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.