Vampire$

All of you act so hard and tough, she thought, gazing gratefully at them. Is that so no one will know about you?

“So,” Felix continued gently, “you and your friend Kitty slept with those two men.”

She could only nod, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“It wasn’t fair! He made us helpless! And then he told them!”

Of course Ross had known the men. Of course he had told them to be there. Of course they stopped by the booth to say hello. And then they were following the limo to her Aunt Vicky’s house and then they were all having a drink on the terrace and then, somehow, she was alone with one of them in the library, the short, fat, balding one who owned her, and abruptly he stopped being sweet. He put down his drink and leaned forward on the leather sofa and told her to take off her dress.

She wept and said, “Please don’t make me do this!”

Even as she rose and exposed herself to him.

She did see it as if from afar. As if from the top of Uncle Harley’s vast eighteen-foot bookshelves. And in this awful, obscene, filthy image of what she was doing, she reveled. She rolled and spun and gushed animal screams.

The only thing Ross spared them was seeing the money change hands.

It happened again, of course. And again. And again and again and one night there were two men just for her and then one night Kitty wasn’t there and there were three. Three men she didn’t know, back once again in her uncle’s vast library, back on the vast leather sofa. And through her tears and shame she looked up and saw Ross there, standing and smiling at the uncurtained window. She called out to him from the couch, there on that couch on all fours wearing nothing but her jewelry that glinted and turned in the moonlight, she called out to him to make it all stop.

But he only laughed.

And then she felt added weight of the second man on the leather behind her and the animal cries soon returned to wash away the tears.

For a while.

Kitty was absent more than once. Soon she was hardly there at all and when she was she was as pale and wan as Aunt Vicky and Davette was starting to worry and fret but Ross would soothe her and comfort her and reassure her and fool her. She lived now in a constant dream state in which the oddest things were acceptable. She was exhausted from loss of rest and loss of blood and lack of… focus. She had nothing going on around her that she was used to, that she could count on or lean against. Aunt Vicky was always abed now, looking tight and worn and deathly pale. When they did talk, which was rare, they talked as strangers. For Davette’s sense of shame and guilt encompassed her always these days, like the air around her. And when she sat in Victoria’s great bedroom, the shame smothered her into silence. She was too engrossed with her own humiliation to notice her aunt’s oddly distant behavior.

Then one night, with Kitty gone and Ross not yet arrived, she almost told her. Sitting there in that chair at her aunt’s bedside, the pressure was almost too much. A sudden desire — passion, really — to throw herself to her knees and confess everything all but overcame her.

But then she thought of what the news would do to the lady, and she choked it back.

Weeping later in the corridor, she thought her tie with Aunt Vicky could never be worse.

But it could.

Two nights later, for reasons only Aunt Vicky would know, the frail elderly woman decided to get up from her bed in the middle of the night and go downstairs. She didn’t even take the elevator, but rather the long curved front staircase. And that’s where she was standing, on the bottom step, when she saw Davette, naked and rolling on the mansion’s entryway carpet.

Davette did not cry out. She did not scream or try to explain or even move. Instead she closed her eyes and lay there waiting to expand and explode and be gone forever. But neither did this happen. When at last she opened her eyes everyone was gone.

When she woke the next night, so was her beloved Victoria. Forever.

Overdose.

Jack Crow spoke softly: “He had her, too, didn’t he? Your aunt.”

Davette looked at him and nodded. “All along.”

“And she couldn’t stand the shame…” finished Annabelle, her eyes welling tears.

Davette nodded once more. “Everyone was so nice. I guess I’d forgotten how many friends Aunt Vicky had. The medical examiner, Dr. Harshaw, came out to the house personally to take care of her — and, I guess, me — through it all. And the governor sent something. And the mayor came to the funeral; she’s so nice. And senators and… everyone…”

Her voice drifted off and she simply stared for a few moments, at something only she could see.

The Team exchanged painful looks. All except Felix. His eyes never left Davette.

“Where was your Uncle Harley?” he asked. “He was Aunt Vicky’s brother?”

“We couldn’t reach him. He was in Samoa or somewhere.”

“Samoa? In the South Pacific?”

“Uh-huh. Harley is a photographer. He’s always going somewhere out of reach for National Geographic or somebody. I think he’s in Samoa. Photographing diving pigs or…”

“Speaking of pigs,” said Carl Joplin bitterly, “where was little Ross during all of this? The funeral was in the daytime, right?”

Davette smiled at him gratefully. “Yes. Yes, and I had to be up during the days, to do the… to handle all of the details. So I didn’t see Ross at all for those three days except one night. Ju… Dr. Harshaw was with me all along and he didn’t like Ross because I was all alone and Ross did have that horrible reputation. Anyway,” she said breathily, looking to Carl Joplin once again, “anyway, it did change when he wasn’t there. With the sunlight. And Dr. Harshaw gave me something so I slept at night, all night, and in the mornings I could think and I could remember and I hated him! I hated Ross!”

She was almost out of her chair. Her voice had become strident and wild and the tears flipped from her eyelids and Felix leaned forward and took her in his arms to soothe her but she fought, not with Felix, but to speak:

“He would stand there and laugh when those awful men would have me. They would all have me. They’d pass me back and forth between them and Ross would be there laughing and calling me filthy names and saying what a lesson I was learning to treat him the way I used to and I wasn’t such a lady now, was I? And — and I just wallowed there in front of him! I just wallowed for those men because I couldn’t help myself! I couldn’t help it! I couldn’t! ”

And she sobbed a painful sob and pitched forward out of her chair into Felix’s arms and bawled and bawled.

In the heavy silence surrounding the child’s weeping, Annabelle felt the full force of Team Crow’s collective hatred pulsing about her. It was like a real and tangible force, so mighty was its purpose. The men looked not at each other or at her but rather straight ahead, each lost in his own thoughts of vengeance:

It’s frightening, thought Annabelle. And I would be frightened, if I didn’t feel the same way.

And then she thought: The vampires are very foolish to make men such as these this angry.

“When,” asked Felix gently after Davette had been silent a long time, “did you see Ross again?”

Davette pulled her head off his shoulder and sat back in her chair, sniffling and wiping her eyes.

“The night after the funeral. He woke me to tell me he’d moved in.”

“Into your house?”

“Yes. Yes. Into my house. And I sat up in bed and I didn’t care what he looked like. I didn’t care about his eyes in the moonlight. I told him ‘No. No! I don’t want you here! I don’t want to ever see you again!’ And I meant it!”