'We can't let a civilian - an Irish national at that - compromise the situation,' said Croft. 'Give the word, and I'll send in Bond and settle Meinster's hash. Set-ups like this are why we have people like him.'

Bond stood at attention, ready to kill for England.

'Margaret would have our heads on poles, Croft. And I'm not ready to become an ornament just yet. Katie Reed, do you solemnly promise not to succumb to the Stockholm Syndrome? Meinster's a fearful rotter, you know. Good clothes and a boyish charm are no guarantee of good character.'

'I've met him before. I was not entirely captivated.'

'Good enough for me. Any other opinions?' Everyone looked as if they were about to say something, but the Home Secretary cut them all off. 'I thought so. Katie, our hearts go with you.'

'Wouldn't you rather have a gun?' asked Jeperson.

'Ugh. No. Nasty things.'

'A shadow? I can have Nezumi here in fifteen minutes. You've worked with her before.'

Kate remembered the Japanese vampire girl who used to live in the flat upstairs from hers. An elder, and an instrument of the Diogenes Club.

'Isn't it a school night?'

Meinster would have someone who'd notice even a shadow as mouselike as Nezumi. It was safer to go into the Embassy alone.

Safer, but still stupid.

She was marched again, with Dravot taking hold of her arm in exactly the same place, to the front line, the pavement outside the Embassy. Power was cut off to the street lamps as well as the building, but large floodlights illuminated the dragon banners, projecting human silhouettes against the walls. It must be very dramatic on television, though she overheard Paxman arguing down the line with a BBC controller who wanted, if no one was being murdered just now, to cut back to the snooker finals. As she approached the Embassy, there was some excitement among the crowd, mostly from people asking who the hell she was.

Kate saw no faces at the windows. SAS snipers with silver bullets in their rifles were presumably concealed on the nearest rooftops. Men like Hamish Bond were trained to use crossbows with silver-tipped quarrels. There were even English longbowmen schooled in Agincourt skills, eager to skewer an undead with a length of sharpened willow.

On one side, Jeperson suavely ran down what they knew about the situation inside the Embassy. On the other, Croft brutally gave bullet points about the things they'd like to know.

So far as they understood, there were about twenty-five hostages, including the Romanian Ambassador, whom no one would really miss since he was a faceless apparatchik, and Patricia Rice, a pretty upper-middle class student who had been visiting in order to arrange a tour of collective farms by her Marxist Student Group. As a bled-dry corpse, Rice would be a public relations nightmare: her great-great uncle or someone had once been a famous comedian, and news stories were already homing in on her. The viewers were following the siege just to see if the posh bird made it through the night. Besides Meinster, there were perhaps five vampire terrorists. It was imperative she confirm the numbers, and find out what kind of ordnance they were packing besides teeth and claws. From what she remembered of Meinster's kids up in the Carpathians, they didn't need that much more.

As they reached the front doorstep, Dravot let her go.

Everyone backed away from her in a semi-circle, skinny shadows growing on the Embassy frontage.

In theory, Kate could be arrested if she crossed the threshold. The Embassy was legally Romanian turf and she remained a fugitive from state justice. It occurred to her that this would be a needlessly elaborate way of whisking her back to the prison she had clawed her way out of. Which didn't mean the Securitate, besides whom the SPG were lollipop men, weren't up to it.

She thought of pressing the bell-button, but remembered the power was off. She rapped smartly on the door.

The report was surprisingly loud. Weapons were rattled, and she turned to hiss reassurance. If anything would be worse than being bound in a diplomatic pouch and sunk in a Bucharest dungeon, it would be getting shot dead by some jittery squaddie.

The door opened and she was pulled inside.

In the dark lobby, her eyes adjusted instantly. Candles had been stuck up all around and lit.

She had been grabbed by two vampires. A rat-faced fright who scuttled like an insect, his unnaturally elongated torso tightly confined by a long musty jacket with dozens of bright little buttons like spider-eyes. And a new-born girl with a headscarf, bloody smears on her chin, a man's pinstripe jacket, Dr Martens boots and a sub-machine gun. The girl's red eyes told Kate exactly how she felt about her: hatred, mistrust, envy and fear.

'Patricia Rice?' Kate asked.

The new-born hissed. She had been turned recently, in the four days since the siege began.

No one had told her Meinster was making vampires of the hostages. It was the surest way of triggering the Stockholm Syndrome, she supposed. Rice had given up Marxism and pledged herself to a new cause.

She remembered Meinster in the mountains, explaining why the Transylvania Movement would win. 'We can make more of us,' he had said. 'We can drown them.'

Rice took her hand and tugged. Kate stood her ground.

She had been a vampire for nearly a century. This fresh immortal needed a lesson in seniority. Meinster was a fanatic for bloodline, pecking order and respect for elders. It was one reason he was wrong about longterm strategy: he could easily make more vampires, but not more like him. As Ruthven said, he was a parvenu anyway, a pretend-elder barely older than Kate. If Dracula was still King of the Cats, Meinster would never be taken seriously by anyone.

She broke Rice's hold.

'Just take me to your leader,' she said.

The rat-nosferatu led the way. He moved jerkily, like a wrong-speed silent movie. He was one of the very old ones, far beyond the human norm. Kate had met creatures like him before and knew they were among the most dangerous of vampirekind. They were all red thirst, and no pretence about civilisation.

She was taken upstairs to a high-ceilinged conference room. Freestanding candelabra threw active shadows on the walls. Hostages were tied up, huddled against the walls: their arms were striped with scabs, but not their necks. Meinster was conserving his resources.

The Baron stood in one corner with his lieutenants. They were vampire kids, child-shaped but old-eyed. These were his favoured troops, not least because he wasn't himself very tall or broad. On Not the Nine O'Clock News, he was impersonated (very well) by Pamela Stephenson.

Meinster wore a very smart grey cloak, over a slightly darker grey frock coat and riding boots. His ruffled shirt would have looked better on Adam Ant. His hair was improbably gold, gelled into a fixed wave. His smile was widened by his fangs.

One of his lieutenants had a gun to match Rice's; the other held Meinster's two poodles. In the forest, Kate had seen Meinster kill another vampire for ridiculing his beloved dogs. They were vampire pets, little canine monsters with sharpened fangs, fattened on drops of baby's blood. They must have been smuggled into the country despite quarantine regulations designed to keep undead animals like them out - a more serious crime than terrorism in the opinion of many Home Counties pet owners.

'Katharine, well met.'

'Baron,' she acknowledged.

'She was insolent,' hissed Rice. 'I hate her already.'

'Shush up, Patty-Pat,' said Meinster.

'We don't need her. We only need me. You said so, when you turned me. You said you only needed me. Me.'

'Am I beginning to detect a theme tune?' suggested Kate. '"The Me Song"?'

Rice raised a hand to slap, but Kate snatched her wrist out of the air and bent her arm around her back. She got snarled up on the strap of her gun.

'You turned this girl, Baron?'

Meinster smiled artfully, a boy caught out.

'Things must be desperate.'

She let Rice go. The new-born sulked, face transforming into a bloated mask of resentment and self-pity. She should watch that tendency to shapeshift, or her scowl might really stick. She only had to look at Mr Rat-features to see a dire example of the syndrome.

'May I offer you someone to drink, Katharine. We've a fine selection of fusty old bureaucrats. Oh, and three cultural attaches who admit that they're spies.'

'Only three?'

'So far. We can offer Ruthven some interesting documents from the secret files. Nicolae and Elena tell the world about modernisation and harmony with the West, but we both know they play a different hand at home. My old comrade has much to hide. I'd be most willing to share it with your lovely Mrs Thatcher.'

'She's not mine. I'm Irish, remember.'

'Of course, Katharine. Potato famines, Guinness, Dana. I am well up on the West. As a coming man, I have to learn all these things. Just as He did, a century ago.'

When he so much as hinted at the name, his eyes were radiant. She thought she saw tiny twin bats flapping in his pupils.

'You so want to be him, Baron. How well did you know him?'

'He was more a father to me than any human family. More a mother. More anything.'

On the subject, Meinster was blind. To him, Dracula was the King of the Cats, the fount of wisdom and destiny, a God and a champion. Kate knew too many vampires like the Baron, forcing themselves to be what they imagined Dracula had been, hoping to become everything he was but not knowing the whole story.

'At the end, he wanted to die,' she said. 'I saw that.'

'You saw what you wanted to see, Katharine. You are not of his direct bloodline.'

'I wish that were true.'

'Heresy,' shouted Rice, raising her gun and fiddling with anything that might be a safety catch. 'She defiles the name of the Father-in-Darkness.'

Meinster nodded, snake-swift. The old nosferatu, rodent-ears twitching, took the new-born's gun away from her.

'Thank you, Orlok,' acknowledged Meinster.

Kate looked again at the reeking thing. She knew who Graf von Orlok was. During the Terror, when London rose against the rule of Dracula, he had been in command of the Tower where the 'traitors' were kept. If she had been less fortunate during her underground period, she might have met Orlok before. Several of her friends had, and not survived.

Sometimes, she forgot to be afraid of vampires. After all, she was a bloodsucking leech too and no one was ever afraid of her. Sometimes, she remembered.

Now, looking at the spark in Orlok's grubby eyes, she remembered the first vampires she had seen, when she was a warm girl and the dead were rising all around.

In her heart, nightmare spasmed.

'Katharine, I will prevail,' said the Baron.

'How? The British government doesn't negotiate with terrorists.'

Meinster laughed.

'What's a terrorist, Katharine? You were a terrorist. And you've just had a conversation with the Home Secretary. Once upon a time, you were a wanted insurrectionist and Orlok was a lawful authority. Once Nicolae Ceauescu was a terrorist, my partisan comrade, and the Nazis were our enemy.'

That was true.

'And, in our homeland, you were unjustly accused of murder, hunted by corrupt police. Then, when you came to me in the mountains, we had common cause. Nothing has really changed. We have been adrift, I'll admit. Since He passed, we have pretended to be humans, to be just another of the many races of mankind, but we are not. You've never lived with your own kind, Katharine. You've spent a century working with them, fighting for the cattle. Yet they still fear and loathe you. Here in England, the warm are polite and pretend not to despise us; but in our homeland, you must have seen the truth. Vampires are hated. And we must be hated. Our inferiors must hate and fear and respect us. He knew that. His was the vision we must struggle to bring about. We must be the princes of the earth, not the servants of men. Then, believe me, He will rise again. What you saw was an illusion. Dracula does not die and become dust.'

Meinster was trembling with excitement, a boy dreaming of Christmas morning.

Kate saw Patricia Rice, adoring her father-lover-fiend.

'First, Transylvania...'

Meinster let it hang.

'I've seen who's out there,' said Kate. 'I know what they can do. Having hostages won't help. You had one card, and you've played it badly.'

She nodded at Patricia Rice.

'On the contrary, she was my masterstroke. Are you not, dearest Patty-Pat?'

He reached out and touched Rice's face. She squirmed against his hand, like one of his fanged poodles.

'She will be my Elena, when I rule. The first of my Elenas.'

The Baron gave orders to Orlok, in rapid Romanian. Kate only picked up a few words. One of them, of course, was moarte - 'death'.

'First, the fire,' said the Baron, sweeping over a candelabrum. Flames caught a tablecloth and swarmed over the furniture. The hostages began screaming. 'Now, we make a dramatic departure.'

He leaped up onto a windowsill and posed against the tall opening. Searchlights outside swung to light him up. He was a swashbuckling figure, cloak swept back over his shoulders.

'To me, my brides.'

Rice hopped up to nestle under one arm. He stretched the other out, beckoning to Kate.

'Become a bride of Dracula, my fiery Irish colleen.'

'That's far too presumptuous, Baron.'

Orlok picked her up and tossed her to Meinster.

'Comfy?' he asked the two. Kate saw Rice almost swoon in delight, but didn't understand it herself.

Apart from all other considerations, she knew Meinster was gay.

He leaned against the windows and smashed through.

For a moment, Kate assumed the Baron, like his supposed father-in-darkness, could grow wings and fly. Then gravity and reality took over.

They plummeted to the pavement.

Meinster sprang up like a cat. Kate, badly shaken, rolled into the gutter. Rice, knees and ankles broken, howled as the bones knit back together.

People rushed forward.

'I have surrendered,' Meinster announced, 'to these flowers of English and Irish vampire maidenhood.'