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marks, everywhere but over the major blood vessels at the neck and the insides of her thighs.
    â€˜Thanks, love,’ he whispered. ‘You were a blast.’
    But Sophie heard none of that.
    (Ben)
    And this is Ben, the golden boy, youngest of the six vampires in the City. Young enough that he can still pass for human and that he can still go out in daylight, though he wears long-sleeved shirts and sunglasses then and keeps to the shade of buildings because direct sunlight stings him. His hair is cut fashionably short and quirky now, and his eyes are warm and direct. His skin is still tanned from the sun that shone in 1967, a year of wild fashion, wilder youth and chemical revolution. The year he died.
    You wouldn’t know that Ben was different from anyone else, meeting him. Undeath hasn’t changed him much, not yet. His demeanour is relaxed and he likes a beer, and in fact it’s easiest to bump into him in a bar or a nightclub. Only in sudden strong light might you notice anything, because his eyes are so sensitive that he can see even in total darkness and under bright light the pupils contract to invisible pinholes, leaving his irises blank. But his eyes never were windows to his soul; even in life they were more like silvered mirrors, reflecting the gazer’s desire.
    As a youth his aims were to have fun and chase tail, and in over forty years as a vampire they’ve altered remarkably little. His life revolves around sex and food, which are almost always the same thing. For vampires, there’s no distinction between thirst and desire. Blood-lust and fuck-lust come as a package, one engendering the other. He’s constantly horny, eternally obsessed with pussy. It’s one of the things he likes so much about his new life: he never has to stop. There are other advantages: he’s become faster and stronger and has keener senses, he heals cuts in minutes, his flab has converted to muscle and even his face has subtly changed, honed to a new beauty – but the buzz of rampant desire, the priapic stiffy that threatens to wear a hole in his pants, the heat that grips him every time he spots a potential target: that’s what he really trips on.
    Being dead – What’s there not to like?
    He’s vaguely aware that others of his kind are different, that things do change with time, but he doesn’t worry about that. Ben is young; still young enough to eat, even. Perhaps only a few mouthfuls a night – pizza and Chinese takeaway mostly, and hold the garlic because in the last couple of decades it’s started to turn his stomach – but he’s still capable of digesting some solids. That will be the first faculty to go, and he will miss it when it happens. The multiple flavours of life will be lost to him, the spices and the textures. All that will be left will be hot, sweet, infinitely appealing blood.
    In a big city like this, a world hub, there’s no problem with him taking a different person a night as prey – so long as he doesn’t kill them – and enough places to hunt in that his face doesn’t become known. Notoriety would be a handicap, and Ben likes to fly below the radar. Bars are the easiest places to pull in: hothouses of exotic painted blooms. There’s never a problem if you look like he does, and everyone is awash with alcohol, and they’re all young and hot and eager to be plucked. He does a lot of plucking.
    You might well meet Ben that way, particularly at night. But he is a seducer by nature rather than a hunter, and he’s surprised himself in recent years by discovering a taste for the more difficult target. The plainer girl – not the dull, slack-jawed type who’ll do it for a bag of chips or the cheery twinkly one who’ll do it for a laugh, but the buttoned-down type. Does that describe you? There are more women of that kind about than people think, though they’re invisible to so many eyes. Perhaps