"Are you going to kill me?" I asked, getting straight to the point, and staring back at snake man.
"Surprisingly, no," said Anne in that soft voice. Brief relief. But then it occurred to me that she had nonetheless abducted me. Her intentions were likely to be suspect. I decided not to get too excited.
"So why?"
"I need a new mate," she said. "Mine has disappeared." Her lips curved in an ironic smile that was reflected back at me in the rear-view mirror. It was hard to tell if she was angry or not. She said everything in such a matter of fact way.
"So you're thinking to lure Angus and then capture him. Clever. You might struggle a bit to get what you want from him, though. He's a bit feisty." I chuckled inwardly at this massive understatement. Well, this woman would find out about Angus soon enough.
"No. Not Angus."
"You're hoping to get Fergus or Marcus then? Or maybe Oliver, but I'll tell you for free that he's your nephew twice over, so any kids you had would probably have extra limbs or eyes or something."
"No."
"Well, who then?" I was starting to run out of ideas here. She looked at me in the rear-view mirror again and winked. And then the penny dropped.
"Me?" I gazed back in horror, although I have to say a tiny part of me was secretly a bit thrilled. Gorgeous older woman? Every teenager's dream, I reckon. Except this one was, how to put it, a complete nutcase. Take your regular bunny boiler and amplify that madness by a factor of a couple of thousand and you might just be approaching this one's determination-slash-insanity. She was Jack's other half, for God's sake. And she'd just abducted me. And something else - I wasn't even fifteen yet. She was a couple of centuries old. That was all kinds of wrong.
"I'm not an iron metaboliser," I told her. And I'm fourteen you pervert, I thought.
"You will be. Soon."
"How can you know that?"
"You're starting to smell like a male vampire. Another couple of weeks under normal circumstances and your hormones would have kicked in properly. But I have a way to speed up that process. Two days, maybe three."
I decided to shut up right then, because the information I'd been getting was deteriorating rapidly. Things had gone downhill fast after she'd told me that she wasn't going to kill me. And now she was going to turn me into an iron metaboliser. I wondered if I'd end up looking like the bloodsuckers, all haggard and creepy, rotting from the inside. And I didn't even want to think about how she was planning to achieve my transformation. It could only be bad.