Vampires (22 page)

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 roiled 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 team.

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 anus 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!”

“And what did he say?” asked Father Adam.

Davette looked at him and she half laughed, half cried, and shook her head. “He just laughed and reached down and jerked me high into the air way over his head with one hand and...”

“And what?”

"And let me see his teeth. .

“And then, at last, you knew?” asked Jack.

“I don't know what I knew. Then. But I knew an hour later. You see, he carried me downstairs, in my nightgown, and threw me into my car and then he got in behind the wheel and started driving.”

He drove to a part of Dallas Davette had never seen. She had heard about it, read about it, seen the police reports on the local news. But she had never been here in deep south Dallas, mostly black, mostly miserable, full of hookers and rival street gangs and crack dealers and fractious racial politics herded together by terrified and outgunned police. The faces through the whizzing car windows seemed alien and menacing and the streets seemed seedy and tense as a shaken fist.

Ross pulled the car into a crowded and littered parking lot alongside a place called “Cherry's” whose neon sign lacked an “r” and part of the “h” but still blinked spasmodically through the heavy gloom. The parking lot was full of people, mostly men and all black, standing around in little groups of twos or threes or sixes talking and smoking and passing bottles back and forth. A group of four were standings in the parking space Ross had selected. He pushed forward into it anyway, honking and lurching the great Cadillac bumper toward them. They leapt out of the way, one dropping his bottle, only just avoiding the car.

“What the fuck's wit you?” cried the largest, a huge black man with a great broad-brimmed hat and what Davette believed was a least two pounds of gold jewelry.

“Parking my car,” snapped Ross as he stepped out. “This is a parking lot.”

Then he stepped quickly around the car and opened Davette's door and lifted her, literally, out of her seat and onto the Cadillac's roof. She was still wearing her nightgown and she struggled to keep its dainty ends from fluttering in the heavy breeze. Ross sneered at her efforts, then turned back to the four blacks.

“Want to make something of it?” he asked them.

And when they hesitated, too amazed to speak, be

added:

niggers?"

As she spoke this next, the Team heard her voice change. As she had spoken of her own fall, Davette's tone had been rich with shame and fatigue and hatred. But now it became tinged with awe. Awe and fear and something else.

Resignation? wondered Felix. As if, now that she thinks back on it, they really are unstoppable?

Shit.

And she tried to explain, to describe what she'd seen. The might of him. The surrealistic animal force of the vampire among mortals.

When they heard the “nigger,” they surged at him as one, as if choreographed. Ross had just laughed and then reached forward and snatched them up, just snatched them like they were dolls, like they had handles on them-on their stomachs, even. And they had screamed when he snatched them, crushing their bones with his fingers, collapsing their organs, they had screamed. And then he had laughed again and shaken them and at first they fought, stiffly blurring, but then they just flopped obscenely from side to side and he just-tossed them away. And the sounds when they hit, against the other cars, against the cinderblock wall of Cherry's were almost as bad as their screams.

The crowd formed immediately, some there to “teach this honky motherfucker.” Two, three, six maybe, tried. Ross laughed and casually bashed them from side to side with the backs of his hands. Davette couldn't stand it and she turned away after the first two and Ross noticed and spat “WATCH!” at her in that Voice and for just an instant, everyone-fighting or watching-froze while she meekly obeyed. Then they came out of it and rushed him again and he slapped them as before.

Then a short man circled in darkly, looking serious and unintimidated and wielding a huge knife. Ross looked at her and smiled and then turned back to him and opened his arms wide for the charge and it came and Ross did nothing and the blade rose in a quick glinting thrust from below, splitting the chest to the hilt.

Ross grunted-Davette could tell it pained him-but did nothing else. Except smile. The black man went wide-eyed but hung tough. Instead of running, he just jerked the blade out and slammed it home once again. And again Ross grunted.

And smiled.

Then he leaned over the little man and opened his mouth wide and the fangs were there flashing in the neon and he.

hissssed...

And the man with the knife fainted dead away.

The crowd melted off after that, save for a handful of men standing at the entrance of the club. One of them, Davette suspected, was the owner or at least the manager. She saw the pistol he had hidden behind his thigh, saw him trying to decide if he dared use even that.

Ross saw it, too, and laughed harsh and point-blank at him. The man stared numbly back.

Then Ross laughed again and his look took in all who were left to watch, at the front door, in the parking lot, biding around the edges of the neon.

“So,” he boomed harshly, “you want me to move the car? This car? Very well!”

He strode quickly around to the front of the Cadillac, reached down and grasped the huge chrome bumper. He tensed, strained, then lifted the car to his chest. Then he took four powerful strides forward and the rear wheels, still on the ground, whined and treaded thick black rubber oft the asphalt and, just like that, the Cadillac was unparked. When he dropped the front of the car it bounced and Davette, still on the roof, was kicked sideways into the air. But Ross was there, as she slid to the ground, to catch her so easily.

And that's when she realized the knife was still in his chest.

He sneered down at her. “Well?” he Voiced at her.

She knew what he wanted. She took a breath, forced herself to grasp the handle, and tugged. The knife came immediately into her hand, as if being also pushed from inside. And there was no blood. Just a clear, sticky mucous something.

The knife clattered to the asphalt.

Ross snorted and shoved her inside the car. Then he went around to his door. There were still three people remaining, too stunned to move.

“Well, niggers?” cried Ross happily.

No one moved, spoke, died.

Then they drove away in silence.

And it stayed silent, almost all the way home. Davette was too overcome to speak, too astounded, too shattered by what she had seen. This wasn't just little Ross turned sexy. This was much, much more. Much, much worse. This was black magic Evil Oh God! Save me!