Archive of Our Own

Love Bites

Part One: The Problem with Adoration

Lucinda Vail had been a vampire for eighty-seven years, which was long enough to master most of the practicalities and nowhere near long enough to solve romance.

Blood was simple.

Blood had rules. It was warm, necessary, inconveniently packaged, and generally best taken from people who were too drunk, vain, wicked, or distracted to notice the precise moment their evening became anaemia. Lucinda had fed on sailors, vicars, adulterers, poets, burglars, chauffeurs, one cabinet minister, three dentists, and a man who claimed to be a duke but later turned out to be an estate agent from Hove.

Blood made sense.

Love did not.

The first time it happened, she had thought it was coincidence.

His name was Oliver, and he had been leaning against a cemetery wall after a funeral, smoking someone else’s cigarette and saying, “Death makes you think, doesn’t it?” in a tone suggesting he had not previously made the attempt.

Lucinda had been hungry. She had worn black. It had all seemed tidy.

She took him behind the yew trees, pressed him gently to a headstone, and drank only enough to blur the edges of his grief. He tasted of gin, ham sandwiches, and mild hereditary disappointment.

When she released him, he stared at her with wet eyes.

“My God,” he whispered. “You’re the only person who has ever understood me.”

Lucinda had not spoken a word to him.

Within forty-eight hours he had sent flowers to her house, written three poems, and posted a letter through her door containing a lock of his own hair and the sentence, “I shall wait beneath your window until the moon forgives me.”

She moved.

The second was a woman called Margot, taken delicately from the wrist in the powder room of a private members’ club. Margot arrived the next evening with two suitcases, a silver cigarette case, and a firm proposal that they raise peacocks together in Sicily.

The third was a butcher, which became logistically difficult because he knew where to get pig’s blood wholesale and considered this courtship.

By the twentieth, Lucinda accepted she had a condition.

By the fiftieth, she had named it.

Post-haemophagic romantic fixation.

Her maker, the late and very irritating Countess Orsina, had mentioned nothing about this.

“Choose carefully,” Orsina had said on the night of Lucinda’s turning, while standing on a balcony in Prague and wearing a cloak with wholly unnecessary lining. “Immortality is mostly administration.”

That had been true. There were leases to manage, identities to renew, cellar drainage issues, suspicious neighbours, tax correspondence, and the eternal nuisance of remembering which decade one had claimed to be born in.

But Orsina had not warned her that the bite might turn otherwise tolerable people into devotional lunatics.

Lucinda had tried feeding less.

This produced worse results. People given only a sip became wistful and symbolic. They wrote diaries. They took up watercolours. They stood in parks looking at fog.

She tried feeding more.

This produced unconsciousness, police involvement, and one unfortunate incident with a magistrate in Bath who woke up in a fountain and immediately proposed marriage to the moon.

She tried feeding from bad men.

This was ethically pleasing but romantically catastrophic. Bad men, once bitten, did not become better. They became bad men with sonnets.

The burglar was the worst. Lucinda found him halfway through stealing her candlesticks, bit him out of irritation, and the next night discovered him on her doorstep with the candlesticks polished, a roast chicken, and an engagement ring he had also stolen but now considered spiritually repurposed.

“I can change,” he said.

“Not into anything useful,” Lucinda replied, and shut the door.

By the time she settled in the town of Bellweather-on-Sea, Lucinda had developed systems.

The first system was distance. Never feed near home. Never use one’s real accent. Never reveal a surname. Never allow the victim to see one’s shoes, because people remembered shoes with astonishing fidelity when love was involved.

The second system was misdirection. She kept wigs in three colours, spectacles with plain glass, false moles, a reversible cape, and a small collection of accents ranging from plausible French widow to aristocratic Welsh eccentric.

The third system was disposal.

Not murder, usually.

Murder was vulgar, risky, and harder to explain than most murderers seemed to appreciate. Lucinda preferred relocation, discouragement, inconvenience, and emotional bureaucracy.

She had once cured a besotted solicitor by introducing him to a woman who bred award-winning ferrets. They married within the year. Another suitor, a naval historian, was shipped to Reykjavik after she forged a letter inviting him to lecture on rope. A third, who had become impossible after a single sip at an art opening, was persuaded that true devotion required a silent pilgrimage to Naples.

He was still walking, as far as she knew.

Her current difficulty was that Bellweather-on-Sea was small, damp, nosy, and full of people with time.

It was a town of tearooms, gulls, charity shops, occult boutiques, and retired colonels who believed bins should be militarised. The promenade had iron railings and three hotels, each pretending to be grander than the others. In summer, tourists came for the beach. In winter, the town belonged to dog walkers, drunks, widows, night-shift nurses, and the dead.

Lucinda liked it.

She lived in a narrow house on a lane behind the old theatre. The house had black shutters, a blue front door, and a cellar so dry it had once made an estate agent cry. She told people she wrote historical romances under a pseudonym, which neatly explained her odd hours, pale complexion, and large deliveries of red liquid in medical coolers.

Her neighbour, Mrs. Pounce, believed none of it.

Mrs. Pounce lived opposite, owned seven cats, and watched the lane through lace curtains with the unblinking moral intensity of a medieval saint.

“You had another gentleman caller,” she said one evening, as Lucinda returned from disposing of a dentist.

“Did I?”

“Tall. Trembling. Carrying lilies.”

“How tiresome.”

“He asked whether you were an angel.”

“I hope you corrected him.”

“I said no angel would put recycling out on the wrong day.”

“Thank you.”

Mrs. Pounce narrowed her eyes. “Are you in trouble, Miss Vail?”

Lucinda considered the question.

A reasonable person might have said no. A less reasonable person might have said only with God. Lucinda, who was hungry and tired and had spent the afternoon persuading a weeping dentist to join a monastery with no forwarding address, sighed.

“I am over-loved.”

Mrs. Pounce sniffed. “That is not a real problem.”

“It becomes real when they climb drainpipes.”

The old woman looked interested despite herself.

“Plural?”

“Recently, yes.”

That night, Lucinda fed from a man called Daniel Pike, and the entire situation became unmanageable.

Daniel was not her usual sort. He was not drunk, grieving, vain, or especially wicked. He was a magician at children’s parties, though not, he insisted, “just children’s parties.” He performed illusions, close-up card work, corporate events, séance recreations, and, according to his website, “bespoke wonder experiences.”

Lucinda met him behind the theatre after a charity gala, where he had made a councillor’s watch appear inside a lemon and somehow convinced six adults this was culture.

He was forty, handsome in a collapsible way, with tired eyes and a red velvet jacket. He smelled faintly of smoke machines and peppermint.

“You look,” he said, seeing her in the alley, “like someone waiting for a secret.”

Lucinda had been intending to feed from the councillor, but the councillor was sick in a planter and therefore lost aesthetic value.

“You must say that to everyone,” she said.

“Only the ones who look expensive.”

“I am expensive.”

“I knew it.”

Daniel smiled. It was a practised smile, but beneath it was exhaustion. That attracted her. Tired people had fewer defences. Entertainers especially. They spent their lives producing amazement in others and then went home to microwaved soup.

She stepped closer.

“Show me a trick.”

He produced a card from the air.

Queen of hearts.

“Predictable,” Lucinda said.

He looked wounded. “It was going to be the three of clubs, but you seemed more like trouble.”

She should have left him alone.

Instead, she laughed.

That was the first error.

The second was taking blood from the throat instead of the wrist. It was quicker, warmer, more intimate, and apparently disastrous in men who already owned capes.

Daniel gasped, sagged against the brick wall, and whispered, “Oh.”

Lucinda caught him neatly.

“You will forget this,” she murmured.

“No,” he said.

She frowned.

Usually there was pliability afterward. A soft-headed acquiescence. The mind like warm wax. But Daniel’s eyes were open and bright.

He touched the punctures at his neck.

“I’ve spent my whole life pretending to do impossible things,” he said. “And then you come along and actually do one.”

Lucinda released him.

“Oh, dear.”

By morning, there was a white rabbit on her doorstep.

It wore a small ribbon. Attached to the ribbon was a card.

For the woman who made wonder real.

Lucinda looked down at the rabbit.

The rabbit looked up at Lucinda.

Mrs. Pounce opened her door across the lane.

“Is that yours?”

“No.”

“It has a waistcoat.”

“I can see that.”

“There’s a man hiding in your bin shed.”

Lucinda closed her eyes.

Daniel emerged from the bin shed holding a bouquet of black tulips and looking as if he had slept in a dustbin for artistic reasons.

“Lucinda,” he said.

Mrs. Pounce’s eyebrows rose.

Lucinda looked at Daniel. Then at the rabbit. Then at Mrs. Pounce.

“Would you believe,” she said, “that this is research for a novel?”

“No,” said Mrs. Pounce.

The rabbit sneezed.

Daniel dropped to one knee.

“Marry me,” he said.

Lucinda stared.

“Absolutely not.”

“I don’t mean legally.”

“That makes it worse.”

“I mean eternally.”

“That makes it much worse.”

Daniel’s face shone with unbearable sincerity. “I know what you are.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Then you should know I am likely to kill you.”

His smile widened.

“What is death,” he said, “beside a love that has seen beyond the veil?”

Lucinda turned to Mrs. Pounce.

“You see my problem.”

Mrs. Pounce folded her arms.

“I begin to.”

Part Two: The League of the Bitten

Lucinda did not murder Daniel Pike immediately, which in retrospect was where the trouble began.

She had rules about murder. Not moral rules exactly, though she had acquired a few of those by accident over the years. Practical rules. Never murder anyone whose absence would be noticed by a committee. Never murder anyone with a distinctive hat. Never murder a man who has recently performed at a charity gala attended by three councillors, a magistrate, and the editor of the Bellweather Gazette.

Daniel, unfortunately, qualified under all three categories. He had friends, bookings, a red velvet jacket, and a website with an active mailing list.

So Lucinda attempted discouragement.

“Daniel,” she said, standing in her doorway while he remained on one knee beside the rabbit, “you are experiencing an entirely chemical delusion caused by blood loss, moonlight and professional vanity.”

“I have never been more lucid.”

“Men always say that at their most deranged.”

“I saw the truth in you.”

“You saw my teeth.”

“Exactly.”

Mrs. Pounce watched from across the lane with a cat under one arm and the expression of a woman seeing community theatre unexpectedly improve.

Lucinda lowered her voice. “Go home. Eat liver. Drink orange juice. Forget me.”

Daniel rose slowly, swaying a little. “I cannot.”

“You can. You are simply refusing.”

“I have been chosen.”

“No, you have been lightly anaemised.”

“I shall prove myself.”

Lucinda shut the door in his face.

Through the letterbox, Daniel said, “I shall wait.”

“You shall not.”

“I shall.”

“You are in my recycling area.”

“For love.”

“You are standing on cardboard.”

“Then cardboard shall be my altar.”

Lucinda opened the door again.

Daniel smiled hopefully.

She sprayed him in the face with a plant mister filled with cold tea.

He blinked.

“What was that?”

“Reality.”

Then she shut the door again.

By afternoon, Daniel had gone. The rabbit remained.

Lucinda named it Treachery and gave it parsley.

For two nights, nothing happened. This was suspicious. Lucinda had learned that silence was rarely a sign of resolution. Silence was merely catastrophe putting on shoes.

On the third night, Mrs. Pounce knocked.

Lucinda answered in a mourning gown from 1902 and rubber gloves.

Mrs. Pounce looked past her into the hall. “Have you a corpse in there?”

“No.”

“Then why the gloves?”

“I was polishing silver.”

“You haven’t any silver.”

“Precisely why it takes so long.”

Mrs. Pounce held out a cream envelope.

“This came through my door by mistake.”

Lucinda took it.

On the front, in purple ink:

MISS LUCINDA VAIL

OR CURRENT IMMORTAL OCCUPANT

“Oh, hell,” Lucinda said.

Mrs. Pounce leaned forward. “Good letter?”

“No.”

“Legal?”

“Worse. Romantic.”

Inside was an invitation.

THE LEAGUE OF THE BITTEN

cordially requests the presence of

OUR LADY OF THE NIGHT

at a private gathering in her honour

Below that was a drawing of Lucinda, inaccurate but flattering, surrounded by roses, bats, and what appeared to be muscular cherubs with puncture wounds.

At the bottom:

Hosted by Daniel Pike, Master of Wonder

The Old Aquarium, Bellweather Pier

Midnight

Mrs. Pounce read it over her shoulder.

“League?”

Lucinda closed her eyes.

“No.”

“How many are in a league?”

“Too many.”

“You’ve been busy.”

“I have been hungry.”

“At your age, you should know the difference.”

Lucinda opened one eye. “Mrs. Pounce, I am very old, very tired, and currently being courted by a magician with a rabbit. I cannot also endure judgement.”

The old woman sniffed. “Then avoid spectacle.”

Lucinda looked at the invitation.

The Old Aquarium had been closed since the seventies, when a moral panic involving a fraudulent mermaid and several missing pensioners ended its public usefulness. It sat at the far end of the pier, damp and glass-roofed, used occasionally for storage, ghost tours and illegal poker.

It was exactly the sort of place a lovestruck magician would rent for a theatrical mistake.

“I must go,” Lucinda said.

Mrs. Pounce’s eyes sharpened. “Why?”

“To prevent this becoming worse.”

“It is already called the League of the Bitten.”

“Worse is a deep well.”

At midnight, Lucinda arrived at the Old Aquarium wearing a black coat, dark glasses and the expression of a woman prepared to commit administrative violence.

The pier creaked under the wind. Below, the sea battered the supports with the theatrical spite of an understudy denied a leading role. The town lights blurred in the rain behind her. Ahead, the Old Aquarium glowed blue from within.

A banner had been hung above the entrance.

WELCOME, BELOVED MONSTER.

Lucinda stared at it for a long moment.

Then she took out a pen and crossed out BELOVED.

Inside, the aquarium had been transformed.

Candles stood in seashells. Red cloth covered the cracked fish tanks. A papier-mâché moon hung from the ceiling. Someone had placed cushions in a circle around the central pool, which had not contained water for decades and now contained seventeen people in varying states of romantic collapse.

Lucinda recognised nearly all of them.

Oliver, the cemetery man, wearing a cravat and holding a sheaf of poems.

Margot, with peacock feathers in her hat.

The butcher, who waved shyly.

The burglar, wearing a suit that did not belong to him.

The magistrate from Bath, barefoot for reasons Lucinda chose not to investigate.

A nurse from Worthing.

A cab driver.

A young man she had fed from during a power cut and immediately forgotten.

The dentist she had sent to a monastery.

“Oh,” Lucinda said. “You came back.”

The dentist looked ashamed. “The monks were emotionally unavailable.”

Daniel Pike stood at the far end, dressed in full stage magician attire: red velvet jacket, black trousers, silk waistcoat, and a cape lined with stars. Treachery the rabbit sat on a velvet cushion beside him, apparently promoted.

Daniel spread his arms.

“My friends. She comes.”

Everyone turned.

Seventeen faces lit with adoration, resentment, longing and the unmistakable pallor of people who should have eaten more spinach.

Lucinda took one step backward.

Margot stood. “Darling.”

“Do not darling me.”

Oliver clutched his poems. “You have haunted my every dawn.”

“You live in a basement flat, Oliver. Dawn hardly troubles you.”

The butcher lifted a covered tray. “I brought black pudding.”

“That is thoughtful and obscene.”

Daniel raised a hand for silence.

“We are not here to accuse you, Lucinda.”

“Excellent. Then I shall leave.”

“We are here to understand the pattern.”

Lucinda narrowed her eyes. “What pattern?”

“That each of us was touched by darkness and remade by love.”

“No. Each of you was bitten by me and became intolerable.”

A murmur passed through the group.

The burglar looked hurt. “I polished the candlesticks.”

“You stole them first.”

“As a former self.”

“You stole them again last Tuesday.”

“As a test of your attention.”

The nurse from Worthing stood, arms folded. She was practical, sharp-faced, and therefore more dangerous than the poets. “You do realise what you’ve done to people?”

“Yes. I made you all tremendously annoying.”

“You made us dependent.”

That quietened the room.

Lucinda looked at her.

The nurse continued. “Not on blood. On you. On the feeling after. You bite, and for one minute everything feels meaningful. Then you vanish, and the world becomes ordinary again.”

The magistrate nodded solemnly. “I returned to Bath a hollow man.”

“You were already in local government.”

Daniel stepped down from the dais.

“We believe the bond can be formalised.”

Lucinda stared. “Formalised?”

“A rotation.”

“No.”

“A devotional calendar.”

“No.”

“Shared access.”

“Absolutely not.”

Oliver raised a hand. “I have prepared a sonnet cycle on the theme of equitable longing.”

“I will kill you first.”

The group reacted badly to that, though not badly enough to leave.

Daniel’s expression softened.

“You are frightened.”

“I am surrounded by anaemic obsessives in a derelict aquarium.”

“You fear being loved.”

“I fear being organised.”

The nurse said, “We are not your victims.”

Lucinda glanced around the room.

That, inconveniently, was not entirely true. They were victims. They were also adults, fools, romantics, opportunists, and in two cases people currently violating restraining orders issued by their own spouses. Victimhood, Lucinda had discovered, did not purify anyone. It merely made the paperwork more complex.

“What do you want?” she asked.

Daniel smiled.

“One night each.”

Lucinda blinked.

The butcher nodded eagerly. “Monthly would be fine.”

“Speak for yourself,” Margot said. “I have a villa emotionally prepared.”

The burglar cleared his throat. “I’ve drawn up a timetable.”

Lucinda saw, on a nearby table, a corkboard covered with string, names, moon phases and little red pins.

For one terrible moment she felt faint.

“I have become a allotment,” she whispered.

Daniel approached, hand over heart.

“No. A queen.”

“A timeshare.”

“A mystery.”

“A timeshare with teeth.”

Then the aquarium doors burst open.

Mrs. Pounce entered in a raincoat, followed by three cats and carrying a large handbag.

Everyone turned.

Lucinda stared. “What are you doing here?”

“Following you.”

“You are eighty-one.”

“And quiet.”

Mrs. Pounce surveyed the room with deep disapproval. “This is worse than the Methodist whist drive.”

Daniel bowed. “Madam, you stand among souls touched by eternal passion.”

Mrs. Pounce looked at him. “You look like a curtain in a mid-range hotel.”

The butcher laughed before he could stop himself.

Daniel flushed.

Lucinda stepped toward Mrs. Pounce. “You should not be here.”

“Clearly someone sensible should.”

The nurse looked at her. “Who are you?”

“Her neighbour.”

Oliver whispered, “A familiar.”

Mrs. Pounce hit him on the shin with her handbag.

“I am not a familiar. I am a ratepayer.”

Lucinda almost smiled.

Then the young man from the power cut said, “Why does she get to be near you?”

The room changed.

Small jealousies, previously held in place by the absurdity of the gathering, began to rise. Margot looked at Daniel. Daniel looked at the nurse. The butcher looked at the burglar. The burglar looked at the candlesticks, which he had somehow brought. Oliver looked at everyone with the wounded alarm of a poet discovering other people had feelings too.

The League of the Bitten had mistaken common obsession for solidarity. Now proximity to Lucinda reintroduced hierarchy.

“Ah,” Lucinda said softly. “There it is.”

Daniel lifted his hands. “Friends—”

“Don’t friends us,” Margot snapped. “You sent the invitations. You signed yourself Master of Wonder.”

“It is my professional title.”

“You put yourself nearest her on the rotation,” said the nurse.

“For administrative purposes.”

The butcher frowned at the corkboard. “Why am I after the dentist?”

“Because your availability was irregular.”

“I close at five.”

The burglar had begun removing red pins from the board and placing them in his pocket.

Lucinda watched chaos bloom.

It was beautiful.

Not morally. Strategically.

Mrs. Pounce leaned close. “You’re enjoying this.”

“I am observing a natural correction.”

“They may kill each other.”

“One hopes only socially.”

But then Daniel produced a knife.

It was not a theatrical knife. Lucinda knew theatrical knives. She had been stabbed with one in 1963 during an amateur production of Dracula and considered it among the more insulting evenings of her death. Daniel’s knife was short, bright and real.

“Enough,” he said.

The room froze.

Lucinda sighed.

“Oh, Daniel.”

His face had changed. The soft wonder had curdled into something brittle.

“I found you,” he said. “I understood you.”

“You found my neck and understood nothing.”

“I made them see.”

“You made a club.”

“A church.”

“A support group for the romantically infected.”

His hand tightened around the knife.

“You mock what you create.”

“No,” Lucinda said. “I flee what I create. Mockery is incidental.”

Oliver stepped forward. “Lucinda, come with me. I can protect—”

Daniel slashed at him.

Not deeply, but enough.

Oliver cried out and fell backward into Margot, who struck the butcher, who dropped the black pudding, which startled Treachery, who leapt from the cushion and disappeared into the central pool.

The cats gave chase.

What followed was later described by the Bellweather Gazette as “a disturbance at the old pier site involving theatre enthusiasts.”

This was inaccurate but not entirely unfair.

The butcher punched Daniel. The burglar stole the knife. The magistrate attempted mediation and was hit by a candlestick. Margot climbed onto a fish tank and declared herself the only one who had ever truly understood Lucinda’s solitude. The nurse tried to stop Oliver bleeding and shouted for someone to call an ambulance. Three cats pursued a rabbit through a forest of devotional cushions.

Mrs. Pounce struck Daniel twice with her handbag.

Lucinda, seeing the situation had passed beyond discouragement and into farce, did the only sensible thing.

She turned off the lights.

Vampires could see in the dark.

Besotted humans could not.

The aquarium became screams, collisions, accusations and the sound of glassware meeting its destiny. Lucinda moved through them lightly, plucking keys, phones, knives and emotional leverage as she went. She guided the nurse to the exit because the nurse had been correct and therefore deserved survival. She pushed the magistrate into a chair. She tripped the burglar on principle.

Then she found Daniel.

He was on the floor near the empty pool, breathing hard, one hand pressed to his nose where Mrs. Pounce had modified its shape.

“Lucinda,” he gasped. “Don’t leave me.”

She crouched beside him.

In the dark, without staging, he looked small. Not magical. Not chosen. A tired man in a ridiculous jacket who had mistaken astonishment for destiny.

“I should have killed you in the alley,” she said.

He swallowed. “Would you have missed me?”

“No.”

The honest answer broke something in him.

For a moment, Lucinda felt almost sorry.

Then he whispered, “Liar.”

And lunged.

The stolen knife was not in his hand. A hatpin was. Long, silver-plated, taken perhaps from Margot’s peacock hat. Not enough to kill a vampire in any respectable mythology, but enough to hurt like bureaucracy.

It went into Lucinda’s shoulder.

She hissed.

The room seemed to notice.

Even in darkness, obsession knew the sound of its object wounded.

“Lucinda?” Margot cried.

“Who touched her?” shouted the butcher.

Daniel tried to rise.

Lucinda took him by the throat and lifted him one-handed.

Everyone heard his feet leave the floor.

Silence spread outward.

Mrs. Pounce’s voice cut through it.

“Miss Vail.”

Lucinda did not look at her.

Daniel choked, clawing at her wrist. His pulse hammered under her fingers. It would be easy. Easier than moving. Easier than regret. A quick twist. A drop. One less lover. One less problem.

Novel ways to get rid of them, she thought.

There was always the oldest way.

Daniel’s eyes bulged. Still adoring. Still furious. Still somehow expecting the violence to mean intimacy.

Lucinda hated him for that.

Then she let him fall.

He hit the floor, gasping.

“Do not,” she said, voice low enough that the room bent around it, “ever mistake my refusal to kill you for affection.”

No one moved.

Lucinda stood, pulled the hatpin from her shoulder, and snapped it in half.

Then the emergency lights came on.

The old aquarium appeared in full disgrace: broken glass, scattered candles, blood on Oliver’s sleeve, black pudding smeared across the floor, Margot standing on a tank like a shipwrecked duchess, the magistrate wearing a cushion as a hat, Mrs. Pounce holding Treachery by the waistcoat, and seventeen pale fools staring at Lucinda as if terror had only deepened the romance.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said.

The butcher whispered, “Magnificent.”

Lucinda covered her face with both hands.

Mrs. Pounce approached and handed her the rabbit.

“You need a better system.”

Lucinda looked over her fingers at the room.

The League of the Bitten looked back, wounded, devoted, jealous and very much not gone.

“Yes,” she said.

Outside, sirens approached the pier.

Daniel began to laugh.

Not happily.

Not sanely.

Lucinda looked down at him and understood that the evening had not ended anything.

It had escalated.

The League now had blood, grievance, mythology, and minutes from its first meeting.

That made it, in practical terms, a religion.

Part Three: Several Novel Solutions, All Bad

The police arrived seven minutes after the rabbit escaped and three minutes after Lucinda realised the League of the Bitten had become legally inconvenient.

That was very fast for Bellweather-on-Sea, where official response times depended on weather, parking, and whether the sergeant had already taken his boots off.

Two constables entered the Old Aquarium with torches, rain on their helmets, and the wary resignation of men who had expected teenagers and found theatre.

“What’s going on here?” said the first.

Lucinda opened her mouth.

Seventeen people answered at once.

“Religious meeting.”

“Book club.”

“Private grief circle.”

“Magic rehearsal.”

“Blood cult.”

That last was Oliver.

Everyone turned on him.

“What?” he said, holding his bandaged arm. “It felt honest.”

The first constable looked at Lucinda. He was young, square-jawed, and already regretting the career. His torch beam found the blood on her shoulder, then Daniel sprawled on the floor, then the black pudding, then Mrs. Pounce holding a rabbit in a waistcoat.

“Madam,” he said carefully, “are you injured?”

“No.”

“You appear to be bleeding.”

“I often appear many things.”

The second constable whispered, “Is that Councillor Pike from the gala?”

“Magician Pike,” Daniel croaked from the floor. “And yes.”

Lucinda sighed. “He is not a councillor. He merely looks morally compromised.”

The first constable took out his notebook.

That was when Mrs. Pounce stepped forward.

“This is a rehearsal,” she said.

Lucinda stared at her.

“A rehearsal?” said the constable.

“For a promenade performance.”

The constable looked around the shattered aquarium. “What performance?”

Mrs. Pounce did not blink.

“Love’s Crimson Folly.”

Oliver made a strangled sound of appreciation.

Lucinda said, very quietly, “Do not help.”

Mrs. Pounce continued. “Experimental. Immersive. Poorly funded.”

“That explains the black pudding,” said the butcher.

“It does not,” said the constable.

Daniel sat up, clutching his throat. “I wish to press charges.”

Lucinda looked at him.

Daniel looked back, then reconsidered several possible futures.

“Emotionally,” he added.

“You cannot press emotional charges,” said the second constable.

“Not yet,” said Oliver, darkly.

The police took names. This consumed nearly forty minutes, mostly because half the League gave false ones out of romantic instinct and the burglar gave three out of habit. The magistrate attempted to explain the legal basis for voluntary nocturnal assembly and was asked to sit down. Margot claimed diplomatic immunity on behalf of Sicily, which was not hers to claim. Daniel insisted Lucinda had assaulted him with supernatural indifference.

The constable wrote: possible intoxication.

In the end, everyone was told to go home.

This was not justice, but it was Bellweather.

Lucinda walked back through the rain with Mrs. Pounce, Treachery tucked under the old woman’s arm like a disgraced nobleman.

“You lied to the police,” Lucinda said.

“Yes.”

“Very fluently.”

“I chaired the residents’ association for eighteen years. The police are nothing.”

Behind them, the League dispersed in wet clusters. Daniel was escorted by the nurse, who had the practical expression of a woman deciding whether compassion required a restraining order. Oliver limped after Margot, reciting lines under his breath. The butcher carried his ruined tray with priestly sorrow.

Lucinda stopped at the end of the pier.

“This cannot continue.”

Mrs. Pounce adjusted her grip on the rabbit. “Then stop biting people.”

“I would if I could.”

“Eat animals.”

Lucinda looked at Treachery.

Treachery looked back with the serene entitlement of prey under diplomatic protection.

“No.”

“Blood bank?”

“Too cold.”

“Hospital?”

“Too guarded.”

“Politicians?”

“Too rich.”

Mrs. Pounce considered. “Estate agents?”

“I have standards.”

“Then you need a proper deterrent.”

Lucinda turned. “Such as?”

“Marriage.”

Lucinda stared.

“Mrs. Pounce, I am already undead. Must you also make me wish for oblivion?”

“Not real marriage. A decoy. These people want what they think is exclusive access. Remove the possibility.”

Lucinda thought about that.

It had elegance. It had malice. It had the comforting falsity of all good social arrangements.

“I would require a husband.”

“Or wife.”

“Either would require a pulse.”

“Not necessarily.”

Lucinda slowly smiled.

By noon the following day, she had exhumed Sir Barnaby Vail.

Not from a grave. That would have been dramatic and muddy. Sir Barnaby had been stored in a cedar travelling trunk in Lucinda’s cellar since 1954, when he had failed to survive a duel with a hatstand. He had been Lucinda’s third husband, legally speaking, although the marriage had lasted only eleven months and the final four were spent arguing over curtains.

He was not alive.

He was not exactly dead either.

Sir Barnaby belonged to that category of aristocratic Englishman who had been emotionally deceased long before the body followed. Vampirism had taken poorly in him. He had risen twice, complained about soup, and then entered what Lucinda called “a constitutional torpor.”

She opened the trunk.

Sir Barnaby lay inside in evening dress, with a carnation pinned to his lapel and an expression of faint social disapproval.

“Barnaby,” she said. “Wake up. I need you to be tedious.”

One eyelid opened.

“How very like you,” he whispered.

Lucinda dressed him in a better suit, powdered the greenish areas, and installed him in the drawing room beneath a portrait of herself painted by a man she had later eaten for unrelated reasons.

Mrs. Pounce inspected him.

“He smells of cupboards.”

“He is nobility. That is almost the same thing.”

“Can he stand?”

“Only on principle.”

Sir Barnaby opened both eyes. “Who is this small prosecutor?”

“My neighbour.”

“She has the aspect of a woman who boils cutlery.”

“I like him,” Mrs. Pounce said.

Lucinda announced her engagement that evening.

Not publicly. Public announcements attracted paperwork. Instead, she allowed the information to leak through channels most likely to reach the League: the butcher’s shop, the theatre bar, the charity shop where Margot bought hats, and Mrs. Pounce’s apparently bottomless network of widows.

By midnight, the League had gathered outside Lucinda’s house.

All seventeen of them.

Plus two new people.

Lucinda opened the upstairs window.

“No.”

Daniel stepped forward, neck wrapped in a scarf, eyes fever-bright.

“Who is he?”

“My fiancé.”

“You cannot be engaged.”

“I can. I have been several times. It is like measles. One survives.”

Oliver clutched his poems. “Does he understand you?”

“Barnaby understands very little. It is his finest quality.”

Margot pointed upward. “Show him to us.”

Lucinda looked over her shoulder.

Sir Barnaby sat in an armchair by the fire, drinking what appeared to be port but was in fact varnish.

“Barnaby,” she called. “Wave at the mob.”

He lifted two fingers without turning.

The League gasped.

The butcher whispered, “He’s so pale.”

“He is from Wiltshire,” Lucinda said.

Daniel’s face hardened. “This is a trick.”

“Yes. And yet it has emotional force.”

The plan worked for twelve minutes.

Then Margot began crying. Oliver challenged Barnaby to a duel in verse. The burglar attempted to scale the drainpipe and was pulled down by the nurse. The butcher offered to cater the wedding. Daniel declared the engagement invalid on metaphysical grounds. One of the new people, a harpist Lucinda vaguely remembered from 1988, asked whether there would be bridesmaids.

Mrs. Pounce appeared at Lucinda’s side.

“Marriage is not enough.”

“I gathered.”

Sir Barnaby called from the drawing room, “If there is to be a wedding, I refuse lilies.”

Lucinda closed the window.

The next solution was repulsion.

Lucinda reasoned that adoration relied on glamour, mystery, distance, and favourable lighting. Therefore, the antidote was overexposure. She would make herself unromantic.

It was a sound theory.

She began with ugliness.

For three nights she wore a brown cardigan, sensible shoes, and a wig of such aggressive beige that even Mrs. Pounce recoiled.

“You look like a deputy headmistress who confiscates imagination,” she said.

“Excellent.”

Lucinda walked through town, allowing herself to be seen under fluorescent lights. She complained about parking. She purchased bran flakes. She discussed guttering. She stood in the post office queue and loudly compared energy tariffs.

The League followed at a respectful distance, taking notes.

“She moves among the mundane,” Oliver whispered. “A goddess disguised as boredom.”

“She buys bran flakes for a reason,” said the butcher.

Daniel nodded gravely. “Perhaps bran is sacred.”

The plan failed.

Lucinda escalated.

She invited the League to a slideshow evening entitled Drainage Through the Ages. For three hours she displayed photographs of cellar damp, pipe corrosion, Victorian waste systems, and one regrettable sequence on root ingress. Mrs. Pounce provided weak tea. Sir Barnaby slept upright.

At the end, the young man from the power cut stood and said, “I feel closer to your foundations.”

Lucinda dismissed them all with a fly swatter.

The next solution was substitution.

If the League wanted mystery, Lucinda would give them too much mystery. She hired three actresses from a seaside murder-mystery company and dressed them as alternate Lucindas: one tragic, one imperious, one vaguely Transylvanian. They were instructed to appear at different locations around town and receive adoration until the League became confused and emotionally bankrupt.

This worked beautifully for one evening.

By the second, Daniel had created factions.

The League split into Traditionalists, Reformists, Barnaby Sceptics, and those devoted to “Lucinda in the green hat,” who was actually a woman called Bev from Eastbourne with a tax bill and remarkable cheekbones.

The Reformists declared all Lucindas equally valid.

The Traditionalists denounced them as heretics.

The Barnaby Sceptics attempted to interview Sir Barnaby through the letterbox.

Bev, sensing opportunity, began charging for blessings.

“Your lovers are monetising you,” Mrs. Pounce said.

“They are not my lovers.”

“They have formed denominations.”

Lucinda peered through the curtain at Daniel, who stood in the lane distributing pamphlets titled Against False Fangs.

“I should have murdered one early,” she said.

“That is often how dictatorships begin.”

“I was thinking more of gardening.”

Then the first murder happened without her.

The body was found in the bandstand at dawn.

Not Daniel. Not Oliver. Not the butcher. A man Lucinda had nearly forgotten: Gregory Vale, retired dentist, failed monk, devotional moderate. He lay on the bandstand floor in a white shirt, arms arranged dramatically, a red ribbon tied around his throat.

There was no blood.

Not a drop.

The Bellweather Gazette called it “a macabre seafront mystery.”

The League called it “the first sacrifice.”

Lucinda called it, after seeing the photograph in the paper, “extremely bad news.”

Mrs. Pounce read over her shoulder.

“Was it you?”

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Mrs. Pounce, I may occasionally misplace a conscience, but I remember where I put corpses.”

The police came to Lucinda’s house that afternoon.

This time, they had questions. Gregory’s phone contained messages from Daniel, Oliver, Margot, the nurse, the butcher, the burglar, the magistrate, and three people claiming to be Lucinda. His notebook contained several references to “the Lady,” “the bite,” and “the rotation of longing.” His last known location had been outside Lucinda’s lane, where he had been seen holding flowers and arguing with a woman in a green hat.

Bev had fled to Eastbourne.

Lucinda sat in her drawing room while Detective Sergeant Harrow took notes. Harrow was a compact woman with tired eyes and the alarming habit of listening to answers.

“You knew Mr. Vale?”

“Slightly.”

“He had your address.”

“Many people do. I am admired locally for my shutters.”

“He mentioned you repeatedly in his diary.”

“Dentistry is lonely.”

Harrow looked at her.

Lucinda looked back.

Sir Barnaby sat motionless in the corner, pretending to be a decorative corpse. For once, he was excellent.

Harrow’s gaze moved to him.

“And this is?”

“My fiancé.”

“Is he all right?”

“No.”

Barnaby opened one eye. “I am aristocracy, Sergeant. Health is for tradesmen.”

Harrow stared for a fraction longer than politeness required, then returned to Lucinda.

“Several people seem to believe you are the centre of a romantic or religious group.”

“I cannot be held responsible for the imaginative poverty of others.”

“Can you account for your movements last night?”

“Yes.”

“Will you?”

“No.”

Mrs. Pounce, sitting beside the fireplace with Treachery on her lap, coughed sharply.

Lucinda sighed.

“I was here.”

“With witnesses?”

Mrs. Pounce raised a hand. “Me.”

Harrow turned. “All night?”

“Until three.”

“And after three?”

“I slept.”

“Did Miss Vail leave?”

“No.”

“How can you be sure?”

Mrs. Pounce’s face became flinty. “Because if she had left, my cats would have followed. They admire wrongdoing.”

Harrow wrote that down, perhaps because she had given up hope.

When the police left, Lucinda locked the door and turned to Mrs. Pounce.

“You are enjoying this too much.”

“A little.”

“Someone killed Gregory.”

“Yes.”

“And drained him.”

“Yes.”

“And arranged him like an amateur opera.”

“Yes.”

Lucinda paced the drawing room. “It was not Daniel. Too theatrical, but insufficiently self-centred. Not Oliver. He would have left a stanza. Not the butcher. He would not waste blood. Not Margot unless the ribbon was imported.”

Sir Barnaby stirred. “Have you considered the rabbit?”

Treachery twitched his nose.

“No,” Lucinda said.

Mrs. Pounce looked thoughtful. “What about the nurse?”

Lucinda stopped.

The nurse from Worthing had been different. Practical. Angry. Less adoring than the others. She had named dependence before anyone else did. She had guided Oliver out during the aquarium chaos. She had cared for Daniel afterward.

Caring people, Lucinda knew, were dangerous when they decided care had failed.

That evening, Lucinda visited the nurse.

Her name was Helen Voss. She lived in a small flat above a pharmacy, with clean windows, labelled cupboards, and a shoe rack that suggested psychological discipline. She opened the door before Lucinda knocked.

“I wondered when you’d come.”

Lucinda smiled. “That is rarely a safe sentence.”

Helen let her in.

The flat smelled of antiseptic, lavender, and iron tablets. On the kitchen table were files. Notebooks. Press cuttings. Photographs. Names.

The League.

Lucinda’s victims.

Helen’s face was pale but composed.

“You have a real gift for creating damage,” she said.

“I prefer to think of it as accidental devotion.”

“Gregory is dead.”

“I did notice.”

Helen’s eyes hardened. “You think this is funny.”

“I think many things are funny until they become corpses.”

“Then perhaps you should have stopped before the corpse.”

Lucinda said nothing.

That was rare enough to alter the room.

Helen continued. “Do you know what it felt like? After you bit me?”

“Unfortunately, people keep telling me.”

“No. They tell you the romantic version because that is what the bite leaves them with. Meaning. Longing. The sense that ordinary life has been a sheet pulled away. But I know addiction. I see it on wards. I know the first high lies. I know craving when it puts on holy clothes.”

Lucinda watched her carefully.

Helen opened one of the files.

“I started tracking the others after the aquarium. Gregory was frightened. He wanted out.”

“Out?”

“Of the League. Of you. Of the feeling.”

Lucinda looked down at Gregory’s photograph.

In life, he had been irritating. In death, he looked suddenly specific. A man who had once fixed teeth, failed at monks, and perhaps wanted ordinary misery back.

Helen said, “He was going to talk to the police.”

Lucinda closed the file.

“Who knew?”

“Daniel. Oliver. Margot. The butcher. Me.”

“That narrows nothing. You people are appallingly communal.”

Helen went to the sink, filled a glass of water, and drank it in one controlled motion.

“There’s something else.”

“Of course there is.”

“Gregory had puncture marks.”

Lucinda’s expression changed.

Helen noticed.

“Not yours?”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“I am an artist.”

“Of puncture wounds?”

“Among other things.”

Helen took a photograph from the file and placed it on the table.

Lucinda examined it.

Two marks at the throat.

Wrong spacing. Wrong angle. Ragged. Amateur, but not human. Not knife work. Not a syringe. Something had bitten Gregory and taken all his blood.

Lucinda felt a coldness that had nothing to do with death.

There was another vampire in Bellweather-on-Sea.

Or something pretending to be one badly.

Behind her, Helen said, “Did you make someone?”

Lucinda turned slowly.

“No.”

“Would you tell me if you had?”

“No. But in this case, still no.”

Helen’s face was unreadable.

Lucinda picked up the photograph. “Who else has seen this?”

“The police. They think it’s staging.”

“They would. It has staging.”

“Daniel has seen it.”

Lucinda closed her eyes.

Daniel with evidence of another bite. Daniel with a murdered rival. Daniel with a League already half-convinced suffering was sacrament.

The situation rearranged itself into a much worse shape.

“He will think Gregory was chosen,” Lucinda said.

Helen nodded.

“Or replaced,” Lucinda continued.

“Or that there is a second beloved monster.”

They looked at each other.

Then came shouting from the street below.

Lucinda went to the window.

A crowd had gathered outside the pharmacy.

The League.

Not all of them, but enough. Daniel stood at the front in his red velvet jacket, holding a candle. Oliver beside him. Margot in mourning black. The butcher with a ceremonial cleaver that was, Lucinda hoped, symbolic.

Behind them was a banner.

GREGORY ROSE FIRST.

Lucinda read it twice.

“No,” she said.

Helen came to the window.

Daniel looked up and saw them.

His face lit with grief, revelation, and catastrophic purpose.

“Lucinda!” he cried. “We understand now!”

“No, you don’t,” she muttered.

He raised both arms.

“Love is not enough. We must become worthy of the bite!”

Oliver began chanting something that rhymed moon with wound, proving again that death improved nobody’s taste.

Helen whispered, “What are they doing?”

Lucinda watched as the League knelt in the wet street.

The butcher lifted his cleaver.

Margot extended her wrist.

Daniel smiled up at Lucinda.

“They’re escalating,” she said.

Helen grabbed her medical bag.

Lucinda opened the window and shouted, “Everyone stop being symbolic immediately!”

Nobody did.

The cleaver came down.

Not on Margot’s wrist.

On the butcher’s own palm.

Blood spilled bright onto the pavement.

The crowd gasped.

Lucinda smelled it.

So did something else.

Across the street, in the alley beside the closed bakery, a figure moved.

Tall. Thin. Hat low. Face hidden.

Then the smell came: not old vampire, not living human, but something between. Damp velvet. Rotten roses. Stolen blood.

The figure lifted its head toward the League.

Lucinda’s dead heart, which usually maintained a professional silence, seemed to knock once against her ribs.

“Oh,” she said.

Helen stared. “What is it?”

Lucinda watched the figure smile with too many borrowed teeth.

“I suspect,” she said, “it is my problem getting ideas.”

Part Four: Murder Most Foul

Lucinda had always believed that if a vampire saw another vampire across a rain-slick street while a group of romantically deranged admirers knelt in ritual formation around an injured butcher, one should first establish seniority.

It prevented confusion.

“Excuse me,” she called down from Helen’s window. “Are you local?”

The figure in the alley looked up.

The League went silent.

Even Daniel stopped looking meaningful.

The stranger stepped into the streetlight.

He was tall in the wrong way, as if height had been added after manufacture. His coat hung black and wet around him. His skin had the greyish polish of old mushrooms. Beneath the brim of his hat, his mouth curved in a smile built from other people’s teeth.

Lucinda winced.

“Borrower,” she said.

Helen glanced at her. “A what?”

“A vulgarity.”

The stranger bowed.

“Lady Vail.”

Lucinda stiffened.

Nobody respectable had called her that in decades.

Daniel gasped. “He knows her title.”

“I have several titles,” Lucinda shouted. “Most were clerical errors.”

The stranger’s smile widened. “I have followed your work with great admiration.”

“Oh, that’s always bad.”

He moved closer to the kneeling League. The butcher clutched his bleeding palm. Margot looked between Lucinda and the stranger with the thrilled confusion of a woman discovering adultery in a religion she had just joined.

Daniel stood slowly.

“Who are you?”

The stranger turned his borrowed smile on him.

“My name is Silas Grin.”

Lucinda groaned.

Mrs. Pounce, who had arrived below with three cats and the expression of a woman unwilling to miss municipal collapse, called up, “Is that his real name?”

“No,” Lucinda said. “No one is named Silas Grin unless raised by pamphlets.”

Silas touched one hand to his chest.

“I am an admirer.”

“Then queue with the rest,” said Margot, recovering territorial instinct before good sense.

Silas looked at her.

Margot stepped back.

That was his gift, Lucinda saw. Not glamour. Not exactly. He had a hunger that impersonated invitation. Where Lucinda’s bite caused adoration by accident, Silas cultivated it as method. He did not want lovers. He wanted congregations. Empty people, cut people, people already softened by longing. Her League was not merely absurd to him.

It was prepared soil.

Daniel stepped between Silas and the butcher.

It was a stupid gesture, therefore sincere.

“These people are under my protection,” Daniel said.

Lucinda leaned out of the window. “Daniel, you are wearing theatre velvet and recently lost a fight to an elderly woman’s handbag. Reconsider hierarchy.”

Silas placed a pale hand on Daniel’s shoulder.

Daniel froze.

“Oh,” Silas said softly. “You are the first fool.”

Daniel trembled.

Lucinda saw it happen. Silas did not bite him. He did not need to. He merely pressed against the wound already there: Daniel’s need to be chosen, to be central, to turn humiliation into destiny. Daniel’s face filled with light of the worst kind.

“You understand,” Daniel whispered.

“I understand everything,” Silas said.

“Liar,” said Mrs. Pounce.

Silas looked at her.

Three cats arched their backs simultaneously.

Mrs. Pounce lifted her handbag.

“I have met men like you at planning meetings.”

That broke the spell slightly.

Lucinda used the moment.

She jumped from Helen’s first-floor window.

This was less elegant than intended. Her coat caught on the sill, one boot struck the pharmacy sign, and she landed in a puddle beside Daniel with a splash that ruined the dignity of the undead. Still, she arrived upright, which was the important part.

Helen came down the stairs by conventional means because she was alive and therefore burdened with cartilage.

Lucinda stood between Silas and the League.

“Mine,” she said.

The word left a silence behind it.

Daniel stared at her.

The League inhaled collectively.

Mrs. Pounce looked disappointed.

Lucinda closed her eyes.

“Not romantically.”

Too late. The damage was done.

Oliver whispered, “She claims us.”

“I claim liability,” Lucinda snapped. “There is a difference.”

Silas laughed. It was a dry, papery sound, like old love letters burning.

“You made them hungry for you, and now you object when something hungrier arrives.”

“I made a minor medical error.”

“You made a church.”

“Daniel made a church.”

Daniel straightened, almost proud.

Lucinda pointed at him. “Do not preen. You are evidence.”

Silas’s gaze moved across the League.

“Look at them. Each bitten once. Each abandoned. Each dreaming of blood, meaning, return. You scattered desire through them and walked away.”

Lucinda disliked him because he was wrong in detail and correct in structure.

Helen stepped beside her. “Gregory Vale. Did you kill him?”

Silas smiled.

“I completed him.”

The League murmured.

Lucinda said, “You drained a dentist in a bandstand and tied a ribbon round his throat. Completion was not the theme.”

“He wanted to rise.”

“He wanted attention. That is not the same thing.”

Daniel turned to Silas. “Gregory rose?”

“No,” Lucinda said.

Silas tilted his head. “Not yet.”

Everyone looked toward the seafront.

From the direction of the bandstand came a sound.

A groan.

Not a theatrical groan. Not Oliver rehearsing. Something wet, confused and displeased. A second later, Gregory Vale appeared at the end of the street.

He was walking badly.

This was not because he was undead, although that contributed. It was because someone had buried him in formal shoes belonging to a man with smaller feet.

His shirt was still white. His ribbon remained at his throat. His face had the resentful vacancy of a man summoned back from death before breakfast.

The League gasped.

The butcher crossed himself with the hand not bleeding.

Margot whispered, “Gregory?”

Gregory opened his mouth.

A small amount of grave dirt fell out.

Then he said, “Is there tea?”

Lucinda covered her face.

“Oh, this is beneath everyone.”

Daniel fell to his knees.

“He rose first.”

Gregory blinked. “Did I?”

Silas spread his arms. “Behold the new blood.”

Gregory looked down at himself. “I feel unwell.”

“You are blessed.”

“I think I’ve been burgled.”

The burglar said, “Not by me.”

Lucinda walked to Gregory, took his chin, and examined his eyes.

No intelligence of the old kind. No stable hunger. No proper death. Silas had not made a vampire. He had made a revenant out of stolen blood and bad technique. Gregory was undead in the same sense that cold toast was cuisine.

“Gregory,” Lucinda said, “do you remember what happened?”

He frowned. “I was in the bandstand. I had decided to leave the group. Daniel had sent another poem. Then there was a man with a hat.”

Silas’s smile tightened.

Gregory continued. “He said I was special.”

“Common predatory opening,” said Helen.

“Then he bit me. Then there was shouting from somewhere far away. Then I woke up in a drawer.”

“A morgue drawer?” Helen asked.

“I didn’t enquire.”

Daniel stared at Silas.

“You said he rose.”

“He did.”

“You killed him.”

“I liberated him from ordinary limitation.”

Gregory raised a finger. “I object to liberation without consultation.”

The League began to shift.

Silas sensed it. His smile sharpened. Rain slid down his face without making him look wet, which Lucinda found pretentious.

“You are weak,” he said to Lucinda. “You bind them by accident and free them out of laziness. I can give them order.”

“You can give them infection.”

“I can give them purpose.”

“Purpose is what scoundrels offer when they lack wages.”

Silas moved then.

Fast.

Not toward Lucinda.

Toward the butcher.

Blood still ran from the butcher’s palm, bright in the rain. Silas seized his wrist and drew it toward his mouth.

The butcher screamed.

Lucinda hit Silas with the rabbit.

This was not planned.

Treachery had escaped Mrs. Pounce during Gregory’s entrance and chosen the worst possible route to freedom, namely past Lucinda’s feet. She caught him by reflex and swung. The rabbit, being plump, indignant and waistcoated, struck Silas across the face with a sound like a cushion slapped against a coffin.

Silas staggered.

Everyone froze.

Treachery looked offended.

Mrs. Pounce shouted, “Don’t damage the rabbit!”

Lucinda lowered Treachery.

Silas touched his face.

“You struck me with livestock.”

“Companion animal,” Mrs. Pounce corrected.

Helen grabbed the butcher and dragged him back.

The League erupted.

Not heroically. Never that. The League attacked with the uncoordinated zeal of people who had attended one meeting and misunderstood the agenda. Oliver threw poems. Margot swung her hat. The burglar attempted to steal Silas’s coat while Silas was still wearing it. The magistrate announced a citizen’s arrest and was immediately bitten on the sleeve. Daniel produced a string of handkerchiefs from nowhere and tangled them around Silas’s legs.

Gregory, confused by loyalty but eager to participate, shuffled forward and bit Silas on the wrist.

Silas shrieked.

Lucinda stared.

Gregory spat. “He tastes of moths.”

Silas threw him into the gutter.

That annoyed Lucinda.

Not because she liked Gregory. She did not. But Gregory was her mistake, and there was a kind of property law in monstrosity.

She caught Silas by the throat and drove him backward into the pharmacy shutters.

Metal buckled.

His mouth split wider than it should.

Behind the borrowed teeth, something black moved.

“Ah,” Lucinda said. “There you are.”

Silas was not a vampire.

Not properly.

He was a feeder wearing vampirism as costume. Something old and parasitic that learned from stories because stories made people invite their own destruction. He had seen Lucinda’s accidental cult and dressed himself accordingly: hat, teeth, velvet, murder, resurrection. A mimic of the gothic, living off the emotionally overfurnished.

Lucinda leaned closer.

“You are not even original.”

Silas hissed.

The shutters behind him began to rot.

The League recoiled.

Daniel whispered, “What is he?”

“Derivative,” Lucinda said.

Silas struck her hard enough to send her across the pavement and through the window of the pharmacy.

This hurt, mostly because the display had contained mobility aids and commemorative mugs.

Helen shouted her name.

Mrs. Pounce unleashed the cats.

There are three things in the world that do not respect supernatural hierarchy: tax law, damp, and cats.

Mrs. Pounce’s cats hit Silas like domestic judgement. One climbed his coat. One attached itself to his hat. The third, a scarred grey creature named Admiral Nelson, went directly for the face.

Silas staggered into the road, clawing at fur and curses.

Lucinda pulled herself from the pharmacy window, covered in glass, plasters, and a cardboard sign reading ASK US ABOUT FLU JABS.

Daniel stood in the road, facing Silas.

This, Lucinda thought, is how people die while trying to become interesting.

“Daniel, move.”

He did not.

He raised his hands.

“Behold,” he said.

“No one behold anything!” Lucinda shouted.

But Daniel had already begun a trick.

Perhaps his last.

He took off his red velvet cape and snapped it outward. It billowed in the rain, absurd and crimson. Silas lunged. Daniel spun the cape over him, not restraining him exactly, but blinding him for two seconds.

Two seconds were enough.

Helen threw Lucinda a syringe from her medical bag.

“What is this?” Lucinda asked.

“Sedative.”

“For him?”

“For horses.”

“Helen, you are a marvel.”

Lucinda drove it into Silas’s neck.

Silas screamed, tore free of the cape, and struck Daniel across the chest with one long hand.

Daniel fell.

The League screamed.

Lucinda caught Silas again before he could finish the job. The sedative would not stop him, not wholly, but it gave his borrowed body ideas about gravity. His limbs shuddered. His face flickered between shapes: Daniel’s longing, Gregory’s fear, Margot’s vanity, Lucinda’s own pale outline reflected back in mockery.

Then Mrs. Pounce stepped forward and opened her handbag.

“Move,” she said.

Lucinda did.

From the handbag, Mrs. Pounce produced a brass curtain tieback, a bottle of holy water from Lourdes, a can of hairspray, three knitting needles, and a kitchen lighter.

“Mrs. Pounce,” Lucinda said.

“I was a Girl Guide.”

“That explains nothing.”

Mrs. Pounce sprayed Silas full in the face with hairspray and lit it.

The flame went up blue.

Silas howled.

Not in pain alone. In offence. Creatures like him preferred symbolism controlled by themselves. Being set alight by an octogenarian with handbag cosmetics was an indignity beyond metaphysics.

His borrowed skin cracked.

Black smoke poured out.

Within it were whispers, half-formed faces, little hooks of desire. The League swayed toward it despite themselves.

Lucinda saw the danger.

“Do not breathe that,” she shouted. “It is mostly poetry!”

Everyone covered their mouths.

Except Oliver, who inhaled by reflex and immediately said, “The wound of the moon is a spoon.”

“See?” Lucinda said.

Silas collapsed into a puddle of coat, teeth, ash and wet velvet.

For a moment, the street was quiet.

Then Gregory said, “I really would like tea.”

Daniel lay on his back in the road, cape ruined, shirt torn, blood spreading from three shallow cuts across his chest. Not fatal. Dramatic, but not fatal. Very Daniel.

Lucinda crouched beside him.

“Do not speak.”

He smiled weakly. “Did I save you?”

“No. You delayed something, which is not the same.”

“Close enough.”

“It is not.”

“Will you bite me again?”

“No.”

He closed his eyes, wounded more by that than by Silas.

Lucinda looked at him for a long moment.

Then she said, “You may visit Treachery on Thursdays.”

His eyes opened.

“Really?”

“The rabbit likes parsley and being admired from a distance. You will not bring flowers. You will not kneel. You will not form committees. You will not write about my mouth.”

Daniel swallowed.

“Can I write about your refusal?”

“No.”

He nodded, as if accepting a monastic vow.

Helen began bandaging the butcher. Mrs. Pounce retrieved her cats. Margot wept over her hat. The burglar quietly returned three wallets under Helen’s stare. Gregory was given a blanket and a chair. The police arrived again, saw the same general cast in worse condition, and stood for several seconds in professional despair.

Detective Sergeant Harrow stepped out of the car.

She looked at the smashed pharmacy window, the bleeding magician, the revived dentist, the scorched smear in the road, Lucinda covered in glass, Mrs. Pounce holding a smoking handbag, and the rabbit in a waistcoat nibbling parsley beside a drain.

Harrow closed her eyes.

“Miss Vail.”

“Sergeant.”

“Is this also a rehearsal?”

Lucinda considered.

“No.”

Harrow opened her eyes.

Lucinda said, “This is more of a public health incident.”

By dawn, the immediate lies had been arranged.

Gas leak. Group hysteria. Illegal performance art. A chemical spill from the pharmacy. A hallucination caused by mould beneath the pier. The Bellweather Gazette eventually settled on “Seafront Cult Panic Linked to Amateur Magic Show,” which Lucinda considered defamatory but serviceable.

Gregory was returned to his flat under Helen’s supervision. He remained undead but mildly so. He required no blood, only tea, custard creams and occasional stern reminders not to sleep in drawers. The League found this disappointing.

The League itself was dissolved by Mrs. Pounce at an emergency meeting in the church hall.

Lucinda did not attend. She was not allowed. Helen chaired. Mrs. Pounce enforced.

Daniel proposed renaming the group The Friends of Treachery and was voted down.

Oliver attempted to read a closing elegy and was unplugged.

Margot announced she was leaving for Sicily and invited nobody.

The butcher volunteered to start a support group for people recovering from supernatural romantic dependency, with refreshments. This was approved.

The burglar stole the minutes, but only from nostalgia, and returned them the next day.

A month later, Bellweather-on-Sea had nearly returned to normal.

Normal, in this case, meant the promenade smelled of chips, the pier rotted quietly, the theatre was underfunded, and Mrs. Pounce knew more than the police.

Lucinda adapted.

She stopped feeding from poets, magicians, men in mourning, women with peacock hats, anyone who used the word destiny, and all dentists.

Helen helped her set up a discreet arrangement through the night staff at a regional hospital, involving expired blood units, carefully forged documents, and no romance whatsoever. The blood was cold, medicinal and joyless.

Lucinda adored it.

No one sent flowers.

No one climbed drainpipes.

No one formed a religion.

Occasionally, she missed the freshness of a living throat, but then Daniel would appear across the lane with parsley for Treachery and a face full of suppressed sonnets, and the craving would pass.

One evening, Mrs. Pounce found Lucinda sitting on the front step with the rabbit on her lap.

“Any callers?” she asked.

“No.”

“Good.”

“It is peaceful.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“I am not.”

“You are.”

Lucinda stroked Treachery’s ears.

The rabbit tolerated it like royalty receiving tax.

“I was adored,” Lucinda said.

“You were pestered.”

“There is overlap.”

Mrs. Pounce sat beside her with a small groan.

Across the lane, Daniel saw them from a respectful distance, raised one hand, remembered the rules, and lowered it again.

Progress.

Down the road, Helen passed carrying shopping. She nodded at Lucinda without smiling. Not affection. Not forgiveness. Recognition with boundaries. Lucinda found it strangely nourishing.

The evening darkened.

The first bats moved above the rooftops.

Lucinda said, “Do you think I am monstrous?”

Mrs. Pounce considered.

“Yes.”

Lucinda nodded.

“Less than you were last month,” Mrs. Pounce added.

“That is almost kind.”

“It was almost meant to be.”

They sat in companionable irritation while the town settled into night.

Later, Lucinda would feed from a bag labelled O negative, warmed badly in a saucepan while Sir Barnaby complained about the smell and Gregory phoned to ask whether being undead invalidated his pension. Daniel would send a single text reading Treachery looked well today, which Lucinda would not answer, though she would allow the rabbit an extra parsley stalk.

No one died that evening.

No one proposed marriage.

No one mistook hunger for love.

For Bellweather-on-Sea, it was a remarkable improvement.

And Lucinda, who had spent eighty-seven years learning the rules of blood and nearly as long fleeing the consequences of affection, discovered that the most novel way to get rid of lovers was not murder, exile, deception, committees, decoy husbands, false Lucindas, or rabbit-assisted violence.

It was boundaries.

She hated that.

Obviously.

Aftermath

Bellweather-on-Sea recovered badly, which was to say normally.

The pharmacy window was replaced, though for months one could still find tiny pieces of safety glass glittering in the cracks of the pavement like evidence of a very small apocalypse. The Old Aquarium was boarded up again, then re-boarded after Oliver broke in to “commune with the site of rupture.” The Bellweather Gazette ran three follow-up pieces, none of them accurate, all of them popular.

The official explanation remained group hysteria aggravated by mould, amateur theatre, and an accidental chemical reaction involving veterinary sedatives and hairspray. This satisfied almost no one, but it gave the council something to say.

Helen Voss became the town’s unofficial expert in romantic bite dependency, which she found irritating but useful. She established a Thursday support group in the back room of the butcher’s shop, because the butcher had chairs, tea urns, and a renewed desire to be helpful without bleeding on anyone. The group’s first rule was simple: nobody was allowed to describe Lucinda metaphorically.

This eliminated most of Oliver’s contributions.

Daniel Pike attended regularly. He sat near the door, wore scarves even in warm weather, and practised saying, “I experienced a supernatural attachment response,” instead of, “I loved beyond the veil.” Some weeks he managed it. Some weeks he did not. He was permitted to visit Treachery once a fortnight under Mrs. Pounce’s supervision. He brought parsley, never roses. This was considered progress.

Gregory Vale remained undead in a disappointing, bureaucratic sort of way. He did not crave blood, turn into mist, or command wolves. He did develop an intolerance to sunlight, but only emotionally. He spent most mornings in his dressing gown drinking tea and writing letters to the pension office asking whether “partial posthumous status” affected his entitlements. No one knew how to answer him. Eventually the letters were ignored, which, in British administrative terms, meant he had won.

Margot left for Sicily, returned after six days, and told everyone Sicily had become “spiritually crowded.” She later opened a boutique selling mourning accessories for people who had not necessarily been bereaved. It did well among tourists.

The burglar joined the support group, stole the biscuit tin twice, returned it both times, and was praised for accountability.

The butcher became gentle for a while. He stopped using the ceremonial cleaver. He also renamed his black pudding “Gregory’s Regret,” which Helen made him stop.

Sir Barnaby returned to his cedar trunk voluntarily after declaring modern courtship “too democratic.” Lucinda nailed the trunk shut, not because she distrusted him, but because trust was how one ended up with aristocrats in the drawing room.

Mrs. Pounce became impossible.

She had always been formidable, but after publicly defeating a parasitic gothic mimic with hairspray and handbag discipline, she acquired the settled calm of a woman whose private opinion of herself had been confirmed by events. She did not boast. Boasting was for insecure people and men with podcasts. She merely looked at people in a way that implied she knew how flammable they were.

The cats were worse.

Admiral Nelson, having tasted supernatural authority, began sleeping outside Lucinda’s cellar door. Lucinda objected on the grounds that cats had no respect for metaphysical privacy. Admiral Nelson ignored this, as he ignored most law.

Lucinda herself changed least visibly and most inconveniently.

The hospital blood arrangement worked. It was cold, regulated, unromantic, and dispensed through Helen’s network with the clipped efficiency of contraband managed by nurses. Lucinda complained constantly about the temperature, texture, labelling, anticoagulant aftertaste, and absence of terror. Helen ignored her.

“You wanted no lovers,” Helen said.

“I wanted fewer lovers. Not a dining experience modelled on haemoglobin accounting.”

“You can drink it or starve.”

Lucinda drank it.

The effect was immediate. No flowers. No poems. No drainpipes. No committees. No blood-warmed declarations under windows. No trembling men in velvet. No women announcing plans for peacock sanctuaries. Her nights became quieter, safer, and almost unbearably dull.

Dullness, she discovered, had a texture.

At first it felt like punishment. Then like insult. Then, very slowly, like peace.

She still walked the promenade at night. Hunger had old feet and liked familiar routes. She passed the pier, the bandstand, the boarded aquarium, the pharmacy, the theatre, the butcher’s shop with its evening support group steaming the windows from inside. Occasionally, someone from the old League would see her and stiffen.

She would nod.

They would nod back.

No one knelt.

That was the new social contract.

One evening, Detective Sergeant Harrow stopped her outside the theatre.

“Miss Vail.”

“Sergeant.”

“I’ve been reading the files.”

“How unwise.”

“There are odd gaps.”

“There usually are in municipal life.”

Harrow studied her. “People seem calmer lately.”

“Bellweather has entered a period of erotic fiscal restraint.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Neither does Bellweather. That is why it works.”

Harrow looked toward the pier. “If anything like that happens again, I’ll be less confused.”

Lucinda smiled. “How dangerous for you.”

“Should I be worried?”

“Always. But not necessarily about me.”

Harrow accepted that as much as any sensible woman could.

The next serious development occurred six weeks later, when a parcel arrived at Lucinda’s house.

No return address. No stamp. Delivered by hand.

Inside was a single black feather, a theatre ticket from Prague dated 1931, and a note written in a hand Lucinda recognised though she had not seen it for seventy years.

Dear Lucinda,

I hear you have been careless with admirers.

How very unlike you to start a religion accidentally.

I shall visit soon.

Try not to be domesticated before I arrive.

O.

Lucinda read it three times.

Then she put the note in the fire.

It did not burn.

Mrs. Pounce, watching from the doorway, said, “Another lover?”

“Worse.”

“Tax?”

“Family.”

From the cellar trunk, Sir Barnaby’s muffled voice said, “I told you nothing good came from Prague.”

Treachery sneezed.

Across the lane, Daniel arrived with parsley, saw Lucinda’s face, and wisely placed the parcel of greens on the step without speaking.

Lucinda looked out toward the darkening town.

For once, Bellweather-on-Sea seemed almost peaceful: damp roofs, gulls settling, the theatre lights coming on, the pier black against a bruised violet sky. A ridiculous town. A hungry town. A town where love had recently required minutes, first aid, and police misdirection.

She had thought the aftermath would be escape from consequence.

It was not.

It was maintenance.

Support groups. Blood logistics. Apologies not quite made. Boundaries kept with effort. Rabbits fed. Detectives half-informed. Neighbours impossible. Old names returning from Prague.

Lucinda closed the door.

“Mrs. Pounce,” she said.

“Yes?”

“If a woman called Orsina comes asking for me, you have never heard of me.”

Mrs. Pounce considered.

“Will she be trouble?”

“Profoundly.”

“Then I shall hear her out.”

Lucinda sighed.

The night deepened. Somewhere in the house, the kettle began to boil. In the lane, Daniel knocked once to ask whether Treachery preferred curly parsley or flat-leaf and was told, through the letterbox, that attachment begins in details and he should go home.

For now, he did.

For now, no one died.

For now, the town held.

That was all any aftermath ever really offered: not an ending, but a temporary agreement between disaster and routine.