“She’s not still suckin’ blood, is she?” Charla snapped. “I want that nailed down, cause I’m no part of this if she is.” She glared at Sally, as if Sally was responsible for any of Lavinia’s crimes. It was the day they all met and Charla continued to be annoyed by Sally and to ignore Lavinia.

Lavinia responded with a cheerful “Fuck, no. Would you eat McDonald’s when you got a combo Noma, eBulli and French Laundry?”

Charla, with a blankly smug look (she had never heard of any of those restaurants), said, “I’d take a Quarter Pounder with Cheese over fancy French shit any day. So I ask you again. Are you still drinking?”

Lavinia didn’t get flustered by Charla like Sally did. “I said no, and last I looked, Webster’s still had the same definition for ‘no.’”

She wrinkled her brow and thought about it. “This is like a time I was on a meditation retreat for a few months.” Sally looked at Lavinia in shock. Meditation retreat? “We were s’posed to eat really slow, really mindful. Well, after a while, I got the amount of food just right and I wasn’t hungry but I wasn’t full either. That’s what this feels like. It’s, it’s like I got space inside me, like I got all kinds of potential.”

Sally took Lavinia’s hand and with raised eyebrows mouthed the words, “Meditation. Retreat.”

“Checkered past,” Lavinia whispered back.

Charla’s expression was unfathomable. Sally defiantly said, “I’ll be asking my wife to let me join her soon. As a vampire. As soon as we get a few more--”

Charla snapped, “Well don’t let that bit of felching information out to the world yet. We’d have a worldwide epidemic of, Christ Almighty, of felching conversions.” She shook her head. “It’d be a new religion.”

♦

A new religion, Sally thought, as they paid their money and walked under a wooden archway into the stately grove.

Inside Muir Woods, they found themselves on a boardwalk. The further from the entrance they got, shoes thumping softly on the well-laid wood, the slower Lavinia walked. Sally fought off vague unease.

Finally, Lavinia stopped in a wooden plaza with a huge varnished slice of redwood tree at the far end. Sally stopped with her. There was nobody else in sight. “What’s up, darling?” asked Sally.

Lavinia’s eyes closed. Sally looked nervously for signs of the darkness which Lavinia still fought when she woke up, but she just seemed to be listening intently.

Finally, she said with quiet amazement, “This forest is a home.”

Sally, eyes wide, nodded. Peace seemed to lace together every tree, every rock. No saw had ever whined here. Cars, the brochure said, had once been allowed but that violation had healed. The forest enfolded the early morning visitors in a soft blanket: a nearby man lamenting in a piping furry voice like Piglet’s that he just didn’t know which trail to take (there were only two) and a more distant deep voice with a French accent speaking sentences which ended with, “ah, ah?”

“Do you need to be invited in?” Sally asked softly. “Remember, our home is wherever we’re together.”

“Nah, nah.” Lavinia waved her hand like she was pushing the words away. “I could keep walking. But I don’t want to, not without asking permission.” She opened her eyes and looked sideways at Sally. “Meditation retreat,” she mouthed and Sally laughed.

“Let’s do it, let’s ask,” Sally affirmed. Lavinia closed her eyes.

Just before Sally could join her, a tall thick man with black curly hair pushed an old woman in a wheelchair up to the redwood slab and started reading the little markers on the year rings. “909: tree starts to grow, 1492 Columbus discovers America,” he read in a deep French voice. “1930: tree falls.” “1930?” the old woman said in a Midwest accent. “I was nine years old.”

Lavinia closed her eyes, gloriously unconcerned what other people thought. Sally made herself close her eyes too. Asking a forest for permission to enter. But she felt the velvet softness that filled the air between the trees and asked as sincerely as she could, May I come in? May I walk in your beauty?

With three-dimensional clarity, the little fairy who had welcomed the vampires in appeared on the black screen of her inner eyelids, head cocked as though listening.

Sally gasped. This was just how she had seen the fairy in that first dream, her pert head tilted, listening.

She spoke in a voice like silver bells. “You have understood,” she said. And then she said exactly the words Sally remembered. “And therefore, you may come in. Welcome.”

But she said them to Sally and to Lavinia. Not to vampires.

Sally was suddenly sure that if she opened her eyes, she would see the fairy faintly against the trees. She would swoop in, not with wings but with something that would gleam like liquid gold, and lick Sally’s nose like Cinnamon (oh that sweet cat!) used to do.

She could almost see the fairy wrap small perfect hands around Lavinia’s face and kiss her forehead.

How Sally longed to see the fairy! Her supernatural presence would mean something that the supernatural presence of vampires did not. It would be magic, childhood dream magic.

As she lingered, afraid to open her eyes and destroy the dream, a low moan of horror rose, just like yesterday. Nauseating, familiar, dreadful – she almost placed it.

Her eyes snapped open, and she crouched, scanned every direction. Once more the scream came from everywhere and nowhere. It seemed to belong with thick trees and dark wood. It cut off, leaving echoing silence. And of course, there was no sign of the little fairy.

She felt the loss so deeply she wanted to cry.