Victoria realised by the look on my face that her joke had not gone down well.

“Ethan, I’m kidding!” she said, stifling a small laugh at my horrified expression.

“Thanks!” I replied. She’d nearly given me a heart attack. Victoria Pryce: Really smart, very good looking, lousy sense of humour.

“Sorry,” she added, “I couldn’t resist. Come inside. ‘Enter freely and of your own free will’ as they say.”

“Who says?”

It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“Never mind,” Victoria said, “come in.”

She walked through the mansion’s large oak front door, beckoning at me. After a brief hesitation, my heart still thumping after her joke, I followed. Not a second too soon, either. As I entered the mansion, the black clouds overhead let out a torrential downpour. It was only the early afternoon, but it was dark enough outside that you’d have mistaken it for late evening.

“So, I guess I should show you around,” Victoria said. We were standing in a sumptuous wood panelled foyer with wide stairs leading up to the second floor. Old paintings of people I didn’t recognise dotted the walls. Expensive looking vases sat on small, ornately carved wooden tables. The space smelled clean, everything polished and sparkling.

“The mansion? Sure.”

“Your choice. I could spend hours showing you around a choice selection of old paintings of my thieving, murdering, slave trading ancestors. Or I could show you the cool stuff.”

“Let’s go with the cool stuff,” I smiled.

Victoria smiled, nodded, “The cool stuff it is, then.”

We took a left down a short corridor as opulent as the entrance hallway. Victoria stopped at a section of the wood-panelled wall. She pressed one of the panels and part of the wall slid open to reveal a hidden elevator. We stepped inside.

“Going down,” Victoria Pryce said, pressing the ‘down’ button on the panel. The elevator descended.

“Tell me you have a secret underground base.”

“We have a secret underground base,” Victoria confirmed.

Awesome!

The journey down took about a minute, but we were moving fast. We must have been four or five hundred metres below ground by the time we stopped. The doors opened and we stepped out into a cavern around two hundred metres across. The whole space was filled with computers and a dozen staff monitoring them. The atmosphere was calm and quiet.

The elevator had stopped at a gantry which stretched all the way around the cavern. I looked down at the space in wonder. I looked up, estimated that the top of the cave was a hundred metres above us.

“You’ve got a damn batcave,” I marvelled.

Victoria looked puzzled.

“No, there are no bats here, Ethan,” she said, “I can assure you this is a sterile environment. This is all artificially built. Way, way back in the eighteenth century, my great-great-great and so on grandfather was a member of the Hellfire club. When this mansion was built he took great pains to make sure an underground area was built, because, you know, rituals and so on. Over the years the family drifted away from the whole devil worship thing, since there doesn’t seem to actually be a devil, or hasn’t been for a while as near as we can tell.”

She was being serious.

“Then in the sixties there was some government money flying around in certain quarters to establish nuclear bunkers, so naturally my grandparents tapped into that, used it to build on what had already been established, and...here we are.”

I gawped at the area, my mind blown that a stately manor could have such an extensive underground base. They say you never know what’s going on behind closed doors, but that’s nothing compared to what’s going on beneath billionaire’s mansions, apparently.

“Never mind,” I said. My ‘batcave’ quip hadn’t landed at all.

One of the huge screens caught my eye. A familiar shape was displayed, pacing around a large cage. The demon hound.

“Hey, is that...?”

“It is,” Victoria confirmed.

“You have it locked up?”

“I’d rather not,” Victoria replied, “but so far we don’t know what it is, where it came from or how dangerous it might be. It took us three days just to work out what to feed it. We had to start with small doses to make sure we didn’t poison it.”

It’s a demon hound from another dimension, I thought, and I know this because my best friend is a demon – sorry a djinn. No, really. Hey, I’m as surprised as you are.

I didn’t say it though. As benign as Victoria appeared, lousy jokes aside, I was still a bit suspicious. Moorecroft had suggested that she was behind the attack on Section 13. I’d decided to keep some of my secrets to myself for the time being.

We took a set of steps down to the floor level.

“What’s everyone doing?”

“In this area we monitor what’s going on out there. This is our equivalent of Section 13’s command centre. They’re still getting back on their feet since the attack you told me about, so their social media algorithms are only working part-time. Luckily it’s all quiet out there at the moment.”

“How do you know so much about Section 13?”

Victoria looked grim, “I used to work for them.”

That surprised me.

“I was drafted into Section 13 straight out of Cambridge. I had two doctorates and knew enough about the hidden world to be an asset. My family has a history with the supernatural. My brother is a warlock. You’ll meet him at dinner later this evening.”

“A warlock?”

“He’s a terrible show-off, so ignore him,” Victoria replied in a fond tone, “I’d do anything for him. He’s all the family I have left. He had a talent for magic, me not so much. At all. So I went into science instead and ended up at the section.”

“I ran the science wing as best I could, advocating a capture not kill policy. Trying to change the system from within. No-one listened. If possible, Section 13 became even more extreme. The science wing was closed down, seen as an expensive waste of resources, and I left. That was about fifteen years ago now. Maybe a little more.”

“So I decided to do my own thing. Our parents had died in a fire and left the pair of us with a fortune and a huge company. I began to put both to good use, and here we are.”

We had walked the full length of the cave and come to a white door. Victoria opened it and ushered me through.

The next room was a large lab, not as big as the previous room but just as impressive. A dozen technicians in lab coats moved around, checking data, making notes as they looked through microscopes. There was a lot of equipment that I couldn’t imagine the function of. Massive glass fronted fridges contained hundreds of test tube vials. Cages were filled with lab rats.

Jess would be right at home here, I thought.

“Science lab,” Victoria said, “This is where we’d like to run some tests, if you don’t mind.”

“What kind of tests?”

“We only need blood samples and so on for now,” Victoria replied.

“Right,” I said. I hadn’t prepared myself for that.

Something occurred to me. Apart from the demon hound on the screen, everyone I’d seen so far had appeared human.

“Where are the others?”

“The others?”

“Yeah, the other supernaturals. You said this was a sanctuary.”

“It is, but a temporary one in most cases. We help those that need it and then send them on their way. There’s far too big a risk that Section 13 might raid us. We keep a close network of supernaturals across Britain instead.”

“Oh,” I said, a touch of disappointment clear in my voice.

“I’m sorry, were you expecting a supernatural hotel or something?”

Well, yeah. Or maybe a prison.

“No, I didn’t know what to expect really.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll meet Alice shortly.”

“Alice?”

“Our resident vampire,” Victoria said.

“You’re joking, right?”

“Nope. Vampires are people too, Ethan.”

“Okay, but...Alice?”

“That’s her name,” Victoria shrugged.

As we’d been talking, Victoria had put on a lab coat, snapped on some latex gloves and sat me in a chair. She took four blood samples as well as some hair, fingernails and mucous from my nose, which grossed me out. Victoria was professional and efficient as she worked.

“Good,” she said, “That should be more than enough to get started with.”

She passed out the various samples to the technicians with instructions to start analysing them. She’d paid particular attention to how quickly the small pinprick from the needle had closed up, filming the process and observing it through a magnifying lens.

“Fascinating,” she said, “I’ve seen healers before but not in human form.”

“How long will it take? Before you find anything out?”

“The only answer I have is ‘I don’t know.’ It could take a day to find something out, it could take a year. You’re an anomaly in the scheme of things, so we don’t know what we’re looking for. It might be like trying to find a needle in a haystack, or it might be a lot simpler.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You might not even be an anomaly, Ethan. Section 13 has wiped out multiple species, so we haven’t encountered them. You might be the last of your kind, or you could be a hybrid.”

“You mean part human?”

“Yes.”

I thought of Brooks, shot twice in the back of the head by Major Wilson. I guessed maybe he’d been a hybrid.

“Come on then,” Victoria said cheerily, “Let’s take you to meet our vampire.”