‘Ah,’ Myrnin said. ‘I almost forgot.’ He flashed back inside the barn, and when he came out, he was dragging Dr Anderson by the collar of her lab coat.

She was alive. Bruised, battered, but alive. He’d put her into one of the straitjackets they’d used on him and Oliver, and strapped it too tightly for her to move, though she was trying to fight her way free. He’d also gagged her.

Good. Claire couldn’t imagine anything she wanted to hear from her right now. She was overwhelmed by the conviction that if she hadn’t started all this by her stupid little project, those stupid VLAD guns, then none of it would have had to happen.

None of those people would be dead right now.

Oliver and Jesse, meanwhile, walked out to the van that lay stranded and stuck in the field. The two of them easily picked it up and carried it back to the gravel. ‘We need to go,’ Oliver said. Dr Anderson was screaming behind the cloth, and trying to kick at Jesse, who ignored her. ‘We’ll take both vans. Myrnin will ride with you. Michael …?’

‘We’ll come with you,’ Michael said, and Eve nodded. He turned to Shane, and something strange passed between the two of them that Claire couldn’t understand. She’d thought they were good, but there was some kind of caution there, some wary distance. ‘See you back home?’

Shane nodded. ‘Be safe, man. You okay?’

‘Better,’ Michael said. He sounded more like himself, at least; he wasn’t as pallid as the other vampires, and he seemed less … alien, somehow. What did I do to them? Claire wondered. She’d had to make guesses about how to adjust VLAD’s settings, and she hadn’t been at all sure that it would be enough to reverse the effects of the first blasts … she’d been right about the reversal, but it seemed to have done something else, too. Something scarier. It was as if their essential humanity had been stripped away. Even Myrnin’s. She couldn’t meet his gaze; it was too strange, too … too frightening.

‘We can’t just leave all this here,’ Shane said. ‘For one thing, our DNA’s all over the place.’

‘What do you propose?’ Oliver asked.

‘Well, it’s a farm. There’s gasoline and fertiliser.’

Pete nodded, suddenly looking a lot steadier than he’d been. ‘I’ll help you,’ he said. He and Shane moved to a storage building next to the barn, and began rolling out drums and equipment. It didn’t take long, with vampire help, to wire up improvised bombs – something Shane had learnt from his dad, Claire assumed – and set them in both the barn and farmhouse.

‘What was this?’ Claire asked numbly. ‘I – who are they?’

‘Were,’ Myrnin said. ‘They were from the Daylight Foundation.’