Vampire$

Fourth Interlude: The Victim

The Team stood stunned and staring at her and she tried to get it all out at once, all of it that she had wanted to tell them from the beginning, about what had happened to her and how she had really come to see them that day in California — but it just came out as sputtering tears.

It was Felix, of all people, who rescued her, taking her gently in his arms and speaking soft, soothing nothings. He led her to his chair and sat her carefully down and dragged up a chair for himself, all the time still murmuring reassuringly to her.

The others unfroze at last, Annabelle hip enough to fetch Kleenex and a glass of water, the men moving slowly, still more or less in shock, into seats of their own to listen. And it was kind of like the Inquisition, with them all circling about her suspicious and staring but she didn’t mind. She deserved this. She deserved it for what she had done to them — or almost had done to them.

Because she hadn’t come to do a story on them.

She had come to bring their killer.

She had left him in the trunk of that car she had been driving.

He was the fiend they had just slain, the one with the headband.

The little god.

His name was Ross Stewart and she had known him for ten years, since she was eleven and had taken Miss Findley’s Dance Class for Young Ladies and Gentlemen.

Ross had been in the class. But he hadn’t been a gentleman even then.

She started sputtering again. Felix leaned forward and took her hands in his and told her to relax, to relax and take deep breaths and start from the beginning. And she knew he was right, knew he made sense, knew she should do it that way, but now, looking into his eyes, closer to him than she’d ever been, she wanted to skip all that and…

And get right to the meat.

Get right to the shame.

She felt compelled — obsessed, really — as she had from the very first time she had seen him, to tell him this. To have him know all about what she had done and what she had been made to do.

She wanted him to know everything. Every nasty detail. But she did what he said. She tried again from the beginning. Not the very beginning, when she was young, but from when it had really started. Last spring. Easter vacation. Religious holiday.

Her Aunt Victoria had planned a wonderful party for her.

Aunt Vicky’s house was the best-kept secret in north Dallas, a tiny, nondescript entrance on Inwood Road exploded, once inside the driveway, into a miraculous vision of a graystone mansion with multileveled terraces sprawling throughout the sculptured gardens and running brooks and towering trees that had tiny colored lights way up high in them, where the stars were. The party had spilled out over all the terraces and there was a band playing and people dancing and everyone was there, simply everyone she had grown up with, glittering and beautiful, the Sons and daughters of wealth and private schools, and you just knew by looking at them that it wasn’t just the fortunes of the past represented here but the fortunes of the future certain to be made.

And Davette was the princess.

Because she really was beautiful, she knew that, and tall and blond and smart, too, editor of the university newspaper, and she laughed and talked and gloried in the attention, warm with friends when she wanted and unapproachable whenever she felt like it because Aunt Vicky had taught her that. You didn’t really have to have that same conversation with every man.

But there were two details wrong and they nagged her. Her best friend, Kitty, had yet to show up. And Aunt Vicky was still abed.

Anyone else would still be “in” bed. But not Aunt Victoria, not in that huge three-hundred-year-old canopied bed in that immense bedroom full of all those beautiful chairs and settees and intricate knickknacks her brother, Uncle Harley, had brought home from around the world. The whole house was a treasure, but it was always this room, Davette had realized, that meant her aunt to her, meant romance and glory, which to Davette had always been one and the same.

She missed her mommy and daddy sometimes, so long dead now, but with Aunt Vicky and her brother, Uncle Harley, her rearing had been just as warm and loving — and a lot more fun. Uncle Harley, decorator to royalty, had shown her the world. And Aunt Victoria had shown her the ways of… the lady. Ways that made men sit up straight and turn their language soft and clean when she entered the room. A certain regal air — never haughty, exactly, but definitely, inevitably, superior. Reluctantly superior, as Aunt Victoria once confided to her.

Aunt Victoria had that look about her that made hard men wish for dragons to slay for her. Just for want of that twinkling smile.

But now she was ill and those beautiful lace bedclothes only made her seem more pale and less strong. She had received a few people, close friends who wished to look in on her, but she wouldn’t leave her bed, wouldn’t come to the party.

“Don’t worry, dear,” she had cooed to her niece. “Have a good time, be a lady,” Then there was that twinkle. “Then come back and tell me every single detail.”

And they had laughed and kissed and Davette had gone back to her rooms, where she found Kitty, who was staying with her, sitting naked on the side of her bathtub and crying.

Over Ross Stewart.

Davette couldn’t believe it. Ross Stewart? No-Class Ross, as she and Kitty had dubbed him and the name had stuck with him from sixth grade to high school graduation because it fit! It really fit!

“I can’t believe it!” she blurted, shaking her head before catching herself and realizing how she must sound.

When she heard Kitty’s sobbing “I can’t either!” she knew they had a problem.

Davette sat down on the edge of the tub and put her arm around her best friend in the world and tried to… to what, to console her? Because Davette didn’t really understand how this was even possible and all she could get out of Kitty was, yes, she was ashamed at being with Ross Stewart, but, no, she had no intention of leaving him.

“I can’t help myself,” she said, looking Davette straight in the eye.

And Davette had felt a cold, dark chill.

Now it was after ten P.M. and the party was in full swing and she still hadn’t heard from Kitty and she was starting to fret. Maybe, she thought, Ross has changed. Maybe he really wasn’t as bad as she had remembered. And she tried thinking back through her memories and images of him in a different light, in a more positive way.

But she wasn’t having much luck. Ross Stewart had been just awful.

Good-looking, really, in a kind of decadent way. He had long black curly hair and he was tall and well built, she remembered. And smart, too, because he had made excellent grades and St. Mark’s Prep, the brother school to her own Hockaday, was a very demanding place. No, Ross had no excuses for being the way he was, foul- mouthed and dirty-minded and totally without class. All the boys talked about sex all the time, of course. They were teenagers and that was practically their job. But Ross always talked about it a little too long, his jokes always a little more filthy, his leers always too damned piercing.

And the money, of course. Ross’s family didn’t have any, at least not the way most of the private school parents did. But that was no excuse, either. There were several students worse off than Ross and they were okay. At least they didn’t go around so greedy all the time, talking about the prices of everything and dating the richest, most homely girls who had never before had such attention.

God, she remembered, he used to drive the girls’ cars on dates! And once he