Lavinia, hands crossed behind her head, freshly dressed and looking like a normal human, watched Sally gobble canned chili, saltines and carrot sticks. “Ready for that Four Dick Dialog whenever you are, tiger,” she said happily.

Sally sat cross-legged kitty corner on the bed from Lavinia, who was positioned to avoid the late afternoon sun. Soon they would face their second night in a world of completely new rules. She took a bite of chili too fast and burned the roof of her mouth. Wincing, she forced herself to slow down.

There’d been a note stuck to the windshield when they got back to their camper. “Thanks! We had to take our little girl home early! Because of you and your little hang-gliding tryst! You might show a little consideration for other people next time!” A different hand had written, “Let me just add that my husband and I fully support your right to love whoever you want. But for heaven’s sakes remember this is a public beach.”

Lavinia had had a simple prescription. “Fuck ‘em.”

But Sally had burned with anger and shame. She’d tried to keep the little brown-haired squirrel-cheeked kid from seeing them. An image flashed before her eyes: a pixie face crumpled with hurt and confusion, under a bowl of black hair, begging please, Master of all Masters, please?

Nauseous, she’d taken refuge in anger at the couple. If only the wife hadn’t added her codicil so she could have hated them for homophobes!

“Babe.” Lavinia had seen only the anger. “Someone flying, and all they can do is get pissy because they’re also fuckin’? Fuck ‘em!”

Shaking, Sally took another bite of chili, blowing on it hard. She pulled logic around her like a robe: maybe it was a mercy the couple had manufactured a hang glider to explain people in midair. She and Lavinia could still control how the world learned what they knew.

“Okay, here are the facts as I understand them,” she said. “One, if you get bitten and drained but not torn apart, you rise as a vampire. You can’t think, you’re hungry and alone, you’re locked out of any conceivable home. And every time you sleep, some force shreds any bit of humanity you managed to regain. At least, that’s what happened to you yesterday and this morning.

“But it didn’t happen for Ori, Nori, Oin and Gloin et al. last night, totally not fair. And it’s not just sleep, because it started to happen when you were awake last night, until I breathed into your mouth. So, is it something special about you that makes you a target for whatever?

“Two, you crave any scrap of flesh that might have the tiniest droplet of blood in it. And it’s blood, specifically, not bile, not cerebral-spinal fluid, not lymph. Blood. Is that right? And is it red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, plasma, what draws you?”

Lavinia looked like a reformed alcoholic thinking about drinking binges and waking up in a pool of vomit. “Just blood. Didn’t fine tune it more than that. I think. But shit, did I really crave it or was I just following the mob hysteria? I was so lost…. And was it blood I wanted or was it some kind of, I don’t know, life force?”

“In the parking lot, when you had me feed you back some of the blood you lost?” Sally raised her eyebrows.

Lavinia’s face scrunched into an unhappy mask. “I sure thought I needed it. It tasted … good? Babe, I just don’t know. I feel skanky thinking about it.”

“Okay,” Sally shrugged, “moving on, then. Three, vampires don’t look like the humans they were, until they get into a home or something.” She furrowed her brow. “They look like classic movie vampires, you said? You have to tell me, I don’t know. You liked that vampire stuff more than I ever did, except for dumb Chinese vampire movies.”

“They do,” Lavinia nodded. “Black hair, funeral suits or dresses, white skin, red lips and mouths, soulless eyes.”

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Did other vampires look like that to you, after you got changed? I mean, are they actually physically are different or is it an illusion in the mind of any human who sees them?”

“Fuck if I could tell you. I don’t even know if I looked like that when I was in hell.”

“Not when you first opened your eyes. You just looked sad and lost. And when you were swept out of my arms….” Sally had to stop as her eyes flooded with unexpected tears. “Um, let’s see, I got a glimpse of you before you vanished in the swarm. I think you looked like you, but then I didn’t expect anything else.” She considered it with a scholarly look while Lavinia watched her tenderly. “No, I couldn’t say. Maybe you did look different but I saw what I expected to see, or maybe the illusion skipped me because I saw the real you.

“Okay. Four, it turns out vampires have a secret craving, as strong as the urge for blood: to be home again. Those vampires last night, they were beyond happy to be in our home. They were in a trance.”

“Yeah, they were cute, weren’t they? Like a bunch of kittens. Say, gimme a bite of chili?”

Sally raised her eyebrows again. “You’re hungry for food? Regular food?”

“I don’t know. Let me try.”

Sally held out a spoonful, her hand shaking. But Lavinia sniffed it, shook her head and leaned back. “Nothin’. Doesn’t smell bad, doesn’t smell good.”

“And you’re not hungry at all.”

“No, absolutely, no. I never felt so good after a regular meal as I did after all that sunlight.” Her body quivered. “Mmmmmhhh!”

She was clearly thinking only about sunlight, not sex, but Sally again thought about that family judging them, not seeing the miracle, seeing only…. She shook her head and pushed that cycle of thoughts away.

“Okay, that leads us to, what number was I at?”

“Big fat fucking three?” Lavinia suggested. They both laughed.

“Five, I think. You. First breakthrough in five years. A miracle for me and a miracle for the world too. You resisted that dark call, whatever it is. Maybe because of my love.” She shook her head. “Other good people have been loved after they were turned, I’m sure of it. So maybe a Norse god in disguise as an old hippie sold you a protective spell some twenty years ago, what year was it?”

“78, 79? I could figure it out. But probably 25, 30 years ago.”

“Yeah, so that theory has a lot of, well, what would have been his point? Why you, and why then and why not some better protection? And how did he anticipate the vampire plague? And besides, the jacket has a quote from Wagner on it. Wagner was a German proto-Nazi, a real-life Odin wouldn’t quote him.”

“Maybe,” Lavinia said thoughtfully, “it worked because it seemed magic to me. I still don’t know how I got into our home that first time; I was that close to bolting for a hidey hole. But I clung to what I thought was magic.”

“Or maybe you felt my invitation: I did think you’re still welcome in my home, babe. Maybe my love called to you.” Sally still blushed when she said something like that.

“Okay, six. Sunlight works magic on you. It starts your heart; it gives you blood back. It puts you into ecstasy that’s better than sex. It lets you move during the day, and on your full naked body it charges you up enough to fly.”

“I don’t think it was the sunlight got me moving during the day,” Lavinia said. “You did that when you came after me in the dark, that dream. It was like,” she struggled to find the words. “It was like you pinned me to this world again. And Jesus fuck, I hope it was a For All Time deal. I don’t wanna go through that again.

“But how I walked? I just knew that wherever you were was my home and I wanted to marry you and carry you across the threshold to our home. It was five thoughts all singing together like some fucking Gay Men’s Chorus, and I had you in my arms before I realized. So, whether you broke a spell or cast a new one or the “paralyzed” was all in my head or I beat the bad stuff back, I don’t know.”

“Okay, more unknown. But you were stronger than normal, even before you flew. Jumping out with me in your arms? You couldn’t have done that before.”

“You’re probably right. I sure wouldn’t have tried.”

“And then you flew.” Sally shook her head. “Jesus Christ, I still can’t believe that. And you weren’t just nullifying gravity either, you were controlling it. The earth is, let’s see, two pi times 4,000 miles is 8,000 pi and pi is about 3, so about 24,000 miles around.” Absorbed, she didn’t see Lavinia’s adoring gaze. “And it turns once in 24 hours, so the surface is going at a thousand miles an hour. If you only neutralized gravity, we’d have gone sailing into space in a straight line at a thousand miles an hour while the earth fell away from beneath us, and we would have turned helplessly and…”

“Hey, Feynman!” Lavinia looked at her affectionately. “Vampires don’t gibe too good with physics neither. I can’t tell you how I did it. But going up, it was like surrendering to the pull of the sun. And coming down, it was like pulling the plug on that, just sinking back. Psshhht! Or something.”

Sally, deflated, took another bite of chili and nibbled a saltine. “We’ve got to think about our next steps,” she said importantly. “We know things which somehow nobody else has discovered in five years.”

It sounded impossible when she said it out loud.