Yesterday he killed a scullery maid, a bootblack, an errand boy, and, for good measure, a large drunken Irishman. His work rate made even Darla roll her eyes. It was partly hot, rich blood, then, that had him striding south via a certain Euston alleyway, proceeding between fizzing pools of orange gaslight and the heavy, unremitting black of the night that lay between them. Partly blood, and partly anger. He was enjoying anger. In life, he'd been so committed to being a decent man that he had scarcely allowed a dark thought to squeeze his heart. At his father's funeral, he had been a waxwork. Of course, he'd shivered through hours of weeping alone in bed, shrouded in the counterpane like a child, but in public there had been face to save and an image to keep up. His upper lip was so stiff it wouldn't have been improved by galvanisation. Life had been a struggle, certainly, but a small, pathetic one. He had been slowly drowning, none of his flailing ever making more than a vanishing ripple. Even the unfolding horror of his mother's illness had been a gradual submersion: she blanched in front of his eyes, the disease choking her from within while he wore a ghastly false smile to keep from scaring her, because it was all he could do.

What a waste of blood and effort that had been. All that nodding tersely, and smiling tightly, and frowning faintly – you could hardly call them emotions at all. Not like this anger, this liberating burn in his stomach and his veins that felt like good whisky. To think that he'd missed the fun that flared in black thoughts and incendiary rage – he rather wished he could read Byron again. (Darla had said she once met him, or ate him, or something equally implausible.) He clenched his fists to practise their new strength, admiring his giant, long-limbed shadow cast into the broad rings of light. It was the closest he had to a reflection, and more faithful, showing a creature as enlarged and distorted as he was now. And the stark black against the rough orange, it was just how he felt. Harsh and vivid and real.

As far as he could tell, life, or whatever this was now, presented him with only one problem. A problem that measured up at about six foot one, had the musculature of a prize bull, and displayed an astronomically inflated sense of its own importance. Angelus did to William the kinds of things people had always done: put him down, beat him up, gave out instructions, and, when they weren't followed immediately to the letter, took up retribution using whatever was heavy and blunt and came easily to hand. Last night, that had been a length of railway sleeper. It had been located, inconveniently, in the siding where Angelus had finally caught up with William, the chief suspect in the mysterious disappearance of Angelus's pristine, expensively-bound copy of Trollope's latest.

There had followed a great deal of pain, and some thumping, and splintering wood which had alarmed William more than anything else, and a lot of rhetorical questions in which he'd taken a level of interest typical of the average bludgeoning victim. Why were you made a vampire, William? And Which should you worry about more, William, sulphur or holy water? And Which types of demon make the best minions?Who's the Master? What's a slayer? What does the Lucasian prophecy foretell? Why should you never approach a Neresh demon from the rear? Lots of pointless arcane detail designed to show that Angelus knew more rubbish than William did. He wouldn't have been able to respond even had he had the faintest idea what Angelus was talking about, thanks to his persecutor's strategy of punctuating each question with a brutal blow to William's head. By the time the big vampire left him to slump into the grit, William had expected his battered skull to disintegrate. Angelus's final question had been: How long will this take to heal?

Two days, it had turned out, to William's surprise. Dru had licked his wounds clean, until Darla had made her stop when it looked like her ministrations might prove fatal. And miraculously, though he hadn't been able to see it happening, his face had emerged intact from the pulp Angelus had made of his head. He was left with nothing but a little purpleness around the eyes, a deeply disconcerting clicking in his jaw, and – most usefully – this wonderful, incandescent anger. Being angry with Angelus was invigorating in a way he was sure being angry with his old set wouldn't have been. Angelus beat him down because it bothered him if William got too big, and because he'd done something to annoy him, and – William suspected this was the root of it – because he enjoyed it. The mere capacity for enjoyment put him far above the bullies of William's past. What they'd got out of propriety, he still couldn't fathom.

And at least Angelus's rules gave him something to rebel against, gave him purpose. Angelus obviously liked imparting dramatic lessons: proving, for example, that lack of circulation was no impediment to bruising. Perhaps he really did want to shape William into the kind of fine upstanding undead monstrosity he was himself, as well as causing him lots of gratifying pain along the way. So be it: Angelus was a schoolmaster, and William knew schoolmasters like only an inept pupil can. Good pupils never learnt that much about their masters because they never pushed their boundaries. And William had been bad enough in school to know full well that it wasn't the good pupils the masters liked the best.

Not that he cared whether Angelus liked him.

But teachers transmit lots of lessons alongside the ones they intend, and William thought he was getting a few. The beating, for example, taught him how quickly he could recover. And the stares and glances and slaps and comments were teaching him something about what he was supposed to do with Dru. Obviously, she wasn't his. It was quite clear that he was supposed to bow and scrape and tug his forelock to Angelus and Darla. But they were so bent on proving to him what a worm he was that he was beginning to suspect that they were nervous. That was an intriguing surprise, and he sensed it had something to do with Drusilla. He was supposed to take care of her so Darla and Angelus didn't have to, it seemed, and if they valued that so highly then he had something to bargain with.

The trouble was that he could hardly concentrate on one thing for more than five minutes, which made it devilishly difficult to come up with a decent strategy. When he was alive, he'd taken a certain pride in what he thought of as his poetically non-linear mind, but lately his thoughts seemed to run like the frantic, leaping images in a zoetrope projection. Some of these recent ideas horrified the frightened, murdered William locked up and gagged in the back of his brain. The one he had planned for tonight, for example. But they were the only ideas he'd ever had that came in such marvellous colour, that he was sure were his, not learned by rote when he was in school. Drusilla danced in the middle of most of them, a sharp shard of wicked delight. He was learning how to get her attention, too. Another of Angelus's incidental lessons.

What he had in mind was a porter or a conductor, a prim young lady in a travelling suit, someone shiny and decorative. Dru liked anyone who came with an elaborate costume. She would button and unbutton them, playing with their whistles and watches. He'd bring her one home, a special treat, and keep her occupied all night. Show her what a good hunter he was becoming, how he was willing to break the rules because he had a plan, a real, proper plan, which was far superior to Angelus's ridiculous rules anyway. And it would show Angelus ... Well, it would just show him.

The first part of the plan was easy. Make it onto the station concourse, find a likely-looking candidate and cosh them over the head. Maybe two people, so he could have one for himself and get the other home to Dru without stopping to sample it. There was only a mile or so between the shed and the platforms – less if he cut across the tracks, but he was going for inconspicuous. It was a well-thought-out, elaborate plan and it required elements like that. The route took him past darkened houses where families who would be up at dawn were already sleeping, past the cut-and-cover excavations for the underground railway that would snake west toward Paddington, and at last into the narrowest streets where several branches of business were still being plied. Red-covered lamps burnt in the windows of a down-at-heel bawdy-house from which issued strained, high laughter. A man shouted over a stall selling something that smelled roasted and salty and appetising, and William's stomach growled and clenched. He noted the reaction with surprise. He hadn't known he still had appetites in that direction. He pressed on, though, into the yellow light thrown from the windows of a tiny, grimy, noisy pub, with a riotous assembly of newly knocked-off workers boozing at the open window. He stopped.

He could tell things about people's blood. It wasn't exactly that he could smell it, and the scent of blood to him now was nothing like the faint metallic tang he knew when he was alive, but scent was the only name for it he could find. Everywhere among people he could feel the timbre of a glorious symphony in blood. When tight-corseted women fainted in the theatre queue, he could sense their anaemia. At the wedding they invaded, before it all began, the male guests' undisguised, indecorous lust as they regarded the blushing, doomed bride had nearly made him laugh aloud. In the nastier streets, he felt the alcohol-thinned blood crawling through the narrowed arteries of the legion unfortunates in the gutters. All this secret knowledge opened his eyes: he hadn't the opportunity to be as oblivious about humanity as he'd been when alive. Perhaps he'd make a better poet for it. And the railwaymen here at the inn window had blood that smelled of this great age of steam, and would make Drusilla's eyes roll in ecstasy.

Change of plan. He slowed his pace and pushed open the door of the little pub. The din inside masked the ring of the bell above it, and no one seemed to see him enter. The interior was suffused with a thick yellow light that hung in the smoke-filled, whisky-smelling air. William made for the bar and stationed himself near the group of navvies. His heightened senses made just being in a place like this a little like getting drunk, and he absorbed their conversation without difficulty.

"Not much of this job left," opined a big man with meaty arms and skin slick with sweat and grime. "New track's bloody marvellous. Going to lay twice as fast as the old stuff."

A young man with brown hair and brown eyes to match the brown muck smeared over every visible inch of his skin sniffed expansively. "Then we're stuck back beggin' bloody Crass for more work. I say slow up. Foreman ain't twigged 'ow much better them new spikes is."

"Course 'e 'as," muttered a third, a man who, under the dirt, probably looked little older than his thirty years, and whose hair, where it protruded under the brim of his hat, was still a warm blond despite the grease. "They're a bloody revolution. Drive 'em straight through solid rock, never mind wood."

William's eyes grew round and an irresistible smile caught on his lips. His mind flashed with memory: Angelus beating him bloody with just the wrong hardware, older tormentors who chose their insults unwisely. The plan melted away in an instant – never let it be said that he missed an opportunity. He leaned toward the railwaymen with an open smile. "Could I buy you fellows a pint?"

Three pairs of narrowed eyes stared at him from livid, grime-smeared faces. Admittedly, a fortnight or so of death, bloodlust and living in a warehouse had taken the glaring naïve sheen off his appearance, but he was still an odd sight in this place: too scrawny and pale to look like he worked, too upright and poised to be of their class, and he had all his teeth. That detail was striking in his own circle, and a downright singularity in this place.

But a pint was a pint.

"Alright then," said the fair-haired man. "Stoker." He extended a hand.

William furrowed his brow momentarily, then took the proffered hand. "I'm Mort," he decided.

"And these are Tressell and Hudson."

"Pleasure to make your acquaintances," said William, sliding his accent down a notch with each word. The men looked at him with suspicion, so he turned to the bar and ordered.

"You fellers know a, er, bloke by the name of Inglis?" he asked, as soon as the flagons were stationed in hands.

"Inglis?" asked Stoker, peering round at his companions.

"I'll say we do," chipped in Hudson, the youngest of the men, ducking a thunderous scowl from the more venerable Tressell. "'E's the ol' bastard as pays our wages! Indirect, like. 'E pays boss and boss pays us."

"Pays us sometimes," said Tressell, bitterly.

"I never met 'im," finished Hudson.

"I 'ave," said Stoker. "E's summin' big in the railway firm. Commissioned this new track we bin laying." He regarded William critically, hands jammed in the pockets of his long, tattered coat, eyebrows cocked and head tilted slightly to the side. William swallowed hard. "Tall bugger, red hair, moustache like a walrus?" he asked.

Stoker squinted at him. "Walrus?"

"Big moustache," amended William.

"Yeah, that's 'im alright."

William grinned broadly.

"What's it to you, any how?" demanded Tressell, who himself sported a formidable moustache.

"He's an, er ..." - it was no use: "acquaintance of mine," finished William lamely. He was going to have to practice this. "I know 'im," he said in a flash of inspiration.

It was the wrong thing to say. The eyebrows of all three labourers shot for their cap brims, and Tressell and Hudson paused with their mugs halfway to their lips. "Friend of yours, is 'e?" asked Stoker grimly.

"Nah, nah, wouldn't say that," said William quickly. "He's... not a friend."

Tressell and Hudson drank.

"What do you get paid a day?"

"'Ere, yer ain't one of them agitators, are yer?" asked Stoker, frowning.

"No! Not at all. I'm offering to do you a favour."

"Don't need no favours," began Tressell, but Stoker stilled him with a hand to his elbow.

"I'm listening," he told William, levelly.

"Take me along and show me this stretch of track you've been laying, and I'll give you each whatever you'd earn in a day."

"All three of us? Just to show yer? Wotcher need all three of us for?" asked Tressell. William, aping Stoker's stance with feet planted facing outwards, shrugged and returned his appraising look. "Don't sound right to me."

"Talk yourself out of couple of shillings then, mate," mumbled Hudson, ducking his head as he did so and looking askance at Tressell, who snorted and gulped down the remainder of his pint.

"I'm in," said Stoker. He shook William's hand again.

"Me an' all." Hudson jumped to his feet enthusiastically.

"Bugger this," said Tressell, making for the door.

"See yer tomorrow, I'll stand yer a drink!" Hudson called after him. William grinned at his new accomplices. "Lead the way," he told Stoker.

The track closed for repairs was some distance out from the lights of the main station. All was dark but for the storm lantern Hudson had collected from the shed on the way. "'Ere we are, Mister – Mort, did yer say?" Hudson announced as they arrived.

"That's right," murmured William, looking around. High embankments shielded the track from the rows of filthy, miserable houses collapsing against one another on either side, and the sounds that drifted down from them – the thin, reedy cry of a hungry infant, cats fighting, drunken shouting – were distorted and unreal. William watched Hudson shiver convulsively and cast him a sheepish smile. "Wotcher wanna know 'bout this Inglis bloke, then?" asked the youth.

"Don't want to know anything, especially," said William. "Show me these new spikes, then? The ones you reckon'll drive through anything?"

Hudson cast an uncertain look at Stoker, who looked William up and down again. After a moment, he stalked a few yards up the line and returned with a clenched fist. In it he held a bundle of metal spikes: inches of thick black metal with a broad head at one end, tapered to a vicious point at the other. Transfixed, William took one from Stoker and ran his finger down the length admiringly. Hudson shivered again.

"They're, er, new design, see. These steps cut in the side, they stop the spike creepin', so it don't work out when the trains goes over," babbled Hudson, who suddenly didn't like the way the moonlight was glinting in the stranger's eyes. "Right," murmured William. He tested the spike's weight and pressed a fingertip against the point. It was not hugely sharp, but a decent heft and he could see it would take effect.

"Engineer yourself, is it? Inspector?" Hudson had perceptibly retreated a few steps and was peering at William through the dark. William did not reply, turning the spike over in his hands.

"'S'all there is to see," said Stoker defensively, gesturing across the dark tracks. William looked him in the eye, steadily enough to make Stoker swallow. Seeing the man's Adams apple bob was enough. "Not quite," William breathed, his demon face breaking through scarcely bidden. He seized Stoker by the throat, making the man's cap fall off backward, revealing his dirty blond hair in the moonlight. William drew back his fist and in an instant smashed the spike through Stoker's forehead. The man had no time to scream, and the metallic clatter as the spikes in his hand hit the track disappeared into the overwhelming, dizzying smell of blood.

"Drive through anything," agreed William. He let go of Stoker's throat and the body dropped.

There was a moment of silence as William and Hudson regarded one another. Death, moonlight and shock made both their skins the same colour, where Hudson's was visible beyond the filth. The whites of his eyes were huge. Neither of them was breathing. Then: William broke into a grin, leaned forward and whispered, conspiratorially - "Run, Hudson!"

The young labourer turned on his heel and sprinted wildly along the track. Within feet, the gravel and the uneven rails had tripped him and he hit the earth as William pursued at a saunter. The young man scrambled to look up at him from his position sprawled on the ground, pieces of gravel embedded painfully in the palms of his hands. William yanked him up by the shoulders, smiled, and promised "Won't hurt a bit." He considered. "Well, maybe a bit." Then he sank his teeth into the boy's neck. Hudson screamed just once, bucked his body like a trapped hare, and died.

As William collected the remaining spikes and tipped the bodies into a fetid ditch between the rails and the embankment, he remembered he'd meant to keep a navvy for Dru. He wondered briefly about heading back to the pub in search of Tressell, but concluded that the dark blood beading his shirtfront might prompt uncomfortable questions. Never mind: he could knock her off a streetwalker on the way home. And all this would more than suffice to show Angelus he wasn't dealing with a snivelling inferior. The giant oaf wouldn't be able to belittle him when he heard about this. And next, what he was going to do next, Angelus would be proud to have thought of himself. It was with something of a swagger that William made for the bright lights of the station.