One hour before dawn, Sister Amanda Malreaux faced a gathering crowd of vampires in the tiny park called Juri Commons. She trembled inside, but she stood calmly.

Hers was a complex, intellectual faith. It comforted and sustained but did not take away fear.

“Are you really, really sure you want to do this?” the Minister Provincial had asked two weeks before. Sister Margaret looked like the grandmother everyone wished they had. She was kind and understanding and didn’t scold if a sister occasionally said the eff-word.

Amanda had nodded. She was sure. But it didn’t mean she wasn’t afraid as she climbed into the convent’s station wagon and drove north on that bright afternoon two weeks ago.

The sun had been low when she reached Bear Valley in Point Reyes National Park. Her scholar parents, transplanted to Stanford from her mother’s Nigeria and her father’s Algiers, had brought her there many times.

The place felt like a home.

She’d planned to walk up the wide main trail, step off into the trees somewhere and wait until dark. But when she pulled into the parking lot and stepped out, she found herself facing a ranger.

“Ma’am? Oh, ‘scuse me. Sister. I’m just closing the lot now. There’s no time for a hike, sun sets in a half hour. But please come back another day.”

She had worn a habit today, though she usually went about in ordinary street clothes. She felt almost pretentious, “dressed up” as a nun, but she wanted everything to remind her that God was in her heart and that she was at home.

She faced the tall, skinny ranger, young enough to have been her son. “Young man, I am going out there to speak to those night creatures. I will be perfectly safe. Believe me.” At six feet one inch, she was an imposing figure. She radiated moral certainty.

The ranger twisted his mouth, let out a breath. “How can you ask me…?”

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But he believed in her. Looking at the ground, he motioned with his left hand that she should go. “Thank you, young man,” she said quietly, and walked through the gate and up the fire road toward the first stand of trees.

She reached a huge oak at a junction where the narrow Sky Trail set off up the hill. There she stood and looked back at the parking lot. The last vehicles quickly crunched off over the dusty gravel. The young ranger had disappeared, as though he didn’t want to know what happened. The sun was already behind the hills and even in her robes she was cold.

She stood alone under the tree at the junction, a tall figure in black and white with a handsome face as dark black as her mother’s. Her watch showed that she had another half hour to wait. She bowed her head and prayed.

She was still frightened but the encounter with the ranger had made her certain. She’d always been that way: the more people believed in her, the stronger she became, for their sake. That man had risked his conscience, perhaps his soul, because she had made him believe in her.

Deep in prayer, she waited the last minutes. She had never been one of those lucky ones who talk to God and hear a reply. For her, religion was a conscious act of faith.

She felt the moment of sunset as though a marble door grated open.

A dozen pale forms stepped out of the surrounding woods and one or two rose up from tall grass in the field. What had there been out there hide beneath?

They drifted up to her and formed a ring around the tree where she stood. Like mist off of ice, their evil pushed against the boundary of the home where she stood.

One by one she met their red eyes, saw the awful emptiness there. They could not approach her but she could not go to them.

She picked out one whose eyes might have showed yearning. “Please come in,” she said, heart beating a tattoo as she surrendered her only safety, “and be comforted.”

The pale figure stepped across the boundary and became a heavyset bumbler who looked like Oliver Hardy.

The others hissed like angry cats and it took all her courage to say, “You may all come in. Please come in and be seated.”

But a moment later they were ranged on the ground in a semi-circle, looking up at her with the curiosity of kittens.

Surrounded by persons who believed in her, Amanda Malreaux was strong. Trembling with the cold, she walked to each one and kissed him or her on the forehead, their skin chill against her lips. Then she talked in her shy way about her faith.

They adored her, which made her uncomfortable. Who was she to preach? She was no saint.

But she saw her doubt ripple through them, a ripple that might tear into blood hunger, and forced herself to return to certainty.

The night ahead of her was long and cold and she would be sick in the morning, but she must not waiver.

These outsiders had been too long without love.