“Don’t shoot,” said Valentin, a broad smile on his pale face, and threw the decapitated body of the vampire to the ground beside its head.

Jamie lowered the T-Bone. “Jesus,” he said. “Are you all right? Have you seen any of the others?”

“I’m fine,” said Valentin. “And no, I haven’t. You?”

“No,” said Jamie. He twisted the comms dial on his belt. “Strike team, come in. Larissa? Angela? Is anyone there?”

“I’m here,” replied Larissa, and Jamie felt relief spread through his chest. “I’m with Colonel Frankenstein. Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m with Valentin and we’re both OK. Have you seen Angela?”

“No.”

“Shit,” he said. “All right. Fly straight up.”

“Why?” asked Larissa.

“So I can see where you are,” he said, and glanced at Valentin. “Stay here.”

The ancient vampire nodded. Jamie rose slowly into the air, scanning the sky for the vampires that had ambushed them. He saw no movement until Larissa appeared in the distance, maybe two hundred metres away across the rooftops.

“Got you,” he said. “Stay there. We’ll come to you.”

“OK,” replied Larissa.

“Valentin,” said Jamie, looking down to the street below him. “Get up here.”

The youngest Rusmanov appeared at his side, and the two vampires flew towards Larissa; as they passed above the maze of streets and yards and alleyways, Jamie kept his gaze fixed downwards, searching for any sign of Angela, but seeing nothing. They reached their squad mate, and followed her down to where Frankenstein was waiting for them, outside a toyshop on a narrow road.

“Everyone in one piece?” asked Jamie.

The members of the strike team nodded.

“What about Angela?” asked Larissa.

“We’ll find her,” said Jamie. “Until we do, she can look after herself.”

“So what’s the plan?” asked Frankenstein.

“Same as it was,” said Jamie, and felt heat rise back into his eyes. “Kill Dracula.”

Before she opened her eyes, Angela was aware of the pain.

It filled her, radiating from her hands and feet and coursing through her body, hot and sharp. She grimaced, and as she forced her eyelids open, she tried to move.

Nothing happened.

Fear flooded her system with adrenaline. She was suspended above the ground, over a jumbled pile of wooden benches, and as her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw that she was inside a church; carved stone pillars rose up towards an ornate ceiling, with great panels of stained glass between them. There was something hard and flat behind her; she tried to move forward, to push against it, but remained still. She could remember nothing since the vampires had swooped out of the clouds above them; she had no idea how much time had passed since the attack, or what had happened to her in that time.

Then Angela turned her head, and saw.

Her arms were stretched straight out against a plank of wood, parallel to the floor below, and nails had been hammered through the palms of her hands. Her eyes widened, her stomach churning; she looked down, straining her neck as far as she was able, and saw metal sticking out of her feet.

Crucified, she realised, her mind teetering on the edge of shock. I’ve been crucified. Oh God. Oh God.

The pain intensified, surging through her like a wave of acid. She flexed her muscles, trying to thrash against whatever she was pinned to – a cross, it’s a cross, oh God – but didn’t move a millimetre; she tried to bring the fire into her eyes, to force her vampire side to the surface, but felt nothing but pain and emptiness. She tried to think around the pain, to push it aside, but it was so big, so huge, that she could barely form a rational thought; she had never felt so weak, so drained of energy.

She looked down again, and saw blood. It was pooled at the base of the cross, running freely down her legs from somewhere inside her uniform, and Angela understood what had been done to her; she had been bled, to make sure she was too weak to resist.

Panic overcame her, and she screamed in the silent stillness of the church, an animal howl of terror and pain. Her head swam, and she fought against the shock that was threatening to drag her down into unconsciousness, even though she had never felt so tired, so exhausted, so utterly helpless.

Footsteps.

She forced her eyes to focus and saw a figure walk slowly down the centre of the nave. It was a man in his forties, with precisely parted hair and neat, ironed clothes; had it not been for the dripping hammer in his hand, he could easily have passed for an accountant, or an estate agent. He stopped below her and looked up into her eyes with an expression so blank and empty that Angela thought for an awful second that she was going to burst into tears.

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me how much it hurts.”

She stared at him, her eyes wide and wet, bile churning in her stomach. Then shock and pain finally overwhelmed her, and she sank into welcome oblivion.

Less than a hundred metres away, on the second floor of the Hôtel de la Cité, Alan Foster felt the knot of nerves in his stomach tighten as the door of the room adjacent to theirs opened.

He and Cynthia had been imprisoned in Room 31 for almost a week, and although Foster would have been forced to admit that it was unusually luxurious, it was still a cell. They had been wearing the same clothes for six days, washing them each night in the bath and drying them on the radiator, and eating only what their vampire captors thought to bring them; mostly potato crisps and an occasional bag of sweets or chocolate bar.

Minibar food, thought Foster, as he picked up the result of two hours’ careful work and tested its weight in his hand.

The window beside the bed only opened a few centimetres at the top. It was barely enough to provide the warm, stuffy room with even the slightest breeze, but more than enough to allow the distant rattle of gunfire – a sound Foster was more than familiar with – into the room. He didn’t know exactly what, but it was clear that something was happening. Their vampire captors had checked on them every three hours since they had first been locked inside the room, but almost twelve had passed since the last visit, leaving Foster sure that the time to make a move had come; he believed this was the best chance he was going to get.

The club was as ugly a weapon as he had carried in his long military career. For several days, he had been working at the screws that held the metal towel bar to the bathroom wall, chipping away long-dried paint with the corkscrew he had found in their fridge and working at the screws themselves with the back of the safe key. It had been slow work, but Foster was by nature proactive, a man who hated sitting aimlessly around, and he had been pleased to have something tangible to do. That morning, shortly after the last time they had been checked on, the bar had come away from the wall with a small shower of plaster dust and flaked paint. It was almost a metre long, and although it was hollow, and therefore not as heavy as he would have liked, it was solid enough.

“So you’ve got it,” Cynthia had said. “What now?”

“I’m going to use it,” he had replied, giving her a tight smile.

Working quickly, he had wrapped a small hand towel round one end of the bar, looping it over and over and tying it off as tightly as he could. It was not perfect – if he swung it with enough force, the towel might simply fly off – but it was the best he could do under the circumstances. Their luggage was in a hotel bedroom outside the medieval walls, providing it had not been burned to ashes, along with seemingly the rest of modern Carcassonne, but Cynthia had kept hold of her handbag when they were seized by Dracula’s followers, and for that he would be eternally grateful. He wrapped the two water glasses from the bathroom in another towel, stamped on them, and carried the towel over to the desk in the corner. He popped the cap off the can of hairspray his wife always carried in her bag, without fail, and sprayed the towel-covered end of the metal bar. While it was still wet and sticky, he pressed pieces of broken glass into the towel, pointing the sharp edges outwards as much as possible; once the head of the club was coated in glass, he emptied the rest of the hairspray on to it, coating it on all sides. Fifteen minutes later, it had dried as hard as resin.