"But it's you, only you, that's all I've ever wanted... promise me you feel the same?"

Maya's eyes widened, her sincerity all too believable as she addressed Justin. She stood at the assembly building with the door wide open behind her. "Follow me. All the MAs want to meet you. They're so glad you're going to help persuade everyone to take the vampire cure."

He rushed to her, desperate to grab the arms she held out. The ground stretched out, elastic band-like beneath him, and she moved further away. Every step he took thrust her back as if they were on one of those travelators in airports, Maya moving in one direction, him in the other.

"Wait," he yelled, and she clapped a hand to her ear.

"What? What are you saying?"

Behind her, Vampire Security Guards fanned out behind her, all of them armed with those automated crossbows trained on him.

He tried to stop running and couldn't. Now, the ground underneath him did the opposite—the elastic band that had gone past its stretch point and now pinged back, sending him hurtling towards those crossbows far too quickly.

Stakes fired at him.

"No!" Maya shrieked. "Stop it! He's one of us! Come to tell us about the cure. Don't!"

She spun around, grabbing the guard nearest to her. His crossbow came with him, catching her a blow on the chin that made her tumble to the ground.

"Maya!" he yelled as he hit a force field and bounced back, falling to the ground himself.

"Justin!"

They crawled towards each other, separated by that thick glass wall.

"I'm here, I'll always be here, don't forget about—"

"Babe!"

Letitia shook him, startling him into wakefulness, the dream ebbing away even as he tried to cling to it. She clambered on top of him, wriggling down so that her crotch aligned with his.

"You were tossing and turning like mad. Bad dream?"

He nodded warily. Dreams were like that. Vivid only for a few seconds as you stirred into consciousness before leaving you, though some remnant always remained. A nagging feeling that he should... Letitia wriggled some more. After he'd returned from the warehouse yesterday, she'd flung herself at him, apologising repeatedly and promising to change.

He'd patted her back, apologising in return and stifling that sense that he would have been much more relieved if she'd dumped him.

"Good morning," she said now, drawing out the syllables of the last word and winking at him as one hand moved downwards. "I see you've got a big present for me..." When Lewis in the next-door room banged on the wall—keep it down in there—Letitia exaggerated her moans, yelling, "Yes, Justin, yes! Do me harder, baby!" Revenge in part for the occasions Lewis's conquests had subjected them to the same performance.

Letitia headed off afterwards. Justin was in the middle of pulling on jeans when Lewis let himself into his room and plonked himself on Justin's bed.

His brother wore that 'cat that's got the cream' expression. His skin had that suspicious sleekness to it that only came from drinking actual blood, making Justin stiffen. Was he...?

No. Animals only. The odd deer here and there.

Justin scowled at him. Telepathy had its uses, but Lewis did it to show off most of the time.

"What do you think Letitia would say if she knew," his brother smirked, "that the main reason you close your eyes whenever you're shagging her is because you want to pretend that she's Maya?"

"Are you reading my mind when I'm having sex? Fuck off, Lewis!"

Lewis's mouth twitched. "Got to get my kicks somehow. And c'mon. It's too easy. You're in the room right next to me. Interesting dream, by the way. What do you think that meant?"

Hell, even when unconscious, Justin had no privacy.

"Why don't you tell me seeing as you seem to know everything."

"The first bit was wish fulfilment. Your beloved Maya comes to her senses, realises that you're the vampire of her dreams and abandons that arsehole of a husband. The second bit, I'm not so sure. What are you doing today?"

Justin's shift at the club didn't start until late afternoon. He'd planned to return to the warehouse and investigate that basement once more and clear out that room himself so that the vampire chemist could use it.

Some instinct made him hold that back. The fewer people who knew about his plans, the safer it was.

"If you're going out, you need to be careful," Lewis said, the smirk vanishing as he grabbed hold of Justin's hand. "There's all these lynch mobs wandering around threatening to kill any vampire they run into, licenced or not."

The aftermath of the attack on the Garshake Estate. Last night, a small crowd had gathered outside Vamp Towers. While they hadn't flung stones at anyone coming in or going out, they'd set up a PA sound system that allowed some guy to keep up a monotonous chant of Vampires out, vampires out way past midnight.

Justin pulled on a jacket. "Nice of you to care, but I can take care of myself, Lewis."

"Sure, but two heads are better than one, right? I'd be able to deal with that Carly bitch and the creep she hangs around with better than you can."

The words irritated Justin; his brother's assumption that his strength and skills far outdid Justin's. It wasn't physical strength that held Justin back from turning on Carly and Ryan; the threat to Maya far more terrifying and the fear that Carly resembled the mythical hydra. You cut off one head and two sprung up to replace it. Whoever had sent her after Justin would have endless stocks of nasty bully boys and girls also ready to poison babies and beat up anyone who stood in their way.

Lewis followed him out and down the stairs as headed out. "I said I didn't need your company," Justin snapped at him. Lewis shrugged and kept pace with him.

Outside the tower block, the crowd had gone, though protest banners littered the ground, their slogans facing upwards. Someone had planted a stake through one, no doubt intending it to make a literal and metaphorical point to the vampires within.

Justin pulled his hoodie up. Lewis did the same. If they kept their heads down and did not get too close to anyone, they might pass as human. Vamp Towers was in a rundown part of the city, close to the dilapidated building Dorian wanted to buy. Getting there would only take them twenty minutes. Much as it pained him to admit it, Justin found himself glad of Lewis's company after all. He told him about the building and Dorian's plans for it, leaving out his own intentions for the basement.

The same small boy cycled up when they arrived at the site, his BMX tyres crunching over the stones. He bunny-hopped the bike before halting in front of them, eyes widening briefly when he noticed their identical status.

"Got your car, Mister?" he asked, impressing Justin by addressing him and not Lewis showing that he knew which twin was which. "I can watch it for you again."

"Nope, I walked here."

The boy's face fell. His disappointment, however, didn't extend to leaving them alone. He chained his bike to a busted streetlight and followed them towards the building.

"Shouldn't you be in school?" Justin asked. The boy curled his top lip. The group that had been there the other day huddled around a brazier in front of what looked like former army barracks watched them.

"Fraser!" someone shouted over. The boy turned towards them and stuck his fingers up.

Lewis picked his way over the broken floorboards. "What did you say this building used to be?"

"Merchant shipping headquarters. Company called Hamilton & Co. Dorian reckons it's not been in use for at least seventy years."

Justin located the trapdoor. "I'm going to check this out."

This time he'd come prepared with an industrial-sized torch in his rucksack. Lewis yanked up the iron hook, and the three of them took a step back as that stale sewage tang hit the air. Behind it, acetone so strong you could almost taste it.

"What's down there?" Lewis asked.

"A basement, one room. Probably more," Justin said, Fraser backing him up. "Aye, there are a few rooms down there. Want me to show you them?"

Fraser seemed to have appointed himself their tour guide. Maybe this passed as entertainment in his world. They descended; Justin first, Fraser, then Lewis. There was a whoosh as Lewis overtook Justin and Fraser, stepping off the ladder two metres above the ground and dropping gracefully to the floor. Fraser's eyes popped out on stalks.

"Over here," Fraser said. Justin shone his torch where he pointed. Not the room he'd seen the first time he'd been here.

Lewis wandered off, opening the door to the room Justin and Dorian had investigated when they'd visited. Fraser's face took on a wary look. "There's nothing in there."

Justin followed Lewis. "No, not anymore. But people used the room to cook meths in here, didn't they?"

Fraser's shoulders raised to his ears, as his face took on a blank look. Fair enough. In an area like this, you didn't admit to knowledge of criminal gangs. But Justin would need to get the boy on his side if he wanted to keep his intentions for the lab secret. The better light revealed a cardboard-bounded sheaf of papers lying on the centre table under a conical flask.

He flicked through them. Dull accounts entered in spidery writing, all of which seemed to apply to only three days. Lewis ducked under a table at the far side of the room. "Look what I've found." He emerged, tugging at an ancient safe, its stubby legs scraping the floor as he did so.

The three of them stooped in front of it.

"That might be the money the meth guys left behind!" Fraser said. Avarice replaced wariness.

The locked door would take more than brute strength to open it. Justin tried anyway, twisting the handle as far right as possible. Lewis yanked it the other way. No joy. Fraser found them an old metal railing that they leveraged under the bottom of the door, which didn't work either. They would need the passcode to open the safe. Two letters, four digits and tens of thousands of possible combinations.

"Mebbe they wrote the code down in those papers," Fraser said.

"No-one would be that stupid," Justin replied, but then hadn't it seemed odd that the accounts only covered three days? He stared at one paper. The dates were written just with four digits—05/04, 17/03 and 15/08. What if he tried HC for Hamilton & Company and then 05/04? He tried the second one. Same result. The safe door remained firmly shut. They would only have three more tries to open the safe, and then it wouldn't work for at least twenty-four hours.

He shone a light on the paper once more. There was a signature sprawled at the bottom—James Hamilton. JH then, instead of HC, but which combination of numbers? Wouldn't someone instinctively choose the middle one...?

HC1703.

Result. The lock clicked as the bolts on the door drew back. The safe's interior contained neither bags of cash nor jewels.

Fraser ran his fingers all over it, anyway, insisting there might be a hidden compartment somewhere.

"What are these?" He held up two USB flash drives. The metal clip over them read Hamilton & Co in tiny lettering.

"Memory sticks," Justin said, taking one from him. "People used to use them to transfer files in the days before the cloud. Or if they wanted stuff stored offline where hackers can't find it."

He inspected the stick's thumb drive. Not made recently. To find out what was on the stick, he'd need an old model desk or laptop.

"Bitcoin!" Fraser said. "Bet that's a Bitcoin wallet from the olden days, and they've stored all their codes in there. A smart guy could mine it and make a tonne of money."

Possibly, but Justin didn't think a criminal gang would have left this behind and made the passcode to the safe relatively easy to crack. The metal clip saying Hamilton & Co too; had the original owners of this building downloaded information onto the drives and hid it here, intending for someone to find it some day?

Still, the Bitcoin theory gave him an idea.

"Tell you what," he said to Fraser, "you keep the other drive and I'll find an old computer we can use to find out what's on them and if I can mine the stuff. Better not tell anyone what we've found, though. You don't want any of your mates sharing this stuff, do you? Might be worth millions."

Fraser shook his head, the exaggerated motion making his cheeks jiggle from side to side. "I can keep an eye on the place for you too. Make sure nobody comes down here."

Even better.

"Let's get out of here," Justin said, shining the torch light around. The beam picked out another door opposite the one underneath the ladder. It opened out into a tunnel, dank water dripping from the stonework.

Justin and Lewis met eyes. The fabled tunnel network that vampires once used extensively to transverse the city. While some tunnels had been blocked up after the war, the network still threaded underneath most of Dunrovia's capital. The torch illuminated a rusty metal sign on the wall, a short sequence of letters and numbers.

"Coordinates," Lewis said, tapping his fingers against it, "so people know where they are."

In that year he'd been absent, he must have used the network hundreds of times.

"Where does it lead?" Justin asked Fraser.

"Under the river, right along to the rock and out at Balgreddan. There are aw these wee tunnels that lead off it too."

Promising. Balgreddan was where Justin had dropped Griffin off the other day. If the safe house was nearby, transporting the chemist would be easier than he'd originally thought. Justin's excitement ramped up. He could use the tunnels to smuggle the chemist in and out of the building without being seen.

A sensation like a fly hitting his forehead struck him. Lewis doing his best to get inside his head and not managing. He grinned at his brother, enjoying the ferocious scowl Lewis gave him in return. So, it was possible to hold him at bay.

"Let's go."

Fraser scampered up the ladder first, pausing as he reached the top.

He turned to look at Justin and Lewis over his shoulder. "There's a lorry outside and a few guards wandering around. Vampire Security. One o' them's talking tae Billy and the boys."

The signs around here said Vampire Security didn't patrol this area. Them turning up now didn't bode well.

"Who's Billy?" Justin asked.

"That eejit that shouted at me when I came to see you. He'll have grassed you up to them."

Or worse. The intruders might be Carly Wang and Ryan, here to see what he was up to...

"D'you know how we can get out of here through the tunnels?" he asked Fraser, whose face lit up.

"Aye, I do." He ducked down again, dragging the basement trap door over the top of him quietly and plunging them all into darkness. "If you follow me, I can get you out to Balgreddan."

Above them, they heard thumps and bumps. It sounded as if the guards were something from a lorry. Boots stamped across the trapdoor, stopped and marched off another way.

"Boss," someone yelled, "the trapdoor to the basement's here."

Above them, they heard the iron hook creak and groan as someone attempted to yank it open.

"Quick," Justin hissed, and the three of them darted towards the tunnel door, Fraser's hand in Justin's as human eyesight made moving around in the darkness much harder for him.

They closed the door behind them just as the trapdoor above popped open once more and three dark clothed figures descended.

AUTHOR'S NOTE - thanks for reading! Next update, Tuesday 15 June 2021. Have a nice weekend y'all...