Sally barely heard Lavinia’s bitter but grateful, “What the fuck do we do now?”

Or Jesse’s labored breathing or Walter whispering, “Oh, Buttercup.”

Vampires filled windows again all around the world, stalked little girls in the dark, clotted the night.

And the monster was inside of her now.

It was a roaring tidal wave and it would kill her the instant she looked away from it but she had always looked danger in the face.

Through crashing salt foam and a chaos of screams, Sally reached out a slow, molasses hand and felt Lavinia’s strong one fill it. “You got a plan? Tell me what to do,” her beloved said.

Sally fought to think through the swirling. “Touch a tree?” she managed to say. “Put me … in touch.”

“Done, come with.” Lavinia dragged her along through phosphorescent neon lights and pounding surf to the nearest trunk. “I don’t dare touch,” she said.

Sally put her hand on mossy bug-infested rot, threw her head back, screamed. In one flickering movement she blasted from the ground, landed again, spun around and clutched at a shocked Lavinia. Greedily, hungrily, Sally pulled the dark-haired beauty into herself…

She forced the craziness to a grinding painful stop and knelt, gasping. Lavinia crouched a foot away, watching her with enormous eyes. Rich sucked in frightened gasps, shocked out of his pain and misery. Walter knelt by Jesse. Vampires ringed the edge of the clearing. Everyone waited for something. For her, for what she would do.

Lavinia had once told her she had to lead.

“If you’re with me, I can lead,” she whispered, afraid to speak loudly or move fast. She’d spoken just for Lavinia, she thought.

Lavinia, with steady redwood resolve, stood, walked to her and took her extended fairy hand. Sally felt Lavinia’s heart pound, saw her muscles tense and felt her resolve not to fight if Sally pulled her in again.

But more: Jesse Casselberger struggled to his feet, still choking, and held out his hand. Walter LaMont, reclaiming the dignity he’d had when he’d stood against gay bashers, stepped resolutely toward her as well, ready to throw himself on the fire to make amends for all he had done.

The ring of robed vampires became the people they’d been, like vulnerable voices emerging from the email accounts of internet trolls. Some of them fled, stumbling, smashing into trees, and some fainted with terror. But five of them walked toward Sally with hands extended. They were a nice mixture of humanity: a couple of classically Nordic young people, one old man with a white moustache, two who clearly were Middle East immigrants. “La hawla wala quwata illa billah,” murmured one woman with wide eyes.

They all laid hands on her, some firm, some trembling.

She could drink them all in, feast on their fears, create new terrors for the world from their nightmares, and all because they had touched her, as Rich, waking from a nightmare, had touched what he dreaded to find was the boot of a vampire…

“If you’re with me, I can lead!” she said more firmly, in a voice that seemed to echo.

She felt the presence of others. Helga, not far off, warm and passionate and maternal. Farther away, Michael on the island, solid and profane and true. Even farther off, her old friend Steve heard her through his meditations. Amanda Malreaux swam to a standing position, drenched with sun, still in ecstasy but herself again. Sally had never met Charity Claire but she felt her now as a shining silver swimmer of the ether, felt the quiet strength of Peter and the old grandmother, the bumblebee buzz of little Tommy.

As all those people and dozens, hundreds of others, saw her and each other, the eyes of Sister Amanda went wide with recognition of something or someone, and she smiled through tears. Sally could not see what had caused either the tears or the recognition, and let go of it as a story that belonged to another person, another place. But it had happened just like KerriAnne had told her it must.

Lavinia had an amazed hand on the tree Sally touched. “Nothin’ at all in there,” she whispered. “It’s all in you kid, yeah?”

It was all in her. She felt its hunger, its need for terror and hate. So much simpler to shut it out, to close the door, lock the window, build an enormous wall. And somehow, she needed to welcome in the monster, make peace with the terror, remove its evil and make it a human face, a vulnerable human face.

The knowledge of what she had to do was like that tidal wave and it struck her, swept her off her feet…

She was in a dark room, just like she knew she would be.

Her old blue blanket, soft as felt, was across her swelling chest. She strained to see movement in the dark. Her pre-teen heart hammered, filling her chest.