AUTHOR'S NOTE - this chapter contains a little more explicit content than usual, so be warned... if you don't like that kind of thing, you can skip down to the scene change ;)

Mind buzzing, I let myself into our flat, locking the door behind me. Jonno Dupont—up until a week ago someone I thought long dead, and now might be recently dead, which left me with a peculiar sense of loss and the burden of finishing what he had started.

Underneath it all bubbled the news about Justin and Letitia. Gladness she was gone at the same time as disgust in myself that I rejoiced in another person's demise... but then who ever said human emotions worked in a straightforward way?

Kyle appeared in our hallway, his customary chinos and hoodie combo replaced by a crisp white shirt and dark denim jeans, and his expression wary. He held out his hand. "Come here."

His hand hung there. Ever since he'd made that threat, we'd tip-toed around each other. I edged forward, and his embrace enfolded me. He wore aftershave, too—the pine, musky scent of it clinging to his neck.

"Mirac's fast asleep," he whispered into my ear, "and I've ordered takeaway from that place you love. I've run you a bath too." He slipped his hand under my shirt and undid my bra strap. "Go on, jump in."

Ninety percent of me wanted to eat cheese on toast, find some sneaky way of sending Justin a message to check he was okay and then sleep for ten hours straight. But marriage is all about compromise, so the experts said, and Kyle had gone to a lot of effort. He led me into the living room, the table shiny with polish and scented candles dotted about, their tiny flames pooling small orange and yellow darts everywhere.

The bath overflowed with soapy bubbles; the foam edging up the tiles and spilling over the side. I fell asleep in there, mind conjuring up weird dreams of warehouses and chemicals and people screaming at me, waking only when fingers kneaded my scalp as Kyle washed my hair for me.

"God, you're tense," he said. There was my cue where I explained everything. Kyle, I ran into my father the other day, and now he's disappeared but he made me promise to help him with the illegal plan that will put you, me, Mirac, and everyone else at risk. Plus, I'm desperate to phone Justin and find out how he is... You okay with all of that?

After Mirac had been poisoned, hadn't I promised Kyle honesty?

"Awful day at work," I said, "and there's this..."

"Shush. Don't talk about work." His hands slipped down to caress my nipples. "The food will be here in an hour. Let's have some fun."

I stifled all objections, mind repeating 'compromise, compromise, compromise'. The towels hastily piled up on the floor created a makeshift bed, their white fluffiness so enticing I wondered if Kyle would mind/notice if I fell asleep underneath him. But no—he didn't want a quickie. Long, drawn-out foreplay followed where I stared at the ceiling, too tense to come, as Kyle's tongue flickered between my legs. When he eventually moved on top of me, I tilted my pelvis up to allow him in as deep as possible and delivered another Oscar-worthy performance fake orgasm.

He clutched a hank of my hair in one fist, his mouth by my ear. "Promise you won't leave me, Maya? You and Mirac are the best thing that's ever happened to me, and if you leave, I would, I would..."

The rest of the sentence vanished in a series of groans as his torso collapsed on mine. I shuffled underneath, so that we faced each other on the towels. Naïve me had imagined marrying Kyle would make him more, not less insecure, and yet the guy whose eyes scanned my face, feverish almost, looked as if he might burst into tears any second.

I took a deep breath. What he wanted me to do now was tell him how much I adored him. Kyle, I worship the ground you walk on. You're so gorgeous I pinch myself every day, unable to believe I've been this lucky. When you touch me, I tremble. When your fingers do that magical dance down there, I die... The stuff I used to say all the time when we first started dating but found almost impossible to spit out anymore. It didn't matter how often I said that stuff; it never satisfied him. He was Dracula—you fed him your villagers; he never stopped coming back for more.

I took the simple way out and kissed him, long, slow and deep.

"When I spoke to Gregor the other day," Kyle said, one finger stroking my cheek, "he asked me if you were okay. Reminded me how much you've had to cope with these past few weeks. I'm sorry, Maya."

The conversation of the other day faded away. He could not have meant that threat about Mirac. Bless my (half) brother—he'd sensed something wrong and stepped in.

"You need to take things easy," he added, "stop doing so much and concentrate on us—me and Mirac. Your family."

The emphasis on 'us' and 'your family' made me blink. It almost sounded like a threat again. But now my father had gone missing, and I'd promised to make the whole world a better place where everyone would be much safer and happier, including Kyle and Mirac. Once I'd set that mass vaccination programme in motion and arranged for as many people as possible to receive the inoculation, I'd 'fess up to Kyle.

And hope he would forgive me.

*****

"Get up," Lewis barked. He'd let himself into Justin's room and kicked his brother's feet. Justin pulled the green and white duvet back from over his head and blinked at twin. "Wassa time?"

"Half-three." His twin wrinkled his nose. The bottle of whisky on Wednesday night had turned into four as Justin and Marty decided to test the limits of vampire alcohol tolerance. Vampires didn't get drunk, so legend had it. But by the time they finished off bottle four, they'd reached a peachy state of inebriation where Marty promised Justin he was his "very best, no the greatest friend ever", Justin agreed with the assessment and they'd both managed to blot out the hideous memory of what had happened at the club. Then, as oblivion proved infinitely better than reality, he and Marty kept it up the next day and night.

"Dorian said I didn't need to come in until Saturday," he told Lewis, who shook his head.

"What are you gonna do? Wallow here all day drinking whisky? Go to work. It'll keep you busy."

Lewis had joined him and Marty for part of last night's whisky drinking competition and heard about Letitia. Proof, he had said, that Justin shouldn't get mixed up in any more of Griffin's stupid schemes if this was what happened.

Justin had cornered him by himself. "Why did Letitia do it? I don't understand."

Lewis ducked his eyes. "C'mon, man. We're vampires, and some of us are better than others at resisting humans. Looks like Letitia was one of the ones who couldn't."

"She used to listen to you when you banged on about what a rush it is to attack and kill."

At that, Lewis snarled at him. "This isn't on me! Each of us is responsible for our own reactions. If you'd asked me yesterday which vampire I thought most likely to attack and kill anyone, I'd have put her bottom of the list. And you at the top."

And with that, he'd walked off. Justin picked up the whisky from the sideboard and filled the crystal glass in front of him to the brim. After that, his memory of the night blurred around the edges.

Today, though, his brother was right. No point in wallowing in his bed replaying the attack and wondering how the scene might have played out differently if only he'd had a few seconds' warning. The only positive thing to come out of the whole unholy mess was that Marty didn't seem to hold his mother's conversion back to vampirism against him.

Lewis insisted on waiting until Justin got dressed, perhaps worried that if he left him to it, Justin would stay in bed. They said nothing to each other as Justin pulled on an old pair of Levi's, remembering as he fastened the button fly that Letitia had bought them for him.

His eyes prickled. That hollowed out feeling had returned. His nostrils still held that stink of sulphur, and he wished the vision of Letitia stuck in his head was not the one where he'd yanked her off Janette, blood dripping down her chin, and eyes unseeing.

Lewis picked up the dark grey Arran sweater laying on the floor and chucked it at him. "See you later. Take care out there, alright?"

As there was still an hour until the Friday evening shift at Club Sapphire began, Justin decided to drop in on Shayla and Lara on his way to work as their company always cheered him up.

Inner pep talk done, he decided to drop in on Shayla and Lara on his way to work. Their company always cheered him up. As Lewis had warned, there was an edgy tautness in the air—as if humans might burst out of any building or behind corners, stakes in their hands and bloody vengeance in their hearts.

He ducked back into the tunnel entry outside Vamp Towers. Now that he'd used it a few times, the layout made sense. The routes reminded him of the old maps of underground trains—a network of lines criss-crossing in a logical way. Fifteen minutes later, he found himself in front of a sign; the coordinates showing he had reached his destination—an exit just inside the Bellsmyre Estate.

"Come in!" Shayla trilled, flinging the door to their house open and onto him. "I'm so, so sorry about poor Letitia. You must be so upset."

I'm not. I'm horrible. He didn't say it out loud, patting Shayla's back ineffectually as her shoulders heaved. Behind her, Lara caught his eye, sending out a silent message along the 'are you okay' lines, him nodding in response.

Shayla pulled back from him. "D'you want to talk about it?"

"No. Thank you."

She took his hand, dragging him with her down the narrow hallway to the living room. "Do you want us to distract you? We've decorated in here. What do you think?"

"Interesting," he said; the most diplomatic answer possible when the wallpaper made your eyes bleed. She and Lara must have flicked through one too many interior design magazines and incorporated every suggestion. The red and gold-leaved wallpaper covered half the walls, a dado rail in dark wood marking it out from the magnolia paint below, leopard-print cushions scattered over the sofa and a fake tiger-skin rug on the floor.

Lara winked at him. The décor choice must be all Shayla's work; Lara too kind and indulgent to object.

"We had a bit of luck too," Lara said. "Someone a few streets away was having a clear out, and they had a giant skip in the garden. When we asked, they said we could take what we wanted. They were about to throw out an old computer. Not that old to me—ten years, I think, but we've now got a computer upstairs, so Shayla can do the essay work for her counselling course."

What will all the uproar of the last few days, Justin had forgotten all about the USB stick he and Fraser had taken from that old safe in the warehouse. An old computer might be compatible with the drive. "Can I use it?" he asked, and Shayla agreed at once. As he followed her up the stairs—a series of frames of clashing prints lining the walls there—she dropped her voice.

"That woman Letitia attacked? Lara said she'd been cured. I know it didn't work out, and Lara says I mustn't get my hopes up, but I can't help myself."

She stopped two steps from the top. "My mum," the murmur so quiet he had to stoop to hear her, "flung herself on the floor when they took me away from my family. Begged them to let her keep me. Promised she would keep me from all humans who hadn't been vaccinated. She's got cancer, my mum."

Justin grabbed her hands. Shayla hadn't confessed this before. Tears flowed down her cheeks. "Breast cancer. She got the diagnosis two months before the vampires came for me. I know the chances of survival are much higher now, but we didn't have health insurance and... and... she might be de-dead already, but I need to know and I'm so desperate to see her and my dad and my sisters."

Justin's hands dwarfed Shayla's. Her finger length must be half of his and yet cradling them felt as if a higher power had appointed him the keeper of Shayla's wellbeing.

"Shayla, it's pointless having a cure if you can't get vaccinated at the same time. Janette was lucky to escape alive but she's now right back where she started."

"I'm willing to take that risk," Shayla said.

He pressed the tips of his fingers onto her knuckles. Most of him wanted to promise he would do everything he could to make her human again, even though that was not his gift to give. He murmured something about trying to find out more.

"Thank you," Shayla stood on her tiptoes to peck him on the cheek. "Come and see my computer."

She'd positioned it on a narrow desk, also recovered from the skip, in the corner of her bedroom next to the window.

"It takes forever to fire up," she said, switching the PC on. "What do you want it for, anyway?"

How to reply? Again, as he'd decided with Lewis and Dorian, it would be better for her not to know anything.

"Dorian's old accounts are all on this," he held up the USB drive, "and he wants me to check them in case the tax man comes after him for anything."

As he'd expected, Shayla screwed her face up and told him she would leave him to it. The words 'accounts' and 'tax' tended to turn off most people. She let herself out, and Justin returned his concentration to the computer, which used an operating system so archaic, it took him an age to find the contents of the USB stick.

Five minutes later, he found it in the downloads—a folder stuffed full of jpgs, pdfs and an MP4 video.

He clicked on the video, remembering at the last minute to plug in Shayla's headphones so that she and Lara wouldn't overhear.

An old black and white film started up, the sound crackly and the imagery much blurrier than anything Justin was used to. It looked as if it was set in an office—a man, his white hair slick to his head and formally dressed in a suit and tie, sitting at a desk, hands steepled together. The window behind him caught Justin's eye. He zoomed in. Yes, filmed a long time ago, but that window shape and size was exactly like the windows in the Hamilton & Co building Dorian was about to buy.

The man's face too... where had Justin seen it before? A Bitepedia page. James Hamilton—the man who'd devised the original Hamilton Agreement after the last war with vampires when humans agreed to live alongside them?

"Sir," a voice off-screen piped up. "Are you ready?"

The man stared at the camera. The old photos didn't do him justice. This moving version of James Hamilton hinted at vast reserves of determination. He didn't blink, the bottom part of his jaw moved. Resolve settling into place.

"Yes," he said. "Start the questions."

The invisible interviewer started by asking the man his name.

"James Angus Robert Hamilton," the man declared.

The interviewer asked Hamilton to say the date. "March the seventeenth, 1958."

Ah, yes. After the last war, and just after Dunrovia, Llandia and the West Country had drawn up the Hamilton Agreement.

"Why do you want us to record this interview?"

Hamilton let out a sigh. "Ladies and gentlemen of the years to come. I'm sorry to tell you that when it comes to vampires, the wool has been pulled over your eyes."

AUTHOR'S NOTES - thanks for reading! Next update, Friday 25 June 2021.