Lavinia lay with her head propped at an awkward angle on a redwood root.

Her eyes were wide but Sally, scrambling in painfully slow motion across the slanting ground, couldn’t tell whether that was good or bad. As on the night when her hand moved to the chest of the fallen Lavinia to feel for a heartbeat, twin futures stretched before her.

And in that endless moment when she groped forward through the confusion, she knew at last where she had heard that scream before.

She landed on her knees at Lavinia’s side, not feeling the scattered branches pressing into her flesh. In another instant, one of the two futures would become real.

Her arms stretched out as if to pull Lavinia bodily back.

“Babe.” Lavinia’s voice was a barely audible whisper as Sally clutched her hand. But the face Sally saw was one of wide-eyed wonder, not horror.

“You’re alright?” Sally’s voice was shrill, not daring to believe yet. “You’re still welcome in our home, keep my love in your mind, can I pull the splinter out, tell me?”

Lavinia shook her head, a small movement like she shook off a droning fly. Pushing away the momentary hurt, Sally begged, “Love, love, tell me what to do to help you.”

She lifted Lavinia’s hand, pointed at the protruding splinter. “Should I get this out?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Lavinia’s voice was dreamily reluctant.

“Tell me what’s going on for you!” Sally nearly screamed. “Are you in pain or…”

Suspicion dawned. “This is another thing like sunlight, isn’t it? I’m worried to death that you’re dying in horrible pain and you’re just having another orgasm, aren’t you?” Tears of tentative relief filled her annoyed eyes.

Concern slowly creased Lavinia’s face. “I’m sorry, hon. I didn’t even think. I, yeah, pull the splinter out so I can…” She trailed off. Sally took the protruding end between her first and second finger and worked it gently out.

With no physical change, Lavinia seemed to condense from a more dispersed form.

She lay still for several moments but just before Sally could ask again if she was alright, she sat up and hugged her, murmuring, “I’m sorry, tiger, I’m, I’m not human, you gotta remember. This is all so weird.” The tears of relief squeezed out of Sally’s closed eyes.

“What was happening?” she asked finally.

“Well, not another fucking come, I just do that in the sun, I guess.” Lavinia’s eyes got dreamy again. “When that splinter went in, boom, in one second I was that tree and I felt what it was thinking and its connection to all the other trees. It was so fucking big, I couldn’t barely hold it all.

“But,” she continued, opening her eyes and looking at Sally. “I caught it this time. Finally.”

“Caught what?” Sally asked in a whisper. Then she remembered Lavinia going from tree to tree earlier, trying to hear something and just missing it. “What was it you finally caught?”

“The trees. They’re vampires.”

“What?!”

She looked up at the towering ring with the wreath of blue sky. They seemed to lean ominously.

“You, um, said the trees are vampires?” Sally kept her voice carefully neutral. She believed me when I almost saw a fairy.

Lavinia nodded. “Or maybe vampires isn’t the right word. But they were whatever I am now.” She shook her head in wondering disbelief. “They fell so in love with the sun and the earth and shit, they turned into trees.”

Lavinia levitated to her feet in that disturbingly inhuman glide and went back to stroking folds of wood. “Oh, my beautiful sisters and brothers,” she sang, eyes closed. As Sally watched in amazement, she flitted from tree to tree, touching them, crying, climbing several feet up to put her face against a burl which had erupted like boiling sugar from the side.

Finally she sank down, eyes filled with distance and longing. Kneeling beside Lavinia, Sally put out a tentative hand and touched her shoulder. Lavinia stroked her hand absently but affectionately.

“I, um,” Sally began, flustered for some reason, “I guess I don’t know what to do with the information that these trees, uh, used to be vampires. Are you likely to … to go that way anytime soon?”

She’d intended the question flippantly but it seemed to snap in the still air and something seized in her as she waited for an answer.

Lavinia looked startled. “Don’t think so. But this maybe says something how wood kills vampires. Maybe any one of ‘em gets staked, they die of happiness.”

Sally’s nose wrinkled. “I’ve staked enough vampires to know they don’t turn into trees, babe.” The statement came out with more scorn than she’d intended, she was so relieved to hear Lavinia say she wasn’t contemplating moving on from this life.

Lavinia grinned her dear old grin. “Yeah, theory’s prob’ly bullshit. But at least that’s the ‘wrong’ I sensed in the stake: piece of a former vampire forced to become a killer of vampires?” As she said it out loud, she shook her head. “I dunno, sounds like bullshit again.”

Every time Sally nearly lost Lavinia, she found the bonds of love more silver-corded firm. Melting while listening to Lavinia theorize, she lost track of what was being said. I proposed to her, she remembered, reliving the rush of feeling. Though they had called each other wife many times since then, they had made no move to marry. There was always some crisis, some event to plan, some aggravating Midwestern closeted-lesbian dipshit to cater to.

Watching Lavinia talk, she thought about actually getting married.

They’d have to tell their surviving parents and Sally’s mom didn’t want to know anything about her sex life. Instead she would have a list of young Chinese men that Sally would like better. Lavinia’s mom, on the other hand, would want to fly out and dance at Lavinia’s wedding but was too frail to travel and so they’d have to go to her. (Rachael Starr, Lavinia had told her, was a comical cross between Jewish housewife and mystical ex-hippy dancer who had named her only daughter Lavinia Lyte Tremain Starr after Johnny Tremain’s mother in the classic children’s book which she still adored.)

Would the word “wife” have the same intensity when they were married or would it dull into familiarity?

Lavinia’s lips were quirked in amusement.

“Sorry, love, what did you just say?” Sally asked, embarrassed.

“I said, you haven’t heard a word I’ve just said, have you? That would be agreement, then, huh?”

“Um, that would be agreement. I was thinking how scared I was to nearly lose you again and I just got lost in loving you.”

“Thought it was somethin’ like that. Your face gets a kind of moist puppy look.” She squeezed Sally’s hand affectionately.

“I’m thinking,” said Sally slowly, “that it might be time for you to do me.” The sexual term had become their slang for make me a vampire. “If only we could be sure about the nightmares…”

That reminded her that she had something to tell Lavinia, and she rushed into it before Lavinia’s reluctant expression could hurt her feelings. “Baby, when you collapsed, I finally remembered where I’d heard that scream before. And I think it’s important.”

Lavinia nodded, face cryptic.

“That nightmare, in the camper, when I came and rescued you from … whatever?”

“Ain’t likely to forget that, no.” Lavinia picked at scraps of sap and soft tree bark on her clothes.

“Well, I’d forgotten until just now that it started with me in some vast, dark room. I knew there was something ancient and awful under the floor of that room. That’s when I heard that low moan of horror that grew into a scream. And right when I heard it, just before the dream moved on, I got a flash of something that felt absolutely vital, like it was the center of everything. The center of the whole vampire plague.”

Lavinia’s expression altered. Was that pain or dawning awareness on her face?

“I saw a young man,” Sally continued, watching Lavinia curiously. “I knew he was a hiker, I don’t know how I knew because I didn’t see a backpack, but he was lying dead in the overgrowth at the foot of a ruined stone wall in a dark black forest. It was just a glimpse, then the nightmare moved on to me looking for you and rescuing you. Something about rushing through craziness to save you brought it back.

“Maybe it’s not important,” she went on, embarrassed as always when she talked about her dreams. “But I remember you said once for some reason, Dead men don’t talk, and I thought then ‘that dead guy is talking to all of us.’ The despair you keep hearing is coming from that guy. I knew it, and then I got distracted and forgot again.”

Lavinia nodded, still looking like someone listening to a distant voice. “It occurs to me, tiger, you’ve heard those moaning screams each time we make some breakthrough.” Her voice grew excited. “The one in the nightmare was just before I walked and flew in the daylight. The one at the rally was when we showed the world me flying. The one just now? I was that close to learning the secret of the trees.”

Warmed by Lavinia’s excitement Sally exclaimed, “Yes, yes! It all makes sense. I’m as sure as anyone can be that if we could find that guy, we’d hold the secret of what started the vampire plague and how to end it. If we only knew where in the world he was.”

Lavinia said softly, “I could take you there…”