3.

The doorbell chimed just after midnight, sounding the first six notes of 'Money (That's What I Want)'. From the first-floor landing Alucard used the universal remote to admit the girl Heidi had sent over. The main doors were California mission relics, hung between Transylvania granite - it had taken some effort to get the hinge-creak, which needed oil and grit every week. He punched in a lighting plan for the reception hall. Artificial moonglobes shone through a blue-and-green stained glass faux ceiling, casting bat signals on red-and-white, honeycomb-locked, skull-motif floor tiles.

The girl, pinned in the harsh crossbeams of three movement-sensitive spotlights, had a waist-length fall of raven hair, pale skin surgically taut over model-sharp cheekbones, clunky platinum man-in-the-moon earrings, and a carmine mouth held open in permanent Pepsodent rictus by ivory fangs. A high-collared, floor-length black cape covered her body: she could have been one of those Malay penanggalan creatures - a lovely-faced head floating above a sac of bloody innards.

He descended his main staircase, footfalls muffled by thick carpet, eyes on the vampire girl. These nights, Heidi delivered more suitable product than her predecessor, Madame Alex. He'd made the call ten minutes ago and someone fitting his individual requirements was express-delivered to Castle Dracula 90210. He would send Heidi a present, a collectible plate signed by the surviving cast of Gilligan's Island.

'I am Alucard,' he said. 'I bid you welcome.'

Acoustics in the hall were perfect for the timbre of his voice. The girl reacted as if his greeting had come at her from all directions at once.

'Come freely and of your own will and leave something of the happiness you bring.'

Red-nailed white hands slid out of the front of her cape and travelled up to her throat. The cloak slithered off slim, bare arms, parting like stage curtains. With a practised twitch, she tossed cape-wings back over broad shoulders and displayed her goods, hands on hips.

She was a big-busted hardbody, a product of aerobics, implants and directed shapeshifting. Her scarlet swimsuit was cut in a V that went below the navel, straps barely covering her nipples. Black leather spike-heeled knee-boots added six inches to her height.

Her knowing smile suggested she expected to make an impression.

'You can call me Vampi,' said the girl.

Oh dear.

The girl - Vampi, doubtless with a little bat over the i - didn't yet realise how special a client John Alucard was, how big a noise he could make in this town and how much he could do for (and to) her. That had been the Father's strength. No one believed the stories about him until it was too late.

The girl strode towards the stairs, puzzled by the follow-spots. She frowned and giggled, eyes blurring red. Her silicone shivered.

To Alucard, Vampi was more dead flesh, a drac package with a date stamp. Admittedly, the wrapping was superior. Hollywood was full of tens. Beauty-contest runners-up and high school athletes had been flooding the town since the 1920s. Most didn't become movie stars but they got together and bred good-looking kids. Los Angeles was brimful with the third or fourth crop of beauties, an infestation of hunks and honeys, ace faces and knockout figures. Excluding character actors and screenwriters, you could go months without running into anyone ugly.

'Leave your cloak and come upstairs,' he said.

She tapped a cameo at her throat and the cape fell away. She turned to catch it, giving him a view of her taut butt: thong-divided buns of steel, untanned skin of velvet. Necrophagous Arabian Nights ghouls and South American plane-crash rugby players always started cannibal cook-outs by eating ass, the choicest meat cut on the human body.

Vampi came up the stairs towards him, swaying with practised ease on her heels.

He stretched out his right hand for her. She was taken with the large ruby on his long forefinger. She bowed her head to consider the ring.

'It was His,' he explained. 'An inheritance from my Father-in-Darkness.'

He pressed a key on the remote. A neon frame illuminated a full-figure portrait, executed by Joseph Sibley to a Royal Commission in 1887. Prince Consort Dracula in uniform as Commander of the Carpathian Guards. His shining steel helm surmounted by a snarling white wolfshead, trailing the entire pelt. His Empire-red tunic heavy with military decorations and orders. The Father's great hand, black-haired, rested on the hilt of a ceremonial sword. The ring was clearly identifiable, a speck of blood bright as a spectral stain.

Vampi was impressed. The ring and painting were very expensive.

'Beyond imagining,' he confirmed, 'but not priceless. Nothing is ever priceless.'

At the touch of a button, the portrait slid soundlessly aside. Lights grew in his den.

'We can be more comfortable in here,' Alucard said.

The girl went into the room and he followed. He offered her blood-threaded Cristal. She accepted, though she just used her flute as a prop. Alucard took a place astride the recliner in the middle of the room, feet on the floor, swivelling to keep track of the girl. Vampi was a walker and a talker. She prowled his lair, examining framed movie posters - his credit growing bigger the more recent the release.

For obvious reasons, he couldn't display that Hollywood den commonplace: photographs of the owner with celebrities from the worlds of politics, business, sports, crime and showbiz. So he kept C.C. Drood on a permanent retainer. When appearing as character witness for Charlie Sheen, Alucard discovered the lightning caricaturist working as a court artist. Now Drood was always on hand when he was out in public or receiving guests at the castle. Sketches captured the moment of Alucard's meetings with the Reagans (he'd been a major campaign contributor in '84), Gordon Gecko, OJ. Simpson, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Whitney Houston. Vampi found the drawing of Alucard with L. Keith Winton at a launch party for the Kindred dodecology.

'I turned my life around through Immortology,' Vampi said. 'Came over to the nightside.'

So she was one of Winton's odd little things. He was polite enough not to laugh.

'When I first turned, I was a mess,' she said. 'In the early days of drac every dhamp in the Valley was out to batten onto a new-born. My seminar guide told us about those sucker-fish, remora. That's what they were like, the dhamps. I had no respect for my pale self. I carried too much baggage from the day-world, screwing up my night-life. A friend, an actress, was killed by a Slayer. Nico was like this luminous flame, flickering. Then, one night, she was snuffed. Stake through the heart. Some mad cheerleader. I got straight, ditched the dhampires and came to the Church. I know myself now. I know what I am.'

She posed against a poster for Bat-21, the film he'd made about the US Bat-Soldier School with C. Thomas Howell, Gene Hackman and Kelly McGillis. The top-grossing release of 1988, domestic and foreign. A platinum disc soundtrack and two Number One singles. Shut out of all but the Technical and Original Song Oscars, but the hell with the Academy.

'You should take their tests,' she said. 'The Church has a lot of movie people. Producers and stars. They say the Short Lion's a member. And his mother. There are coded references to Immortologist doctrine in his songs. The Blood is Not Enough album is named after the title of the second chapter of L. Keith Winton's Plasmatics.'

The Short Lion still hadn't committed to the Concert for Transylvania. The French vampire dandy didn't care about Dracula's old country. But he was out of retirement, following Dylan into a Born-Again period. Right now, he would only sing religious songs. Some of his fans had doused themselves in kerosene and lit matches to protest their idol's abandonment of Satan. In the end, the Short Lion would come round. 'I've learned so much, John,' said Vampi. About myself.'

Proselytising was part of the Immortology package. Amusing, really. Alucard had worked with Winton on many of his ideas. The name of the game was Control and Command. The Father understood it was no longer enough to be feared, loved and worshipped. These nights the flock needed to follow a path of self-interest to surrender their individual will, to submerge themselves in something greater.

Whenever Alucard needed wetwork ('spring cleaning'), he called Winton. His people had no police records and would immolate themselves ('go candle') for the Church if caught. He was satisfied with the number they'd done on the financier and petty draclord Roy Radin. Winton's crew ('night deliverers') had taken Radin out to a ravine, made him cough up the required security deposit box numbers, and finished him off execution-style: a single silver bullet to the pineal gland.

'I was taken through past-life regression therapy,' said Vampi, 'to emerge from my warm chrysalis persona and discover my inner nyctlapt imago. L. Keith Winton teaches that we vampires are all old souls, born on a planet where blood flows in rivers and streams, like water on Earth. There, vampirism is not tainted by personal tangles and killing. On the planet, I was the daughter of a king.'

He remembered a saying Gorse had overused: all Americans want to discover that they are really princesses. The Revelation of St Sammy Davis Jr of the Rat Pack was 'and the voice said: "Daddy, there's a million pigeons, waiting to be hooked on new religions."'

Winton, himself only recently turned ('ascended') after twenty years of self-administered training ('night prep'), had helped Alucard understand this country. He'd worked hard to become a citizen of the imaginary America everyone born or accepted here learned to believe in with the fervour of the Faithful who know their place in Heaven is earned and reserved and inalienable. Immortology was spreading outside the States. Winton was on a permanent cruise, living on the Hope, a refitted ocean liner which stuck to international waters, outside 'terranean jurisdiction'. Immortology Centres were established around the world, even in former Warsaw Pact countries and the jumble of states and statelets which used to be the Soviet Union. For the first time in a century, vampirism was on the rise in its traditional heartland, Central and Eastern Europe. Winton's Church was there to shape the post-communist wave of new-borns into twenty-first century vampires ('fully integrated nyctlapts').

'When we were reborn on Earth, at the moment of turning, we were open to a raft of bad feelings, impediments to spiritual progress. The I-sems helped me peel them away, like onionskins. Ideally, night prep should start before ascension, but I came half-finished to the Church. I had to catch up on my training.'

She slipped a strap off her shoulder and popped out a cherry-top tit.

'It's a process of true liberation.'

She took her swimsuit off over her boots. Her pubic hair was shaved into a black batwing.

'You can't believe how free I feel.'

He called to her with his mind. She was yanked across the room, boots rucking up the rug, and fell to her hands and knees. He kept tugging. She crawled, ass in the air, face to the floor.

Since coming to Hollywood, he hadn't drunk warm blood. Drac was his invention and he was its master, one of the few who could survive and thrive on a pure diet. Others wound up sucking their own veins dry and burning out their brains. They became zombies or phantoms, scuttling along in the margins, grey faces lit by passing headlamps, ground under cars on the freeways.

Heidi was under orders not to forewarn the girls. Surprise was an essential in the flavour. Whenever the madame bitched about damaged goods, he slipped her novelty crockery and she shut up. Heidi had the largest hoard of sit-com-themed collectible plates in the Greater Los Angeles area. She'd once delivered twelve girls to Max Zorin to get her hands on a rare variant Elizabeth Montgomery/Rosamond Denham with the wrong colour eyes.

Alucard had seen Bloodwitched on re-runs. Most vampires found the premise - the suburban housewife who has to pass for warm to support her dim-bulb husband - offensive, though he liked the way Rosamund killed her first husband between seasons and replaced him with another identikit ad-man without anyone in town noticing.

Vampi reached the recliner and wound her fingers around his ankles, then climbed his legs. She laid her face in his lap and, wet-mouthed, began to lick around.

He picked her up and embraced her, looking into her eyes. He got through the fog Winton had whipped up in her mind.

'Princess,' he said, feeding her self-image.

She had thought she was unreachable. She had thought he was just another John.

The Father worked through him, reaching deep into the girl's mind.

Most men in her life wanted her to bite them.

That wasn't going to happen here.

He stuck his tongue into her neck, slitting the silk-soft skin under her jaw and sucked a pulsing stream of her vampire blood. It was more like transfusion than feeding, his mouth-parts perfectly adapted into needles and pumps, his throat a tube into which she gently emptied.

With the blood came everything that she was.

Everything she had been.

The warm girl was of no interest to him, but the vampire she had become, nourished by the blood of Beverly Hills and the illusions of the Immortologists, was a choice creature, a meal and a half.

Even when she realised how far it would go she didn't fight. By then, the greater part of her was within him. Her mind was a broken bird fluttering inside his own skull, wings oiled with thick blood, consciousness shrinking to a black-red pearl and then nothing.

The thing in his lap was a white shell, a scrap of fragile leather between a heavy mane and a pair of kinky boots.

Some life remained. She was a vampire, after all.

He let her go and she tried to stand alone. She fell.

Alucard was full, but not bloated; satisfied, but not glutted. With practice, he'd become able to drain a girl at one feeding, absorbing all her blood without ballooning like the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man. He considered his livid purple hands, and knew his face must be the same colour.

With each vampire he drained, Alucard became more the King of the Cats. The Father was stronger in him, centuries of memory uncoiling in his brain, swallowing the pearl that had been the call girl. Centuries spent within these walls, these broken battlements foraged from the Old World and thrown up again atop a gentler hill, surveying not the forests and gorges of Borgo Pass but the night-carpet lights of Los Angeles.

If he fed on a warm person like this, he would be overcome by lassitude and drawn to a crypt or catafalque. Vampire blood cubed his energies.

Now, he had a chore to take care of.

Darting swiftly, he picked the wraith-like remains up off the floor. He hadn't spilled a drop. The girl moved too slowly and he broke her arm by rough handling. She wasn't at home to the pain. Her eyes were red blanks. Her hair was white, streaked with unhealthy yellow. Her face was a skull, skin a translucent papyrus. She had no blood in her.

He carried her to the sun room and lay her on a steel table. He pulled off her boots and threw them in the corner, onto a pile of underwear, wigs, leather fripperies and weapons.

Stroking her forehead, he made her smile, showing all her ivory. It would be over soon.

Stepping back into his lair, he pulled the heavy door shut and threw the switch. The whole ceiling of the sun room was a solar lamp, hooked up to panels atop the highest turret. Days and days of California sun stored in special cells poured forth, the full spectrum raining down on the skeleton girl.

A minute or two did the trick. He passed the time watching his bruise-purple hands go pale. When he turned off the sun room and opened the door, Vampi was reduced to a woman-shaped outline of fine red dust, with glinting black truffle highlights.

Alucard took a pinch and snorted it.

It was a purely physical sensation, without the mind-leak or emotion-rush of feeding. But these were purely physical times. Plenty preferred dry drac to the wet stuff.

He took a platinum card and chopped Vampi's skull into three lines, then rolled a hundred dollar bill into a tube and had a private party.

4.

The convertible's roof shaded them like a black parasol. The rising sun threw their shadow on the road ahead. It was constantly on the point of being ground under the wheels.

'The brighter the sun,' said Kit, from the driver's seat.

'The blacker the shade,' completed Holly, at his side.

They laughed together, holding hands over the stick-shift.

The car's original owner - a medical supplies salesman they'd run into in a Motel 9 outside Lordsburg - had left a shoebox full of cassette tapes in the car. Holly had hoped for something to sing along with. They turned out to be a self-actualisation therapy course from the Church of Immortology, with titles like 'Step 5: Cultivating the Nyctlapt in You'.

'Funny,' said Holly, 'didn't seem like a viper.'

'He was all over you, Bloody Holly. Lookin' for a change, if you ask me. Beggin' for a slurp of your sweet blood so he could be like us. Just another sad warm wannabe.'

She knew what Kit meant. 'Left me with a good feeling inside, Lambchop. He might have been taking up space, but at least his blood was groovy gravy. His taste is all gone now and I miss it. All I got in my mouth is Judd.'

Kit agreed. 'That Judd was a bitter individual. He had sickness in him, down deep where it didn't show.'

Holly felt the old man's gall in her gut. It would pass soon, but she was queasy. They'd drained him to the point of death, then pitched him into his pit to give his slitherers a chance at vengeance. Disappointingly, the fall broke his neck.

Finding no music in the salesman's box, she tossed tapes out of the window. Kit and Holly didn't need to learn how to be perfect vampires; that blessing was already theirs.

Tombstone was behind them. Judd was inside, fading fast. The movie in the old man's head played itself ragged in theirs. As his killers, his executioners, it was their burden. Mostly, Judd's head had been full of people dying, in the War, in the West or in his pit.

'What d'you reckon his score was, Lambchop?'

In the thirty years since Dr Porthos bit them, Kit had killed 9,682 people, mostly warm but with some vipers tossed in to make a point. Holly had helped a lot, so they shared his score. It was hard sometimes to say they were separate people. For reference purposes, the score was Kit's. Killing was his particular special thing just as shifting was Holly's. Kit was within sniffing distance of his ten thousandth. Holly wanted to make that special, a movie star or a big lawman or a state governor. Someone famous, anyway. Maybe a viper. Special blood for a special man.

'Judd can't count the War,' said Kit. 'Why, if I'd been in a war, say if they'd caught me for Vietnam draft or took me for the Bat-Soldier Program, I'd have racked kills so fast no one could keep count. A score is only real if you do it close, with your eyes on theirs, and their minds open. You have to taste them, at least. You have to take somethin' away.'

'You're right, Lambchop.'

From everyone they killed, they took something: a trophy or a keepsake. Like this car. Or the big gun Judd tried to load with silver. The Buntline wouldn't fit in the glove compartment or even the cache under the seat where the salesman kept a little automatic. It slid about on the back seat. Kit wanted to play with it before selling it on.