"So what the hell was that about?" Annie asked as, the initial plan about going to the pub abandoned, they pulled into the digs car park.

"Buggered if I ken," said Nick. Val was currently sandwiched between him and Mackie in the pickup's back seats. "We were minding our own business when all of a sudden someone yells 'there they are, get them,' and that mob bloody rushes us."

"So what'll we be doing about them?" Mackie asked as Annie parked the pickup. She didn't answer that until they'd all piled out and she'd switched the engine off.

"I'm no thinking there's much we can be doing," she finally said. "We can no exactly be going out idiot hunting now, can we. I'm thinking we stick in a group, keep our long arms handy in my ute or Nick's van, and any time those clowns want to start on us we make them wish they hadn't."

"Idiot hunting, now that sounds like no a bad plan," Fiona, who'd just been leaving the building as they arrived, declared. "I can think of a few idiots who could do with being hunted… hey, were you lot no away down the pub about five minutes ago?"

"Aye, but we ran into a bunch of idiots with other ideas," Nick told her. "That same lot from the other night, they jumped Mackie and myself just down where the road turns to run along the side of the river. They beat it the very moment any of us had a gun."

"Myself am getting down to the bloody gun shop on the morrow and getting a shotgun myself can be keeping under a coat, fuck the whole thing the college is having with the long arms" Mackie declared.

"Aye, you do that," Nick agreed, heading for his van. "Did we have they leatherworking tools in the box in the back of the van? I've got a machete with me but it's no got a sheath or anything."

"And why'll you no be getting a shotgun and all?" Fiona asked him.

"Nick with a shotgun would be a danger to anything but whatever he was firing it at," Annie said. "The man's the worst shot in Scotland."

"Oh get to fuck Annie, I'm no that bad,"

"Oh yes you bloody well are," Mackie declared. "Nicodemus 'capable of missing a barn from inside the bloody barn' Macbane,"

"Shut your pie-hole you great teuchter. Anyway basically, I'm a bloody terrible shot," Nick told Fiona, climbing into the back of his van; he continued talking in between rooting around. "This bunch of numpties like to exaggerate how bad but at the end of the day I'm more likely to actually do something useful in a fight with a big knife."

"Bad eyesight?" Fiona asked.

"There's nothing wrong with Nick's eyes, it's what's behind them that's the problem," said Mackie.

"And it's no for want of practise either, I've fired tens of thousands of rounds and never got any better," Nick grumbled, notably not contravening Mackie's statement; he chose this moment to come out of the van with a fishbox full of clobber in tow.

"Odd," said Fiona.

"Story of my life," Nick agreed with a shrug.

Alice refrained from comment. Nick thought odd was the story of his life? He should try living hers, odd had become the new normal roundabout when she'd woken up in Grace Mitchell's living room.

"So will you be doing anything about these idiots you're talking about?" Fiona directly asked Annie, apparently having decided that the conversation about Nick's utter absence of proficiency with firearms was complete.

"Well can you think of anything we can be doing? Because apart from keeping our guns handy and sticking together I can't," Annie told her.

"Well that's no a bad start," Fiona told her with a nod. "And if you'll have me I'll be joining in with that one, given that I'm rooming with one of your friends," and she nodded to Alice.

"Aye and you'd be welcome," Annie said with a nod; she gave Nick a meaningful look. "That'll be meaning we use my ute and your van, lads,"

And that was why, the following morning, the whole gang of them went trooping off down to JOHNSON & CO GUNSMITHS only to find the place closed.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Shite, shite, shite, what the hell, when was Scotty ever no open of a Saturday?" said Mackie. He and Alice had ridden down with Nick, Alice in the van because it was so much more civilised than Annie's monstrosity, and they were now loitering around in a group between and/or in the two vehicles outside the very closed gunsmiths.

"It's no the first time," Fiona told him. "Your man's off to trade shows five or six weekends a year, and you ken what that Mags lassie's like about being further than a stone's throw from himself."

"Eh, bear in mind we're only normally seeing himself once every month or so," said Nick. Fiona made a startled sound, then laughed.

"Och, look at me," she said. "Okay, aye, short version: he's got the best pistol range in Inverness so anyone in the town who's interested in competitive pistol shooting knows him like he was family."

"You shoot competitively?" Annie asked, instantly interested. "I've thought of giving it a go but never really had an opportunity."

"Aye," Fiona said with a pleased nod. "Quickraw shooting, it's something that I felt that I had to be doing and it's bloody good fun so I stuck at it and I'm nae bad, anyway like I was saying Mags sticks to himself like glue, I can't say I've ever seen her much more than fifty feet away from that lad, she's himself's bodyguard."

"Scotty Johnson needs a bodyguard…?" Annie asked.

"I'm no knowing if 'needs' is the word you're looking for, but he certainly has one and I wouldn't want to get on that lassie's bad side if you ken what I'm saying," Fiona told her. "So long story short, any time he decides to bugger off somewhere she's right behind him, and it's no like he's got anyone else working for him on this site."

"Well I guess we'll no be getting any shotguns till Monday then," said Nick, elbowing Mackie.

"Actually it's no like Scotty's the only place near to Inverness you can be buying that sort of guns, he's just the best place that's doing the big stuff," Mackie said with a shrug. "There's that place up by the flying field, Kingstons, that was where myself was getting the trench gun in the first place."

"Well let's go on up there then," said Annie.

So they did.

Ten minutes drive out to the east of Inverness proper, 'the flying field' was apparently a funny name for a startlingly busy airport. It had two entire separate sets of runway, a sprawling sea of hangers, enormous queues of aircraft waiting to take off or land - the thunder of jet engines was shaking the air near-constantly, it was more on the order of what you'd expect to see somewhere like Gatwick or just generally serving a teeming metropolis than 'the flying field' outside an arse-end-of-nowhere little north-of-Scotland town like Inverness had up till then given every impression of being. Virtually every aircraft coming and going was preposterously big to boot - massive great hunched-up beasts like a Jumbo Jet's bigger uglier stubbier-winged cousin, and they all had these really weird-looking cockpit windows, sort of radial clusters of stripes of window running fore-aft around the top of the nose and utterly unlike any aircraft Alice had ever seen.

It also had a swathe of railway yards and nondescript prefabricated concrete industrial units jammed between it and the sea; it was to one of these industrial units that they drove, and on the way Alice got the latest in a long line of surprises on finding fleets of heavy-duty trucks loaded with car-sized boulders carefully working their way from actually on the airport proper to the rail yards behind it then going back to the airport empty, which made so little sense she found herself staring in slack-jawed pop-eyed silence.

"That's asteroid ore," Mackie said, catching what she was gobsmackedly gawking at.

"You what?"

Nick and Mackie glanced over her at each other.

"It's asteroid ore," Mackie repeated. "This is the only place in the British Empire that it's legal to be flying privately-owned spacecraft out of - see, after the Navy started selling off their first generation Eagles back in the mid-1970s it wasn't all that long before some poor sod stuffed one into the side of a mountain somewhere or other in South America which is how they were finding out that when you smash a rocketry reactor you tend to get an awful lot of naked fusion reaction flashing out of the damaged reactor casing and there isn't any great difference between that and a small atomic bomb going off. But by that time how very big a thing it all was had already been made clear, at that time they were landing something like ten thousand tons of ore down at Luton in England a week and my God the amount of money, so to cut a long story short not having somewhere for big businesses to fly out of in the Home Islands would have been political suicide. So since there's not a soul in Westminster who has any more regard for the Highlands than for a wad of freshly-used bog roll, and since Inverness already had major rail links headed south..." and he shrugged.

"Rocketry… reactor… fusion… you what?"

"I'm taking it that they've no got thermonuclear spaceflight where you're from, then," said Nick as he parked the van outside one of the industrial units.

"Thermonuclear… what..."

"That'd be a no then," Mackie said, climbing out of the van.

"A no to what?" Annie asked; the pickup was already parked and she, Val, and Fiona were loitering around beside it.

"Alice didn't ken about fusion rocketry," Mackie told her with a shrug.

"Oh," Annie shrugged it off as insignificant. She nodded to Alice, then turned to lead the gang of them into the industrial unit. "Mackie'll wax lyrical at endless length if you're giving him half a chance, he's daft for space. It's no as exciting as he's thinking, it mostly consists of sitting around locked up in wee a tin can with no 'down' and everyone's rotten socks for weeks at a time with nothing to see and less to do, I should know, I've been to Mars - imagine being stuck in a bus for a couple of months and no even any scenery to be looking at or any actual driving to do since the computers are doing most of that, anyone who's on about romance and adventure and great explorers is talking out of their arse. I suppose you could poke around on Mars or something, imagine being stuck in a space suit out in the dreariest driest most completely empty bit of Australia you can possibly imagine, except perishing bloody cold - it'll be able to actually start being a world once the terraforming is completed but that won't be in our lifetimes. Maybe it's the future but it definitely is not today."

"While Annie is a complete bloody dour old teuchter about the most important advancement in human history since… since the invention of fire," Mackie declared.

"Oh stop your harping on about it you pair of absolute numpties, we're supposed to be shopping for a shotgun," said Nick.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The first thing Fiona said when the two of them were back in their dorm room and sitting down, Fiona at her coffee table and Alice on her bed, the thump of Mackie trying out his new shotgun intermittently audible from outside the building, was, "It's no just an initial impression now, is it. You really are one hell of a long way from home."

"The wrong face, science fiction cybernetic arms and legs and eyes, hologram computers that you plug into your brain, giant rhino monsters, guns bloody everywhere, clothes from before the first world war or something, Nick doing freaking magic with a biro like it's nothing, ye Gods and little fishes, just when I think I'm starting to comprehend the sheer scale of it suddenly thermonuclear rockets," Alice said with a shake of her head. "I don't know what to think… My little brother would love it, total space geek."

"… Geek?" Fiona asked, coming and sitting down beside Alice instead. "What on Earth does 'geek' mean?"

"You know, a nerd," and that didn't enlighten her. "You actually seriously don't know what 'nerd' or 'geek' means, ye Gods,"

"I can't say I've ever been hearing either one of those words in my life,"

"Does 'anorak' make any sense? You know, like a trainspotter or something?" Alice asked, and Fiona snorted.

"You mean those numpties standing at the bottom of railway platforms with a notebook, aye?"

"Yeah, them. A nerd is like that but not necessarily over trains, and a geek and a nerd are pretty much the same thing."

"And every time you think you've realised how far from home you are, you're finding out that it's even further than you'd thought, aye?"

Alice nodded.

"It's like every time I think I'm starting to think I've figured out just how fucking deep the rabbit-hole is I realise what I thought was the light at the bottom is actually another freight train coming up, at this point it's like I might as well be on a different planet."

"Oh Alice, Alice, Alice, you are on a different planet," Fiona said with a sigh, and put an arm round Alice's shoulders. "It's the same situation as when you meet a complete stranger who looks like someone you know, but with worlds. You shouldn't be taking anything at all for granted - when all is said and done you are as alien here as I would be in your world."

"I think I can at least take 'down' being 'down' for granted,"

"Yet only a few days ago you were going pop-eyed at a levitating bit of cardboard."

"… fuck," Alice muttered.

Although she would in time come to regret it, and although she knew she probably should, she did not ask what else she was taking for granted that she should not - and not just because, as Fiona had said, it wasn't like the other girl would know what was different about the world Alice remembered and the world around them either.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Coursework began in earnest on the Monday the ninth of September, and having something to focus on other than being impossibly lost and/or having been blown up appeared, in Alice's opinion, to be exactly what she'd needed, just as Brigid had predicted.

She and the group she was beginning to think of as her friends continued to travel together despite not having seen hide nor hair of the 'greaser' gang in days - it was not, in fact, until they were exiting the pub - not the same place as they'd been before - just after eleven ostentatiously enough on the evening of Friday 13th that they found a mob of about thirty of them sitting around and on Nick's van and Annie's pickup all armed to the teeth - prominently including the girl who they'd last seen laying on the pavement with a broken neck, who was standing on Annie's pickup's cab roof with a large rifle in her hands.

"About time you fuckfaces showed yourselves," she said.

-/-/-/-/-/-

For the second time in a matter of weeks, Alice Liddell slowly began to realise she was, in fact, still unexpectedly alive - this time in the aftermath of a brief but intense salvo of gunfire - as the gang of greasers, or rather what was left of them, once again fled, everything having once again happened entirely too fast for Alice to follow.

Fiona was standing there like a Western gunfighter, a smoking revolver in each hand, looking very pleased with herself. Three of the 'greasers' had exploded into gallons of slurry much like the one Nick had stabbed with a pinch bar at the start of the previous week, and the girl one seemed to have had her neck broken again - her legs were still visible sticking up the back of Annie's pickup's cab while she swore the air blue. A glance around showed that both Nick and Val appeared to have moved a good fifty or sixty feet in the half a heartbeat the 'fight' appeared to have taken, and both were covered in mud; Mackie and Annie had their guns out (in Annie's case she'd appeared a T-shaped piece of black metal identical to the greaser's stolen gun from the previous week from somewhere) and smoking.

"I see," said Fiona. "Why don't you ask the idiot in the back of your ute what her problem is?"

"Y'know that's not a bad idea," Annie agreed. "Let's find somewhere quiet."

-/-/-/--/-/-

The somewhere quiet they arrived at in the end was the north end of the derelict airbase between the Kessock Bridge and Inverness proper, which turned out to be the end that was full of fly-tipped rubbish and derelict cars - the south end was full of shacks. Here they dragged the unfortunate greaser girl - whom Annie had hogtied with fencing wire - out of under the tarps in the pickup's loadbed and dumped her on a pile of decaying mattresses, and Annie spent nearly a minute poking at her with the pinch bar and telling her to stop pretending to be asleep.

"I think she's proper dead," Nick said, squatting down to have a closer look; he started feeling at her throat. "Crap, she's proper dead, the body's cold and I can't find a,"

The greaser girl bit his arm.

"Pulse? The fuck, hey, get the fuck off of me, oh what the hell!"

Fiona shot the greaser girl in the crotch - the gunshot made her scream, and Nick yanked his arm away when she opened her mouth in the process. He was bleeding profusely.

"Fuck me, what the hell," he declared, shedding his bike jacket into the back of the pickup.

"Jesus man, she's really got you one there," Mackie declared, fishing around down the back of the pickup's driver's seat; he emerged with a first aid kit. "Let me get a look at that,"

"Yeccch, what the fuck have you been eating, you taste like a wet dog smells," the greaser complained, starting furiously wriggling. "Think that's a big bite, I'll fuck you up proper once - ugh - once I get, argh, fuck you, lemme go!"

"Are we looking as daft as yourself?" Fiona asked, sounding curious.

"No pulse, no body heat, what the hell is this crap?" Val complained.

"Are you," Alice asked, the answer seeming quite obvious, "A vampire?" and that question silenced everyone bar the trussed-up greaser girl.

"Holy crap I'm a vampire, I never would've noticed if you hadn't pointed it out!" she snarled, the prominent fangs not doing anything to change what anyone was thinking. "What the hell gave it away, was it when I drank your smelly cunt mate?"

Fiona shot her again.

"Okay, sure, you're a vampire. Now, how about you answer a few wee questions my friends have for you, or would you like me to keep shooting you in a very sensitive place?"

"You can't do this!"

"Myself am thinking yourself'll be finding we can," Mackie declared, withdrawing his nice new shorty shotgun from his coat; he made a presentation of working the pump, then casually aimed the barrel where Fiona's bullets had gone.

"You're god-damn prey you fucknut, prey doesn't win against predators!" and Fiona and all three of the Loch Allen kids all burst out laughing.

"Well that's one of the stupidest things I've been hearing in a while, have you no seen what a cow does when something bothers her wee calf?" said Nick with a shake of his head.

"Do we seriously believe this crap?" Val asked.

"Try finding her pulse," Nick said with a shrug. "She's cold as a dead body and hasn't a heartbeat."

"What the fuck," Annie complained, "Since when the hell were vampires real? I've never heard of this sort of crap before, the hell?"

"You're gonna be hearing a lot more, Denny's crew is gonna proper fuck you up," the vampire girl on the ground declared.

"Denny? What in the fuck is a 'Denny', it sounds like an American imitation chip shop," said Nick.

"How about this," Fiona cut in. "How about you, dead girl, tell us where to be finding this Denny for a wee chat, and I don't keep shooting you right in the twat."

"Go fuck yourself," the vampire girl snapped, and Fiona shot her for the third time. "AAAGH! Stop it you shitcunt," and the pistol roared a fourth time, "Go to fuck, I'm not telling anyone," and a fifth bullet went, "A goddamn thing, oh God stop doing that," and bullet six fired.

Fiona popped the revolver's cylinder open - this didn't go quite how Alice had expected, the barrel and cylinder folded forwards as a unit instead of just the cylinder coming out sideways, and the gun spat the six empty cases out - and started reloading it.

"I've a lot of ammunition on me," she said. "I can keep this up until sunrise if you're wanting."

She closed the gun on the six freshly-loaded rounds, lowered the barrel to point at the vampiress's very sensitive parts again, and thumbed the hammer back.

"Nah, fuck this, we'll just leave her up on the top of the old control tower with a rope to chew on and see if she feels more talkative this time tomorrow," Annie suddenly said, putting a hand on Fiona's shoulder. This made the vampiress actually look frightened for the first time.

"NO! You can't leave me for sunrise, you just can't!"

"Well you'd better start talking then," Annie said with a shrug. "Cause if you're no telling us what we want to hear it's suntans for everyone. Now, who are you?"

"… my name's Candice," the vampire said.

"That's sounding American too," Nick remarked.

"Who are you working for?" Annie asked.

"His name's Denny, Denny the Priest."

"And why are you working for some numpty with a name like whatever the Yanks are using for a chip shop?" Annie asked; Nick guffawed.

"Well he vampired me, didn't he?" said Candice in this sort of the-hell-do-you-think tone.

"Oh aye, and where'd we be finding this bloke?" asked Annie.

"You know where the road along the north side of the River Ness turns uphill towards Dalneigh? There's that street turning right there that heads straight up towards Raigmore, look for the third house on the left, the one with a blue door and the body of one of those old lorry-mounted self-propelled pillboxes in the garden."

"Oh aye, and how many of his mates are we going to be finding there?" Mackie asked.

"I dunno do I, twenty? Maybe thirty?"

"Sounds manageable. Let's have a wee word with this twat," said Nick. "Knock on the bloody door and say we're needing a chat."

"Sounds like a plan, aye," Annie said with a nod. "Let's go."

"Eh, what about her?" Mackie asked, angling a thumb at the vampiress. "What, shove her back in the ute?"

A sadistic smile appeared on Annie Kelly's face, and she reached through the hole in her pickup's bonnet to persuade the engine to start.

"Nah," she said. "Let's find out why the bitch is so feart of greeting the rising dawn," and Fiona started laughing.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The door of the named house did not, as it happened, open in reaction to Mackie knocking. Instead, someone pulled the letter flap up and peered through, eyeballing the group outside the door. Everyone bar Alice was armed - Nick had retrieved his sword from his van, and the rest of them had their guns handy.

"Who in the fuck are you?" Whoever the someone was, they were presumably male if the gravelly smoke-roughened voice was anything to go by.

"We're needing a word with this Denny twat," Mackie declared.

The voice the other side of the door said, "Fuck off, we don't want fucking door-to-door salesmen, sorry, pimps and their sluts, in here you fucking fuck, go and fuck yourself,"

"Myself was saying," and Mackie kicked the door. He kicked the door so hard it came clean off of its hinges, collected the owner of the voice on the way past, and collided with a horrible crunch with the door at the other side of the porch, "We're needing a word with this Denny twat."

He gave the porch inside door a matching kick, pancaking the owner of the voice between two doors in the house's hallway. The insides of the place - what of it was visible from where Alice was standing - were utterly filthy, it visibly hadn't been cleaned in years and there was a sea of trodden-in junk mail spewed all over the porch.

"Denny," said Nick, striding in behind Mackie. "I'm still saying it's sounding like an American imitation chip-shop." The door crunched beneath their feet.

A veritable horde of the greaser types came boiling out of under the stairs brandishing a mixture of knives, a couple of swords, random blunt instruments, and two with guns - Mackie concentrated on that last, blowing the first one's face off before hitting the second centre chest with a second shotgun blast half a heartbeat later, then Nick was crashing into the mob like a whirling dervish with the best part of four feet of semi-sharp steel.

Val and Annie waded in behind the boys, Mackie's shotgun and Annie's revolver barking off near-continuous streams of gunfire with the only pauses being the two heartbeats it took either one of them to reload; Alice hesitantly followed them in as they stood at the bottom of the house's stairs and utterly destroyed anything that attempted to charge them.

The pile of doors bust apart just as Alice was walking over them - she caught a momentary glimpse of a cloud of wooden splinters before a snarling, fang-faced, psychotic-looking, six-foot-something greaser type had grabbed her by the throat and then Fiona was suddenly there out of absolutely nowhere with a long leaf-shaped knife in her hand - she slammed it into the centre of the vampire's chest, and he went off like a firecracker in a sack of wet cement.

"You alright?" she asked Alice.

"I th-think so," Alice said.

"Well that'll be where they were coming up from, looks like this place is having a basement," said a very muddy Mackie, peering under the stairs.

"Hold up, we'd better be checking the rest of the place," an even muddier Nick told him, heading for the stairs; he noticed Alice too was splattered in mud that used to be a vampire as he passed. "You alright?"

"Yes, I will be," Alice told him, and he appeared to take it at face value, heading on up the stairs.

Several crashes, bangs, a gunshot, and a couple of suddenly-cut-off screams later, he came trooping back down with even more mud on him and headed through to the living room; a moment later he came back through the kitchen nodding to himself.

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"Well if there's anyone else in here they're in this basement," he said.

"Aye, let's get on with it," Mackie agreed, and went stomping down the very steep jury-rigged-looking staircase that went down where there would more normally be a cupboard under the stairs.

He started making to kick the door at the bottom in, then paused, visibly thinking very fast; he came stomping back up, went into the kitchen, bodily picked the (filthy, derelict-looking) washing machine up, ripped it out of the wall, and went and hurled it from still standing on the ground floor level down through the door at the bottom of the understair set of stairs with a cry of, "Knock knock, wankers!"

It went crashing through the door before coming to halt with a massive crash and a flattened sort of a scream, and Mackie shrugged and went and had a peer through the door; the others followed him as he let out an impressed-sounding whistle and carried on, shotgun repeatedly barking.

Inside was a much larger and much more open space than any of them had expected - it was visibly hand-dug and shored up with scrap timber and what looked to be old telegraph poles, but it was a good two storeys deep and had a footprint not all that much smaller than the house.

There were also several dozen more of the vampires skulking around, one of whom appeared to have recently been pancaked by a washing machine and several of whom - most of whom Mackie had riddled with buckshot on the way in the door - had been holding firearms.

"Oh damn that's some fair old excavation," Annie shouted over the salvoes of gunfire.

"Aye. GERONIMO!" Nick declared, and hurled himself off of the steps.

"Och for fuck sake, he was just jumping right in," Mackie complained, and followed him. Mud and clothing abruptly containing nothing but mud went everywhere.

"What the hell is going on here, I'm trying," a man in a stereotypical vicar outfit started, emerging from a side room as the splatter settled and the others came trooping down the stairs.

"And you," Nick declared, running the unfortunate vicar-looking man down and pinning him to the ground with a Claymore through the stomach, "Will be this bastard with a name like an American imitation chip-shop then, won't you."

"Denny the Priest, I presume?" Annie clarified, sauntering over to join Nick while Mackie went and stuck his head into the side room. "Your mates have been bothering us, thought we'd pop over and tell you," but she cut off as Mackie started yelling furiously in Russian.

There was a crash, and the furious young man came raging back out of the side room, half-carrying another young man who looked like he'd been hit by a bus, and Alice immediately recognised him as her coursemate Andy Macbride right about the same time the first aid training she'd received the previous year came back to her and she started moving.

"The fuck is this," Mackie roared, reverting to English and very suddenly sounding very Russian indeed. "I've never seen a human being in a fucking dog cage before and that's a fucking bite he's bleeding from and what in the holy mother of fuck do you bastards think you're doing!"

"The bastard drank my damn blood," said Andy.

"Nick," said Alice, arriving at Andy's side. "Is there a first aid kit in your van?"

"What? Oh, aye, that there is, Dad insists on it,"

"Well someone get it right now." Alice told him. He caught her expression and instantly split it for the van.

The vampire skewered to the floor started laughing and made to try to pull the sword out.

"Oh you stupid bastard," he said as Fiona put her hand on the sword's hilt and held it there, "You people are food. Fuck you, woman! I'll bite your damn neck out for you,"

"Vampires. Really vampires," Annie said, sounding a bit like she was the one who'd been beat half to death and shoved in a dog cage.

"No shit Sherlock," the vampire skewered to the floor hooted. "What do I look like, the King of the Banana People?"

"I've heard enough. Val - take the bastard's head off. The dead should stay dead."

-/-/-/-/-/-

"You kent about that vampires stuff yourself," said Mackie Romanov the very moment the others were out of earshot, causing Fiona to turn round as she realised he'd followed her. They'd been almost silent for the entire ride back to the college digs - Andy had just been taken into Annie and Val's room for them to finish patching him up, he'd taken quite a beating and had somewhat less blood in him than he should, and Fiona had immediately split from the group and headed for her room to clean her guns and change into something that wasn't splattered with vampire sludge.

Mackie Romanov was not by any means a small man: he stood over six foot six tall with a broad-shouldered barrel-chested frame to go with it. As a result of that and the way he usually stomped around most people - Fiona included - assumed at first glance he could not move quietly, but when he wanted to he could be very quiet indeed, and thus he'd successfully crept up behind her.

Fiona was silent for several very tense moments, then finally nodded.

"Aye, that I did," she said.

"And you were guessing what ourselves were on about the moment Annie was starting talking about idiot hunting, weren't you,"

"… Myself and a couple of friends were down at Gunnies when Nick was using that crowbar for a sword," Fiona admitted."We were seeing the entire thing."

"Why the bloody hell were you no warning us then?" asked Mackie.

"Aye and you'd absolutely have been believing myself then when I was saying 'well you've been fighting with a bunch of bloody vampires' now, wouldnae you," Fiona said, her voice oozing sarcasm, and that gave him pause.

"Okay, aye, I was no being fair," he said. "Christ. Vampires. What a fucking night… Fiona, what are you yourself knowing about vampires?"

"Well sunlight makes a vampire go up like a blowtorch but it's no anything to do with ultraviolet light, they think people are food, that turning into dust thing you see in the penny dreadfuls is missing out the part that seventy percent of a human body is water and their clothes and the likes of shite in their pockets are certainly no collapsing along with them, and killing them is a matter of, taking their heads off good, burning good, putting something - anything, no just wood - clean through their heart good, bullets will knock them down but won't keep them down unless you do something like blowing one's head proper off or shoot them in the heart with so much bullet their heart basically goes away, at which point you've probably shot everything behind the vampire for a hundred feet too, and ignore any shite about silver. Given enough blood they'll heal up good as new from anything that doesn't mud them, you can hang one for weeks or bury it 'alive' for a month and it'll be just fine after. Oh, and they most certainly do have reflections and most certainly do show on cameras and the likes, forget all that shite the penny dreadfuls were telling you, the only particular giveaway is that they're as warm as the corpses that they are. As far as being strong and fast goes, they're about as strong and fast as an extremely fit person - something like an unaugmented squaddie or a street thug with cheap boosters. They've also got an excellent sense of smell, nearly as good as a bloodhound, and their eyes and ears are much more sensitive than a person - if you can be getting hold of flashbangs that'll really be messing with a vampire. Did I mention they think people are food? That's the most important part."

"I think," Mackie said, "You should be telling the others all that," and that put a hesitant look on Fiona's face.

"Well I'm no sure about," she started, but he cut her off with a raised hand.

"That was no a request," he said.

"I am not," Fiona said, "Into being told what to do," and Mackie let out a short laugh.

"Could've fooled me, I ken exactly what website you were getting the 'necklace' off of, I ken you're into that same maiden-protector shite as Nick and Annie, are you thinking I'm daft?" he asked.

"... I find it rather hard to imagine Annabella Kelly playing meek and obedient for anyone or anything," Fiona said.

"Well myself am no just finding it 'rather hard' to be imagining Annie playing meek and obedient for anyone or anything, myself am finding it completely bloody impossible to imagine Annie playing meek and obedient for anyone or anything up to and including atom bombs, but on the other hand myself am kenning for a fact that herself'd have no objection to having a nice-looking lassie playing meek and obedient for her," Mackie said with a shrug.

"What, she's queer? I'd… no been expecting to hear that,"

"She's had more girlfriends than me and Nick and both Nick's brothers all put together," Mackie told her with a shrug. "So are you going to tell them what you were telling myself, or am I going to be frogmarching you in there and making you?"

"I'm going, I'm going, and just so you know, dickhead, having been someone's maiden doesn't mean liking being jumped out at and ordered around at the drop of a hat by some great numpty of a half-Russian crofter I barely bloody know."

Mackie shook his head. "Well in my defence it's no like I'd ever had a reason to be discussing it with someone who's actually into that shite from the end yourself's interested in - it's no my thing."

"Shame, you're no a bad-looking lad," Fiona said, and headed back to Annie and Val's room leaving Mackie caught flatfooted by the less-than-subtle implication.

"Och well," he finally said, shook it off, and followed her.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"So," said Nick Macbane, "What'll we be doing?"

The question was addressed to everyone currently in Annie and Val's dorm room - which ran to Alice and Mackie, Andy, Fiona who had just finished repeating what she'd told Mackie, Annie and Val, and of course himself.

Annie shook her head. "I'm thinking this is being a whole lot bigger than we are Nick, we should probably be having a word with the cops,"

Val cut her off with a loud rude noise. "The pigs? The pigs? Come off it, that's the worst idea I've heard in weeks,"

"Aye," said Mackie, "Just picture how that conversation'd go," and he switched over to a remarkable approximation of a plummy English accent. "Hello, Sir Kelly? Constable Plod speaking, we've found your daughter and she would appear to have had an episode," and dropped back into his own accent, "Or if it wasnae one of the coppers you ken, it'd be something like, 'Craig Dunain? This is the cops, you'd probably better be checking how many of your nutters have done a bunk, we just found one wandering about in the street'."

"Your average copper's going to be thinking you're off of your rocker if you're on about vampires, I bloody know I'd have been looking at you like you were daft just this morning," Nick agreed. "And on top of that even if they didnae turn round and section you apparently Inverness - and probably everywhere else - is bloody heaving with vampires and they're no exactly being all secretive about the whole being a bunch of bloody vampires thing and that makes me wonder if the fuzz are no intentionally turning a blind eye to this entire vampires thing."

"Police corruption, right," Val said with a nod. "It's not just common, it's fucking normal,"

"I wasnae finished," said Nick, "Now I've got nothing for or against that suspicion but until we know better I'm no thinking talking to any coppers about it is a plan."

"Okay, aye, those are good points… Shit, what the hell are we going to do?"

"I don't think we need to worry too much about sticking together when its light," said Alice.

"Well you've already found out for certain that you're no slouches at making the undead just plain old dead," said Andy.

"What, are you suggesting we should be taking up vampire hunting for a hobby?" Alice asked.

Andy gave her an odd look.

"Alice," he said, "Those fucking things were going to drink me to death, I don't just think it'd be a good idea to take up vampire hunting 'for a hobby', I'm more or less completely certain it is the single most important thing any of us in this room are ever likely to do with ourselves, and aye, Annie, I do know exactly who your dad is."

"He's no wrong," said Fiona, who was sitting beside him.

Annie looked at each of them in turn, starting with Andy and working her way round counterclockwise to finish with Fiona.

"Okay," she said. "Aye. Well that'd be making the next question… how?"

"Shoot them then take their fucking heads off with a big knife while they're laying around yelling a lot? It worked tonight," said Val, patting her kukri.

"Well how are we going to be telling that we're ventilating vampires and no those townies with the white face makeup?" Mackie asked.

"Goths," said Val.

"You what?"

"Those 'townies with the white face makeup'. They're goths."

"Well they're room temperature - the vampires, the vampires, no the goths! - so thermograph goggles or gunsights seem pretty obvious," Andy said. "Anyone know where to get that?"

"Not a problem, my dad's company makes those things for the military," Annie told him. "Andy, Alice, I'm no thinking you two are up for much fighting, you're no exactly Mackie-strong."

"Aye, those fuckers casually flattened me," Andy agreed. "What I can do is, you'll be needing a headquarters to work out of for your vampire hunts, and I'm no thinking using your daily-runner vehicles is a good idea. My mum runs a pub down by the harbour and it's where all the local hobbyists are drinking, you could be plotting another land war in our pub and everyone would be thinking it was part of a role-playing game. Not only that, we've got a back room we're just using to store a few boxes of spare parts for the beer machines, we can easily convert that into an armoury - keep any firearms the cops ken you have separate from the ones that you're using to riddle the undead with bullets - and there's sheds and a wee bit of a yard out the back for vehicles."

"I can drive," Alice said.

"What's the biggest vehicle you've been driving?" Nick asked her. "I've got a wee plan for, call it a bigger van."

"A small car, the one my driving instructor used," Alice told him.

"Okay, so I'll be needing something with power steering and a synchronised gearbox then, aye," Nick said with a nod. "I'll be off down to the scrappers to see what I can be digging up on the morrow, then - Dave Wade had a couple of smashed Albion Super Clyde tractor units in there last I kent and those are fitted with power steering and I should be able to piece together one working chassis out of the pair of them - the gearbox will be interesting, those things have crash boxes, but that's besides the point."

"Won't that be costing a few quid?" Val asked.

"Och, no, no, I do welding and cutting work on and off for Dave in exchange for parts off of the scrap heaps," Nick told her.

"Other thing we'll be needing is information," said Mackie, and everyone looked at Fiona.

"Well," she said, "There is someone I could suggest."

-/-/-/-/-/-

"So what's this 'Vrotch' bloke's story then and how do you ken him?" Nick asked as his van - into which the whole gang of them were crammed - rattled across the bridge over the River Ness on the road towards Muir of Ord.

"I've kent him for a while," Fiona said. "I was in a maiden-protector relationship with a lady from the south called Catherine Noble, this was when I was seventeen, and let's just say Vrotch took it on himself to make sure I wasn't being coerced into that - short version, it happens far too bloody often - and after that he was just someone I kent. He found me the night Catherine was killed - that was how I knew about vampires - and very nearly brought me back from the dead, I had a hell of a lot less blood in me than I should've. Long story short there's no an awful lot about the supernatural that Vrotch doesnae ken, and if there's anyone who'll be able to be identifying vampire nests?"

"What kind of a name is 'Vrotch Vosk' anyway?" asked Andy.

"One someone very strange was making up for himself," said Fiona.

"So what's his story?" Nick pressed.

"Well you can be asking him yourself, that's where he's biding," Fiona told him, pointing at the entrance to a run-down caravan park jammed in the quadrant of waste ground between South Kessock, the Caledonian Canal, and the tracks of the railway towards the west and the north. Nick grunted in surprise, and turned the van into the caravan park.

There were a dozen battered residential caravans, many with rickety wooden lean-to porches, covered decks, and/or extensions, with twenty-odd assorted old cars and vans of every shape and size, everything from a rusted-out van up on blocks with its wheels missing to a giant battleship grey estate car sort of an affair over half the length of which was bonnet, in conditions ranging from beat-up to horribly mangled, parked between and around them along with two dozen dilapidated motorbikes, with the whole scene illuminated by strings of fairy lights along the caravans' eaves, a fire burning in an old 40-gallon drum, and a single woebegone streetlight sitting at a drunken angle beside the gate - as for the gate it had very visibly been driven through at some point in time and had, instead of being repaired, been propped up out of the way on its gate posts and left.

A group of people and muttley-dogs, all of them just as run-down and scruffy as their surroundings but looking utterly contented for all that, were clustered on deck chairs on and around one of the covered decks, drinking beer and passing joints and one of them playing a lively tune on an acoustic guitar - the guitar was, unlike everything else, beautifully kept and perfectly clean, its polish catching the light from the oil-drum brazier. They glanced up as the van entered the site, saw that it wasn't the police, and went back to what they'd been doing, showing no further interest in the van as Fiona directed Nick towards the caravan right at the back, nearest to the canal and the railway.

"That's himself's place," she said, and exited the van as soon as it was stopped with an air of some trepidation; she went and knocked at the door, adding, "Dinnae stand in front of the door," then stepped smartly back and to one side.

There was a pause lasting about ten seconds during which the others had time to notice an oddity - unlike all the other caravans where you could see light through their curtains and the translucent panels of their doors, this one didn't have any light at all showing through its windows - then there came a sound roughly like a stampeding elephant from inside the caravan, and the door exploded open on the receiving end of a careening tangle of gangly limbs and dreadlocks with a tenor-toned scream of, "SPULK A FURKING BLURT?!?"

"Hello Vrotch," said Fiona, and the flailing of arms and legs abruptly ceased; now that he wasn't whirling like a dervish it was possible to tell that the owner of limbs, hair, and scream was a very tall, almost comically skinny and knobbly-jointed, man clad in a raggy shirt and jeans with the knees out - his feet were bare - and his hair wasn't dreadlocks after all, instead being this huge mass of impossibly curly frizzy black stuff, so much of it about all you could make out of his face was his nose and, somewhere between beard and moustache, his teeth.

"Fiona," he said, in a much more normal and quite serious tone - he had one of those vaguely Midlands English accents that are pretty much impossible to put an actual location to. Several young women - some of whom it would be entirely fair to call girls, one of whom should probably be thought of as a little girl - appeared at the door behind Vrotch, mostly peering cautiously round the doorframe. "I thought it was entirely clear- hey," and his attention was abruptly distracted onto Annie, who he pointed at, "I know you, you were at Reg Bethnal's funeral when you were little but you're still recognisably the same person - hey," and he pointed at Mackie, "Same goes for you, and… Bloke whose mum runs the Harbourmaster's? What are you doing with, hang on, that's a vampire bite?"

"Reg Bethnal's funeral? You were at Reg Bethnal's funeral?" Annie asked.

"Aye, I was thinking he was looking familiar from somewhere," said Nick.

"Wait, you were there too?" Vrotch asked.

"Aye," Nick said with a nod. "That I was - I was about half of the height and without the beard, and no wearing the bike jacket - it's been nearly ten years."

"Huh, weird… Just out of interest what were you doing at Reg Bethnal's funeral anyway?"

"My dad's Joe Kelly," Annie told him, and he snapped his fingers.

"So of course he had his family at his partner's funeral, gotcha, and you two are her mates so you were along for morale support, gotcha. So basically what's with the vampire bite, bloke whose mum runs the Harbourmaster's, and what in the name of Jesus and dead puppies are you doing hanging around with her?" and he pointed at Fiona.

"Vrotch," Fiona started.

"I wasn't talking to you," Vrotch bluntly informed her. "You said some things that are very hard to unsay and did some things that only just didn't become permanent and the only thing I'm interested in hearing out of your pie-hole is an apology and it'd better be a bloody spectacular one if you want it to stick. Bloke whose mum runs the Harbourmaster's?"

"Where do you seriously think I got a vampire bite?" Andy asked. "I nearly wound up a bloodsucker's breakfast. And the name's 'Andy', not 'bloke whose mum runs the Harbourmaster's'."

"Give me a chance man, I've always been terrible at names. What's happening."

"Well we were finding Andy half-dead in the basement of a walking corpse calling himself 'Denny the Priest' earlier this evening," said Annie. "We had a bit of a council of war just a few minutes ago, and basically it seems like nobody's doing anything about this vampires business. So we decided to start, and she was saying you might be able to help us finding vampires."

"Oh, right," Vrotch said. "Uh, look, something you should know about her," and he pointed at Fiona. "She's involved in some really, really, really bad shit, she got mixed up in it deliberately, when I tried to warn her what she was getting involved in she said the sort of thing that doesn't un-say very easily at all, there was a fight, some friends of mine got hurt, badly, and basically I guess what I'm saying is, like don't take this personally but, so long as you're friends with her," and again he pointed at Fiona, "I don't want to have anything to do with you until she's done some really exceptional un-saying. Sorry."

He turned round and walked back into the caravan; one of the several girls, specifically the pretty blonde teenager-but-only-just whom Alice couldn't help but notice had not blinked once throughout the entire conversation, stepped fully into the doorway.

"You should leave," she said, and shut the door in their faces.

"Well," said Fiona. "Fuck."

"Okay," Annie said, "What the hell just happened?"

"What happened," Fiona said, sounding like it was being dragged out of her, "Is that Vrotch turns out not to be anything like as forgiving as… oh fuck sake, why does life have to be so bloody complicated? We'd better get out of here, I don't think I'm going to be welcome in this corner of the world any time soon."

"So I guess that's that for getting himself to be telling us where to be finding any fucking vampires then," said Nick.

"Aye, looks like it," Fiona said. "Fuck. Och, sorry I wasted your time."

"What the hell did you do to him?" Val asked as they climbed back into the van.

"That's, well, that's a very personal question but I guess I owe yourselves that much. Catherine Noble was… she was everything to me, and I guess what I'm saying is I wanted revenge on the walking corpses that killed her, and particularly the one that was walking around wearing her face. Vrotch wasn't going to help - he couldn't fight his way out of a wet paper bag - so I, I may have found someone who would help, only that someone turned out to be one of Vrotch's enemies, and when Vrotch tried to tell me I was making a mistake getting caught up with that one, and when all is said and done he wasn't wrong, I said some, some pretty strong stuff, and, well, yeah, some punches got thrown and guns got brought into it, and, well, honestly that was my fault, and nobody got fatally shot but the operative there is 'fatally'. That was the year before last and this is the first time we've spoken since. I suppose he's got a point - how the hell do you apologise for something like that? I won't be having a chance of getting un-involved with herself any time soon."

"Maybe we should head for our pub," said Andy. Fiona nodded, visibly grateful for the offer of a change of subject, and Nick fired the van - and as he turned it and drove back out the gates, Alice realised that the group round the guitar at one of the other caravans were putting guns away.

"Well," said Annie Kelly, "Now that little expedition's out of the way, new first things first until we… hey Fiona, this 'enemy of' that guy, would they maybe,"

Fiona let out a dull laugh. "Not a chance, I'm afraid. Grandmother's… particular about who she will and will not associate with - your parents are both English, Nick's parents are lowlanders, Mackie's half-Russian,"

"One-eighth." Mackie said.

"What?"

"Myself's one-eighth Russian. My great-grandma was Russian, we're no totally sure where Granda's biological father was from but Nan reckoned he sounded like he was from Siberia and that'd be about all she's ever been saying about that,"

"That's beside the point, you're Russian enough to make no difference. Val, you're part-Ghurka and part-English aren't you? And last but not least Alice, you're from London and anyone with ears can hear it. Not to put too fine a point on it, Grandmother would consider the whole lot of you enemies because of that."

"Ah," said Nick. "One of them, aye," and Alice realised that nobody else in the vehicle was even surprised by what Fiona had just said.

"So I guess we're down to driving around with infra-red goggles looking for people wandering around being room-temperature," said Val. "Fuck, this isn't going to be easy, is it."

"What the hell ever is?" Andy asked, and Fiona let out a flat humourless bark of laughter.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The Harbourmaster's, or to give it its full name The Harbourmaster's Arms, turned out to be almost directly across the mouth of the river from Vrotch's caravan park, in the old stone-built house between the bridge where the railway heading north crossed the river and the similar house on the corner of Shore Street and Innes Street. The doors were standing open to let in the warm summer night, and the strains of rock music could be heard from within; Andy headed straight in the door as soon as they'd piled out of the van, yelling, "Mum! Mum, that's me back,"

The place was swarming with an eclectic mixture of what would where Alice had come from be called geeks, goths, moshers, metalheads, rock kids, and for something completely different crusty old seamen; a wargame involving a lot of brightly-coloured toy soldiers was in progress on the pool table, there were at least three groups of roleplayers packed round booth tables, and there were a group round one table painting miniatures, while a line of weatherbeaten men with cob pipes and Merchant Navy hats occupied the bar stools - similar men were dotted round the pub in little groups, in one case making amused observations about the flow of the wargame at the pool table. The walls and ceiling were lined with an assortment of nautical memorabilia - old glass fishing floats, empty antique rum bottles, stuffed and mounted fish, paintings and photos of ships, a couple of brass ship's bells, assorted cutlasses, another bizarre-looking flintlock pistol with the splayed barrels much like the one Alice had seen in Grace Mitchell's living room - and a locked display case full of beautifully-painted model figures, forming the sort of contrast that you couldn't help but smile at.

"Andrew Malcolm Macbride!" the woman behind the bar - one of those very large (both in height and in girth) women with a voice that rattled the rafters, clad in a suitably-proportioned Edwardian-looking black dress and shawl - roared. "Where the hell have you - Andy, what's happened, you look like you've been hit by a bus!"

"We'd better talk about that somewhere quieter, Mum," Andy declared as he, followed by the others, arrived at the bar. "These are some friends of mine - saved my life in fact, we have stuff we really need to discuss and you really need to hear about."

The woman, whom Alice was now mentally tagging 'Andy's Mum', frowned and turned to the line of old sailors.

"Murdo," she said, adding another to Alice's growing list of faces she though of as 'the Murdos'; she assigned him as Murdo Inverness, "Do us a favour and mind the bar - Andy, will you be wanting Dad to be hearing this?" and in response to that one of the old boys - a particularly weatherbeaten specimen even amongst the company at the bar, with an enormous hoary white beard and a sea-captain's peaked hat - rose to his feet with a frown.

"Grandpa, I hadn't realised the Diamond was in port," Andy declared with a delighted smile, throwing his arms open to give the old boy a huge man-hug replete with lots of backslapping. "Ow ow ow, mind the shoulders, got bruises back there,"

"Aye lad," the old man said, a similar smile beneath his beard, "We just put in only a few hours ago, I was straight over here as soon as we'd settled for the trip. So who're these friends who were saving my favourite grandson's life then?"

"I'm your only grandson," Andy pointed out, in the tones of a conversation that's been had many times before.

"Well all that's saying is it's obvious who my favourite grandson'll be," the old man said, quite unconcerned and making it very apparent that he'd just repeated his very favourite 'dad joke'. He turned to the others. "Evening lads and lasses, Captain Keith Thompson, the skipper of the Diamond, and this is my daughter, Mary Macbride - you already ken her lad. I gather that we're owing yourselves a bit of a favour then,"

"A pleasure," Annie said, exchanging handshakes with him. "I'm Annie Kelly. This is Val Adamson; Nick Macbane; Mackie Romanov; Fiona Macleod; and Alice Liddell."

The Captain raised his eyebrows at that, while Andy's mum stifled a bark of laughter.

"Well now," said the Captain, "I must say I have to wonder if your parents liked Lewis Carrol too much, or had never heard of the man - whichever way they were no doing you any favours were they. Well, come on through to Mary's back room, I understand that there's an important conversation to be had."

"Aye, you could say that," said Andy with a nod, directing the others through a door between the bar and the first seating booth. This led to a cramped roughly T-shaped passageway, with three doors (or doorways) off the head of the T - one dead ahead as you entered the bottom of the leg of the T, the other two of course off of the branches. The right-hand one led down a steep and strangely fittingly nautical-looking flight of steps to what was clearly the beer cellar, from the lay of the land it had the pub's toilets above it while the other - to which Andy headed - extended past a sharply-sloped set of steps going up then opened into a room behind the bar proper; this contained a mixture of, as Andy had said, a stack of cardboard boxes and what appeared to be spare (or retired) pub seating and tables, to which Andy's mum showed everyone to sit.

Once they were seated, Captain Thompson asked, "So what's this about, then?"

"Mum," Andy said, "You've been running a dockyard pub for twenty-seven years - Grandpa, you've worked at sea since before the second world war. Surely in that time you've seen some… odd things," and his grandfather stilled and a shadow came over his eyes.

"You could be saying that, Andy," he said, glancing at his daughter.

"Andy… what have you run into?" Andy's mother asked.

By way of an answer, Andy pulled his shirt collar to one side, revealing the bite mark - this Alice had, at Annie's urgings, sprayed a pinkish substance - effectively a spray-on dressing - called 'syn-skin' onto, leaving it looking almost like scars but too inflamed around it for that.

Mary stifled a gasp and Captain Thompson drew in a hissing inbreath.

"I'd no realised that the living dead had reached these shores," he said.

"Dad, is that a…?"

"Aye, Mary - what we're looking at is a vampire bite," the Captain said. "I've had a very similar scar on my left shoulder since the autumn of 1944, a crewmate of mine was killed by a bloodsucker just after the end of the war in Europe - he managed to stagger back to the ship, told us what'd happened, but died the following day - he rose as a vampire himself, without any apparent memory of his life and speaking only the Polish, two days later and nearly killed four of us before the bosun stabbed the poor devil through the heart with a marlin spike... No, what most fail to realise is that the book that made Bram Stoker famous was based on a true story, told to the man himself by the poor soul who went down in the historic record as Renfield, if… elaborated upon, as Stoker thought that he was listening to some creatively insane babbling."

Fiona had been nodding along, and added, "Essentially from Stoker's work you can disregard any religious imagery, the parts about gravedirt, and anything about returning to coffins,"

"That and I suppose turning into foul mud when killed wasn't dramatic enough for him," the Captain said. "So, vampires had Andy, then. How do yourselves come into it?"

"The bunch of ticks who had him picked a fight with us," Val told him, causing him to snort at the 'ticks' part, "And bit of more than they could chew in the process - my dad was a Ghurka and his mates made bloody sure I knew how to use his kukri after he was murdered, Annie's some sort of wicked quick gunslinger, and Mackie and Nick and Fiona there are all boosted and Fiona's nearly as fast a gun as Annie. We, uh, basically tortured where their hideout was out of one we managed to capture, paid them a visit planning on telling their boss to fuck himself, found out they weren't of a mind to be told, and found Andy in the basement beat the shit out of and drank half to death."

"And you?" the Captain asked Alice.

"I was just bumbling along behind my friends," Alice said, abruptly realising that they were indeed her friends, "And getting my life saved by Fiona. I'm not exactly much of a fighter."

"There's no shame in that, lass," the Captain told her with a nod, and it was clear to all that he meant every word of it.

"Anyway Annie was talking about intentionally going out trying to find vampires to, well, to mud - huh, that's the first time I can think of using 'mud' as a verb," Andy took up the flow. "And the first thing that crossed my mind is they're going to need a home-base and the college digs aren't suitable - oh, yeah, they're all in the college, in fact Alice and Fiona are studying archaeology too - and I thought this," and he pointed at the floor, "Would be spot on."

Everyone looked at Mary.

"How many of your friends know about vampires?" she asked the Captain.

"Everyone who was aboard Empire Bairn that night - you ken Malcolm Campbell and Billy Macleod, there's another four men still alive though the bosun's now biding on Mars. Four men from Fort William who had the bad luck to find a walking corpse in their cargo in '43, and a Polish gentleman by the name of Pilecki and a dozen friends of his, who between them were helping us to get a little payback for what happened to poor Michael. I'd say there were fifteen men alive today who I ken are aware of this, though the youngest is in his seventies. That said, there's not a sailor of more than a few years experience who wouldn't believe it if you told him - many things happen at sea. Many things."

"Like what?" Alice asked. "I know I wouldn't believe it if,"

"Lass," said the Captain, "You're young - I'd warrant you're not into your twenties yet, how old are you?"

"Eighteen as of this April just past."

"Aye," said the Captain with a nod. "Well by the time I was your age I'd been working at sea for four years aboard a ship haunted by a man who'd died during the building of her, there wasn't a soul aboard who hadn't seen our ghost within a week of first coming aboard her, and had already seen two sea-serpents and four ghost ships, nearly been eaten by a tree, and lost a shipmate to a vampire in Gdansk - I was six months older than you yourself the night that my ship was almost taken by the kraken. No, lass, there are very few things that I would not believe, and with time you'll likely find that the same goes for a great many people of my sort of age."

"You yourself kent about vampires and all," Fiona said, directly addressing Mary.

"No, actually, I did not, but straight off of the top of my head I know for a fact six of my regulars are selkies and another starts lighting his fags by summoning a flame from his fingertip once he's three sheets to the wind, I've seen four different kelpies in and around this end of the Firth, I used to ken an old lady from the northwest who I can tell you for absolute certain was a witch and a damned powerful one too, and I've seen wolf-men late in the evening up near to Mallaig a time or two. And just between you and me there comes a time when a body has to start wondering just what else that's not supposed to happen does happen."

"And vampires are no much of a stretch, aye," Fiona said with a nod.

"How do you kill them?" Mary asked. "I keep a self-loading shotgun full of silver shillings under the bar, will that be doing the job?"

"Guns only do it if you hit them with so much bullet their head falls off or their heart goes away, but on the other hand a shotgun blast to the nadgers will put a vampire flat on the floor long enough that it's easy enough to be taking the bastard's head off with a big knife while it's still laying around and yelling a lot," Nick told her.

"Stab through the heart, behead, suntan, or burn," Fiona said. "Any one of those will do the job, anything else will just keep it still for a while, you can hang a vampire by the neck for weeks and it'll be on its feet and biting in a matter of minutes once you're cutting it down. You can tell it's a vampire because it looks human and no like a dead body either but it's no got any body heat and is still walking about - Sea People are cold too but you'd bloody know one of those fish-lipped bastards at first glance, they really don't look human for all that they're arranged like us, and the varied other kinds of living dead all look dead - oh, by the way, the sort of zombie that's dangerous just makes groaning and gurgling noises, if it looks dead and talks it's a lich and they're no any bother. Silver shillings instead of buckshot is no a bad idea at all - it'll no do anything more to a vampire than the buck would but there's a few things out there it'll savage, straight off of the bat if you let a lich have it with that he'll be needing his body rebuilt."

"That's it, I'm getting a thermographic security camera," said Mary with a shake of her head.

"Aye, that's no a bad idea, you'll be wanting it fitted with a screen under the bar, aye?" said Annie.

"That'd make sense, aye," Mary said with a nod. "Damn it, I didnae think I'd be shopping for security equipment again this soon,"

"Darling daughter of absurdly rich owner of enormous high-tech manufacturing business with fingers in all of the pie?" Annie pointed out, indicating herself. "Don't worry about it, I'll be going up to Dad's company depot over by the flying field tomorrow morning to chase up thermograph goggles, I'll grab a closed-circuit thermo camera for you while I'm at it. Consider it a down payment on the use of your back room."

-/- End: Chapter 2-/-

Next - As chapter 3 begins, the gang's chasing around with thermograph equipment leads to another just flat weird discovery - and Alice gets in way over her head...