“Listen. This is London. Eight million people, give or take: a hundred thousand deaths a year, on average. Twenty thousand terminal cancers. Ten thousand strokes. And so on. You need blood to establish a sympathetic link that allows the V-parasite to feed: you can probably make do with a tiny amount. And you don’t need to feed very often. If it’s taken from a donor who’s waiting for the transplant surgeons to break them up for spares, if it’s used immediately, that’s not going to shorten their life appreciably. Taken from someone dying of advanced metastatic cancer who’s on so much morphine they think it’s next Friday already, ditto. We’ll need to find a cooperative hospice, or a hospital with terminal care facilities. And a cooperative consultant or two. We can arrange for blood samples to be taken from patients who’re within forty-eight hours of death and have them couriered over to where you and the other PHANGs are waiting to consume it immediately. We can make this work, Mhari, but it’s not going to happen unless you can give the organization a reason to want to keep you alive. Do you understand?”

She nods—reluctantly, I think. I can’t tell if I’ve gotten through her layer of defensive self-loathing or not. I try again. “I keep hearing, everybody knows vampires don’t exist. And you know what? That phrase, that conviction, will kill you if you can’t overcome it. And it’ll kill Alex, and, uh, Evan, and Mr. Menendez, and what’s-her-name-with-the-spikey-hairdo-and-bad-attitude—”

“Janice.”

“Janice. It’ll kill you all if we can’t work out where it’s coming from. And even if we get past it, we’ve then got to justify why we’re going to take elaborate and dangerous measures to keep you alive, measures which are frankly repulsive to most right-thinking people—think of the newspaper headlines if it got out; it’d look worse than the hospital that was saving up organs from autopsies on dead children—we need a justification. Just being powerful ritual practitioners who are immune to K syndrome isn’t going to be enough: you need to bring some added value to the organization. This is not office politics as usual. This is deadly serious: if not now, then in twenty years’ time. Or weren’t you planning on being around in another couple of decades?” I meet her eye. “Oh hell, Mhari, don’t be stupid.”

She shakes her head. “It’s awful,” she says. “This can’t be happening.”