I would have probably added, you giant bag of dicks, but that worked just fine. Davis looked as surprised as Wile E. Coyote suspended over a canyon, and he dropped his weapon and let Liz go, fast. Liz lurched away a step or two, then came back and grabbed the gun, which she pointed right at the good doctor’s face.

Yow. That did not look friendly. For a sick, breathless second, I really thought the girl was going to do it … and then she backed off, shaking.

Davis sank down to a crouch, hands up, clearly full of surrender.

‘Come on,’ Claire said. ‘Come on, we have to go. Right now!’

She didn’t need to issue a formal invitation. We all bolted to follow her as she left. The farmhouse behind us was ringing with shouts, and I heard the steel door scrape open; we didn’t have long before they had us in their crosshairs. To add more trouble, there were three guards coming out of the barn across the gravel yard.

They were dragging three limp vampires by their feet.

I don’t know why, but that sight shocked me. Myrnin, Oliver, Jesse – not just vampire-pale, but blue-white. Dead white. My God, what had happened in there?

The guards yelled when they saw us, dropped their cargo, and went for their weapons. We made it to the shelter of the van before they were able to draw and fire, and I slid the door back to let Michael in first – he was already burning in the sunlight – and Eve, Pete and Liz piled in next.

Claire didn’t get in. She put her back against the cold metal, breathing hard, and she seemed to feel as sick as I did. Seriously, my whole bloodstream was on fire, and if we hadn’t been in a live-or-die situation, I probably would have been collapsing under the pain … but for now, that had to go away. Better to burn than eat bullets.

‘I killed them,’ she told me. She sounded devastated. ‘I thought – I thought I was saving them. But I think I just killed them.’

She was right. The three vampires lay in the sun, not moving. Oliver’s skin had started to smoke a little, like mist coming off a lake. It wouldn’t take long for him to blacken, and then to start to burn. The others would follow. Myrnin was old, Jesse might be even older, I wasn’t sure. But in the end, they’d be ashes and bones.

It was going to kill her, knowing she was the cause of all this.

‘Get in,’ I told her. Eve had already scrambled into the driver’s seat and was trying keys from the ring; one worked, and the engine caught. ‘We have to go. Right now.’