5.

Someone in the next unit shouted for them to keep the noise down.

Genevieve could hardly see Holly for Gorse's huge shape. But the shifter was Kate again, completely this time, with two eyes and the fighting Irish in her. Genevieve held her elbows close to her sides and tucked her injured forearms out of the way. Then she launched a series of kicks at Gorse's rump, back and head, stabbing higher and higher with her shoe-tip. She was wearing the comfortable sneakers she liked to travel in, but put enough force into the kicks to make them seem like steel-tipped combat boots. There was a crack. Thick red gruel seeped through the mat of fur on the back of Gorse's skull.

He turned around and stared hate at her.

'The French they are a funny race,' he chanted, 'they fight with their feet...'

Genevieve flew at him, mouth open, fangs extended.

'...and they fuck with their face.'

He put a meaty palm in front of her chin and braced himself to snap her head off. She slipped round it, incisors sinking into his hand just below the root of the little finger, then scraping over his wrist, clamping tighter, scoring two red lines through his sleeve and arm.

She was inside his guard and could have torn his throat and face if her hands were any use.

Holly-Kate's hands weren't injured. She had claws in the soft part of Gorse's neck, wriggling in deeper past tendon, bone and vein.

Genevieve got her shoulder under Gorse's chest and heaved him up off the floor, shifting his balance. He pressed down on her, bearing on her spine as Holly had borne on her wrists. New agonies clamoured in the small of her back and up along her spinal cord. If she cracked again, she would be out of the game for good.

Gorse had his scalpel back and his arm raised.

She saw him thinking, deciding which woman was the bigger threat. Holly-Kate won, and the scalpel descended towards the back of her neck. Her hands were deep in Gorse's throat, occupied.

Genevieve reached up and put her hand in the way.

One advantage was that she hurt so much already that it could hardly feel any worse. No, that wasn't true.

The silver knife stuck through her palm, and its point slid out between her knuckles. The weapon's descent was, for a moment, hardly slowed. Genevieve's useless hand was carried with the thrust, to be pinned against Holly-Kate's jugular.

Gorse snarled.

The pain in her hand, and the poison shock of silver, was enough to evict her from her own body. She hurtled away, looking down from above into the cramped space where, shoved into a corner, four living dead folk were locked in blood and pain. Then, pulled back, she found herself screaming.

There was serious hammering on the door.

Holly-Kate took one red hand out of Gorse's neck and held Genevieve's swollen wrist, gripping to realign snapped bones. Genevieve's skewered hand was almost black. Holly-Kate put a thumb to the handle of the scalpel and pressed, shoving the entire blade and an inch of handle out through the back of Genevieve's hand.

Genevieve understood.

Gorse's jacket hung open. Genevieve roughly angled her hand so the point of the scalpel was over the top pocket of his tweed waistcoat, above the heart. It took all the strength of three women to force the blade through the material, between the ribs. But the silver point sank in.

'The Devil take all vampire bitches,' said Gorse.

His mouth opened, drooling red. His fur vanished. He was just a once-handsome middle-aged Englishman, a roguish uncle with cold, cold eyes.

He was a deadweight.

Genevieve's hand was an inflated horror. She tugged, feeling the handle - unsilvered, so less of an agony than the thin blade - pass between the bones. She pulled away and was free, then collapsed into a chair. Holly-Kate held up the dead vampire, whose face was flaking away.

The door opened. Crosby was there, ahead of a towering warm fellow in a dressing gown. The complaining neighbour.

Crosby gravely assessed the damage to the unit. She smelled all the vampire blood. She saw the stranger holding up a truly dead corpse, the naked human remnant strewn across the floor, and the guest holding a venom-bloated right hand.

'Is everything all right?' she asked.

'I could do with some clean blood,' said Genevieve. 'To fend off silver-rot. I've hurt myself a bit.'

'I'll have some "golden" sent over.'

'Thank you.'

'It's no problem.'

Crosby led the warm guest away.

Genevieve breathed again, her mind fuzzy with exhaustion but periodically cleared by waves of pain.

Gorse was dropped.

Holly was completely Kate now. Kate in a new body. She stood over the straggle of flesh where she used to live. Then, a shiver came. A flash of Holly's eyes, but only a flash.

'I may have to say goodbye now, Gene.'

Genevieve's vision blurred. She formed an adieu in her mouth, but a pulse of pain stopped her.

'No,' she said. 'Not yet.'

6.

She drank half the jug of 'golden' Crosby sent over, and used the rest to wash out her wound in the tiny bathroom sink. The hole closed over, but the veins were black. Genevieve's wrists were better now, but silver-poisoning was serious. She wouldn't play the piano again soon. She'd taken it up two centuries ago, becoming a virtuoso in thirty years of intense, obsessive work before the craze passed and she more or less abandoned it, save for a brief fling with ragtime in the 'teens. She didn't think she'd lose the hand, but she'd have arthritic twinges for a long while.

The blood - real 'golden', not the commercial stuff sold in cartons -was on the house. Genevieve realised she had a protector. Someone must have put the invitation on her bed. Someone apart from the management of the Le Reve was paying Crosby, who'd also arranged for a 'cleaner' - a dapper fellow with a trimmed moustache - to have what was left of Ernest Ralph Gorse quietly gathered up and spirited away, presumably to the nearest drac factory. She was not comfortable to be in debt to an anonymous, if guessable worthy, but the blood was a godsend. Without it, she'd be shopping on Rodeo Drive for a claw prosthesis.

So they'd worked for Dracula after all - disposing of the inconvenient, used-up Gorse. Had John Alucard known that when he had her protected in Baltimore? This was what it was like having a King of the Cats again. Being stuck in a giant web.

She stepped back into the bedroom-living room. The unit was one big space now, with mess on the floor. Holly and Kate lay on the bed in a tangle. They seemed more like Young Kate and Old Kate. The old woman, the original, was comatose, but the copy was alert, active. Kate was struggling to stay in control. Holly was asleep, but stirring.

'I can't hang on much longer,' Kate said.

'You're going to have to let go. I think you have to be in your own head for this to work.'

Kate's face showed distaste. Then it was slack, a Kate mask on Holly's face.

'You have something of my friend's,' said Genevieve, to Holly. 'Something she needs back.'

Swiftly, she sat on the bed, her uninjured hand against Holly's neck. Her pale eyes looked out from Kate's fading face. She would not be Kate much longer.

Genevieve could kill the woman relatively easily. She had the blessed silver scalpel. But murder would do nobody any good.

Instead, she tore open Holly's neck with her nails, in the place where she had been ripped earlier.

'Kate,' she said, 'you have to take back from her. Do you understand?'

Kate, single eye bright in the brown-grey of her face, made a nodding motion. Blood fell on her skin, like cream. With heroic effort, she sat up and reached for the throat of the woman who had stolen her form and so much more. She made a fang-mouth and fixed herself to the vampire girl's wound, sucking, sucking...

Genevieve held Holly down and stroked Kate's hair as it grew back, transforming from wispy white to healthy red. As she drank, Kate regained substance, face and form. She had the angry wounds the shapeshifter had imitated, still fresh and ugly.

'Thank you, Gene,' she said, mouth scarlet.

'Take more,' Genevieve encouraged.

'Don't mind if I do.'

Kate made a new hole, on the other side of the shifter's neck, and suckled delicately, more like her old self than the industrial-vacuum-cleaner-cum-giant-leech she'd needed to be to get her strength back. She drank and the scores in her face narrowed to red lines. Her missing eye emerged blinking from a vanishing ball of scar tissue.

'Am I spoiled?' she asked.

Faint trace-marks were across her face. Kate had no reflection, so she would never see them for herself.

'Good as new,' Genevieve said. 'No scars at all.'

Kate smiled weakly, her old smile.

'I'm blind without my specs.'

Genevieve found the glasses, which Holly had worn. One arm was bent, and the lenses were smeared. She did her best to straighten and clean them and handed them over.

With her glasses on, Kate was herself.

'I'm also naked.'

'I hadn't noticed. I'll get you a robe.'

She opened her suitcase and handed over a green silk kimono. Kate wrapped it around herself and Genevieve showed her how to tie the belt.

'Holly helped,' said Kate. 'With Gorse. It wasn't just me.'

'I know.'

'I found a lot of strange things in her. About people we know.'

Holly was not in as bad a state as Kate had been, but was out of action. She was still trying to change. She ran through other faces but couldn't manage any with any conviction.

'I've a lot of her in my head,' said Kate, thumping herself above the ear with the heel of her hand. 'Too much.'

'It passes.'

'I should bloody hope so.'

She wondered if Holly-as-Kate would have convinced her to support the Count. That was what her job had been, no matter what else Gorse tricked her into. Genevieve tended to go along with things, to follow the principled examples of her friends rather than take on her own. She had been led by Charles, by the gumshoe, by Kate. With a persuasive argument, would she have settled in for an eternity as a minion or a court ornament?

She hoped not. But she would never know.

'Good grief,' said Kate. 'Holly knows Penny!'

Genevieve had lost track of Penelope Churchward, though she knew she lived in the States these nights.

'It's "Bad Penny Blues" all over again,' said Kate. 'That girl has made more trouble than anyone else of her generation. She was a horror as a child, you know. Next time I run into her, I'll give her such a bollocking! And I don't care if her family did have more servants than mine in 1885.'

Sometimes Genevieve felt she'd come into the story too late to understand it. She had met Charles through John Seward, after the deaths of Pamela, Charles's wife, and Lucy, Dracula's first English get. The two women, one dead in childbirth in India, the other the first step in the Count's rise to power, were vivid memories for Penny (Pamela's cousin) and Kate, but shadow-ghosts to Genevieve. She'd only known Dr Seward and Mina Harker after they'd been changed by Dracula, and she had barely met Lord Godalming, Seward's rival with Lucy and Penny's father-in-darkness. These people had grown up together, in an intricate tangle of warm relationships and rivalries. The only Jonathan Harker, Quincey Morris or Abraham Van Helsing she could imagine were fictionalised characters from Bram Stoker's book, though she had a sketchy idea where Stoker and his wife, Florence, fitted into the jigsaw too. Charles had been more than half of her world while alive, but she could never follow his part in this extended true-life soap. That gave her something in common with Dracula: he had sliced his dragon's sword through the Gordian knot and let the ends fray.

Kate, invigorated by fresh blood - in fact on a little drac high - sorted through Holly's bag.

'This is mine,' she said, opening it. 'She even has my passport. And my rent-book. Damn, but I'll have lost the flat. It's months since I paid rent. What is it, June? July? It was January when she did for me. Ah-hah. Traveller's cheques. American money. Credit cards in several names. Prickly little Holly owes me some clothes, I think. And a selection of Los Angeles luxuries. I've never been here before, you know.'

'I have,' said Genevieve.

She had human connections too, to the living -Jack Martin, the Dude, the Lieutenant, Kenneth Anger, Iorga - and the dead - the gumshoe, Moondoggie, Orson Welles, Nico, even Gorse. Here, Kate would have to pick up the threads as she went along. It was a mistake to think, as Dracula had done for a while, it possible to live outside the world, imagining master-slave as the only possible relationship. Just by walking into a bar, you initiated a dozen stories, in which you were a star or a walk-on.

Kate found the invitations for the screening of The Rock.

'I think we should go to this,' she said. 'To show him we're still here. That we can't be touched.'

Genevieve wasn't sure.

'I don't mean "can't be touched" like that. Of course we can, Gene. We'll have to be on our guard. But we've warred against him before and survived. Just because the world has forgotten what he's like, there's no reason that we should go along with it. What would Charles have said?'

'"Never surrender."'

'Indeed he would. And indeed we won't.'