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