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She rolled down her window. “Mary Margaret? Mary Margaret Flanagan, is that you?”

More laughter. “ ‘Mary Margaret’?” someone cried. “That’s Wicky!”

The girl stepped forward and looked Carole in the eye. “Yes, sister. That used to be my name. But I’m not Mary Margaret anymore.”

“I can see that.”

She remembered Mary Margaret. A sweet girl, extremely bright, but so quiet. A voracious reader who never seemed to fit in with the rest of the kids. Her grades plummeted as a junior. She never returned for her senior year. When Carole had called her parents, she was told that Mary Margaret had left home. She’d been unable to learn anything more.

“You’ve changed a bit since I last saw you. What is it—three years now?”

“You talk about change?” said the top-hatted girl, sticking her face in the window. “Wait’ll tonight. Then you’ll really see her change!” She brayed a laugh that revealed a chromed stud in her tongue.

“Butt out, Carmilla!” Mary Margaret said.

Carmilla ignored her. “They’re coming tonight, you know. The Lords of the Night will be arriving after sunset, and that’ll spell the death of your world and the birth of ours. We will present ourselves to them, we will bare our throats and let them drain us, and then we’ll join them. Then we will rule the night with them!”

It sounded like a canned speech, one she must have delivered time and again to her black-clad troupe.

Carole looked past Carmilla to Mary Margaret. “Is that what you believe? Is that what you really want?”

The girl shrugged her high thin shoulders. “Beats anything else I got going.”

Finally the old Datsun shuddered to life. Carole heard Bernadette working the shift. She touched her arm and said, “Wait. Just one more moment, please.”

She was about to speak to Mary Margaret when Carmilla jabbed her finger at Carole’s face, shouting.

“Then you bitches and the candy-ass god you whore for will be fucking extinct!”

With a surprising show of strength, Mary Margaret yanked Carmilla away from the window.

“Better go, Sister Carole,” Mary Margaret said.

The Datsun started to move.

“What the fuck’s with you, Wicky?” Carole heard Carmilla scream as the car eased away from the dark cluster. “Getting religion or somethin’? Should we start callin’ you ‘Sister Mary Margaret’ now?”

“She was one of the few people who was ever straight with me,” Mary Margaret said. “So fuck off, Carmilla.”

The car had traveled too far to hear more.

“What awful creatures they were!” Bernadette said, staring out the window in Carole’s room. She hadn’t been able to stop talking about the incident on the street. “Almost my age, they were, and such horrible language!”

Her convent room was little more than a ten-by-ten-foot plaster box with cracks in the walls and the latest coat of paint beginning to flake off the ancient embossed tin ceiling. She had one window, a crucifix, a dresser and mirror, a worktable and chair, a bed, and a nightstand as furnishings. Not much, but she gladly called it home. She took her vow of poverty seriously.

“Perhaps we should pray for them.”

“They need more than prayer, I’d think. Believe me you, they’re heading for a bad end.” Bernadette removed the oversized rosary she wore looped around her neck, gathering the beads and its attached crucifix in her hand. “Maybe we could offer them some crosses for protection?”

Carole couldn’t resist a smile. “That’s a sweet thought, Bern, but I don’t think they’re looking for protection.”

“Sure, and lookit after what I’m saying,” Bernadette said, her own smile rueful. “No, of course they wouldn’t.”

“But we’ll pray for them,” Carole said.

Bernadette dropped into a chair, stayed there for no more than a heartbeat, then was up again, moving about, pacing the confines of Carole’s room. She couldn’t seem to sit still. She wandered out into the hall and came back almost immediately, rubbing her hands together as if washing them.

“It’s so quiet,” she said. “So empty.”

“I certainly hope so,” Carole said. “We’re the only two who are supposed to be here.”

The little