur. I collapsed a second time.

Stay put.

Not only because the blow, a rude and deafening bok , had dazed me but because the position concealed my Braille navigation of the flamethrower. She hadn’t seen that. Didn’t know the weapon was there. What I needed from her now was the Bond villain’s soliloquising delay. I wasn’t going to get it. She was here to kidnap, not to kill.

“Uhhhr,” I said, not entirely faking. The head gouge was in the transitional stage between very cold and very hot. The wound in my chest was a rose of fire. I opened my eyes to see her descending gently to the floor. Flier. Fuck. Closed them again. Forced nimbleness into my fingertips. It’s basically a glorified water pistol , Harley had said, knowing not whereof he spoke. Two triggers, one for fuel release, one for ignition. Ergo I’d need both hands. The odds had just worsened.

“Phil?” Mia said.

Flying over me she’d passed the library doorway. Peripherally registered its lone occupant. She hadn’t known.

Two-thirds out of the holster.

She stood with her feet apart and an ugly hang to her limbs, face slack, staring at the crisping corpse by the hearth. Rain was a continuous exhalation against the house.

The weapon’s nozzle was caught on something, I couldn’t tell what. Talulla’s voice said quietly in my head: You’re running out of time.

Closing my eyes would’ve helped my fingers but Mia turned in the doorway and looked at me. “You?” she asked. I opened my mouth to lie but she said: “Don’t bother.” In the brighter light of the library her face’s colours vivified: red; blue; white. Very calmly she bent—one nyloned knee ticked, humanising her—and picked up the Staker that lay by her feet.

“You want me alive, don’t forget,” I said. She stood over me. I looked up at her. Here was the submissive’s camera angle of choice for his dominatrix, the perspective all boot and thigh and hip narrowing to the remote worshipful contemptuous head like a mountaintop divinity. I took a breath for reiteration—and she shot a stake through my left leg.

Pain, yes, sheet lightning, but also a peculiarly schoolboyish sense of injustice. She’d clipped the femur but not broken it, gone instead at an angle through the quadrilateral and vastus externus. No major arteries, but the sciatic nerve violently wronged already playing the Psycho shower scene strings in shock, a sensation that went all the way up to my molars.

Paltry vandalism as far as her ladyship was concerned. Something to keep me busy while she, tossing the Staker downstairs and turning with an expression testifying to the effect of my odour on her , took out a mobile and dialled. “It’s me,” she said. “I’ve got him.” Pause. “Phil’s dead.”