Chapter One - Medina

Adam had managed to go for eighty four years without any fatalities and over forty four years without turning anyone. I was a personal best. But now he would have to start all over again. The hunger had taken over and they had fed on the young couple, so strong that they weren't sure if they were alive when they'd left them. Cursed to become like them. To be trapped by the constraints of hunger and darkness, if they even survived the transformation. At least they would have each other. He wished he could avoid such things, but the sun was about to rise. They were starving. It was a necessary evil, but that didn't mean that he hadn't enjoyed it. It had been so long since he had fed from the source. It had been stupid and reckless. Anything could have happened back there, but it hadn't and the two of them would go on to live another night. It was not the worst problem they'd encountered nor would it be the last.

He was beginning to feel the after effects as he came down from the state of unparalleled ecstasy that feeding brought him. The girl had been clean for the most part. A +ve, nice enough but everyday). But she was a smoker which tainted things a bit, and left him feeling pretty disgusting, as though he had been drinking out of an ashtray. He couldn't sleep; he had been controlling his intake for so long that the sudden rush was a shock to the system. If they weren't careful they could slip back into old habits, which was why it was imperative that they found a new supplier, and soon.

Eve stirred in his arms. In these situations she would be the one comforting him, but today he could only hold her until she had cried herself to sleep. He had never seen her like this, she was meant to be the one who had it all together, and he was the wreck. They overslept long into the evening, still jetlagged and troubled from the last few nights. The moon hung high over the Medina in a sky stained orange and brown from light pollution. When was the last time they had seen a pure sky? Not for a long time, their kind couldn't exactly live that far away from humanity as much as they'd have liked to.

"What time is it?" Eve mumbled from somewhere under the covers.

He reached out in the dark for the bedside table and checked the time on Eve's phone.

"11:26, fucking hell." He saw that she had three missed calls and one voicemail from a number he didn't recognise. He held up the phone. "Who's this?"

"I don't know." She played the message back. And Adam froze as a voice he thought he'd never hear again began to play through the tiny speaker. It was exactly as he remembered, frozen in its youthfulness for all eternity.

"Evie? I don't know if you even use this number anymore. Um, I'm sure it's nothing. But I've been having some crazy dreams lately, about you, and this girl I used to know who claimed she was your sister. Anyway, I can't say I'm not a little worried. Please phone me back on this number and let me know if you're all right." The message ended.

"Ada." Eve whispered, as shocked as he was.

"You've been in contact with her?"

"I send her postcards. Every time one of us moves I send our new contact details to the old house. She's never replied before."

"Why would she call you and not me?" Adam said, perhaps being a little belligerent.

"You don't have a mobile phone, my love." Eve pointed out. "Should we call her back?"

"What you think just because she had a few nightmares and got worried, that all's forgiven and we can play happy families?"

"Adam…" Eve began.

"No, she made her feelings clear and she won't want to see us." He cut her off.

"Who said anything about seeing; I was just going to put her mind at ease. And mine."

"She said she never wanted to speak to us again" he snapped. Under the circumstances he didn't blame her.

"She had just been born; it's a difficult time for anyone. Don't you remember how troubled you were when you were at that age?" she was right, Adam might have had a pretty gloomy personality but he was almost a ray of sunshine compared to how he used to be. "She might have settled down by now." There was a long silence. "Please, it's only a phone call. Don't you wonder how she's doing? After forty years of nothing."

"Of course I do. I just… How can you be so optimistic about this?"

"Because Kit is gone and Ava is out of control and I would like to find out if the last remaining member of our family is all right. I mean, it's tough when you're starting out. And it's not like how it used to be in the old days, there's so much more you have to do now to stay under the radar."

"All right, all right. You phone her though; I don't think she'll be too thrilled to hear from me." He said with some reluctance as she called the number back.

"Ada?..." he heard her say, though he could only hear Eve's side of the conversation. "Oh my darling, how are you?...Oh yes we're fine, just a temporary supply problem, nothing serious…. Yes, I know it can be a little frightening sometimes, it's just the psychic connection, it's completely normal. Why yes, I suppose it is bit like that…Yes he's here, would you like to talk to him?...Oh of course he does, don't think like that? The pair of you I could bash your heads together… Look, I'll put you on speaker phone."

"No, wait! Eve don't. Eve?" the voice from the message s returned, sounding panicked.

"Ada." Adam said.

"Adam, hi."

"Hi." He was at a loss for words. "This is... unexpected."

"Yeah, I got worried. I've been getting some spooky signals lately. Sorry if I bothered you."

"Oh of course not, you know you can contact us anytime, sweetheart, day or night. Well, not day, but you know what I mean." Eve butted in.

"How do you know about Ava?" Adam asked, if she had done something to her heads were going to roll.

"She just showed up at Crowndale Road one day back in seventy seven, looking for you two I think. We formed a band. I won't bore you with the details but she drained my supplies, stole my songs and three people died including our drummer."

"Yeah, that sounds like her." He was glad they'd thrown her out when they did, Eve wouldn't have been too thrilled if he had put a wooden bullet through her sister's heart.

"Oh dear, you must tell us everything, no detail is too insignificant. Are you still in London?" Eve asked.

"Oh no, I moved out. London's got a bit of a… gang problem at the moment, if you know what I mean. I'm living in Liverpool now. It's nice, easy to blend in." so that was her wilderness.

"Oh how wonderful, I gave a lecture there once at the Victoria Building, is it still there?"

"Yeah, but it's an art museum now."

"What about your music, are you still working?" Adam asked, getting back to the more important questions.

"I'm…on hiatus. I can't seem to find the inspiration anymore." Came the reply. What? Fucking unacceptable! "What about you, I could have sworn I heard something of yours recently at some dive bar. It had your fingerprints all over it."

"How could you tell?"

"It was too morose to be anyone else."

"You always were my harshest critic. What do you mean hiatus? What's wrong?"

"Nothing, it just, started to cause problems, people were asking questions, so I decided to disappear for a while." She paused as though deliberating over whether it was a good idea to say what she said next. "You know if you're going through a rough patch I guess you could come and stay for a while. We could talk things over."

There was a long silence "Or if you'd rather not travel at the moment, I completely understand. I learned about that the hard way." The thought of her having to learn everything on her own made Adam's heart freeze with horror. 'Of course if she'd bothered to stick around and hadn't gone off in a sulk, that wouldn't have been a problem'. some horrible part of his brain though. 'yeah, but if you were any kind of father you would have tried harder to get her back.' Said an even worse part of his brain.

There was a long silence on the line as both women waited for his answer. The thought of a reunion sent a thrill of excitement through him. The possibility that the three of them could be together again was more than he'd dared to hope for. And the fact that they had an invitation, even if it was only a temporary one meant the world to him. It was a different bond to the one he and Eve shared. Over the course of their marriage, their love had always been his one constant. The one thing that always caused them to drift back together no matter how far apart they roamed. It had been the only thing he could accept without question in an uncertain world. But the bonds between parents and children among their kind were fragile things. More thorny with conflict, but still born from love.

"Do you know, I've never been to Liverpool." He said finally, cautious, though it wasn't much of an answer.

"All the more reason to come. I could show you George Harrison's house." He loved George Harrison.

"I'd like that."

He had met her one late afternoon in the winter of 1967, he had been disorientated from getting up so early, and while his kind could stay awake during the day as long as they stayed away from sunlight it was not a state that came naturally to them. They had been introduced by a friend of her mother's who also happened to work for him on occasion and had heard her play. After some pestering he had agreed to meet the child after school. Adam hadn't taken on a student in nearly a century, not since that whole Mahler thing. He generally tried to avoid children at all costs, they tasted too good and they were easy prey, the base instinct to carry them away and drain them was deeply ingrained in his system. But you couldn't just lure street urchins back to your lair anymore, humans these days tended to notice when their kids went missing. Now instead of killing them he was teaching them piano and violin and bringing them tea and biscuits (kids liked those, right?) that he had nipped out to get the night before, which wasn't easy considering most shops closed before six.

'Now you must be Adelaide. It's good to finally meet you, I'm Adam.'

'It's nice to meet you too, but everyone calls me Ada, you know like Ada Lovelace.' She said, a little nervous at being left with a stranger, or perhaps subconsciously she knew she was in the company of a being that could kill her in seconds if he wanted to. He wondered how on earth and eleven year old with pigtails and an ugly school uniform could possibly know about Ada Lovelace.

'What a coincidence, I used to know a girl called Ada Lovelace.' He had replied, not elaborating that said girl was the actual Countess of Lovelace aka Byron's daughter, and that she had been as delicious as she had been clever and far more interesting that her arsehole of a father had been. 'Did you know that when she was about your age, she tried to build a flying machine?' the fact about the kid's namesake peaked her interest and for a moment she seemed to forget about being afraid.

'Did it work?' Ada asked.

'She never finished it but the theory was on the right track. I hear you've been building things, too.'

'Me? There's just this old electric organ thing in the shed. I've been fixing her.' She said.

'It's a girl?'

'Granddad thought so, he called her Miss Vera.' He would have to ask her more about the model later. He had encountered a lot of Hammond organs back in the US but they were harder to find across the pond, particularly the older models.

'Well, I happen to enjoy fixing things too. If you ever need help with something, don't be afraid to ask.'

'Okay.'

'Now, why don't you play me this song I've heard so much about?'

After settling Kit's affairs and securing the house, they left for Ada's place. Neither of them really felt up to the journey but luckily it was only five hours or so and could be done in one night. It was a little risky to travel in such a sorry state but Ada had promised them some premium stuff. It was a pretty selfish reason to go, but regardless of how civilised they claimed to have become, blood would always be priority number one. It could be all love and roses on minute, but the second their supplies ran low they would be at each other's throats, or more to the point at other people's throats.

They found an evening flight to Lisbon then another flight to Manchester the following evening where they would have to bribe the nearest taxi driver to take them on the last leg of their journey. He would never be able to get used to travelling by plane, all that recycled air, the noise, the feeling of being trapped, the almost complete loss of energy, and the horrible, almost constant feeling of motion sickness (that supposedly affected all of their kind but Adam could have sworn he got it fifty times worse than anyone else). It was still better than boats. Adam despised crossing water. In the old days you were stuck below deck for weeks while the crew tried to figure out why they were losing so many men overboard.

"Maybe this is a bad idea." He mumbled, as Eve eased his fingers from their death grip on the armrest and interlaced them with her own. "What if she changes her mind and turns us away?"

"She won't." Eve whispered. "But I still have our key to Crowndale Road, you know just to be on the safe side."

"I swore I'd never go back there."

"I highly doubt you'll have to, my darling." Eve said. "This is the girl who opened a vein for you. That's practically the oldest covenant we have, it can't be broken."

At long last they were finally dropped off outside the large house on Ullet Road. It was a blockish detached classic revival job with twin bay windows on each side of the front door, on the edge of a large and stately park. It was the kind of house that would normally be turned into flats or student bedsits, a remnant of a wealthier time with its blackened brickwork and the columns on either side of the front door topped with sculpted faces disfigured by time and polluted rain. There were a few dim lights on behind the drawn curtains, all mains power of course, fucking zombie shit; he would have to fix that later.

He thanked the driver, giving him another generous tip just to be on the safe side, and fetched their things from the cab. He was stalling, waiting for Eve to make the first move and ring the doorbell so he wouldn't have to. All through the journey he kept trying to think of what he would say, how to apologise or explain himself. What could he even say anyway?

Ada technically belonged to them both according to their laws, but he had met her first, he had been the one to initiate things and he had borne the brunt of her anger. In all his long years of life, he had never met a more promising student, a true child prodigy, nothing but raw talent and intuitive creative understanding. Her grandfather had been a reasonably successful jazz musician in the twenties and thirties, her mother had briefly pursued a singing career, and she had spent her childhood surrounded by music. Before everything went wrong, all he had needed to do was nudge her in the right direction and she would create wonders. He longed for those happier times, even though this whole fool's errand would probably all end in tears. But that's what happened when his kind forged those kinds of bonds, they weren't built to have families and loved ones and yet a part of them would always yearn for it, always being stuck between not being able to live together for long and hardly being able to bear living apart.

The front door opened and suddenly he could hear his own heartbeat ringing in his ears. He kept expecting her to have grown when he tried to picture what she might look like, he could almost imagine her as a middle aged woman with wrinkles and reading glasses and children of her own who had already grown up and left home. But in reality, she was exactly the same as when she left them, frozen in time, stuck in a state of perpetual puberty, disarmingly youthful. She had just turned seventeen when it had happened, at a stretch she might have been able to pass for a university student. She was petite, catlike, with dark hair and darker eyes, and the same unnatural pallor and emaciation that afflicted their kind. She was wearing jeans and a grey sweater that had seen better days. He noticed her hair was still reasonably tidy, but over time it would grow matted, dry and brittle just like his.

"I wasn't sure if you'd come." She said softly.

"Oh, sweetheart." Eve cried and pulled her into a crushing hug. "Oh, my little one." The girl hesitated a moment before returning her embrace, her small hands gripping the ivory leather of her jacket. Adam approached as they separated, feeling a little awkward when the two of them could just get along so easily and he was…well, him.

"Please, come in." Ada said, taking one of the bags from him and leading them inside without ceremony, as though they hadn't been estranged for forty years. "You must be tired."

They crossed the threshold into a small entryway surrounded by stained glass and tiled floors in black, white and orange in some pale imitation of ancient Greek design jumbled up with Victorian gothic. The walls were almost completely covered by those cheap ikea bookshelves filled with books, records, CDs and every kind of movie on DVD or VHS tape. He remembered her being a film nut, her grandfather used to take her to the pictures every Saturday when he had been alive. Later on when she had moved in with them they had tried to keep up that tradition but they could only go to evening shows. As a teenager, Ada had liked those midnight screenings of hammer horrors and all that low budget trash. She would always claim not to be scared but sometimes when there was a particularly grisly scene she would grip his hand tightly or bury her head in his shoulder. The light from the big screen stung his eyes a little so they had made a strange pair, a man wearing sunglasses in the dark and a clearly underage girl going to see Night of the Living Dead together. She had said she didn't see that much difference between the humans and the zombies, and he had laughed for the first time in months. The nickname had sort of stuck after that.

The inside of Ada's house was much like any other vampire's house, every window covered with heavy curtains or blinds, clutter and bric-a-brac on every available surface, and a healthy layer of dust on everything. Over the years things just accumulated, until it was time to move on to the next place.

"What a beautiful place." Eve cooed contently, glancing around their surroundings. She held up her gloved hands "May we?"

"Oh, yes. Yes of course." Ada said but looked hesitant as they removed their gloves and Eve reached out to stroke her hair. Eve was more powerful than their whole family put together when it came to reading things, and her touch took some getting used to.

"Oh, we have been learning, haven't we?" Eve marvelled and reached down to grip Ada's hand and his and he received a few faint glimpses of forty years of the girl's life, her early projects. "You're a natural. Who knows Adam, give it a century and maybe she'll be better than you."

"Maybe." Adam realised he hadn't spoken yet. Through Eve's link he saw a sprawling city filled with lights and people, somewhere in China maybe, he couldn't tell for sure, he saw the terrified face of a young man then suddenly the link went silent.

"Ok yeah, it's still weird." Ada said, pulling away from them.

"Sorry darling."

"I made up a room for the two of you. It's the one on the top floor, to the right."

"Well, why don't I take up our things and you two can catch up." said Eve, giving him a small nudge in the small of his back.

He followed her into the kitchen, which looked more like a laboratory, especially since the fridge was filled with blood packs and petri dishes with some sort of gel in them. There was a workbench in the corner with more petri dishes piled up in rows.

"Orchis Morio. I found some seed pods on the green and thought I'd grow a few. The secret is isolating the corresponding fungi. Are you hungry? I splashed out on some of the rare stuff."

"B1+ve, how did you get this?"

"There's a big transplant centre a few miles away. I mostly stick with Type O but they have a rare blood bank on ice, it's like the pope's wine cellar down there I kid you not."

"Um, if you don't mind me asking, why did you invite us here? Why now?"

"I don't know really, I suppose it's beginning to sink in that I'm really in this forever. I don't really want to go it alone anymore." She paused a moment, carefully measuring out the blood into three wine glasses. "So what exactly is going on? Eve mentioned you were having some trouble, and that music of yours..."

"What about it?"

"It gave me the impression that you were writing your own funeral mass."