"Not a lot of vampires survive this alone," Lucille corrected. "So you have no nest?"

"There's no nest. There's no scheme," Christian said, and added quickly, "Sorry."

Lucille's alabaster brow wrinkled. "Seriously?"

"You're the second vampire I've ever met," Christian said. "Seriously."

Lucille regarded Christian with cool, suspicious eyes. Christian hoped she found his total fear and confusion convincing. They certainly convinced him.

"Why are you doing this, then?" Lucille asked at last. "If there's no plan, why?"

Christian thought of being up onstage tonight, facing the Beatles' legacy and smiling at it, listening to the surge and roar of the crowd, and being companionable in the dressing room afterward.

Lucille had come here because of some gathering of vampires she'd called her nest. She might understand the urge simply to not be alone, to belong.

But Christian didn't want to have anything in common with her.

"I enjoy it," he said.

Lucille stared at him with cold, cold eyes, as if trying to judge his sincerity, as if measuring whether it would be worth her time to kill him.

"Well," she responded eventually. "I suppose there's nothing more to be said."

She got up, the movement a sliding, gliding thing more like an eel's than a woman's, and left.

She did not go far. Christian was just up himself the next evening, going through the blood bags in the big kitchen he shared with the rest of the band, adjoining onto all their suites. He was trying to find some O positive.

He was very surprised when Lucille staggered in.

She was still not moving like a human. She was moving a little bit like a giraffe on stilts. She was also wearing a green T-shirt with love is the drug on it in purple letters, and her hair was all sticking up on one side of her head.

"Good evening, Christian," she said, and sat herself with great, solemn care at the kitchen table.

Then she toppled forward, her face smacking against the wood.

In a slightly muffled voice, she said, "I feel most peculiar."

"Would you, er, like some bagged blood?" Christian offered, trying to be a good undead host. "It's A positive."

Lucille, her face still planted on the kitchen table, gave a full-body shudder. "Drink from a bag? I could never."

"Right," Christian said. "Because you shouldn't pop down to the shops and buy yourself a steak. You should go find a field and take a big bite out of a cow."

"All I had to do was knock on the door directly beside yours," Lucille said. "It was very simple. Much simpler than cows. Cows never have hotel rooms. Well, I suppose some cows might. Cows with credit cards."

"You knocked on Pez's door," Christian said. "Didn't you?"

"Sweet boy," Lucille told him. "Very amenable. But now I really do feel most peculiar. Have I said that already?"

At that point Bradley wandered in, wearing a headband and a muscle shirt. He looked at Lucille on the table and gave Christian a thumbs-up.

"She's a vampire," Christian said.

"I see that," said Bradley.

"She knocked on Pez's door last night," Christian continued, just to make things clear. "And now she feels most peculiar."

"Oh," said Bradley. "I realize this is a personal question, and I have no wish to pry into a lovely lady's intimate affairs, but is Pez, er, alive?"

"Of course," Lucille told him in an offended voice. "I haven't lost control and killed a human in years."

"Awesome," Bradley said.

"Well, one year," Lucille conceded.

Christian and Bradley exchanged worried looks over Lucille's head.

"The O positive's in the back of the second shelf," Bradley told Christian. "Give her the A negative, you're always chugging that stuff trying to ignore the taste. Can you snag me a rhubarb-crumble yogurt?"

"Almost a year," Lucille murmured. "Ten months."

Christian passed Bradley the yogurt. Lucille propped herself up on one elbow. The elbow did keep slipping and getting away from her, but after a few tries she managed it.

Bradley regarded her with some concern. It had taken Christian a while to realize that Bradley, who was ridiculous and terrible in so many ways, was also naturally very kind.

"How many fingers am I holding up?" he inquired.

Lucille regarded him blearily and said, "Avocado," before her elbow got away from her again. "What was in that boy's blood?" she demanded, sounding feebly outraged.

"Hard to say," Christian told her. "I saw him eating dishwasher powder once."

Lucille twisted about in her chair, horribly graceful again for a second, and focused on Bradley.

"Is your blood clean?" she asked.

Bradley hesitated. "My body is my temple," he said eventually. "Glowing and gorgeous inside and out."

Lucille tensed. Bradley was already a bit tense. Christian wondered what the hell he should do, and as he wondered he moved between them, shielding Bradley.

Josh came in through the door, saw the hungry look Lucille had fixed on Bradley, and backpedaled so fast he hit the door with a bang.

"No," he almost shouted, his breath coming too quickly. Christian opened the cupboard and started rummaging around for Josh's emergency inhaler, but Josh took a few more fast breaths and repeated, "No. Having one of you things around is bad enough-"

"Hey, don't talk about Chris that way!" Bradley snapped.

"Having a wild one that bites people-"

"I'm not a tame dog," Christian snarled. He saw the flicker of fear on Josh's face, and stepped back, the inhaler pressed hard against his palm.

Lucille stood, still a little shaky. "And we don't think of you as people."

Christian put the inhaler on the counter and seized her arm. The way Lucille stiffened and looked at him, her lip curled back from her razor-sharp teeth, he knew it would have been suicide any other time.

Fortunately, right now she was debilitated enough that turning around rendered her so disoriented she swayed and had to hold on to Christian's arm.

She dug her pointed nails into his arm as she did so, and he swept her out of the room, safely away from Bradley and Josh, then faced a dilemma: she was a vampire preying on his band-mates and had to be eliminated, and yet she was also a lady in distress.

He called her a cab.

When he got back, Pez was sitting at a table being lectured by Josh and Bradley both at once.

"You've got to be safe, dude," Bradley told him. "Next time you sleep with a vampire, you've got to make her wear a gum shield."

"Or you could not consort with vampires!" Josh screeched.

"Josh, I swear to God," Bradley began.

"I didn't mean Chris," Josh said, somewhat to Christian's surprise. But then he assumed Josh meant "consorting" in a certain way, and despite the allegations of certain tabloids, Christian was not in the habit of consorting with his band-mates all night long.

"Wait," Pez said slowly. "That girl was a vampire?"

Christian had only been out of the coffin for half an hour, and he already had a migraine.

"What did you think was going on?" Bradley asked after a while.

He'd stopped looking frustrated, and now looked a little bit like he wanted to laugh. On the whole, Christian was glad: if the stress had given Bradley worry lines, Faye would have made them all suffer for it.

"I just thought she was a little rough-and-tumble," Pez said dreamily. "I went with it. I mean, whatever you're into, am I right? Don't be a hater."

Bradley really did laugh then, collapsing backward into a chair with his yogurt in one hand and his other hand held palm up.

"All right, then," he said. "Liverpool down, and the band scored a vampire groupie. High five."

"I don't think she counts as a-," Christian began.

"Hey," said Bradley. "She came, she saw, she sampled. She counts. High five."

Christian gave him the high five, and not too long after that they were in a tour bus trundling along the Mersey River, leaving Liverpool, city of the Beatles and their vampire groupie, far behind.

Birmingham was their third stop, and time for Christian's surprise. He had been surreptitiously collecting supplies behind Faye's back for weeks.

He still felt scared and sure that she was watching him, even though he'd used vampire vision and speed to take out the spy cameras on the tour bus and every hotel they'd stopped in. He found himself looking wildly around the hotel room as he slipped what he needed out from behind the lining of his coffin.

First came the orange T-shirt, with the picture of a giant turnip sitting on a sofa. The big green letters read because couch potatoes have too much ambition.

Then came the flip-flops, the sunglasses, and the baseball cap.

Christian could have tried for the lift, but that meant walking the halls of the hotel, where Faye could be prowling.

He was too much of a coward. So he decided to jump out the window.

The rush of the night air through his hair and the glitter of city lights too far below made a dozen remembered human survival instincts get together and carol, Oh my God, oh my God, we are going to dieeeee- Then he landed, on one knee with his hand placed out in front of him, like a runner who was about to sprint.

He was barely on his feet when one of the hotel staff came outside for a cigarette. The guy gave him a critical look, and Christian fiercely resisted the urge to zoom away at vampire speed. Faye would know then, and she would find him. He knew she would find him.

Instead he tilted his head at the guy and tried to think of the least vampiric possible thing to say.

He settled for "'Sup?"

He could practically see the wheels turning in the man's mind-That looks like and He is staying in-a dozen thoughts, all being steadily turned away by the insistent, prevailing conviction that a vampire would not be caught undead in flip-flops.

"Hey," he said eventually, his voice creaking with unease.

"Nice night," Christian dared to offer, and then he walked at a steady, human pace, in his flip-flops, around the corner to freedom.

The house looked just like he remembered it. He would've thought it might seem smaller; that was what they said about coming back home and how you never really could. But it was the same size, the crazy paving forming the same pattern as it had when he had wound his way up it every day. All you had to do was follow it home.

It was when he was home, when he knocked on the door and it was thrown wide, that everything went wrong.

Rory answered the door. He was much taller than he had been: he was taller than Christian was, now.

Christian had been expecting a hug-the kind they used to give each other when Rory's football team won, thumping each other on the back hard and holding on.

Rory moved awkwardly, clumsily, backward. As if he still wasn't used to his new height, or he was scared.

Christian panicked, and tried out his new not-really-a-vampire mantra. "'Sup?"

"Mum!" Rory shouted, his voice cracking as he did so. "Mum! Christian's here!"

And maybe Christian wouldn't keep insisting that was his name to Faye and the band. Not when he had to hear it spoken like this.

They let him in, of course. Home was the place where when you came there, they had to let you in.

That didn't mean they wanted him there.

"Sorry," Mum said as soon as she gave Christian the cup of tea. She'd made it in jerky, slapping movements, like a tea-making robot, and she only seemed to think about what she had done once she had to be still.

Christian curled his cold fingers around the hot mug anyway. "That's okay, Mum. Thanks."

She hadn't hugged him either.

"We thought we'd see you at the concert tomorrow," Mum told him abruptly. "Rory's really been looking forward to it."

"Right."

"Not that it's not lovely to see you now, Christian!" Mum told him hastily.

He didn't like the way his mother said his name any more than he liked the way his brother had said it.