“Yeah,” said Jamie. “It really is. Why didn’t it work?”

“You know what your father was like,” she said. “He had a stubborn streak a mile wide. I think it just made him all the more determined.”

“And what about you?” he asked. “It can’t have been easy, knowing they didn’t approve?”

“Oh, I couldn’t have cared less,” she said, and laughed. “If anything, it just made me even more attracted to him. Which I’m sure isn’t something you can relate to.”

Jamie smiled. “Definitely not, Mum,” he said. “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

His mother nodded, her grin still in place. “I was young once, Jamie,” she said. “I was even a teenager, if you can believe that, and I can still just about remember what it was like. Although to be fair, I didn’t spend my adolescence hunting vampires. So that’s probably where our experiences diverge a little bit.”

Jamie stood up. “Can I have a hug, Mum?” he asked.

His mother flew across the cell, wrapped her arms round him, and squeezed him so tightly that for a moment he couldn’t breathe.

“She’ll come back,” she whispered. “And if she doesn’t, it wasn’t meant to be.”

He squeezed her back. “Thank you,” he said. “Any more tea?”

Marie released him. “Of course,” she said, and set about refilling his mug. “So what else has been happening upstairs? Anything new?”

“Yeah,” he said. “There actually is, for once. The way we go on patrol got changed today. We have to bring vampires in alive now.”

“Why?”

“Nobody knows for sure,” said Jamie. “Some people think it’s a PR thing, that it’ll look better if the public sees us locking vampires up instead of destroying them, and that’s probably true.”

“But you think it’s something else?” asked his mother, holding out his mug.

Jamie took it and nodded. “I haven’t seen Matt for about a week, and neither has Kate. So yeah, I think it’s something else. I think the Lazarus Project has found a cure.” His mother’s eyes widened, and he moved quickly to clarify what he was saying. “I mean, I think they’ve made some kind of breakthrough. I think we’re being asked to bring them test subjects. But like I said, I don’t know.”

“You’ve always said Matt would do it eventually,” she said. Her eyes were so full of hope it made him feel guiltier than ever. “You’ve never doubted it.”

“I never have,” he said. “But I really don’t know, Mum, and I need to be sure you’re listening to me. I’m not telling you there’s a cure. I probably shouldn’t have said anything at all.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Jamie,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “I’m not an idiot.”

“I know you’re not,” he said. “I just don’t want you to get your hopes up.”

“And I appreciate that,” she said.

Jamie sipped his tea. “What do you think you’d do, Mum?” he said. “If this was all over, and you were back out in the world?”

She shrugged. “That would depend on whether or not I was still a vampire.”

“Assume not,” said Jamie. “Assume you were back to normal. What would you do?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’d like to go somewhere I haven’t been before. Somewhere I could read, and sleep, and try my very hardest to never have anything exciting happen to me again.” She smiled at him. “I think I’ve had enough drama for one lifetime.”

He smiled back. “Fair enough,” he said. “I don’t think anyone could blame you for that.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” she said. “So yes, a bit of peace and quiet would be nice. And I’d like to make some friends. I used to like having friends, before your father died. What about you?”

“What about me?”

“What would you do if you were cured?” she asked.

Jamie narrowed his eyes. “I don’t know if I would take a cure.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I don’t know for certain that I would take a cure, Mum.”

“Is that a joke, Jamie?” she said, her tone suddenly sharp. “Because it’s not funny.”

He shook his head. “No, Mum,” he said. “I’m not joking. I know it isn’t what you want to hear, but I don’t hate being a vampire like you do. And it makes what I do every night a lot easier, and a lot safer.”

Marie put her tea down, sat forward, and looked him squarely in the eyes. “I want you to make me a promise, Jamie,” she said. “Son to mother. Promise me that if Matt and the others really have found a cure, you’ll take it. You’ll take it straight away.”

“I’m sorry, Mum,” he said. “I can’t do that.”

Pete Randall checked his watch, and looked around a community centre that he sincerely hoped had seen better days.

The concrete building, which squatted in a nondescript suburb of Peterborough, was coated in flaking whitewash and floored with peeling linoleum. Plastic tables were lined up at one end of the long room, beneath a fading string of triangular union flags and a handwritten banner announcing that TUESDAY NIGHT IS BINGO NIGHT. Behind the tables stood two large plastic bins, from which a line of SSL volunteers were handing plastic bottles of cattle blood to the vampires queuing quietly along the wall of the community centre and out on to the street.

Several of the volunteers looked nervous, but were getting on with their jobs without complaint. Pete didn’t blame them, particularly those who were helping out on their first drive; the blood caused an involuntary reaction in most of the vampires, and the sight of their fangs and the red glow in their eyes was unsettling, no matter how dedicated you were.

The blood drives had fast become a central part of SSL. The first, which Pete had overseen barely a month earlier, had been sparsely attended, and the vampires who had shown up had been visibly suspicious, as if they were worried that Blacklight Operators were waiting to jump out from behind the tables and stake them. But attendance had risen rapidly once it had become clear that the drives were safe, and they were now running at least half a dozen every week. Pete had made arrangements with two chains of slaughterhouses to supply blood, but he was already frantically trying to locate more; they had brought two hundred and fifty litres to the community centre, and had already given more than half of it away, barely forty minutes after they had opened the community centre’s doors.

“Is this what it means to be the boss?” asked a voice from behind him. “Just standing around and not getting your hands dirty?”

Pete smiled as he turned round. “I’m strategically assessing the situation,” he said. “It’s vital work. You wouldn’t understand.”

The girl standing before him grinned and punched him on the arm. The abundance of rings on her fingers meant the blow hurt more than he suspected she intended, but he didn’t let it show. Her name was Genevieve, but anyone who called her that was taking their life in their hands. She considered her name evidence of her mother’s pathetic obsession with class, her desire to drag their family as far up the social totem pole as was humanly possible; instead, she grudgingly went by Jen. She was twenty, a politics student with a razor-sharp tongue and purple streaks in her hair and a paragraph from George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London tattooed on her forearm. In the pub around the corner from the SSL office, not long after she joined, one of the other volunteers had suggested that she was a class warrior; her response had lasted for almost twenty minutes, and contained language of such graphic specificity that it could have stripped paint from the walls.

Pete was very, very fond of her.

“All right then,” said Jen, narrowing her eyes and grinning at him. “Whenever you’re finished being all strategic, the last of the blood needs bringing in. I’m going outside to check on the queue.”

“All right,” he said. “Give me a shout if there are any problems.”