“Babe?” Lavinia’s voice was tense. “Tell ‘em, they gotta hear it from both of us!”
White hands pushed tentatively into the circle. The harder she fought against the despair, the deeper it settled. She had molested her sister, then abandoned her in a cold, lonely world. Lavinia would leave her once she truly understood.
She clutched her heart and wept. Cold hands touched her arms, tickling at first, and then scratching. Triumphant voices hissed. The world faded to blackness.
And then a little fairy, about the size of a large cat, floated against the blackness. With deep compassion it regarded her, as Cinnamon had so long ago when he purred solemnly on her chest.
The fairy’s blazing eyes were violet as the wine-dark sea. And they saw everything.
The rough sidewalk under her hands held a black blob of ancient bubble gum. Her skin felt warm where icy hands no longer clutched. She was on her knees with Lavinia in a cave of hissing ice.
The “ice cave” was made of white faces, flattened and distorted as if they pressed against rippled glass. Teeth snapped, fingers strained, voices whispered and threatened, but Sally and Lavinia’s little dome-shaped “home” held firm.
Lavinia said with wonder, “I saved you. Just like you rode in and rescued me this morning.”
Sally shook her head helplessly and Lavinia explained: “Whatever the fuck messed me up when I slept was messing with you just now. It picked up on your mishegas about your sister and made it huge as the whole world. I had to look through tunnels and shit to find you, just like you did me.” She shook her head and rumpled Sally’s hair. “Fucking idiot, the one time you don’t got the emotional maturity of a 52-year-old and it has to be now.”
The hopeless burden of ancient guilt was smaller. When Lavinia found her just now, she had seen exactly what Sally did to little Carrie Yan. And she still regarded Sally with the usual exasperated affection.
I saw myself as a tiger this morning but she saw me as one of Odin’s ravens. This time I saw her as a fairy; I wonder how she saw herself.
Sally sat up and the white walls lurched back. She felt a stab of hope and joy and put her hands on Lavinia’s shoulders. “We did it! We can make a home together, just by being together in love!”
“Yeah, no thanks to you,” said Lavinia, but her eyes were soft and a newly buoyant Sally kissed her without paying attention.
Together they stood, the space around them ballooning to push the vampires aside. Sally realized that she was needlessly straining her muscles. She nestled into Lavinia’s side and relaxed. The space only grew wider.
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The house they sought was surely less than 100 feet down the hill.
♦
Charity placed trembling hands on the window the Welcome Wagon had smashed, her breathing steady for once as she thought of the rape. She looked only at her hands.
She had always invested in quality: the replacement window was a good one which now slid up silently. Her long loneliness would be over in just a few moments.
She lifted her eyes.
♦
First by tens, then hundreds the vampires rimmed the plaza. The relentless cajoling filled the background like a nagging cold. Malcolm sought the restful company of Sister Amanda where she sat in a folding lawn chair.
“Tell me about that kid, Jeremy,” he asked, sitting on a concrete wall next to her. “The last time I saw eyes like that was that mine disaster.” Enthusiastic vampires had dug trapped miners from a collapsed mine in Peru last year, while real rescue workers waited helplessly for daylight. Most of the freed miners came pouring out, not knowing it was still night. The few who cowered in the black pits until daylight had had eyes like Jeremy’s.
Sister Amanda looked sadly at Jeremy and his three older companions as they walked the perimeter taking videos and talking. “It goes against my grain to bring someone so young into danger like this. But this is his passion. He brings such enthusiasm to his ‘crusade,’ if you’ll forgive the expression, that I must support him. And his parents…” Again, that sadly disappointed look. “His parents are happy that he’s enthusiastic about this,” she concluded firmly. “And as for why he feels such a personal interest, I’m afraid I really ought to let him tell you, if he wants.”
“How did you get involved with him?”
She smiled a golden smile. “He was one of our most enthusiastic volunteers at the homeless shelter in the Haight.” Her lip curled and she looked disappointed in herself. “Forgive me,” she said, with a gesture towards her heart (perhaps she wore a cross under her turtleneck?), “I shouldn’t say ‘homeless.’ It’s bad practice. The shelter is a home and the souls who stay there are safe for the night.”
The cracking teenaged voice drifted to them, narrating into his phone. “I’m facing the monsters in one of the most famous places on earth today. You can see them, standing like statues. They’ve been driven out of this plaza but we need to drive them off the whole earth.”
“He’s making his daily vodcast,” the nun explained, and Malcolm wondered why it was odd to hear a nun say “vodcast.”
A new sound started up. The vampires were saying something different. It started at one place and spread until they were all chanting. Malcolm couldn’t make it out but Jeremy stopped speaking and looked stricken.
“Cinder rout sin drought cinda rowt.” The chant refused to take shape for Malcolm. But Sister Amanda’s eyes widened. Her face set and she walked swiftly toward her charges. Malcolm ran after her.
Jeremy’s smartphone slid from nerveless fingers and cracked against the ground. He fell to his knees with a painful smack, blubbering, “No, no, I’m sorry, I didn’t, I didn’t!”
The other three made a shield around Amanda as she arrived. “They’re not getting you, Sister,” declared the one with green hair and a paperclip through his left ear.
The chanting suddenly clicked into sense as Malcolm skidded to a halt. “Send her out. Send her out. Send her out to us and we will let you live. Push her out…”
Jeremy closed his eyes, lost in memories of horror.
… one of the vampires looked at me. He was older than the others and his face was fatter. “Open the window and push him out to us.” …. Alec got that mischievous look. “I’m gonna moon those vampires.” …. I twitched against him. His balance shifted, and his white butt stuck out past the line of the door… that older vampire gave me a wink and a thumbs up…
“No,” he whimpered. “No, no, I’m sorry, please, I’m so, so sorry…”