Nature has a way of creating balance. Sometimes the scales are reset because a dominant species exhausts all resources. Sometimes a new apex predator evolves to fill a hole in an ecosystem.

Reggie had known she was evolution's answer to a nasty problem from the age of thirteen. Unfortunately, even apex predators make mistakes.

Walking into a vampire dive just before it was raided by some kind of government black ops organisation, was a really big one.

Of course Reggie knew some governments had woken up to the fact that supernatural creatures existed, even if logic said they shouldn't. It also made sense that a place like Romania would have come to such conclusions faster than the rest of the world. Not all legends were just stories. The fact they apparently had people working against fiends of the night was, however, news. She mentally swore about bad intel while she sat in a cage, being jostled, in the back of a moving van.

All she remembered about the attack were flash grenades and some kind of dart hitting her in the neck. The world had gone the most amazing shades of silver and black before vanishing completely. She had woken up in the cage.

The door and sides were silver plated (it all but glowed in her enhanced vision), electrified (she could feel the hum) and covered in something nasty for supernatural entities (it smelled of herbs and chemicals and made her skin itch just from being near it). Her captors had at least been kind enough to put mesh between her and either side of the cage, because waking up leaning against them would have been unpleasant.

There was also some sort of filter over the whole cage, letting only a little light through, and the strip down the centre of the van ceiling looked like a UV tube. The back plate behind her was solid steel that even an older vampire would have trouble breaking through. Then, if that wasn't enough, there was also, what she guessed was, an unlit UV bulb in its own little cage above her. Whoever her captors were, they covered their bases.

Then again, with vampires, that was the only way to survive.

Since she had spotted the cameras covering the whole of the van as well, the only option was to bide her time.

There were five other cages besides her own, each with an unconscious individual in it. She suspected they were all vampires. At least one of them was, her sixth sense told her that, but the rest was supposition. Some of them could have been other supernaturals, or even humans for all she could see through the side of her prison. Without touching them she couldn't be one hundred percent sure anyway.

Reggie was the first awake. Or, at least she was the first not still pretending to be unconscious or dead. Vampires could be tricky like that. Being able to shut down their breathing at will, they played possum really well.

No doubt her captors thought she was a vampire. After all that was her natural disguise-usually a good thing-right then, not so much. As she took in her surroundings and fellow captives, as much as she could without giving away any of her more advanced abilities, she decided to play the new naive vampire until she knew what was going on. If she handled it right, her captors might believe she was young, recently turned, clueless, and even a victim. Vampires believed it often enough after all.

In light of this she reached out and touched the front of the cage like an idiot. It hurt, as expected, and she grabbed her hand back with a yelp. Cradling her now burning fingers under her arm, she shrunk down into herself and did her very best to look unthreatening.

"What the fuck?" were the words that alerted her to the fact at least one of her companions had woken up a few minutes later.

Whoever he was he did not sound pleased. There followed a series of expletives that impressed Reggie with their imagination, range of languages, and the completeness with which they questioned the ancestry, species and mental aptitude of their captors. Suffice to say the male vampire was not best pleased.

She was sure he was a vampire, because he wasn't shy about letting his other side out while he was swearing either. Interestingly he did not try and touch the door of his cage, however. He might have been hot-headed, but he was not inexperienced. Reggie watched him from under her lashes to see what he would do next.

"What are you looking at?" the male vampire demanded in Romanian.

Flashing around vampire powers definitely had its advantages, it seemed. With the undead everything improved with age, so she added the new information to her mental inventory of him. He had to have very good eyesight indeed to see her watching through the filter on their cages.

"I ... I don't understand," she said, ducking her head down.

She spoke the language perfectly, but Jane Harrington, helpless English tourist and her cover, didn't.

"Imbecilic foreigner," was what the other vampire threw back at her, but in Romanian, so she put on her best confused expression. "American?" the male vampire eventually asked in a very heavy accent.

She shook her head.

"English," she said quietly.

"Romanian now," the man said with a snide laugh.

Vampires weren't big travellers. It's wasn't quite as bad as Bram Stoker had made out, they didn't require huge boxes of earth, but they did need tokens from where they had died, which could be tricky with customs.

"What's happening?" she asked, finally looking at him properly as if he was her last hope.

"We are caught, Little English Girl," he replied, "that is what is happening. We are caught."

With that he put his head back, closed his eyes and clearly dismissed her. There would be nothing useful coming from that direction.