Peter’s handsome cheeks were streaked with tears but his eyes held no accusation, only sorrow.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” he finally said. “She’s really gone.”

Charity barely dared to comfort him: she held out her hand and he took it. She watched him kiss it, aware of the sharp teeth behind his lips. When he looked up again, she saw that he now was aware he was in bed with another woman where he hadn’t thought of it before. She was glad the thin cotton nightgown hid her nakedness.

He hid his face in his hands, reliving a nightmare memory. “We were driving home,” his muffled voice said. “Must’ve been a long time ago, things weren’t so bad then, been attacks but nobody knew it was vampires.

“Creepy looking white man beside the road tried to flag us down. Jean, she put her hand on my knee. Now I wasn’t sure I ought to stop.” His sad voice turned bitter for a moment. “Driving While Black, you can’t be too careful.”

Charity blushed but he went on, “Maybe a hundred feet further on, another white man stepped right out into the road and I had to swerve to miss him. We skidded to a stop and next thing, they were all around us. Half a dozen of them…”

He didn’t go on. But Charity saw the rest in a moment of rapport: Peter getting bravely out to face them because nobody knew yet they could have declared the car a home and been safe. Sweet-faced Jean pulling out her phone to call someone, to make their position public.

Jean’s wide eyes as Peter was drained by the pale gliding monsters. Her terror as they easily reached into the car, which was only a car, and pulled her out. Peter’s last sight of her before they hid her from view, and her bulging belly which held their daughter or son (they deliberately hadn’t found out). And then monotonous years of gliding through the night and sleeping by day, the cold fog whispering despair.

Oh dear God, Peter had lost his wife and his unborn baby, in one dreadful moment.

Or had he? Charity hugged her knees. Peter’s wife had not been torn apart, there hadn’t been so many vampires then. They had simply wandered away from each other when they rose, undead. Why was he at last sure that she was “really gone?”

She might still be out there. She might have had the baby…

With every bit of courage she had, she put her hand on his shoulder so that if he wanted to turn and kiss her – or shout at her – he could.

She felt him move and looked up shyly to find his eyes on her. She looked quickly down again but a hand touched each arm and she let him pull her close.

“This is alright with you?” he asked. “I’ve got nobody now, but I’m not taking advantage of you?” He was worried about how she felt!

She kissed him gratefully. A guilty voice said Jean might be out there and you should help him find her. But she couldn’t do more than she’d done. They drifted back to the love they’d been so gloriously making just a short time ago.

Out in the tiny living room the elderly German voice murmured on and on. “Papa, the Erl King, he comes, see he comes for me!

“No, my child, it is the wind, nothing but the wind.”