Vampire$

wineglass spilling — she was among them. A semicircle of faces she couldn’t meet were staring surprised looks in her direction and she heard that voice she had recognized again saying, “Davette!”

And she looked up and saw it was… Kitty!

Kitty and other girls she had grown up with. There was Patty and Debra and… Oh God! The embarrassment, because it wasn’t just crashing through the shrubbery, it was the looks on their faces, the steaming-dreamy looks because they had been listening to that Voice, too, and their faces were flushed and their chest heaving and she knew they could see her own flush..

And, Oh my God, if Kitty was here, that meant…

“Davette,” said Kitty again, “you remember Ross Stewart.”

And he was there, looming over her, his black curly hair and ivory-white skin and black eyes so deep and forever and he took her free hand in his and said, with a wicked curling smile, “Davette! How often I’ve thought of you.”

And that was that. Her lights went out. She fainted dead away.

It took her some time before she figured out exactly what had happened next. Ross must have caught her as she fell.

And though she was only out for a second she managed to have what seemed an endless dream — nightmare — or running through some awful wet-stoned maze of tunnels with someone she never saw but knew to be Ross Stewart, walking briskly after her and laughing.

But when she woke up she hadn’t even’ reached the floor yet and Ross Stewart still held her in his arms with his eyes boring through her and she panicked and she flailed at his chest and arms and she screamed.

It was the sound of her own voice that shook her out of it, that and Kitty bending over her saying, “Davette! Honey!” And as Ross lifted her upright — so easily! — and she saw all the faces on the terrace turned to look at this crazy woman, she was so humiliated she wished she could just explode at will.

And then “Stewart! What do you think you’re doing with her?” sounded out and she recognized the voice of Dale Boijock being macho and saw him shouldering his way toward her and she closed her eyes and wondered, Could this get any worse?

It could.

Ross, still supporting her — again, so easily! — transferred her to his left arm and turned and faced the oncoming Dale and said, “What I am doing with her, so far as it concerns you, is anything I damn well please.”

It was meant to taunt him — all these people watching him — and it worked. Dale lurched forward, his right arm reaching out, and Davette whispered out, “Dale! No!” but she had no breath and her voice didn’t carry and in any case it was too late.

Ross’s right hand snapped out like a snake around Dale’s wrist and held it fast and there was a pause as the two eyed one another and then she felt, rather than saw, Ross’s smile as he began to squeeze and Davette had a chance to think how oddly beautiful were Ross’s half-inch-long fingernails before Dale’s wrist broke.

Ross released the wrist as Dale cried out with pain and jerked backward. Then came a beat or two as Dale stared, unbelieving, between Ross and his swelling wrist.

“It was easy, Dale,” whispered Ross so that only the three of them could hear. “Want to see it again?”

Davette saw Dale’s eyes go wide with surprise and growing fury and she saw it coming so clearly. Dale, who had probably never lost a fight in his life — and certainly not to that wimp-ass gigolo, Ross Stewart — simply could not help himself. And his roar was very leonine as he launched all six-foot-two- inches and two hundred thirty — odd pounds of muscle at his rival.

Ross’s casual backhanded flick of his wrist swept, rather than knocked, Dale some three feet sideways through the air, through the terrace railing, and nine feet down into the gently rolling slope of the gardens below.

He wasn’t really hurt. The slope was thick with rich ground cover and they could hear him moaning out in pain and shock. Within seconds others had reached him and pronounced him okay. But the fight was over. That was the point.

“I wish he hadn’t made me do that,” said Ross to the astonished onlookers and his sincerity seemed so real that Davette felt them collectively taking Ross’s side of it.

“I’m terribly sorry about that,” he then said to her, looking down.

Only then did she realize she was still in his arms and as she started to pull away he spoke again, but this time it was that Voice.

“I’m sure,” he purred at her, “you’ve had enough excitement for one night. Let us take you upstairs before you fall asleep on your feet.”

And she hadn’t felt sleepy, had she? But now she had images of that soft bed and no voices or crowds or music, those cool sheets…

“Thank you,” she whispered, nodding to both of them, for Kitty was back alongside her and the three of them left and took easy steady steps up the broad staircase and down the hallway to her rooms. Ross didn’t seem to be there as Kitty helped the sleepwalker undress and climb into bed and lie down.

“He’s really changed, hasn’t he?” was the last thing Kitty said to her and Davette saw her friend’s pleasure, as though the evening had redeemed her association with him.

But Davette was too tired to answer. She thought she managed to nod before drifting off.

She had no dreams.

She wasn’t sure it was true sleep at all. She felt only light and floating and still and intermittently aware. She knew when the band stopped. She had a sense of the party finally ending and the great house becoming empty. Kitty always stayed in the adjoining bedroom, ever since junior high, and later she was sure she heard her in there talking to Ross and then there were other muffled noises and she pressed herself back into sleep so as not to hear.

Much later, toward dawn, she felt the weight on the edge of the bed and opened her eyes to protest once and for all. But she could not speak at first. His eyes seemed to shine at her. His skin was so creamy white and softly carved around his smile. His black curls glowed in the light coming through her open balcony.

“Could you hear me well enough through that plant?” he asked.

She had been lying flat on her back, without moving, the entire night. Now she sat straight up.

“You mean… you knew?”

“Of course,” he replied softly and the Voice was back. “Kitty has heard me before. The others didn’t matter at all.” His hand reached out and caressed her cheek and there was nothing, dammit, she seemed to be able to do about it. “No,” he continued, “it was all for you.”

And the blood roared through her and her breath raced as sharp hissing pants and when his hand pulled back she all but cried out, What is happening to me! when she felt disappointment at the loss of his touch. And his smile curled, wide and full around his face, melding with her eyes, and his right hand came toward her again, with the fingernails of forefinger and thumb snapping together like a small animal… click… click… click

And she knew where, through her sheer nightgown, the little creature would bite her. But she could not stop this, either. She could not even stop the wanting of this. And when, matching the heaving rhythm of her chest, the two fingernails clamped with gentle pain on her left nipple, she fainted once more — but not before an orgasm of more exquisite agony than she could ever have imagined.

Sitting there in that cheap lime-green motel room and telling the Team — telling him — about that first night… it was the worst moment. It was not the worst part of her story — there were many crimes to come. But, still, it was the worst.

For now they knew what Ross could do to her, what he was always able to do to her, anytime he wanted. The… humiliation. The sense of being so simple and cheap. Of being used goods. Easy used goods.

Because the sexiness was still there. Even now, thinking back on it and thanking Sweet Jesus it was over, she felt the trembling passion of it all. And the others around her felt it also, it steamed from all the men save Father Adam, whose pious visage seemed struck in granite. But even Annabelle was affected.

And she tried to explain it to them. Tried, because she wasn’t sure she understood it herself. But it had to