A hand closed round his ankle and whipped him downwards.

Surprise filled him so completely that he didn’t get his hands up until it was too late; his helmet thudded against the ground, and everything went black.

Everything fell away.

The politics, the bureaucracy, the endless meetings and briefings and red tape, everything that went with being the Director of Blacklight was suddenly gone, leaving Paul Turner with a simple, cold reality: himself, an enemy and the chance to do what he had always been so horribly good at. He could have stayed standing in the jeep, removed from the battle like Dracula and the rest of his fellow Directors, and he knew nobody would have blamed him.

But this was where he belonged.

Turner raised his T-Bone and fired it through the stomach of a vampire leaping towards the back of an NS9 Operator. The woman wasted no time acknowledging the reprieve; she threw herself straight back into the carnage without so much as a glance. Turner ran forward, his T-Bone’s motor winding furiously, plunged his stake into the stricken vampire’s chest, then leapt back and swung his MP7 into his hands. The vampire burst, and Turner fired his submachine gun through the resulting gout of crimson, the bullets spraying the gore in every direction and filling the air with the bitter smell of burning blood.

A chorus of screams rang out as the remains of the vampire splashed to the ground. Turner’s bullets had ripped through a group of Dracula’s followers who had foolishly turned to see what had befallen their comrade; they fell to the ground, screaming, the faces that had not been destroyed by the volley of gunfire twisted with pain and red-eyed confusion.

Turner holstered his MP7 and his T-Bone, raised his stake, and ran towards them, a man doing what he had been born to do.

High above the city, Dracula smiled as his personal guard dropped from the clouds and sent the black-clad figures plummeting into the narrow streets below.

Had his enemies really believed he would float in plain sight without protection? Or that he would not expect them to send an assassination squad in the hopes of ending the battle before it had even really begun? If so, then they were stupider than he had even allowed himself to hope, and deserved no mercy.

I know everything they are going to do before they do it, he thought. I highly doubt the reverse is true.

Valentin ducked a punch, gave the vampire who had thrown it a look of outright contempt, then tore his head off with a sound like ripping cardboard.

Blood spurted from the stump, bright arterial red under the pale street lights of Carcassonne. The decapitated body took a faltering step forward, its hands clenching and unclenching reflexively, before it overbalanced and toppled to the ground. Valentin strode across the cobblestones and stamped his foot through the vampire’s chest; the heart gave way beneath his heel, and the man burst with a wet thud across the cobbled street.

Valentin heard a low growl behind him, and turned slowly towards it. Three vampires, two women and a man, were floating up the street, their eyes glowing, their fangs gleaming. He narrowed his eyes, taken aback by the strength of the emotion coursing through him; it was rare that his opulent and privileged life gave him reason for anger, but he was angrier than he could remember being in decades, angrier even than when he had discovered the desecration of his home in New York and beaten one of the culprits to death with his bare hands.

He was absolutely incandescent with rage.

The three vampires were smiling, and it was their expressions that had triggered his fury; the thought that these nobodies had the nerve to approach him was absolutely outrageous.

It was offensive.

Valentin strode towards them, meeting their smiles with a wide, warm grin. He had lost his helmet in his fall from the sky, but he gave it no thought; he had hated wearing it, and was happy it was gone. One of the women leapt towards him, and he fought back the urge to laugh at her pitiful lack of speed. He slid to his left, a blur in the evening gloom, and grabbed her throat with his gloved hand; her eyes widened with shock as he drew his arm back and hurled her at the stone wall on the opposite side of the road. She hit it with an impact that cracked the stone in a wide spiderweb and a crunch of breaking bones that echoed up and down the street. The vampire slid down the wall and landed in a crumpled heap on the ground; there was a long second of silence, before she began to howl in hoarse, broken agony.

The two remaining vampires took a step backwards, their easy arrogance faltering, but Valentin was upon them before they could flee. His fist shot out like a piston and crashed against the man’s sternum; it broke with a dry snap, and the vampire screeched as he folded to the ground. Valentin leapt over him, and buried his fangs in the female vampire’s face. Blood sprayed down his throat, and he drank deeply as she screamed into his mouth. He released her, and spat out a lump of her flesh as she scrambled backwards, her hands clutching her face, her screams so loud and desperate it was as if the world was ending around her.

Which, in truth, it was.

She stumbled into the air, seeking escape, but Valentin was much too fast. He grabbed her hair as she babbled apologies and pleas for mercy, hurled her down on to the cobblestones, and plunged his stake into her stomach. She stared at him with an expression of profound surprise as he shoved the metal stake up through her torso and into her heart. She exploded in a thunderclap of steaming blood, but Valentin was already on his way back up the road, the dripping stake in his hand. He didn’t hurry; he wanted the two broken vampires to see him coming, to have time to process what was about to happen to them, and for delicious expressions of terror to rise on to their faces.

He staked the male vampire without slowing, a dismissive crouch and flick of his wrist that put an end to the man’s tortured howling, and advanced on the tangled woman. Her face was bright white, her mouth open. He looked down at her shattered body and felt nothing; no sadness, no pity, no mercy. He crouched down, pressed the tip of the stake against her chest, and paused.

“Look at me,” he said.

The vampire’s eyes rolled in their sockets and settled unsteadily on him. A wheezing sound was coming from her throat, and Valentin realised she was still trying to scream; either her vocal cords had torn, or something was so badly broken inside her that she could no longer make them work.

He held her gaze, then pushed the stake forward. Her eyes widened as the thick muscle of her heart was pierced, then they burst, along with the rest of her. Blood splashed across Valentin, but he made no effort to avoid it; it was a spoil of war, the only one that really mattered.

Don’t even think about it, Bob Allen told himself. You’re too damn old. Just stay right where you are.

The NS9 Director was still standing in the back of the jeep, although he was now its only occupant; Paul Turner had managed to restrain himself for barely more than thirty seconds before he had leapt to the ground and joined the fight. Allen was theoretically in charge of directing the battle, but the fighting had immediately taken on a life of its own, just as he had known it would, rendering the team colours and squad designations he and his fellow Directors had worked out all but irrelevant; what would carry the day would be the strength and will of the Operators fighting and dying in front of him. His headphones carried a jumble of voices directly into his ear; he could have tuned them out, could have twisted the comms dial on his belt back to the command frequency, but he didn’t. The noise of the battle roused something primal inside him, something that was straining for release.