By Blood We Live

Homo, who accompanied us to the brink of extinction more than once, but are now on the increase again. They're not quite ready to come out of hiding yet-like us, they're not entirely free of their old instincts-but they're making discreet diplomatic moves at every level, taking one step at a time in the tedious business of winning hearts and minds."

Mina hadn't noticed Lucy Stanwere's cliché-addiction before, but she tried to concentrate her attention on the more important aspects of the speech. Apparently, she wasn't going to be required to dance the tango in any literal sense. Instead, she was going to lie down on the bed while Marcian and Szandor drank her blood, presumably relieving her of forty fluid ounces or so, while pumping some kind of enzymes into her that would retune her metabolism to mobilize her fat reserves and set her on the road to paradise, or at least size twelve.

All in all, it was difficult to see a downside.

Eyes wide open now, Mina found herself staring at Lucy's neck, looking for tell-tale holes.

Lucy smiled. "That stuff about fangs is just Hammer horror," Lucy said. "It's more sucking than biting, actually. It doesn't even leave a love-bite, because there are no leftovers. You'll feel a slight numbness for a day or two, and your complexion might be a trifle pale, but you'll feel a lot better in yourself."

Mina belatedly thought of a potential downside. "Will I turn into a vampire too?" she asked, surprised at the lack of faintness in her own voice.

"No, silly," Lucy replied. "I told you, they're just another human species. You can't turn into one of them any more than they can turn into wolves or bats. It's symbiosis. They obtain sustenance from us; we get fitness and an amazing sense of well-being in return. Mutual profit-the ultimate expression of free-market economics at its finest. There's no rush; you can have all the time you need to think about it. All we ask is a little discretion."

"Discretion?" Mina echoed, with a confidence she had never felt before. "To hell with discretion. Let's get on with it!"

In the next two hours Mina discovered why the After Dark Club's card depicted two dancing figures. The movement was internal and emotional, and there were three people involved rather than two, but it was rhythmic as well as hectic, measured as well as erotic.

Marcian and Szandor never touched her below the waist, but that didn't matter. Mina understood well enough, by the time she went to catch the night bus back to Ealing, why sophisticated people said that the most important sexual organ was the brain.

She didn't see Lucy Stanwere before she left. Presumably, that wonderful woman and perfect friend was still engaged in a languorous horizontal tarantella of her own, probably with a single partner given that she no longer had the stored-up wealth to satisfy two. Marcian saw her to the door, bid her a fond goodnight, and made another date with her for the following Tuesday.

The old Mina would have asked, anxiously, whether she'd be ready for another session quite so soon, but the new Mina took it for granted that she could raise her blood to the required pressure with time to spare.

Marcian's conversation had been mostly devoted to technical matters and mild warnings, so Mina felt that he hadn't really warmed to her as yet, but Szandor-who had been silent apart from a few incomprehensible mumblings-had been free to indulge himself in fond stares and tactile explorations, and Mina felt that they had already built a delicate rapport. Although she was besotted with them both, she couldn't help feeling a little fonder of Szandor.

They seemed such nice young men, so expert in their arcane art, that she would have been more than happy to see them again even if the pounds hadn't started to melt away with such awesome rapidity.

It wasn't until the Tuesday, when Mina plucked up enough nerve to make a feeble joke about Dracula, that she discovered how old the seemingly young men actually were.

"Old Vlad!" Marcian said, with a delighted chuckle that was a fine compliment to her joke. "I remember him. Not one of us, of course-just a…how do you say?…a groupie. Thought he might become immortal if we would only teach him the trick. Poor sap!"

Her experience was so ecstatic that it took Mina ten minutes to realize that she too was a groupie: someone who hung around vampires, avidly offering blood. Twenty more were required to disclose that "poor sap" wasn't an Americanism. "Sap" was a vampire colloquialism for