In The Daylight Sun Café, Charity Claire cradled a mug of coffee, exhausted, knowing she should go home and sleep.

There had been a worldwide explosion of brunch places, coffee houses and dinner-delivered-before-dark services. But of course you couldn’t have a brunch place without someone being there pre-dawn to get things ready, baking and vegetable chopping and whatnot. So family-run establishments thrived that were part storefront, part living quarters. Many sold takeout dinner food until a half hour before dusk, and then person or people who lived there cleaned up and prepped for the next day. Late-night diners were a thing of the past but the vampires had been good for small family businesses.

Three tables down, Jesse Casselberger wished he could comfort the exhausted looking girl at the table near the wall. Walter rolled his eyes in exasperated affection.

At the plaza, Malcolm Donald grabbed a quick nap while assistants hurriedly bought the biggest, solidest tent they could find and other assistants argued with the police.

And in the green camper, Sally stared at her dead beloved.

The sun was full on Lavinia’s ecstatic face and her blazing eyes were wide. She wasn’t burning or whatever was supposed to happen to vampires in the sun.

It sure sounded like she was coming.

Color came back into her cheeks as she made what tiny hip thrusts her nearly paralyzed body would allow. Sally felt answering heat. Graphic, intense images blasted into memory: Lavinia looming over her, pressed wet and musky rich against her face, pubic bone rocking until even her eyelids were dripping. Once she’d grabbed Sally’s hair, tilted her head so their eyes met, and roared in a mighty voice, “Now, baby!” As she came, her eyes had pulled Sally into a universe of streaking stars.

Now Sally’s nipples crinkled against her shirt, her vagina throbbed wet, a secret thrill lanced up her thighs.

She couldn’t bear it.

She shoved her body into the path of the sun. Lavinia stopped screaming and her panting slowly calmed. “Hoe … Lee … Shit,” she gasped, eyes still wide.

Lavinia had always come with her eyes open. It was one of the many ways they were alike in spite of the age difference: Sally had always longed for a lover who would look into her eyes as she came. Shaken, she sobbed, “What the hell was that?” The jolt of excitement had left her nauseated, like that time long ago with …. She pushed the memory away.

Traffic on a nearby street reminded her that anyone could hear them. She kept her body blocking the sun as Lavinia’s breathing slowed. She was still pale; the color in her cheeks must have been an illusion. The camper smelled of sex and unwashed bodies (they hadn’t had a chance to shower for two days before the rally).

The heat on her back died out. The sun was momentarily behind the clouds. Sally turned to the broken curtain. She got the knob back into its holder but the metal rod was bent. Heart still pounding, she straightened it as best she could without snapping it in two and got the sagging thing back in place.

She turned back and stretched out beside Lavinia before she could find reasons not to. Wrapping arms and legs around her she pulled the limp, heavy body so they were face to face and nudged a pillow under the hanging head. Those still-marvelous eyes met hers with wonder.

Sally had never read any of the vampire literature popular before vampires became a plague. She had never had fantasized about a vampire lover. What she felt now was completely and solely because Lavinia was still Lavinia. The faint, mildly pleasant otherworldly smell made her nervous.

“I never felt anything like it,” Lavinia finally said, her voice stronger than before. “Well, no, I’ve felt something like it.” She smiled weakly at Sally and Sally wanted again to kiss her but didn’t.

“But shit,” Lavinia went on. “Everybody knows sunlight destroys vampires. Don’t they?” Sally shook her head and Lavinia echoed her thoughts: “Hell, did we ever actually see a video? Maybe we all just assumed. But fucking Christ, you’d think the vamps would be all over this! But no, they dive for the sewers and the basements, soon as the sun comes up. I almost did that too.”

“How did you wind up in here?”

Lavinia, suddenly shy, said, “’Kay, don’t laugh. It may’ve been some kind of, I dunno, magic. Prob’ly not,” she added hastily.

“Magic.” Sally kept her voice neutral. But in a vampire-infested world, what was so impossible about magic?

“When I was in Germany, back in ‘75, I bought this leather jacket from an old ledermacher. Oh, yeah, I told you about him. Old German hippie, long gray hair, patch on one eye. Anyway, I fell in love with this one and paid, well, what was a lot of money then for it. Because of the raven emblem.”

Sally pulled back to look once more at the emblem on Lavinia’s jacket. She had admired it before, though she’d thought it was a crow. A raven, perched on a shoulder, whispering into an ear, flames in the background. And tiny letters that spelled out the German words: Fliegt heim ihr Raben.

She gasped. Fly time her robin…

Lavinia had said Fliegt heim ihr Raben as she reached for the emblem with her hand. And the words were familiar because they were from the Wagner opera Götterdämerung: the opening of Brünhilde’s last aria before she throws herself into the fire to burn with her beloved. “Fly home, thou ravens.” Fly home.

Sally looked back up at Lavinia’s watchful face. The ravens had been flying home to Odin, the one-eyed Norse father god. “You’re not trying to tell me that old guy was...?” She couldn’t even say it.

“Well, you can’t blame me for thinking it. Prob’ly just a stoned-out old hippie with one eye and fucking talent.” She looked embarrassed. “But I always kind of told myself there was a little something in this jacket more than just good leatherwork.” Sally remembered how embarrassed Lavinia had been when she asked about the jacket on the morning after they met.

“How did that, well, magic, how did it work?”

Lavinia was quiet for a long minute. Pain spread over her face again as she thought about the night before. Sally wished she could take the question back.

“I was so fuckin’ cold and so hungry.” Lavinia said at last in a bleak monotone. “This gnawing in, hell, every part of me, it was all I could feel. Couldn’t think. Fuck, I didn’t even think of thinking, wouldn’t have wanted to.” Her eyes sagged shut as she spoke.

“I remember it. Was like I’d got some special dispensation from the Pope to be an animal. I moved, I saw you lucky living assholes and it was like, ‘kid at the window of a candy store.’ I did everything to find a way in.

“Around me? Enemies. Hundreds of enemies. Trying to outsmart me, trying to outsmart everyone else. Jesus fuck, yeah, that’s what hell’s gotta be like.

“So. I had to keep moving, keep trying any trick. But because I was brand new, I couldn’t be near as crafty as the, I dunno what to call ‘em, the seniors, the older ones? On my guard every second not to show any sign of weakness.” This actually contradicted Lavinia’s claim that she didn’t even think of thinking but Sally didn’t interrupt.

“And all the time hungry,” Lavinia whispered on. “I’ve missed a few meals, my time, fasted by choice for a day or so. But I never felt any ‘hungry’ like that ‘hungry.’”

Sally noticed that Lavinia said “that hungry” instead of “this hungry.” Was the hunger less now? But again she kept quiet and stroked Lavinia.

“Jesus god, moving, moving, trying this, trying that. All around me, competitors for the food, moving, pushing at the edges, trying anything, calling out, coaxing, teasing.” Lavinia’s eyes opened and her brow wrinkled like she was trying to understand something. The puzzled look stayed as she repeated, “Trying any trick, anything at all. I’d have done anything.”

She gave up on whatever she was trying to figure out and went on. “Well, anyway, a long, fucking long time later, the sky starts to pink up. When it does, you can feel this energy start up. This ‘shit, gotta get underground but let’s have one more try to get someone’ energy. I’m thinking – no, it’s nothing like thinking, I’m feeling just terrible. Like, I’m outside and can never go inside ever again.

“And right then, me comes back to me. I dunno why right then. Something about the sun coming? I remember full on who I was and I see your face and I feel all I lost ….” Her face crumpled and Sally pulled her closer. For half a minute, Lavinia’s head was on her shoulder and Lavinia made no move to bite her neck. Sally took the risk deliberately, fairly sure she could fight Lavinia off if she tried, but starting to wonder if she would surrender instead. This is no time to bottom, she told herself sternly. Can’t go there, can’t.

Against her neck, Lavinia said “Put me back, I can’t stand it.” Sally quickly set her back on the pillow. “Can’t stand…?” she asked in a neutral tone.

“Lemme finish my story.” Lavinia looked guilty and Sally suspected she had been tempted.

“So anyway,” Lavinia continued quickly (didn’t she know how impressed Sally would be that she’d resisted the urge to drink?), “I think, we had a home, and I put my hand right here.” Lavinia’s hand twitched where it was draped across Sally’s back, and her face showed an instant, quickly suppressed, of panic that she couldn’t move. “Shit! I hate this.”

“Where you put your hand was on the raven emblem,” Sally said quietly. “And you spoke the words from the opera.”

“How did you know that?”

“You did exactly the same stuff when you, first...” Sally couldn’t finish the sentence.

Lavinia looked confused for a moment, then said, “I remember now. That was the last rational thought I had until this morning, it’s like I picked up right there. So, I touched the raven and I remembered that old guy and how I always thought this raven had a little magic in it.

“When we talked about the Wagner opera – and just by the way I was impressed as fuck that you’d seen it, did I tell you that?” Sally nodded, remembering how pleased she herself had been to impress Lavinia so.

“Well, okay,” Lavinia went on, “I don’t know if I really told you about the ravens or how much you already know, so don’t have a hissy if I’m telling you something you know, right?”

Sally smiled. It was one of the few sources of tension in their relationship, that Lavinia (usually) felt compelled to explain anything pre-1990. “I won’t bite,” she said, then wished she’d phrased it another way.

But Lavinia went right on. “Odin’s got these companion birds. Fly out every day and come home at night, tell the god everything they seen. I dunno if this one is Hugin or Munin, those are the damn birds’ names, but you see he’s whispering into Odin’s ear. And there’s the quote on it, that “fly home, you damn birds” business.

“Next thing I know, I’m flying through the night. Not flying flying, you know. Running hell-fuck fast. And there’s our home, where we parked it and I got the keys.

“Only a couple other vampires around by now, it’s seconds before the sun’s up. And I want to get in so bad, it’s a hurt even bigger than the hungry. I’m not sure, I think I hear one of the running vamps call out to me to get underground. Maybe not, though, it’s everyone for himself.

“It comes to this. I don’t got time to try the door and to run for shelter. I’m crazy with the hungry and I know the sun’ll kill me. But I see you looking down at me and I think how Brünnhilde sent the damn birds home to burn the damn gods to the ground and then jumped into the fire to be with the one she loved, and I chose this. I still don’t know how.

“And then I was in. I hide cause I don’t know what you’re gonna do and one second later, boom, I can’t move.” Another ripple of panic, sternly suppressed, made Lavinia breathe hard for a moment.

Sally held Lavinia until she breathed evenly again. Lavinia’s body wasn’t warm and living but it wasn’t ice either; it was room temperature, like a person-sized body pillow. But even so, it was heaven to hold her again. Sally nestled closer, treasuring the feeling.

With a start which jarred her heart, Sally woke up knowing it was hours later and that she’d been asleep with a vampire in her arms the whole time.

Her neck felt strange. Lavinia’s eyes were closed and she was motionless. Cautiously, Sally took her right hand from Lavinia’s back and brought it up to her neck. Smooth skin, no wetness. Her neck was probably just stiff from sleeping like this. She looked at her watch: a little after 3 pm.

She wasn’t sure she should wake Lavinia up, but she had no hesitation what to do anymore. “Babe? Babe.” She rubbed Lavinia’s back. No response. There was probably some vampire rule that once they went to sleep for the day they couldn’t wake up until sundown. Everything was so damn cutting edge and uncertain.

More firmly, she shook Lavinia and said, “Baby? I need you to wake up.”

Lavinia’s eyes snapped open. Relieved, Sally said, “I’ve decided--”

Lavinia slid from Sally’s arms and flew to her feet in a huge electric motion. Sally was so shocked that she floundered helplessly for a crucial second. Huge fists pounded on the rear door of the camper and a shriek rent the air as she recovered and scrambled into a ready crouch, eyes scanning left, right.

Lavinia was pressed against the rear doors. She screamed a thin horrible scream.