Enter, Night

maternal devotion.

“Morgan, no! Don’t go to her!” Finn shouted. “Don’t look at her! That’s how they get you!”

Morgan, empty-eyed, took another step towards her grandmother.

At the exact moment that Adeline’s arms snaked out, her fingers grazing the sleeves of her granddaughter’s sweater, Finn placed his palm flat in the middle of Morgan’s back and shoved her as hard as he could.

Morgan spun off-balance and fell, sprawling on the floor near where Christina had fallen. Christina scrambled for Morgan and dragged her daughter across the carpet towards her.

Blind fury passed across Adeline’s face. From her open mouth came a shrill, sibilant buzzing, vaguely insectile or serpentine.

Her teeth actually click when she hisses like that, Finn thought in wonderment, fascinated in spite of himself. Just like in the comics.

Then Adeline threw back her head and laughed. “Little idiot,” she said. Her voice brimmed with contempt and malicious, dark mirth. “Dirty little townie boy. A dirty townie, just like my cunt of a daughter-in-law.”

Very clearly, Finn said, “Fuck you, you snob. This is for my dog.”

He unscrewed the lid of the mason jar of water he was holding behind his back and threw its contents in Adeline Parr’s face.

Finn’s father had once let him hold a candle up to a blowtorch. The candle had literally been uncreated in front of Finn’s eyes, liquefying and becoming viscous in the heat of the blowtorch.

That was what happened to Mrs. Parr’s face when the holy water splashed into it-into it, not across it. The water burned into Adeline’s face, flushing away skin, troughing bone, until the liquefied mixture that had been her face ran down in an oily red and yellow stream of blood and fat. Adeline dropped to her knees and then fell on her side, clawing at her face and rending the air with her agony.

She’s melting just like the Wicked Witch of the West, Finn mused. Good. I hope it hurts like hell.

It seemed impossible that she could still make that agonized highpitched sound with her throat melting away like it was, but Finn’s ears rang with the sound of her excruciation. Acrid, stinging white smoke poured from Adeline’s dissolving face, filling the room. It burned Finn’s throat and eyes, making him cough and retch.

Temporarily blind, Finn stumbled into the cavernous bedroom, feeling his way as he went. He flailed his arms in front of him, trying to stay balanced.

He didn’t see Adeline’s spindly dressing table chair, but he surely felt it when he collided with it. He said, “Ooooh!” Then his legs buckled and he collapsed on the floor at the foot of the bed, disoriented and unable to see.

He heard Christina screaming his name, but-still smoke-blind-he didn’t understand why, and he couldn’t see what they saw until it was long past too late.

The old man in black streaked toward Finn with the speed of a deadly underwater snake. Christina screamed Finn’s name as she saw the man’s blackrobed arms with their long-fingered white hands uncoil from his sides and seize the boy in a possessive grip, yanking Finn back towards him, enfolding him in his arms. He slipped his elbow around Finn’s throat in a crushing chokehold. Finn’s face turned a dull, airless red as he began to suffocate. As he dragged Finn towards the French doors leading to Adeline’s balcony, the old man’s eyes met Morgan’s.

“Let him go!” she screamed. “Let Finn go!”

Christina shouted, “Morgan, stay away from him!”

But if Morgan could hear at all, she gave no sign of it. She launched herself at the old man, her fists raised. But she never reached him or Finn.

Finn’s face was the colour of the dark pink flush of an overripe peach, and his eyes bulged and watered from lack of oxygen. He reached out one arm and choked out one ragged, pleading word that sounded like Morgan at the same time as Morgan reached out to him, fully intending to wrench Finn from the old man’s death grip.

Their fingers brushed, once.

Then the old man threw himself back against the closed French doors. The glass shattered around him in his wake, and the momentum sent them tumbling over the edge of the balcony, thirty feet above the ground. Clouds of wet snow and cold rain blew into the bedroom from the broken doors and the night outside, curtains flapping into the room like flags.

But instead of the sound of their bodies striking the lawn below, Morgan heard the sound of giant wings churning the air outside the window-and Finn screaming her name, over and over again.

When she ran to the balcony and tried to follow the sound, Morgan saw a great dark mass, nearly indistinguishable from the general blackness, rising into the night sky.

She might have missed it entirely except for the helplessly flailing figure of a small, screaming boy in white pyjamas it carried in its claws, growing smaller and smaller as they drifted almost lazily into the deeper darkness towards the outlying forests and the cliffs beyond. Then it was swallowed up entirely by the rain and the sheets of snow.

Adeline Parr’s bedroom reeked of blood and acid smoke. Christina stood up carefully, but spears of white-sharp pain still shot up her left leg from the impact of her collision. Her head throbbed. Morgan, her hair wet with melting snow, stood on the balcony, wailing Finn’s name over and again.

Adeline Parr’s headless body was motionless on the carpet. Where her head had been, there was only a nimbus of boiled slush and bits of stubborn bone fragment that had survived the annihilation of the holy water.

Christina had a great longing to kick the body as hard as she could, but there was still some lingering fear in her that, even now, Adeline would reach out and grasp her ankle, diamond rings and red-lacquered scimitar fingernails digging into Christina’s soft skin. Instead, she stepped over Adeline’s body and went to the gory tangle of silk sheets where Jeremy had bled out and died.

Christina couldn’t breathe. She looked down at the familiar face, so much like Jack’s, and felt a band of grief tighten around her chest so strongly that she feared she might literally suffocate from the pain of this second tragic severing from their lives of the second of the two men who had meant the most to her and Morgan.

Oh, Jeremy, she thought. Oh, my poor, sweet Jeremy. What did they do to you?

Christina pulled one of the sheets out from under him-a cleaner one than the others, at least-and carefully and lovingly covered his broken and torn body with it.

As she did, a glitter of silver on the carpet caught her eye. It was Jeremy’s St. Christopher’s medal. The chain was broken as though it had been ripped off his neck and thrown down. Christina bent and picked it up. She put it in the pocket of her jeans.

By the window, Morgan had stopped calling Finn’s name, but her body still shook with sobs. Her shoulders were hunched forward and her hands were loosely clasped in front of her, as though praying.

Christina called out softly, “Morgan? Honey?”

Morgan turned around. Her face was white and stiff with shock. “Hi, Mom,” she said. “What did you say? Mom… he took Finn. He carried Finn away.” Fresh tears streamed from her eyes. “There really are vampires. Just like Finn said there were. It was all true.”

She shook her daughter gently. “Morgan, we have to leave,” Christina said, struggling to keep her voice calm without sacrificing the force of her words, words she needed Morgan to hear and heed. “We have to leave right now. Are you OK to walk? Can you make it downstairs to the car?”

“But what about Finn?” She stared frantically through the broken French doors.

“Morgan, listen to me,” she said urgently. “We have to leave the house. It’s too dangerous here. We can’t worry about Finn now. Finn would want you safe.”

“OK,” Morgan said. She glanced down at Jeremy’s body on the bed and started to shake again. “Oh, Mom…”

“Don’t look at it, Morgan. Don’t look at him. Come on now-here, look at me instead. Look at my face.” When she did, Christina smiled encouragingly. “That’s it. Just keep your eyes on me.”

She put her arm around Morgan’s shoulders and gently herded her past the carnage in the bedroom and out into the hallway. Once there, she hurried her daughter down the stairs. The keys to the Chevelle were where she