His big skull was full of exhaustion. I embraced him, gently.

Then stood back and pulled the trigger.

I picked up Justine’s scent again thirty minutes later. West on West Carey Boulevard, south on Martin Luther King, west on Balzar Avenue. Warm. Warmer. Hot. Red hot. 1388. By which time I didn’t need her scar on the atmosphere. By which time the spilled blood was blaring.

Sunrise eighty-two minutes away. I wasn’t worried. The VanHome had a built-in blackout compartment. (Justine should have taken this instead of her Jeep.) I’d go to one of the underground casino lots. There was time.

I found Karl Leath as she’d left him (aside from the glut of circumstantial evidence there was no mistaking either my girl’s physical scent or its soul’s correlate), on his back on the bed, one pale and varicosed leg hanging over the edge, bottom jaw missing, throat torn open. His eyes were wide, showing mostly whites. His tongue lolled, lewd and frank as an Aztec god’s.

“She made quite a mess,” a female voice said.

At the risk of redundancy, let me tell you I’m not easily startled. It had probably been a thousand years since anyone had given me a fright. But I’d poured all my consciousness into Justine’s slipstream and left none for what was going on in my own. Therefore I started—and turned.

“She’s new, obviously,” the vampire said.

She was standing in the bedroom doorway, hands by her sides. Tied back blonde hair, glacier-blue eyes, white skin and a full red mouth. Red, white and blue so vivid the Tricolour flashed in my memory. Dark jeans, riding boots, black leather motorbike jacket. All of which had seen better days. She’d fed, recently. The blood-glut’s throb came through her body’s aura of dust and gasoline and burnt flesh. She wasn’t alone. Someone else was in the kitchen.

It took me a moment—memory wobbled and flailed and wrenched itself back into balance—then I knew her: Mia Tourisheva.

There was history. Three years ago her vampire son, Caleb, had been captured by WOCOP and incarcerated. Talulla, held at the same facility, had escaped and taken the boy with her, saving his life. Which would have left Ms Tourisheva in her debt, had Talulla not done what she did next. What she did next was threaten to torture and kill Caleb herself unless his mother infiltrated the vampire cult holding Talulla’s son and helped her rescue him. Mia had had no choice. In the rescue operation that followed (I was there—Justine had filled me in—as Marco Ferrara) relations between the two women were further complicated by Talulla saving Mia’s life—and returning Caleb to her unharmed.

“Is she all right?” I asked her. “Do you have her?”

“Have her? Why would I have her? We just happened to be passing. I was curious. I observed.”

“Do you know where she went?”

“Southeast.”

“How long since?”

“Two hours, perhaps.”

“You remember me?”

“Of course. Though I don’t believe the name Marco Ferrara is yours.”

“It’s one of mine,” I said. “You have no idea where she was going beyond the direction?”

Mia shook her head. She looked tired. Sensing I meant her no harm, she stepped into the room. Light from the streetlamp showed dried blood on her hands. There were holes in the jeans. One side of the bike jacket was heavily scuffed.

“Trouble?” I asked. She’d been screening, but understood now it wasn’t necessary. I wasn’t trying. We know when someone is.

Her smile said yes, trouble. The latest in a long run of troubles. “Idiot driver,” she said. “There’s a wrecked Harley in the desert.”

A child’s voice said “I found some” a moment before a boy with a human age of perhaps twelve appeared in the doorway. White-blonde nest of hair, gaunt, androgynous little face, large green eyes. Also in torn jeans and scorched leather jacket—a blood-red one that set his hair and eyes off beautifully. He had an open pack of Lucky Strikes in his hand. I found some. Cigarettes.

“We’re not that broke,” Mia said to him. Then to me: “They went up in the bike fire. With other things.”

The boy stared at me.

“Hello, Caleb,” I said. I felt sorry for him. I’ve seen it before: Turned before adulthood. It never works out, the body that never catches up, the body fundamentally deprived, the body that becomes a joke at the immortal soul’s expense. It was palpable between them, that he had the power to punish her for doing it to him. Palpable, too, was the love. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for him. And to her nothing she could do for him would ever be enough. Looking at them was like looking at someone resigned to a deformity.

“How do you know who I am?” he said. He’d pocketed the cigarettes, quickly. To leave both hands free. I recognised in him Justine’s reflex readiness for flight. Or fight.

“Your mother and I have met before,” I said.

“Are you …?” Mia asked me.

Who they say you are.

“I think so,” I said.

“You think so?”

“It’s the only answer I have.” I felt suddenly tired myself.

“Do you—”

“No.”

I interrupted her quietly, but with finality. Our eyes met. No, I don’t have any answers. I don’t know why. I don’t know what it means. Only that the conviction that it means something is a necessary disease. Not sure which sense of the word necessary. The room bristled. It had been waiting for this. The corpse wasn’t its nucleus. This was.

Mia looked at me. I wasn’t trying to summon the length of my life for her. It came up on its own. It comes up in my eyes. In the space immediately around me. People feel it and it’s like stepping into a tomb unopened for twenty thousand years. In which there may or may not be treasure.

“The prophecy?” she said.

I shook my head. I knew which version of the prophecy she meant. The wrong one. The mistranslation. Not “when he joins the blood of the werewolf” but “when he sheds the blood of the werewolf.” Jacqueline Delon had been working from a (conveniently) corrupted text, one which suggested that Remshi (that would be me, yes, don’t laugh) would return and raise the vampire race to global supremacy in a midwinter ritual that demanded not the betrothal but the sacrifice of a lycanthrope.

“I was looking for Talulla at the time,” I said. “But not for the reason you think. Not for the Disciples’ nonsense.”