alace Green was blocked, an armoured car emphasising a point she would have thought established sufficiently well by police vans. Uniformed coppers -- the Special Patrol Group, of recent ill reputation -- and camo-clad squaddies were kitted up for riot, as natives kept out of homes and offices muttered themselves towards a resentful shade of disgruntled. To Kate Reed, this patch of Kensington felt too much like Belfast for comfort, though passing trade on Embassy Row -- veiled woman-shapes with Harrod's bags, indignant diplomats of all nations, captains of endangered industries -- was of a different quality from the bottle-throwers and -dodgers of the Garvachie Road.

TV crews penned beyond the perimeter had to make do with stories about the crowds rather than the siege. Kate saw Anne Diamond, collar turned up and microphone thrust out, sorting through anxious faces at the barrier, thirsty for someone with a husband or girlfriend trapped inside the Embassy or, better yet, among the terrorists.

'Evenin' miss,' said an elderly bobby, the survivor of a notionally more genial past, bewildered among the armoured thugs now sharing his uniform, 'it's been a funny old week at Palace Green ...' Sensing the imminence of an anecdote with a moral, Kate showed him her NUJ card and won open sesame. 'We've been waiting for you,' he said, with fatherly concern, lifting a plank from the barrier. 'This is a rum old do and no mistake.'

Anne Diamond and a dozen other broadcast and print hopefuls were furious that one of the least significant of their number had a free ticket to the big carnival. It wasn't even as if Kate were the only vampire hack on the street. She'd spotted Paxman, drifting incorporeally in mist-form through the crowds. She was, however, the only journo Baron Meinster would talk with.

For two years, she had been waiting for the Transylvanian to call in the favour he'd granted by spiriting her out of Romania via his underground railway. She knew he'd helped her to spite the Ceausescus, with whom he had a long-standing personal feud, but his intervention still saved her life. This was not what she had expected, but the development didn't surprise her either. Since Teheran, embassy sieges had become a preferred means of the powerless lording it over the powerful. Not that the Baron, soi-disant First Elder of the Transylvania Movement, would consider himself powerless.

A tall, moustached vampire in police uniform took charge of Kate with a firm grip on her upper arm. Her real police sergeant kept his distance, and retreated without offering the traditional cup of tea.

'Daniel Dravot,' she said, 'it has been a long time.'

'Yes, Miss Reed,' said the vampire, unsmiling.

'Still Sergeant Dravot, I see. Though not truly of the Metropolitan Police, I'll wager.'

'All in the Service of the Queen, Miss Reed.'

'Indeed.'

She was walked over to the command post, a large orange workman's hut erected over a hole in the pavement. Dravot lifted a flap-door and ushered her inside.

he found herself among uncomfortable men of power.

A plainclothes policeman sat on a stool, hunched over a field telephone whose wires were crocodile-clamped into an exposed circuit box. Down in the pit, ear-phones worn like a stethoscope under long hair, was a thin warm man of undetermined age; he wore New Romantic finery -- full-skirted sky-blue highwayman's coat, knee-boots and puffy mauve britches, three-cornered hat with a feather -- and jotted notes on a pad in violet ink. Above them, literally and figuratively, hovered three vampires: a death-faced eminence grise in a gravemold-grubby Ganex mac, a human weapon in a black jump-suit and balaclava, and a willowy youth in elegant grey.

She recognised all of these people.

The policeman was Inspector Cherry, who often wound up with the cases involving vampires: a solid, if somewhat whimsical plod. The dandy in the ditch was Richard Jeperson, chairman of the Ruling Cabal of the Diogenes Club, longest-lived and most independent branch of British Intelligence. He had inherited Dravot from his late predecessors, to both of whom Kate had been close, Charles Beauregard and Edwin Winthrop. The vampires were: Caleb Croft, high up in whatever the United Kingdom called its Secret Police these days; Hamish Bond, a spy whose obituaries she never took seriously; and Lord Ruthven, the Home Secretary.

'Katie Reed, good evening,' said Ruthven. 'How charming to see you again, though under somewhat trying circumstances. Very nice piece in the Grauniad about the Royal Fiancée. Gave us all the giggles.'

Ruthven, once a fixture as Prime Minister, was back in the cabinet after a generation out of government. Rumoured to be Margaret Thatcher's favourite vampire, he was horribly likely to succeed her in Number Ten by the next ice age, reclaiming his old job. He brought a century of political experience to the ministerial post, and a considerably longer lifetime of survival against the odds. If he recalled that he and Mr Croft had put a price on Kate's head in the 1890s, he tactfully didn't mention it.

'She's here,' said Cherry, into the phone.

The policeman passed her the set, hand over the mouthpiece.

'Try to find out how many of them there are,' said Jeperson in a stage-whisper. 'But don't be obvious about it.'

'I don't think we need teach Katie Reed anything,' said the Home Secretary. 'She has a wealth of varied experience.'

Unaccountably, that verdict made her self-conscious. She knew about all these men, but they also knew quite a bit about her up-and-down career. Like them all, she had wound in and out of the century, as often covered in blood as glory. Ever since her turning, she had been close to the Great Game of power and intelligence.

Kate put the phone to her head and said 'hello'.

'Katharine,' purred Baron Meinster. His unretractable fangs gave him a vaguely slushy voice, as if he were speaking through a mouthful of blood.

'I'm here, Baron.'

'Excellent. I'm glad to hear it. Is Ruthven there?'

'I'm fine, thank you, and how are you?'

'He is. How delicious. Ten years of dignified petitions and protests, when all I needed to do to get attention was take over a single building. How do you like the banners? Do you think He would appreciate them?'

She knew who Meinster meant when he said 'He'.

The flags of the Socialist Republic had been torn down, and two three-storey banners unfurled from the upper windows of the Embassy. They were blazened with a tall black dragon, red-eyed and fanged.

'It's time to revive the Order of the Dragon,' said Meinster. 'It's how He got His name.'

She knew that, of course.

'People here want to know what you want, Baron.'

'People there know what I want. I've been telling them for years. I want what is ours. I want a homeland for the undead. I want Transylvania.'

'I think they mean immediately. Blankets? Food?'

'I want Transylvania, immediately.'

She covered the mouthpiece and spoke.

'He wants Transylvania, Home Secretary.'

'Not in our gift, more's the pity. Would he take, say, Wales? I'm sure I can swing Margaret on that. The taffs are all bloody Labour voters anyway, so we'd be glad to turn them over to that drac-head dandy. Or, I don't know, what about the Falkland Islands? They're far distant enough to get shot of without much squawking at home. The Baron could spend his declining years nipping sheep. That's all they ever do up in the Carpathians, anyway.'

'There might be a counter-offer, Baron,' she told him. 'In the South Atlantic.'

'Good God, woman, I'm not serious. Tell him to be a nice little bat and give up. We'll slap his wrist and condemn him for inconveniencing our old mucka Ceausescu and his darling Elena, then let him do an hour-long interview with Michael Parkinson on the BBC, just before Match of the Day. He should know we like him a lot more than the bloody Reds.'

'Is that an official offer?'

'Not in my lifetime, Miss Reed. Will he talk to me?'

'Would you talk with the Home Secretary?'

A pause. 'Not really. He's an upstart. Not of the Dracula line.'

'I heard that,' said Ruthven. 'I've been a vampire far longer than Vladdy-Come-Lately Meinster. He was turned in the 1870s, and he's basically little more than a Bucharest bum boy. I was already an elder when he was sucking off his first smelly barmaid.'

They might be of different bloodlines, but Ruthven and Meinster were of similar type. Turned in their golden youth, they remained petulant boys forever, even as they amassed power and wealth. To them, the world would always be a giant train-set, and engineering crashes was great fun.

'Katharine,' said Meinster, 'you had better come visit.'

She really wasn't keen. 'He wants me to go inside.'

'Out of the question,' said Croft.

'Not wise, Kate,' said the spy. 'Meinster's a mad dog. A killer.'

'Commander Bond, your concern is most touching. Are you with the SAS now? Or is everybody dressed up in the wrong uniform these days? What do they call it, "deniability"?'

'Aren't you supposed to be a secret agent, Bond,' sniped the Home Secretary. 'Does everybody know who you are?'

'I met Miss Reed on an earlier mission, sir.'

'That's one way of putting it, Hamish Bond.'

'Rome, 1959,' said Jeperson, from the pit. 'Not one of the Club's notable successes. The Crimson Executioner business. And the death of Dracula.'

Lord Ruthven ummed. 'You were mixed up in that too, weren't you? How you do show up, Katie. Literally all over the map. A person might think you did it on purpose.'

'Not really.'

'We can't let a civilian -- an Irish national at that -- compromise the situation,' said Croft. 'Give the word, and I'll send in Bond and settle Meinster's hash. Set-ups like this are why we have people like him.'

Bond stood at attention, ready to kill for England.

'Margaret would have our heads on poles, Croft. And I'm not ready to become an ornament just yet. Katie Reed, do you solemnly promise not to succumb to the Stockholm Syndrome? Meinster's a fearful rotter, you know. Good looks are no guarantee of good character.'

'I've met him before. I was not entirely captivated.'

'Good enough for me. Any other opinions?' Everyone looked as if about to say something, but the Home Secretary cut them off. 'I thought so. Katie, our hearts go with you.'

'Wouldn't you rather have a gun?' asked Jeperson.

'Ugh. No. Nasty things.'

he was marched again, with Dravot taking hold of her arm in exactly the same place, to the front line, the pavement outside the Embassy. Power had been cut off to the street-lamps as well as the building, but large floodlights illuminated the Dragon banners, projecting human silhouettes against the walls. It must look very dramatic on television, though she overheard Paxman arguing down the line with a BBC controller who wanted if no one was being murdered just now to cut back to the snooker finals. As she approached the Embassy, there was some excitement among the crowd, mostly from people asking who the hell she was.

Kate looked up and saw no faces at the windows. SAS snipers with silver bullets in their rifles were presumably concealed on the nearest rooftops. Men like Hamish Bond were trained to use crossbows with silver-tipped quarrels. There were even English longbowman schooled in Agincourt skills, eager to skewer an undead with a length of sharpened willow.

On one side, Jeperson suavely ran down what they knew about the situation inside the Embassy. On the other, Croft brutally gave bullet points about the things they'd like to know.

So far as they understood, there were about twenty-five hostages, including the Romanian Ambassador, whom no one would really miss since he was a faceless apparatchik, and Patricia Rice, a pretty upper-middle class student who had been visiting in order to arrange a tour of collective farms by her Marxist Student Group. As a bled-dry corpse, Rice would be a public relations nightmare: her great-great uncle or someone had once been a famous comedian, and news stories were already homing in on her. The viewers were following the siege just to see if the posh bird made it through the night. Besides Meinster, there were perhaps five vampire terrorists. It was imperative she confirm the numbers, and find out what kind of ordnance they were packing besides teeth and claws. From what she remembered of Meinster's Kids up in the Carpathians, they didn't need that much more.

As they reached the front doorstep, Dravot let her go.

Everyone backed away from her in a semi-circle, skinny shadows growing on the Embassy frontage.

In theory, Kate could be arrested if she crossed the threshold. The Embassy was legally Romanian turf and she remained a fugitive from state justice. It occurred to her that this would be a needlessly elaborate way of whisking her back to the prison she had clawed her way out of. Which didn't mean the Securitate, besides whom the SPG were lollipop men, weren't upto it.

She thought of pressing the bell-button, but remembered the power was off. She rapped smartly on the door.

The report was surprisingly loud. Weapons were rattled, and she turned to hiss reassurance. If anything would be worse than being bound in a diplomatic pouch and sunk in a Bucharest dungeon, it would be getting shot dead by some jittery squaddie.

The door opened and she was pulled inside.

n the dark lobby, her eyes adjusted instantly. Candles had been stuck up all around and lit.

She had been taken by two vampires. A rat-faced fright who scuttled like an insect, his unnaturally elongated torso tightly confined by a long musty jacket with dozens of bright little buttons like spider-eyes. And a new-born girl with a headscarf, bloody smears on her chin, a man's pinstripe jacket, Doc Martens boots and a sub-machine gun. The girl's red eyes told Kate exactly how she felt about her: hatred, mistrust, envy and fear.

'Patricia Rice?' Kate asked.

The new-born hissed. She had been turned recently, in the four days since the siege began.

No one had told her Meinster was making vampires of the hostages. It was the surest way of triggering the Stockholm Syndrome, she supposed. Rice had given up Marxism and pledged herself to a new cause.

She remembered Meinster in the mountains, explaining why the Transylvania Movement would win.

'We can make more of us,' he had said. 'We can drown them.'

Rice took her hand and tugged. Kate stood her ground.

She had been a vampire for nearly a century. This fresh immortal needed a lesson in seniority. Meinster was a fanatic for bloodline, pecking order and respect for elders. It was one reason he was wrong about long-term strategy: he could easily make more vampires, but not more like him. As Ruthven said, he was a parvenu anyway, a pretend-elder barely older than Kate. If Dracula were still King of the Cats, Meinster would never be taken seriously by anyone.

She broke Rice's hold.

'Just take me to your leader,' she said.

The rat-nosferatu led the way. He moved jerkily, like a wrong-speed silent movie. He was one of the very old ones, far beyond the human norm. Kate had met creatures like him before and knew they were among the most dangerous of vampirekind. They were all red thirst, and no pretence about civilisation or magic.

She was taken upstairs to a high-ceilinged conference room. Free-standing candelabra threw active shadows on the walls. Hostages were tied up, huddled against the walls: their arms were striped with scabs, but not their necks. Meinster was conserving his resources.

The Baron stood in one corner, with his lieutenants. They were vampire kids, child-shaped but old-eyed. These were his favoured troops, not least because he wasn't himself very tall or broad. On Not the Nine O'Clock News, he was impersonated (very well) by Pamela Stephenson.

Meinster wore a very smart grey cloak, over a slightly darker grey frock coat and riding boots. His ruffled shirt would have looked better on Adam Ant. His hair was improbably gold, gelled into a fixed wave. His smile was widened by his fangs.

One of his lieutenants had a gun to match Rice's; the other held Meinster's two poodles. In the forest, Kate had seen Meinster kill another vampire for ridiculing his beloved dogs. They were vampire pets, little canine monsters with sharpened fangs, fattened on drops of baby-blood. They must have been smuggled into the country despite quarantine regulations designed to keep undead animals like them out -- a more serious crime than terrorism in the opinion of many Home Counties pet owners.

'Katharine, well met.'

'Baron,' she acknowledged.

'She was insolent,' hissed Rice. 'I hate her already.'

'Shush up, Patty-Pat,' said Meinster.

'We don't need her. We only need me. You said so, when you turned me. You said you only needed me. Me.'

'Am I beginning to detect a theme tune?' suggested Kate. '"The Me Song"?'

Rice raised a hand to slap but Kate snatched her wrist out of the air and bent her arm around her back. She got snarled up on the strap of her gun.

'You turned this girl, Baron?'

Meinster smiled artfully, a boy caught out.

'Things must be desperate.'

She let Rice go. The new-born sulked, face transforming into a bloated mask of resentment and self-pity. She should watch that tendency to shapeshift, or her scowl might really stick. She had Mr Rat-features around as a dire example of the syndrome.

'May I offer you someone to drink, Katharine. We've a fine selection of fusty old bureaucrats. Oh, and three cultural attachés who admit that they're spies.'

'Only three?'

'So far. We can offer Ruthven some interesting documents from the secret files. Nicolae and Elena tell the world about modernisation and harmony with the West, but we both know they play a different hand at home. My old comrade has much to hide, and I'd be most willing to share it with your lovely Mrs Thatcher.'

'She's not mine. I'm Irish, remember.'

'Of course, Katharine. Potato famines, Guinness, Dana. I am well up on the West. As a coming man, I have to learn all these things. Just as He did, a century ago.'

When he so much as hinted at the name, his eyes were radiant. She thought she saw tiny twin bats flapping in his pupils.

'You so want to be him, Baron. How well did you know him?'

'He was more a father to me than any human family. More a mother. More anything.'

On the subject, Meinster was blind. To him, Dracula was the King of the Cats, the fount of wisdom and destiny, a God and a champion. Kate knew too many vampires like the Baron, forcing themselves to be what they imagined Dracula had been, hoping to become everything he was but not knowing the whole story.

'At the end, he wanted to die,' she said. 'I saw that.'

'You saw what you wanted to see, Katharine. You are not of his direct bloodline.'

'I wish that were true.'

'Heresy,' shouted Rice, raising her gun and fiddling with anything that might be a safety catch. 'She defiles the name of the Father-in-Darkness.'

Meinster nodded, snake-swift. The old nosferatu, rodent-ears twitching, took the new-born's gun away from her.

'Thank you, Orlok,' acknowledged Meinster.

Kate looked again at the reeking thing. She knew who Graf von Orlok was. During the Terror, when London rose against the rule of Dracula, he had been in command of the Tower, where the 'traitors' were kept. If she had been less fortunate during her underground period, she might have met Orlok before. Several of her friends had, and not survived.

Sometimes, she forgot to be afraid of vampires. After all, she was a bloodsucking leech too and no one was ever afraid of her. Sometimes, she remembered.

Now, looking at the spark in Orlok's grubby eyes, she remembered the first vampires she had seen, when she was a warm girl and the dead were rising all around.

In her heart, nightmare spasmed.

'Katharine, I will prevail,' said the Baron.

'How? The British Government doesn't negotiate with terrorists.'

Meinster laughed.

'What's a terrorist, Katharine? You were a terrorist. And you've just had a conversation with the Home Secretary. Once upon a time, you were a wanted insurrectionist and Orlok was a lawful authority. Once Nicolae Ceausescu was a terrorist, my partisan comrade, and the Nazis were our enemy.'

That was true.

'And, in our homeland, you were unjustly accused of murder, hunted by corrupt police. Then, when you came to me in the mountains, we had common cause. Nothing has really changed. we have been adrift, I'll admit. Since He passed, we have pretended to be humans, to be just another of the many races of mankind, but we are not. You've never lived with your own kind, Katharine. You've spent a century working with them, fighting for the cattle. Yet they still fear and loathe you. Here in England, the warm are polite and pretend not to despise us; but in our homeland, you must have seen the truth. Vampires are hated. And we must be hated. Our inferiors must hate and fear and respect us. He knew that. His was the vision we must struggle to bring about. We must be the princes of the Earth, not the servants of men. Then, believe me, He will rise again. What you saw was an illusion. Dracula does not die and become dust.'

Meinster was trembling with excitement, a boy dreaming of Christmas morning.

Kate saw Patricia Rice, adoring her father-lover-fiend.

'First, Transylvania ...'

Meinster let it hang.

'I've seen who's out there,' said Kate. 'I know what they can do. Having hostages won't help. You had one card, and you've played it badly.'

She nodded at Patricia Rice.

'On the contrary, she was my masterstroke. Are you not, dearest Patty-Pat?'

He reached out and touched Rice's face. She squirmed against his hand, like one of his fanged poodles.

'She will be my Elena, when I rule. The first of my Elenas.'

The Baron gave orders to Orlok, in rapid Romanian. Kate only picked up a few words. One of them, of course, was 'death'.

'First, the fire,' said the Baron, sweeping over a candelabrum. Flames caught a tablecloth and swarmed over the furniture. The hostages began screaming. 'Now, we make a dramatic departure.'

He leaped up onto a windowsill and posed against a tall window. Searchlights outside swung to light him up. He was a swashbuckling figure, cloak swept back over his shoulders.

'To me, my brides.'

Rice hopped up to nestle under one arm. He stretched the other out, beckoning to Kate.

'Become a bride of Dracula, my fiery Irish colleen.'

'That's far too presumptuous, Baron.'

Orlok picked her up and tossed her to Meinster.

'Comfy?' he asked the two. Kate saw Rice almost swoon in delight, but didn't understand it herself.

Apart from all other considerations, she could have sworn Meinster was gay.

He leaned against the windows and smashed through.

For a moment, Kate assumed the Baron, like his supposed father-in-darkness, could grow wings and fly. Then gravity and reality took over.

They plummeted to the pavement.

Meinster sprang up like a cat. Kate, badly shaken, rolled into the gutter. Rice, knees and ankles broken, howled as the bones knit back together.

People rushed forward.

'I have surrendered,' Meinster announced. 'To these flowers of English and Irish vampire maidenhood.'

A black-clad figure swarmed up the front of the Embassy, to the broken window. Flames were already pouring out, blackening the sill.

There was gunfire inside the building.

Richard Jeperson helped her stand and brush herself down, showing real concern. His style was more Charles Beauregard than Edwin Winthrop: she wondered how long he could last under the likes of Ruthven and Croft, not to mention Margaret Thatcher.

Along with the police, TV crews surged forward.

She heard commentators chattering, speculating on the rapid pace of events.

Another vampire was tossed out of the window, turning to a rain of ashes. Hamish Bond was doing his job. Kate thought Orlok might give him a fight, then she saw Dravot, out of his police helmet, signalling a cadre of black ninja-suited men, vampires all, to move in. Britain had been working for a century to create the vampires it needed rather than the ones imposed upon it.

The front door was smashed. Vampires crawled head-down from the flat roof and lizard-swarmed in through upper-storey windows. It was over in moments.

Jeperson and she were separated from the action by a press of people. Between riot shields, she saw Meinster and Ruthven facing each other, warily but without going for the throat. It was as if they were looking in reflecting mirrors for the first time since their turning.

'What was the point?' she asked. 'This was all arranged between them. This wasn't a siege, it was a pantomime. It's not about vampires, it's about communism.'

Jeperson was sad-eyed.

'You of all people know Romania,' he said. 'You've seen what happens in the satellite countries. There's no real detente. We have to get rid of the whole shoddy system. Nicolae Ceausescu is a monster.'

'And Meinster is better?'

'He isn't worse.'

'Richard, you don't know. You weren't there during the Terror. When people like Meinster, and people like Ruthven, are in charge, people like you, and people like me, get shoved into locked boxes. It happens slowly, without a revolution, without fireworks, and the world grows cold and hard. Ruthven's back, and you're supporting Meinster. How long will it be before we start praying for Dracula?'

'I'm sorry, Kate. I know a lot about you. I do understand.'

'Why was I here?'

'To be a witness. For history. Beauregard said that about you. Someone outside the Great Game has to know. Someone has to judge.'

'And approve?'

Jeperson was chilled. 'Not necessarily.'

Then, he was pulled away too. She was in a crowd.

A cheer rose up. A line of people, hands on heads, bent over, scurried out of the Embassy door. The hostages. Among them was Orlok, with the poodles. She would have bet that he would survive.

She tripped over thick cable, and followed it back out of the press of bodies. A BBC OB van hummed with activity.

This was news. She was a newspaperwoman.

Somewhere near, she would find a phone. It was time to call her editor.

Kim Newman