There were no other dead ones to find, for now they had all been accounted for. Save Camillo.

Rachaela moved behind them.

She was numb, afraid. She had known that Alice, Dorian and Peter, missing from below, were also dead.

Through the long hot afternoon, this was what Ruth had been doing, in her blood-red dress. And in the evening, after the lighting of the lamps, Anna.

She could have killed me, too. But Rachaela was nothing to Ruth; Rachaela was not a vampire.

Their glamour had turned rotten for Ruth. Ruth was no longer the vampire princess, but the vampire hunter. Each time she struck them down, she proved that they were real—

The blue rooms and the brown rooms, the yellow room like an autumn leaf—they did not find Camillo. To Ruth’s bedroom they went, Adamus leading the way. With lamps and candles. But Ruth was not found.

Why did they think she was hiding in the house? Because they themselves would have gone to earth here. They knew Ruth. Even what she had done. Themselves in a distorting mirror.

Had they ostracized Camillo all these years, these hundreds of years, for his obscure and disgusting crime. Rachaela had said to him: You believed you were vampires because someone told you that too.

She knew Ruth had not gone near Camillo.

She knew. Did she then know where Ruth was hiding?

Yes.

Rachaela knew and perhaps all of them knew, this search being only some ritual they performed among the black windows Ruth had smeared with crosses, and under the carvings, the paintings and painted mirrors which had lipstick crosses like blood.

And now they were here, and Cheta took out the key, and put it away again, for the lock of the door had been broken.

Adamus flung the door wide.

And there again, in the prancing lamplight and candle flash was the mildewy paper of bats, and the countless red gowns upon their stands.

The Scarabae stood in the doorway, muted, and put their old dry hands up to their lips and throats and on each other’s shoulders.

It was as if they could not enter.

But Adamus went in.

As if he knew it all, had been told of the scene, as perhaps he had, the bird hiding in the skirt of the gown.

He strode forward, and as he passed the dresses he thrust at them and sent them spinning. He was the centre of a red whirlwind, and as they thudded down their gauzes shattered and crimson smoulders and sprays of beads burst up from them. He the wind and they the red sea, parting.

The Scarabae women gave tiny cries, as some of them had done on finding Anna and Alice, Peter and Dorian. It was another sort of death.

But Adamus came to the dress in the corner, a dress with a full skirt, a train.

He did not push the dress over.