“No, no, that’s quite all right,” says the ancient archivist. “How do you take your tea? Milk and sugar?”

“Milk, no sugar,” says Pete. He nudges Alex.

“Oh! No milk, one sugar.” Alex looks at the door they entered through, then back at the elderly Basil. Woman with gun, or elderly man with teapot. Nostrils flare. “You’re a vampire!” he exclaims, then bites his tongue.

“Don’t be silly, vampires don’t exist,” Basil retorts, then sniffs. He finishes pouring the tea. “Unless we’re talking about the sanguinary curse that adheres to inanimate objects, of course, the organization has several of those in inventory; but that’s another story. I could have said it takes one to know one, but then we would be tacitly admitting that vampires do exist, and then we’d have to do what vampires always do when they meet.” His hands shake, Alex notices, but his voice is steady and his speech is clear and unhesitating.

“What do—would—vampires do when they meet?” asks Alex.

“You’ve seen Highlander—there can be only one.” An expression, hard to read in the twilight, crosses Basil’s face. “No? You haven’t seen Highlander? I must confess, the talkies are my one vice—I picked it up in the early 1920s and can’t seem to shake it. Vampires kill, lad. It’s in their nature. They can’t help it; if they don’t kill, they die horribly. It is common lore among their kind that the public, were they aware of vampires, would mandate naked noonday parades and shoot everyone who didn’t turn up. Or something like that. So a vampire who allows himself to be recognized as such is a clear and present danger to all other vampires. More tea, Vicar?”

Alex stares at Basil. The gears in his head are whirring as they mesh at high speed, building a Babbage-engine picture of a proposition in predicate calculus. “Why are you breaking the rules?” he finally asks, taking the mug.

A wry smile creeps across Basil’s face.

“If you don’t need me, I’ll just be leaving,” Pete suggests, sidling sideways towards the door. Evidently he’s decided that he’d rather take his chances with the serial killer outside.

“No, I think you should stay,” Basil says, affably enough, and Pete lurches to a stop, as if his feet are rooted to the stained concrete floor. “We don’t always kill each other. If we’re evenly matched, we may even leave one another alone: there’s no victor in a fight where everybody dies. To each, his territory. I’m not the only ancient in London, Alex, or even the strongest. But that’s a long story. If I arranged for you to be made, why do you think I would kill you?”

“But the woman outside—but, but Evan’s dead—”

“Evan was your colleague, wasn’t he? The, ahum, hipster?”

Alex nods.