When Kit died, he'd torn a part of her mind away. Over the years, they'd dribbled into each other, becoming halves of a single entity. It happened with evenly matched vampires, as opposed to the master-slave relationships elders cultivated with new-born get.

It was good that there was so much missing. Kitten was easier to teach.

Kitten liked Beverly because Alucard had his Renfield fetch a whole new wardrobe for her. The clothes she'd arrived in were impossible and the call-girl leftovers strewn around the mansion only a little more suitable. Beverly went up and down Rodeo Drive with his Platinum card, picking nice things from Maxfield and Madeleine Gallay, as if dressing a doll. Kitten now had outfits for every occasion, in various lengths to suit the shapes she could choose.

He put Kitten down on the couch. She dabbed her lips dry. After tasting him, she was quicker, smarter, more open. He was almost skull-walking her. He saw himself as she saw him, filling her world. Sharing the suppleness of her body, he experimentally doubled the length of his fingers, adding extra knuckles. It was just a trick. She had done the same thing, his thought sparking in her body.

'Teach me to fly, John.'

He was amused.

'Not yet, Kitten.'

'Pretty please.'

'You will fly. I promise.'

She mewed with pleasure.

10.

Sometimes, it was as if Kitten had always lived at the castle. She knew she'd once gone by other names, but when she went back into her memory and found herself in a passenger seat, she'd turn to the driver and see only a blank face. Something had happened to her head. Stuff had been spilled. She didn't exactly miss what was gone, but was eager to fill the hole with something. When John let her taste his blood, she had all the answers. They rarely stuck in her mind, popping like bubbles after moments, but she was the better for her glimpses of truth.

This evening, they were receiving. Beverly helped her select a gown for the occasion, something elegant in black from Versace. A golden mesh studded with pearls fitted over her crown like a hairnet, a single teardrop pearl dangling dead centre of her high forehead, matching her Spanish earrings.

Her hair was purged of the dyes and treatments that used to mar its silkiness. Her default colouring had gone from straw to gold. Even among vampires, chameleon hair was an unusual talent. It took concentration to wake the roots and force the new hue through all the tiny channels. But this kitten could change her spots. Under her pearl net, she wished for tiger stripes, streaks of velvet black and reddish blonde.

'Good girl,' said Beverly, surprised. 'If you could teach that, you'd make a million dollars.'

John's personal assistant was a warm, light-skinned black woman. She earned more than the last four generations of her family put together, but was still on the LA equivalent of starvation wages. Kitten was under orders not to touch, but knew Beverly was interested. The woman wondered what it would be like to give blood, to John or to Kitten. She'd stayed in the job longer than others because of that barely admitted fascination, but she was too handy a Renfield to waste.

Kitten stood, steady on four-inch heels. In the dressing-room mirror her Versace hung elegantly under the skull-shaped veil of pearls. Her face was there, too, from some angles. A watery transparent mask.

Beverly nodded approval.

'You'll kill 'em, Kitten. You really will.'

Kitten laughed the laugh John had taught her. It didn't mess up her face. Laughter should be like making music not breaking wind. A controlled flow, not an unconfined explosion.

'Kitten,' John's voice came from a speaker, 'you may join us now in the reception hall. Our guests await your pleasure.'

'Go on,' Beverly said, 'make an entrance.'

Kitten rid herself of nervousness. She knew John's friends were important, but she had a sense of her own importance to him. Nothing could threaten that.

Leaving Beverly in the dressing room, Kitten walked down a short corridor to the first-floor gallery and stepped into a spotlight. She looked down at a crowd. Conversation and sipping stopped as they saw her. Waiters and waitresses circulated with trays, bearing thimble-beakers filled with their own blood. The caterers John used guaranteed golden quality.

Kitten smiled.

John was near the main doorway with a woman in a man's evening suit - black tie and tailored tux, very tight black pants with a violet stripe down the side, glittering black pumps. John, in Astaire white tie and tails, transmitted encouragement to Kitten, his blood singing in her brain.

She drifted along the gallery, hand trailing the balustrade, and paused at the top of the steps, then descended, without a wobble, heels spiking red carpet, head high, shoulders back, chest out. Beverly had taught her that clothes were all about posture. A circle of men and women waited at the bottom of the stairs. John made his way through them.

'Kitten, how kind of you to appear,' said John.

She smiled and said nothing. He took her hand and she stepped off the bottom step as if alighting from a heavenly chariot to join the mortals on Earth.

'You must meet everybody,' said John, guiding her across the hall. 'Mr Feraru, of the Transylvania Movement, with his associates Mr Crainic and Mr Striescu. They have the confidence of Baron Meinster and stand high in the Romanian provisional government. Hamish Bond, of the British Secret Service. Allegedly retired. Be on your guard with him. He has a reputation with the ladies. Griffin Mill, from the studio. Griffin has just come in on The Rock, the project I was telling you about. We're very excited about the Eddy Poe rewrite. Mr William Gates, the entrepreneur who does clever things with computers. Captain Gardner, of the American Bat-Soldier Program. Warren Beatty and la bella signorina Ciccone. Dick Tracy, I have to say, kids, I think you can be very proud of the picture, though I also have to say we made the right decision to let it go to Disney. Mr Chapman, of the Pale Anti-Defamation League, who has done so much to gain acceptance for our kind. Thanks to his lobbying, General Mills were forced to withdraw their disgusting "Count Chocula" cereal from the warm market. Mr Edward Exley, our estimable chief of police. If you've got a concealed cam-corder, don't mention it to him. Just kidding, Ed. Fine job on the post-King verdict clamp-down. Jack Nicholson, of course, devouring something from the live buffet. Crispian, who runs the Viper Room and other clubs too cutting-edge for us to have heard of yet. Sebastian Newcastle, a big wheel at CAA. He's agenting L. Keith Winton's twelve-volume Kindred saga. He used to be a nuclear physicist, but he's found a field where he can let off the really big bombs.'

Kitten kept track of them. John had briefed her on the guests. Almost all vampires. All important people in Los Angeles, and therefore the world. She knew who was in favour, who was here to be wooed, who was on the way out, who could be safely ignored. Of the movie folk, she knew the grosses on their last, second-to-last and, in almost certainty, next pictures. Of the political and business folk, she knew what they wanted and the likelihood of them getting it.

Oddly, the only person she hadn't been briefed on was the dark-haired woman in the tux. She squeezed a waiter's forearm, squirting blood-drops through a spigot into a shot-glass. John steered Kitten through the crowd towards her. She let the waiter go and reddened her mouth with a sip. She had a summer smile on her face but winter in her eyes.

'This is someone who'll be very close to you,' said John. 'Penelope Churchward, Lady Godalming. I've asked her to do me a kindness and become, well, I suppose we should say your mentor, but I hope most of all she will be your friend.'

The woman took a frosty look at Kitten.

Cleaned-up guttersnipe, but with possibilities. Very faint, but there all the same - Kitten shut the woman's thought out, batting it back.

You can hear me, how divine! And you can touch me in here, too. You are a Project.

She shook her cold hand.

'Call me Penny,' said the woman. 'Ignore the rest of these nouveaux. They'll only talk about themselves and their money. You should be more interested in yourself. After all, they're finished and done and turned into what they wanted to be or need to pretend to be. You're still on the way. Never become a waxwork, my dear. That's my first lesson. Keep changing with the times.' Penny was in her mind, just like John.

Like someone else had been. Someone she couldn't picture.

Forget that. We'll deal with it later.

'How do you like her? Will she do?'

Penny saluted John and said, 'She certainly will.'

Winter was still in the woman's eyes, shot through her heart and soul. But Kitten didn't take against her.

'Look around,' Penny whispered in her mind. 'Ignore the lightweights. The one-off murderers and the dream merchants. Who's dangerous?'

Everyone in the room had thought about fucking or killing - or fucking and killing - everyone else. Some were constructing elaborate fantasies of conquests, but she discarded most of them - they were the least likely to act out. Who were the real killers?

'Striescu, Bond, Gardner... Villanueva?'

'Newcastle, yes. Well done. You've missed only two.'

'Three. John, me, you.'

'You're flattering me.'

'No I'm not.'

Penny almost showed a real smile. Hamish Bond and Captain Gardner, ferocious but controlled, were fixed on her from across the room. Kitten could see the hooks she had in these trained killers.

'Maybe you aren't, at that,' Penny admitted.

Hamish Bond, supposedly squiring a tall black woman with snarly eyes, was now hungrily eyeing Penny and Kitten. He raised his glass. A lemon-curl floated in his bloody martini. Kitten saw a tumble of limbs and lips in his mind. Women in segments, dead eyes open, drifting by accompanied by guitar music, overlaid on one another, with guns and cars. Kitten didn't want to be in that movie. She blinked the kaleidoscope out of her head.

'Penelope will be the making of you,' said John.

'You'll make yourself. I'll just clean away the mess we don't need. The first thing to go will be that awful name. I bet a man gave it to you. Am I right or am I right?'

'You're not wrong,' said John.

Penny looked reproach at John Alucard, then had a moment of doubt before sticking to her guns. She was on probation, but could see, do and say things John could not. There was no point sucking up to him when he'd brought her in to complement his skills.

'What was your warm name, dear?'

Kitten concentrated, working around the gaps. 'Hazel?'

John shook his head. It came to her, through the fog.

'Holly,' she admitted.

John nodded.

'Couldn't be bettered,' said Penny. 'Beautiful, romantic, thorny, homey, bitter, cute. Not a saint's name. Pagan. Holly will do nicely for all concerned. No last name, I think. That was a good idea, John. Holly. Just Holly.'

Kitten was gone. She was Holly.

Fine. Holly was fine.

11.

Alucard had called in favours from Chief Exley - whose fantasy was that if Dragnet were back on the air, the Rodney King burning would vanish from public consciousness - to have Griffith Park sealed off until after dawn. The Wild Hunt was not the real Zaroff deal, but a fund-raising excuse for a mock stalk and semi-orgiastic bleedings.

Many industry figures - not all of them vampires - were willing to cough up the ten-thousand-dollar entry fee to be let loose after a mixed band of warm starlets and overconfident stuntmen. The foxes were well-paid to lead the hounds in a satisfying chase with an innocuous finale. Eisner was out there with nightscope glasses and a crossbow, wondering if he could get away with sticking a sucker-tip arrow on Katzenberg 'by mistake'. Lajos Czuczron, Meinster's 'military attache', intended to get away with murder and claim diplomatic immunity. Jean-Claude Van Damme was flying on drac-wings among the quarry, a three-picture deal depending on his 'surviving' the night. If any vagrants had slipped through the LAPD's park clearance operation, they were fair game.

From Bronson Canyon, one of his favourite spots in the city, Alucard commanded the park. In this powerful psycho-cultural nexus, John Wayne lifted Natalie Wood at the end of The Searchers and Kevin McCarthy kissed Dana Wynter in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The space-helmeted gorilla of Robot Monster and the Venusian fanged turnip of It Conquered the World had lurked in the tunnel that was usually shot to look like a cave. The Batmobile roared out of it in that '60s comedy show which pretended Batman was a warm millionaire in a mask. Los Angeles was haunted by the movies shot here.

Media presence was concentrated around the Observatory from Rebel Without a Cause, where Entertainment Tonight were doing 'info-tainment' interviews with familiar faces. Alucard had lined up David Mamet to deliver a soundbite lecture on the noble kinship of hunter and prey, claiming one was never more alive than during a potentially fatal stalking even if you were technically dead. Mamet could dress it up more credibly than Robert Bly, and had enough screen credits for it not to seem like a joke. He might come in for a dialogue polish on Rafkin's rewrite of Rifkin's rewrite of The Rock.

Holly and Penny were in the undergrowth somewhere, operating independently. Penny said her pupil learned more refinement every night. She could be trusted to cover her tracks. The girl needed to feed often, having never tried to resist her red thirst, but was becoming more discriminating. From different ends, Exley and Visser had erased her from law enforcement databases. Records of the crime spree of the late Christopher Carruthers now listed Holly Sargis as hostage rather than accomplice. Of all people, Quentin from the Video Archives was putting together a script about the killer couple, spinning his survivor status into a first-look deal with Miramax. Jack Martin, slower off the mark to register a treatment, was shut out again. He'd be lucky to get a last-look deal with Troma. Alucard would not figure in any Kit Carruthers films; a fictional cop - Scott Glenn, Fred Ward, Alec Baldwin - would get credit for bringing down the killer and saving the girl.

Alucard knew the Romanians were coming long before he could see them. The Father cloaked his head and shoulders as if flowing from the cavern behind him. Dracula entered the tracery of nerves and veins in his face, sinking into his brain, pulsing through his entire body, penetrating and overlaying, informing and insinuating. Beyond the limits of his sharp night vision, Alucard tracked the movements of minds, as if he were simultaneously himself standing in a canyon and a great bat hovering above the park. By psychic echo-location, he knew the precise courses of dozens of creatures. Feraru and Crainic were slowly following the instructions they had been given. Their thought-tangles were beacons, blazing that blue light the Father associated with lost treasure.

If Alucard let Dracula grow within him, their shared mind would extend beyond the park, spreading throughout Los Angeles, in a sense becoming the city. They would build Transylvania in the desert by the sea, mentacles laid under boulevards like television cables.

Feraru was wondering whether Winona Ryder was old enough to be seeing anyone and what she'd look like with pearly little fangs. The newborn had been disappointed to learn that Jennifer Beals was spoken for. Crainic, more cautious, worried that they were being lured into a trap. Without Striescu, Crainic felt degrees less safe in this far foreign land - though the thug was ready to kill him at a nod from Meinster. It's just that Striescu wouldn't let anybody else ice the senior academician.

Someone screamed as a sucker dart stuck to them. Someone else whooped in victory. Crainic had been certain he was about to be destroyed, but it was just part of the game.

Striescu was back in Romania on urgent state business. On June 14th, Bucharest had been invaded by a mixed band of miners from the Jiu Valley and vampires from Bistritz. They came not to stage a coup but in support of the provisional government, who were taking criticism over the slow pace of reform and the way that odiously familiar faces from the Ceauescu days kept popping up in their old positions. The mob, hardly unruly since it was effectively NCOd by ex-Securitate hardmen, destroyed the offices of the two main opposition factions, the Liberals and the Peasants' Party. On the streets, they collared and roughed up, or simply 'disappeared', many 'trouble-makers' - mostly students and journalists, with a few vampire-hating priests mixed in. President Iliescu appealed for calm and tried to distract his 'followers' with the progress of the national side in the soccer World Cup, but Baron Meinster had authorised a few tactical murders only a wet-worker of Striescu's skills could be trusted with. When the dust settled, the United Nosferatu Party would be in a stronger position to make territorial claims. Alucard's concert was a distant half-year away. In six months, the situation could change again and again and again.

The world paid little attention to Romania, distracted by the Gulf. Iraq had invaded and occupied oil-rich Kuwait and the tiny principality of Lugash. Saddam Hussein claimed to be acting under direct orders from Allah to depose the decadent vampire sheikhs who'd been bleeding the region dry for centuries. Whether Allah also told him to steal everything of value in both countries for himself was a question Saddam would not be drawn on. President Bush was rallying NATO and the UN in favour of counter-attack. There was talk of US Bat-Soldiers being deployed for 'surgical strikes' against Baghdad. The whole sordid mess suited Alucard.

Feraru appeared first, Crainic huffing after him.

'Good evening,' Alucard spoke out of the darkness, surprising even the nyctlapts. He stepped from the shadow of the cavern mouth.

Feraru smiled, eager.

'My London people have got a commit from Cliff Richard to headline at Stonehenge. He's going to sing the Lord's Prayer backwards to the tune of "Mack the Knife". It'll be the Christmas Number One in the UK. And he'll make it a TM charity record.'

Alucard now knew who Cliff Richard was. An eternally youthful vampire pop singer whose fame had never crossed running water.

Crainic said nothing. The elder was worried about the Old Country, troubled by methods used in the cause to which he was committed. Too many brutes who'd opposed the counter-revolution were transformed into its servants. Yet again, tyranny shapeshifted, absorbing those who stood against it. Crainic's thoughts of his homeland were overlaid by stamping boots, tearing teeth and thumping fists.

'We can't rely on others to give,' said Alucard, in Romanian. 'We have to take. This is the lesson.'

Crainic realised he was being addressed in his own language.

The Father was an armour around Alucard, the old wise mind shot through his get's brain. It was as if the conjuring had not been thwarted. At this moment, Alucard was the ghost and Dracula the physical presence. They were aspects of the same being.

'Who are you, John Alucard?' Crainic asked, in Romanian. 'Who are you really?'

The Father spoke. 'King of the Cats.'

Alucard felt Crainic's mind changing. Until now, embarrassed by Meinster's love of titles, he'd not understood the Baron's need to claim this particular meaningless distinction. Count Dracula had been the undisputed ruler of pale-kind, but the title expired with him and it was futile for the Baron or this Hollywood player to lay claim to it. To declare oneself King of the Cats was not to accede to Napoleon's throne but to claim to be Napoleon, a cartoon lunatic with a sideways hat and paw stuck in his institutional shirt. Now, Crainic knew better. Everything that had been Dracula's, physically and spiritually, was Alucard's by right. If nosferatu were to have Transylvania, this man - their father and furtherer - must be recognised.

Crainic went down on one knee and bowed his head, pulling off his student's cap.

'I acknowledge you, master,' he said. 'In death and life, Count Dracula.'

The Father withdrew. Alucard was alone in his mind again, shocked clean. A point had been made.