In the next two hours Mina discovered why the After Dark Club's card depicted two dancing figures. The movement was internal and emotional, but it was rhythmic as well as hectic, measured as well as sensual.
The vampires were polite drinkers. They took their time and showed as much delicacy as anyone could reasonably expect. Marcian even found time for a little small talk, although it was mostly devoted to technical matters and mild warnings.
Mina felt that Marcian hadn't really warmed to her, but Szandor - who was silent apart from a few incomprehensible mumblings - was so good at tactile expression that Mina and he were already building a nice rapport. Although she was besotted with them both, Mina 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 meet up with them again even if the pounds didn't start to melt away.
Mina didn't see Lucy Stanwere before she left, presumably because that wonderful woman and perfect friend was engaged in a languorous horizontal tarantella of her own. It was Marcian who saw her to the door and bid her a fond goodnight, after making another date with her for the following Tuesday. On the way out Mina caught sight of three more of the club's female clients, one of whom she recognised as the youngest minister in the cabinet. They all glanced at her, not with pity but with respect - almost with envy. Not one of them, she guessed, had enough spare capacity left to satisfy two vampires at once.
The old Mina would have asked Marcian, anxiously, whether she'd be ready for another session by Tuesday, but the new Mina took it for granted that she could raise her blood to the required pressure with time to spare. She was right, and the session went so well that she even plucked up the nerve to make a feeble joke about Dracula.
"Old Vlad!" Marcian said, with a delighted chuckle. "I remember him. Not one of us, of course - just a... how do you say... groupie. Thought he might become immortal if we'd only teach him the trick. Poor sap!"
It took Mina ten minutes to realise that she too must be a groupie: someone who hung around vampires, avidly offering blood. After a further twenty minutes of relaxed conversation she also figured out that "poor sap" wasn't an Americanism. "Sap" was a vampire colloquialism for Homo Sapiens. Marcian referred to his own kind as "ultras" - that being a contraction of Homo Ultrasapiens, which, loosely translated, meant "man the extremely wise".
It wasn't until it was nearly time to go home that it occurred to Mina to wonder how old Marcian actually was, given that he had obviously been around for centuries, but it didn't seem polite to ask forthrightly. After all, he'd been polite enough not to ask her age. They made a third date for the following Sunday.
As she said good night to Lucy Stanwere on Friday evening, Mina gloried in the conspiratorial glance that they exchanged - a pleasure in which she had never indulged with any other colleague during her entire career. At work they both behaved with strict formality, never making the slightest mention of their secret, but as they stepped over the threshold at the end of every day they made their silent acknowledgements.
Mina went straight from work to the gym, where she spent half an hour on the rowing machine and forty minutes on the cycling machine. She caught other people staring at her once or twice, but that didn't make her feel self-conscious any more. Once, they would have been appalled by her bulk; now she was content to assume that they were amazed at her capacity for exercise.
Regenerating the blood she required to feed Marcian and Szandor was no mere matter of stuffing herself with calories and iron tablets; she had to crank up her retuned metabolism, rebalancing the energy-economy of her physical and spiritual being. Rowing and cycling on the spot now gave her a sense of furious speed and steadfast endurance that was remarkably satisfying - though not as satisfying as lying on the curtained four-poster while Marcian and Szandor sucked their sustenance from her flesh with such obvious appreciation.
On Sunday, she observed to Marcian that it must have been hard for vampires living through times of plague, famine and religious persecution.
"The Black Death was inconvenient," Marcian admitted, "and there's no nourishment in the under-nourished - but civilization has been a great help. Life was much harder before there were cities."
"You must have very good memories to recall a time when there weren't," Mina suggested, delicately.
"It's more tradition than memory," Marcian admitted. "We make up stories to remind ourselves of the things we're bound to forget. We all feel nostalgic about the good old days before you saps wiped out the Neanderthals, but it's legend-based. Nobody really remembers anything much before the last few hundred years."
"The price of living forever, I suppose," Mina said, pensively.
Marcian actually raised his head then, to look her in the eye - as fondly as Szandor, but also a trifle darkly.
"Nobody lives forever, Mina," he said. "We don't age or suffer from disease, but we die eventually: drowned or decapitated, burned or blown up. We survivors know how lucky we are - but things are a lot better nowadays, thanks to people like you. You don't know how grateful we are."
"I know how grateful I am," Mina told him, "and I'm not sure you could be any more grateful than that."
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My other vampire novels offer very different 'explanations' of variant kinds of vampirism, but they share the same conviction that once superstition can be set aside, there ought to be nothing very alarming about the prospect of vampires taking over the world.
In Young Blood the takeover begins in the present day, when a genetically-engineered virus escapes from a university laboratory. In The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires a Victorian time-traveller visits a future in which the degenerate descendants of our own species have been reduced to the status of domestic animals by a closely-related vampire species; this news horrifies most of the people to whom he tells his story, but not the narrator, an Eastern European Count with an unfortunate reputation.
Since publishing The Empire of Fear I've acquired a reputation as a writer of ironically offbeat vampire stories, which brings a steady trickle of requests to do more. I've tried hard to vary the stories as much as I possibly can, but certain basic themes inevitably recur.
Young Blood was written just as one sector of Goth subculture was becoming passionately interested in vampire fiction, and I was fascinated by the impact that vampire imagery had on the content of Goth rock music during the 1990s - a link that I've explored in articles as well as stories like the novella Sheena (in Marvin Kaye's anthology The Vampire Sextette).
Young Blood also features a hypothesis advanced by the American scholar Lloyd Worley, who suggests that our interest in vampires drives from the fact that we all begin life as vampiric embryos, drawing our sustenance from our mothers' blood.
I've extrapolated the basic frisson of that idea in a couple of horror stories featuring vampire babies: Rent (in Weird Tales ) and Emptiness (in the vampire magazine Dreams of Darkness).
All these stories lurk in the background of After the Stone Age, which is yet another tale in which vampires seem to be well on their way to taking over the world, this time by cleverly exploiting an opportunity to set themselves up as a valuable service industry, answering an obvious pattern of demand.
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