As the helpless vampire watched the transformation, it started screaming. It was still screaming when his rows of razor sharp teeth sank into its throat.

Demons? No problem. Just find your local stalker psycho and ask the whistling dear head hanging above his fireplace how many licks on a toostie pop does it take to make a demon go away.

Ha!_ cackled the fiend, __ expect you__ like revenge on that husband of yours. Murder shouldn__ go unpunished, and no creature enjoys delivering chastisement as much as I. What about giving him a taste of his own medicine? If you__ be so kind as to lend me your body, I__l set him dancing to my tune.__he wife__ spectre grimaced and nodded, at which the wicked Likho stripped off the nightgown, then the dead woman__ pliant skin, peeling back the flaccid folds. These it left in a slack heap. It gobbled her flesh and sucked the bones clean. These it hid behind the stove, before inserting itself inside the empty, wrinkled carcass, taking the former position of the corpse. Its fat tongue swiped the last juices from around its lips.When the husband returned home, all was as it had been; there was not a speck of blood to be seen, although the strangest smell of rotten eggs lingered

Love is an exorcism of angels.

Krisztina played the song. It was a lament made of eight notes, repeated. It was an empty melody. It sounded elemental too; it made Krisztina think of the snow falling beyond the window and across Budapest. She wondered if it was snowing in England. Alice__ mother would be here again later, all the way from London. There was so much grief. They were mourning her little girl before she had gone. Without realising she heard these words making themselves part of the song. She played what she could, her head down, her face solemn and determined. She went back to the start, and felt the world falling away, the tears drying on her face. She heard the words coming, falling like the luminous snow. After a few minutes she looked across what seemed like a huge divide to Alice on the bed and faltered. In the house of the body, the lights were being extinguished, one by one. The floors were now bare, the walls unadorned, all sound hollow and lost; all that remained was the ghost of what was, the glimmer of the melody, the tune, the song of a life lived and lost in three minutes.

Humankind is but the pieces in a game, plastic soldiers waging war between boy gods.