(Speaking of victims, you can forget the night clubs and glamour. Real vampires prey on the lonely, the elderly, and the unloved. You might find poor ones working the night shift at a hospice, or befriending widows at a bingo hall. Rich ones are more likely to cruise homeless runaways, offering them a meal and cash in return for a night’s sexual exploitation, only for the victim to wake up in a small bedroom with double glazing and a door that locks on the outside, fed by staff who never speak. Real vampires seek the ones who nobody will ever miss.)

Because of the vile secret of their long existence, if a vampire becomes aware of the existence of another vampire, their first response is to kill it with fire. (Consider: if they learned its nature, then other people might do so. And if the common people ever realize that vampires exist, it will be a very short time indeed before naked noonday identity parades are required by law.) Only if they fail to assassinate their rival and defuse the deadly existential threat of exposure will they even consider communicating with it as an equal—and even then, the only subject important enough to require joint action is the elimination of threats to their collective security.

Which is why everybody knows vampires don’t exist.

Except for us. (And the Scrum, who didn’t get the memo.)

So congratulations; you’re now a target!

• • •

I MANAGE TO GET A VERY UNSOUND EIGHT HOURS OF SLEEP, punctuated by various anxiety dreams. You want anxiety dreams? I’ve got them all: if I could bottle ’em and sell ’em I could out-gross George Romero. There’s the regular strain—at the office with no clothes, having to get home across rush-hour London in the buff—and the more recondite variety where I’m being stalked by zombie clowns because I misfiled an expense report. And then there’s the extra special sauce variety.

In this recurring dream it’s night, I’m at home in my own bedroom (yes, I’m in bed, dreaming I’m in bed, dreaming . . .) and Mo’s awake next to me. And there’s a crib. No, we don’t have kids: given what’s going to happen as the stars come into their unfortunately-too-damned-accurately-foretold alignment, it just seemed like a really bad idea. But in this dream, there’s a bone-white cot in our bedroom, with bars around it and some kind of net curtain arrangement dangling around it. Talk about symbolism, right?