“Arright, freeze it roight there, yeh shitehawk,” the stranger said sternly in a trembling voice. “I don’t want to waste a wooden bullet on you but by Christ I will.” Telling her he knew how to fight off vampires.

“I’m not a vampire!” Sally shrieked. The man hadn’t seen Lavinia yet and Sally, with no idea how to explain a naked corpse, kept it that way.

“Yeah, my dead uncle’s barse. Wha’d you be doing out here then? I’ve chased enough of you manky bastards off, trying to invade this island. Who else would swim out here after dark to be here now, answer me that?”

“It’s, it’s daylight, isn’t it?” Sally reasoned. “How could I be walking around in the daylight?”

The man thought about it for a moment, looked around and said, “Arright. Yeah, arright, I wasn’t thinking. Jaysus fuh—eh, sorry, ma’am.” Sally, in spite of the danger, had to fight to keep from smiling. The man had been about to say “Jesus fuck” just like Lavinia always did.

He took a few steps toward her, lowering the pistol but still holding it ready. Sally tried to casually reposition herself to block Lavinia, still half invisible through the grass and mist.

The stranger was a tall young man with bluff good looks. Thank goodness, he seemed more inclined to explain than to ask questions. “Forgive me, I’ve spent a good bit of my time as a Guide out here chasin’ off them gyppos, but we’ve managed to keep the island clean. Yeh startled me the more in that I was walking the stone steps up to the old monastery before sunrise, Christ, yeh could never do that on the mainland. And then here you were.”

“Oh,” said Sally, “so this is an old monastery? I thought so. Are you one of the, um, Brothers?”

“Nah, this hasn’t been a monastery fer a thousand – Christ, yeh really have no idea where in the world yeh are, do yeh?” He faced her, suspicious again. “Just you tell me how you do come to be here? All tourists shoulda been off the island long before sunset yesterday.”

Sally, shivering, raced desperately for an explanation. And just as she came up with “parachuted out of an airplane,” the man saw Lavinia and she looked like nothing but a vampire.

He jerked back and the gun snapped up. Lavinia looked up at the man with ashen stillness. If a wooden bullet pierced her heart it would kill her (unless it came out the other side?). And if it hit her anywhere else, the wound would bleed and bleed when the sun hit it, until she died like man with gold-rimmed glasses on the beach.

Sally babbled, “We were flying in a, in a really small, um, hang glider, I mean, a puh, a pedal powered aircraft and we crashed, and Lavinia’s naked because, because…”

She would probably have gone on for several dreadful minutes but the young man suddenly gasped and his eyes went wide with recognition. “You’re that Lavinia, then? The vampire on the telly who shucked her clothes and flew?”

Sally floundered gratefully to a halt and nodded carefully. Lavinia’s voice from the ground said, “’At’s me.”

“And you’d be the girlfriend, your name was Sally, wannit?”

“Sally, yes that’s right, I’m impressed you remember.” She held out her hand and the young man shook it, saying “Michael Connor.”

She decided to try at least most of the truth. “Lavinia was flying us to Germany and we lost the sun yesterday and sort of crash landed here. So where are we?”

“Well, you’re a bit off the road for Germany in any case.” The young man laughed. “You’re on the island of Skellig Michael and you’re just off the coast of County Kerry, about 20 miles.”

Michael was eager to talk now. People came by boat from the mainland to see the thousand-year-old monastery. They climbed the fairy-tale stone steps which came all the way up from the water, where boats could land in decent weather.

“Thing I like best about being a Guide here is no vampires. You can walk around at night as much as you want and even look at the stars if you catch a night with no clouds or rain. Every now and then, those scum try to invade the island but there’s really only one place to land a boat and we can see ‘em coming for miles. We blast ‘em before they can land.”

Sally wondered if there were other places vampires never reached. Islands far out at sea, remote valleys in the Himalayas, the frozen north and south poles?

“We need to be getting on,” she said when Michael paused for breath. “Can you give us any idea when the sun might break through?”

“Definitely in an hour.” Her heart leaped until he added, “Unless it’s not for two weeks.” He shrugged his shoulders in apology. “This is Ireland, love, can’t do you better than that.”

“Shit.” She sagged. From the ground, Lavinia muttered a three-syllable something that had to be “Jesus fuck.”

But her jaw set: the sun might break through in an hour. It would take just a solid beam and Lavinia would rise like a soul on judgement day.

Michael was extending them an invitation to come down to the docks. “Boats’ll be landing in a few hours. You’ll get someone to ferry you to the mainland. I can even give you a doughnut while you wait.”

“But it might burn through inside of an hour?”

“Might being the operative word, yes.”

“We’ll wait here, then. If we can get on our way by air, that’s still the best.”

“Go, butch you,” Lavinia muttered.

“Allright. Eh, if I could ask you to put clothes on your lady? Folks’ll be traipsing up here right after the boats land.”

Sally found that funny but she tried to hide it. “Sure thing.”

“Right, ta then. One of the other guides’ll be up here in about an hour. I’ll tell him you’re here so you don’t get shot at.” And with that he was off, leaving Sally with the surreal impression that he’d never been there.