I shrug. “Apart from her being my long-ago psycho ex? She’s one of them, Pete. A PHANG, a Person of Hemophagic Autocombusting Nocturnal Glamour, or whatever the fuck the politically correct acronym stands for this morning. She’s a stakeholder in the whole process and she’s been given carte blanche to control the outcome of a committee process tasked with defining policy for Human Resources with specific reference to Workplace Health and Safety, employee special needs subject to the Equalities Act (2010), and other relevant legislation. What DRESDEN RICE comes up with has the potential to be set in stone—”

“Stop!” I stop, startled by Pete’s interruption. He raises a hand. “Can you tell me what’s wrong with that? Because what I’m hearing is, if you had an equivalent committee looking into the needs of, say, an Orthodox Jew or a paraplegic in a wheelchair, you’d object to the group in question being represented on the committee—”

Andy shakes his head, for which I’m profoundly grateful, because I seem to have stepped on a landmine in the fraught field of discrimination awareness, and it’s only a matter of time before someone unmasks me as a running dog of the oligoheteropatriarchy. (Which I will cop to, but it’s a hell of a handicap to play under when you’re participating in a game of privilege bingo.) “There’s a fundamental difference between a vampire and a regular human minority, Pete: normal people don’t have super-strength, mind control powers, and a thirst for blood.”

“Also,” I add, “the committee seems to have been weighted from the outset with the aforementioned WOMBATs. Whose defining characteristic seems to be that they don’t believe in vampires. So someone upstairs put a vampire with rad mind control skillz in charge of a ship of fools who are blind to the problem this presents. Like, oh, the whole new variant K syndrome thing that led me to them in the first place.”

“New variant what?”

“K syndrome; it’s a kind of dementia that ritual magicians are prone to,” Andy explains. “What Bob found was a new one, let’s call it V syndrome. It doesn’t affect the PHANGs themselves: it affects their victims. Looks a lot like Kuru or Mad Cow Disease, only it kills within weeks.”

“Oh dear”—Pete’s hand moves instinctively to his throat—“God.”