The Gene Wizards

                                    "....it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."

                                                                                                                                          Philip K. Dick, Valis

Am I just a gibbering idiot?

If you think being born into Old Money makes your life sweet, think again. For one thing, my parents are Vanpyres. The Vanpyre dynasty goes back to the Crusades - they make Old Money look like New White Trash. Then there are the names they gave us. They called me Curfew, which is beyond random. My sisters didn't exactly get off lightly either: they're called Taffeta and Amphetamine. I mean with parents like that who needs parents?

Also, let's face it, it's difficult to look cool when you live in an English village called Little Titmongering. Even if you do spend quite a bit of time in New York and your Dad has a top-secret laboratory in the Dakotas that you're not supposed to know about. The Vanpyres are rolling in ill-gotten dough – my father is a banker (say no more), my mother an ex-model who's had more face-lifts than a Pittsburgh slag heap. They're both as cold as ice. There ought to be a law against people like that having children.

It goes without saying we're all complete fruitcakes. I spend a lot of time in my room playing computer games, which makes me seem normal, I guess, and reading books, which makes me suspect. At least to adults, who seem to get nervous around anyone who thinks. They keep telling me I live in a fairy tale. They're sort of right about that, but in the wrong way, which is somehow a whole lot worse than just being wrong. Catch up with you soon. (I'm the gibbering idiot in Chapter 1).

My sisters are geniuses and spend most of their time misbehaving at their boarding school, Precious Hall. They're good at that. They also get good grades, which infuriates our parents, because it gives them so little to gripe about. Me, I'm more the quiet, nerdy type. Maybe that's why I had the meltdown. That's what everyone else is calling it anyhow. Personally, I don't think I had a meltdown. I think I saw the light. In a world where the real seems so unbelievable, how can we be sure what isn't real? Either way, this is the story of how we saved the world from a bunch of fallen angels. With a little help from an Asian butler, some seriously cool multi-player computer games and a little (well a lot) of help from a thing called the Philosophers' Guild. It's up to you if you want to believe the rest. But just bear in mind: we become what we believe.

Chapter 1: Curfew's Hell

"Money is the root of all evil," chuckled Curfew's father, Count Moribund Vanpyre, to Archie Firball, his lawyer, across the polished oak dining table of Succor Grange, surrounded by a handsome park on the outskirts of Little Titmongering. His Anglo-Asian butler slid the silver coffee service on to it before discreetly reversing himself out of the room.

Having long ago mastered the discipline of feeling all his emotions to the full while betraying none of them, the Vanpyres' servant of many years matched this deft bodily retreat with its mental counterpart – withdrawing into a private world of irony. He had not served in the Vanpyre household for thirty and more years without becoming a meticulous observer of their characters and affairs.

"Typical," he chuckled to himself from within his facial fortress. "He has the chutzpah to talk about money and evil, but gets the quotation wrong by leaving out the most important part of it!" As he carefully timed the top-up coffee brew in the kitchen and transferred it to an identical, pre-warmed pot that he already had waiting, he mused on the subtle art of hijacking platitudes. "Love of money is the root of all evil, my dear master, not money itself."