I don't like it, but I'm a person, thank goodness, who can do what I don't like. -- Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

Dani ground her teeth. She took a deep breath, clenched and unclenched her fists, and tried to speak calmly.

"No. I will not get involved in this. I absolutely refuse."

The two towns looked at each other. Some sort of understanding seemed to pass between them. Dani steeled her nerve. She had faced monsters, relatives and monstrous relatives. She could deal with this latest nuisance.

"It's entirely your decision," Ballinamallard said at last.

"Thank you for acknowledging that," Dani said with more than a hint of sarcasm.

Ballinamallard paused and gave her a mildly rebuking look. It was surprisingly disconcerting to get such a look from someone who appeared to be a small girl of barely ten. "We won't ask you to investigate what happened to Belfast."

Good. That was a can of worms Dani would happily leave unopened. What the towns had said about Belfast's personality, combined with the strange events plaguing the people who lived in the city, had convinced her that she never wanted to go further north than Lisburn ever again.

"But we believe that you can solve the murder. And I am willing to help you if I can."

Oh bother.

Dani drew herself up to her full height. At five foot eight she was as tall as or taller than most of the people she interacted with on a daily basis, and certainly taller than Ballinamallard. Unfortunately, the town wasn't intimidated. No doubt she had seen far more frightening things than someone who was taller than her.

"Just what makes you think I'm going to get involved in this again?" Dani demanded. "I already tried investigating. I got nowhere. The police are investigating, and they've gotten nowhere. Do you think you can do better?"

Ballinamallard nodded. "I don't know who the murderer is, but I know plenty of supernatural beings who would be willing to investigate if I asked them."

Good heavens. This situation was getting increasingly surreal. Dani felt the sudden urge to pinch herself and make sure she wasn't dreaming. She shook her head to get this thought out of it. Living towns that wanted to turn detective were hardly the strangest thing she'd ever encountered. Well, alright, so they were in the top ten, but still.

"Then you go and talk to some of these beings," Dani said. "And then come back when you have some useful information. I'll consider helping you then."

~~~~

She thought that would be the end of this sorry mess. And for a week, it was.

Then the doorbell rang in the middle of the night.

The clocks showed the time was a quarter to one. Dani was curled up in her bed, fast asleep and blissfully ignorant of everything around her. All the children were asleep, even Max who hated going to bed. Silence reigned through the house.

And then the silence shattered.

Riiiiing! Riiiiing!

Dani's sleep-addled brain interpreted the sound as her alarm clock. She reached out, searching for the mute button so she could go back to sleep. But even hitting the button repeatedly did nothing to stop the noise.

A chorus of sleepy grumbles and exclamations echoed from the children's rooms. Max, startled out of a sound sleep, began to wail at the top of his lungs. Dani staggered out of bed, feeling like something that had just crawled out of a tomb and not entirely sure she wasn't dreaming.

Riiiing! Riiing!

Common sense finally forced its way into Dani's mind when she realised that it wasn't the alarm clock or the phone. The doorbell ringing at this hour of the night? Something was badly wrong here.

One of the benefits of knowing what sort of horrors lurked just around the corner -- sometimes literally -- was that one became rather more concerned about self-defence than most people were. Dani had started keeping weapons in her room when she was thirteen. Now she had a veritable armoury hidden in a small cubbyhole.

She pulled the cubbyhole door open and picked up the first weapon that came to hand. It was a long, curved sword which seemed to glow with a light of its own. This was the Phoenix Blade, a supposedly-magical sword Dani had... acquired on a trip to Urtijëi, a trip that had involved living masks, face-eating ghouls, and more rats than anyone would ever want to meet. The sword had defended her against undead monsters; it could defend her against whatever was outside her front door.

"Go back to bed, children," Dani called as she marched down the hallway, sword in hand. "I have the situation under control."

Heads popped out through the doors. No one ventured out of their rooms, but no one went back to bed either. Oh well. As long as they didn't follow her downstairs, they would be safe enough.

Riiing! Riiing!

Whoever was at the door clearly didn't intend to go away.

Dani crept down the stairs, dodging the ones that creaked. Slowly, noiselessly she moved across the hall. She didn't turn on any of the lights. She hoped to give the night-time visitor an unpleasant surprise, if they were up to no good -- and what else could they be up to, calling at this hour of the night?

A row of faces appeared at the top of the banister. The children hadn't obeyed her order. Go back to bed when something interesting was happening? Not likely!

There was a light installed on the front porch. The switch to turn it on was right beside the door. Dani moved quietly over to it. Then...

Click!

"Argh!" the person outside yelled as they suddenly found themselves standing in the glare of the light. Through the glass panes in the door Dani could see a figure recoil and rub at their eyes.

She unlocked the door, threw it open, and held her sword in front of her. "Who are you and what do you want?"

If she was asked what she had expected to find, her answer would have involved the words "suspicious, threatening character". She certainly didn't expect to find a girl who looked to be barely sixteen. A girl who looked to be barely sixteen, but whose eyes were red and whose nails were alarmingly long and sharp. Most shocking of all, a wooden stake protruded from the girl's chest. Blood soaked her blouse and trousers, dripping down to form a pool around her feet.

"Good heavens!" Dani exclaimed. Shocked though she was, she didn't lower her sword. "What happened to you?"

The girl -- the vampire, for what else could she be? -- stared at her through eyes that seemed to have difficulty focusing on anything. "I heard-- They said--"

She staggered and fell. Dani stood in the doorway, frozen with surprise and not entirely convinced this wasn't a ploy. Could she risk bringing a vampire into a house full of children?

Common sense said, "No." Emphatically.

Dani had never been on good terms with common sense.

The children were still crowded at the top of the stairs, their eyes wide and their mouths hanging open. Well, they weren't much help when they were standing up there.

"Kevin, go and get the first aid kit. Imogene, there's a pile of blankets in the landing cupboard. Bring one of them down to the living room. Noah, go and help her." Dani stepped through the door and knelt down next to the apparently-unconscious vampire. She didn't let go of her sword. "Julie, Amy, come and help me carry her."

No one moved. She looked up to see the children frozen in place, staring at her like she'd grown an extra head.

"Well? What are you waiting for? This..." 'Woman' didn't fit. Neither did 'girl'. "...being needs help!"

~~~~

When vampires were involved, all hope of sleep tended to fall by the wayside. Dani still had nightmares about a long-ago night in Romania, which she had spent huddled beside a fire clutching a cross in her hand. Sleep had been the last thing on her mind back then. Of course, when she actually met the vampire she had been so afraid of, she learnt she had been in no real danger at all. But that didn't make the creatures as a rule any safer to be around.

For the rest of the night she sat up in the living room, the Phoenix Sword at her side. She knew better than to pull the stake out of the vampire's chest; that would only cause more bleeding. Instead she had followed the instructions in the first aid book and had wrapped bandages around the wound.

The vampire never moved. Not even when Kevin, in an effort to be helpful, tried to cut off strips of bandage and accidentally jabbed the vampire in the hand with the scissors. Dani didn't know if that meant she was dead, unconscious, or just deeply asleep. Her experience with vampires in the past had only taught her that when asleep they became indistinguishable from corpses. She had never been close enough to an injured vampire to know how they behaved then.

Slowly the night slipped away. The children had been ordered back to their beds. Dani suspected they were gossiping about this latest development rather than sleeping. Well, they were the ones who'd have to go to school tomorrow, whether they got a good night's sleep or not.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock. For hours the only sound was the clock on the mantelpiece. It wormed its way into Dani's mind, a constant, rhythmic lullaby that almost sent her to sleep. Every time her eyes began to slide closed, she got up and walked around the room. She couldn't let anything happen because she fell asleep. She couldn't.

Morning finally arrived. A cold grey light crept across the sky. The street-lamps outside flickered and went out.

Dani, sitting in the armchair by the window, stared at the vampire's motionless body.

Congratulations, she thought sourly. We're really in the soup this time. This thought was quickly followed by, What am I supposed to feed her?

Dani knew for a fact that some of her children were less-than-human. Yet they were all able to eat human food, so certain dietary requirements had never been an issue. They would become an issue now. If the vampire intended to stay -- and she was certainly in no state to move yet -- then they would become a major issue.

Eight o'clock came, and none of the children emerged from their rooms. Dani made herself a cup of tea and a slice of toast, keeping an eye on the vampire even as she ate. Ten past eight, and upstairs was still silent as the grave.

When the clocks showed a quarter past, Dani knew it was time to do something. The children would be late for school at this rate. Was it safe to leave the vampire unsupervised?

She decided it wasn't worth risking it.

"Children!" Dani shouted, standing in the living room doorway. "Time to get up!"

A few muffled groans and unhappy grumbles were the only answer she got. Well, that just wouldn't do. They had to be in school by nine.

"Children! If you aren't down here in five minutes, you won't get any meals today!"

That got a response. There were more groans, but there were also the sounds of people grudgingly getting up and preparing to face the day.

Dani turned back to look at the vampire. She still hadn't moved. Perhaps she was in a coma. Did vampires go into comas?

For someone who's spent years around vampires, I really don't know that much about them. It was a worrying thought. She urgently needed to do some thorough research on vampires, and specifically what was normal behaviour when a vampire was wounded.

The children were finally stumbling down the stairs and filing into the kitchen.

"Morning," Noah said, rubbing his eyes.

Kevin, following him a minute later and looking like he'd just crawled out of a grave, gave an incomprehensible grunt and staggered over to the table. A steady stream of barely-awake children made their way into the kitchen after him.

Dani looked from the vampire, who hadn't so much as moved a finger, and then at the children. Well, as long as she kept her sword with her, there was no need to stand guard in this room all the time.

~~~~

Breakfast was over, the children had their books and homework ready, and it was time to drive them to school. Dani glanced into the living room again. The vampire hadn't moved. Was it safe to leave her here alone?

Well, there wasn't any other option.

~~~~

Dani had never rushed back so fast from dropping off the children. Usually she went to the shops first and bought whatever they were running out of. When twelve people lived in one house, things ran out very quickly. But now...

She pulled into the driveway and put the handbrake on, scanning the house nervously. From the outside it looked just as she had left it. But what would she find inside?

She had left the Phoenix Sword in the porch, half-hidden behind the children's raincoats hanging from the coat-hooks. Now she picked it up again -- almost getting it tangled in Jack's raincoat -- and prepared herself for whatever might be waiting on the other side of the door.

The front door opened onto a hallway leading to the living room. Dani strode purposely down the hall, sword in hand, trying to look less worried than she felt. She opened the living room door. At once her heart leapt into her throat.

The vampire was gone.