THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS

Genevieve supposed her luck was running true to form. For five hundred years, she'd reckoned Count Dracula the worst person in the world. He incarnated everything bad, everything despicable, everything that was not her. Now, with Vlad Tepes  -  or whoever he was  -  finally dead, it turned out there was someone in Europe older, more dangerous and worse than the King Vampire.

Mater Lachrymarum, the Mother of Tears. Boxed up among Charles's books was a volume by a modern alchemist  -  Fulcanelli? Varelli?  -  that had a section on the Three Mothers. She considered searching through the boxes but decided against it.

This time, there was no real need to find out who was behind the curtain. Charles was dead. Dracula was dead. Genevieve wasn't a detective or an avenger. Kate wasn't going to take the blame. She didn't care who'd killed the Prince. No one actually cared.

She wasn't going to be in the city much longer. Apart from anything else, there was the Crimson Executioner to worry about.

She sat in the dark in the apartment, among trunks and packing cases. It had been disturbingly easy to put away all of Charles's life. He'd only left things behind. He himself was gone.

Truly dead. She wondered what that would be like?

Suicide wasn't in her. But each year was a weight added to her heart. How many more centuries would there be for her? She'd read On the Beach. It was frighteningly possible that there would be no more centuries for anyone. At ground zero, warm and nosferatu alike would be vaporised. Even Dracula had never conceived of the Hydrogen Bomb. She dreaded what such weapons would have meant in the arsenals of the chieftains of her warm days.

Kate was off, chasing her Italian lover. She was still wrapped up in her odd search for answers, but would learn. Genevieve had been the same at her age. It took a warm lifetime to accept the miraculous. Then you started questioning it, wondering what it was all for, what it was about. Who had the answers for Kate? A fortune-teller, a priest, a little girl, a warm man, a bloated genius?

For Kate's sake, she'd stay awhile. Until the smaller mysteries were cleared up. It was the least she could do.

The taste of Charles was fading in her mouth. That thinning trace was the last of him. His voice had whispered in her mind these last years. Its absence was silence.

She drifted to the balcony. Charles's chair wasn't there. She glided to the spot where it'd often been and looked down at the street, at the view Charles had favoured.

A tall, thin man in black stood on the other side of the road, under a streetlamp. He looked up at her with clear blue eyes. It was Father Merrin.

The priest crossed the road and Genevieve went back into the apartment to let him in. A makeshift lock on the door replaced the one Brastov's goons had broken.

'Thank you for coming, Father,' she said. 'I know you've been warned away from me. I appreciate your courage.'

Merrin took off his broad black hat. The wound on his forehead was neatly plastered.

'Not away from you,' he said. 'From your friend, Miss Reed.'

Genevieve offered the priest tea. There was a package of Lipton's in the kitchen. Edwin Winthrop had sent Charles monthly food parcels: Fortnum & Mason's marmalade, Cadbury's chocolate, a secretary's homemade jam.

She busied herself with making tea while the priest silently took in the packed-up belongings and the damage done by Brastov's assassins.

'This isn't about the Mother of Tears,' Merrin said.

'No. Well, I don't suppose so.'

'You have had a loss. Please accept my condolences.'

He said nothing about God or Heaven, for which she was grateful. She wanted to tell this man about Charles.

In her experience, in warm life and all the years since, priests like Merrin were rare as hen's teeth. She had no quarrel with Jesus of Galilee, but a great villain  -  Saint Peter the Denier, or the Emperor Constantine  -  had twisted His ministry. A faith for children and slaves had become a worldly nation, as rich and rotten as any other.

God might have a message for man, but churches seemed the worst possible places to receive it. Twice, she'd been put to the Question by the Inquisition. The faces of holy men were taut with lust as they worked pincers over her body. Worse still were those who truly believed they killed and stole in the name of love divine. She'd also been pursued by Puritan witchfinders in New England and stoned by the mullahs of Mecca. In the last century, she'd sought refuge in a Tibetan lamasery and found it a hive of petty intrigue and spiritual canker.

Father Merrin was better than that. She'd known few truly good men. The priest was not weak, not biddable; in the days when she was fleeing the Church, she'd not have chosen to fight with him. That he could remain in the Vatican proved all the good had not flown from the world with Charles Beauregard.

For the first time in centuries, Genevieve Sandrine de l'Isle Dieudonne felt a need schooled into her as a child.

She imagined God was in the room, with Merrin's face.

'Father, will you hear my confession?'

The priest consented and set down his cup. They were both awkward. Should they kneel? She sank to her knees on the bare floorboards. Merrin found a cushion and knelt by her.

'Pere, pardonnez moi,' she began, in her first tongue. Her accent would be unrecognisable in modern France.

She hesitated.

'It's all right,' Merrin said. 'I understand.'

'Father, forgive me, for I have sinned...'

With the words, her heart opened and everything flooded out.

After Merrin left, she felt different. She'd told him much of her life that no one living knew, but had talked mostly about Charles. And Dracula. She'd told their story, honestly. She'd told him the true identity of Jack the Ripper. She'd admitted her love, and her failure. She had cried. And in talking to a priest, she had prayed.

She was not reconciled with the Church, not yet convinced that there was a supernatural. She was influenced by the cold insights of Dr Pretorius and the warm wisdom of Father Merrin, but was not about to change the habit of many lifetimes.

It was just that now, this very moment, it helped.

Her heart beat faster. The organ was stilled in many vampires, a ripe-to-rotten plum waiting to be pierced. In her, the pump worked. And feelings came with it.

Charles was with her still, inside. His voice whispered. His taste tingled. She had not lost the sense of him forever, just misplaced it.

She wasn't crying any more.

She looked up, reverie broken. She had another visitor. He stood in the doorway in a black tuxedo with matching tie, posing with his Walther, kiss-curl beckoning like a finger, smile calculatedly ironic, fangs bared.

Bond slipped his gun into its holster.

'Come with me, Gene,' he said. 'There's a last monster to be faced.'

His confidence was irresistible. For him, this agony was frivolous. He had a job to do and it was do or die. He could never really be hurt. It was dangerous to be close to someone like that.

But she had nothing better to do.

'I can find him,' he said. 'The Crimson Executioner.'

She stood up and went with him.