Sally stared at Lavinia: they couldn’t possibly be the first people to have figured all this out. “It must have happened before! Five years, billions of people affected, there must be others like you.”

“Whatever the fuck I am.”

Sally stroked one of her bare feet, dislodging granules of sand. “If being loved does it, others have been loved. If sunlight does it, well I, shit, what about that one I killed?” She bowed her head. “I saw him come to life and become human in the sunlight and then I saw him actually die.

“Hey, I just thought of something: after the slaughter at that stupid rally, there must have been piles of vampire corpses, yeah? Well, the sun must have brought some of them to life too. How come nobody noticed? Some city sanitation worker if nobody else.”

Lavinia looked down at the bed and said, “Actually, um, no. As, uh, soon as there was no chance of getting into the plaza, I guess you stopped looking by that point, well, we tore into those piles of bodies like rats. I got a little piece of one. Shit.” She looked again like a reformed alcoholic remembering binges. “Anyway, believe you me, they were gone long before sunrise.”

Sally’s lip curled, and Lavinia looked at the wall. Sally repentantly stroked Lavinia’s foot again, chiding playfully, “You’re getting sand on our bed, you slob.” Lavinia looked happier.

“Okay,” Sally came back to her point. “So, sunlight might do this to any vampire, but nobody knows because vampires hide from the sun and any downed vampire gets … consumed. I still can’t believe that not one damned vampire in five years has been caught by the sun…. There does seem to be some force that makes vampires stay vampires.” She shook her head, feeling she knew something about that force, but she couldn’t imagine what.

She kept talking, hoping she’d make the connection. “Hey, here’s something else. That vampire whose throat I bit, he lived through the night with his throat torn out. Unless they get eaten by other vampires, is it only a stake through the heart that can kill them?” She tried to think of any vampires she’d seen taken down. There was one at the comic book shop whose head had been crushed when it encountered the house magic but for all she knew that one had also been alive when she’d dropped it.

“Do you know?” she asked. “And is it only wood? Not fiberboard or Presto Logs? Any specific kind of wood? Oak, ash, cherry, redwood, mahogany? And is it only through the heart? What happens if a vampire gets a brain injury from wood? What happens if you get a splinter?”

Lavinia wore her Madonna smile. “I don’t know nothin’, I just work here. But, hey, let’s try this. Let me hold one of your stakes for a minute.”

Wordlessly, Sally pulled a stake from her belt loop. She couldn’t afford the specialty stakes, nicely turned and varnished until they gleamed. She bought simple ash stakes, now stocked even by grocery stores. The one she handed Lavinia had a point sharp enough that she’d once poked her finger bloody.

Lavinia took it like a loaded gun and felt it cautiously while a tense Sally watched. She sniffed at it, hefted it and finally handed it back to Sally with an uncertain frown.

“Well?” Sally said. “C’mon, what?”

“Not sure,” Lavinia said slowly. “I got this weird energy off it. Something was, I guess, ‘wrong,’ but that’s not quite it. Don’t stick me with it, that’s for sure.”

Sally gave her a look that said, “Duh” and stuck the stake back in its loop. Eying Lavinia with a sudden rush of excitement, she added, “I wonder what you’ll be like in the night now.”

“Yeah, who knows, maybe I’ll fly in the moonlight, that’s reflected sunlight after all. Maybe fucking starlight’ll do it. Stars are other suns.”

Sally finished her last bite of soup, put the bowl aside and flung herself into Lavinia’s arms.

“So, where do we go from here?” she asked, happy and comfortable. Lavinia was warm, and she wasn’t doing anything weird like flying. In fact, except for that faint otherworldly smell, she felt like she used to feel. What a lot we’ve been through in just two days.

Lavinia said, “What do you think we should do, tiger?”

Sally hoped Lavinia would take the lead again but amazingly she let two whole minutes go by without adding to what she’d said, something the old Lavinia wouldn’t have done for twenty seconds. Sally made herself think about what they should do.

“We know some important things,” she said tentatively. “So, we have to start telling people? But there’s lots of gaps in what we know. We need to find some more things out.”

As she’d hoped, Lavinia finally couldn’t resist jumping in. “Either one of us could get whacked any time. We gotta start telling people. Fucking how, though?”

Sally brooded, oddly reluctant to share their glorious secret with anyone. “Maybe we should try a few more experiments first?”

“Like what?” Lavinia could put a lot of New York huff into a word like “what.”

Sally had a beautiful image of them declaring the world their home and walking hand in hand through the night. She was about to tell it to Lavinia, when she felt something crinkle beneath her ear.

The card in Lavinia’s pocket, with the image from her dreams and a San Francisco address. The card that Lavinia had never thought to mention.

She sat up slowly. “I was thinking we might try walking together outside as soon as the sun sets, since our home is wherever we’re with each other. If that test succeeds, we can tell the world how to be safe from vampires.”

Lavinia arched her eyebrows in that way she had. “And if we get shredded in the first fucking nanosecond? How exactly does that tell anyone anything?”

Cautiously, Sally said, “There’s an address in San Francisco that I think we should go to. We should try it right outside that house.” When Lavinia made no comment, she added, “I think there’s someone there who can help us if we need it.”

Lavinia still looked blank. Had she never found the card in all the years she’d had the jacket? But it had crinkled too noticeably for that to be true.

With a shaking hand she reached into the jacket pocket and pulled the little card out. She held it in front of Lavinia with a rapidly beating heart, trying not to look too accusing, and waited for the explanation which she hoped would not change everything.