Davette wore a khaki blouse and a khaki skirt and a light blue scarf Annabelle had found for her somewhere that highlighted her blond hair and rich golden skin. Felix was, quite simply, unable to look at her.

He was afraid of what he might say to her.

He was afraid of what he might do to her.

He was mostly afraid of the vampires, though, and it didn't matter if she had just lately come on board and it didn't matter that she was, technically, still a reporter doing a story - all that had long been forgotten. She was part of Team Crow now, sure-as hell. Team Crow was home.

He was afraid of what he might do for her.

So now, nine hours into a most un-Team-like victory party, he sat in the lone chair in the far corner of what passed for a suite in the cheap motel the ladies had found and did his drinking and chain-smoking alone.

Because Jack Crow was wrong.

This deal would not play anymore. Not like this.

Not with me.

Fuck 'em.

Everyone noticed, of course. They could hardly help it.

When their gunman was planted so hard in that one chair. When he smoked so incessantly, drank so ferociously. When he would brood so hard he seemed to strobe...

Sometimes it seemed that chair of his, that whole corner of the room, really, seemed to corridor away into the distance.

Sooner or later, it was going to get ugly. It had been heading for it since the last pile of ashes.

Felix rode with Cat in the motorhome on the way to the rendezvous with the women. He rode in silence, ignoring what little Cat had to say, until Cat finally turned in the driver's seat and looked at him.

Is he relieved? Cat wondered. Stunned? Maybe he's in shock or...

No! he realized suddenly. That's anger! He's furious.

And just then Felix had turned and looked at him and those dead eyes had bored deeply for just a moment. Then the gunman climbed out of his seat and disappeared into the back until they reached the motel.

Even for Annabelle, who was used to the endless waiting, this had been a tough one. Her tears of joy were a little brighter this time, her hugs of welcome a little tighter, her voice a little more strident. Davette, on the other hand, seemed possessed by a surreal glow of happiness at their survival. She took turns with Annabelle hugging everyone and blushing furiously when Cat, with a wicked grin, hauled off and gave her a long, wet, sloppy one.

All save Felix. He stood at the edge of it all, nodding curtly to the women and asking for his room key and mumbling something about wanting to take a shower right away.

He got his key and a tense moment before Father Adam announced that he wanted to have special services immediately - while everyone was still sober enough to pray, ha ha.

And Felix took part in this but the way he knelt and rocked and prayed, so fiercely radiating anger and fear... By the time the priest could quickly break it up they all felt sprayed.

Then there was a knock on the door and Sheriff Hattoy and Kirk and a few other deputies appeared for a little celebrating and Jack brought out glasses and their special schnapps and instructed the newcomers on the toast: "Here's to the great ones..." began Jack.

"There's damn few of us left!" finished the others and they all downed the schnapps and all, but Felix, laughed and asked for more. The gunman went to his room, taking a bottle of his scotch with him.

They partied without him, while the women desperately tried to whip up enough food fast enough to absorb just enough of the alcohol to make Annabelle's hypnotic debriefing possible later on. It was going to be close. Even for Team Crow, the boozing was heavy. The sheriff excused himself early. There had been a good reason why he had been late to their troubles, and that reason still existed. He had more work to do. He exchanged a quick private smile with Kirk before leaving his best deputy behind, as everyone had known would happen.

They partied gamely along some more and no one said anything about Felix not being there. And when the food was ready and he called from behind his locked motel room door that he wasn't hungry, no one said anything about that, either.

But everyone noticed. Everyone, that is, except Jack Crow. Jack refused to notice, thought Cat. Or maybe he's just too high on Felix to care. Jack perched on the edge of the sink while they ate and, master storyteller that he was, relayed every detail of the miracles his gunman had wrought. Carl had been outside during the fighting and the women hadn't been there at all and the three of them listened raptly to every word.

About the woman with the stakes in her, streaking and screeching about in the darkness with Felix's split-second marksmanship on her all the way.

About him, the way he seemed to levitate out of the elevator and stroll so casually toward them, about his catching the fired crossbow bolt, about his looking right at Felix and warning him about the gun.

"And Felix shot him anyway?" Carl asked.

Jack sipped from his wine and nodded. "Three shots. Hit 'im twice that I saw. Then it was just a blur until he grabbed the gun."

"And crushed it?" Annabelle wanted to know. "Really?"

Jack nodded again. "With one hand. That's when Carl here opened the door and it turned toward the light for a second. By the time he had turned back around Felix had drawn his other automatic, left-handed, and he shot him right through the center of his goddamned forehead."

Jack paused, lit a cigarette. "I think he would have killed at least a couple of us if it weren't for that. Hell, he could do that on his way past us out of the light. But not after that shot.

"Carl, our shooter is everything we could ever have wanted."

And everything Davette had wanted him to be. She sat there, in the silence that followed, with her eyes welling happy, happy tears. She could not explain her joy, her sense of hope, any more than she could explain, or even fathom, this viselike hold he had on her.

But somehow, because he was so... so wonderful at this, it made it all seem okay. Even the jagged vibrations of his presence.

"Yep," said Jack Crow, staring deep into his wineglass, "everything we could ever have wanted."

Then he looked at the smiling Davette and grinned.

"Then how come," popped Cat from amidst the others' concerned looks, "we're not all happy?"

Jack shook his head. "Aw, Cherry, give it a rest. Felix is just..."

"Where is he, Jack?" demanded Annabelle. "Why is he in his room? Even when he's here, he just... He looked at me like he hated me! Hated us all! He's not eating. He's there in his room drinking alone. He..."

"Relax, woman!" Jack snapped. He stood up and towered over them. "Let me tell you kids a thing or two. Felix is..."

Then the door came open and Felix was there, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, scotch bottle in hand. He stepped inside and stopped and looked at them, all of them, for a heavy silent moment, then turned curtly away toward the chair in the corner of the suite and planted himself there and drank some more.

Under Jack's silent directions, they tried to party anyway. Jack whispered to Annabelle to drop the debriefing for tonight, concentrate on the celebration and the booze.

"Party, babe! You know!" he muttered grinning in her ear.

And they gave it a try, starting with the music. ZZ Top, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Roy Orbison, everyone in their tape library. It helped. They danced and laughed and giggled and drank too much and it went on for hours and hours and early on somebody in the next room complained, a trucker type in a bad sleepy mood, so Jack had the women haul his ass in through the doorway and drink a little drinkie and "Don't worry about being dressed, stranger," he insisted, looking down at his bare chest and feet. "We'll find you a shirt and all the rest of us will take our shoes off! Race!"

And they all laughed and fell to the floor and Annabelle was the first to get her shoes off - in like one half a second. And Cat was the last - it took him three minutes of concentrated effort before he gave up and put his drink down and tried with both hands.

Then it only took him another minute and a half.

The trucker loved it and wanted to know if he could call his buddies who were just down the hail and Jack said, "Hell, yes! Let's go git 'em!"

And they did go "git" 'em, all five of them. Plus Doris, the blond at the front desk, and her boyfriend Eddy Duane who, Cat felt sure, should have by God learned to play the guitar backward by now. They also gathered in a couple named Henderson, who had come into town for a funeral earlier in the day and said they could use a wake. About an hour later a skinny bald man in his seventies, who was easily six-foot-six, knocked on the door and asked to join the party.

He produced a business card: "Mr. Kite, Layman Activist, The Church of the Sub-Genius."

"It's the world's first industrial Church," he explained to Father Adam.

"Industrial?" asked the priest.

"Right. We pay taxes and everything," replied Mr. Kite.

"I'm not sure I understand. What is it you believe in?"

"Everything," said Mr. Kite with a smile. "But mostly the free-market economy."

So they all had another drink on that, for the benefit of Mr. Kite.

Felix sat stone still and staring throughout. He didn't speak, didn't get up, didn't acknowledge anyone. There was something so threatening about his somber posture that none of the strangers even tried to approach him. And inquires were put off by Team members.

Only Davette seemed unable to stay away. She got close enough to him to change his ashtray twice. And Annabelle thought she was going to speak to him a few times, almost on impulse. But she didn't and neither did anyone else.

But Jack seemed happy about it all. Weirdly content in fact. Occasionally the Team would spot him standing off to one side, catching his party breath and grinning at Felix's back.

Does he know something we don't know? wondered Cat. Or is he just blind?

By three thirty the party was running out of steam for those with nothing to celebrate. The Hendersons, who had been trying to teach two of the truckers to dance and sing, had finally given up. Their only decent pupil had been a barrel-chested old man with "Pop" on his uniform who had actually learned a few steps of soft shoe in his heavy boots before collapsing from alcohol and years. Once that last person was off his feet, the sleepies began to creep in on all non-Team members. They could have reinvigorated for more fun - Team Crow had its ways. But no one wanted them to stay.

Felix had started talking to himself.

Angrily, forcefully, furiously... but in total silence. His lips moved, his face warped in rage, the words spitting bitterly out, but not one sound came with them.

Jack gave Annabelle a look. She used her deft touch and less than five minutes later the revelers had been poured out and the door locked behind them. Then they stood, Cat and Carl, Annabelle and Davette, Adam and Kirk, and Jack Crow, and watched. It was eerie. The music still played softly. The cheap overhead lights of the motel room reached Felix's corner only in shadows that played oddly on his working silent face.

Annabelle stood next to Jack. She sounded more concerned than frightened. "Oh, Jack! How much has he had to drink?"

Jack smiled softly down at her. "He's not drunk."

"Not drunk? I find that hard to believe."

Jack shrugged. "Oh, he is drunk. But not drunk drunk. This isn't booze."

"What is it?"

Jack paused a moment, thinking.

He seems so confident, Annabelle thought, looking up at him.

"What is it?" she repeated.

"Claustrophobia."

"What?" Cat whispered suspiciously.

Jack laughed quietly, looked at them all. "C'mon, people. Let's all have a seat."

And except for Davette, they did. She stayed fussing idly in the kitchen while the rest of them found a seat on the floor or sprawled on the couches. Jack took the only other easy chair and drew it up to face Felix's, about six feet directly in front of him.

Felix saw him, knew he was there. His lips went still. But he didn't look directly at him or anyone else.

"Davette," Jack called out softly, "turn that off."

She eyed him nervously, then smiled and stepped over and turned off the music. Very quiet, all of a sudden.

Then Jack leaned forward in his chair, propping his elbows on his knees and smiling pleasantly into his drink.

"Okay..." he said.

It took a couple of beats. Then the gunman's eyes riveted onto Jack's. Still staring, Felix took a sip from his bottle, lit a cigarette, leaned back in his chair, and spoke. Drunk as he was, his words were clear. Very cold, like very sharp ice.

But clear.

"You're out of this, Crow. It's blown. They know who you are. They know what you do. They know your name."

"So?"

"So. Change your name, change what you do. Quit. Or every job from now on will be another trap."

"What about the Team?"

"Same as before. But as the hunters again. Not the hunted."

Jack grinned and leaned back in his chair. "You think I can do that now?"

Felix's smile was scary. "One of us can. Now."

"So that's it. One of us."

"That's it."

Jack glanced at the others. "If they don't follow you... Form your own Team?"

Felix looked surprised. He frowned. "I hadn't thought about that."

Jack's voice was hard. "I didn't think you had."

"What the hell is..." began Carl angrily.

"Quiet!" snapped Crow without looking at him. Then he relaxed, eyed Felix for a moment.

"Did it ever occur to you that we've finally got them on the run?"

Felix sneered. "Ever occur to you that you're not cutting it anymore?"

Jack held up a hand before any of the others could protest. He lit a cigarette, leaned forward in his chair once more.

"Yes," he said simply. "Yes it has. I can admit that. Can you admit running out on the job you were born to do?"

"I'm not running out on..."

"Like hell you aren't!" snapped Jack. He stood up angrily, began to pace back and forth in front of Felix's chair.

"This is the game, Felix. This is it. I can't quit because I'm the symbol. They know my name. You can't because you're the best there is and that's the part you don't like!"

"Bullshit, Crow!"

"Is it? Is it? Hadn't thought about your own team, had you? Hell, no. If you had thought, which you by God didn't want to do, you'd have realized they wouldn't leave me and you would have to do it on your own. But you don't want to do that. You don't want to do it at all!"

Felix was out of his chair in a flash.

"You calling me a coward?"

And Davette couldn't take it anymore. Suddenly she was there, standing beside the two heaving chests, her voice that of a small child, a small doll.

"Don't..." she whispered, the tears already starting to pour, "... don't... please, don't."

"I don't know what I'm calling you, Felix!" yelled Crow. "Because I don't know what the fuck you are!"

Felix's voice was stone. "Then try something."

And they all thought the fight would start then and it should have, really. But a piece of Jack was also shouting at him. Leadership, goddammit!

And so he took a breath and backed off a bit and tried again.

"Felix, I can't quit just because they know my name. Is the next guy gonna do the same? That's all it takes. They know if they can find out who we are they can run us off? We can't. We're it. This is the game!

"Look. I'm sorry if this comes at a bad time in your life, Felix. But it always does, dammit!" And then Crow felt the anger spurt out and he lost it again.

"You're just gonna have to see if you're man enough to face it!"

And Felix barked, "Fuck off!" He turned to the others. "Fuck you all..."

And Davette's baby voice sighed, "No... no no...

And for a second they stopped and looked at her. But then Felix shook it off. He reached down and picked up his cigarettes and stuffed them in his pocket and stalked toward the door.

"Die, then!" he shouted at the room. "Die if you want to! Die for his ego or senility or whatever..."

Davette was chasing him, her arms held out. "Please please..."

"Forget it!" he stormed at her. "All of you, forget it!"

"You can't..." she pleaded and the sobs shook her tiny form.

But he could. He could do what everyone had known for hours he was going to do.

"I quit," said Felix.

And Davette's voice came out strong and full and she cried out, "You can't! You don't know what they can do to people! You don't know what it's like... You..."

And Felix and Jack Crow looked at her together and together they said: "Whaat..."

Davette looked at the two of them, back and forth quickly. She hung her head. Then she reached down to the hem of her khaki skirt and took it in her fist and raised it up, exposing the perfect silken lines of her golden legs and the sharp heartache contrast of yellow panties... and there, there high on her left inner thigh... Like the bite of a monstrous spider.

It could be no other kind of wound.

"Help me," she whispered.

"Help me..."



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 even - "There you are, baby!" sounded a familiar voice. She sighed before turning around. She really wasn't up to this. But she was trapped. She turned around and smiled at her last high school boyfriend, football captain, senior class president, Taker of Her Virginity, Dale Boijock.

And also the most boring human being alive.

"How are you, Dale?" she said without enthusiasm. "I'm so glad you could come."

Dale stepped forward and flashed his perfect smile and said, in a voice rich with meaning, "I wouldn't have missed it."

And she thought she would die or run screaming from him or worse but she hung in there, talking small talk. She managed to get them walking toward the bar for some wine so she could keep running into other people and not be left alone to talk to Dale one-on-one.

Dale fought it, trying to get her off to one side to talk all alone. But he was getting quite a bit of attention, too, and enjoying it. Tall blond, beautiful blue eyes, a natural leader, a wonderful athlete - a Polish-American god was Dale Boijock. He had been the Catch of All Catches in high school but he was so boring and how could she ever have slept with him?

Curiosity, of course. She did not live in Aunt Vicky's era and almost all of her friends had "done it," many more than once, and here she was with the most eligible boyfriend around and she was just dying to know and it had been her suggestion.

He had been shocked. But he had come around.

At the motel he really was sweet and tender, treating her like a porcelain doll, and she had to face it, some parts of it were pretty interesting.

But somehow Dale had managed to make even those dull. And she knew, as he drove home, that she simply could not bear to be with him ever, ever again but she couldn't think of a graceful way to...

And then she had turned in the car seat and told him he was the best lover she had ever had.

He had laughed at that at first, of course. Then he had looked at her and saw she was serious and that tanned blond face had frowned and he had pulled the car over and the questioning had begun.

Looking back, she decided she had handled it just about perfectly.

Did he know him?

Who?

The other guy.

Well, she knew Dale knew some of them.

Some of them? There was more than one?

Well, yes.

Who?

Dale, I don't really think I could - How many, then?

How many? What difference could that possibly - She had taken a positively wicked joy in bashing his pride. After she had strung it out a good half hour, she allowed him to force her to tell him the "truth," that there had been somewhere between fifteen and an even dozen. She couldn't remember exactly.

Then he had leaned across her and opened the passenger door and ordered her to get out.

Trying desperately to keep a straight face, she had climbed meekly out of his car, closed the door behind her, and stood there, head down, her hands together in front of her, until the car screeched off.

On the way back home she had giggled quite a lot.

It really was a perfect solution. His pride wouldn't let him tell others about her and even if he did no one would believe it of Princess Davette anyway. And best of all, she would never be bothered by Dale Boijock again. And she hadn't been, for four long-years.

Until tonight. And this was looking grim. After four years of the Ivy League's worldly ways, she knew his attitudes had changed. She could tell by that look on his face. It could only mean one thing, his insistence at getting her alone to talk: He was going to, God help him, forgive her.

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 he 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, nobody 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!

It was great.

And they had lunch at the same place they always did shopping bags piled up high all around the table, and Luigi waited on them like he always did, making those awful snide little remarks about rich girls and "Come the Revolution" and they were just as snitty back and all involved loved it like they always had.

Kitty loved it as much as she did, maybe more. She seemed to relish the air and the sun, and Davette thought she could use more of each - she looked just a trifle pale - but that didn't matter right now because the day was so perfect and then tonight, like every other vacation, the three of them would sit in the formal dining room, the girls wearing their new loot, and talk and talk with Aunt Vicky. And then Kitty, in some chance remark, mentioned casually that Ross would be joining them for dinner that night.

And the planet froze. And slowed down. And wanted to... grind... to... a... stop.

Because it had always just been the three of them on those nights, sitting and eating, and Davette had counted on that safe picture of at least one night, tonight, without having to see him again or hear that Voice.

Davette started to say something about maybe Aunt Vicky not wanting to share their traditional post-shopping dinner with an extra person and Kitty beat her to it, telling her how Ross and Aunt Vicky had become such fast friends, talking long into the night about philosophy and what-all, sometimes until almost dawn because Ross simply hated the daytime. He said it was only for primitive man, who had good reason to fear the dark.

And the planet slowed further and the faces in the mall seemed more distant and it seemed suddenly terribly important to Davette that she not make a big deal about this, not object at all.

Not let anyone know how she feared.

So she kept walking and she kept shopping and she managed a hollow echo to Kitty's laugh that she felt sure she had gotten away with and then, abruptly, when they passed a restaurant they had always passed by before, Davette suggested they drop in and have a cocktail.

"Because we are twenty-one now, aren't we?" was all she would reply to Kitty's startled look.

She ordered a bloody mary and when Kitty ordered just mineral water Davette kidded her until Kitty said, "Ross says he doesn't like women who drink."

And Davette thought: good.

And ordered another.

And then another.

She wasn't exactly drunk when they finally got home. But she was certainly feeling it, feeling pretty good, in fact, because the fear seemed more distant somehow and the alcohol seemed a kind of talisman, maybe, to ward off evil spirits.

And she giggled to herself thinking that. Kitty, sitting beside her in the bathroom toweling her hair, gave her an odd look.

"Are you drunk?" she asked her.

And Davette shook her head firmly and that made her dizzy and that was so funny she spat the bobby pins out of her mouth laughing and Kitty looked at her funny again but then she started laughing, too, and all was fine for a long time.

And then Kitty began talking about Ross. About how intelligent he was. How witty. How exciting. How sexy. And Davette stared, shocked, at her because they had never discussed such things before.

But Kitty, standing up to go into her own room, just gave her a sly, wicked smile and said, "You should find out for yourself."

And then she was gone and Davette sat there for several minutes before she could manage to move.

So, to dinner.

In point of fact, she never could remember the dinner much. It all seemed to go by so fast! She remembered the table being so beautiful and Aunt Vicky so lovely, but frowning that special frown because Davette was drinking so much but she had to, she had to do something...

Because he was there, looming at her from his dark eyes and perfect skin and immaculate tuxedo and knowing, knowing, smile. Not that he was intrusive or mean or anything; he wasn't. He was charming and witty and friendly and funny and he didn't seem to mind her getting soused. If anything, he encouraged her, refilling her wineglass again and again.

And with that thick cushion around her eyes the whole thing seemed less and less dangerous after a while.

And awhile after that, danger seemed kind of intriguing.

And just after that, she passed out.

She wasn't exactly unconscious. Not exactly. Her eyes were more or less open and she was able to recognize things. She just wasn't able to pick them up and hold them without dropping them.

They took her to bed with her weaving and slurring to Aunt Vicky that she was "so sorry! I'm just so sorry! I've spoiled everything!" And dear Aunt Vicky giving her that long cold look before finally, blessedly, relaxing and smiling and patting her on the cheek and saying that it was really all right, that anyone's entitled to a mistake in her own home and that just made Davette bawl some more because it was so sweet.

Ross excused himself while Kitty helped her struggle out of her clothes and into a nightgown and it felt great to just lie back and relax and she guessed the others went down to finish dinner because it was much later, after two A.M., when they came back and she woke up from that deep, deep sleep to see them sitting on the edge of the bed.

Why, she wondered, did I wake up?

But before she could think about that Ross leaned over her and asked, "Are you all right? Would you like to get sick?"

She had felt all right up until then. She hadn't felt nauseated, had she? Had she? But looking into his eyes she suddenly felt that alcohol vault and swirl within her and she lurched up tripping out of bed toward the bathroom and they both reached to help her.

But she didn't want their help, she thought. This was just too embarrassing. But ten seconds later she didn't care who saw her.

Ugggghhh!

She seemed to throw up for hours! She just couldn't stop, her bare knees hard on the tile on either side of the toilet, that awful wrenching in her tummy, those dreadful noises she kept making.

Once, hunched over with sweet Kitty murmuring gently and patting the back of her neck with that cool damp washcloth, she remembered thinking she was glad of at least one thing: she did not feel sexy.

In fact, she doubted she would ever feel sexy again.

But it happened.

She came to, more or less, curled up on the bathmat in front of the toilet seat, the nausea gone. She was dimly aware of being helped to her feet by someone gentle and very strong and she was almost to her bed before her beating heart allowed her to admit who it was. The top sheet and blanket had been rolled neatly to the foot of the bed and he lifted her up and carried her the last few steps, his hands cool and strong beneath her. She turned her head and swelled into his eyes as he put her down atop the broad empty bed.

He did not lay her down but, rather, sat her up against the headboard. And then he sat there beside her, boring his eyes and dreams of passion unknown to dull drab lives and fantasies of glorious ecstasy streamed into her when he smiled.

Her chest heaved. She panted and gasped and his face began to burn.

"Oops, I'm afraid you can't wear that anymore," he said.

He meant her nightgown, of course, and she did look down and she saw no stain...

But he wouldn't lie, would he?

"Better take it off," he said next.

And - God help me! - she did. She did, reaching up to the straps and pulling them slowly down off her shoulders and she knew just what she was doing.

And she did it anyway, slipped the nightgown down, exposed her breasts to the open air and to him and then...

Then his face was close to hers and tiny kisses all around her mouth as she slid backward, chest heaving, and then his hands were soft and cool and so strong on her shoulders and around her throat and the kisses slowly - too slowly - worked their way past her chin to her throbbing throat and across the top of her chest and to the breast the little creature had attacked the night before.

When he bit her the pleasure poured throughout her and arms shot out into the air and her fingers spread trembling and she moaned and cried and undulated wantonly beneath...

There! There at the foot of the bed, perched like a grinning cat, was Kitty! She couldn't believe it! Kitty! And she wanted, for just an instant, to throw him off and run away. But she knew she couldn't do that. She knew she couldn't stop him. She knew she didn't want him stopped. Ever.

And Kitty's grin went wider and she leaned forward and her smile was bright in the moonlight as she said, "See? Didn't I tell you?"

And it was too strange, too bizarre. But she couldn't care now. She shrieked her whisper and wrapped her bare arms around the black curly head and pressed it deeper into her soul.

She slept all through the daylight hours. She dreamed deep and hard, long, exhausting dreams of intricate twisting erotica. When she awoke the tall french doors to her terrace were open, spilling in moonlight and soft breezes through her ghostly curtains, and they were there, sitting on the edge of her bed and smiling down at her.

For a brief moment she felt an icy jolt of... of what? Fear? And disgust?

But then it was gone, for they were so beautiful, Kitty sitting naked with her thighs tucked under her and that lustrous brown hair tumbling about her shoulders and he with that billowy black silk shirt open at the chest. So beautiful. And the smiles were so warm and genuine and happy.

"Swim," said Kitty with a mischievous tilt to her face. "Come on."

Davette shook her head that she didn't understand and Kitty grinned some more and said that Aunt Vicky was asleep and the servants were all out of the way and the pool was beautiful in the moonlight and it really was a warm night for the spring and let's go!

"I'll meet you down there," said Ross, rising to his feet.

But before he left he stepped around to Davette's bedside and leaned down and caressed her cheek with his hand, boring gently now with his eyes. Then he bent and kissed her softly on the cheek. And then he was gone and Davette was once more full of tingles and catching her breath.

And when she remembered Kitty was still there and looked at her she blushed. But Kitty just laughed and Davette laughed, too, her cheeks red with embarrassment but also humor because Kitty was in the same boat and the laughter became schoolgirl giggles.

As she scrambled out of bed she felt a sharp pang from her left breast. She gasped and looked down and when she saw the swollen wound she gasped again.

"It won't last long," Kitty said, standing beside her.

Kitty was right. Davette worked the muscles of her chest and gently massaged the area and the pain seemed to stretch itself out. It still felt tender. But the sharp ache was gone.

It was then that she realized she was naked, that Kitty was also naked standing beside her. The two of them: rich girls, nice girls, ladies, standing naked in the moonlight of an open door about to walk downstairs and swim, skinny-dip, with a man who was down there waiting for them now and who was quite sure they would come.

It seemed to incredible that she should be doing this, that they both should be. But it seemed also so wickedly sexy, so decadent and wanton, and with her best friend it seemed a safe, dark secret and the two smiled and held hands and walked naked out onto the terrace.

She had been out on this terrace barefoot before and the possibility that anyone could climb over the walls and through the gardens and see her was remote. But it was still there. The wind caressed her bare thighs, rolling gently all around her as they descended the broad stone steps to the pool and Davette had never in her life felt so unclothed. So... available.

Ross reclined on one of the sun loungers like a prince awaiting the court entertainment. He was turned over on one side, a knee propped up with a forearm propped on that. He had a half-smile on his face and the light seemed trapped between the moon and his eyes and the surface of the water and Davette thought: That's the color of his skin! Pale moonlight!

But she didn't think much. Instead, she blushed. For there was no way to avoid the pointed directness of his gaze or the fact that she continued to approach him. And she wondered once more which was more exciting - that she was behaving this way or that she knew what she was doing.

In any case, they continued to approach, still holding hands, until they came to a stop before him. He smiled at them. They smiled back at him. Then they looked at each other and giggled and turned and dove into the water and it was that, that flash of cold and clarity she felt in her icy spring swimming pool, that would come to haunt her later on.

It sobered her up. Immediately. What had been a gentle night of wicked secrets turned instantly into a cold, clammy, degrading sense of... cheapness. Of loss. What am I doing here? Was I drunk or drugged or what?

When she came to the surface she gasped in shame and turned and saw Kitty and she could tell from her shadowed gaze that she was feeling the same thing. The gritty stone on the side of the bank only added to the sense of shoddiness. She pushed her hair back away from her eyes and face, not looking at Ross, not even looking at Kitty.

I must look at him. I have to. She did.

And she cringed.

He looks like a pimp, she thought. Lounging there in those incredibly tacky tight - what are they? toreador? - pants, he looked not at all like what he had seemed. He looked more like...

How odd! He looks like an imitation of all of that!

How odd. But how degrading. She grasped the side of the pool and vaulted out of the water, shedding drops in all directions, and skipped toward the poolhouse toward warmth and composure. She wanted to try to cover herself with her hands and she started to. But then that seemed silly after all that had happened, and maybe, even rude, so her hands stopped halfway and then she saw that Ross was in front of her, between her and the poolhouse and holding up a towel.

How, she wondered, did he get all the way around the pool in front of her so fast?

He was there, though, which was the point. She didn't want to see him or talk to him or - God no! - have him touch her. But she couldn't really avoid the towel because that really would be rude. She stopped just short of him, arms clasped in front of her chest for warmth, and turned her back to allow him to drape the towel about her shoulders and... and as he draped the towel the side of his hand touched her shoulder and there was that tingle once more and the chill flashed on her skin...

And the towel seemed to... coil... about her.

Like a knowing glove.

"Davette!" he whispered.

There was no alternative but to turn and face him and when she did she faced his glowing eyes and they held her and swelled down within her and the heat, the trembling frenzy, the... wicked ache... returned.

And soon it seemed they were back inside - Kitty with them, really with them - and they were laughing and hugging as they walked on either side of him, both women naked once more.

Into the kitchen, because they were starving. For steak. A big, thick super-rare steak, that was the craving. They sat Ross at the little counter that ran the length of the great house's great kitchen while the two of them, still naked, prepared the meal.

Still naked. Bright kitchen lights and cold floor and no reason for it at all except to be... nasty and wanton and...

And as she talked to the Team she didn't describe the way the two of them, she and Kitty, danced around in front of him making that meal. How could she tell them about it... how could she ever have behaved that way? Stretching up high to reach this, reaching way across him to get that. Bending over farther than she needed to for something else... She crimsoned at just the memory of it, of how she and Kitty, carnal tension sputtering in the air, had competed to see who could act like the cheaper tramp.

No. She couldn't tell about that.

But she could tell them about the food.

"Ross never eats," Kitty said chidingly when he said he didn't want a steak.

Ross's face had gone hard and he had used that Voice when he replied that he had his own diet and the smile he gave as he spoke softened it not at all. Davette had almost jumped at the tone, had felt a brief shiver of fear.

But learned nothing. She merely resolved not to question him about so sensitive a topic again.

The erotic atmosphere had been restored to its original tightness by the time the meal was prepared. Davette sat down but knew she was far too excited to eat.

"But you must be hungry," whispered Ross, gazing deep through her eyes. "You haven't eaten in twenty-four hours. And look at that thick juicy steak. Just what you need."

And even as he spoke she felt her hunger rush back so strongly that nothing in the world seemed more tempting than the smell of that food. She fell upon the steak like a starving beast.

"All better?" he asked pleasantly when she had finished.

Davette looked up, surprised. She had forgotten he was there, forgotten anyone was there, forgotten everything but eating. She looked down and saw her plate was totally clean.

How weird, she had thought at the time. Like I was in some sort of a spell or something.

Of course she was in a spell. His spell. A spell he could twist and curl as it suited him. With a knowing smile, he gazed their passions back into them.

Seconds later the three of them ascended the steps to her room and there, in the utter darkness he insisted upon, Davette sought within her some sense of shame as she lay listening to the couple embrace beside her on her cool sheets. But she could find no sense of shame or jealousy or anything other than pounding, aching need for her turn to come soon.

Soon, it did, and with it a bizarre hope that her cries would be as loud and thrilling as Kitty's.

When Davette paused a moment and Felix leaned forward to hand her the glass of water, she felt the heavy silence of the motel room. She realized she had looked at nothing besides the floor and Felix's face for the past, two hours and she made herself look up and face their troubled expressions. They gazed uneasily back and she knew it was out of concern for her - she could read that. But she knew it was from embarrassment also. For the sexual charge was as heavy as the silence.

It's not your fault! she wanted to shout.

But she knew they wouldn't believe her. Not yet. They wouldn't understand that it was not them, it was a piece of them. A piece the magic had tainted her with and a piece she now passed on.

They wouldn't understand.

Still, she should try. And she did. She tried to tell them about the feeling of the bite, about the warping volcanic pleasure rolling through you, vibrating and caressing and powering you deep into your memory and far into your fantasies.

"Didn't it hurt?"

She stopped, looked around. It was Carl Joplin. His face softened and he smiled at her.

"I'm sorry, sugar. But we are talking about someone biting you."

"And sucking your blood out," added Cat.

Carl nodded, but his tone remained gentle. "And sucking your blood. It must - "

"But you don't know that!" insisted Davette. "You aren't aware. You don't know you're losing blood. There's so much else going on, you.

"You mean he's also..." whispered Annabelle before catching herself and blushing.

Davette's voice was harsh and bitter. "No. No sex. Vampires can't have sex. Oh, the women can... pretend. And they do. But it isn't real. It isn't life. They're dead."

It was quiet for a while while they digested this.

And Felix thought, looking at her: There's still something left to you, isn't there, beauty?

But he didn't smile. She wouldn't know it was admiration.

Davette had another sip of water and tried to explain some more:

"There are really three stages to it. The first is... well, it just never occurs to you. Vampires? That's for movies, you know?"

They nodded. Yes, they knew.

She had another sip. "It's just sort of... kinky, I guess. And everyone has a part of them that likes and wants that. Vampires swell that desire inside of you and... Well, you're enjoying it and it seems harmless.

"That's the first stage.

"In the second part you're so much of an addict for it, you don't want to examine what's going on. It holds you and controls you. You don't really ever think about anything else - you don't want to look at it. Because you... You don't want to think about it."

"And the third stage?" asked Felix. "You know then?"

Davette nodded wearily. "You know. The pretense is past. He lets you know. He lets you see it. And it's awful to see, the things they do to the living, the terrible smiles they get when they twist us. And..."

She drifted off, looking at something behind her eyes.

"'And'..." Felix gently nudged.

She looked at him and her smile was grim and tight. "Maybe the worst part is not the knowing, the... admitting. The worst part is that you realize you knew, you always knew, deep down inside you, from the first. It's not the wickedness, the sex part. That's in everyone and that can be fine. It's deeper.

"It's basic.

"It's Evil.

"And you always feel it, some part of you does, when it grazes you.

"Always."

She was quiet for several seconds. Then she sighed, took a sip.

"The good news is that the last stage is rare."

Jack Crow spoke for the first time. "Why is it rare?"

"Because most people are dead by then," replied Davette, looking at him.

And Jack nodded back, as if he had been expecting the answer.

"So," began Felix once more, "were you an addict now?"

She looked at him. "Pretty much. But within the next week of that... The next ten days...

A week, she would think later. A week, ten days...

That's all it took for her former life to disappear.

Within a week she had learned what it was like to be teased. Within ten days she understood the end of the leash. Her life had shrunk to a single nighttime dot. She never went anywhere alone. She never saw the sunshine. She never talked with anyone besides Ross, Kitty, Aunt Victoria, and the servants. She did write one letter. To her college. Less than a month before graduation and she wrote them to say she wouldn't be coming back.

No life.

He teased her by being especially charming one night, giving her more than her share of attention. He was witty, he was tender, he burned her with that look. Then, abruptly, he left.

She lay awake until dawn. Steaming.

One night he didn't show at all. The two women sat around talking, wearing their most knock-out attire - for Ross preferred them to be either overdressed or naked - all night long waiting for him to show up.

But he never did.

It wasn't as if he had actually promised to be there that night. But he had been there every other night. Even if just to tease them. By the end of the night the two friends no longer spoke. They merely sat in front of the great fireplace in silence. Each of them knew then, Davette thought later. Each of them knew it was madness and darkness to continue. And if he hadn't shown up, if only for just a few nights, they would have been free. Or at least aware enough to instinctively flee.

He was back the next night, apologetic and charming and, later, as awesomely rapturous as ever.

They were his.

His property.

His toys.

And what good are toys if not to play with?

"You can make any man desire you," Ross said, smiling, from the center booth at Del Frisco's.

And they were all attention because it had been that kind of a night. For the very first time, he had taken them out!

Long black limousine. Long-stemmed roses. A gorgeous, tuxedo-clad Ross escorting them through the front door of the famous restaurant. Del, himself, there to greet them and lead them into that classic dining room with its carved deep mahogany and deeper rugs and immaculate diamond-bright crystal and the people! The way they stared at the three. Stared and (the ladies just knew it) envied. Davette was wearing her best and she had never felt so beautiful or attractive or, well, glamorous... in her whole life. Kitty was pretty show-stopping herself, though a trifle pale, and the service they received managed to be even better than Del Frisco's usual standard. The waiters positively swarmed around them.

"You can make any man desire you," Ross repeated. "Any man. Not just desire you. Crave you!" As he said the last he had leaned forward across the candlelight and beamed energy at them and they had shivered.

Because it was so exciting! To be out again and in the glitter. To feel so desirable - and Ross had seen to it they felt that way before they ever left Davette's house. They felt like movie stars, like... sirens!

"Let me tell you how," said Ross next. "First, you have to want him. Or, at least, imagine you do."

And so it began.

They were in his world now. And everything he wanted to be thrilling and acceptable was so. Every suggestion seemed fun or at least... harmless. A harmless secret between the three that somehow didn't really... count. ("ibis will not go on your permanent record.") It was easy to believe it didn't count. It was all so unreal anyway.

"Imagine," Ross purred, "that those two men in that booth over my left shoulder were so dynamic in bed that you could not resist them."

And so the women glanced over his shoulder at the two men in the booth. They were much older, in their fifties. Davette thought immediately of her friends' fathers, and though the older men's appearance was pleasant enough, the whole idea, the concept of it all, seemed incestuous. One of them was tall, even seated, with white hair at his temples and a lovely dark suit that seemed to glow in the candlelight. He was thin and erect and rather aloof. The second man was shorter, not much taller than she, Davette guessed. He was beginning to lose hair on top and gain weight in his middle but he had a warm ready smile and a friendly look. He wore a sportcoat instead of a suit but it was of the same high quality as his companion's attire.

Not for me, she thought.

But then Ross began to purr once more, purr with that Voice, and every single thought would seem to resonate their marrow.

"No, they're not as young as you would like. They are not what you would choose. Is that not what makes it so thrilling? Is it not decadent? These old men, old enough to be your fathers, can take you in their hands and make you sing. You cannot resist it. After a while you will not want to. And you know that. You know that. You will tremble and shake in their gaze. You will find yourselves doing things you cannot believe you are doing. But you will still do them. You will obey their every command. And, worse, you will enjoy it. You will see yourselves doing these wicked things - as if from afar - and you will be appalled and embarrassed... but also the carnal joys will jolt through you because you really are doing them! You! Ladies! Proper young ladies rolling wanton in their arms... My goodness, you think, if those people I grew up with should see me doing this! They wouldn't believe their eyes! The shame! The shame!

"And yet... Yes! Let them see me! I want them to see me, wallowing whore and free at last!"

Davette stopped speaking and her head went down and the motel room became quiet. Then, head still down, she tried to explain.

She tried to explain that vampires tell the truth. And she knew she had said all this before and all but she... just... wanted... everyone... to... understand. It wasn't the Truth. It was only a piece of it - a small piece, really, but... But people are like a spectrum, you know? They have all the colors and some have more of one shade than others but everybody has some of any shade and Ross, the vampire, could make that shade seem brighter and stronger than any of the others and... And, yes, it was there! He did have something to work with. But that didn't mean I'm really... Or anybody is really...

And she drifted off to silent tears until she felt a finger under her chin, gently raising her head up. She lifted her head and Felix was there, smiling at her.

"We know," he said softly. Tenderly. "We know. We understand."

And she knew he meant it. His eyes were so pleasant and sweet. She followed the gesture of his head, next, to the faces of the others in the room, to the rest of the Team, and the glow was still there. Smiling, understanding faces. Misty faces, small tears hidden in the corners of understanding eyes.

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!"

"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, he 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!

And she cowered over against her door waiting to die.

Only...

Only she knew that he wasn't going to kill her. Not here, anyway. Not right now. And...

And his stomach was hurting him, she thought. He rubbed it, hard, as he drove, constantly kneading it with his free hand. And the thought of this, the dream of his vulnerability, was like the tiniest slice of hope.

Hope for what, she didn't know. She only knew that he could be hurt and she couldn't take her eyes off his kneading and that's when he spotted her doing that and snorted with disdainful fury and jerked the Cadillac to a skidding stop on the side of the freeway, grabbing her with his right hand and dragging her across the seat to him and with his left hand ripping his shirt open and - And the wound was closed.

"It itches, you stupid little mite!" he barked shaking her head with a handful of her hair. "It doesn't hurt! It itches!"

And then, when she just stared blankly at him, he reached up and grabbed the rearview mirror and tore it lose from the front windshield. He slammed her cheek up next to his and held the mirror in front of her eyes and...

And he wasn't there.

She could feel him, his hand in her hair against her skull, his cheek pressing into hers - she could see that, she could see the impression his cheek was making against hers in the mirror.

But he wasn't there!

And then... And then he sort of was. Sort of. Outlines, flashes, traces of his features when he moved. He wasn't completely invisible. But... But.

And then he dropped the mirror and turned and bored his eyes into hers and opened wide his mouth and the fangs were growing out.

"Vampire, mite!" he hissed that awful hiss. "VAMPIRE!"

And his mouth went wider and the fangs grew longer toward her and his features went red and demonic and unholy and she screamed a scream of hopeless irrefutable terror and all was black and dark.

The next night she signed everything over to him. The stocks, the bonds, the CDs, the cash, the houses... everything. Full power of attorney.

Ross, the vampire, owned her.

After that, things started happening pretty fast.

First, Ross decided to redecorate.

Soft things. Sickly-sweet, tender-to-the-touch things. Tasteless things. Expensive things. Gone were the great broad antique leather sofas from the library. He replaced them with silk-pillowed lounges. And he replaced the tapestries, some centuries old, with what looked to Davette like red satin bedsheets.

Ross actually did take the time to sit down and show her his new "motif." It looked like a cross between a sultan's harem and a Colorado Gold Rush Whorehouse. "No-Class" Ross's true colors were, quite literally, coming through.

He fired all the servants Aunt Vicky had retained for years. He replaced them with a handful of gray-faced, dull-witted, self-loathing slobs. It always amazed Davette how they simply could not seem to tidy up. No matter how rich and expensive their uniforms, no matter how much care and attention was paid to their appearances - their hair was always razor-cut, their faces always shaved, fingernails always clean - they still looked like unmade beds. Their jackets, however well pressed and tailored, never quite seemed to fit. And their starched white shirts never managed to stay tucked in for over a minute or two.

Davette had no idea where Ross had found these people who knew he was a vampire and still wanted to work for him. And she didn't want to know. Still, Ross managed to replace the entire staff in one single evening. He also managed to get a terrific amount of the redecoration done that first night - all the library, most of the main living room. An army of preened and primped men of all ages showed up to handle the work, all blatantly homosexual and each clearly enraptured by Ross's slightest notice of them.

In the midst of this, still in her bathrobe, Davette sat drinking vodka on the rocks and watching these dreadful people reshape her universe. It was all so distant somehow, as if this really weren't her house and Aunt Vicky weren't really dead and one morning she'd wake up...

No. Best not to get too detailed and lose the fantasy.

So she just sat and drank some more and waited for the scurrying trolls to leave. Which they did about midnight. Not because they were finished. But because Ross couldn't wait one more minute to try out his new playhouse. He dismissed the workers and went out to hunt.

Ross returned soon, just after two, with two couples driven in a limousine of their own. The four were well dressed and cultured and wildly, happily, drunk and friendly, the two men in their early forties, their wives a few years younger, and they laughed and laughed as they came tripping through the front door following Ross and they laughed as they got their drinks and they laughed some more when one of the ladies caught a heel on the edge of Ross's new red carpet and when Ross made some comment about Demon Rum they laughed some more and one of the men raised his glass and said, "I'll drink to that!" And they all laughed a lot at that and then Ross apologized for the unsecured rug, explaining that he was in the midst of redecorating and one of the women, who could not have known that the whorish red carpet was Ross's idea, picked up an edge of it and said, "Better hurry!"

And all four laughed longest and hardest at that until they realized Ross was not laughing at all. Davette was thirty feet away and above them, hidden in a shadowy recess, still wearing her bathrobe, still drinking her vodka, and she could not only see but feel the change in Ross. His coldness and anger, instantaneous, eruptive, seem to sphere out from him to the high walls of the living room and back, and the two couples, as the wave passed through them, caught their breaths and their faces went slack and pale.

And then Ross was all smiles and laughing one second later, his face animated and gracious and gregarious and endearing. And Davette watched the four stare and exchange uncertain, uneasy looks. But this passed because they had just been having such a good time and Ross was so charming, after all and...

And what was this? A game! How fun!

And Ross was everywhere among them, laughing, making them laugh and oh, yes! we're going to play a game, a drinking game, but we need one nondrinker, and somehow they were persuaded to fetch their chauffeur in while Ross and an ash-faced servant rolled out the plastic tarp left by the painters to cover the new red rug. The women had to take off their high heels, to keep from making holes in the plastic, and there Ross was, on his knees, to assist them and oh, the comments and the sly exchanged looks and the ooh's as he performed this sensual task.

But then all was ready for the game and Ross personally positioned everyone, including the chauffeur, at just the right place on the plastic tarp after first taking their glasses from their hands. And one of the men groaned and said, "I thought this was a drinking game!" and Ross smiled a sly smile and, "It is! It is! You'll see!" and then he had one last person to position, the loveliest of the women, the only name Davette had caught from her perch, Evelyn, whose long black dress suited her so. Ross took her by the shoulders and stepped her over to the center of the tarp, the exact center, and then, with everyone smiling and laughing, turned her once more with her shoulders, turned her around so that her smiling faced his and slit a gaping gash in her throat with the edges of his long fingernails.

The blood fountained from her severed arteries and Ross had an impish moment to catch some of it in his mouth before turning and doing the same thing to her husband who simply stood there staring, with no chance to react. The second husband had enough time to open his mouth to protest, to raise an arm to object before Ross's vise-grip closed his throat and spinal cord forever. The second woman screamed a high-pitched scream before Ross grabbed her around the waist with his left hand and slammed his right fist into the center of her chest so hard she died, hemorrhaging, before her limp body had reached the plastic tarp.

Ross killed the chauffeur with another blow of the fist, straight down atop the man's skull. Davette heard it crack.

And then the feeding. The servants, panting the obvious repulsive sexual fervor, began scurrying about lifting the edges of the plastic to drain the blood into an enormous urn while Ross himself clamped a hand over Evelyn's still-spouting arteries. Then he lifted her body into his arms and positioned the throat within reach.

And then, before removing his palm from the wound, he turned and looked straight at Davette, straight at her, knowing all along she had been there, knowing her, knowing everything. Davette had time to gasp and put a drunken hand to her mouth before she heard the words, heard the Voice, slicing into her shadows.

"Entertained?" purred the vampire, before removing his hand and plunging his fangs into crimson.

Davette had been wondering what had happened to Kitty. She hadn't seen her for weeks. Now she wondered no more.

She knew.

And she knew the rest.

I'm dead too, she thought.

Soon, I'm dead.

And then the doorbell rang.

"Get rid of them!" hissed Ross's bloody mouth.

It was not so easy. Pough, Ross's main slug, went dutifully to the front entrance, checked through the eyehole, and opened the door to dismiss whoever was there. Davette heard his voice briefly. Then, for several long seconds, heard nothing.

Then Pough reappeared. His face was, even for him, ashen. His eyes were wide and bright.

And fearful.

"Master..." he all but whined.

Ross put down Evelyn's body and stood up. He eyed Pough menacingly for an instant, then opened his mouth to speak.

But..."Ross!" sounded out from the front entrance and all present were silent.

"Ross Stewart!" then sounded out. And again, as before, it was from another Voice.

Davette watched Ross start toward the sound, then stop, find something to wipe his mouth, then continue. He paused at the step to the entryway and Davette felt sure he wanted to turn and look to her. For what? For reassurance?

Maybe.

Then he was out the front door and it closed behind him.

When she awoke, late the next afternoon, she found someone had put her in her bed. Her first thought was of the look on Ross's face as he had stepped toward the door. But her second was the look he'd had as he'd raised his fangs from the feast.

He had been drunk. On the blood.

Dinner on the terrace just after sunset. Candlelight, flowers, fine wine. Just the two of them. Just Davette eating. Ross wore a tuxedo and Davette, under orders, wore her glittering best.

And that part had made her feel better. Not dressing up. Ross often made her dress up. He liked to look at her, liked to show her off. Liked to make her strip. No, it wasn't the dressing up. It was that it didn't take two hours to do it like it usually had.

Because she would... just... sit... there... in front of her dressing table and she would reach for something, a comb or a brush or some perfume? Maybe? And... by the time... her... her hand had... reached out... for it... she had... forgotten what it was she was reaching for.

And then she would have to just sit there for a second until she remembered what she had been trying to do and to do that she would have to look in the mirror to see what was still undone and she hated looking at herself these days, hated it so much it would often make her cry and... And she was too tired to cry, too exhausted, too drained.

So she would just slump there and the dry sobs would rock her shoulders for a while. Sand-blasted by horror and fear and shame.

And then it would be time to continue getting dressed. And she would sit herself up, and reach for something, reach fast, before she forgot, and sometimes she missed and Pough spent a lot of time cleaning up broken bottles.

But tonight had been... okay. Not great, not the way she used to feel. But better.

Then she knew.

He hadn't bitten her in a week.

I'm recovering, she realized. I'm coming back.

And then she thought, looking directly at him, Whom do I kill first? Him or me?

He had started talking about high school. Not just about the school but about old friends from school and old events and old dances and parties and the way they used to dress and how everyone from those days was doing - well or poorly - and how much he thought of them and how much he missed them and...

And on and on and it came to her, suddenly, what he was trying to do.

And she also knew why.

Ross was scared.

The other Voice had scared him, made him realize he was not all-powerful to everyone, just to mortals. So he was retreating, now, back to the mortal he held most firmly in his palm. And pretending she really wanted to be there.

It was disgusting.

And worse, much, much worse, it was effective.

For Ross had turned up the heat again, the distant warmth of his Voice. His looks had become more pointed, his gestures more graceful and casually touching. And despite her best efforts to remember her hatred and fear, she was giving in to the vampire's magic.

When he reached out a perfect white hand to gently palm her chin she managed to mutter "damn you" before his skin touched hers and her breath caught and the awful wicked excitement stirred within her, fluttered from deep within, sprinkling up her arms and through her shoulders and...

And she did just what he said to do.

She stood up, in front of the servant-slugs, in front of Pough, and slipped her dress off, exposing her naked body underneath. And she did slide her manicured nails along her hips and thighs and she did tease her diamond-hard nipples and...

And oh God! but she enjoyed it as much as ever before, enjoyed the wanton, whorish nastiness of it all, the shameful, rutting depravity of it all.

She loved it, God help her.

But even more, she loved his laying her, with her eager consent, across the top of the quickly cleared dining table and opening her thighs to his exquisite, monstrous, bite. And she loved the sounds she streaked up through the leaves and clouds at the moon.

Perhaps she would not have hated herself so had she known it would be the last time he would do this to her.

By 7:30, he had lain her in her bed, saying something about an errand he simply had to run. Even as she dropped off, she could tell he was trying to be too flippant. That this was more than an errand.

In her dreams she heard that other Voice again and again and again.

"That was the night," said Jack Crow suddenly, "that he came up to Bradshaw and killed my men."

"Yes," said Davette quietly. "Only he missed you because he got there too late. Pough got lost. And then... Well, you know."

"Yeah."

"What did Ross do to Pough?" Kirk wanted to know.

"He had bruises all over his face when he came back. And he limped."

"Did Pough enjoy his pain?" asked Father Adam quietly.

Davette looked at him, surprised. "Yes. How did you know?"

The young priest shrugged his broad shoulders.

"Just a feeling," was all he said.

"What about," asked Felix leaning forward, "the wound?"

"Yes," added Cat eagerly. "In his forehead..."

"From the cross..." finished Carl Joplin.

"The Holy silver cross," amended Father Adam.

"Yeah."

"Oh!" sparked Davette, remembering, "It hurt him. It really hurt him... He thrashed about on the silken sheets of the huge bedroom suite he had furnished deep in the basement, wallowing in pain and frustration. And it was impossible to restrain him, with muscles hard as a bronze statue come alive and hurting and... angry!"

"DO SOMETHING!" he raged and they tried, Davette and Pough, they really tried, but the wound would not stop bleeding. The thick, heavy vampire mucus continued to ooze, rhythmically, with his panting dead man's pulse. And every time a new surge of matter pushed its way out, the monster howled and grabbed his head, or ripped the sheets with his long nails or tore one of his brand new tailored silk shirts from his chest or...

Or lashed out. At the walls, at Davette, or at Pough, who was either too stupid or too masochistic to step beyond his reach. The first time Davette went down was from being struck by just the edge of his hand. That blow had sent her rolling onto the floor and from then on, whenever she saw the glob begin to form at the wound's opening, she would step quickly back while the vampire raged in agony.

But then she would jump quickly back onto the bed an sop up the stuff before it rolled heavily down his forehead and got into his eyes, because that seemed to hurt him more than anything else. When the mucus hit his eyes he would shriek!

Three hours at this and Davette was exhausted. More she was angry. At Pough, the slug who liked being hit, a herself, for being here at all, for the vampire Ross, who, like the wicked infant he was, refused to accept the bill he'd run up.

She saw him differently now, in his pain, and her contempt was joyous. There was no seduction here, no hypnotic gaze, no Voice. His skin was no longer smooth cream but mottled, crinkled, paste.

The Undead, she kept thinking.

All those movies and all those stories I've seen and read in my life were fantasies. But this is so true. He is not alive. He is Undead. He is Unhealthy.

He is scum.

Ross actually tried aspirin for the pain, a notion that Davette, in her newfound insight, found laughable, ludicrous almost beneath contempt.

You're dead, pig. You can't take aspirin, she thought.

But she said nothing as Pough fetched the bottle and Ross tore the top of it open with a flick of his fingers and forced a half dozen of the dry white pills down his throat. She stood way back then, eyeing the ornate quarters for a receptacle. He had quite a few of those urns around against the walls but they were too heavy. At last she spied some awful, intricate, and expensive French washbowl - something on one of the side tables - and sidled over casually to pick it up while Ross lay frozen in his misery, staring straight up at the ceiling, his hands outstretched and talon-taut in the ragged sheets.

First he started to retch, his body warping on the bed as electrocuted. And when he finally vomited it was the most vile, fetid, loathsome... Decay! That awful smell of Death, rotting, sickly-sweet bile!

Davette dropped the washbowl to the carpet and staggered back from that smell.

"Ross, you fool! You're a vampire! You can only have blood!"

And the monster's eyes rolled back in his head, the pupils almost disappearing entirely, and his spine arched once more against the bed. But then his head snapped forward and his eyes were red and demonic and the fangs were there and he looked at Davette and hissed:

"Yesss!"

And she thought she was going to die.

But Ross's arm streaked out and his taloned hands clumped down on Pough's forearm and pulled it toward his jaws and Pough screamed when the fangs sliced the arteries and the blood began to spurt and Davette felt her scream coming as Ross aimed the stream not at his mouth but at his wound. And as the blood splashed and splattered across Ross's forehead Davette looked at Pough and saw his eyes go back, but not in pain. In ecstasy.

And her scream blew out from her soul and possessed her and she collapsed, still screaming.

It worked. The wound didn't heal. Not completely. But the opening shrank to little more than a large pinprick. It still dripped that clear viscous fluid. But a headband was all it needed.

And the pain was less. Not gone, but less. It no longer incapacitated him. It just made him a bit more cruel.

Ross had looked into her eyes and told her she was tired, sleepy and exhausted, that she would go to sleep and not wake up until midnight tomorrow night, and it was so.

He awoke her with his mind or his Voice - she wasn't sure - at the appointed hour. He was standing in her doorway, the light from the hallway silhouetting him. She could hear voices downstairs, many voices laughing and talking.

She didn't want to go.

"Ross..." she began weakly.

"Get dressed," said the Voice. "Now. I'll be back for you."

And then he was gone.

She lay there a few seconds, then clambered slowly dizzily, out of bed. She was exhausted, beaten, drained. She hadn't eaten. She had slept too long. She wanted to die

She didn't know if she could get dressed.

"I'll help you," offered a soft, silky, familiar voice.

Kitty, even in the dim starlight from the terrace doorway, was incredibly beautiful. She was radiant, really, her features sharp yet soft, her walk lazy yet precise and sensuous. She was friendly and warm and obviously glad to see Davette and...

And a vampire.

"I'll help you," she said again, this time all but cooing as she strolled forward and took her friend's limp shoulders. "I'll make you beautiful."

And she did. She dressed Davette as one would a child. She fixed her hair and applied her makeup and never once turned on a light.

Davette simply sat there. Or stood up. Or raised her arms as told. She couldn't cry or disobey or think. She just let it be done.

And then she was ready and Kitty pronounced her beautiful and then Ross, who had reappeared at the doorway, agreed. Then the two of them took each of her arms and guided her downstairs.

On the long main staircase Davette managed to speak at last.

"Are you... going to make me a vampire?"

Ross's smile was satanic.

"No, my dear," he replied pleasantly. "I'm going to make you watch."

And when they reached the bottom of the stairway and turned in to the main living room filled with happy partying victims, Davette saw the plastic tarp had already been laid out.

She watched them feed from a far distance it seemed. The horror was too much, the screams of surprise and terror too piercing, the quantities of blood too enormous to accept. She didn't move, she didn't speak. She didn't respond, except to Voices. She wasn't there.

But she noticed them swelling as they drank. Like ticks, she thought.

For their bodies did actually expand as they sopped the lives. And their eyes became dreamy and their voices, Voices, became slurred. There was too much blood for the two of them but they drank most of it anyway, gorging themselves and laughing about the presumed lives of the victims based on their clothing and personal effects and when they realized they simply could not drink it all, they laughed and rubbed it all over each other and Davette thought they really did look like serpents, intertwined and slimy with blood.

It was the same the next night. First, though, they had the orgy for the sheep, seducing them with Voice and Gaze, and the sexual tension was rich and thick.

But somehow carefully directed. One young couple in their twenties were somehow carnally separated. Ross had him bound and gagged while the young wife rolled and clasped with a series of men on the floor in front of him, knowing what she was doing, weeping throughout, but unable to help herself, unable to stop the rich, luxurious orgasms from rocking her again and again.

Davette watched the young man, his eyes red with tears, as he went through the torture of his wife the rutting slut. She didn't know how they had managed to keep the feeling of sex from him, only that they so much enjoyed seeing his agony without having any idea as to what was causing his wife to behave like this.

Then Ross just let them go, without explanation, before the slaughter began.

"Let's see them work this out," he said with a laugh as he watched their subcompact lurch away down the drive.

Davette wept silently. The two had been married less than three weeks.

And she thought, for a few brief moments, that it would have been less cruel to kill them. But that was before the night's slaughter began. Once she heard the new screams, she realized she was wrong. There was nothing worse than what she saw. Except, possibly, the vampires' pleasure in it all.

I cannot do this, she thought.

I cannot continue like this.

I cannot live like this.

And then she thought: So I won't. I know where Aunt Vicky kept her pills.

Davette lived because she overslept. She had no chance to sneak into Aunt Vicky's room to kill herself. Before she was half awake, Ross and Kitty and someone new, another woman, another vampire, a redhead named Veronica, were all in her room, rousing her out of bed to show her their new clothes. Vampire clothes.

They were all blacks and reds, the women's dresses trailing wisps of material to give the illusion of black widows, Ross's jacket and red ascot making him look just like a movie Dracula.

The three seemed to think this very witty. And they had a dress just like it for Davette. They also had victims on their way.

So Davette got dressed and went downstairs and listened to the three whisper among themselves and wondered what adolescent horror would come about in her home that night. The main living room had been just about transformed to Ross's specifications. It reminded Davette of these absurd outfits the four were wearing. If only the absurdity were not so vicious and macabre.

I've got to get away, she thought. If I can just get to the pills, and take them at dawn, it will be over before they can do anything about it.

So just smile, stupid. And go along with these monsters.

And then leave this all. Leave everything.

And she took a deep breath and braced herself. She could get through anything, couldn't she? This one last night? Please? Only... what have they planned to show me tonight?

As it turned out, they had to change their plans.

The vast eighteen-foot-high french doors to the grand terrace burst inward with a rush of air and electricity and a White Giant walked into the room.

At least that's how Davette thought of this great huge man, at least six-five and weighing close to three hundred pounds with huge shoulders and a massive mane of snow-white hair. He had the most piercing blue eyes Davette had ever seen. He was supremely confident, blazingly intent.

And a vampire.

"Ross Stewart," he bellowed, "you have failed me. What will it be?"

Davette recognized the Voice from the other night.

Ross had stumbled to his feet upon the man's appearance. Davette felt rather than saw him try to draw himself up to his full height and power as the other vampire approached.

As she also felt him give in as the giant drew near.

"What is it," he asked, with no Voice at all, "that you want me to do?"

The giant took one more step forward so that he literally towered over Ross.

"Finish it!" he roared. "Finish it! Kill him!"

"Kill Crow..."

"So!" hissed Cat, and his smile was not a friendly one, "that's the guy!"

"Yeah," rumbled Jack, sitting forward. "Who is it?"

"I don't know. They wouldn't let me know."

"Any ideas?"

She shook her head. "No. Even when they had me sign the papers, they had tape over his name.

"What papers?"

"I don't know. He brought them with him. And he made Ross have me sign them before we left."

Carl Joplin frowned. "You signed them without knowing what they were?"

Davette's eyes dropped as she nodded.

"Ease off, Carl," said Deputy Thompson gently.

Carl looked at him, nodded. "Sorry, sugar," he said to Davette, "I just keep forgetting..."

"Well, how?" sparked Davette suddenly, her eyes bright and flashing. "What did you expect me to do, with four vampires in the room?"

It got very still. The Team sat stunned at this bristling defiance from this meek little broken...

And then Felix started to smile and so did Davette and then everyone laughed and Cat thought, My God, girl! How do you keep shining?

And everyone felt a lot better. Cat got up and fixed more drinks. Even Davette had one. Only Felix declined.

Instead he lit a cigarette and looked at Davette. "Still, it's important about the papers. More legal documents?"

"Yes. Like the ones I did for Ross. Power of attorney, I guess."

"How about a last will and testament?"

"It could be."

"A death sentence."

"What?" cried Annabelle. "What do you mean."

Felix frowned at her alarm. "Sorry, Annabelle. But she said she had to sign the papers before she left."

"Yes," replied Davette slowly.

"Where were you going?"

Davette paused, looked at Jack Crow.

Jack nodded and answered for her. "... to California."

"Yes," said Davette.

"Yes," repeated Jack. "That was the night you came - "

"To kill you. Yes." She looked down, looked back up at him. "I'm sorry, Jack."

He shook his head. "Not your fault. How long did it take you?"

"Three days."

"You drove?"

"Yes. Almost straight through. We only stopped at all because I was so tired..."

She couldn't keep her eyes open but it was still too light for Ross to leave the trunk and tell her it was all right to stop. But she had to stop. She had to.

So she did, somewhere in Arizona, at a rest stop. In the shade. She pulled over and lay down for just a second to "rest her eyes".

When she awoke it was dark and Ross was shaking her awake to get moving and the couple in the Camaro convertible parked beside them at the rest stop were dead and drained, their lifeless eyes staring, a slack corpse's mouth hanging open over the driver's door.

She roared back onto the highway and, once more, Ross began to talk.

About being a vampire, about the trouble back in Dallas with the white giant. Something about invading another monster's territory without permission, something more about getting to stay as soon as he got this "Crow" person. Davette still didn't understand who this Crow person was and why they wanted to kill him. And she had seen so many murders, horrible slashing murders, already, that she found it hard to worry about anyone in particular. Every night someone else died. Names didn't matter.

Neither did any other details. Ross had always kept everything secret from her before, yet his wanting to let her in on this trip suddenly repulsed her. She didn't want to hear. She didn't want to know.

She didn't want... anything.

She didn't even want to die. She was too tired.

She had thought about it, thought about stopping the car at some little town and going to a drugstore and getting sleeping pills and maybe a little vodka (maybe a lot) to wash it down with. But even that seemed too much trouble.

Too numb. Too lost.

So tired.

And then, on the last moonlit leg of the journey, up U.S. 1 along the northern California coast, he finally got her attention. She finally realized why he was telling her so much.

This Crow person was not just a person. He wasn't just another victim or plaything. He was more. A lot more. Just a man, but a very powerful one.

He killed vampires.

And this thought, that someone existed who not only stood up to them, but fought them and won... ! It staggered her, it raced her blood and breath through her soul. She felt the stirrings of something deep within and long lost and she reached for it, reached deep down inside her until she could grasp it and identify it and... and it turned out to be her. The her that once, so long ago, had been.

And then she remembered that this man, this Crow, was going to die, too, and she tried to hide it all away.

Because he would die. You couldn't stop these monsters.

So she went along and listened to his plan and did just what she was told, dressed up and put on her Reporter Face and straightened her extra-clean clothes and went up to that great mansion on the ridge over Pebble Beach and knocked on the front door.

And she met them and she liked them and she refused to notice she liked them and she confirmed that this Crow person, Jack Crow, it turned out, wouldn't be there until the next day and she went back and told Ross and he was furious and thought about killing them all, all the others in the house, before Crow came back, but...

But he couldn't afford to frighten Crow off. He couldn't afford to fail again.

But neither would he leave. Just before dawn he closed himself in the trunk of the rental car and sealed the seal he had devised that no one could possibly break alone.

And she lay down in the front seat and went to sleep expecting to help him feed the next night.

But then... but nothing, not really. Crow's car driving past her had awakened her and when she awoke she awoke to the fourth day without being bitten and enslaved and maybe, just maybe, she had some extra strength and will and hidden crying hope...

So she just got out of the car and went up to meet this fool who thought he could stop evil with his drunken little band and...

And she met him and he was, yes, special, but not that special - no one was special enough for this job. And she played reporter and he walked her through those empty rooms of his dead comrades' - was it seven? Yes, seven who had been insane enough to follow him - and he told her their stories and they were wonderful stories...

And then he'd said they were going and asked if she wanted to go along and then she'd heard that music from downstairs and, well, she...

She just went. She just did it.

She didn't know how she managed such spectacular courage.

But she suspected the music.

"What was that music playing downstairs?" she asked Jack suddenly.

"Downstairs? Downstairs when?"

"When we were in California and you asked me to fly back with you?"

Jack frowned. "Oh. When we were in the zoo... That was Stevie Ray Vaughn. Texas rock and roll."

And she smiled. "Yes! Rock and roll. That's it!"

Cat, along with the others, found himself smiling at her smile. Because it was the first one in so long. But...

"But I don't get it. What's the music got to do with anything? Don't you like rock and roll?"

And she laughed. She really laughed.

"I love it. But Ross hated it. All vampires hate rock and roll."

"You're kidding."

"No," she giggled, sitting up straight. "He told me on that trip. All vampires hate it."

"What do they like?" Kirk wanted to know.

"Opera," replied Davette. "All kinds of opera."

"Figures," muttered Father Adam and they all turned and smiled at him.

"So," finished Jack. "That was it. You just... ran. When you heard that music, you just..."

"I just did it. I didn't think about it. I just went."

"And that's all?"

She sighed, looked at him. "That's all."

And it was quiet for a moment while they thought about this, this sweet golden human made slave and a swine, about all that she had been and all that she had lost and all that had been done to her and...

And Carl Joplin stood up and stepped over to her and looked down and smiled and held out his huge chubby hands to her. She hesitated, then put her two small hands in his and he pulled her up out of her chair and his smile went wider and he said, "You're a good, good girl."

Then he gave her a bear hug that almost hid her from view.

The other smiles glowed upon them from all around the room.

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