"Where are you going?" Kyle asked, squinting at me as I pulled on a thick sweater. Mirac lay next to him, fine dark hair sticking up at an angle and his face flushed on the side, squashed into the pillow.

We'd taken him into the bed with us when he woke up screaming the place down at three o'clock in the morning; something that seemed to thrill him. For such a tiny thing, he took up a lot of space—the snuffles and kicks keeping me awake along with worrying about how Justin was, and what I did about Jonno's stolen goods.

Kyle squinted at his phone. "It's only seven o'clock."

"Work thing," I said, leaning over to peck him on the cheek, "but I'll be back for lunchtime, promise. Then we can spend the afternoon binge-watching something if you like?"

He nodded reluctant agreement, and I let myself out of the flat. As I trotted down the stairs, the walls pulsed the words, liar, liar, liar! I'm not lying, I pleaded with them. I will be back for lunchtime! They tutted, anyway.

We lived within walking distance of the Argist Academy, and I hurried there, joining the throng of students making their way in for early classes. Gregor was ahead of me, I ducked behind a wall, anxious not to be spotted. Lying to Kyle was one thing; lying to an older brother known for his superior mind-reading skills was another.

Gregor entered the Academy building. I let out a sigh of relief, sneaked out from behind the wall and bumped into Nell.

"Maya! What a lovely surprise!" She gripped both my hands. The paranoid bit of me detected too much sarcasm in the surprise bit. Almost as if she'd been expecting me.

"Nell!" I matched her tone. As we stood locked together, we vibrated, the both of us trying to read each other's mind and blocking the other. In the time I'd known her, I'd always wondered where she came from. This woman with amazing powers and the drive to push forward an institution that advocated mind control as the best and only solution for dealing with vampires.

She stood in front of me now—a tiny old lady, cropped white hair, bright blue eyes and padded jacket sloping off thin shoulders. The eyes pierced me. People streamed around us, oblivious.

"Jonno," I said, remembering what Gregor had said the other day when he'd hinted that Nell knew more about Jonno than she was letting on, "is missing. Is he safe?"

Nell dropped my hands. "I don't know, Maya. We've been in close contact for years and yet I can't sense him anymore."

"Did you always know he was my dad? And Gregor's?"

She waited a beat, then nodded. Perhaps that should make me mad, but it didn't. The knowledge made a lot of things slot into place. How easily the Academy had accepted me. The way they allowed my mum and sister to continue living there rent-free. The feeling that Nell always looked out for me.

Anyway, I had too many other things to worry about. Something told me too, that continuing Jonno's mission to vaccinate people with drugs stolen from Sunshine Health was something Nell would approve of. She'd probably cooked up the whole idea in the first place. As long as I didn't tell her.

"Be careful," she said. I watched her go. It wasn't too late for me to change my mind. I could walk out of here right now, return to Kyle and Mirac and do as Kyle suggested. Be a proper mum and wife. My feet seemed to make the decision for me, one step in front of the other until I found myself outside Kirsty's lab located at the far end of the main Academy building for health and safety reasons.

Kirsty, dressed in a white lab coat splattered with suspicious looking stains and her hair standing on end, opened the door to my knock. Her face, as always, wore an air of distraction, though today it seemed more pronounced. And she'd only opened the door a few inches, her body blocking my view.

"Can I come in? I want to find out how you're getting on. Like, maybe you're on the verge of crucial discovery."

She sighed. "Now is not a good time. I'm busy."

"Please? I thought you might like to see some pictures of Rosie?"

Rosie was my secret weapon. Offering my sister up as a guinea pig for Kirsty's vaccine alternative had made me nervous (and Sharon had needed a tonne of persuading) but when it worked, Sharon changed overnight. The years melted off her. As Rosie had been among the first to receive the initial vaccine, most of the time Kirsty loved hearing stories of Rosie's progress.

Behind Kirsty I detected rustling. She edged the door closer to its frame, further blocking out the view. "Another time, maybe."

"What are you doing in there? Something secretive? I represent the government and they're funding you, so I'm entitled to walk into that lab anytime I want."

Mean of me to pull rank like that, but it got a reaction. Kirsty flushed a dull red, but not before the blink of her eyes told me that yes, I'd barged in on Kirsty doing something she wasn't supposed to be doing.

"No, of course I'm not," she snapped at me. "Come in."

In the last six months, the lab had expanded to a proper research type facility. Three well-lit rooms, locked cupboards to store those oh-so-precious chemicals and formulations, computers that generated modelling for cell behaviour and lab benches.

As usual, the smell in there made me wrinkle my nose. Bleach trying to mask rotten eggs and the sour-milk stink of bins. Kirsty used super-potent chemical combinations, all of which caught in the back of your throat. Her coat and person might be filthy, but she kept the lab hospital level clean. As I shut the door behind me, she tossed me a hairnet and white coat and instructed me to take off my shoes.

"Use the sanitiser too. I don't want you bringing in bacteria to a clinical environment."

I squirted the gel onto my hands and massaged it in. The threat I'd made had been a mistake. I was here to convince Kirsty to break the law and help me. Instead, I'd pissed her off. I took my phone out, asking the voice assistant to find the Rosie album.

"Here," I said, handing it to Kirsty, "check out your biggest success story."

Her face softened as she flicked through the pictures. In the summer, just before Mirac made his appearance in the world, Sharon, Rosie, Kyle and I had booked a caravan holiday in the West Country. Holidays were new to all of us—the first day beyond weird as we tried to work out what you did on a holiday.

Eat ice-cream? Tick. The album included a photo of Rosie sitting on the step outside the caravan tucking into one about the same size as her face. Kirsty lingered on that picture. And the second, the one where Rosie buried Kyle in sand on the beach, her laughing at the camera as he grimaced.

(Sand, he later told me, should not be allowed anywhere near a guy's balls.)

Kirsty gave me the phone back. "What do you want to inspect? I can show you the records of my work so far, as I've documented everything I've done. And I've kept tags on all the children I vaccinated at the same time as your sister, so we have enough quantitative and qualitive data on that group to confirm the vaccine formulation I came up with works."

She pointed at the storage cabinets. "It's just that I do not have nowhere near enough of the raw ingredients and no way of getting them."

Therein lay her problem, she explained. While most of the components of the vaccine were cheap and easy to reproduce, Sunshine Health owned every single chemical plant that manufactured them. And those chemical plants only sold in bulk to one supplier, so while Kirsty had managed to buy small quantities here and there, she couldn't purchase in bulk.

I swallowed back guilt. My little sister benefited from Kirsty's initial attempts, as had Angus and several others, but nowhere near as many people as we'd hoped. Imagine thinking I could burst into the lab and come up with a straightforward solution. Stupid, stupid, stupid...

Kirsty opened the door to the lab. "I'll keep busting my gut to mass produce the vaccination, I promise. One day, I'll come up with the perfect substitute for the chemical elements in the formulation and then we'll be laughing. Take care of yourself, Maya."

The sound of "and now piss off and leave me alone" vibes echoed there. As she shut the door behind me, a flash of red emerging from the door at the back of the room caught my eye. Oh-ho! I walked down the corridor, stamping my feet loudly, waited a few seconds and then crept back, and pressed myself up against the door to listen in.

"That was close!" Kirsty said, her voice muffled.

"Yes, but we got away with it. Mabel's waking up. Shall we see if it's worked?"

*****

Kirsty must be pursuing that vampire cure, even though our respective bosses had forbidden work on it. I knocked on the lab door. No reply. I tried the handle anyway. Locked.

"Kirsty?"

Nothing. As the corridor behind me was empty. I raised my voice. "Kirsty, can you let me in, please? I know you're in there—you and Lois, and you're trying to cure Mabel."

The door pinged open. Kirsty grabbed my arm. "Get in," she hissed, "and shut up."

The lab had that air of unnatural stillness rooms take on when someone has vacated them suddenly. "Lois," I called out. "Mabel. I know you're in here. Look, I don't care. I'm not going to report you to the Argists or the Assembly."

Lois stepped through the back door. Kirsty always stuck to white lab coats and the make-up free look as befitted her sober scientist status. Lois wore a red silk cocktail dress, the flash of which I'd seen earlier and the colour the perfect contrast with her blonde wig. She'd matched her lipstick and nail varnish to the dress too. The wedding outfit styling must be a full-time thing and not a one-off she and Mabel adopted when they crashed my wedding.

"Where's Mabel?" I asked, excitement mounting. They must have done it! Any second now, Mabel would push open that back door too, a heart beating, blood pumping human once more.

Lois folded her arms, fingers drumming against the skinny bicep.

"How do we know we can trust you?" Kirsty asked. "The funding I get is fifty-fifty the Argist Academy and the Assembly and it is solely to work on a vaccination. If they find out I'm spending time on anything else..."

No funding. Or a lot more supervision at the very least, to ensure that Dunrovia's chief medical researcher stuck to her brief and didn't spend any of her time pursuing a cure for vampirism.

"Because I want one too! I'm friends with vampires. It would be a dream come true if they ended up human again."

Kirsty, Lois and Mabel had only known me with Kyle; they wouldn't automatically assume Maya Dupont's motivation for a cure might include a green-tipped dreads vampire.

Which of course it didn't.

Kirsty and Lois did some silent eyeball communication thing, which looked worryingly like a 'no, we still can't trust her' message.

"Swear to god, the cure for vampirism is the best thing I've ever heard of," I said, "and I dunno why Cheryl and Nell aren't pushing for it. But it's obvious to me it's our best chance of a better, peaceful world. I've always banged on about a more equal society, and I think this is the only way we'll get one."

When they still looked wary, I threw in something my old friend Safi and I used to say to each other. "I can keep a secret. Pretty, pretty promise." I stuck my pinky out.

Kirsty pushed it away and let out a sigh. "I suppose you did introduce us. Yes, I'm trying to find out what worked on Lois, and not getting anywhere. Although we tried something different today, and the signs seemed promising earlier on."

Her eyes shone, marking her out as the true scientist on the brink of a grand discovery. I knew she enjoyed producing the vaccine, but the cure would be the biggie. It would stamp her name on the Humanity's Greatest Scientists' List for ever more. Win her the Nobel Peace Prize, even, and make up for what happened to her great-grandfather when Sunshine Health stole the credit for the vaccination from him and then proceeded to make billions from it.

"Come on then," she said, hurrying Lois and I through the back door. "Let's look in on Mabel."

Mabel lay on a bed in a side room. Two IV poles either side of her held inflated plastic pouches of liquid that dripped into the veins of each hand. An electronic monitor bleeped information on a small screen at the front of the bed. A body image scan flashed up—green lines illustrating the contours of Mabel's body. To the side of it, a box popped up. A straight line running along the bottom of a graph.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

Kirsty turned Mabel's wrist over, three fingers pressing on the underside.

"When that line goes up and down, it signals a human heartbeat. That's what we want."

She glanced up at Lois. "It's there! The pulse. Feel it!"

Lois took her friend's wrist. Her touch of it was far more tender. Her fingers stroked the underside gently before pausing.

"It is!"

"You try!"

Lois extended Mabel's arm to me. I pressed my two forefingers down on it the way Sharon had taught me years ago, seeking that warm movement beneath that told of life. There! The unmistakable...

No. Nothing. Over the last two years, I'd been up close and personal with vampires. Their limbs were rubbery. Not necessarily off-putting, but you never found the undercurrent of flowing life there. Mabel's arm felt like this now.

The pulse we'd all sensed just now. Maybe it was there because we wanted this to work so badly.

Kirsty grabbed Mabel's arm. The line on the graph kept its straight path. She stabbed her finger onto Mabel's wrist, holding it there well over the time she needed to.

Mabel's eyes flickered open.

"Lois?" she croaked. Mabel had been in this state for the last three days. No wonder her voice sounded rusty.

"Am I cured?"

The brief speech revealed her teeth. Two sharp canines.

Kirsty blew out a sigh. If she'd been by herself, I suspected she'd burst into tears.

Lois didn't bother with the social niceties of having to disguise your true feelings. "No, darling!" she wailed, flinging herself on top of Mabel. "But you will be, you will!"

Back in the main lab, Mabel re-joined us ten minutes later. Like Lois, she favoured dressing up. I did a double take. A silver, skin-tight jump suit worn with a beehive hairdo and knee-height white boots.

"Too much?" she asked, and I shook my head. The style guru should shut her mouth, seeing as poor Mabel hadn't achieved her dream of becoming human.

"This," Kirsty said, pointing at her computer screen, "is what we changed this time, so we can score that off."

The screen showed formulations, all of them scored through. They were trying out different chemical combinations to see what worked. Another one had just bit the dust.

"Who was that chappy who invented the electric lightbulb?" Lois asked. "We met him years ago."

"Thomas Edison," Mabel chimed in. "That quote he told us... I haven't failed—I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

Kirsty smiled, but Mabel's comment didn't lift the collective despondency.

"We're going to head off," Lois said, threading her arm through Mabel's. "There's a flash sale at that outlet store in the east end, and we might be able to pick up loads of bargains. No-one will recognise us, will they?"

I shook my head. Mabel and Lois's dress-up collection included wigs, coloured contact lenses (Mabel needed them to disguise her vampire status) and glasses, so that any of the bad guys chasing them never knew what they were looking out for.

They headed out, Lois's chatter artificially cheerful as she promised Mabel they would splurge, splurge, splurge money on a beautiful outfit for her.

Kirsty powered down her computer and took her glasses off, polishing the lenses on her coat. I took a deep breath.

"What-if-there-was-a-way-to-make-the-vaccine-not-strictly-legit?"

Kirsty squinted at me and made me repeat what I'd said. A warehouse stuffed full of every chemical element the vaccine needed awaited, I explained, but we mustn't let people know what we were up to... did she fancy it?

"Stolen property?" she asked, and I nodded, and she added that she didn't want me to tell her anything more. Damn it; I'd assumed it would prove irresistible. What if she reported me? The shit would well and truly hit the fan then.

She powered down the computer. "Where is it?"

"An old warehouse on a disused estate about an hour from here."

"I'm overdue a holiday. If you can find me a van to pack up some of the stuff from here."

My heart zinged back up to its rightful place in my chest once more. Yes, persuading a scientist to handle stolen goods was only the start in a long, complicated process but it felt like a victory after weeks and weeks of thwarts and disappointment.

"I'll get you one tomorrow," I promised, and let myself out.

And walked slap bang into two police officers.

AUTHOR'S NOTE - thanks for reading! It does mean a lot to me when I see my regular readers here. You lot rock. The next update will be Tuesday 29 June, 2021.