In 1959, Holly had been fourteen and Kit eighteen. In a way, they weren't any older now. They'd decided to run off from Fort Dupree together and live on the road. Within nights, they found Dr Porthos. He was from Europe, an elder, but a sorry specimen. A viper hobo. His knees showed through the suit he was buried in. The Good Lord knew how he'd been cast loose in South Dakota. He was in a freight siding, keeping out of the sun in a box-car. He said they should join him on the night-side, become his children-in-darkness, first among his colony of bats. Kit noticed the viper feeling up Holly while lapping her blood and stiffened when Porthos put his mouth on him, but they'd gone through with it. They drank enough elder blood to wake the vampire seeds in their hearts and let themselves bleed empty to drift into the sleep of death. They had woken up together, hand-in-hand, at moonrise. It took a couple of nights to learn what they needed from their maker. Then they'd shown Dr Porthos things wouldn't be the way he'd figured. Holly stuck him in the eyes with a silver hatpin she'd taken from her mother's dresser and Kit put a split length of packing crate through his heart. They left him out on the rail-bed where the sun would fall and huddled in a shack to watch him turn to red dust. Everyone else they tasted stayed with them but Porthos was gone forever. He'd lived too far beyond his time.

Kit and Holly hadn't always got away with it. They'd been in and out of jails, together and apart. Kit had a few heavy convictions. That didn't matter. It meant there was at least some official recognition of his score. Prison walls couldn't hold them long. No law short of the Devil Himself could take them down.

As permanent interstate fugitives, they kept on the road, but the nation was wide enough to offer new places to visit and play. By now, they could go back to their earliest haunts and not be recognised - though they were always remembered. Both, if surprised by a question, were as likely to give the other's name as their own. Both, without quite realising it, spent as much time in the other's skull as in their own. They sometimes really did swap over and become each other.

They had so many names - invented, borrowed, ascribed - it was difficult at times to recall their true ones. Down through the years, they had called themselves or been called Bonnie and Clyde, Bowie and Keechie, Bart and Laurie, Sailor and Lula, Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry, Robin and Marian, Mickey and Mallory, Butch and Sundance, Sadie and Krug. Really, they weren't even Kit and Holly - names they hadn't chosen - but Lambchop and Bloody Holly.

Many stories and songs - even motion pictures, with stars like Goldie Hawn and Peter Fonda - were versions of their night-lives, moments stolen and changed in the retelling, polished or coloured or clouded, as real or fake as the kaleidoscopes in their minds. Dates, names, facts and rulings existed in the files of the FBI and Sheriffs' departments, but they weren't the whole story.

This was real, the song she was writing as a surprise for Kit's ten thousandth score, 'The Ballad of Holly and Kit'.

Holly and Kit in a stolen ride, Streaking across the sand, Leaving the scene of a homicide, Heading for a happier end.

Holly and Kit would take 'em Drinking away the red red thirst The lawmen swear to stake 'em But the Devil'll get there first.

When the police found Judd and searched the Tombstone Dime Museum, another story would be born. Kit and Holly would be bigger and better, killer angels who bested the old man of the mountains. Judd's score would come to light. They'd been down into the pit and come up safe, their faith proven and their love sublime.

'Bloody Holly,' said Kit, 'let's get married.'

She writhed up against him in pleasure.

'Of course I'll marry you, Lambchop.'

Kit whistled in joy and said, 'Only one place to go, then.'

She knew what he meant.

Vegas.

5.

He shifted the attache case to his left hand and held his right fist up to the door goon, showing the Dracula ring. A rope lifted and he was admitted to the Viper Room. Envious fury poured from a waiting line of gorgeous creatures.

Alucard had a 54 flashback... another coast, another decade, another person. He was not nostalgic about shed snake skins. He was who he was now. Another lesson from the Father: look forward, not back. That set him apart from others who would claim to be King of the Cats. They wanted the old nights back. He wanted the new nights better.

The Viper Room. The name was deliberate provocation, assimilationists like the columnist Harry Martin carped, especially since the club's notional owner was a warm movie star, Johnny Depp. Alucard, who had a piece of the establishment, felt a duty to reclaim for vampirekind the terror squandered over the last century. He avoided fey euphemisms: 'Undead-American', 'pale', 'haemovore', 'type V', 'nightbird'. Alucard preferred fear-striking words: 'vampire', 'nosferatu', 'leech', 'viper'.

The warm had to learn to be afraid again. So did vampires who pretended they were no different from the living. He thought of some he had climbed past: Katharine Reed, the foolish Irish woman he'd used in the Old Country; Penelope Churchward, Andy's Girl of the Year for 1979; and Genevieve Dieudonne, the elder who ruined Gorse. Alucard remembered their walk-ons in his mental biopic, but other images of them - in old-fashioned clothes, by gaslight or the stars of Europe -crowded in. All three had bad history with Him. Alucard had only made a down-payment on their punishment. The Dieudonne chit had crossed them badly, forestalling a conjuring that would have brought the Father back from beyond the veil. Upon her, Dracula's revenge would be spread over centuries.

He passed through a short corridor hung with string cobwebs and Hallowe'en bats into the small club. A mass of people writhed between the wet bar and the tiny stage. 'Riders on the Storm' pounded, by-passing his eardrums to thrum through his body, thrilling Vampi's blood. Had the management necromanced Jim Morrison back from Pere Lachaise? No, it was only Val Kilmer, researching the star part in the expensive film Oliver Stone threatened to make next year or the year after. It would gross forty tops domestic, far short of break-even. A possible rind of future profit from foreign, ancillary and soundtrack.

In this crowd, Alucard couldn't be anonymous. He was given courteous space at the bar. Dancers didn't thrust into the bubble around him.

He made eye contact with Kilmer and let the actor go on with his public audition. Alucard had used him in Bat-21.

Alucard did not order a drink. The Viper Room had stuck piglets in harnesses, squealing behind the bar. The spigot-veined warm waitresses all had resumes and 8" x 10" glossies stashed in case some player showed up in search of a new face. Alucard would sooner cast one of the pigs. In back rooms, the occasional live one, hustled through the line and off the streets, could be had if the buyer was willing to pay clean-up costs.

Thanks to underground republication of The Most Dangerous Game (Amok Press), a sixty-year-old memoir by the (frankly cracked) White Russian General Zaroff, Hollywood new-borns had a craze for hunting humans. Dusk-till-dawn sports shops up and down the Strip carried equipment for the night-hunter, though purists disdained even Zaroff's Tartar war bow and relied on teeth and claws. Every night, a bat-pack of fresh-risen youths got in touch with their wolf-souls by stalking warm prey as they were told their forefathers-in-darkness had done. It appealed to a more ambitious viper than the lost, dim souls who went for Immortology. Alucard had Adrian Lyne and Kathryn Bigelow independently developing projects about the night-stalker scene - he'd greenlight whichever tweaked his fancy and shitcan the other.

The sharper Zaroff kids might make suitable lieutenants in a reformed Carpathian Guard. Once they learned not to leave prey dazed but walking. Those who shut mouths as they opened throats prospered.

Lately, a string of vamps and dhamps had wound up doing jail time for offences against cocktail waitresses and exotic dancers which wouldn't even be common assault if committed by someone without fangs. Ten years ago, after the conviction of racketeer Salvatore Macelli on a raft of charges which didn't even include felony vampirism, the government reopened Alcatraz Island, refurbished as a maximum security prison for vampires and other 'extranormal' convicts. On the Rock, the Shop's tame mad scientists poked and probed the inmates, building on a century of fruitless scientific study of vampirism.

Dirk Frost, a new-born, approached him.

The short-ish young man had TV credits in docu-dramas about male prostitution and the dhampire problem. Turning vamp, he lost his photographic image and agency representation. So he sought other employment opportunities.

Alucard put the attache case on the bar.

Inside were a double-dozen vials of pure red dust, a clean drac high with no soul-residue. Money couldn't buy the stuff. These vials were paid for with obedience or favour.

Alucard had gone beyond the need for cash. Aside from rolled hundreds, he rarely carried any. A flash of his ring got him everything he needed, gratis. His New York broker kept him abreast of the numbers. He'd learned to read the market runes, appreciating the beauty of greenscreen columns. He had passed beyond mere wealth, and become a man of substance. The fortune was just a way of keeping the score.

Frost didn't open the case, but took it.

The music was too loud for conversation but Alucard had a hook in Frost from an early feeding. He cultivated his tools to keep their selfinterest aligned with his own, and disposed of them if they got rusty. After a session in Alucard's private tanning parlour, Frost would fill vials as comfortably as the late, unlamented Vampi.

Tonight Frost had to take care of Spinal Tap, an English metal band from the 'Where Are They Now?' file who didn't yet know they'd be the opening act of A Concert for Transylvania. Frost had laid a taste of drac on them last week, but only the bass player was even a dhampire. Once they'd snorted or shot a couple of hits of red dust, they'd be so into the night-life they'd agree to play the Petaluma Polka Festival for a scratch of California Red. First up at a charity supergig was a poisoned chalice: warm early-comers would be pissed off by the seven-hour wait and weighed down with merchandise they'd had nothing else to do but buy, and vampires would only just be getting into their best frocks to make an entrance later. The Tap could be counted on to deliver a short, explosive set and get out of the way for Bruce Springsteen and the Be-Sharps.

'I'll want the briefcase back,' said Alucard, 'it's raptor skin, from Maple White Land. You can't get it any more.'

Frost kissed the ring and left.

On the stage a shirtless Kilmer was on his knees gasping at a microphone. Alucard decided to tell Carolco to greenlight The Doors, to teach Oliver Stone a lesson. He might let Kilmer do 'Light My Fire' in the middle of the concert. A rumour would spread that the real Morrison was returning from the grave to avenge himself on pretenders to the Lizard Crown.

Frost jostled Visser at the door. They didn't know each other - Alucard liked to keep his tools in separate compartments - but Frost's nostrils twitched. He took extra sidesteps to avoid getting close to the warm man.

Like Alucard, Visser could part dance-floor crowds and walk unmolested across the room. Nothing to do with fear and respect, and everything with disgust. Everything the private eye ate contained garlic. The stench radiated from his fleshy face, squeezing out in droplets of alcoholic sweat. The fat old Texan wore a once-white suit and a cowboy hat. His grin was feral enough to pass for a nosferatu snarl. He said he'd once tried human meat, to see whether he could stand to turn vampire. According to him, long pig tasted like shit next to the ribs at Dr Hoggly-Woggly.

Alucard indicated an unoccupied back room. Visser's grin broadened and he sauntered in, hitching up a skull-buckled belt under his soft, substantial belly bulge. He moved like an ass-wiggling beauty queen, as if daring the viper crowd to feast on him.

They would not meet here again. Too many would remember seeing John Alucard with such unappetising wormmeat. They'd wonder at his low tastes, though no one would say anything.

Alucard swiftly nipped into the room and closed the door. The small, unlit chamber was soundproofed. The absence of noise was shocking.

A match flared - a magnesium burst to Alucard's night-adapted eyes - and Visser lit a cigarillo, under-lighting his face like a carnival devil. The private eye sat on a leather-upholstered piece of furniture - a cross between a dentist's chair and a tackle-dummy, with manacles, straps and other useful add-ons. Pine-scented air-fresheners hung from the ceiling. The floor was tacky.

'No support for my poor ole back,' drawled Visser, thumping the rape-rack.

'It adjusts,' said Alucard, stepping closer.

Visser seemed to exhale garlic through his pores, halting Alucard in his tracks.

'I'm sure it does, Mr A. I'll just take your word on that.'

Alucard laughed. Visser was terrified of him, which was as it should be. He was a licensed private investigator. Also - a nasty, resourceful little man. He'd come to Alucard's notice when acting for the eleventh husband of vampire socialite Nerissa Simms, managing to take photographs which were evidence of adultery on velvet sheets, though neither the errant wife nor the (female) co-respondent showed up on film. Now on a retainer to one of Alucard's dummy corporations, he followed the private and public lives of persons of interest.

'Our three friends from out of town, Visser? How have they been?'

'All day in coffins in Chateau Marmont,' said the detective. 'Feraru has been at the room service girls and is hitting the parties and the clubs. He was in here last night. Crainic is taking meetings with Undead-American businessmen, third-level government people, journalists. He's got a one-on-one with Harry Martin for Newsweek. Most folk he's wooing are Shop in disguise. I have the minutes of a secret conversation he had with Darius Jedburgh out at the Bat-Soldier base in New Mexico. You can guess the gist. "Puh-lease come and help us take over our pissant country, pretty please. We hate commies oh so much even though we licked their red boots for forty years. Gimme foreign aid, Mr President, and we'll be so grateful you'll never want for a blow job in Eastern Europe ever again, no sirree bob."'

Visser was whinier than he was funny, but Alucard recognised good judgment.

'The KGB goon...' he continued.

'Securitate,' Alucard corrected.

'Whatever, Streisand... Striescu... He's done it again. Has a powerful red thirst on him, I guess. They'll be calling him the Skid-Row Slasher or Scorpio Junior. Snatched a pimp right off a corner in South Central. Bit his neck through, guzzled down the full eight pints, tossed the empty in a dumpster. The dead guy's name was Momentous Pryde, if you can believe it. Your secret policeman just loves the taste of nigger blood.'

'It's still red. There's no difference.'

'Maybe it's the novelty. So many things you can get here aren't on the menu in the Old Country. Wonder if he'll try Korean while he's in town.'

'There'll be a point to it. Revenge or trouble making.'

'The others don't know about his night stalking. He's careful about that. They don't like each other much, all three of them. The limey is too dumb to notice what the others think of him. He's paying for the whole trip, the hotel tab, everything. You might say he's a real sucker.'

'I've heard all the jokes, Visser.'

The detective chuckled, shaking his chins.

'Suit yourself. Feraru used to be a major dhamp in London, before he turned. Snuffed red all through the boom and the crash. He was drac-head supreme of the Stock Exchange. Do you know that he still uses the stuff? Isn't that insane? A real goddamned vampire who does drac! What does he get? Fangs on his fangs?'

'It's a habit. Like a lot of things.'

'Mucho loco is what it is. He was cruising Hollywood Boulevard last night in a limo. Scored a couple of low-grade vials off some street skag. More cayenne pepper than anything. Feraru spent half the night snorting red, and the other half pouring blood out of his nose.'

Visser finished his cigarillo and lit another one. The night's specific business was done, but Alucard had long-term projects.

'So, Visser, how are my girls?'

'Still goin' strong, Mr A. I got information on 'em all. Recent shit. No major developments.'

Of the three vampire women, only Penelope Churchward was in California. He'd hired her as a technical advisor on Bat-21. Another one for reinvention: Penny's latest incarnation was as a Daughter of the American Revolution, an Orange County Republican with the Governor's ear.

'Churchward has re-upped for another dime with the Shop. They don't let her join in all their reindeer games. I pushed a few buttons to find out policy in the event of a sad accident. No one's panties would get in a bunch. She's done for them what they wanted done. Now, she's high-maintenance surplus.'

Alucard shook his head. He saw no particular point in having Penny killed. She couldn't hurt him and had no real reason to want to. She'd quit the New York scene of her own accord, walking out on Andy, making room for Johnny Pop.

'She's definitely made the connection,' said Visser. 'She knows who you are.'

That was new material. He wondered whether to spit or swallow. Visser could be stringing him along, creating a need for a high-priced hit.

'She knows who I was once.'

'Same difference.'

'No, it's not.'

The investigator had, of course, dug back and thought he knew all about John Alucard. It was as well to let Visser play mastermind. He'd learned enough to be respectful, to stay properly scared. A minion should be more afraid of the consequences of breaking faith with his master than eager for rewards others might give him for treachery.

'I have plans for Penny. She's got lines into the music industry which I might need.'

'The Short Lion still holdin' out?'

'Just negotiating.'

'They say the little faggot's lost his voice.'

Alucard snorted. 'Did you ever hear his voice?'

'I like Hank Williams Jr myself.'

The vampire superstars of rock were throwing snits. The Short Lion didn't want to appear on the same stage as Timmy V, but equally couldn't bear to let his rival hog the spotlight. Right now, the eternal child was hotter with key demographics than the exile prince. Only sad urban murgatroyds bought the last Short Lion solo album, Queen of the Damned, while every teenage girl in America owned Timmy's Bat. The Short Lion was regularly hailed the greatest vampire celebrity of the 1980s, but his dark sun was moving into eclipse. Dating Julia Roberts didn't help. But Alucard still wanted both singers on his bill. And he wanted them together.

'Here are the mick bitch viper's clippings,' said Visser, pulling out a fat folder of pages torn from newspapers and magazines. 'My mailman wonders why I subscribe to City Limits, Searchlight, Private Eye, Spare Rib and International Times.'

For much of the last decade, Kate Reed had been up to her thick specs in feminist mud at the Women's Peace Camp in Greenham Common, England, popping out of a shallowly buried coffin to chant slogans at the American airbase and file stories about potential (and actual) mishaps with nuclear weapons. After a Romanian jail, a muddy grave in the English countryside was a picnic on the village green. These nights, she was back in a flat on the Holloway Road, sharing rent with a freelance film critic and saving pennies to trade her Amstrad word-processor for an Apple. Her articles appeared in low-paying periodicals whose subscriber base was evenly divided between the radical left and security personnel infiltrating and observing the radical left.

Alucard took the clippings. He would enjoy reading them later. Katie was so far out of the loop she was no real threat. If she ever showed signs of making a move against him, a call to the unlisted number of Caleb Croft in Cheltenham would see her whisked without trial into indefinite detention, preferably in the Little Ease cell of the Tower of London. The silly girl had done enough things in her long life which could be defined as terrorism. Visser had dug up an old story about someone called Eric DeBoys which meant Croft could stick a murder on Kate Reed if he wanted. Furthermore, she was on a stack of shitlists in Thatcher's Britain simply by being, as Visser put it, 'a mick bitch viper'. Thanks to the continuing influence of Lord Ruthven, she could be forgiven for drinking blood, but being Irish, a woman and a loudmouth red-flagged her files in what was left of the British Empire.

'The Frog twist's still with the Mounties,' said Visser. 'Made the news with her testimony at the Lacroix trial. One hundred and twenty-two counts of aggravated vampirism and cold-blooded murder. Fella must have a taste for it, if you ask me. Likes 'em juicy and with a bit of fight in 'em. The Canucks are making a deal to ship him to the Rock for a century or two. He'll make a lot of friends there.'

Alucard had never actually met Genevieve Dieudonne, but had a clear mental image of her. She was living in Toronto, presumably on the grounds that Canadians could at least properly pronounce her name (Zh-NE-v'yev), working as senior forensic technician on attachment to the only North American police department which boasted an equal-opportunity employment policy for vampires. Thanks to do-gooders like Genevieve's cop pal Knight and the romantic novelist Fitzroy, Toronto was known as a hole for Granpa Munsters.

A breed of nosferatu suck-up was named after the sickeningly cuddly, non-threatening vampire Al Lewis played on All in the Family. Rosamund on Bloodwitched was the vixen warm America secretly wanted to be neckraped by; Granpa was the fangless fool who knew his place in the sit-com crypt. Even Carroll O'Connor's diehard ninety-eight-point-sixer Archie Bunker let Granpa cross his threshold, and became best pals with the viper he spent two seasons dreading and plotting to stake.

Genevieve was, Alucard was pleased to learn, a controversial figure even in the Toronto 'pale' community. A growing minority saw her as not merely a Granpa but a diabolical traitress selling out her night-brethren for the meagre approval of the warm. She had worked for the apprehension of a couple of serial killers who turned out to be vampires. Called to justify her actions, she claimed to be following the Zaroff doctrine, but that, for her, the most dangerous game wasn't warm.

'Gorse is on the Rock, too,' said Visser. 'Maybe him and Lacroix will be bunkies. They can pin up a picture of the Frog on their dartboard and jerk each other off as they fantasise about the things they'd like to do to her fine white hide. If they ever get out, she's dust.'

It wasn't worth calling in a Winton favour to have the Dieudonne woman staked. That would be too easy.

'Is Genevieve seeing anyone?'

Visser's grin showed flecks in his gums. 'Jealous, boss? Is she your dream girl too?'

When he conjured up Genevieve's face in his mind, it was through a bloody film, as the Father had seen her from atop a throne at the summit of his red reign. From the summit, there had only been one direction to go. In no small part thanks to Genevieve's intervention, Dracula had lost his position in Great Britain, cut out of power after the death of Queen Victoria and toppled after years of open rebellion. The French elder had been there again, one of the last faces the Father saw as his eyes dimmed, his head stuck on a pole at the Palazzo Otranto in 1959. All three of the women - Penny, Kate, Gene - had been there, at the death. The Father whispered that they had all been involved, had all contributed. Genevieve had undone the conjuring that should have restarted the Anni Draculae. John Alucard's business with that strange trio - they weren't exactly friends, having squabbled over the affections of some warm man years ago - was not over. In the end, he would see dawnlight rise on their ashes.

'I went up to Toronto for her big day,' said Visser, calculation gleaming in his eye. 'Was in the courtroom just for her testimony. She's a honey, all right. Solid nine and a half... a ten, if it weren't for the overbite.'