Lavinia would have died by slow torture before admitting how much she looked forward to casually telling Sally all she’d accomplished since mind-melding with the trees.

Like Mr. Spock, she kept her fingertips spread a feather-width away from the bark of the tree she’d selected, aware that she’d done good.

About an hour ago, she’d smiled in the midst of all the darkness because Jesse and Walter were paralyzed by the ending day not far away. She knew at last what she could do. Taking control and guiding them towards that grove was as easy as chomping on Mom’s sponge cake. They’d passed within two feet of her about twenty minutes ago.

But now she needed to wake them up if they were going to do her any damn good.

She could sense the real Jesse and Walter through a plaster of cobwebs, but that asshole’s brain radiated despair and Sally was caught helpless somehow.

Lavinia’s eyes squeezed shut and her face whitened as she stood unmoving, hands trembling with the physical effort not to accidentally touch the wood or to get too far away.

“Jew, baby, I’m a Jew and I’m also a fucking atheist so fuck you,” she whispered, feeling her mother’s Mogen David around her neck. She knew she wasn’t fighting the Christian church or any other religion now. She was fighting something not just misguided but evil.

She hadn’t seen Mom in two years – who could afford travel with airline fares so expensive, all the precautions they had to take not to land at night? But the slightly hapless love and acceptance of that old woman washed her like spring rain. Many years ago she’d brought Poky home (poky to smile, poky to cry, and so poky to fucking come that Lavinia had quoted Woody Allen, “I think I’m gettin’ some feelin’ back in my fuckin’ jaw”) and Mom had set out a party-sized spread for her ungracious daughter with the sarcastic, slovenly wannabe-goth girlfriend. Poky’s chain smoking had stunk up her clean house but she’d laughed at the clumsy barbs, nodded at the extreme political stances and somehow brought out the tender side of Poky which Lavinia was the only other person ever to have seen.

After that, she and Poky had traveled all over, taking every risk, courting disaster. When disaster came it was two men in Morocco, drunk off their asses but with muscles enough to take down two tough girls stoned out of their minds.

When Lavinia told Sally she’d slept with a man exactly once, she hadn’t lied. She’d been high enough to try it with that smelly folk singer who played nothing but Neil Young songs and that had confirmed her sexual orientation just fine. But she hadn’t mentioned those two bastards in Morocco, it didn’t count that one of them got his dick inside her before she got his knife and stabbed him.

Pushing him off her as he collapsed bubbling, she found a brick in that filthy alley and slammed it onto the other guy’s head as he fumbled on top of Poky. Then, efficient as a machine, she crushed both of their skulls with that gritty, gory brick.

And there she was with two dead guys and a girlfriend in shock. She was numb as she led the bleeding, half conscious Poky away. The bodies must have been found but she and Poky were never caught.

She’d saved Poky but she hadn’t saved the relationship. Poky (real name Lucille, yuh? How could she not even remember?) had been different after that. Sure, she talked about shoving a butcher knife into Nixon’s guts, but Lavinia had killed someone. For a while Poky worshipped the woman who had saved her but that faded and resentment grew. Somewhere in there they’d spent that night with Helga and tried to have a picnic lunch in the midst of a forest full of monsters.

Not many nights later, Poky snarled, “You think you’d of maybe found a way not to kill those guys if they’d been white?” That had slammed Lavinia on her ass because she wasn’t sure. The next day Poky left Lavinia with a camper full of memories and a head full of questions. After a few insanely passionate weeks with Helga (and Sally had been right, that relationship had been more than just the one night) Lavinia felt a sudden need for her mother and abandoned Helga without a goodbye.

“I’m a Jew and I got lucky with my mom, she loves me like nobody’s business,” she said now through gritted teeth. She thought now of Mom, who wore horn-rim glasses and a beehive hairdo, who set out a meal to feed twenty when two people came for coffee, who actually said, “Eat, eat, yah too skinny,” but who named her daughter after a character in Johnny Tremaine and who made antennae come out of her head with her fingers like “My Favorite Martian.”

And thinking of Mom, she wiped the fog from Jesse and Walter’s minds like Mom would have wiped dust from the coffee table with lemon scented oil.

Now she just had to get one of them to kill that kid. To take a fucking rock and … crush his skull. Like that drunk in Morocco. Like Bunt, who had been white, god fuck it. Sally had looked her when she killed Bunt like Poky did so long ago, but Sally hadn’t left her.

But Walter couldn’t do it and Jesse couldn’t even hear her clearly. They were both vampires and could no more destroy the source of the vampire plague than a neuron could have destroyed a brain.

It had to be Sally. That was why Sally’d had to stay human. But why was she just lying there?

She was paralyzed by the tail end of the day! And that could only be true if she was a bissel vampire! Lavinia must have bitten Sally in her sleep, not once but several times. Just a little. Like a kitten nursing, god damn it. It would be cute if it wasn’t such a mess now. Contact with whatever horror was in that kid’s mind must have brought it out. Shit!

Maybe if she could get Jesse or Walter to bite Sally just enough… the shock might snap her out of it.

Carefully, Lavinia backed away from the tree and its spidery fungus threads. Stepping over a root without missing a beat, she selected the meanest, rottenest-looking hulk she could find, hoping it would have more power to control. Spreading her fingers (my mind to your mind, my thoughts to your thoughts), she drifted her hands with ginger confidence to that ancient, pungent wood.

Holy fucking shit! The older they got, the meaner they got. If the trees were Nazis, this tree was a fucking Vernichtungslager Kommandant. Her breath puffed out as she struggled. Her hands were too close! It had her, it wrestled her spirit down like dirty ice in a New York alley.

Jew, Jew, I’m a Jew, I got relatives died in the Holocaust, never a-fucking-gain. And I got a girlfriend loves the shit out of me!

This evil was what she had thought she’d fought on that island. This was what poisoned Christians and Muslims … and fucking Jews too, not to mention ignorant Wiccans.

She was almost blind. Tiger! Tiger, burning bright! But no Sally came charging in to pull her back.

How she treasured brightly shining Sally Yan who faced down danger and fainted at heights. I love her! Those intense eyes would look straight into hers, sometimes in surrender, sometimes in passion, sometimes in rage, sometimes in near worship. Never getting full.

They’d flown away home together. Maybe they’d make their home right here in this fucking forest, turn this batch of stinking trees into retreat center, get that nun with the Mister Rogers pep to lead a workshop on loving each other and invite everyone in!

It was working again. Her eyes blazing (Sally would have been more in love than ever), she straightened her spine degree by degree and pulled her hands millimeter by millimeter to the right distance so she had control again.

But what had happened while she’d wasted time with this shit?

When she focused on the grove again, she found Sally up and moving and Jesse huddled on the ground bleeding and thinking he’d been ordered to drink Sally’s blood. Oh what a fercockta mess.

But on the other hand, it seemed to have worked. He’d put just enough … whatever … into Sally that she realized what was going on and that she could move since the sun had just set. But was she still human enough to do what had to be done?

Only then did Lavinia realize that with the sun set, she herself was in deadly danger.

As soon as she thought it, she felt the cold presence. Very close, too close, and moving toward her.

Oh shit.