“I’m going! I’m going!” Pete opens the door and shuffles through. Alex twitches, then cringes after him when he sees her expression. It’s the hunger of a tiger on a choke chain, in sight of its next meal but not permitted to approach. A moment later the door closes with a click.

The woman (who is not called Marianne) relaxes slightly. She crosses the room and hurriedly turns a key in the lock on the inner door. She returns her pistol to an inner pocket. Then she sits down on the edge of the desk to wait for the next victims to show up, shivering with joyful anticipation. Her new patron has promised her his leftovers.

• • •

IF THERE IS ONE THING WORSE THAN VAMPIRES, IT WOULD HAVE to be vampire hunters.

Consider: vampires are obligate predators. If they try not to feed, eventually the V-parasites get hungry and chow down on the host. Prudent vampires do not feed indiscriminately, and try to minimize their chances of being caught by picking one victim at a time, and fasting as long between victims as possible. But they are, of necessity, serial killers.

Vampire hunters, on the other hand . . .

A vampire hunter is a serial killer who hunts serial killers. Not only that: the serial killers they hunt are supernaturally strong ritual magicians with mind-control chops and an aptitude for occult magic.

So I think it’s reasonable to say that vampire hunters either have an extremely short life expectancy, or constitute one of the most deadly threats you are ever likely to encounter. They are invariably howling-at-the-moon stark raving bonkers, and not in a good way. Nobody who wasn’t several screws short of a full set would ever consider hunting vampires for business or pleasure. (Especially because vampires don’t exist. Right? Right.) We are not talking Buffy here. Paging Dexter, Dexter to the white courtesy telephone . . . Both Buffy and Dexter are fictional characters, and kind of cute, because their creators want to entertain you, not scare you to death. The real thing is something else.

Having established that vampire hunters are a whole bundle of no fun at all, it’s also important to bear in mind that vampire hunters can sometimes be a vampire’s best friend.

Consider that the first law of the vampire club is that, if I can see you, I will kill you. But killing in person is messy, dangerous, and can backfire horribly: the risk of overexposure is very real. So smart, experienced, ancient vampires collect vampire hunters wherever possible—cherish them, feed them, keep them in a cotton-wool lined box, and only take them out when it’s time to point them at a rival and pull the trigger.