“Dude, we gotta ice that lead vamp.”

Brandon, his long face mournful under his green spiky hair, whispered to Jeremy where he sat shaking.

Jeremy looked up, just as Malcolm called to the pixie-faced Asian vampire, “Why are you different? Why do you have an individual face when all these thousands are just things?” Less than 20 feet separated her from Malcolm and Amanda.

Jeremy stood, trembling. “You are different,” he called in his cracking voice. “Just like he was different. The vampire who train-wrecked my life. He didn’t look like all the others either. He had original ideas, just like you do.”

He walked toward KerriAnne, too-visibly readying his hand to grab the stake on his belt. She snapped, “You and you and you! Lift me!” A moment later, she teased them from the shoulders of the vampires, literally singing “Nah nah na nah na.”

Jeremy ran screaming at the line of vampires, whipping out his stake.

“Jeremy, no, you mustn’t!” Amanda shouted. Brandon and the other two grabbed her as she tried to stop him. She snapped, “This is not acceptable,” and, abashed, they released her, but by then Jeremy was only feet from the icy wall.

Then Malcolm slammed him sideways with a tackle he’d last used forty years ago at NYU and they both slapped to the cement inches from the eagerly straining claws.

KerriAnne stood on the shoulders of her supporters, leaning against the magic barrier which sloped inward like a dome. “Too bad!” she teased. “He would have been yummmmmmyyyy!”

Amanda tongue-lashed the three young men in an intensely quiet voice. “Brandon, Satsuki, Keevian. Do not ever do something like that again.” With obvious caring masked by toughness, they babbled, “Are you demented? They’d have got you too,” and “My mom’d never forgive me if I let something happen to you!”

Malcolm rolled painfully to sitting. I’m too old for this kind of shit, he thought. His shirt now had holes at both elbows and his skin was scraped in several places.

Jeremy, face bloody, sat inches from the vampires. “I want to kill you,” he roared. “You’re evil. Get off this earth, the earth is a home and you’re not welcome.”

The vampires, still chanting Sally Yan’s name, followed Kerri’s example, climbing on shoulders three and four high and pressing against the barrier as if it were a force field in an old science fiction movie. The barrier apparently became a dome over the plaza: several vampires crawled out onto it, hands and knees shuffling in midair, snarling faces glaring greedily down so that those inside jerked back. But still the vampires could not reach through.

Malcolm called to everyone, “All of us. Hold the image of a home in our minds. Join with me, affirm that no vampires are allowed in, even if there might have been one in here before. No vampires can enter this home!”

But Jeremy still stared at Kerri, so hard that she blinked and her eyes shifted. “You’re like he was. You, you didn’t just get bitten and turned, did you?” His breath hissed with sudden insight. “You chose this some-which-way, didn’t you? Didn’t you??!”

KerriAnne made faces as the vampires crawled against the sky like bugs crawling thickly on glass. What the hell did it matter that she couldn’t remember how she turned? She’d been all sad and she remembered a harsh bitter taste but she didn’t remember being bitten. The next conscious memory was of being forced to her door and out into the night, already a vampire. How had it happened?

A motor roared and echoed at the edge of the plaza. A confusion of voices blended with the chaos of the vampire voices. But KerriAnne still puzzled: had she chosen to be a vampire? Well, that meant she was smart; her destiny was to be Queen of the Night! It was like someone had called her name. KerriAnne, KerriAnne, what the fuck do you think you’re doing!

Wait, what? She turned and lost her balance but caught herself against the invisible wall.

Sally came for her with angry strides from a red 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Seville parked at the edge of the plaza. Beside her was a tall dark-haired stranger and a couple of men who she immediately dismissed as fags.

They were unprotected in the night! They walked like they didn’t see her army of minions!

The vampires turned as one and surged toward them.

“You fucking idi—aw shit!” Kerri shrieked as she fell from their shoulders and smacked into the ground. “Don’t hurt her!” she tried to call, but vampires slid from the glass dome and thumped on top of her.

Groaning and cursing, she scrambled to her feet and tried to push through the thronging idiots.

The sea of bodies parted. Surrounded by an impregnable shield, Sally Yan and her beloved Lavinia Starr, along with Jesse Casselberger and his beloved Walter LaMont walked up and stopped five feet away from her.

Without hesitation, she reached for Sally, but the barrier around the four was as solid as any house. It bumped her back against the wall of vampires. Sally stared at her, face rippling between pity, anger and disgust.

Instantly Kerri was little Carrie Yan again, the whole Queen of the Night charade forgotten. She just wanted her big sister to fix everything. “Boss,” she said in a tiny, cute voice. “You came for me. I need you. Oh, I need you so.”

There it was, that comfortable feeling as her hook settled into Sally. She was safe and Sally would fix everything and it didn’t matter that Sally was with her lesbian lover even though she’d told Kerri, “You’re sick,” not that Kerri would do it with her sister even though confused fire looped through her belly at the thought, because that would be incest and she would never stoop that low unless she had to…

The dyke rolled her eyes and snorted, and right away Sally wasn’t safe in Kerri’s grasp anymore! Sally rubbed her lips against each other and looked weird, like she might get mad and meanwhile there were voices from behind Kerri, those jerk-faces in the plaza were plotting the minute her back was turned… Her thoughts tumbled with increasing speed.

Sally Yan, heart aching, watched her loved and hated sister. Lavinia’s strong hand on her arm couldn’t help her, nor her voice murmuring, “She don’t deserve you, babe.” (“Does too, does too!” Kerri’s voice darted in.)

Sally stepped forward, her barrier pushing KerriAnne back. The throng behind her little sister melted away and soon she was pressed against the plaza barrier. Sally stopped pushing forward, remembered Lavinia hurled to the door of the camper so hard her skin split. Kerri panted, face wide with terror.

Behind Kerri stood a teenager with haunted eyes, mouth working, turning a stake over and over, eyes darting from Kerri to Lavinia. Three other young men stood protectively around a tall woman they called “Sister,” who seemed to be praying for guidance. Malcolm looked everywhere, like a teacher who knows the gunman will get one of her charges no matter how hard she tries.

Sally opened her mouth with no idea in the world what she was going to say.