Hotter Blood: More Tales of Erotic Horror

plum much too dark for her age and skin.

'Did your mother tell you you could wear her things?'

'She doesn't care.'

'It's not as becoming on you as your own clothes, you know.'

She did a saucy pirouette, basting spoon in hand, a look both coy and defiant on her face. 'I think I look nice. Very nice. I think I look better than I ever have.'

He started to reply with a rebuke, something like he didn't appreciate having a daughter dressed like she was thirteen going on thirty, but decided this time to let it pass. It was all too rare that he heard Blair say something good about herself. More often, she bemoaned her oily hair or the twenty pounds she vowed to begin dieting away right after one last Almond Joy. To hear Blair defend her appearance was both encouraging (maybe she was at last outgrowing the pity-pot stage) and at the same time a little jarring. How fast they change, thought Derek, and he felt his age dragging him down.

The phone rang again. Blair was taking the roast out of the oven and lost time setting it down. She ran, but he beat her to it.

Radell's voice was a tight, bitter crackle.

'Listen, you little bitch, don't hang up on me again or —»

'Hello!'

There was a small gasp. 'So you're home already, babe. Fast flight.'

'I can't believe you called me at home. I thought you understood —»

'Oh, I understand fine. Your daughter and I had a nice little talk. She's pretty smart, you know. You sure she's yours? She tells me I'm not the first one. She says you've turned your wife into an alkie, that the whole family knows what a scumbag you are.'

She broke off into braying laughter. Half cackle, half sob. A sound that made his heart go cold and thunderous. He slammed down the phone, bent quickly and yanked it out of the plug.

Blair watched from the doorway. She held a red mixing bowl full of chocolate icing tucked into one arm and she was stirring with a wooden spoon, slowly, with Zenlike ease. She might have been a stranger, so fixed, so coolly placid was her tiny smile. Mona Lisa with the mixing bowl, thought Derek, and realized, even as it dawned on him how little he really knew her, how much he loved her, too.

'Who was that, Daddy?'

He managed an embarrassed laugh. 'You were right. A nerd. Let's have some peace. Don't answer the phone for a while.'

'Your hands are shaking.'

'1 guess the trip wore me out worse than I thought.'

He went to the sink and rummaged under it until he located one of the bottles in Jess's stash, a pint of Johnnie Walker behind the Windex and the Lemon Pledge.

Taking a glass down from the cabinet, he poured an inch, then doubled that for good measure. Christ, his hands shook like there were battery-powered vibrators in each finger.

'You can't drink that, Daddy.'

'What?'

Blair's little-girl face set in a prim, cold stare. 'Woody and I made a rule. No drinking in the house. I thought I got all the bottles, but I guess I missed that one.'

'Well, sweetheart, don't forget you and Woody don't make the rules here. I'm damned near frozen from the cold. I need something to get my juices flowing.'

He raised the glass.

'I told you you can't do that!'

Blair's hand swept out, plucked the glass away, and flung it at the back wall. Glass shattered and dark whiskey streamed along the patterned wallpaper.

'What the hell's got into you!'

'I told you, Daddy!'

'Goddammit, Blair, I won't have this!'

'No drinking!'

They glared at each other. Blair raised the mixing spoon as though prepared to deliver a blow. It was Derek who broke eye contact. He sat down heavily at the kitchen table, massaging a lightning-bolt-shaped pain in his temples. Blair put a consoling hand on the back of his neck and he felt again — unpleasantly — how very moist and warm her flesh was, how floral her perfume. Jess's perfume. That Estee Lauder scent he hated.

'I'm sorry I did that, Daddy. Only, you were being bad.'

He started laughing. Who, indeed, was the parent here? With wives out boozing and ex-lovers on the phone? Good God, how had things gotten this out of control?

'Daddy, don't worry. We'll make things all right.'

Astonishingly, she picked up the pint bottle and fetched him a new glass. She poured two golden jiggers. 'This is an exception, Daddy. Because you're upset and because that crazy woman called. Just this once.'

He gulped the drink gratefully, felt it loosen and warm him. A hot dark glow blazed in his belly, and his rage receded. Outside, snow was again pelting the window. Icicles fanged the sill, but here he sat cocooned in the smells of good food and warmth. To hell with Radell and her deranged mistress act. The truth was, in spite of Blair's temper tantrum, he felt safer, more relaxed here at home than in the steamy clinch of Radell's greedy embrace.

'You look so tired, Daddy.'

'It was a long trip home.'

'We waited for you.'

Blair slid her small, soft hands with their unvarnished, badly bitten nails around his neck. He stood up and she nuzzled into him. She smelled of cinnamon and chocolate and Estee Lauder lilac, a luxuriant profusion of scents. Her closeness dizzied him. But when she began to undulate her hips in ever-narrower figure-eights, he jumped back as though she were on fire. Her bright lips fastened to his, her tongue warm and chocolaty. He was inundated with her various perfumes and sickened by the sudden, alarming realization that, incest taboo be damned, his lower portions hadn't heard of it and were firming up accordingly. Shame scoured him. He shoved her away and cracked an open palm with more force than he'd intended across her face.

She reeled back, nearly falling, then righted herself and glared at him with venomous contempt.

'Blair, wait, I —»

'I hate you,' she whispered and ran out of the kitchen. As she fled past the table, her hand shot out long enough to collide with the roast and send it careening in a greasy arc, an oiled football, across the floor.

Derek rushed after her, trying as he did to find a way to put the blame on Jess, Radell, on anyone but himself, for his daughter's concupiscence. Maybe Blair really had talked to Radell and concluded that if Jess had failed at holding on to Daddy's sexual interest, the task now fell to her. A frightening possibility, but less mortifying than the fact that he'd actually gotten a hard-on, that while disgust was registering in his brain, the neurons in his groin were firing to a different drummer.

At the top of the stairs he stopped, caught his breath. The heat there was oppressive, stifling. The thermostat must be turned to ninety. Dust motes rotated slowly in the air, mimicking the patterns of the snowflakes outside the windows.

'Blair?' For once the house was absolutely quiet. Woody's stereo, normally ablast, was silent. No showers ran, no doors slammed. The effect was of expectant waiting, of inheld breath. He moved quietly, furtive as a prowler, until he came to Blair's door and tapped.

'Blair? Honey, I'm so sorry.'

He knocked again, then waited a few seconds and tried the knob. To his surprise, it was unlocked. The door opened easily.

She was in bed, the covers tugged up over her, one arm thrown out as if to ward him off. The exposed hand was small and pink with smooth red-lacquered nails — Jess's hand.

His flesh went cold and crawly. He flung back the sheet, and Jess regarded him, her lips dark blue, her eyes rolled up into the whites. She was dressed in Blair's Farmer Johns and red pullover, and, bizarrely, someone had pierced her ears — a quick and brutal job, to judge from the way the lobes were gouged so that a pair of Blair's gold