Feraru, whose Romanian was basic, wasn't following this.

He had only seconds to think, anyway. Holly came out of the night and fell upon him. Two strokes of her nails and a mouth over the wound. No blood fell.

Crainic noticed his comrade being taken. He accepted what was happening.

Penny was with them, approving Holly's strike.

Feraru's money was committed, which was what mattered. He was just a walking wallet, for Meinster and the Movement, even for his own family. His consciousness, his body, was surplus.

As Holly sucked purposefully, Feraru's face shrivelled. His eyes opened wider, irises paling to transparency, thread-thin vessels emptying of red. The girl took more than blood from him. His hair bleached white. He was in shock.

'Crainic, you must trust me,' said Alucard. 'There is no Transylvania Movement, there is no Baron Meinster. It's all a sham. It's all so hideously small. But what we are - what we are doing - is important. It will win us not a province, but a world. I need to know you're with me.'

Alucard extended his hand. In the night, to the others' eyes, the ruby ring was black, but Alucard saw the bloody spark in its heart. He made Crainic see it too.

Crainic kissed the ring.

Holly stood, gore-smear on her face, eyes wide red. As the last of Feraru's blood rattled in her throat, her face shifted like a dissolve. Alucard looked at Holly, at the new face she was wearing.

INTERLUDE.

MISS BALTIMORE CRABS.

ANNO DRACULA 1990.

1.

Two homicide detectives stood over a body. Number One Male, late teens/early twenties, five-nine. Black cloak with red trim, jeans, serious running shoes. Face down on the street. Scarlet spider-web radiating along cracks in the asphalt. The rank tang of dead blood at dawn. Cause of death: multiple GSW.

Murder? Yes - obviously. Yet, not her bailiwick... except technically.

At first lookover, Genevieve diagnosed a characteristic East Baltimore disagreement-over-the-sale-of-illicit-substances slaying. The crime scene: a come-down-in-the-world neighbourhood. Boarded-up row-houses. Sturdy Victorian homes for the well off, sub-divided a few Depressions back for the struggling poor. Now, shells for skells. Gang graffiti. Junked cars. A violently orange couch upended next to a dumpster. Thin crowd of kept-back-beyond-the-yellow-tape citizens. They'd have seen nothing.

Her blue windbreaker had OCME on the back in oversized yellow letters, in imitation of those FBI jackets worn to help limit the number of times when federal agents got accidentally shot by fellow law enforcement professionals. She went through a pair of Nike knock-off trainers a month. This gig regularly took her into alleys carpeted with bottle shrapnel and across floors sticky with undrinkable body fluids. She toted her forensic kit in a Gladstone bag she'd had since Gladstone was alive.

She had parked her cherry-red Plymouth Fury just behind the white van from the morgue. The car had been with her longer than most men in her life, and given her less grief. Blake and Grimes, her morgue attendants, were on the scene already, breakfasting on Pop-Tarts.

Walking from her car, she passed a lounger who eyeballed her from under a cowboy hat. Big white guy, out of state. Creepy. Then again, this was Creep Town.

Docs and cops were like aliens here. Real vamps were scarce on the drac corners. Plenty of dhamps hereabouts, though. That's what rattled her cobweb. Folks thinking hard about what she had in her veins, what it could do for them.

She bet Dracula hadn't seen that coming when he made his damn Declaration.

The cops looked up from the body.

'Gene Dee, Gene Dee, what have you got to say to me,' sung-chanted the light-skinned African-American detective who always wore a hat.

'Ou se trouve l'assassin diabolique?' asked the underfed Jewish detective who always attempted French avec l'accent diabolique when talking with her. He lowered his hipster shades to show her soulful comedy eyes.

There had to be something she'd not been told.

'What troubles the mighty murder police?' she asked.

She'd moved from Toronto to Baltimore at the specific request of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for Maryland. For some reason Crab Town got more than its share of gimmick killings. Rare moth cocoons in the gullets of preserved severed heads. Mad poets walling themselves up in tribute to Edgar Allan Poe. Giant crustacean attacks. Lately, there'd been a rash of vampire-related freak crimes. A hundred years after the Dracula Declaration, there were still few specialists in vampire medicine, let alone vampire forensics. Despite what had gone down in Los Angeles, she'd been headhunted back to the USA.

...but not to work routine drug shootings.

'True you busted Jack the Ripper?' asked the black detective.

'There was no Jack the Ripper,' said his partner. 'It was a Masonic conspiracy...'

'You don't know the half of it,' she said.

Sometimes - like now - she felt it was still 1888 and she was stuck in Whitechapel. This was another old, bad district. More open to the skies, less crowded - block after block of empty or seemingly empty houses -but the same stink. City jungle, predators and prey.

Then, she'd lived in the middle of the slum. This time, she was snug across town in a Federal Hill apartment, an easy walk from the morgue on Penn Street. Rents near the harbour were high, so she roomed with two other professional women. Lorie Bryer, an editorial contributor to the Baltimore Sun, was intelligent, reasonable and empathetic, which was probably why she got more hate mail than anyone else on the paper. Emma Zoole, an architectural model-maker, specialised in crime scene reconstructions used in court to walk juries through murders. Neither was a vampire, though Emma was a weekend dhamp. Genevieve was gently trying to persuade Lorie, whom she liked a lot, to ease Emma, a flake with a colourful love life, out of the flat. Genevieve spent enough on-the-job time at crime scenes without coming home to find a doll's house replica of the Tri-State Hooker Hacker's latest killing room on the kitchen table.

Mr Deceased had six holes in the back of his cloak. An unusual garment, but surely not why Genevieve was here. Dressing like a vampire - rather, like vampires were supposed to dress - didn't make you undead. It was arrant stereotyping, anyway. Unlike Emma Zoole, she didn't sleep in a white coffin and have a wardrobe full of shrouds.

'Meet Alonzo Fortunato,' said the black cop. 'Honour student. High school athlete. Once a.k.a. "Track" Fortunato. Gave up on gold and started peddling red. Got hisself a new street name. "Drak"...'

'Hence the un-fortunate Mr Fortunato's distinctive choice of attire,' put in the other detective. 'He was a walking billboard for his putrid product. The finest powdered sang de vampire in the city, probablement.'

Genevieve shuddered. The drac craze had followed her from Los Angeles to Toronto to here. It was still spreading. According to DEA reports, the business of selling vampire blood in liquid or powdered form, in various degrees of purity or adulteration, started in New York in the late 1970s, a country away from where she'd been at the time. She still took it personally. Nico, someone she hadn't saved, was one of her personal ghosts. The vampire waif was an early casualty of the drac scene; not of the bleeding process - plenty of vampires bled to nothing to make red powder - but the whole bloody business.

She gave Alonzo Fortunato, today's victim, due consideration.

'Cause of death was a handgun, discharged repeatedly,' she said. 'You find owner of said gun, you solve case. Drak goes up on the board in black. Commendations all round. Now can I get back to my morgue? I have pressing whodunits...'

'Ah ah ah, not so fast, Dr Dee,' said the black detective. 'Come into the parlour...'

When shot, Fortunato had been running from a particular house. She back-tracked his likely trail up some steps to an open door. A uniform was stationed on the stoop.

The detectives ushered her inside. The stench was worse here.

Though the windows were boarded, the house was in use. Power was hooked up. Coats on a rack. She was directed into a reception room off the hallway.

Seven more dead people. Four males, two females, one whose sex would have to be determined at autopsy. Predominantly black. Comprehensively shot. Weirdly stretched, as if sculpted from warm wax. A still life with weapons, shell casings, drugs paraphernalia, blood spatter, death. Feathers from murdered cushions still floated like zephyrs on the summer breeze. A free-standing lamp had been felled, casting harsh film noir shadows.

Too many bodies for Blake and Grimes to get into the van for a single run. They'd need back-up. Admin had been on at her about the expense of additional journeys in city vehicles. If they got their way, corpses would be stacked like firewood and moved like furniture.

'Welcome to the war zone,' said the Jewish detective. 'Savour one of the city's happiest traditions: the yo-on-yo firefight and general massacre... Time to sort out who shot who in what order.'

'I don't think so,' said Genevieve, gingerly moving around the room, trying not to step in or brush against anything that might be mentioned in court. 'The limp on-the-couches positions of the bodies indicate a leisurely moment of communal relaxation interrupted by an armed visitor or visitors who unloaded before this krewe could respond. See: all the bullet holes are on that side of the room, away from the hall door. Note firearms still in waistbands, pockets or on side tables. At a guess, Fortunato was upstairs sleeping or in the can at the time of the surprise visit. He made a vain attempt to use his track skills to get away. Unless they bumped a head on a lintel, your doer or doers probably got in and out without sustaining a scratch. This was a murder raid.'

The black detective thumped his partner's arm with a told-you-so grin.

'I still don't understand why you asked for me,' Genevieve said.

'Coupla things... the teeth, the claws, the eyes.'

She had noticed what the detectives meant. She'd need them naked on a table under a good light to be sure, but the corpses all looked dhamp. Sharpened teeth and nails. Bleeding gums and cuticles which weren't yet accustomed to popping fangs or talons. One had an elongated neck, which could have been congenital. Again, this wasn't too surprising. Drac was the drug flavour of the new decade. Cocaine cartels and poppy growers were hurting.

'No, no, no,' she said. 'A drac angle doesn't make this vampire related. I'll have Scheiner briefed when these bodies come in...'

'These bodies?' said the Jewish detective. 'You thought we'd called you to look at these bodies? Oh, no no no... wrong end of the stick, meet Genevieve Dieudonne. If you'll kindly step this way, through the beaded curtain charmingly redolent of the summer of love, you shall find the reason you and only you are the ME for this...'

He held the curtain aside.

Genevieve passed through and into the next room - a kitchen.

Only one dead person was here, a very fat man in very tight scarlet underwear. Most of the back of his head missing.

GSW, again. Nothing unusual.

Light was low, but something glittered on the linoleum. An antique carved box lay upside-down, lid open. Small white objects scattered.

'Are them what we think them is?' asked the black detective.

Genevieve opened her bag and found the proper implement. She crouched and picked up one of the objects with a large pair of tweezers.

It was a fang. A vampire tooth.

2.

There were thirty-eight fangs, presumably not all from one victim - though, since vampire teeth grew back if pulled or broken, it was just conceivable they'd sprouted from the same jaw. Incisors, canines, biters. No molars. A couple were grossly oversized specimens - three-inch tusks. One had a black diamond set in it.

'Another Poe killing?' she asked.

Staging murders in imitation of the tales of Edgar Allan Poe was an odd fad which had caught on lately, especially in Baltimore. In 1849, Poe had died here during a ballot-stuffing bender and been buried (by a nasty irony, prematurely) in a churchyard on West Fayette Street. A headstone still stood and someone's bones lay under it. The poet was supposedly exhumed and reburied in 1875 and Walt Whitman (who attended the ceremony) claimed he recognised Eddy by the distinctive forehead of his skull. Whitman was mistaken. Another unknown egghead lay in the grave. Poe was still around as a vampire, squirming on Oprah or The Jerry Langford Show whenever another ardent fan sicced an orang-outang on his girlfriend's mother or rigged up a basement pendulum to bisect a vacuum-cleaner salesman.

The black detective looked blank.

'"Berenice",' said his partner. 'In that conte cruel, first published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835, the perverted perp Egaeus keeps his cataleptic cousin Berenice's gnashers in a box, much like the one these spilled out of.'

And the body outside,' said Genevieve. 'His name was Fortunato...'

'Just like the victim in "The Cask of Amontillado". Probable coincidence. Poe killers usually go the whole hop-frog. Wall up their Fortunatos and Madelines... hearts under the floorboards... plague bacillus spread through the prom. They all have pet ravens or oneeyed cats. I can't recall a Tale of Mystery and Imagination in which a melancholy protagonist muses on the loss of a pale young woman and opens up with an Uzi to ventilate a roomful of sleazoid drac-heads. Of course, I've not kept up with the latterday oeuvre.'

'None of the Poe killers count the recent books,' she said.

'I like Ed McBain,' said the black cop. 'No hump ever kills another hump because he read an 87th Precinct paperback.'

Genevieve stood. She had an urge to collect the fangs and put them back in the box. The crime scene needed to be undisturbed a while longer.

'Edgar Allan Poe is a special case,' she said. 'A vampire writer.'

She'd seen Poe from across the room a couple of times, when they both had an Italian period. He'd been there in 1959, the night Dracula was killed. They'd not actually met, but she had followed his career.

A few years ago, Alexandra Forrest, a New York editor, sunk her claws into the author and struck a deal for a series of saga-length sequels to his most famous works. The Usher Syndrome, The Dupin Tapes, The Valdemar Validation, The Pym Particles. Poe blew the advance on 'golden' - high-quality human blood Genevieve could seldom afford on her salary - and a tabloid sensation marriage to a warm groupie who turned out to be thirteen years old, then failed to deliver. Forrest, it was rumoured, did something terrible to Poe's cat. The books eventually came out with Poe's notorious name huge across the covers and tiny footnotes about less-regarded co-authors. Jack Martin, her one-time Hollywood source, was the actual writer of The Mentzengerstein Factor. He was also the 'as told to' on the title page of freshly annulled Lydia Deetz Poe's tell-all memoir Eddy Dearest, which Genevieve, guiltily, had relished. Now, there was a film out, with a starved-to-a-skeleton Dennis Quaid and black lace-wreathed Winona Ryder.

Poe was in Hollywood too, working for John Alucard. All monsters together. She had a pang at that, reminded of her exile. It had been ten years. She could probably go back. She was, after all, a government employee now. Still, what was there in Los Angeles for her?

'Who's the tooth-collector?' she asked. 'He isn't called anything like Benny Egaeus, is he?'

'No, worse luck,' said the well-read detective. 'Though his name is a literary reference, intentional or not. The rotund, scatter-brained gent is Wilkie Collins, rising captain in the Barksdale organisation. Risen as far as he can, now. Fallen, too.'

'This is a Barksdale house?' she asked.

'Yes, indeed. The Avis of Baltimore drug-dealing concerns. They try harder, because they're number two...'

'Which means your prime suspect is Number One...'

'...with a bullet,' said the black detective. 'Luther Mahoney.'

'Charm City's own Kingpin of Krime-with-a-K,' said his partner. 'The Napoleon of Narcotics... the Diocletian of Drac... There never was a cat of such deceitfulness and suavity...'

'Not that he pulled the trigger. Too busy shooting hoops with the Mayor at a rally for underprivileged youth. This bloodbath is absogoddamnlutely Mahoney, but we ain't gonna put it on Luther. He be the Untouchable Man.'

Genevieve understood from Dan Hanson - Lorie's on-off boyfriend, a crime reporter - that the Mahoney organisation was Baltimore's outstanding supplier of drac, crack and smack. Dan said they probably also dealt in horse, whores and s'mores. If Mahoney let competition stay in business, it was because scrabbling for small change was beneath him. Recently, Barksdale, another family concern, had made aggressive moves into the market, absorbing a succession of Mom and Pop drug dealerships into a loose affiliation. This sort of shift in the city's criminal geopolitics entailed bodies getting dropped. Mahoney was big on endowing community centres, free clinics, playgrounds and cultural events with some of his cash backwash, but he really ought to bestow an additional wing to the city morgue.

Mahoney wasn't a vampire. But he had vampires on his krewe.

If anyone pulled their fangs, he'd be pissed.