Don’t even think about it, he repeated to himself.

Allen looked along the line of jeeps parked safely behind the row of Operators who had been tasked with staying back to protect their Directors. His counterparts watched silently, their eyes fixed forward; they looked like the conductors of an orchestra. The need to do something surged relentlessly inside him, and he grimaced behind his visor at the dilemma; if he joined the battle and was killed, the consequences for his Operators could be dire. But if he stood by while they fought for their lives, how would he ever be able to face them again?

Then, in the jeep to his right, Aleksandr Ovechkin moved.

The SPC Director drew his Daybreaker, swung himself down to the ground, and strode towards the chaos, his greatcoat billowing out behind him. Allen watched him for a long moment, then unholstered his T-Bone and went after his friend.

He caught up as Ovechkin cut left round a pile of burnt wood that looked like it had once been a street trader’s stall. The Russian spun round, his eyes flaring, then smiled.

“You too?” he grunted.

“Yeah,” said Allen, and smiled back at him. “Me too.”

They walked forward side by side, their weapons drawn and raised. The battle spread out before them, the noise increasing with each step they took, but Allen was breathing easily. His body and mind were at peace now that he had decided to involve himself, even though that decision had dramatically increased the likelihood that he would not live to see another dawn.

So be it, he thought, as his boots crunched across the black landscape. If this is the end, then so damn well be it.

“Wait!”

The voice came from behind them, and both Directors turned to see who it belonged to. General Tán was running towards them, holding a weapon that Allen didn’t recognise. The PBS6 Director stopped in front of them, and gave them a tight smile.

“Three is better than two,” he said. “Don’t you agree?”

Larissa tumbled towards a narrow alley hung with washing lines and full of rubbish bins, managed to rotate herself in the air as the cobblestones rushed up towards her, and hit the ground on her back with a thud.

The impact sent pain coursing through her; heat exploded into her eyes, and a thick growl rose from her throat as she got to her feet and looked around. The alleyway was tight and winding, one of the hidden arteries that had served the people who had actually lived and worked in the city, as opposed to the tourists they relied on. There was no sign of her squad mates, or of the vampires who had ambushed them from above.

Stupid, she thought. Should have seen that coming.

They had assumed that Dracula would have kept a cadre of vampires within the city to protect him, but they had been expecting them to rise from the streets below, rather than attack them from above. Now they were scattered throughout the city, their mission in tatters; they needed to regroup, and do so very, very quickly.

“Strike team,” she said into her helmet’s microphone. “Come in.”

Silence.

“Come in, strike team. Come in.”

Nothing.

Larissa strode along the alley, preparing to leap back into the air and get a better vantage point from which to search for her squad mates, then stopped. From the other side of a tall stone wall, she could hear noise: footsteps, heavy breathing, low growls.

Vampires.

She drew her stake from her belt and floated silently up the face of the wall. She hovered as she reached the top, forcing the glowing red out of her eyes, and peered down into the cobbled street on the other side. Two vampires were approaching the doorway of a toyshop, in which was lying the unconscious form of Frankenstein; their eyes were blazing, and the smiles on their faces were hungry.

She settled herself silently on top of the wall, drew her T-Bone, sighted down its long barrel, and pulled the trigger. The bang of exploding gas was deafeningly loud in the quiet streets; the vampires jumped, and whirled towards her. As a result, the stake that would have pierced the rightmost vampire’s heart ripped through his stomach, punching a hole the size of a grapefruit and spilling the man’s guts on to the cobblestones. For a second he only stared at her, his eyes bulging in their sockets, then he threw back his head and screamed.

Larissa was already moving, dropping the T-Bone and swooping down from the wall. She drove the second vampire against the wall, drew her stake, and brought it up in a short, hard jab. She leapt back as the man burst, spraying the wall with dripping crimson, and darted across to the disembowelled vampire; he was standing motionless in the middle of the street, staring down at a steaming pile of his own innards. She shoved the stake through his back, and the look on his face as he exploded suggested that ending him had been a kindness. The T-Bone’s metal wire fell to the bloody ground as she crossed to the unconscious figure in the shop doorway and crouched beside him.

“Colonel,” she said, raising her voice as far as she dared. “Colonel.”

Frankenstein stirred, but didn’t open his eyes. Larissa checked him, searching for severe injury, and found none; there was a lump the size of an egg above his left eye, but his chest was rising and falling steadily, and his limbs were straight and unbroken, at least as far as she could tell.

“Colonel Frankenstein,” she hissed. “Wake up, sir.”

No response.

She swore under her breath, and looked through the window of the toyshop. Inside the door stood a fridge full of bottles of water and cans of Coke; the power was off, but that made no difference for what she had in mind.

Larissa stood up and pushed open the door; it was locked, but it took only a fraction of her supernatural strength to pop it out of its frame. She grabbed two bottles of water from the fridge, unscrewed the first, and splashed half of it into Frankenstein’s face. His eyes flew open and he sat up, coughing and spluttering and wiping water from his skin.

“What the hell are you playing at?” he growled.

“Saving your life,” said Larissa, and gestured at the two smears of blood that had been living, breathing vampires thirty seconds earlier. “You’re welcome.”

Amid the charred ruins of Carcassonne, at the heart of the raging battle, Qiang wound his T-Bone back in and ran for cover.

The battle was completely unprecedented, both in its scale and ferocity. Thousands and thousands of Operators and vampires were raging across a space more than a mile wide and half a mile deep as a constant rattle of gunfire and a pall of grey smoke filled the air.

The Chinese Operator was not a vampire – PROMETHEUS had been suspended before his name had been called – but he was causing as much damage to Dracula’s army as any of his turned colleagues; he had destroyed nine in the first five minutes, his T-Bone and MP7 working in perfect harmony, his situational awareness almost supernatural in itself. A vampire loomed in front of him, and he shot him in the heart with his T-Bone without so much as a second thought; the man exploded with a confused look on his face, and as the stake wound back in again, Qiang checked his position and considered his options.

They could keep killing vampires one at a time, but there were no guarantees they could outlast Dracula’s followers. The ultimate result of the battle lay in the hands of Jamie and Angela and the rest of the strike team, but that didn’t mean there was nothing that could be done on the ground to help tip the odds in their favour. The vampire army was a seething mass, seemingly obeying no set plan or implementing any identifiable strategy, but as Qiang surveyed the battlefield, it was clear that there was a hierarchy at work; behind the hacking and slashing lines of men and women, above the drawbridge that controlled ground access to the walled city, a small group of vampires surrounded a single man.