Cold Furnace of Gloating Malice

Sally Yan lay still, looking with glassy eyes at a small patch of sky filled with cold hard evening. The dark hands of the looming trees squeezed in on every side.

The iron bar in the pit of her stomach told her there was no hope, no way out. She had heard the hiker’s story, though she still couldn’t understand why she’d had to come to this place and touch him, why she couldn’t have seen all this in a vision. She had heard his story, and she still didn’t understand anything. She had the helpless, hateful feeling that she’d missed something, that in between the exhausting unending misery and hatred and surrendering and trying to be strong and surrendering again, that somewhere in there she had heard something tremendously, vitally, all-consumingly important.

But meanwhile, it was nearly nighttime in a world where vampires haunted every outdoor space (except on inaccessible islands) and she was outdoors without Lavinia and with no home around her in a forest where the very trees were so evil that they had defeated Lavinia without even trying.

And she couldn’t move.

Her breath caught and came in stitches. She was as paralyzed as Lavinia had been with the first coming of the day. She could see the sky and she could hear every creak and groan of the forest but she couldn’t move. The grit on the kid’s face under her fingers was sharp, cold, unpleasant.

In blind panic she struggled furiously, heart hammering. Tears of frustration and rage spilled down over her cheekbones. The seconds were slipping away and she had the answer in the palm of her hand.

She would never see Lavinia again.

She knew this now, without question. She’d felt it when she’d said goodbye to Lavinia hours ago. As she’d walked away, looking back again and again, she’d known she was saying goodbye forever. She’d found true love, and it was gone. The trees would destroy Lavinia, or the other vampires would.

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The sun would soon set, invisible and hateful behind the trees and she was as helpless as she’d ever been. Again she flew into a frozen slurry of panic, struggling helplessly to move even a fingertip.

Her neck at an awkward angle wouldn’t let her breathe. Her throat kept closing. She would have thrashed like a drowning woman if she could only have moved.

Then she felt, finally, inevitably, a presence. A cold furnace of gloating malice.

Ghosting up from the dark behind her head, it pushed the air aside as it moved but made no sound.

It was coming for her, the heart of evil, the calm malevolent center of this vampire storm. Its terrible fingers would touch her face, she would see it in a moment looming into her field of vision, and she could do nothing.

She was a little girl again. The masked evil moved toward her, but she had no sticky rice to hold up to ward it off.

She was Jiro, watching the Great Wave come again, knowing that in a moment she and everything she loved would be dead.

But Jiro had built his window so that he could see the Great Wave if it came again. All her life she, Sally Yan, stern and unyielding, a true Yan, had looked danger in the eye. She was not to blame for the few times that her terror of heights made her weak, made her look away.

She would face the evil now. In a moment it would move into her field of vision and she would see it and it would destroy her. But she would look it in the eye in that moment, and she would stop it if she could.

Trembling in every cell, she watched the edge of her field of vision, that line where the arch of the eyebrows hides the world above our heads.

She heard a scrape of pebble on grit.

Her heart froze again. Until an instant ago, it had been possible to believe there might be nothing.

Then came a scrunch

as something knelt beside and behind her, a hulking presence, unrecognizable but terrible and familiar, at the very edge of vision.

Cold fingers touched her arm.

And then at last, the thing leaned over her, blotting out the deep cold sky. A face loomed dangerously close to hers, close enough to kiss, to bite.

The face was Walter’s. The eyes blazed blood red.

And, horribly, it still wore its mask of caring concern.