There was no sign of Osvaldo in the square outside, and Dracula assumed he had personally taken a squad of vampires down to deal with the police; such attention to detail was characteristic of the Spaniard. He listened for the screams that would mean his order had been successfully carried out, straining his supernatural hearing, then growled as the thunder of a helicopter engine hammered into his ears, as suddenly as if it had materialised beside him. The acoustics of the old city were unpredictable, which he didn’t like, but there was nothing to be done about that; it was a rabbit warren of old stone perched on a hilltop, and strange echoes and dead spots were only to be expected.

Dracula leapt easily into the air and rose above the rooftops, searching for the source of the noise. He turned south, towards the main gate and the modern city of Carcassonne that sprawled beyond the walls, and was engulfed in the blinding white beam of a spotlight. He howled in pain, and flung himself clear; the light was agonising to his supernaturally sharp eyes, and he felt crimson fire flood into them as anger roared through his body.

The fools, he thought, as black spots and points of light wheeled across his vision. They have no idea what they bring upon themselves.

His eyes cleared, and he immediately located the helicopter. It was painted blue and white with the word POLICE printed on its side, and was rising quickly over the distant ramparts to the south-west, its hateful searchlight sweeping back and forth across the sky. Dracula spun up and around, keeping a safe distance between him and the wide beam, silent and invisible in the darkening sky.

Gunfire rattled out, from somewhere near the bottom of the hill, punctuated by a terrible screech of pain. Dracula smiled as two more screams rang out, followed by an awful gagging noise, like the sound of someone trying to breathe underwater, and a second, final burst of gunfire.

He spun forward in the air until he was looking down into the square below; less than thirty seconds later four vampires flew in from the south-east corner, each one dragging two black shapes behind them. The bodies of the police officers were dumped in front of the entrance to the hotel, and Dracula permitted himself a moment of satisfaction; ability and experience were valuable traits, but obedience outranked them both, and on that front, his army were thus far proving acceptable.

He spun back upright, and sought out the helicopter again. If the order he had given to Osvaldo was not carried out quickly, he would fly down and deal with it himself. But as he located the helicopter, now flying low over the western walls, he saw that his intervention would not be needed.

A distant trio of dark shapes soared silently up from the narrow streets. They accelerated towards the unsuspecting helicopter from below, safely out of reach of its searchlight, and slammed into it with crippling force, driving its metal body up and over. The engine noise rose to a deafening howl and its rotors sent turbulent air billowing in every direction as the pilot tried to stabilise the aircraft. The three vampires, one of which he believed was Osvaldo himself, hammered the protesting helicopter back and forth, then began to haul it up and away from the walls. The engine screamed, the sound awful to Dracula’s ears, then gave out in a shower of sparks and an explosion of shearing metal. Without power, the helicopter pitched forward and fell towards the ground. Osvaldo and his comrades held on, steadying it with its nose pointing directly down; across the clear, suddenly quiet night sky, Dracula could hear the muffled screams of the pilot and the thuds as he beat at his cockpit windscreen.

Then the helicopter was moving again, as his followers swung it out and up. They released their grip and sent it flying over the walls, flipping end over end until it dropped out of sight. A second later the sound of an explosion hammered into the air as a bright cloud of orange fire bloomed above the ancient battlements and screams and sirens filled Dracula’s ears.

Now, he thought. It’s time.

He sped over the city towards the thick stone wall that stood above the drawbridge. The old entrance was purely ceremonial, designed to make tourists feel that they were entering something old and dramatic, but that was just fine for his purposes. As he descended towards it, he got his first look at the scene beyond the walls. There was a long line of ambulances, standing in front of rows of police cars and fire engines, around which paramedics were frantically treating the men and women who had made it out of Carcassonne with their lives. Further down the hill, approaching along the wide streets of the new city, he could see a great many spinning blue lights.

The survivors of the attack he had ordered were wandering aimlessly or slumped on the grass, groaning and sobbing and begging for help. The paramedics were running back and forth between them, as the police looked on with apparent paralysis. Beyond them, Dracula could see a steady stream of people making their way up the hill; word that something was happening in the old city had clearly travelled fast.

He hovered in the air, searching for what Osvaldo had assured him he would see. He scanned the chaotic crowd, then settled his gaze on a man standing beside a white van who was holding what he was looking for: the wide glass lens of a television camera.

The walls of Carcassonne were ringed by powerful spotlights that illuminated the pale stone once the sun had set. Dracula dropped silently on to the top of the wall above the drawbridge, his clothes and hair fluttering in the night air, and looked down at the oblivious crowd. They looked so like ants, diligently going about lives that were insignificant at best. He took a deep breath, then spoke in a voice that rumbled the walls beneath the feet.

“Citizens of Carcassonne,” he said. “I am Dracula, and I have taken possession of this city.”

Shouts and screams rose from the crowd, and he smiled as several people turned and fled down the hill without a backward glance. The rest stayed where they were, frozen in place, their eyes fixed on him. He kept his own gaze on the camera, marvelling at the thought of how many people this modern technology was allowing him to speak directly to.

“I will keep this communication short,” he continued. “To those of my kind who would submit themselves to my service, I say this: come, bow your heads, and make yourselves known to me. And to those humans who reside in Carcassonne: you have forty-eight hours to leave the city. Failure to do so will result in your deaths. This place is no longer your home.”

The residents of Carcassonne woke to a display that had not been seen in Europe for more than five centuries. Staring down at them from poles driven into the high walls of the medieval city were the lifeless eyes of dozens of impaled men and women, their blood-caked bodies twisting slowly in the morning breeze.

Below, the modern city was significantly emptier than it had been as the sun set nine hours earlier. Thousands of people had already fled, piling belongings into their cars and driving away, many of them with no real idea of where they were going, or what they would do when they got there; all they cared about was not being inside Carcassonne when the forty-eight hours were up. The outskirts of the city had seen roads jammed with cars, horns blaring as men and women wove their way through the narrow streets.

The authorities had been just as unprepared for Dracula’s sudden appearance as everyone else and although they were now scrambling to respond, there had been little progress overnight. As a result, hundreds of cars were parked in the empty fields beyond the city’s borders, their owners wandering through the pale morning light, waiting for someone to tell them what to do. Fifty miles to the north, a convoy of trucks was rumbling south with large red crosses painted on their sides, carrying tents and food and water and blankets; everything that would be needed to begin the process of setting up a camp for the Carcassonne refugees.