Lavinia blasted out one final thought, “Kill that kid, stop him thinking!” and desperately started to pull back from the old hulk’s influence.

But she had to move too slowly, like a deep sea diver coming back to the surface without getting crippled by bends.

The heart of evil of all this world was within sight now if she could open her eyes and turn to see. It was creeping up. It was right behind her.

It laid a hateful hand on her shoulder.

Her spirit was still tangled with the tree. Furious with helplessness, she felt the icy hands turn her slowly. Ice in her belly. She wasn’t ready, she wasn’t ready. The most evil thing in all the world swam into view.

When she was a little girl, there’d been a string of child murders, kids taken from the streets. Mom had hidden the details from her, all the parents had tried to hide it from their kids, but what the kids didn’t know they filled in. They called him the Tartar Man, she couldn’t even remember why. He’d find you no matter how careful you were and torture you and put his big thing in you. You came home by 7 sharp and stayed in but you shivered in your bed. And then after a month, the murders stopped and slowly life went back to normal. Lavinia had a bleary picture in her mind to this day of the man they never caught.

He would have looked like the vampire who now turned her to him.

Though they looked nothing alike, Charity might have recognized the Welcome Wagon, Jeremy might have recognized his tormenter, and Rick might have recognized the vampire who stalked him. Death camp inmates or victims of the inquisition would have known this face. It was one who knew he did evil, that normal rules of human decency were gone, anything was allowed, any cruelty was his. Not maniacal or cackling but calm and interested.

Lavinia forced her drunk hands to move (and it was like trying to move while blind drunk), groping at the cold river of chain around her neck, fighting off the certainty that she was a little dark-haired girl with a missing front tooth caught out after dark and in the power of the Tartar Man. If she’d hurried home, she’d be safe behind the locked door, but the Tartar Man smiled down at her, the smile of one who would peel the skin from a kitten while it mewed with pain, absorbing its misery as it died slowly in his hand…

And then she hit the ground with a whack that stung her hands and flared lightning through her head but left her clear and free. She reached with smarting palms into her shirt and pulled out the totem, the Star, but there was nothing to hold it out against, nothing to press it against with the hope that it would sear flesh. Nearby branches, feathery shapes in the nearly complete gloom, wavered as if something had rushed desperately away and she was alone again.

Now that it was gone, she could see a ghostly after-image and knew it had been Walter. Sally had been right, it had been Walter all along.

And he’d had her. She’d been lost but then he’d left all by himself. She hated being so helpless. She would have pounded things with her fists except that might stick another splinter into her.

Exhausted, drained, she forced herself to her feet and prepared to infiltrate that monster tree again.

And only then did she hear in her mind (and just maybe with her ears, dim in the distance) the warning, Lavinia, watch out he’s coming for you!

Darling, fucking idiot.