MONDAY OCTOBER 6

Justin waited five minutes after the bus had dropped them off Dunrovia College and made for the car park behind the film studios used by the Media Studies students.

He paused, still unsure of whether he wanted to or should do this, but if the answer was 'yes', now would be the only opportunity. A sense of duty compelled him. Or was it the desire to shout at the woman about how she'd ruined their lives? Love didn't feature at all.

Julie Tree and her car awaited him. He opened the passenger door.

"Hello, hello!" As always, she was far too cheerful for a woman who'd chosen the unlikely career path of lawyer to the undead, beaming up at him from beneath a mop of dark curls already making an escape bid from the silver claw clip at the back of her head. The elbows of her suit were shiny from overuse, and the edges of her cuffs frayed.

She shifted the vast pile of papers on the passenger seat and stuck them behind her, where they joined piles of yet more paper. Paranoia, she'd once told him, made her carry around everything with her, rather than leaving it in her office overnight.

He climbed into the passenger seat, squeezing his feet in between the empty coffee cups and chocolate wrapper that littered the footwell. While the springs on the seat might jag his arse and the cramped space force his knees up higher than he might like, the comfort beat the Vampire Security bus by miles.

Julie handed him a baseball cap. He crammed it over his dreads and pulled it down. Their 'outing' was legitimate, but why ask for trouble?

Julie started the engine and performed a text-book perfect five-point turn.

"What..."

She grinned at him. "Good, eh? My husband put his foot down last month and insisted I take a remedial driving course."

Thank you, Julie's husband. The lawyer might be a kind, supportive soul but that one time Justin had travelled in her car before had sent his non-existent heart to his mouth so many times he could almost feel it beating there. Julie, the Highway Code and road safety had not been words you would put together, and Justin had wondered whatever incompetent idiot of a driving instructor had ticked a pass the day she sat her driving test.

The car drove out of the college gates, with Julie executing another text-book like move as she joined the traffic heading north.

"Didn't you want to bring Maya with you?" Julie asked as they waited at the slip road onto the main motorway. Three Vampire Security vans, sirens blasting, headed in the opposite direction, making Justin sink into his seat.

"No. She, uh, doesn't know about this. Um, you don't mind...?"

Julie shook her head. "Fine. I'll file it under client confidentiality until you're ready to tell her."

He nodded grateful thanks. Lara had come up with the idea of Julie facilitating today's visit to Justin's mother. After hours of mulling over Lara's revelation, he had waited until Maya popped out to visit her mum and sister and approached Lara.

Could he... could he see Grania, he asked Lara. Drop a bombshell like that and the ripples of the explosion will hit home, no matter how far the target tries to dodge 'em. If he showed up at the care home, maybe it would give him the one big opportunity to ask why his mother had acted the way she had.

There was also the argument that in the years to come, decades from now when everyone else—Maya, her Argist friends, Julie and the others were all dead and gone—he might look back at his younger self and scold him for not taking the opportunity to spend more time with a dying relative.

Lara, someone who must have worked such thought processes for herself a long time ago, patted the chair in the kitchen beside her. Thanks to her friendship with Julie, she paid attention to legal loopholes in vampire licensing agreements.

While the state licensing rules separated newly converted vampires from their families, they permitted compassionate visits. A dying mother came under that category. Julie, armed with the relevant paperwork, could pick him up from the college, which was nearer to the nursing home, and take him there.

If he'd told Maya, she would insist on coming with him. What will she think of me, though, Justin asked himself, if when I see Grania I don't give a shit...?

"Nearly there!" Julie turned to smile at him now, returning her attention almost immediately to the front window and leaving Justin wondering afresh at her much improved driving skills. She signalled a left turn and drove the car up to the security barriers in front of the care home.

The building's ugly architecture made it clear the developers had stinted on costs. Square block. Flat roof. Tiny windows. The outside pebble dashing had turned grey-yellow, and letters were missing from the sign at the front, so that it read Sant Mara Car Home. As numerous vehicles took up the space at the front, 'car home' didn't seem that inaccurate.

The guard at the barrier glanced in the car, indifference turning to hostility straight away.

"What the fuck?"

Julie, no stranger to the finer points of Anglo-Saxon herself, smiled sweetly. "Special permission to bring him in, Sir." The sarcastic inflection on the 'Sir' went unnoticed. She held up her phone. "If you scan that barcode, the certificate will flash up."

The man studied the screen. Justin's eight months as a vampire had schooled him in patience, the words, "Take your time! I've got forever, mate," a mantra he repeated every time he had to deal with any security guards, whose contracts specified arsehole behaviour at all times.

The man's Alsatian reared up on its hind legs, tongue hanging out, drool frothing at the corners of its mouth and barking fit to wake the dead. If only the undead weren't here already. Coping with animals that shied up, scurried away, howled and bared their teeth, or rose on wide-spanned wings to flap into the skies as instinct ordered them to flee from vampires was something Justin hadn't yet adjusted to, and it made him flinch.

"Go on in," the man said, dropping Julie's phone onto her lap. He yanked the dog's chain and yelled at it to shut up. The barrier in front of the home swung up. The dog barked once more, and the man kicked it.

Julie glared at him. "If you mistreat that dog again, I'll have Animal Welfare here quicker than you can blink."

And with that, they were in. Julie parked the car in between an ambulance and a black Ford Focus with a sticker promoting the Liberal Life Party. She led Justin to a back entrance. One of the home's members of staff would whisk him in and out as inconspicuously as possible. While he had permission to be there, other visitors to the home might baulk at vampires in plain sight.

Justin stopped at the door, heart doing that hideous whup-whup-whup. "Julie, I'm not sure if I'm ready for this..."

To her credit, she didn't growl at him in frustration, as she must have jumped through hoops to arrange this.

She took her hand off the door. "Everyone these days bangs on about closure, don't they?"

She waited for his nod before continuing. "Absolute bollocks most of the time. As if there is ever a neat and tidy ending to anything, but in your case, this might be one instance where it is useful."

The Alsatian, still unsettled by Justin's presence, barked in the background.

"Thanks, Julie," Justin said, rapping his knuckles lightly against the door. "Here goes."

She stuck her thumbs up.

The staff member who opened the door to them was in her early thirties. She wore the uniform of a carer—a tunic and trousers made from cheap rayon, and the green colour faded thanks to repeated washing. Carers' pay was above that awarded to vampires working in menial roles, but only just.

"Your mum's going to be so pleased to see you," she said, eyes lingering on Justin, long earrings jangling. "I'm Emily."

"Good luck," Julie said, clapping him on the shoulder, "I'll wait in the car."

Justin followed Emily through narrow corridors, heart whuppity-whupping once more. Something made his nose twitch—the smell of it more powerful than the disinfectant, over-boiled vegetables underlaid with waste—and his head glance over his shoulder.

Emily noticed and her eyes gleamed. "Later, when you—"

A scream made them both jump.

"We've got a lot of dementia patients in here," Emily said, recovering first. "and al to of the time they think they're under attack."

She searched his face there. Those dementia patients must flash back to vampire attacks where they watched their children, spouses, parents or friends killed in front of them. He bit back the automatic apology for what his species did.

She halted in front of a cheap, flimsy door, where a piece of cardboard covered in plastic announced it as Grania Johnson-White's room.

Whup-whup-whup. His mind screamed, I'm not ready, once again.

Emily, hand on the door handle, paused. "Your mum... She's been very ill. She'll look different."

He flashed back to the photo, the one that sat next to his bed at Vamp Towers. Grania and Alice, taken a few years ago, them celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary. "Open the champagne, Justin!" Alice had called out as Justin pointed his phone camera at them. "You and Lewis can have a glass each. But no more than one!"

The picture caught them clinking their glasses together, Grania flushed. Alice past caring when he and Lewis snaffled the rest of the bottle as the sun died behind them, trees picked out in black. Two women with white, toothy beams and matching apple cheeks, burnished red on brown skin.

Emily swung the door open. The smell hit him at once. Decay, sickly sweet. The bit of vomit or diarrhoea that always escaped bleach and washing powder. Breath exiting a body, taking bits with it as it did.

Emily had propped Grania up on pillows, her once luxuriant hair spread out in thin strands.

"Justin! You came." She stretched out a claw-like hand and her eyes filled with tears. "I didn't think—oh, it's so good to see you!"

Emily pulled a chair out and stuck it next to the door. "I'll leave you," she said, holding up two hands, fingers spread wide. Ten minutes then.

He sat down and took Grania's hand in his, watching her flinch as she felt its chill. What had she expected? Perverseness made him squeeze her hand.

"How are you, Mum?"

As kids and teenagers, he and Lewis called her Grania and Alice, Alice because Mum one and Mum two felt clunky. Grania shifted her head, twisting it so she faced him. Rectangular rather than round-faced as she'd once been.

"Cirrhosis," she replied. The yellow tinge to her eyes hinted at advanced liver failure. That, and the weird roundness of her belly on an otherwise shrunken frame. "I didn't cope with..."

Selling your twin sons off to vampires?

Grania gripped his hand. "With what I'd done. And knowing I'd never see my boys again."

The words came with an effort. Every sentence left her wheezy, the wind rattling in her chest. Grania coughed. The spluttering put her out of action for the next few minutes.

"Don't exhaust yourself," he said, as his mind floated above the scene and placed him in a scenario where he wasn't Grania's son, only a carer, and made the words easier to utter when there was no personal connection.

Grania coughed some more. How much longer did she have left to live? That question made him fast-forward. Grania turned into Maya, an old woman lying on her deathbed, her hand in his. If they stayed together, that scenario would surface at some point. And come up time and time again with any human he befriended. He blinked back tears.

"Oh, darling!" Grania croaked. "Don't cry about me! I'm so, so sorry. About everything."

He glanced away. What to say?

"Where's Lewis? Is he... is he still alive?"

"My brother wouldn't sign up for the state-registered programme," Justin muttered, "and is now holed up in a secure facility until he agrees to be a good little vampire. Like me. I haven't seen him for months."

And I try not to talk about him. Even if he pops up in my head all the time.

Grania's eyes filled with tears. The yellowed hand gripped his.

"Justin, I can't die without seeing Lewis," Grania said. "Can you bring him here for me,? Promise? Please, please do this for me, darling."

The clock on the wall showed he had three minutes left of the allotted ten. How on earth would he manage to bring Lewis here? And why should he? The grip on his hand tightened, making him want to place his other hand on hers and rip it off.

I owe you nothing, nothing! If you really cared about us, you would have persuaded Alice to get us vaccinated as babies. A loving parent never hands her kids over to vampires.

His mother spluttered once more. Justin got to his feet, tugging his hand out of hers. "I can't."

Won't.

Grania pawed his thigh. "Please, Justin. I'm begging you."

Her fingers were skeletal already—a glimpse of what was going to happen the second her heart beat for the last time, triggering off the immediate rot of flesh. Alice's voice started up. Justin! The boy I raised would not refuse his mother this!

He let his fingers pat Grania's. "They won't let Lewis come here, Mum," he said. "But I'll visit you again, okay?"

Another cough cut off her reply. He didn't need eyes on the back of his head to know hers stared after him as he left. Closure? Not at all. And now she'd demanded he do the impossible.

Emily appeared the second Justin closed the door to his mother's room—mouth twitching in a way that made Justin suspicious.

"Do you want to see something? I promise you'll like it?"

That smell that he'd noticed when he first came in. He began to pant—an instinctive reaction beyond his ability to control, following her along the corridor in the opposite direction to the way he'd come in.

She stopped outside a sealed off door at the end of the corridor. The sign outside said authorised personnel only.

"Shush!" Emily said, grinning at him as she keyed in the lock code for the room, and he pushed past her as the keypad flashed up 'entry authorised'. As he'd suspected, the room was where the care home kept its medical supplies. Shelves lined the walls packed with bandages, disinfectant and swabs and eight fridges with padlocked doors.

Hie dismissed the first few fridges, but five of them appeared to throb—their contents screaming Justin's name, and his feet carried him over to the one on his right. They must be where they kept the blood that patients might need for emergency blood transfusions.

Real blood, not fake.

Emily leant across him and inserted a small key into the padlock. The door creaked open, and the bags with their dark-red content shimmered there. A vampire's pile of gold at the end of the rainbow.

"Help yourself," Emily said, picking two bags out of the fridge. "The van delivered this stuff from the blood bank this morning. Fresh as a daisy!"

His hands shook. The state's artificial blood tasted shit. This stuff would be the vampire equivalent of a meal in Michelin-starred restaurant after eating beans on toast for months. But once you drank it, returning to the fake stuff took an almighty amount of willpower. Give a vampire a bit of the real thing and they hankered after the life they should lead. The one where they lived in the shadows and pounced on unvaccinated humans wherever they found them.

He swallowed the saliva that had flooded his mouth the way it did humans when faced with a slap-up meal after not eating for a long time. "I'm okay, thanks."

"No, you're not," Emily said, unscrewing the toggle on the bag and releasing the rich, iron tang of blood. "You want this more than anything."

What the hell was wrong with her? The gleeful expression on her face repulsed him as he worked out that she wanted to watch him drink. Vampires fascinated some humans, intrigued by the animalistic instinct that took over whenever they got close to blood. On the dark web, people uploaded films of vampires, mouths open, blood dripping from the teeth, tongues darting out to lick what remained around their lips and chins.

She must be one of them. No wonder she'd volunteered to help Grania find her sons, imagining the moment where she stood next to one and watched him drink blood 'live'.

"Here," she said, pressing it into his hands.

The bag burned his palms—the screams of "don't do it!" drowned out by the shrieks of "yes, yes, yes!"

Why are you hesitating? Actual blood that no-one had died to give up. Problem-free, right? That voice in his head again. The one that sounded exactly like his twin brother.

He whirled around, convinced Lewis must be hiding somewhere nearby.

"There's no-one around," Emily piped up. "Monday mornings are quiet as the grave here. No-one will catch us."

See? That voice again. Drink, you idiot.

Emily folded her arms, a smug smile in place. "Go on. It'll be our little secret, I promise."