II.

Three laps around it counter-clockwise – and one clockwise – deactivated The Reverend Greenway's wards on the church. Lila gazed eagerly up at the bell tower. Later someone would remember seeing nothing more than a sliver of blackness slithering up its smooth, white sides.

Word had reached the congregation. Greenway's followers – all 35 of them – moaned and wailed. Lila swayed in ecstasy from her perch in the rafters. The tip of her tongue touched her upper lip as Daddy's next appointment stepped forward.

"My husband," Amalia Greenway raised her hands for silence. "My husband was a good man!" Lila's lips curled in a dead smile. She so loved liars. They had a spice all their own, like a light dusting of cinnamon on an eggnog latte.

The wailing mourners weren't aware of Lila until she stood next to Amalia. "Your husband," she breathed into the woman's ear, "tasted gooooood."

She breathed on Amalia again. "You taste good too." A black spot, where Lila's breath touched her, expanded down from, and into, the woman's ear. The church doors blasted open. Lila snarled and leapt.

Behind her Amalia screamed, but Lila ignored the now convulsing woman. Her leap took her past the startled Chief of Police and out into the darkness. Hiding behind a headstone in the churchyard cemetery she licked the taste of her brief closeness with Amalia off her upper lip and shivered in glee.