“Your mother is a reasonable terror of a woman who frightens me more than all the vampires in all the castles in the world, but she has nothing on my mother when there was a chance one of the neighbors might see me with dirt on my dress,” said Jack darkly. “I learned to be afraid of dirt before I learned how to spell my own name.”

“I can’t imagine you in a dress,” said Alexis. “You’d look…” She stopped herself, but it was too late: the damage was done.

“Like my sister, yes,” said Jack. “We would be two peas in a terrible pod. I don’t think I’d make a good vampire, though. They never seem to have a napkin on hand when the spurting starts.” She shuddered theatrically. “Can you imagine me covered in all that mess? And they haven’t reflections. I’d be unable to tell whether I’d wiped my face clean. The only solution would be dipping myself nightly in bleach.”

“Hard on the hair,” said Alexis.

“Hard on the heart,” said Jack. She gave Alexis’s fingers a squeeze. “I am what I am, and there’s much about me that won’t be changed with any amount of wishing or wanting. I’m sorry for that. I’d trade a great deal to share an afternoon in the hay with you, dust in the air and sweat on our skins and neither of us caring. But I’m afraid the experience would drive me mad. I am a creature of sterile environments. It’s too late for me to change.”

“You say that, and yet I’ve seen you leap into an open grave like it was nothing.”

“Only with the proper footwear, I assure you.”

Alexis laughed and stepped a little closer to Jack, hugging her arm as they walked toward the looming wall of the village. She rested her head against Jack’s shoulder. Jack inhaled, breathing in the salty smell of her lover’s hair, and thought that there was something to be said for worlds of blood and moonlight, where the only threat more terrible than the things that dwelt in the sea were the things that lived on the shore. Beauty was all the brighter against a background of briars.

The walk was too short, or maybe their legs had just become too long: both of them were still so haunted by the ghosts of childhood that they had yet to learn the fine art of dawdling, of stretching things out until they lasted as long as they would ask them to. In what seemed like no time at all, they were standing in front of the great wall.

Alexis let go of Jack’s hand. Cupping her hands around her mouth, she called, “Alexis Chopper, returning home,” to the sentry.