Vampires (19 page)

And she really didn't think she could handle that with a straight face.

She just had to get away beforehand.

“Dale? Would you excuse me just a minute?” she asked sweetly, then fled.

That's how she ended up hiding out on the terrace, in a metal chair behind an enormous plant.

And that's where she was when she heard the Voice.

It wasn't a deep voice. It wasn't rich and melodious. In fact, it was rather dry and thin. But it was so... smooth. Smooth and clear and it really carried, cutting through the other voices with it.

She had been aware, in the few minutes she'd spent in her little hideout-on the lookout for Dale-of a conversation going on on the terrace a few feet away. But she hadn't really been paying attention. Now, with that voice, she began to.

Sex. They were talking about sex. About the difference between men and women. About what each needed. What women needed. What women craved. What they had to have. Release. Abandon. Wantonness. Penetration.

Looking around at the faces in the motel room... Looking at Felix's face now so close to her, his eyes gentle but so acute...

She just didn't know.

Should she tell them? Should she tell them all-tell Felix-what exactly had been said? What words? What sweet, forbidden, pornographic...

She didn't know.

She didn't know if she could describe what it had been like, sitting there on the terrace and bearing those awful dirty words cutting through the night toward her. Surrounding her. Caressing her. Prodding her. The words he used were so filthy and his descriptions so graphic. No one else was talking but him, now, the entire terrace alive with electricity because it was arousing. She couldn't believe it. Never in her life had anyone spoken such things in her presence. Oh, she knew the words. She knew what they meant-every schoolgirl knew the words. But to hear them used, to feel them scything in her direction.

And to have them so erotic. To see what he described so clearly. To understand it so well.

Ladies and whores, he talked about. About the difference. About the need for ladies to be both. About what the right man knew to do with his lady behind the bedroom door, free her from her ladyship, from her courtly demeanor. Give her the chance to wallow and grovel and glow.

She could not understand how such talk could affect her so. But it had. It had. She had sat there-perched there, really-on the edge of her little chair, panting, chest heaving. . . Because she seemed to understand it. She seemed to understand just what release, just what euphoric abandon he meant. And when be went on and on spinning his pictures and images she saw her own skin glowing, her own fingers grasping, her own thighs wide and receptive and

God help me! What is happening?

She didn't tell the details to the Team. She didn't. She glazed over it and hurried past it and she knew she wasn't meeting their eyes-his eyes-so she forced herself to look up and his gaze was steady and she believed he knew she had left something out.

And she believed he knew what it was.

It was when she decided she could simply hear no more that everything began to happen, that things began to whizz and spiral about her, that her life began to ricochet..

That her soul began its twist in the vise.

The Voice had stopped for the time being and she had risen, spontaneously, from her chair, jerked herself up and forward and away from this madness and the heavy air left by the silence and taken a step around the plant toward the sliding glass door to the library-she could do this! Just step around and through and no one would see her or even know she had been there...

And the other voice suddenly perked up and it was a voice she knew, knew well-had always known-and she couldn't help herself. She turned as she stepped and leaned wrong and her heel caught and she just careened into that awful plant, banging the branches with her shoulder and leaves went everywhere and by the time she had regained her balance-barely, with ankles out and knees together and 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 do with the darker edge of a half-lie. Half-lie implying also a half-truth, yes, she knew that. And that was the vampire's secret.

What the vampire told you was true. He lied when he told you it was everything.

The day after the party had been one of the great days of Davette's life. Later, when she looked back on it, she knew it was because she had spent the day hiding from an impending sense of darkness; But at the time it was sweet, accustomed, familiar silliness.

The first days of every school vacation for years and years Davette had spent the same way: shopping with Kitty. Usually they went with Aunt Victoria in the limo and that was always fun because Aunt Victoria's entrance at the front door of some place like Neiman-Marcus prompted some truly amazing scurrying around on the part of the sales staff.

Aunt Vicky was too tired to come with them that day, but that didn't prevent her from rousing the girls up early like her usual imperial self and getting them “dressed and pressed and made-up for the table, ladies!”

And Davette loved it, being rousted out of bed, rushing around trying to get ready, with Aunt Vicky's voice carrying over everything, laughing and giggling with Kitty as they used, the adjoining bathroom. -

Davette loved it because she didn't have to think

Think about last night.

Or him.

Or herself.

Or...

Or whether or not she should tell Kitty. After all, Ross was her boyfriend. Lord, what would Kitty think of her if she told her that...

That what? What really happened?

Did anything really happen?

Maybe... Maybe it was just a weird dream. I mean, no-, body can just reach out like that and make you. . . Can they?

And a tiny little voice answered back: Ross Stewart can., Anytime he wants to.

But she ignored it and giggled some more and then they were out there in the sunshine, checkbooks and credit cards with safeties off. And it was just as much fun as it always was. Shopping, SHOPPING, SHOPPING!

They laughed so hard and they laughed so long and they spent so much money!