‘Of course we’re at war. And we were winning for a while; the vampires were sick when I left Morganville, and getting sicker. If you’d left it alone and let nature take its course, it would have been over by now.’

‘Did you make them sick?’ Claire asked, horrified. Myrnin had never completely believed the idea that Amelie’s vampire father Bishop had developed and spread that disease. Had it happened right in front of him?

But Dr Anderson was shaking her head. ‘No. I can’t claim credit for that. I just made sure that the research went nowhere on how to fight the illness. Seemed like for once, nature was favouring humans instead of vampires.’

Claire shivered. She’d thought she understood Dr Anderson; she’d thought they were alike. But they weren’t, deep down. They’d both survived Morganville, but they’d come out of it completely differently.

‘If you didn’t think we were at war,’ Anderson said, ‘then why did you make this?’ She patted VLAD’s metal frame.

‘I just wanted – I wanted a way for us to stop them if it came to a fight. That’s all. It’s supposed to be for defence.’

‘Well, you know what they say: the best defence is a good offence. We’ve been working on enhanced anti-vampire weaponry for some time. Including biological weapons.’

‘Dr Davis was running experiments,’ Claire said. ‘That bat-thing that killed Derrick. That was his?’

‘Yes,’ Anderson said. She was watching Myrnin, but not with any compassion or regret. It was all clinical, the look in her eyes. Clinical and bitterly cold. ‘He’d made considerable progress, but our samples were degraded. We’d had to rely on what I brought with me out of Morganville, and it wasn’t much. I was working on getting Jesse to cooperate with me, but for all her friendly ways, she’s smarter than that. Too bad. If she’d just done it peacefully, I wouldn’t have had to take the steps I did.’

‘Is Jesse—?’

‘Alive? Yes. Happy?’ Anderson shook her head. ‘I didn’t want to do it. But she pushed me into it. I’ve got a monitor on her. So far, the effects haven’t worn off. I’m starting to wonder if the beam does permanent neural damage.’

‘Permanent? What did you do to VLAD? It was never supposed to be that powerful—’