Sally Yan had let a guy shit on her once.

She hadn’t even known his name but his dull-witted smile, dried sweat smell and black shirt with death symbols came back to her now. She still felt the crotch-gripping satisfaction of being hated, despised, treated like a toilet and she’d come so hard.

And right in the middle of that orgasm, the smell had punched her guts and she had rolled over and vomited a permanent stain on the old wood floors, the steaming mass on her belly smearing her clean sheets.

She gagged now at the memory and nearly slipped back into the hiker’s mind. Why had she been so sure that she needed to come to this place, to touch the young man who lay here? As she struggled, paralyzed with her hand on the kid’s face, feeling a bit of grit under her fingertips, she wanted to hate this dreary slob and his cringe-worthy fantasies and his surrender to evil but she’d have to hate herself.

The face she studied had three or four pimples, a scraggly growth of chin hair that would never be a beard and a mask of misery that hadn’t smoothed out even in death.

Was he dead? She managed to see his neck. Smooth, except for a wart and three tough hairs. He was breathing, taking ages to pull in a little air and sigh it out again.

Just as it occurred to her to wonder why he was lying above the ground when his last memory was of falling into that dark crypt, she realized that the screams were gone, replaced by a steady drone of despair. And the shadows were darkening as deep purple evening moved relentlessly toward night.

She wished Lavinia were at her side but her heart told her she would always be alone now.

***

Lavinia hated being useless.

She’d fought off two strong men on motorcycles who would have raped her and Poky, she’d stayed human through the cold mists that claimed her when she slept, she’d done her best at that ancient monastery.

And now, knocked on her ass by a splinter!

She’d watched Sally swallowed by the gloom while she lay helpless, a pillow of bulging earth supporting her head. She thought of Aunt Rebekkah’s funeral, of that helpless old face on the satin pillow that seemed too sensuous. (Did they reuse those pillows? What a Christ-awful thought, pulling a pillow from under a dead head and running it through the laundry.)

Fuck fuck fuck. What could she do to help Sally? She was only a burden.

She had never planned to let her life depend on someone the way it now did on Sally. She’d resigned herself to a dead-end existence at the bank, to celibacy and for shit certain to never again having a young, cute lover. And then like a fighting tiger, Sally Yan.

Lavinia’s life meant something again. And she’d helped change the rules of the world on that hunk of rock in the Atlantic, and gotten them to the Schwartzwald, she didn’t need to wallow in Jewish guilt.

She needed figure out some fucking way to help.

She sat up gingerly, keeping her hands on dirt and needles, avoiding any contact with the tree trunk. She wouldn’t be any good if she got another splinter, she’d just be a danger.

She shuddered. Fuck this creepy forest. In Muir Woods she’d nearly died from the ecstasy of a splinter from one of those tall, ancient trees that used to be vampires like her.

Whoever these trees had been, God they must have been bastards.

Could she crawl after Sally, keeping low to the ground so as not to make the tiniest contact with the trees? But one fucking splinter from a bulging root and she’d be slithering like a nighttime ghost to destroy the one woman she’d ever let herself love like this.

Maybe she should rip off a branch, get a good point on it and stab it into her heart? Remove herself as a danger source? But what if that just turned her into some floating goblin with green wild hair and twigs for fingers? Jesus fuck.

She fretted and tapped her fingers against the earth.

Maybe if she carefully put her hand against a tree she’d get some hit off it?

She rose to her feet in that boneless glide that so creeped Sally out but which was really a residue of the sunlight she’d absorbed during the day. Heavy branches with thick fronds hung before and behind her but her path lay clear to one old trunk, covered in cruddy moss.

Carefully, planting her feet so she wouldn’t fall against it, she stretched out a flat palm.

A millimeter before touching, her hand entered a darkness that surrounded the tree. Lavinia winced: it would be just like her to make some doofus asshole mistake.

She was already pulling her hand back but couldn’t stop it from making contact with scummy wood as repellant as a urine-soaked glove. The tree was a river of acid, an electric fence. That horrible old fog nearly claimed her again.

But she broke loose, clutching the Magen David with her other hand.

She recovered and stood stock still, thinking excitedly. For all her “whuh the fuck” persona, she was damn brainy. “Ah-hah-hah, gotcha!” she muttered.

There was that millimeter layer of energy all around the trunk – she didn’t have to touch the ass-fucking wood at all! Like an engineer making micro-adjustments to delicate machinery, she shifted her hand a feather forward and back until she found just the right spot where she could absorb and analyze without losing everything.

She wished Sally were there to be impressed.

Then her eyes widened as she took in exactly what was happening. These trees were like an array of antennas broadcasting to the world. Screams of horror overlapped with peals of maniacal laughter like happened with AM radio when two stations overlapped. This one tree wasn’t the source of the broadcast but it was broadcasting, louder and more insistent each minute. Along with this whole effing forest, it shouted, whispered, insisted, “the dark contains vampires, here’s what they look like, they drink blood and they cannot enter a home. Vampires, bite and drink and spread the horror, give in to this image, give in and drink, drink, drink…”

The trees were laying the vampire spell on the world. But they weren’t the source. She could trace the source and it was that kid that Sally had seen in her vision.

This was what he thought vampires were like. The trees sent it everywhere.

All Sally had to do was to stop that asshole from thinking.

She, Lavinia, knew it now, but if she ran after Sally to explain it to her, she’d get another splinter and turn into exactly what these trees thought a vampire ought to be.

What could she do? She stopped herself from pounding her fist against the tree in frustration.

Then she smiled. In the middle of all that creepy ass-fucking darkness and rot with the sun going to set soon and fuck knows what unleashed, she smiled.