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