At some point Sally must have turned onto her back again.

Exquisite tiny plants dimpled the tips of her fingers. The morning air cooled her and she heard the grit of a pebble on a pebble and, somewhere, the drone of a mosquito. Mosquitoes had all but vanished because vampires snatched and ate even the tiniest drop of blood, but here one was.

Her eyes opened at last to see Lavinia smiling down at her, a radiant dark Earth mother. Sally smelled her own groin on Lavinia’s face as she stooped to kiss her. That sharp smell on a lover’s face used to make her queasy but now it was a joyous celebration of her body.

Lavinia was still Lavinia: she raised an eyebrow and said, “Good, huh?”

Sally was still Sally. “Duh?”

Eventually she could sit up and look around as day revealed this “new” world. But the sun dappling through the trees was the old sun; it wasn’t any brighter or purer. The smell of rot was replaced by an organic rich soil smell but low building didn’t even seem to have a rock missing.

Maybe only living things had “entered” and everything else was just backdrop. But that “backdrop” was a planet in a spiral arm of a minor galaxy in a cluster of hundreds of galaxies. What could it possibly mean that some living organisms on its surface had “stepped into a new world?”

Unless this new world was an illusion, like sameness and whiteness of the “movie” vampires…

Filled with sudden dread, Sally stared intently at the thinner forest which had lost so many of its evil trees. Would it dissolve into familiarity when she looked at it deeply, as the vampires had flickered into humanity?

But the more she looked, the more she saw it was the other way around. The pressing, suffocating evil forest had been the illusion. This gentle, park-like wood was the reality. The deeper she looked the more the few remaining shadows dissolved away.

Her rational mind rebelled: the world held thousands of swamps, jungles, deserts and tar pits, any number of places unpleasant to humans. They couldn’t have all become manicured parks, the world just wasn’t like that!

But the forest around her was no manicured park. It was as joyously wild as her orgasms had been. A fox darted behind a tree and she heard a wildcat snarl in the distance. Tentative birds became bolder and some of them were birds of prey. The forest was still wild enough that a bear might lumber up and take a swipe at them. But the supernatural evil was gone.

Jesse, Walter and the other vampires must have walked (or flown!) somewhere else to give them space. Except for a spider crawling up the old wall with a head as purple as a kid’s aluminum drinking glass, she and Lavinia were alone.

Lavinia, solid and true. Sally saw the residue of regret for Poky, for the man she had killed, a trace of lust for Helga, affection for her mother. She suddenly saw Lavinia as a child with her special blanket against her cheek, thumb in her mouth and a shy special smile that would have melted the heart of a snowman.

“Wanna fly?” Lavinia pointed at the sky.

Sally realized with a shiver of fear that she could fly now. The thought of being up in the sky scared her. Stupid! She’d faced so much worse.

With a brisk nod, she stripped off the teeshirt and sweatshirt and jacket she still wore and stepped into a sliver of sun. Lavinia quickly undressed and joined her.

Sally wrapped her arms around Lavinia to treasure that nakedness as luscious as a rich oil painting. She squeezed Lavinia’s fleshy buttocks, turned her head up for a kiss and realized with a thrill of fright that her feet touched nothing but air.

She quickly brought her attention back to Lavinia, hoping to sweep the fear away with passion.

But she finally risked a look down. Beneath their dangling toes a cloak of dark trees draped the morning hill with a bright meadow lapping to its edge. The trail to the road and the road back to town along the valley floor spread out down there.

She didn’t have to fear even this! She was lifted from inside. There was no need to hold on to anything. She was completely in charge of when she went down. It was an amazing feeling.

“Good, huh,” Lavinia stated again, wiggling her toes.

Sally looked into midnight violet eyes, buried her hands in thick black hair, opened her mouth against slippery fire and agreed absolutely.