Victory

Walter and Jesse, also recovering from the illusion of falling, followed the two women, afraid to look too closely at each other.

In the cold moonlight Sally, dreading what she would see, walked icily around to where the kid had been.

She saw exactly the bloody corpse she’d been afraid she’d see.

Now that he was dead, she felt only pity for him. Pity and cold fear. Something had lived in this kid’s mind for fifteen years, feeding on his fear, growing in power until it could somehow create physical vampires. Now it was loose. It had tried to foist her fear of falling on the world and it looked like Lavinia had saved them all. But what would it do now?

She heard Lavinia breathing nearby. A ragged crowd of other vampires shuffled around in confusion, still recovering from the illusion of endless falling.

Lavinia’s bluff hands laid like hams on her shoulders. Sally longed to relax into the comforting, demanding and tentative touch. But she could only see the black pool which would be dark red if the morning ever came, and the vague shape of the mangled skull.

“Look closer,” whispered Lavinia. Sally shrugged off the hands and knelt.

The nose was crushed and gushing blood. Both eyes were blackened and swollen. But the broken head had been an illusion of the shadows.

“I didn’t kill him,” Lavinia said gruffly. “But I had to make it

think its home was gonna get demolished. I had to really hurt the kid. But I didn’t kill him.”

It was true. She saw now the bug-like tears leaking from the swollen eyes, the twisted grief of betrayal on the young face. For perhaps the first time in his miserable life, he had trusted. And Lavinia had hurt him horribly.

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But she hadn’t killed him. Sally could let herself relax into Lavinia’s arms.

Confusion surged all around, a living palpable thing. Whatever had been evicted from the boy’s mind had taken over hers for a time, had fed on her terror of falling. Now it wheeled like a crying gull, searching. It would find someone in a moment and the world’s next nightmare would begin.

They had to deny it a home anywhere

.

Willing her mind to be more powerful than it ever had been, she tried to imagine putting a shield between that thing, whatever it was, and everybody

.

I’m Sally Yan, I’m at home with my beloved. And

you are not home

anywhere on this earth!

Whatever had made the vampires was between bodies, without a fear to feed on. And it weakened.

She felt it weaken. Helpless as a handful of glittering shards that would cut your hand but that you could drop

.

“Everyone!” she cried, voice ringing with power she’d never let herself summon. “Everyone focus on kicking it out. Whatever it is, it is not welcome anywhere!

”

Impossible that she could have such power, impossible that it could be this easy. She felt herself wrestle with a slippery, snakelike thing

and she stayed firm. “It’s weakening!” she yelled.

Between one moment and the next, the thing suddenly gave way, collapsed like a Goliath hit by a tiny stone. It shrank down until it seemed no more than a handful of jagged, harsh crystals of hurtful glass.

Have I won? Have I done it that easily? Is it giving up?

Just as she thought this, she heard a sickening wet gurgle. Lavinia’s hands stiffened: was she a monster again

?

But it was Jesse who fell into her field of vision and lay twitching on the ground, his throat ripped open. Walter knelt at his side, sobbing and then fighting to hold himself up.

The other vampires tilted their heads, like they listened to their mothers. When they fell, they were like children going to bed.

Lavinia clutched tighter. Sally, emotionally exhausted, whipped around, knowing she should be holding a stake.

But Lavinia was not a monster. She was holding on for life and as Sally stared, she sank shockingly to her knees, eyes frantically trying to convey something.

If…

If she had managed to kick out whatever it was that made all these vampires, then everyone who had died was just … dead.

Sally’s vision dimmed. She could no longer see in the dark. That “zetz of vampire” was gone from herself too.

Lavinia collapsed in her arms like a bag of rocks.