Damn, he was right. Always.

And he was gone, not even a ghost...

The present faded back up and her date was talking at her. Like most Americans, he called her Genevieve.

Every time he used her name, which he did unnaturally often, it sounded odder to her, more grating...

At nine-thirty, Lorie - who was responsible for directing Genevieve to the Sun's personals in the first place - would call her beeper. They had agreed on a cut-off point. If the evening was worth pursuing, Genevieve could tell her date it was a wrong number and carry on. If not, she could claim to be summoned to a bloodbath on the other side of town. Door number two was the current favourite.

Her big wrist watch was for work, so she wasn't wearing it. She couldn't see the restaurant clock from where she was sitting.

He was talking about shampoo and conditioner. Time stood still.

Prison was boring. As mind numbing as this. She'd been imprisoned in her time. In dungeons, convents, an eighteenth-century zoo. In well-appointed apartments and shacks. She had mostly shut down and tried to stay calm, secure that she could outlive confinement, waiting for the walls to fall down or her captors to age and die. She had been forgotten in oubliettes. Before the Dracula Declaration, that was easier than it would be now. Then, few had believed what she was.

She didn't know what she'd do if she were captured and held nowadays.

If what went on in the Barksdale basement was now a thing, she must at least work out contingency plans. It could happen to any vampire.

Cut-off time must have come and gone. McCormick & Schmick's Steak and Seafood was emptying out.

Lorie must have got distracted by a deadline, an argument with Dan or one of Emma's loser guy crises. Genevieve would make her pay for that.

At last, beep beep beep.

She didn't even bother with an excuse, just collected her coat and left. She threw down her half of the bill - worked out to the cent in her mind, as an exercise - to avoid any obligation. There would not be a second date.

'I have your number,' she said.

When, for convention's sake, she checked her beeper, she didn't recognise the number. Odd. Lorie should have been calling from the apartment. As part of the escape routine, she made a beeline for the restaurant's bank of payphones. She had planned to call Lorie and vent.

A large, rumpled man hogged one of the phones. He was in the habit of eating too much garlic. She took the kiosk furthest from him.

She fished a quarter out of her purse and dialled the number.

It rang for a long time. Then was picked up.

Silence. Except for breathing. Not Lorie's.

'Doctor Dee,' she identified herself.

'Listen to me, Doctor Dee,' responded a voice she didn't know - male, loud. 'I got your gal pal here. A clean snatch. She ain't been puncturated, so far. But things can change, baby. In a flash. You come see me, sister, and we can rap. You don't come, consequences there be, you dig?'

A frightened squeal, curtailed.

'Picture in focus, doll?'

'Yes.'

'There's a diner on Reistertown and Rogers. It's open late... we be waitin'. I strongly recommend you make good time...'

5.

She had walked to the restaurant from her apartment and her car was parked at the morgue anyway. So Genevieve took a cab to Northwest Baltimore.

The intersection of Reistertown Road and Rogers Avenue was in Woodmere. Once predominantly Jewish, now middle-class black. Few bodies dropped suspiciously in this neighbourhood, so she hadn't been here often.

The diner was easy to find. It was an Americana postcard, an aluminium-sided '50s relic. The boxcar-shaped building supported a huge orange neon sign which just said 'Diner'.

The windows were steamed up, but she could see people-like shapes inside.

She had the cab cruise by and drop her three blocks up.

For her date, she was wearing her good black dress, heels and one of Lorie's puffy-shouldered jackets.

She took off her shoes and put them in her bag, then put her purse and ID in an inside jacket pocket.

She owned a gun, a habit from her private detective nights. It was locked safely in her desk at the morgue.

Walking the three blocks, cold sidewalk under her soles, she felt her hackles rise. She salivated as her fangs slid from gumsheaths. Her nails elongated and curved.

No one could mistake what she was.

People - not that there were many around - got out of her way.

She hid her bag behind a potted shrub in the diner's parking lot. The only vehicles here were a Cadillac pimpmobile, a beat-up Ford truck and a rusty black van with 'Mondo Trasho' written on it in lipstick pink. A late-in-the-day punk band? Some freak subculture she'd not come across yet?

She half-expected to be shot with silver as soon as she barged through the diner door. Instead, she got a slow handclap.

Sat at a table waiting for her was a smiling African-American vampire with a helmet of conked hair like James Brown's, and fur on his cheeks and the backs of his hands. He wore tartan flares over yellow stack-heeled boots, a wide-lapelled jacket with a zigzag pattern in mauve and electric green and matching coat-hanger-shaped tie, plus wraparound mirror shades. His clock had stopped in 1973, which - at a guess - was when he turned. If they didn't go the murgatroyd route with black capes or gauze shrouds, twentieth-century vampires tended to dress the way they had when they died.

She remembered the toast rack of soul records and knew who this was. He seemed to be enjoying his freedom.

The other people in the diner were dhamps, not vamps. A gaggle of flaming creatures: a 400-pound man with a cockatoo mohawk, squeezed into a frilly scarlet ball gown; a mad-eyed old woman, toothless but for temporary fangs, in a ragged nightie; a cadaverous, long-haired white dude with purple moustaches and bullet holes in his sports jacket; a beehive-do blonde sweater girl with a sardonicus smile; an emaciated punker, trussed up in bondage trousers and a ripped Ramones T-shirt. This must be the Mondo Trasho gang.

They were mostly crammed into a booth, surrounding a terrified Emma Zoole.

Genevieve was tempted to say 'wrong roommate' and leave... But she couldn't let Emma take the heat for her and, worse, she had this nagging itch to find out what the hell this was all about.

She could blame Charles for inculcating in her a need to know.

Emma wasn't dhamped. She kept her head down.

'Doctor Dee, Doctor Dee,' said the soul vampire.

'You have a name too?'

'Willis, baby. Willis Daniels.'

He left a pause for it to sink in.

She had never heard of him, so she couldn't give him the 'we meet at last' response he clearly craved.

'Mamuwalde's get,' he elucidated.

Prince Mamuwalde was an African vampire. Not a cat to be invoked carelessly. Genevieve had met him and been impressed.

She suspected this son-in-darkness was not a credit to the Prince.

'Salaam Alaikum,' she said.

Willis tittered, showing a long right fang and a short left one.

'Peace on you too, sister,' he said. 'Now set your bootie down and let's get to talkin' business...'

She slid onto the red-upholstered chair opposite him.

Everything in the diner was cherry-red or silver-chrome, and bolted to the floor. A giant jukebox bore the smiling, faded face of Corny Collins, whose 1960s music show still played late at night or early in the morning on local television. Corny promised 'All the teen beat hits to set your toes tappin' and your fingers snappin'!'

The juke played Gene Pitney's 'Town Without Pity'. A tragic wail of a song.

A blood splatter arced on the wall behind the counter. This krewe had taken out the staff. One of the Mondo Trasho dhampires - a disco punk with roller-skates and an orange crinkly headband - had an unconscious waitress in his lap and was nuzzling her neck with teeth not sharp enough to puncture a vein.

She had no reflection in Willis's shades, but saw the purple-moustache guy moving to block the door she'd come through. He put up the closed sign. A tall, warm, black woman with angry eyes and a leopard-print outfit sat on a stool at the far end of the diner. She was straight, not flying on drac-wings, and had a Glock 9mm on the counter. Genevieve took the Leopard Lady for the most dangerous person in the room...

No, she told herself, second most dangerous person in the room. She hadn't lasted since 1416 by being a pussycat.

Emma, the connoisseur of terror, was not enjoying this. She was morbid, but no masochist.

Genevieve tried not to show her fangs.

Willis dipped a long forefinger in a spill of sugar from the table dispenser and drew a smiley face. He licked sugar off his finger.

'I have your missing tooth,' she said. 'At the morgue.'

He shrugged. 'It's growin' out, sweet cheeks.'

'Don't you want the diamond?'

'Easy to come by.'

'For some.'

'You an' me, girl. We don't have to try so hard, do we? What do they call it - power of fascination? The oogada-boogada? The Charm.'

He made hypnotic gestures.

'Slap the Charm on a person, make 'em do what you want. A trip and a half, Doc. Open up the cash register... open up a wrist. Hah, bein' unborn is the best thing ever happened to Mrs Daniels' boy, and that's the truth.'

'What are you talking about, Willis?' she asked.

He was flustered for a moment, suspicious, prickly. He liked to be taken seriously. He was fundamentally insecure.

In street terms, he was just Blacula's bitch.

Which did not make him any less dangerous.

If it came down to Die Hard in a Diner, she could take Willis. She could even deal with the dhamps. But Emma would be killed. The waitress, too. If the Leopard Lady was packing silver bullets, and she had no reason to think she wasn't, Genevieve wouldn't make it either. At her age, she'd go to dust - some dhamps snorted that! - which would spare Blake and Grimes the embarrassment of hauling their boss to the morgue.

Emma whimpered. The big Mondo Trasho transvestite stuck a long tongue in her ear. The hag cackled.

'Emma,' Genevieve said, 'don't worry. They can't hurt you.'

'Oh I think they most surely purely can,' said Willis.

'Not if you want to keep talking with me.'

He held up his be-ringed, hairy hands and made a Stepin Fetchit I's-so-scared face, then chuckled.

'The Charm, you know,' he continued. 'It come natural to me. Not from bein' a vampire and shit, but from birth. Mrs Daniels was mama-loi from the islands. She never turned, but she had the Charm. S'what voodoo's all about. Makin' puppets of people...'

'Puppets of people,' Genevieve echoed.

Willis let his grin widen. She intuited he'd practised that so his diamond would glisten. It was wasted now.

'In that basement, someone put you on strings, Willis.'

'Mr Wilkie Collins,' he said. 'Look at him now.'

He made a puff gesture at the back of his head. A fraction of an expression crossed the Leopard Lady's face. So Genevieve knew who'd raided the Barksdale house. Looking at her, it seemed possible she'd gone in alone.

Are you really off the string? Or on another one?'

She indicated the woman with the Glock.

Willis laughed but his cheek-fur bristled. An unusual tell.

'You are misunderstandin' the situation, Doctor Dee. Me an' Georgia Rae's tight.'

Georgia Rae Drumgo. Not a name you were likely to forget. Dan Hanson had mentioned her while running through the players in Baltimore's crime organisations. Luther Mahoney's sister. Married to an ex-Tonton Macoute Haitian who was currently missing presumed dismembered. Reputed avatar of the avenging, red-eyed spirit Erzulie Ge-Rouge. Executioner and enforcer.