'You are not worth punishing. You are no martial man, to be sent to honourable death. You are a dog, like your pets. And so it shall be.'

He withdrew his hand. Meinster fell to the floor.

He called the tiny minds of the dogs. Quietly, with no yapping, they came to attention, fixed on white throat, and attacked. Their fangs tore through ruffles and sank into skin and vein.

Spoiled blood spilled.

His women were at his shoulder, watching the usurper suffer.

The Baron's mind bled out through the rips under his chin, gushing and dissipating. He wondered where the century had gone.

The usurper's mouth pursed.

'P-Pat...'

Meinster looked to the woman he had called bride, seeing her face blur and shift. His eyes burned bright for a moment and were dull. He murmured through the hole in his throat and lay still, meat in the shape of a man.

With his passing, the last memory of a warm boy who had met the King of the Cats in a granite keep vanished from the world. Now no one remembered him, it was as if he had never been.

'Let them know that I have returned.'

'Yes, Count,' said Crainic.

He turned to the woman who had shaped herself to get close to the usurper.

In her place, in her clothes, stood a boy with a gun, aimed at his face.

'Re-ma-ma-re-muh-me-member me, Granpa?' said Kit Carruthers.

11.

Granpa Munster was going to take a silver slug between the eyes, then his long-dead brains were going to splat out of the flap in the back of his head and redecorate these walls. Kit had seen it before. It always struck him as funny. All that a person was could become grey and red mush at a single trigger pull.

'Been bidin' my time 'til now,' he said. 'Makes it more special.'

'Holly,' said the Englishwoman. 'Come back.'

'Holly ain't home, sweet thing. Just me. The Big Bad Wolf with a Big Bad .44 Magnum, all loaded up for bat. Steel-jacketed silver rounds. One of these pops inside your viper ass and it's sayonara senorita.'

'Shazam.'

'That's for the songbird. Don't work on Killer Kit.'

Granpa was a picture of rage. He stood tall, just like in the video store. Dressed all in black for his own funeral. His face stretched into a fearsome mask, white as milk with lines of scarlet around his eyes and mouth.

A fancy-pants viper in some kind of uniform made a move, trying to untangle his side-arm from a webbing of braid and sash. Kit swivelled, put a silver starburst in the elder's heart, and, ignoring the recoil that hammered his wrist and elbow, drew a bead again on Granpa. In the flash of distraction, the old man had taken a step towards Kit, hands raised like the boogedy man, nails thorny diamond barbs.

'You'd purely like to get your hands on me, wouldn't ya? Your hands into me?'

The dead elder was on his knees, coming apart inside his tunic, black flakes falling away from his bones. His chest cavity was exploded from the inside, as if his heart had hatched into a hand grenade.

Holly was inside him somewhere, his woman like always, back on the team. She had wavered, been tempted away by this mad old man, left Kit for dead. But he had always been with her, small and quiet and healing. They had known they would always be together. Now they were as together as people could be, sharing one skeleton.

Granpa dropped his hands, straightened up.

His backbone was iron. He didn't know he was broken yet. Kit had met too many like him over the years, starting before Doc Porthos turned him and Holly. All had looked down at him and learned - if not lived - to regret it.

Kit gestured with his smoking Magnum.

'Granpa, I guess this makes me Master of the Universe.'

Kit decided to get it over with and pulled the trigger.

12.

He was still faster than a speeding bullet, even one fired so close to his face.

He saw the silver point emerge from the barrel of Kit's typically overgrown gun. He fixed on the killing streak as it inched across the space between them. He put his head to one side, and watched the bullet drill lazily past him, spinning as it travelled.

His hand fastened on Kit's gun hand, squeezing.

The boy's eyes were wide in a 'not again' expression. Kit's flesh and bone was crushed, the gun began to buckle. Inside his fist, something cracked.

He reached into the boy's head and flicked a switch.

Holly looked at him, appalled.

'He's gone now,' he told her. 'Forever.'

He let her go. The useless gun fell from her hand. She shifted the mangled ruin, fixing everything.

Penny took Holly away. The Englishwoman was shocked, and feared reprisals. When she looked at him, she could peel away the faceskins of John Alucard and Johnny Pop to see Dracula. He remembered Penelope Churchward from the old nights, saw himself in her mind as he had been when weak, exiled, despairing, desiring true death. That Dracula was deleted, wiped off the slate. Now the times were right and he was what he had been. All who had beset him were shrugged off. Here, in this castle where it had all began, he was again King of the Cats.

Music filled the room. Two voices, joined.

'Imagine...'

Yes, he had imagined. And he had made the whole world imagine along with him. He was master of this land, and of so much more.

'They need you on stage, Count,' said Gorse. 'Now.'

'Of course.'

13.

John wasn't himself any more, or he was more himself than Holly had ever seen. She was changed too. Kit no longer coiled in her depths. She was at last free of him, even of the sense of who he had been, what part of her he had fulfilled. He'd gone to another kind of true death.

Captain Gardner had people taking away the bodies. Nikita and the Angel carried the slack Baron Meinster between them, his fat poodles loping at their heels. Czakyr, a sheepish elder, had been given a broom and pan and told to deal with what was left of Lajos Czuczron and several other Meinster supporters who were in the same condition.

At their stations, Ernest Gorse and Crainic were talking with a dozen people all at once, liaising with the world's media and the coup's ringleaders. On stage, the Short Lion and Timmy V sung John Lennon's song. The whole world was watching.

An attendant scurried up to the vampire who had been John Alucard and settled a black, floor-length cloak on his shoulders.

Penny gripped Holly's arm. She was terrified and struck with wonder.

'It's Him,' she said. 'He's come back.'

Holly stroked Penny's face with her nails.

'Yes,' she agreed. 'He has.'

14.

The two singers, a youth and a child, stood in their respective circles of light winding pure, cold voices around each other. Out on the hillside, a hundred thousand points of light burned, fires against the coming of dawn.

The vampires sang of what was to come. Of the world without heaven or hell, without property or theft. Of the world with peace and order, with love and obedience. As they finished, there was a moment of silence, like the long seconds between lightning and thunder, pregnant with applause and acclaim.

The silence lengthened.

The singers were both astonished, robbed of their power, wondrous at what could turn off such an inevitable hurricane of noise.

He stepped out through the door in the backdrop. Alone.

The singers knew him at once. Even they were humbled.

He flung open the wings of his scarlet-lined black cloak, displaying the red dragon on his black silk tunic, and walked across the stage.

He needed no microphone.

'I bid you welcome to my house,' he announced to the multitudes on the mountainside, and to the billions watching around the world. 'Come freely. Go safely, and leave some of the happiness you bring.'

Like a divine wind, it rushed at the stage. The sound of the people, of his people. More than applause and cheering, it was a massed cry of triumph and sacrifice and homage and love. It was his right.

There was only one more announcement to make. It needed to be said aloud.

'I... am... Dracula.'

INTERLUDE.

DR PRETORIUS AND MR HYDE.

ANNO DRACULA 1991.

No wonder the old Count picked London as the capital of his vampire empire. Grey cloud rendered the sky sunless at two in the afternoon, as if the day had given up early. Streetlamps stubbornly refused to shine, but everyone drove with headlights on. The well-lit cheer of January sales shops just reminded Kate Reed of the prevailing misery. It was as cold and wet as it could be without actual rain. At least there was no fog. The Clean Air Acts of the 1950s had dispelled the city's 'pea-soupers' forever.

She was in a quiet square, one of many corners removed from the flow and bustle of the metropolis. Even a hundred years ago most of these Georgian mansions had been sub-divided into flats, carved up in the first of many calamitous property gold rushes. Buildings bristled with satellite dishes and estate agents' signs.

Crazy prices. Boom and bust.

Her landlord kept offering to buy her out of the tenancy agreement she'd signed with his father ('They call me a bloodsucker, ha-ha!') in 1955. The son still believed he could make a packet by getting rid of his sitting tenants and the ground-floor launderette and converting the building into a yuppie hive. Holloway Road was bound to gentrify. The first espresso machine had already been sighted north of Highbury and Islington Tube Station. But the long-lived clung to their few legal rights, an inconvenience for anyone who wanted to cash out and retire to Spain. Kate would give in eventually and accept her cut of the silly money floating about London even after the last stock market quake. She thought the landlord might be on the point of switching from carrot to stick.

An instinct sharpened over a century suggested she was often - indeed, now - shadowed by someone stealthy enough to stay out of her eyeline whenever she turned. To whit: someone more dangerous than her.

Once, when she had semi-official status with the Diogenes Club, she'd have had Nezumi, her former neighbour, watching her back. A thousand-year-old schoolgirl who could do as much damage with a hockey stick as a samurai sword was always welcome on any dangerous jaunt. The last Kate had heard, the Japanese vampire was working in the public sector, as yojimbo for the Nakatomi Corporation.

The address she sought was marked by a blue plaque. Henry Jekyll 'chemist and natural scientist' lived here from 1868 to 1902. He was honoured for scientific researches into the vampire condition, but Kate remembered the name from a run of minor scandals. The good doctor was known for keeping bad company: vivisectionists, bully boys, resurrection men, low people of all sorts. A string of murders was laid at the back door of this house, attributed to a monkeyish lout named Edward Hyde, bosom pal (and more?) of Dr Jekyll. Hyde, infamous after skewering a vampire Member of Parliament, eluded the long arm of the law and apparently escaped to the Continent or the Americas.

In the 1880s and '90s, when Dracula ruled England, ordinary villains often got away with crimes that in more reasonable times would have been punished. Last Sunday's Independent had run a piece on the papers of Sir Rodger Baskerville, unsealed fifty years after his peaceful death in bed surrounded by doting grandchildren. It seemed the West Country baronet had acceded to his title in 1889 by contriving the deaths in improbable circumstances of relatives who stood between him and the family fortune. No one had been around to stop him. The most notable criminal investigators of the period tended to be labelled enemies of the crown they had once served, and got packed off to the Tower or the internment camp at Devil's Dyke. Only a lifelong tendency to mouse-like unnoticeability had preserved Kate from such a fate.